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Ash Wednesday
2/3/2022

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-20

In a sentence:
Lent is a time to give up anything which reduces us or others

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

We hear this every Ash Wednesday and, with the text ringing in our ears, we have learned that Lent is a time of “giving up”. We “give up” wine, or meat or coffee or chocolate or some other thing which might count as a “treasure”. This is, in part, an act of sacrifice which honours Jesus’ own “giving up” of his life in faithfulness to his calling.

Of course, the implication o “giving up” for a season is that we will then, with a sigh of relief, “take up” whatever we have sacrificed once Easter arrives. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, especially if the disciple of such time-limited sacrifice causes us to think about the ministry of Jesus and the meaning of the cross.

But let’s consider that not all treasures are alike. In particular, not all treasures glitter but they still seem important to us. At least, we invest a lot of time and energy in them.

So, for example, what would it mean to give up gossip for Lent? Or slander? Or snobbishness? What we treasure in these things is judgement. Let us give up being judgemental for the 40 days of Lent; there’s plenty of time to judge others over the rest of the year.

Of course, the real sting in judgement is that, if we are really good at it, we will also judge ourselves, for better or for worse. The “worse” is the more interesting here. What if we gave up our shame? Or our guilt? Or our fear? Again, the venerated tradition of giving things up for Lent means that we can start feeling ashamed and guilty and afraid again once Easter comes. Lent is only 40 days, and surely we can cope with not judging ourselves for that long.

Where your treasure is, there is your heart. Where your heart is, there is your treasure. This tells us what we value, but not what is valuable in itself. What is valuable, Jesus says, is what cannot rust or be snatched away. Whatever good Lenten disciplines might indeed do for us, penitence is not a season because forgiveness is not a season. Forgiveness doesn’t corrode and can’t be stolen away because it is a re-valuing of all value – God’s own re-valuing

To judge another is to place a value on her, and so we feel justified in denying her our treasures. To judge ourselves is to have treasured the wrong thing. We reduce ourselves to our knowledge of who we are rather than God’s knowledge of us.

Lenten disciplines are targeted at those things which make us less than free and loving human beings. We give up only what does not accord with that, and we do not take those things up again. This might or might not include wine or chocolate; it almost certainly includes slander and guilt.

Let us then, at least for the season of Lent, stop being sad and fearful at our own expense, greedy and safe at the expense of others.

And let us see what God will do with that.

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Transfiguration
27/2/2022

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Psalm 91
Luke 9:28-36

In a sentence:
We don’t know what we see in Jesus, but we know that it is good

Many approaches have been taken to the story of the Transfiguration. Some imagine that we have here a dream sequence or a vision – something which only happens inside the disciples’ heads and but not “really” occurring in time and space. The story is so rich in symbolism that the symbols themselves cry out for recognition, to the extent that questions of “what really happened” become quite secondary. Others have thought that this is a resurrection narrative that has been dislodged – deliberately or accidentally – from the end of the gospels to become something of a hinge point in the middle of the narrative. Others, of course, have taken it to be a reliable account of a historically “objective” event.

Our approach today won’t be to untangle these tightly knotted and confused approaches but simply to take the story at face value, and dive in at one particular point. In response to the strange change in Jesus, Peter apparently gathers his senses and speaks on behalf of the disciples: “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”. Our focus text today will be the remark which follows: Peter has spoken, “not knowing what he said”.

We’ve long heard that this comment characterises Peter’s state of mind at this point. Like the callow teenager who has long loved from a distance a pretty girl in his class, only to respond with something utterly stupid when one day she speaks to him, so Peter is generally cast as blurting out the first thing which comes into his head, “not knowing what he said”. On this reading, he might as well have said, “…the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”.

But biblical texts are economical. We already know that Peter and co. are out of their minds with fear. His building proposition, and naming this as incoherent, scarcely seems necessary.

We might, then, come at this another way. The Greek word behind “dwelling” is translated in other places as “tabernacle”. The Tabernacle was a tent-like structure in which God dwelt before the construction of the Temple. This is, then, a heavily loaded word – not merely a “place to stay” but having connotations of a holy presence. In the prologue to his Gospel, the evangelist John writes, “…The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1.14). John uses the same word here: the Word “tabernacled” among us.

In this light, Peter’s proposal of tabernacles becomes less silly than naïve. That is, tabernacles might be entirely appropriate but does Peter understand what that would mean? Has he grasped what it means that Jesus is in the same room as Moses and Elijah?

The Transfiguration story follows an episode in which Jesus puts a question to his disciples, Who do you say I am? To this, Peter responds, You are the Christ. Jesus then goes on to explain what will happen to him. In Mark and Matthew’s version of the story, this greatly offends Peter, who demands that such things must not be allowed to happen. Jesus then hammers Peter in return, naming him “Satan” and announcing that Peter, in effect, has not understood what he himself has said – what “Christ” means.

Luke doesn’t have that part of the story. Still, perhaps Peter’s announcement about the tabernacles is the same: “not knowing what he said” is about saying the right thing while not understanding what it means, or saying the wrong thing but, at a deeper ironical level we don’t yet recognise, being precisely right.

This naïve irony is not an unusual experience – certainly not merely a “religious” experience:

“Will you take this man, to have and to hold in the covenant of marriage, loving, comforting, protecting and faithful

as long as you both shall live?” “I will”, she said, not knowing what she was saying.

“Let’s start a family,” he said, not knowing what he was saying.

“We would like to offer you the job”, they said, not knowing what they were saying.

“You are the Christ”, Peter confessed, not knowing what he was saying.

“Let us build a tabernacle”, Peter said, not knowing what he was saying…

Or consider our own current deliberations:

“Let’s amalgamate with another congregation”, said the one, not knowing what he was saying.

“Let’s find another place to call our own”, said another, not knowing what she was saying.

As a community, we have before us a range of options, about which it can be easy to speak and yet not know what we are saying. If we are ignorant of the facts or simply ignoring them, we have a responsibility to expose those deficiencies. This will be part of the work of the Church Council towards a final tabernacling proposal.

But there is another “not knowing what we say” which has to do with the very nature of the church as the people of this mysterious transfiguring God.

We have spoken about the fact that change is inevitable. When things are more or less comfortable, more or less easy, change becomes something we endure rather than embrace. To endure what happens next is to doubt that God could look anything different from what God appears to be here and now. To embrace what happens next is to expect God to be transfigured for us but still be the same God. This transfiguration won’t be a mystical mountaintop vision but perhaps a re-discovering of God in a house of sticks or straw after having we have known him in a house of bricks. To embrace what happens next is not to know that it is right, but to commit to it being right and then discovering how – in God – it can be. And if it is truly a choice for this God, what we have chosen will be both wrong and right: we didn’t expect that, but we needed it.

In a couple of month’s time we will hear a proposal from the Church Council which will be put for all sorts of good reasons, and in Peter’s sense we won’t know what we are saying, or choosing. If we are to continue to represent what we think MtE has stood for up to this point, what is required from every one of us is the expectation that God will meet us in some unexpected transfiguration, whether our next thing is a house of bricks or that we become members of someone else’s household.

The deep ironic truth in Peter’s “let’s build a tabernacle” is that a tabernacle is built for Jesus in the gospel. It is just that his tabernacle is made of only two pieces of wood joined in the shape of a cross. And, to recast his call to discipleship, this Jesus says to us: whoever would be my disciple must take up his tabernacle and follow me. This is not a call to mere self-sacrifice on a cross. It is a call to believe in the God who raises the dead.

This we say, not really knowing what it means, but that it matters. For we do know that tabernacling God, the giving of flesh to our faith, becoming the Body of Christ: this is the end of all things, the goal towards which all creation is oriented, and what God most earnestly seeks. To hope that we will faithfully be the church in all that we choose is to hope…we’re not quite sure what, but we know that it matters.

To say it again, what is required of us now is the expectation that, whether it is on a mountaintop or in the last place we might have imagined MtE to end up, Jesus will meet us there and, in his own strange way, will remake us and renew us.

The dwelling we seek to build is not about mere space. It is about place: life in all its fullness. The tabernacle of Jesus doesn’t finally house him but us; he is a place for us in God, wherever we find ourselves in the world. And we will discover ourselves – not knowing how – finally at home.

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Epiphany 7
20/2/2022

Psalm 37
Luke 6:27-38

In a sentence:
The command to love knows no bounds, and is to be part of everything that we do

Take a few moments to reflect upon who your enemies are.

Perhaps this is a confronting task. We are strongly conditioned today towards keeping the peace through broad tolerance. Having enemies is perceived to be wrong – so wrong, perhaps, that we are inclined towards thinking we don’t have enemies, only people we can learn to tolerate under certain circumstances.

Yet let us consider: are there places you cannot go because of who is there, or who might be? Perhaps a part of town, or a country, where we would expect to be unwelcome, or perhaps certain streets after dark, or the gatherings you can scarcely abide but must attend and yet cannot speak your mind.

“Enemy” might seem too strong a word for characterising at least some of those we might encounter in those spaces. But it’s worth keeping in mind the etymology – the word sources – behind our word “enemy”. The English word is comprised of two constituent Latin words. The second is the most interesting: the ‘-emy’ at the end of the word comes from “amicus” – friend (amicable, amiable, amigo, French “ami” – friend/ly, etc.). The first part of our English word – the “en-“  – is just a negation. An enemy is, literally, an “unfriend” (the Greek word in our gospel reading today – echthros – similarly goes back to meanings of “stranger” and externality). This broadens greatly our sense of what “enemy” might mean: not merely those who passionately oppose us but those we don’t want much to do with.

It is not such a long bow to draw, when we equate enemies and unfriends. The social media platform Facebook calls adding people to your network an adding of “friends”; to remove someone from your network is to “unfriend” them. This is very often taken with great offence by the one excluded in this way. To unfriend can often be to make an enemy.

But the presence of enemies in our world is reflected more deeply than in word origins and social media spats. Our perception of the omnipresence of enemies is reflected in our story-telling, something very close to the heart of our being as social creatures. The stories we tell are almost universally structured by “agonism” – by conflict. The protagonist – typically the hero or heroine – is opposed by the antagonist: Churchill vs. Hitler; Dr Who vs. the Daleks; Harry vs. Voldemort; Little Red Riding Hood vs. the Wolf; Jesus vs. – well, how we complete this last one would reveal a lot about where we think enmity finally resides in the world – for another time, perhaps!

Some have wondered whether this experience of the world and our telling stories to inform that experience needs to be changed. This is because the fact of unfriends easily morphs into the need for unfriends. We can begin to define ourselves over against our unfriends. And our world shrinks a bit with every unfriend. With each unfriend we identify there is another place we cannot safely go, another thing we cannot learn, more love we cannot receive. However, the losses we incur in “enem‑ising” others often seem to be offset by gains. Enemies can be convenient. We can cast enemies as the source of all that is wrong in our experience. In this, we can transfer what might be wrong in us to another. It is easier that she might be “a piece of work” than that I might be.

This is all very general, of course, and in any particular instance there might be at play things over which we have little control. But recognising the general dynamics of life with unfriends might help us a little towards acting on the confronting imperative of Jesus: love your enemies, do good to those, who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

Let’s see whether we can bring this closer to home by considering what it might mean for our life together as a congregation and the decisions we have to make about our future. Most of us met last week to look at some basic scenarios for that future, including obtaining a new place of our own (even if only on long-term lease), co-habiting with someone else and amalgamating. Very roughly, only a few of those 25 or so people present preferred amalgamation over the two remain-as-MtE options, and only about a third could “live with” amalgamation as a prospect. The two stay-as-MtE options each gathered about half the group as a first-preference and about 80 per cent of us as a “could live with” continuing as MtE in our own or a shared space.

At first blush, I took from this that our thinking prioritised retaining our identity as a congregation. It looks like an affirmation of what MtE is and stands for in itself. By extension, however, amalgamation looks like the loss of what is signified and made possible by a continuing of MtE.

There are various reasons why we might say not to amalgamation – some better than others – but let us consider some which have been articulated.

We wonder whether the congregations we might join value what we value. Will we still be able to have a weekly Eucharist? A liturgy like the one we still have? Where there are differences, we wonder whether other congregations can become more like us so that we need not become too much like them.

Implicitly, perhaps, we take the answer to these questions to be, No. We have not yet tested this, of course. But as the Church Council considers what it has heard from everyone, and the resources we have, and our freedoms and responsibilities, it must also consider the motivations behind our expressed preferences. In this case, is amalgamation per se the problem, or who we might amalgamate with? We need to be sure we know why not if we choose not to go this way.

In making these observations I’m not proposing that amalgamation is our best option. It’s just that, while we did a good job last week of hearing Where people are “at”, we didn’t do so well at testing and teasing-out and understanding more deeply the Why. In this case, why do so few of us find amalgamation unattractive, given the many clear benefits it could have? Regarding the perceived differences between ourselves and others we might say – humbly – that we are too difficult for others to get along with, so it’s not going to be worth trying. Less humbly, we might mean that, given they are impervious to the truth, we don’t want to have to give up what matters to find a way to get along with them.

Or is it that amalgamating would be admission of defeat? Or do the anticipated conversations seem too difficult? Do we fear getting lost in such a change? Of course, more positively, we might think that there really needs to be a Uniting Church in North Melbourne(-ish). But we haven’t quite said that.

Again, I’m not proposing (yet!) that we amalgamate. I am simply wondering what the relationship is between our future as a congregation and Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies. We might not consider other congregations enemies, but perhaps they are not quite friends either and, in some sense, are unfriends. When Jesus says love your enemies, it’s almost easy to agree with him that it is a good idea – easy because our enemies are often a long way away. Or, to take him literally, no one really hates us, curses or abuses us. But “love your unfriends” – this is hard, because unfriends are everywhere, even very close, and are not quite nasty enough that Jesus might have meant that we should love them.

What then, shall we do? There is no final answer yet, but we might still need to put some questions to the answers – the assumptions – we think we already have.

In view of what Jesus says today and our place in the Uniting Church, we might at the very least say that the imperative to love our enemies ought to part of the rationale for all that we do, not least what we plan to become as a congregation.

“Love your enemies”, Jesus says, “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you…Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful…Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven…give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

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Epiphany 6
13/2/2022

Genesis 3:1-10
Psalm 130
Luke 2:22-40

In a sentence:
God clothes us with Christ and, so attired, we are dressed for anything.

What is the question to which the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist seeks an answer, the problem we need to resolve?

Obviously, it is how we will continue as a congregation once we leave this place. Less obvious is what “how” means – “how we will continue”. Central to our thinking today and in the weeks to come will be the question of “where?”: Where will the congregation be? This understanding of what matters predominates for us because “where” has been central to our efforts over the last too-many years.

Yet the challenge we face is not simply that of location. If we were the congregation that built Union Memorial Church, we would also be able to fix it – this is what congregations of many hundreds of people can do. But we are not that congregation. The church-world relationship we considered last week has shifted monumentally since those foundations of UMC were dug – not quite deep enough. Buildings aside, the crisis moment of our congregation includes the declining fortunes of the broader church in western societies.

And so what we need is not only a new location but also a clear sense of the time. What does this particular moment require? As we reflected a couple of weeks ago, nothing about tomorrow is clear except that it need be nothing like yesterday. This is to say that nothing about tomorrow is necessary. Nothing is predetermined for us by what has gone before.

But we as begin to think more intensely about this, we strike a problem, and it is Adam’s problem in today’s reading from Genesis: we know that we are “naked”. The man and the woman have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, and suddenly they are troubled by what did not bother them before: they have no clothes.

Yet, nakedness itself is not the problem. Adam (and Eve’s) knowledge of good and bad after the apple affair does not include the knowledge that nakedness is shameful. The knowledge of good and bad is not knowledge of what is good and bad, only knowledge that there is good and bad. The man and the woman now know that there is an alternative to being naked, which has not occurred to them beforehand: “the man and his wife were naked, and were not ashamed” (2.25).

Knowing there to be a clothing alternative means that they are now free to – in fact, required to – decide whether to be clothed or remain naked. They are required, that is, to judge themselves and each other: am I adequate? Their judgement is that naked is not good, and they stitch together a few leaves and hide.

The distorted condition of Adam and Eve is not that they are naked but that they know too much: I was naked, Adam says; I see that I could be embarrassed about this, and so I am.

This shift in the story marks the presence of a radical uncertainty in human experience. Awareness of their nakedness is not about their bare skin but is a kind of self-exposure to themselves as responsible before God. With the appearance of choice in the awareness of a distinction between good and bad, morality appears – the possibility of being wrong, and being judged for that failure.

This is what we know as we consider our next steps as a congregation: that God will not tell us what to do, so we must work it out, not knowing what “the right” thing to do is. The apple-eating and its consequences account for our sense of being responsible for what happens next. To protect ourselves, we calculate and plan and rationalise, to act according to whatever seems to be the best principles. In this, we demonstrate to ourselves – and we think we demonstrate also to God – what the future has to look like. We make the future the next necessary thing.

Nothing could be more sensible than working it all out “properly”. Yet this is also fundamentally an exercise in self-justification. To calculate and balance and debate is to demonstrate – to each other as much as to God – that we have done the only thing we could, the necessary thing. Necessary things are safe, but God has no interest in what is necessary; what is necessary is always outside of God. Grace – which is fundamental to the character and activity of God – is radically unnecessary, unlegal, unjust, and is precisely what God does when re-creating us out of nothing in forgiveness or in the gift of a tomorrow we did not imagine but desperately needed.

The gospel is that God has seen us naked and – unlike we ourselves – has neither laughed nor been shocked. But we don’t believe this, so we reach for fig leaves – for visions, for mission strategies and for budgets – and we cover ourselves with these, just in case it be found we don’t have enough on. Yet, to rest our future only on the conviction that we have “done our best” is to declare nakedness before God shocking.

We must surely do our best, but this is not the end of the story because the story of the first couple’s judgement of their nakedness does not end with them hiding in the bushes. At the end of Genesis 3, after hearing all the bad news which now flows from knowing too much, the text reports, “And the Lord God made garments of skins…and clothed them” (3.20).

This gift is not about the durability of leather over withering leaves. It is not about the difference between our Elm Street hall as a temporary fig leaf and what we do next as “better”, as more secure and amenable. The difference between the leaves and the garments of skin is, rather, the difference between what Adam and Eve can provide for themselves and what God provides for them.

What we can do for ourselves is always of the order of fig leaves. We can make these work for a while, as we have made this hall on Elm Street work. Thinking this way, of course, suddenly casts Union Memorial Church itself as something of a fig leaf. As it finally withers and falls away, we naturally reach for something else to cover us. But we must keep in mind that self-provision is always a fig leaf, always an estimation of what we’ll need to cover whatever seems too exposed.

God does not provide us with what we could provide for ourselves – does not provide even a better version of what we might have managed for ourselves. The difference between what we can do for ourselves and what God does for us is the difference between living by our own goodness or cunning and living by God’s grace. What God does for us is grant us the freedom to be wrong. The man and the woman are wrong in their assessment of their nakedness. Yet they are accepted by God, and the garments of leather are the sign of that acceptance. This acceptance does not wear out. The leather lasts forever. To press it to its final truth, Christ himself is these garments of skin.

In clothing us, God says, for all your misjudgement and confusion, you are still mine. There is nowhere to hide. I see you. And my seeing clothes you.

The risk in our conversations over the next little while is that we proceed by telling one another, “If we put that on, we will still be naked.”

God has seen us naked and has not laughed or been shocked. It is neither here nor there. Our conversation today is not about getting dressed because we have to. It is a fashion parade: an occasion to wonder that such garments could be clothing and what it would be like to wear them.

We are free to play dress-ups in this way because God is not overly concerned about what else we wear, apart from Jesus.

We no longer hide from God; we hide in God.

And when we put on Christ,           we are dressed for anything.

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Epiphany 5
6/2/2022

Genesis 2:18-25
Psalm 138
Luke 2:22-40

In a sentence:
The church is more – and less – important than it can imagine.

Storytellers tell lies.

A storyteller requires her audience to accept some basic premise that is not true, in order that the story might begin to unfold. The premise might be simply the proposal that the story begins where the teller begins, for every story begins somewhere before its beginning. More fancifully, the premise might be that there is, in our midst, a hidden world of wizards and witches, within which is unfolding a drama that threatens the whole world, and everything hinges on the personal character of an 11-year-old boy. If it is not a world of witches and wizards, the premise might be that time travel to the past is possible, or an unbelievably grotesque murder, or that a little drummer boy happened to be passing by just as a baby was being laid in a manger. Once we allow the premise, the story has traction and takes us where the storyteller wants.

Stories, then, are lies. And the storyteller needs our complicity in the lie if the story is to gain lift. We become willing conspirators with the storyteller in this way because, however untruthful the story’s premise is, the story is ultimately not about the lie but about people like us in that kind of context. Stories can brutalise reality because they are not about space travel or magic or prehistoric times but about how the various actors placed on those stages interact in those contexts. The basic premise is a lie, but the action might not be. The truth in the story is the human drama in that imagined context.

Stories, then, are true lies – creations out of nothing. “Once upon a time, there was…” – this always means “There 1was never, ever…” a princess, a frog, a drummer boy or even a manger. Or, at the very least, it would not matter if there were not. And yet does matter what happened after the never-happened.

It is the same in church. We gather here week after week to tell a story, and that story is also a lie told to hear the truth. We’ve heard today from Genesis 2. Genesis 1 relates the creation in 6 days. Genesis 2 seems to forget where Genesis 1 ended and places Adam alone in the Garden without animals or Eve, which are added as the chapter unfolds. After the creation of Eve – which ends this second creation narrative – the story continues in Chapter 3 with the apple affair and the expulsion from the Garden, to which we’ll come next week.

The creation of Adam and Eve is a foundation story that places human beings in creation but also casts them as distinct from the rest of creation. In addition to this shared distinction, the man and the woman are, just as importantly, there for each other.

What the story might mean for human beings in sexual differentiation won’t be our interest today. Neither will the social and sexual dynamics that some have read into Eve’s arrival after Adam as “helper and companion”. Rather, we will first note that this story – in common with all stories – is a true lie. This is what we mean when we call it a myth: not that it is untrue – a very narrow meaning of myth – but that it is a lie told to speak the truth. The truth is that “it is not good to be alone” and God does something about this, which is to say that if there were to be an Adam, there would have to be an Eve.

But we’re going to go another step today and tell a bigger lie, even less believable than the Genesis narrative itself: for a proper understanding of this story, we must see that Adam is the world and Eve is … the church. “It is not good for the world to be alone”, God says. And so Adam is lulled into a deep sleep, and the church is called out of him and presented back to him as “a helper and companion”. And Adam declares with delight, “Here at last is my truth”, and the world leaves what was its own and joins itself to the church. And the creation is now complete.

Now, Genesis 2 is clearly not about this. Of course, it’s not clear what Genesis 2 actually is about. This is not least because the story is three or four thousand years old, and the opinion about its meaning is divided into about one opinion for each of those years. There’s a sense, then, that each time we tell it, we lie above and beyond the original storyteller’s lie – and perhaps we lie all the more, the more seriously we tell it.

Our deceit this morning is not so much the untruth of myth but of typology. Typology is what allows the gospel writer Matthew to say that Jesus is the true Israel, what allows St Paul to say that Jesus is the true Adam, what allows Rowling to say that Voldemort and his Death Eaters are really Hitler and the SS, and what allowed us to say what we did last week: that the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist is the deep and the void God acted upon in Genesis 1. In typological thinking, we take a couple of things which look to be little bit the same and ask, what would we see if they were the same? (In fact, Paul does something a little like what we’re proposing today when he considers human marriage to reflect the marriage of Christ and the church [Ephesians 5.22-32]).

Eve-with-Adam looks a bit like church-with-world. Whatever else we might read into it – and there are some pretty unpalatable readings possible – the Genesis story ties Adam and Eve closely together. This matters if Eve is the church and Adam the world. If Adam and Eve are somehow “for” each other then Eve-as-the-church is for Adam-as-the-world.

In the creation of Eve, we see at least the establishment of human relationships and the possibility of a continuing history. But there is more than this. As we have already noted, creation is completed in Eve. God, then, is finally revealed as the creator in Eve’s appearance: God “becomes” the God we know when Eve arrives. Eve’s arrival, then, becomes a sacrament of the being of God as creator, and so of Adam’s own being as creature. In Eve, Adam receives himself – no longer being alone – and so receives God. There is no Adam, and so no God-as-creator, without Eve.

Such a reading of the Genesis story is risky. But it’s essential to see that it’s risky because we’re telling a lie, and really good liars eventually have trouble distinguishing between the lie and the truth. This is why reading the Bible is so dangerous.

Our particular true lie today is that the church is to the world as Eve is to Adam. We know, of course, that we – as the church – have a mission. But the Eve-Adam dynamic has a surprise in it, which might open up our thinking about how God works with the church. Our experience of mission is that it is hard work and that we’re not very good at it. In the creation story, however, something strange to our expectations takes place: Adam recognises himself in Eve: flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. More than this – surprising in what we assume to have been a patriarchal culture – Adam leaves his family and goes to Eve. Nothing could be easier, so far as Eve – the church – is concerned.

If our borrowing of Eve and Adam for thinking about the church in relation to the world has any truth, it might cause us to wonder: what would it mean for the world to recognise itself in the gift of the church? What “attracts” Adam-world to Eve-church? And what would this mean for the church’s own understanding of itself and its vocation?

As a bare story of the creation of bare human beings we might guess at part of what Adam found attractive in Eve: they were naked and not ashamed! But even the original hints at much more than sex. Adam becomes a believer when he sees Eve, for there is truth in her appearing. In Eve, at last, it all comes together.

And there is truth in the appearing of the church. Here we can begin to build on what we considered last week: the utter freedom the church has, if it is the church of the free God. But the essential thing is that this cannot be sheer freedom from all things, if the church is Eve-like. The freedom of the church will be a bound freedom, a freedom to be itself in relation to the Adam-like world. The radical freedom of the church is a freedom not from but for the world.

This is to say that the freedom of the church is to be oriented towards those as different from itself as Eve is from Adam. Adam is bereft because everything in the world apart from Eve is less than he needs. Adam – and so the world, and so God – are not complete without the sending of Eve.

Can we grant this lie, in order to become the truth of this story? Can the church really be all this? Can Mark the Evangelist be this as we take our next step? Would it be truly a lie to hold this, or would it be to lie truly?

It is only if the latter is that case that it is worth our while even bothering with taking the next step.

It is only in the space between the lie and the truth that God – and we – happen.

Let us, then, become a true lie. Let us strive to be a story about God and the world which could scarcely be true, but must be if God is anything like the story says, and we are to have any hope.