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Christmas 1
26/12/2021

Genesis 3:1-24
Psalm 130
John 1:1-14

In a sentence:
The incarnation is not about God ‘invading’ our space but making our space truly a place for us

In 1978 there probably appeared in a milkbar very near to you a “Space Invaders” game machine. Very cool!

It had a left-right movement lever, a single large plastic firing button, monotone 8-bit graphics and a gripping soundtrack. Space Invaders was a whole new world to the average 13-year-old of the day – not that this 13-year-old could afford to play it very much, but that was beside the point. It was, again, very cool.

Space Invaders was a shoot-em-before-they-get-ya game. The enemy was a space invader in a double sense: first and most obviously, it was an invader from outer space. Such invaders are nearly always bad. Second, and a little less obviously, it was a coloniser: the space enemy sought to occupy our space. These invaders are always bad.

But with this second sense, “space” itself needs to be stretched in meaning. When our space is invaded we are not dis-spaced but dis-placed. Space is too arid a concept to capture the loss of being dislodged. The coloniser sees space and takes it, but those already there lose not only their space but their place. Place is lived space – a home as distinct from a house. The violence of the coloniser includes the dissolution of place. The invaders might justify the invasion in terms of their need for “Lebensraum” (the Nazis) – living space – or that they are reclaiming lost space (Israel and the Chinese, among others). Yet space-invasion is violent nonetheless. In modern geopolitics, this kind of invasion is now relatively rare, but the experience of a challenge to place continues through the rise of the modern refuge; the refugee is an invader with moral rather than military claims on our space and place.

Space is not quite place. This difference is not merely [spatial] but is also social and psychological. Have we not felt displaced under the shadow of the virus these last couple of years? The COVID context aside, what we considered yesterday also relates to the distinction between space and place: wanting our lives to be comedic, but suspecting that they might be tragic. These are alienations in our own space – displacements even as our space stays the same.

But our sense of displacement is scarcely new. In the creation myth in Genesis 2, Adam is “placed” in the Garden and – by the end of chapter 3 – is again dis-placed with Eve as they are driven out of Eden. This displacement is marked with a number of curses: the joy of having children becoming a source of great pain, the distortion of the mutuality of human relationships and the struggle between us and the earth. These woes are not because of a “historial” expulsion from Eden but mark our experience that things are not right, the experience of having space but not quite place. This is our world, but it is against us; these relationships constitute us, but they are always troubled.

What Genesis 2 and 3 describe is the reverse of where the creation narrative of Genesis 1 began: in the beginning is not nothing but a chaotic, deep void. This is “mere” space into which God speaks to create place. With the Fall, however, space without place “returns”. Adam and Eve only know place before the Fall; the tension between space and place first appears in Genesis 3. From the point of Genesis 4 – from our point of view as the children of Adam and Eve – displacement is all we have known, and it is uncomfortable. From there, the human being fanned out into the world to fill it with cities, to invade each other’s spaces, and to invade the heavens. The Genesis pre-history portrays space as distorted place into which God doesn’t quite fit, or us. What we come to call “the human condition” is just this displacement. In a world like this, God is alien, and we are too. Most of the time, God is not present and, when present, it is only to “intervene” – to “come among” – before departing from our space again. Such an interventionist God is the space invader par excellence. The soundtrack to the old video game is suddenly the tune for a Christmas carol.

It is within a world like this that we hear from John’s gospel: “And the Word became flesh…” After Genesis 3, this can only mean: the Word invaded the world, for the world is now not a natural place for God. “He came to what was his own”, John writes, “but his own rejected him. ” Compromised space does not easily recognise the place which God makes. The crucifixion is a radical displacement of Jesus from his place among the people, casting him out of even that compromised place into a mere space outside the city. In the crucifixion, we read God’s approach as an invasion, and we reject it.

What happens when the place-making God is thrust into outer space – the cross, outside the city, formless and void? Is the cross a Godless space or a God-filled place? We are at the crux (cross! ) of Christian faith. The question is not, Did God enter the world at Christmas. Or rather, this is the question, but it is the same as the Easter question: Is the place-making God attached to the space of the cross?

Our answer to this is everything, which is why the Creed hammers the Christology: God from God, light from light, through him all things were made. This is not about getting mere theology right for its own sake, whatever that could mean. All of the extraordinary things said about Jesus in the Creeds are said about the one who is crucified – whose story looks finally to be tragedy, to recall what we considered yesterday. The question answered here is whether the harsh space of the cross – or the radical humility of a manger – can be the creative place of God.

Pastorally – in connection to us – the question asked is whether our experience of displacement is within God’s healing reach.

And the answer is, Yes.

God is not absent, occasionally invading our space. Rather, God makes place. God creates a “rest in peace” which is not death and the loss of all space and time but peace in time and space. As in Genesis 1, so also here: the deep empty of our displacement – in this God’s hands – can be made to be place and life.

John might have written: “He came to what was his own, but his own space‑d him. But to all who did receive him, he gave place as children in the family of God” (cf. John 1. 12f).

Is there a home in the world, or are we just invaders of space who must yet fear now being invaded by God or some other threat?

God has “made his dwelling among us” John writes. God comes home in the place­­‑d incarnation. As Adam was placed in the Garden, Jesus is placed among us, naming us as God’s own place, making flesh – our flesh – into Word.

Let us, then, make place for God, and for each other.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2021

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Luke 2:1-7

In a sentence:
God lays us in the manger of the world with a promise to bring us through all things, back to himself.

Every generation throws up its own questions about God. Over the last couple of months, I have found myself pondering one of the pressing theological questions of this age. Most simply, that question is, Does God have Netflix?

Of course, this question concerns not only Netflix but extends to the providers of any video streaming service. And we note that there are those who would insist that heaven is illuminated by the glory of God and not by the ghostly glow of LED flat screens and that, besides, surely God reads books rather than watches TV. But such objections need not be seriously entertained.

Now, while the question of a divine streaming subscription has continued to nag at me, part of the difficulty in answering it was that it wasn’t clear to me why the question mattered at all. However, I have begun to suspect that the problem to which this question points is that of divine omniscience: the theory that God knows all things. We have all had the experience of sitting down to a movie or a book, only to realise 30 minutes or a few chapters into the story that we have seen or read it before. This must surely be the experience of the all-knowing God – Every. Single. Time: “Oh, I think I’ve already seen this! ” So far as an omniscient God goes, what would be the point of watching or listening to a story if you know how it’s going to end?

Putting that question on hold for a moment, we can contrast this divine experience with our own. We would love to know the end of our own stories. To know our own end would not be simply to have information; it would be to know how to live here, in the middle of our story, anticipating that end. Our sense for the end colours our experience of the middle – our experience of life here and now.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that we generally anticipate our lives will turn out to be tragedies. – that, finally, things will not turn out well. Suspecting this, we gravitate towards comedy. The sense of comedy we mean here is not “funny” or “amusingly entertaining” but the narrative sense of comedy. A comedy is a story that starts high, moves through a deep low and then rises to finish at least as high again. (We spoke earlier in the year of “the comedy” of Job in this sense). In contrast, a tragedy starts high and ends low.

The prospect of tragedy is everywhere. Global warming is one such threat – lush forests reduced to dry dust; in a different way, the possibility of a very long tail to the COVID-19 pandemic is another looming tragedy – freedom and predictability gone. And, of course, no one gets out of this life alive.

The prospect of living a tragedy is scarcely bearable, so we seek comedic distractions and diversions from the dismal here and now. We turn away from the present, from our own story. In its worst manifestations, we descend into living through other people’s more uplifted lives. So-called “reality TV” is about someone else’s reality. If the glow of LED screens doesn’t illuminate heaven, it can serve as something of a secular “opiate of the masses” – a diversion from the dreary prospect that, for us at least, things might not get much better. There are, of course, more positive reasons for watching TV or reading books. But when the CEO of Netflix observes that the service’s principal competitor is the human need for sleep, we might suspect that escaping the world – to the point of denying our own biological needs – might have more than a little to do with the booming success of the streaming services.

The choice of a life lived in distraction reflects the experience or suspicion that our own story is finally tragic, without meaning. Our stories are not interesting enough that anyone would want to watch them. We seek, then, to be entertained – entertained, in the sense of amused rather than in the sense of being considered – as we might “entertain” a thought.

Now, while media consumption can be mere distraction, distraction is the purpose of reading Scripture. The Scriptures are there also to distract us from tragedy by telling us a comedic story – that of Israel and Jesus. There is, though, no LED opiate here to null the pain of the life. We are not to “borrow” the lives of those in the biblical story but to live them: to see our own lives as hidden in God, with Jesus. Live this life – the kind of life Jesus lived. Why? Because the life of Jesus is the defining comedy. It begins with all the promise of a babe-in-arms, descends to the crucifixion and ends with the resurrection. This last – the resurrection – is not a “reversal” of the crucifixion in the middle but signals that God’s love is the context of the whole of Jesus’ life: even the cross is not outside of this.

Faith in this God, then, is a conviction as to how our story ends. However, we hold this conviction only in the middle of the story, where we are buffeted from the comic to the tragic and back again, more than a little given to wonder how things will, in fact, end. Sometimes the best we hope for is a little comic relief. Christmas seems to have been cast as something like this in our culture: a gasp of air before we descend under the waters again.

But the central question of our lives is this: are we living a tragedy or a comedy? This question doesn’t ask about what it feels like here and now. It is a long-game question – not of experience but of conviction. And it matters because our conviction about the end of the story changes our experience of the story here and now. If our life is finally a comedy, then “Lift up your heads”. If our life is finally tragedy, then it is perfectly sensible to make the ride as easy as possible with whatever works: drugs, travel, sex, chocolate or distraction-by-media.

Our gospel reading today – as always on Christmas Day – has Jesus laid in a manger. Our focus here is often on the “outcast” Jesus, born at the margin, a manger in a stable being a sign that he had no real place among us.

But we are all born into a manger: the world in which we are placed. And to the extent that we think our lives are finally tragic, we are all cast to the margin, from which we watch someone else’s more comedic passage through life.

It is given – it is the “law”, we might say – that God has laid us in a manger. And we open our eyes and wonder what is going to happen, and our first breath becomes a crying out for fear of it all. But it is the gospel that this God has laid us in a manger. This is gospel because, with this God, all lives are finally comedies. They are comedies because God is watching. It is when God watches that we have life. For God is no mere voyeur seeking distraction, and neither does God watch to oppress, accuse or condemn – all tragic outcomes. Instead, God watches with an attentiveness that brings life and does not give it up.

And so God doesn’t need Netflix. God has us – a divine comedy in the making – and God watches with intense interest. For ours is a story the end of which God both knows and does not know. God doesn’t know the end because it is truly our story – yours, mine, ours. And it is not yet finished.

But God does know the end because God watches not for distraction but for traction: to pull us towards life. Or, to put it differently, God watches not merely to be entertained by us but to entertain us: to consider us. God watches as much for our sake as for God’s own.

Jesus laid in the manger is God entertaining us – not for our distraction but considering us. And God looks to us now to entertain Jesus: to contemplate him. Because in his story we see God entertaining us, considering us, and the gospel makes this attention the ground of our being: that God sees us. Faith is seeing that God sees us, and resting in that. Faith sees in Jesus God and us, together on the great rising arc of a divine comedy which begins wherever we do and takes us wherever we go but always ends in peace.

When God is watching, whatever is laid in a manger ends up in heaven – even us.

From the manger, then, lift up your eyes to meet the gaze of God, and choose a life the ending of which not even God knows except that it ends with life.

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Advent 3
12/12/2021

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Psalm 23
Luke 1:7-18

In a sentence:
The Holy Spirit is given to renew us in the midst of a world which seems to be without God.

With today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, we find ourselves once again in the strange world of apocalyptic thought.

Foreign though it is, we don’t have to try hard to find points of correspondence between that strange world and the estrangement in our own. The threat of climate change presses ever more closely upon us, as does the ongoing impact of COVID-19. In response to our chequered past, questions of restorative justice continue to threaten the future we presumed to be ours. Gender wars fill the papers, as do diplomatic tussles reflecting troubling shifts in international balances of power.

Just as the apocalyptic prophets of biblical times tell their hearers to look to the signs of the times, so also do we read the signs – the patterns in the weather, the number of cases each day, the latest mutation – all to understand where we are and what is coming next.

John’s apocalyptic language, then, is perhaps less strange to us than might first seem. At least in the frightening aspects of the apocalyptic outlook, we see something of ourselves and our experience of our own times. Yet, what troubles we see on the horizon today are “merely” troubles. There is nothing in what is going on around us which could make sense of the conclusion of our passage today: “So, with many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people.” Whatever our trials and tribulations, there is good news in the preaching of the apocalyptic prophet.

As we’ve noted before, the apocalypse is properly not the dramatic, attention-grabbing shaking of all things but the revelation of God which comes with it: the revelation of God’s glory and the setting right of history. This is not a threat but rather something for which the people are longing. This is the “good news” – the gospel – in what John announces.

In the midst of all this, we hear in John’s preaching something which almost passes without notice but which we will consider today: “I baptise you with water … but one is coming who baptises with the Holy Spirit and fire”. The difference between what John is doing as a prophet of the old era and what Jesus will do as a prophet of the new is that Jesus brings the Holy Spirit.

The coming of the Holy Spirit, then, is part of the apocalypse or revelation of God. And when it comes, what happens? Jesus “happens”. The Spirit with which Jesus will baptise is the Spirit which comes upon him in his own baptism by John. Of course, Jesus has already “happened” at this point – he has been born and lived perhaps 30 years. Yet the connection between Jesus and the Spirit made explicit here (and in his birth – consider the descent of the Spirit on Mary in Luke’s narrative account) is crucial for what he is: the presence of God in the form of a piece of the world. In Jesus, God looks surprisingly like one of us.

This means that he has himself become the bearer of the apocalypse – the revelation of God – even as he is. What we see here is less a new age than a renewal of the age – a renewal of human possibility. This holds up even to the point of the crucifixion. What then happens by, around and to Jesus happens for him as the one on whom the Spirit rests.

Why does all this matter?

It matters because, for the things which trouble us today, resolution is only available to us tomorrow – that kind of tomorrow that never comes. Stark apocalyptic thought was also like this – now is the time of tribulation only; peace is coming tomorrow. God is presently – truly – absent, and we are on our own. God is coming, the enthusiast affirms, but right now we are truly alone.

But the New Testament baptises apocalyptic thought, soaking it in Jesus. To say that the Spirit-soaked Jesus baptises with that same Spirit is to say that God’s coming is here and now. The Holy Spirit is the means and the extension of the apocalypse, of the revelation of God. By itself, the world is not a sign of God, and neither are the signs of the times. We might well try to read the signs of the time, but we do just as well to dismiss them. God is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, not in the graphs or the predictions, not in warmer weather or diplomatic boycotts. Rather, God is in and among us by the Spirit who renews the face of the earth (Psalm 104).

This is why our liturgy for these few weeks of Advent has been laid out in the pattern of the church’s liturgical year, making each successive season approximate to each element of the worship service. The service moves from the perceived absence of God lurking under Advent through to the proclaimed presence of God in the world in Pentecost, in the community of believers. At that Pentecostal point of the service – the Eucharist – we pray: send that Spirit which makes Jesus the Christ also upon us and what we will eat and drink, that we might be the presence of God, the Body of Christ. Let your will be done once more on earth as it was in Jesus. As that Body, we then pray for the world and are sent into the world.

And sent to do what? To bear fruit, as John cries out. As a tree takes mere elements and makes of them nourishing fruit, the renewed heart allows God to take what are mere elements – us – and make of them something life-giving. Jesus’ own life is the taking of elements – the stuff of us – and making of them God’s creative presence.

What does God’s creative presence look like? It looks like a table spread in the darkest valley and all its signs of the end, our cup overflowing. We are called to take our seat at that table and to bring others to it – here and now, all the days of our lives given us to live. God comes not to wipe all things away as beyond redemption but to renew them. God comes not “spiritually” – spookily, in hidden places, hearts and minds.  God comes not tomorrow or the day after but today.

The gospel proposes, first, that – by the Spirit Jesus receives – God looks surprisingly like Jesus – that heaven is made of earth.

The gospel proposes, second, that if we open ourselves up to the same Spirit Jesus gives, God will then look surprisingly like us: the Body of Christ, here and now.

The gospel proposes, third, that this is enough, whatever the signs of the times might be.

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Advent 2
5/12/2021

Malachi 3:1-4
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 1:68-79

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

The season of advent begins again the telling of the story of the life of Jesus. Everything in the Christian tradition orbits this story, everything is drawn into its gravity. All of the texts which we have received from the Jewish tradition; all of the experiences of the earliest Christian communities; all of our own lives, find their centre in the story of this one life. The singular person Jesus of Nazareth: who was born, who lived and taught, was crucified, and was raised. We retell this story over and over and over again, until it shapes who we are, until it seeps into our souls, until we feel it in our bones.

This is one of the mysteries of the Christian tradition, that this singular story rooted in the first century, in a particular geography, somehow resonates across history and in quite different places. As we begin to anticipate again the coming of God in the person of Jesus, then, we are invited not only to remember an event fixed in the past. Rather, we are invited to pay attention to how the story of the coming of Jesus in Bethlehem is a story which reaches out and has something to say about the coming of God in our own times and places.

We might view the task of Advent as no less a time of self-reflection and preparation as the time of Lent before Easter. A time to not only swell with the joy of the assured arrival of God’s beloved child into the world 2,000 years ago. But also a time to reflect on whether we are ready to receive this child, to receive this God in the world and lives in which we actually live.

It is striking to me the sharp contrast between the texts scheduled for reading during advent, and the general vibe of the season. While many of us face busy work and social lives at this time of year, we also look forward to end of year parties, gatherings with family, and the celebration of Christmas itself. The anticipation is one of effervescent joy.

And yet in the midst of this season we hear from the scriptures foreboding warnings about the coming Son of Man; the Gospel reading next week will have John the Baptist castigating a brood of vipers. This week we hear from the Hebrew Scriptures a warning from Malachi — whose name is literally rendered “the messenger” — about the refining judgement of God; and from the New Testament, a call from the imprisoned Paul inviting the Church in Philippi to share in his ministry of suffering.

If there is any antidote to the story of Christmas falling into sanitised nostalgia, robbed of its world-shaking power, perhaps it is simply taking the time to truly listen to the Scriptures.

The question which the Scriptures seem to press upon us — at least the question which has been pressed upon me is: are you ready to receive Jesus into the world? Have you become worthy of the coming of God?

Of course we cannot make ourselves worthy, God alone can and indeed will do that. But Malachi offers us a warning: the road to becoming worthy to receive God is fraught, it can be painful.

“Who can endure the day of [the Messenger’s] coming?” says the prophet.

On the road towards Christmas it is common to read Malachi as a primarily Christian prophecy. Particularly as a prophetic prediction about the second coming of Elijah in John the Baptist, with his proclamation of divine judgement. It’s worth recognising that perhaps Malachi saw himself as this messenger from the Lord — indeed Malachi literally means “messenger.” The point is that the message of God’s judgement is not found once in John by the Jordan, but found throughout God’s faithful journey with God’s people. It is found today.

It is found when, like in Malachi’s day, our worship becomes self-serving, when our devotion to God becomes confused with projections of ourselves, holding onto our own nostalgia, or pursuing our own aesthetic desires. This must be burned away, so that we see again the pure riches of our worship and devotion before the God who comes.

So too in the words of the Apostle Paul. It is easy to hear a consoling word of friendship: “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you…” says the Apostle. And yet, this joy arises for the imprisoned Paul precisely because the Philippians, “share in God’s grace … both in … imprisonment and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel.” Indeed we might even hear in the joyous memory of Paul in prison an attempt at taking his mind off his immediate plight. Something like thinking of better days in the midst of a storm. Rather than consoling, Paul is drawing the Church in Philippi more deeply into an appreciation of his own sufferings. The prayer of Paul that the Philippians would abound in knowledge, to become pure and blameless for the day of Jesus Christ, is not a prayer that should be taken lightly. It is the prayer of a prisoner reminding his fellow co-workers that focusing on “what is best,” or better: focusing on what truly matters, means being willing to lose everything, even freedom, for the sake of the Gospel.

The call of the Gospel is not a simple task. The coming of God into the world — into this world, here and now, the world we live in today — is disruptive, and world-shaking.

God comes to us in the beloved child Jesus Christ. God meets us in our fumbling praise, in the compromised ways we live out our faith. And this is both a joy and a challenge. We must be ready to hear the message of God which challenges God’s people across time and place. We must be ready to set aside what does not matter, to attend to what truly does.

Hear then the Good News:

In Jesus Christ God fully enters the world, takes on our humanity, bears with our burdens, stands with us in our imprisonment by the forces of sin and death — those forces which stand opposed to the reach and reign of God’s love: mercy and justice, peace and joy. And on the cross Jesus encounters death face-to-face and there defeats it. Releasing us and all creation from the grip of hate and violence, oppression and cruelty.

And this then is the challenge of this Good News: now refined by the salvific work of Jesus, we must begin again to examine what is still being refined away; and how we will become co-workers with all those who share our imprisoned state.

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Advent 1
28/11/2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25
Luke 21:25-36

In a sentence:
God arrives before death, that we might not die too soon

Not many people wake up in the morning knowing that today is the day they are going to die. Perhaps people condemned to execution know this, or suicides. But even then, there are stays of execution and changes of heart. Inevitable as it is, death nevertheless catches almost all of us by surprise.

Much of our lives are spent keeping death at bay, something at which we have become increasingly successful. Most of us, most of the time, can live without worrying too much “just now” about dying, even if the odds of our greeting death increase with each day we haven’t died.

Perhaps surprisingly in all of this, death is not unlike God: a limit to our being, present mostly as a horizon, arriving in its own time. No one wakes up thinking that today is the day God will finally arrive. Sometimes people gamble on this, usually under the spell of a charismatic cult leader, but disappointment here has been universal. Faith holds that God is, like death, inevitable – ultimately unavoidable – and also that, like death, God is unpredictable. You will meet your maker, like the unexpected thief in the night.

In today’s text and many like it, this scenario is described in terms of first century apocalyptic thought. This thinking included the conviction that God’s arrival was imminent: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place,” Jesus says (Luke 21.32).

We can’t believe this now, at least not in the sense we suspect Jesus and his first hearers believed it. It is entirely possible they believed this in the same way that a suicide bomber believes, or with the true-believer conviction of the staunch defender of “freedom” and “democracy”. This way of thinking was in their blood: this generation will not pass away until all this has taken place.

We can’t believe these texts in that way, not least because that generation has well and truly “passed away”. But we are clever and find a way. Noting the similarities of God and death, we collapse the inevitability of God into the inevitability of death: God arrives when death arrives. Or, as we’re more likely to put it: when we die we go to heaven (or the other place). This mostly works, although now it is not heaven coming to earth (for which we pray each week) but us going to heaven (or not). Or, more profoundly, instead of God coming with the threat of death – which is surely implied in these terrifying texts: now death brings God

Yet, death which brings God is precisely our problem. We kill or are killed, discriminate, alienate and stigmatise because it makes someone feel safer, which we imagine is what God wants for us. We deny others what they need because we feel closer to God when we hold on to our stuff. We are unfaithful or unreliable because the relationships and commitments we already have seem not to bring God with them, se we prefer others.

If God arrives when death comes, then a culture of death already enjoys the presence of God, already is God’s kingdom – surely, the kingdom of a horrific God.

But perhaps we reject the seemingly obsolete “this generation” of our text too quickly. Maybe the point here is that God is “more” inevitable than your death – if one thing cannot properly be more inevitable than another. It’s not death you have to worry about, but God. At least, this is what we ought to want – the coming of God and not death; it is, again, the meaning of “thy kingdom come”.

We pray “your kingdom come” because we are already in the presence of death. Our deathly ways do not bring God, at least, not this God. With this God, death is real but is not a means to good things. Death is not a method for God.

The world is such that death always comes too soon. This is not that we stop breathing prematurely but that death presses in on us in the form of fear, worry, hatred, law, oppression, possessions; or death presses in when we employ it to cause these things in others.

We sometimes speak of “realised eschatology” – the notion that the promised gifts of God begin to be available before the end of all things. But there is also a “realised thanatology” – a realised social, personal, political “death” – which arrives before our biological death. Faith seeks God’s early arrival because death has come among us too soon.

We read these strange and seemingly out-of-date texts today because they pose a question: Does the arrival of God coincide with the end of life, or its beginning? And then, when does God arrive? What we think the answers to be here can be seen in how we live. We do well to ask ourselves, Is the world more alive now because of the way I have lived today?

If God’s coming is the beginning of life then, in a deathly world like ours, God’s arrival marks the beginning of death’s of own death. Something new is in our midst.

Rejoice, Jesus says, not because you have dealt enough death to usher in your own little interpretation of God’s kingdom but because the world is less deathly now that something of God’s kingdom of life has begun to take shape in your lives.

And suffer, Jesus says, not because death oppressed you but because you refuse to let it deny the life which God’s kingdom promises.

The apocalyptic mind declares that God comes before death, and that this is good news for all who say No to struggling under death before its time.

It is in an outlook like this, and life-affirming actions which resonate with it, that our redemption draws near. Stand up, Jesus says, and raise your heads: God is coming, your redemption is drawing near.

So, live and bring life.