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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.

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Reign of Christ
21/11/2021

Revelation 1:4b-8
Psalm 93
John 18:33-19:5

In a sentence:
The true human life is lived not in seeking to escape the limitations of life but to find life – and God – within them

“Here is the man”, Pilate proclaims to the masses who cry out for Jesus’ blood.

Whatever Pilate means, for the gospel writer these words mean more than “Look at this fellow!”  John wants to say – “Look, here is the human being. Gaze upon this one, and see what it means truly to be human.” But how is this beaten wreck of a man really what the true human being looks like? What is true humanity?

Perhaps some of you have seen the movie The Truman Show (1998). On the surface, the film is an entertaining comedy with the usual happy beginning, sudden descent and final rise again to life. Symbolically, however, the film is a clever anti-religious statement about true humanity or, at least, about what constrains us as human beings and what we need to do to be free. The name of the central protagonist is essential: Truman, or “True Man” or “True Human Being.” (Truman’s surname – Burbank – is the name of the district in which such film studios as Disney and Warner Bros. are found).

In the story, the young Truman gradually becomes aware that he’s living in a contrived world. We, the viewers, know that everyone else in Truman’s life is an actor, and that his whole life is being viewed on television by the outside world. When Truman finally realises that something is horribly wrong, he makes a run for it – not knowing where he is running to – only to bump into the edge of the enormous dome which encapsulates his world. There he is addressed from on high by the director of “The Truman Show”. The director’s name “just happens to be” Christo, and his voice booms god-like from the sky via the weather sound system. Christo invites Truman to stay and live out the lie for the pleasure of the millions of viewers who’ve watched his progress since he was born.

But Truman – the True Human Being – decides instead to see what life is like without Christo – without God, we are to understand. And in the story, of course, he can; there’s another, bigger world out there. Truman exits the false world and leaves behind the Christo who has been his limitation, stepping forward into what might be a brave, new world.

The film is a parable of how our society has thought that it has found the measure of God, and that it ought to cut itself loose from God. Truman sees and leaves the untrue people and the false director-God behind. But more importantly, we are invited to do the same. We cheer for Truman as he throws off the tyrannical meddling in his life. We see that it is the right thing to do, for he has been subject to a lie, and he will only find his full humanity by shrugging off what has been holding him back.

But there is a storyteller’s trick at play here. While Christo is God in the story, it is we who have the God’s-eye view of everything in Truman’s life. We stand above Truman and Christo. We see everything and judge that Truman only becomes True-Man – genuinely human – when he turns his back on the god-figure who has been in control of his life. We cannot but judge in this way because we are made to think we see everything. Truman – the true human being – must break free from Christo, the god who keeps his world small.

All this, however, is rather a cheap shot. In the film, Christo is God and Truman is us. As Truman breaks free, so do we. In the gospel, however, Christo is Pilate and the religious authorities and us, and Truman is Jesus. The power is not with a god but with the authorities, and Jesus is constrained by them. The difference is now that there is nowhere Jesus can go. There is no other world in which there are no constraining powers. The film would have us believe that after Truman steps out of his little world, it is into the real world – a place free from Christo-like constraints and powers and crucifixions.

The true human being – Jesus or any of us – can’t escape the world as Truman does. The lie in the film is that Truman escapes not from the limiting god in the sky but from the realities of historical living. Problems on the ground are blamed on the heavens: “Imagine there’s no heaven…above us only sky,” a gentle, wistful song invites us. The implication is that if heaven were imagined away, the earth would be healed.

Of course, heaven has today largely been imagined away, at least as a public thought; there remain only the little heavens in the minds of individuals.

And nothing has changed. With a heaven “out there” no longer capturing the public imagination, heaven has been bought crashing down to earth. It is no longer above us in a religious space but ahead of us in political time. And so the crucifixions continue because heaven and its gods were never really the problem. It is not the gods who place Jesus in the power of Pilate and ultimately on the cross. Jesus simply doesn’t fit and so is squeezed out, pressed towards oblivion.

Yet Pilate’s “here is the man” is made by the gospel writer to be the ironic opposite of what Pilate seems to intend. Perhaps Pilate mocks Jesus, but the evangelist mocks Pilate’s inability to see what is in front of him – that Jesus is more human than we are.

Jesus’ humanity is in his reconciliation to having no heaven to escape to Truman-style, as we wish to escape. It is in his refusal to deny what he holds true for the convenience of an easier ride – Christo-style – as we do. Jesus’ humanity is in that, whether his life is joy or suffering, it is as one who knows himself the child of God: I am God’s, and God is mine.

On this day each year, we take Pilate’s mocking in this morning’s reading and contradict him to declare in faith that Jesus is “king”. But, in this, we don’t make him a Christo in the sky, pulling the strings in our lives, doling out pain and suffering on us like on rats in a laboratory, watching to see what we will do next.

To say that Jesus is king is to say that he lives the life of the true human being – the woman, the man who has but one life, in this world and no other: a life lived for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; in youth or advanced old age; gay or straight; under democracy or dictatorship; as citizen or alien.

Jesus is Lord and King when our lives are lived as his was: looking not for a heaven to escape to, but living the prayer that God’s kingdom come, here and now, in the midst of what we have to deal with. It is only here and now that we can become children of God.

Let us, then, seek the coming of this kingdom in all things so that, in all things, we might with Jesus become God’s kingdom.

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Pentecost 25
14/11/2021

Daniel 12:1-3
Psalm 16
Mark 13:1-14

In a sentence:
God is revealed in the person of Jesus and continues to be revealed in the lives of God’s people

“Not one stone left upon another…”

I confess that last month’s earthquake made me wonder whether our calculations might have been simplified a bit here at Curzon Street: not one brick left upon another! But still it stands!

Yet, had it tumbled down, similarities between that destruction and the prediction in today’s reading would only be superficial. For us, a collapse might mean sadness and but perhaps also relief. For Jesus’ disciples, it was a matter of horror: how could such a thing come about?

The terms in which Jesus speaks here are classicly apocalyptic. Apocalyptic thinking anticipated an in-breaking of God’s righteousness in answer to the unrighteousness of the world. The apocalypse of God – literally, the revealing of God – was the manifestation of God’s glory, a manifestation which would lead to a judgement and a setting right of wrongs. Very often, this final consummation of all things was to be preceded by a breaking down of social and political order, of which the predicted destruction of the Temple in today’s reading would be a dramatic sign.

Of course, we don’t need apocalyptic thought to recognise that all things come to an end. We have enough historical and personal awareness to know that everything ends. But our text is not about the way of all the earth, by which we reasonably expect there will come a day without Google or Netflix, the United States or China. Jesus makes a prediction which disrupts even this expectation. He points not to earthquakes or entropy or the dialectical mechanisms of history but to the rattling of the world with the approach of God.

It’s not entirely clear, then, whether the approach of God is a good thing or bad. “When will these things be?” the disciples ask. Such a question asks about “managing” God’s approach, about being placed as well as possible when God gets here, about becoming a small a target. Jesus speaks elsewhere of the approach of God as being like the coming of a thief in the night, with an implied warning: be ready at all times. We usually focus here on the suddenness – the unpredictability – of God’s otherwise welcome return, but perhaps the activity of the thief should not be dismissed too quickly. For the approach of God is not without threat: the thief comes to take what we value. God is also a challenge to what we value.

And how does God approach? What does God look like when God comes? As the rest of Chapter 13 unfolds, Jesus speaks of the persecution of believers before God finally arrives. The world does not like what it sees in these ones – in the disciples of Jesus. This is because they are not how they should be: they are not as we are, for that is our ultimate measure of others. I persecute one in whom I do not like what I see, in whom I do not see myself.

I can relate to this. There is an old man who hides in the mirrors at our place and who jumps out to frighten me whenever I pass by. Perhaps something similar happens at your place? And perhaps one grows used to this? Whatever the case, such mirrors are the engines of persecution. When we look at each other, we expect to see something of ourselves. You, if you are in radical difference from me, should not be here – you black person, you asylum seeker, you infidel.

The tribulation Jesus describes is, then, what happens when God comes close in the person of believers. It is not suffering in general but the suffering which God brings when God affects people. This suffering is what happens when the world cannot bear what it sees when it looks in a mirror: we do not recognise ourselves, believer, when we look at you. You look like Jesus, but Jesus didn’t look enough like us.

It is the presence of God in the persons of believers, then, which are the cause of the tribulations, the wars and rumours of wars. The apocalypse, then – the revelation of God – is not God’s response to the evil in the world; it is the cause of the strife.

The revelation of God disrupts the settled world. This is obvious in the more dramatic apocalyptic texts. Yet, the crucial revelation in the Bible is not the end-time apocalyptic overturning of all things but the life and ministry of Jesus. For the New Testament, Jesus is the apocalypse of God. Jesus is what the glory of God looks like in the world.

Perhaps this is acceptable to our moral sensibilities, at least through those parts of the gospel when Jesus is doing and saying Godly things. But Jesus is also crucified, which looks like a negation of God’s glory but is in fact its intensification: the glory of God is the crucified Jesus. Or, in terms of apocalyptic thinking, the crucified Jesus is God’s apocalypse, God’s self-revelation. Nothing else in all the horror and splendour of New Testament apocalyptic matters more than this: the crucified Jesus is the revelation of the glory of God.

The cross, of course, is a kind of “negative” glory, in the way that old film-based photography produced an image of “reversed” colour. We can discern in a photographic negative what the image is but it is both exact and shockingly distorted. It is both us and not us – our ghost. The cross is God’s glory in negative – God’s glory as God sees it, God’s glory in the form of the world. We cannot yet see the glory in it. But in the light of the resurrection – the light of the Father’s love – the cross becomes the apocalypse: we see God in Jesus, even crucified.

This is not a new thought. The glory of God, wrote the 2^nd Century bishop Irenaeus, is a human being fully alive. What God reveals – God’s apocalypse – is just this: a human being fully alive in whatever circumstances – suckling at the breast, learning in the synagogue, teaching in town squares,  dying on a cross. Or crossing a dangerous sea to safety, struggling to hold a marriage together, grieving the loss of a life’s love, wondering about that old face in the mirror. We, too, are material for the apocalypse of God.

The ancient controversies about the humanity and divinity of Jesus, which lead to the cascading of affirmations about him in the creeds – God from God, light from light, of one being with the Father, begotten not made… – these are not about theological minutiae. They are about whether the world in which we live – the world which we are – can be a revealing of God’s glory. Can God be here, Now, in a crucifying world, or a warring one, or a burning one?

It may be that what we see or are living looks little like God’s glory. We may have lost the Temple, the standing, the resources, the energy, the youth, the time, the companions. Or, perhaps in other ways we have these and imagine that these are signs of God’s proximity.

Yet, do not be led astray: these things are not the end. Only God is the end. And so God is our beginning, now. The glory of God – human beings fully alive – is possible in all things.

Let us then, in Jesus, live towards that possibility:

becoming the apocalypse of God.

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Pentecost 24
7/11/2021

Ruth 3:1-13
Psalm 146
Mark 12:38-44

In a sentence
In the midst of all that goes on in the world, God is also ‘going on’, making of our lives surprising new possibilities.

Something not immediately obvious in the story of Ruth is that God is pretty much absent from the narrative.

God is invoked for blessing, is blamed for Naomi’s tragedy, and is praised and thanked at the end. But God is not active in the story in the way typical of the other biblical narratives: God doesn’t say anything or do anything (the allusions to such action in 1.6 and 4.14 notwithstanding).

God’s part in the story is less as protagonist than as ‘context’. God is a frame within which the players in the drama do their thing, is the space within which Ruth and Boaz and Naomi live and move and have their being.

The effect of this is to render what actually happens in the story less important than it might first seem, or at least to shift how the action is important. Today we have heard something of what led to the marriage of Boaz and Ruth and, ultimately, to the birth of Obed and a link to one of the central stories of the Old Testament – the story of David. Yet if God is more context than agent in the story, then the purpose of narrating Ruth’s marriage to Boaz and the birth of their son becomes less clear.

If God were portrayed as directly active in the book, then the story would be more clearly one of the blessing of God on everyone still standing at the end. This is perhaps the typical reading: Ruth and Boaz are blessed because their devotion and loyalty is something good. God responds to the need and character of the tragic Naomi, the loyal Ruth and the righteous Boaz.

Yet, a little more cynical reading could recast Naomi as the embittered schemer, Ruth as gullible – or perhaps even as seductress – and Boaz as a good-hearted old fogy who can’t believe his luck. We are far enough away culturally from the historical context that we can’t be at all confident we understand what is going on between Ruth and her mother-in-law, or between Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor, or in the negotiations for Naomi’s plot of land. It’s almost impossible not to impose our own social experience and expectation on the story.

But this narrows the possibilities of the text. Would the lesson of the book as a whole change if Naomi, Ruth and Boaz are rather more morally ambiguous figures? The climax of the story would seem to be the birth of the child and its link to David. But the point cannot be that Ruth’s loyalty and openness to the God of Israel ‘earned’ her this connection to David, or even brought David forth. David had six other great grandparents whose stories we do not know. We have no guarantee that the story of each great grandmother and great grandfather of David was just as virtuous as we’ve been given to imagine that Ruth and Boaz were. And so, we’ve no guarantee that their link to David is a reward for their goodness. If the author did understand Ruth to have been rewarded for her devotion, we cannot.

This is not to say that goodness doesn’t matter but it is to say that goodness is not where the story starts. In Ruth’s story, as people go about doing what people do – grieving, promising, reaping and gleaning, scheming, seducing, annexing, marrying, giving birth – God gets on doing what God does. If it were the case that Naomi did scheme to manoeuvre Ruth into Boaz’ bed, that a simple Ruth just did what she was told and that Boaz then ran a ploy to secure her and her inheritance as his own – and then the baby was born – none of this change the context within which it all happened. They have done their thing, and God is doing God’s thing. The identity of the baby is the sign of God’s hand over what we think and do, however we are motivated. By God’s hand, the anointed one will emerge from within our midst, though we cannot see him coming.

To put it differently, whatever seems to be going on in the world – for better and for worse – God also is ‘going on’ in the world. In the book of Ruth the lives of a few of us are given to us as the very life of God, the lifeblood of God. It is in and through these live that God lives and moves and has his being. We – virtuous or not – are God’s context.

This is the scandal of the incarnation: that the shape of our life could be the shape of the life of God. The devotion of Ruth to Naomi with which the story begins – Ruth’s ‘cleaving’ (1.14, AV) to Naomi – this is how God is with us: where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge… To speak of Jesus as both human and divine is not to say anything about the ‘stuff’ of which he was made, but to say that the life of God and the life of the world are properly bound together in this way. The life of God looks like the life of a human being, and the life of a human being is how God chooses to be.

This is the promise upon which we are to build our lives – that God makes us God’s own. What we are and do is and is done in the God who brings forth from our imperfect lives the anointed one, the christ in its various guises: David the forerunner, Jesus the incarnate Son, and the motley crew called, amazingly, Christ’s own Body – even us here today.

Sometimes it will look as if this happens because of us. Too often, we must confess, it will happen despite us. But always and everywhere it is for us that God creates out of us – surprisingly – as if out of nothing (‘ex nihilo’…).

And so, today, we baptise.

Today, we take a piece of the world – one of us – and make of it a piece of God, a member of the Body of Christ.

Today, we glimpse what Ruth did not but what she nevertheless was: a human life becoming the life of God, and God’s life becoming ours.

Thanks be to God.

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All Saints Day
31/10/2021

Hebrews 12:1-3
Psalm 24
John 11:32-44

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

Tomorrow is All Saints Day – a feast day of the church whose earliest mention is in the writings of Ephrem Syrus who died in 373CE. By 407 it was celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost which is where it is still observed in Orthodox churches. The Western church moved it to 13 May 609 and then to 1 November by Pope Gregory IV prior to 844. It became a very handy day for remembering all the saints for whom there were no special days assigned.

The celebration of All Saints has come into Protestant consciousness relatively recently. So what is our expectation of observing All Saints Day. It is always on 1 November, and yet many churches pull into the nearest Sunday (as we have today). It doesn’t warrant a special civic holiday like Christmas. So what is expected of us in this celebration?

One place to look could be in the minds of those who determine the readings for the day in the three-year ecumenical lectionary. This gets a bit complex if all the readings – Hebrew Scriptures, Psalms, Epistles and Revelation, and the Gospels. Let’s keep it simple and consider the Gospels. In the year of Matthew, the reading is the Beatitudes. In the year of Luke, the reading is the Beatitudes. But in the year of Mark, which gospel does not have any beatitudes, the reading is the raising of Lazarus in John’s gospel with particular emphasis on the family and Jesus mourning his death.

We could surmise that the lectionary compilers would like the church to focus on those who mourn. The Beatitudes announce blessings on those who mourn, those who weep, and John tells of the family in mourning. So it is that on this celebration we remember those whom we mourn. For many of us that will include those whose lives of faith in Christ has impacted on our own lives and faith. It is a good time for a congregation to gather in memory and thanksgiving, those from among us who have died during the past year, since the last All Saints Day.

There is a reading that would be included in the lectionary anthology for All Saints if I were the compiler of the three-year lectionary – Hebrews 12 ‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…’. How could it have been left out of our lectionary? Maybe because the focus is on us – the gaze of the witnesses is on us, not us on them. Maybe because of the horrific list of sufferings the witnesses endured at the tail end of chapter 11. Indeed, these witnesses are martyrs. The Greek for witness is μάρτυρας (martyras). English translations of the New Testament never render this as ‘martyr’ but this is an occasion when it would be appropriate. A good time to remember that witnessing to the good news of Jesus Christ is a risky business.

I am a volunteer coordinator of an icon school. One of my tasks is to lead iconographers in a reflective meditation on an icon. As we contemplate the icon of a saint I tell the story of the saint, listing the virtues and quoting the words for which the person is venerated by the church. I will often then ask two questions – “As you look upon this image of this saint, what do you see? As this saint looks upon you, what might he or she see in you?” This provides, I hope, an invitation into self-examination in light of the virtues of the saint.

My questions are prompted by our Hebrews reading. The text evokes a word picture. The scene is an athletics arena – ‘… let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…’ – the ancient athletes stripped of their clinging clothing. The witnesses are in the stands watching. They are looking at us as we run. And what might they see? The writer of the letter instructs that the cloud of martyrs will see the runners (Hebrews 12:2) ‘looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.’

I guess this holds the clue as to why the cloud-of-witnesses text doesn’t get a go in the All Saints lectionary. It is not about the witnesses who have gone before. It is about us. Because the witnesses witnessed and are looking at us, we who are running the race are to respond as people, who like them, are faithful to Jesus. The text kind of deflects the attention away from the saints that this celebration invites us to remember. Yes, but I would hope that this celebration is not just a focus on the loved ones gone before, to assist our grief, to remind us to be grateful of our inheritance from them. Each Christian celebration is to evoke a change in us – to draw us on in faithful obedience.

Yes, we look to the saints, our own cherished ones who have lived among us and who are now dead. We remember with thanksgiving the examples of faith in Christ that they set us, but their example surely prompts a response from their inspiration to examine our own faith journey. How is our race running? The cloud of witnesses, the cloud of martyrs reminds us that for the saints in the letter to the Hebrews, the race of faith was perilous. Looking to Jesus and choosing the way of faith is perilous as it was for the cloud of martyrs. It is a call to lay aside the sin that clings to lay aside greed, to lay aside seeking power advantage, to lay aside motives of political expediency. ‘[L]ooking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith…’