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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…’

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Pentecost 22
24/10/2021

Psalm 126
Mark 10:46-52

In a sentence
With Bartimaeus, we have need of our eyes being opened, to see that God sees – and loves – us.

As with all miracle stories in the Bible, so also with the healing of blind Bartimaeus: we should not be too distracted by the miracle itself. Even if things happened exactly the way in which they are told in the gospel, the story is not told simply that we might believe that Jesus once healed a blind man. Today’s reading asks not whether we believe Jesus once brought sight to a blind man but whether we see clearly ourselves.

This is the second healing of a blind man in Mark’s gospel. In both cases, the healing takes place just before a revelation of Jesus’ hidden identity. The miracles are not simply about seeing; they are about seeing Jesus.

Immediately following the first healing of a blind man (Mark 8.18ff), we hear Jesus declared to be God’s anointed king (Messiah-Christ) and then of the qualification of this kingship by the cross. Immediately following today’s story of Bartimaeus, Jesus enters Jerusalem riding on a donkey, a traditional way in which Israel’s king would enter the city (cf. Zechariah 9.9). This sign of kingship will be qualified now not by the prediction of the cross but its realisation. Eyes are opened to see a king, if, strangely, a crucified one.

Kings are as foreign to us today as are the miracles of the Gospels, but the king is just a contemporary sign Mark uses to identify Jesus. Bartimaeus cries out and his is sight restored, and what he sees is Jesus. The text’s question to us, then, is not whether we can believe that Jesus could fix a blind person’s eyes but, Are we blind to Jesus?

This is not an easy question to answer, for implicit here is that if we don’t see Jesus, then we don’t see ourselves properly. This is then a strange blindness: we might not know that we are blind.

The possibility of not knowing we are blind is not simply a ‘religious’ proposal. In our social discourse today, there are raging outings of blindness – of those blind to their own violence, privilege, cultural appropriation, racism, or whatever. We seek to unveil what is hidden, what has been blended into the background and so is overlooked. Or we seek to resist its unveiling.

In this political opening of eyes, however, there is deep accusation. We shake each other awake: ‘Can’t you see?’ It is our guilt we are to see: the effects of our blindness on others.

With Bartimaeus, however, there is no accusation. If Bartimaeus had his eyes opened, the healing is an answer to the problem he knew he had but was not his fault. Even if we wonder whether such a thing could happen, we understand what would be happening if it did. An honest answer is given to an honest question.

If the story is about our blindness to our blindness, things are different. Now the healing reveals the problem: that we have been living with our eyes wide shut. A serious question is put to what where our certain answers. Yet, there is still no accusation here, no guilt. Miracle stories are about what we cannot do for ourselves, and this is no less the case when the miracles are metaphors: it takes God’s healing power to reveal this kind of blindness, too.

And the healing is not a one-off. To have our eyes opened – to see something of God and ourselves in Jesus – is not the end of the matter. Bartimaeus does a strange thing when his eyes are opened. Instead of running home to see his family for the first time in years(?) or anything else a just-re-sighted person might do, he ‘follows Jesus on the way’.

To have our eyes opened to our blindness is to learn that we do not know when we are blind. If seeing is first seeing Jesus, then keeping Jesus close – following Jesus – is the way to see clearly who we are and what is happening around us.

Of course, this is not merely ‘looking’ at Jesus. Religious adoration is not the point, at least not here. To see Jesus is to see him seeing me, affirming what I can become, whoever and wherever I am. Having our eyes opened will mean different things for each of us. The rich and the poor are blind in this way, but differently so, and seeing will mean different things. And so also for the young and the old; for the parent and the child; the wife and the husband; the white and the black.

We all know that we don’t know, can see that we can’t see, and it is usually the case that there is nothing we are able to do about it but act in ignorance, step out blindly, and see what happens. And this delivers us the world we live in today.

The cry of those who find themselves in these circumstances is not different from that of Bartimaeus. We need to see more clearly: Son of God, have mercy on me. See me, that I might see.

Our story today assures us: God does see us, and gives us a vision of ourselves through God’s own eyes, that we might begin to walk God’s way.

This is the beginning of our healing, our waking up, our being made new.

May Bartimaeus’ prayer for healing be ours, that God might heal us.