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Pentecost 8
18/7/2021

Ephesians 2:11-22
Psalm 90

In a sentence
God embraces every ‘here’ and ‘there’ of our lives, and so we are never outside of God’s ‘house’

We were, of course, anticipating a conversation this afternoon around the theme of the future shape and location of the life of the Mark the Evangelist congregation. Yet, here we are staring at screens again, with that conversation probably a good month away!

I’ve decided, however, to continue with the sermon which I’d planned as a prelude to that conversation because what we need to consider as a congregation is not confined to one day and one conversation, and neither is what we are to decide only about our future.

Let’s then, through what we have heard today from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, consider ‘How things look from here’. We consider this in view of the fact that we have resolved not to continue to seek to fix Union Memorial Church, and have resolved to make preparations to sell the site.

From here, we look towards a period of significant change – change about which we don’t yet know very much. ‘Not here’ doesn’t tell us much about ‘where’!

We are, of course, well-resourced and have a range of viable options before us. Yet, because we are not forced to do any particular thing, we fall in the realm of responsibility, on two fronts. The first is the front the gospel presents. We want to be peculiarly Christian in what we do, and so such themes as mission, community and worship are important for us. Yet, it’s by no means clear what would be the best way for us to be Christian in our decisions – assuming, of course, that there is a ‘best’ way.

The second front of our responsibility here is to each other. We are called respond to the gospel together, as part of a community. This includes not only ourselves as the congregation but also the wider church. Yet God has the most irritating habit of whispering into the ears of each of us different ideas about the best shape of that response. At least, it will seem that way when it comes to making decisions that matter. Yet, out of these murmurings must come a determination, unless we opt for a status quo.

And the status quo always seems to hold some promise, for it carries its own kind of peace. We are still where we are today because we can live with it all, given what benefits it provides, even if these are not all the benefits we (or God) might look for.

How things look from here, then, is a rather fraught. We sense that God wants something of us, and the church wants something of us, and we want something of each other. Yet, from here, the ‘there’ of our next life is not only different but is an uncertain and potentially risky place.

Our reading from Ephesians this morning features an account of ‘here’ and ‘there’ which is important for our own situation as a congregation, although Paul begins with the ‘there’ and moves to the ‘here’.

The community to which he writes is Gentile, and he reminds them of the ‘there’ of their previous lives. Then, they were ‘outside’ – outside the covenantal promises of God. This location is expressed relative to a ‘house’. House-language runs right through the last few verses of today’s reading, although our English translation obscures the connections. A more literal translation than we heard today might run like this:

¹⁹ So then you are no longer strangers and outside the house [NRSV aliens], but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, ²⁰ built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. ²¹ In him the whole house [NRSV structure] is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; ²² in whom you also are made a house [NRSV built together spiritually into] – [a spiritual] house [NRSV a dwelling place] for God.[1]

Paul tells of the movement of the Gentiles: you were outside the house but now you are members of the household of God.

Yet, this is no mere ‘coming inside’. Paul’s house-talk morphs through the passage. He begins with the notion that there is ‘a’ house which God has, implying other houses which God does not have – including the Gentiles themselves. By the end, however, the Gentiles – with the Jews – are made into God’s own house: a ‘dwelling place’ for God.

This lovely image is moving in itself but it has a far-reaching implication. From the outside there is a fundamental inside-outside division. Yet, once the Gentiles ‘come in’, there is no longer any outside. There is no ‘there’ which is outside God. From inside there is nowhere else we can be but within the household of God.

Paul is dealing with the Jew-Gentile question. We sometimes reduce this to an account of how God overcomes difference, but reconciliation is the effect of something more basic: that God incorporates all things.

What this means for us is that where we are, there God is and where we will be there God will be. This is a dangerous thing to hold, and it should only be said in hushed tones with evangelical fear and trembling: we believe in the church; we believe that our ‘here’ is God’s ‘here’, and that our ‘there’ will be God’s ‘here’ as well.

The promise in our decision about what happens next for Mark the Evangelist is not in our cunning or calculation. The promise is that God will be there, because for us there is nothing and no-one outside of God.

The eighth-century thinker Alcuin of York once observed that place is finally irrelevant in what passes between us and God. Had place really the power to make a difference, the angels would never have rebelled in heaven, nor Adam and Eve in paradise. The question is what we make of the promised presence of God in the place in which we find ourselves.

In our deliberations over the next few months, let us not imagine that we are reaching for heaven or for paradise or even for some approximation to these, as if our calling is to get the place right, as if there is a ‘there’ which is radically different than, and more promising than, ‘here’.

Of course, there is much to be said for a place which is comfortable, convenient and which we have some confidence will serve God’s mission well. Yet let us note that comfort and convenience and confidence are ‘communal’ words, ‘with’ words (Latin, con/com = ‘with’). To ‘comfort’ is to strengthen-alongside. Convenient is ‘convene-able’ – amenable to our coming together. ‘Confident’ means to believe or trust with others.

The comfortable, convenient, confident place is properly a communal one. And so the place we seek – the very temple of God – is the place we are called to become.

But neither are we yet to become this. We are indeed imperfect here and now but will not be less so in our next shape. Being the dwelling place of God is not something we are about to choose but is our calling here and now: today, in our conversations over the next few months, in the transition period and in the new place, whatever it is. Yet, as our calling, it is also God’s gift: in being the community of faith we are given the object of faith, even God.

This is to say that our ‘here’ and our ‘there’ are – in God – the same place, because the fundament – the basis – of here and there is what God is making and will make of us in Christ. We are God’s now and will be then. We do not, then, choose more of God in the next step apart from choosing more of each other, for that is where God will be found: among the living stones which constitute God’s own home, even us.

There is freedom in this. It is not incumbent upon us to find God in our next thing, for God has already found us. To know ourselves as found and then made God’s home is to have no place we can go where God is not already there.

We have, then, work to do but it is a work which declares that God is with us, and not which anxiously seeks to find God.

This is work, then, we can do without fear of recrimination from God or each other.

Work like this would scarcely be work, at all.

[1] ‘Oikos’/house appears in the Greek as part of various compound words which yield the different translations we have into English. It is also worth noting that the idea of ‘city’ (Greek, ‘polis’) – closely related to that of ‘house’ – also appears a couple of times in the whole passage: v.19 citi‑zens, v.12 citi-zenship (NRSV translates this as ‘commonwealth’).

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Pentecost 7
11/7/2021

Ephesians 2:1-10
Psalm 89
Mark 6:14-29

In a sentence
We don’t get the Good God without recognising the bad and the ugly God overcomes to love us.

In 1966 there appeared the ‘spaghetti western’, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the title of which has become a catch-phrase among us ever since. ‘The Good’, ‘the Bad’ and ‘the Ugly’ designated the three main protagonists, each heading towards the same stash of gold buried in a grave in an old cemetery, and each ruthless as he makes his way towards that goal; ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ are relative terms in this view of the world!

The film itself isn’t my interest this morning so much as the catch-phrase: there is a Good, a Bad and an Ugly in our reading from Ephesians this morning, at least in the way in which Paul’s language seems to be received these days.

The ‘Good’ is the easiest to identify. This is the God who is ‘rich in mercy’, who ‘by grace’ and ‘not the result of works’, ‘out of the great love with which he has loved us’, saves those who are lost.

The ‘Bad’ is ‘the ruler of the power of the air’, and the ‘spirit at work among us’, which Paul considers to be oppressing human existence.

The ‘Ugly’ is the human being we seem to strike here. Paul speaks of the human being as ‘dead through … trespasses and sins’, living ‘in the passions of [the] flesh’, ‘those who are disobedient’, ‘by nature children of wrath’.

The Good, the Bad and Ugly, on this reading, correspond to Paul’s account of God the benevolent grandfather, the world of oppressive powers and the human person wallowing in that oppression.

This is to misunderstand Paul, but he is commonly heard this way – as casting the world and us within it only in the negative: bad and ugly. But this negativity about human being is not quite bearable toady, and so we are tempted to focus on the good over the bad and the ugly. Thus, we embrace the God of ‘love’ who has embraced us by grace. God becomes now more the God who ‘loves’ than the God who forgives or has mercy. This approach adores the idea of grace but has difficulty with the language of salvation and mercy, because these two concepts seem to imply that we can’t quite get rid of the ugly ourselves – that we are in some ways not loveable. We claim the good, but not the ugly, and there develops an almost childish assertion that there is only good, and that we don’t need to acknowledge the bad.

But, if not this, what are we to do with the ‘ruler of the power of the air?’ How do we reconcile our understanding of ourselves and our potential with Paul’s apparent pessimism about human character? Can the good and the bad and the ugly be reconciled in a way which will make good sense of us, and of the world, and of God? Does Paul indeed know us better than we want to know ourselves?

We might take a lead here from the last verse of this morning’s reading:

‘For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life’ (2.10).

There are two things to note here. First, the emphasis of this sentence (in the Greek text) falls on the ‘he’ (that is, ‘God’, not the masculinity of the pronoun): ‘For we are what [he/God] has made us…’ – translated differently, ‘by [God] we are…’ The contrast is drawn between what we make of ourselves (things of which we might ‘boast’, in the previous verse), and what we are if we truly spring from God.

And we note, second, the emphasis on being ‘made’ – our nature as creat‑ures: ‘… [God] has made us, created in Christ Jesus…’. Here we have to drive from our heads all anxieties about modern science and the book of Genesis. Biblical talk of creation is not cosmogony – talk of the origin of the world – but cosmology, talk of the nature of the world. These two ideas are fused in modern scientific thought, but they are then typically confused when we try to compare scriptural talk about creation with the discoveries of science. Genesis 1 is not told to explain where the world comes from but what it is and – more pointedly for us – what it is not: the world is not God.

That might seem obvious but in practice it is extraordinarily difficult to live, which brings us back to the bad and the ugly. It’s when worldly things take on divine significance – when we make gods of things that are not gods – that the bad and the ugly arise. When Paul talks of ‘the ruler of the power of the air’ (v2) and of good works we do in order to boast (v8f), he is not being unscientific or pessimistic, but giving a specifically Christian account of what happens when this particular God drops out of the picture: such things as ‘the power of the air’ and ‘good works’ are examples of ordinary worldly things taking on the dimensions of the divine, and so becoming grotesque and oppressive.

Of course, few moderns give much credence to the idea of spirits wafting about causing us to do this or that thing, but neither is that the point of Paul’s language here. The ‘powers’ which might have us in their grip are not otherworldly but precisely this-worldly, yet given divine status. Consider ideas and realities past and present which hold in their grip: notions of human worth according to race, religion, gender or age; or our own personal histories – what was done to us, or not done to us, which now determines our actions and responses in ways of which we are quite unconscious; or the weight of cultural mores: who may talk to whom, knowing one’s place, what is or is not honourable; or the influence of political and economic systems. And consider how often the injustice we’ve come to see in such realities was justified by reference to divine ordinance and will.

The Swiss theologian Gerhard Ebeling once observed that theology is necessary because the human being is by nature a fanatic. That is to say, we are prone to fanaticise about the world – to turn parts of it into the presence of God, whether that bit be an ordering which is there for our well-being – such as the economy or our social rules of engagement – or whether it be our own personal achievements. It is this fanaticism for the things of the world which gives rise to the bad and the ugly, for the bad and the ugly are simply creaturely things which been turned into divine things.

We are, Paul says, what [God] has made us. This is asserted as the possibility of a life free from the disorder our fanaticisms bring with them. Such a life begins with being made, or remade, and not with what we make of ourselves or our world. For we are fanatics, and we will worship things which are themselves only creaturely, and so in the end fail to be ourselves, and reduce others around us.

To cast it in the negative, our calling and so our humanity is in that we are called not to be God. The creature and its creator are their true selves in their proper relationship to each other. If what matters is not what we make of ourselves but what this God will make of us, then our life becomes gift and not a burden to be carried or worked out, and the world becomes open possibility and not some divinely-ordered constraint or ‘power of the air’.

Honesty would place most of us, on the terms as we’ve described them, among the ugly in the realm of the bad. For us, Paul speaks not only of creation but of the good re-creation – a starting again, life out of deathliness, a return to our humanity, an overcoming of those powers we appoint to overcome us.

Paul’s gospel matters, for surely this world needs fewer gods and more humanity. The question is whether a human being which makes itself is capable of getting itself right, or will in the end turn itself into yet another god. The evidence to date would suggest that the latter is the more likely.

For all the apparent ugliness and badness of his worldview, Paul sees more clearly than we do with all the marvellous things we now know. Perhaps it seems quaint or craven to suggest in this age that we need a God in order to be more human. But the irony is that, whether the suggestion is made or not, we will make the gods anyway. Paul simply points to what kind of god might actually work.

A god who sees the ugly and loves it by overcoming the bad is surely the good we need.

Let us reach, then, for such as God as this, for goodness’ sake.

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Pentecost 6
4/7/2021

Ephesians 1:15-23
Psalm 149
Mark 6:1-13

In a sentence
Hope is not a wish but the beginning of a new creation.

—–

What we hope for
            Where we hope
                        How we hope
                        How God hopes
            Where God hopes
What God hopes for

—–

‘I pray’, writes St Paul, ‘that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…’

What we hope for…

We hope for love. We hope for understanding. We hope for acceptance. We hope for recognition, for affirmation. We hope for restoration of what has been lost, of who has been lost. We hope for security. We hope for justice, for vindication. We hope for healing. We hope for life. We hope for peace. We hope for hope.

Where we hope…

We hope from a low place, from a trough. We hope out of the experience of something having been lost, or of a promise which is not yet fulfilled. We hope out of chaos, or darkness. Recalling what we said about the book of Job a few months ago, we hope that our story follows not tragedy’s plummeting path into oblivion but comedy’s rising path to a restoration or fulfilment. Hope always looks up.

How we hope…

We might distinguish two types of hope, ultimate and penultimate. Penultimate hopes are those which seem to us to be steps on the way to our ultimate hope. Penultimate hopes invite action. Within the dark places in which we find ourselves we discern enough light to be able to work or clamour to see some of our hopes realised.

Ultimate hopes – or perhaps there is just the one ultimate hope – of these we also discern a shape and a location and so a way towards them, but the shape and location keeps moving. We take steps towards our ultimate hope as we work on our penultimate hopes but the ultimate finally eludes us, personally and communally. We will die before we experience our ultimate hope fulfilled.

It is important to distinguish between these two hopes because we tend to collapse them, imagining that our efforts to take the steps towards our ultimate hope could finally have brought us to fulfilling it. In this way, we make the fulfilment of our ultimate hope our own responsibility. And we disappoint ourselves.

This is human hope in brief: what we hope for, where we hope, how we hope. What, then, about divine hope? What and where and how does God hope?

How God hopes…

For us penultimate hope and ultimate hope are two things. For God they are one. When God hopes, the matter is resolved. This is to say that with God there is only ultimate hope. We said earlier that our ultimate hope is thwarted by death. It is not for nothing then that there is a death at the heart of Christian confession and the declaration that death is not the final word. God’s hoping begins at the point our hope fails: at the point of nothingness and death. God hopes by creating: by calling into being that which did not exist, by raising to life what is dead.

To say that God hopes is to say that God creates. There are no penultimate hopes with God because there are no half-creations. To say that we cannot realise our ultimate hope is to say that we are not our own creators, that we cannot overcome our creatureliness to remake ourselves.

Where God hopes…

God hopes in those troughs within which we hope: within the world, generally, and within the church, particularly.

God hopes within the dissatisfaction and disorientation and the disappointment of the world. But more specifically, God hopes within the church. This is not to say we are special in any moral sense. The church is not ‘above’ the rest of the world but it is particular and unique. The church is that part of the world within which the hope of God is discerned, which is to say that the church is that part of the world within which God’s creative activity is recognised and anticipated. Most particularly, it is here that we speak of the resurrection of the least – of the outcast, rejected and dead – and anticipate the same in ourselves. And this recognition and anticipation is itself creative. The hope of God – the creation by God – begins here.

And, finally, what God hopes for…

God hopes for us. This ‘us’ is, again, the church and the world, but now in the reverse order. God hopes for – creates within – the church, but not for the church’s sake. It does not matter whether God hopes-creates apart from the church. It remains the case that what happens here happens not merely for our benefit. It happens for everyone’s benefit. The church is for the world. If God hopes, creates, in this space, that is not the end of the story but its beginning.

———-

‘I pray’, writes St Paul, ‘that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…’

The hope to which we are called is that there is one who hopes for us, who creates us. To hope is to turn towards this one. To hope is to expect to be created. This is to see in our disorder and in the shadow of death in our lives the same kind of chaos over which God’s Spirit once moved to bring the world into being, the same kind of death which the cross was. And it is to expect that, over us as over the chaos and the cross, the hope‑full creative word of God will be spoken: Be. Mine.

Yet, to hear that creative word and to rise to it is not to be called and elevated out of the world. To be of this God is not to buffered from chaos and death. To hear the creative word and to rise to it is to begin to learn to hope as God hopes. To be of this God is to begin to create. For us, too, hoping means creating.

The hope to which we are called is to be creatures who create. It is to do as God does: to love where there is none, to bless where a curse is expected, to have mercy where harsh justice is demanded. It is to give more than is asked for. It is to be light in dark places.

‘I pray’, writes St Paul, ‘that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you..’

…and that you may become part of that hope, for the healing of the whole world.

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Pentecost 5
27/6/2021

Ephesians 1:1-14
Psalm 91
Mark 5:21-43

In a sentence
God’s story for us is wider and richer than the ones we tell ourselves

Some 15 years ago there appeared a film, ‘Stranger than Fiction’, which told the story of one Harold Crick. Harold is an ordinary kind of chap who, in the course of going about his daily routine, suddenly begins to hear a voice narrating events in his life. The voice describes the way he brushes his teeth or what he is thinking as he walks down the street. As the tale unfolds, Harold begins to suspect that he is, in fact, a character in someone’s novel.

This realisation doesn’t concern him too much until a day when, standing at the curb waiting for the bus, his watch stops. Asking a bystander for the time, he resets his watch and, at that moment, hears once more the novelist’s narration: ‘little did he know that this seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.’ You can imagine what effect such news has on poor Harold and the efforts he goes to, to change the course of his story.

Now, the point of introducing Harold here is just this: we are, all of us, all of the time, hearing a narration of our life story; we are just much less conscious of it. We are constantly being told what to eat, what to buy, how green to be, how much exercise we need, what we can and can’t expect from our relationships, how much we should work, what we need to earn, that we need a new phone or computer or car, where the best place to live is, how to bring up our children, who we should vote for, who the good guys are and who are the baddies, and so on. All of these things have, in a sense, already been worked out for us, and are presented to us as our story. We largely do and are according the background plot which is ours by virtue of when and where and to whom we were born: this is who you are, and what you must do, and what you can expect. Harold had been living the life of the immortal and is reminded that it is not his true life.

Yet, our mortality is not the point of invoking his story today. The point is that it is quite possible to live a life of apparent freedom but be entirely oblivious to the fact that we are caught in the flow of some grand narrator’s telling of a story. This is the case even in our particular culture, with its heightened consciousness of the ‘binding’ nature of tradition. We are suspicious of received ‘story‑ings’ of who we are. We consider ourselves ‘enlightened’ people who have outgrown tradition and now live and move freely, according to our true story as human beings. Yet even modern enlightened thinking on the past is constantly being revealed to be inadequate. Much of the thrust of modern identity politics (‘critical theory’) is oriented towards a radical destabilising of all story that might confine us. In its most extreme versions, the postmodern principle presses towards the revelation that our story is that we have no story, no narrative curve which causes us to move or by which we can expect others to move.

This is surely a counsel of despair but an understandable one. For stories don’t merely entertain or sustain. They also crush. I rain bombs rain down on you because you don’t fit into my story; you simply shouldn’t be there, says the Jew to the Palestinian, democracy to dictatorship, murderer to victim. Asylum seekers languish because they don’t fit into a nation’s story. The claims of indigenous peoples don’t register with the broader body politic because that story has already been told, and those peoples should reconcile to having been crushed. The story my mum or dad or teachers told me was my story can cripple me.

All of this is to say that there are stories that give life and stories that take it. Each tells me what to do, what to love, what to fear. The question is, which story is the best one?

The work of the letter to the Ephesians – indeed the work of every proclamation of the gospel – is to tell yet another story. In these opening verses of the letter, Paul tells a story of the world. He tells it as the story of all stories. As such, it both must be told and cannot be told. It must be told because it is the key to all stories, all histories. It cannot be told – properly – because it can only be heard as yet ‘another’ story among other stories.

And so, Paul’s language is pressed to its limit. This is a story which begins – nonsensically – ‘before the foundation of the world’, in time before time, in ‘time beyond our dreaming’. Yet the point is not nonsense; it is the sheer excess and abundance of the story Paul wants to tell. The ‘breadth and length and height and depth’ (3.18) of God’s approach to us reveals a love which ‘surpasses knowledge’, so that we ‘may be filled with all the fullness of God’ (3.19) – which is to say, that we may be filled with what could not possibly fit. This excess is Paul overflowing with the gospel story.

The only way to assess the story Paul tells, over against the one I am already living, is to uncover which gives a better account of me and my world, a more desirable account for us all. Or, to put it more succinctly: which story makes us better and freer people? Which reveals to us who we are, the bad and the good? Which shows us the best ethic for that life of peace we considered last week, peace‑full not only for ourselves but for others also?

These questions are not usually to the fore in our day-to-day thinking. Instead, we nestle into the story we have been given, and its flow takes us from day to day, conversation to conversation, joy to joy, sadness to sadness. This is the life ordinary.

This was the story of Harold Crick until he was jolted into lived awareness of a deeper story. But our point here today is not that we know our mortality. The gospel’s word to Harold and to us is unexpectedly different. We are all standing at the curb wondering what time it is as we hear Paul narrate our story: ‘Little did they know that the crucifixion of Jesus would result in their imminent life’.

This is also a life which knows its mortality but does not fear it, even if it should suddenly become apparent how imminent death can be.

This is the life of those who know themselves to be adopted children of God. It is, then, the life of those who are clothed with a new self – a new story – in the likeness of God (4.24), and who are learning to imitate God in humility and gentleness, patience and love, in the unity of the Spirit of the bond of peace (4.1-3).

Paul overflows with the gospel because this new life is a miracle.

Let us, then, not simply acquiesce into the old self – the familiar story which merely tips us into the next thing. Let us not be weary, resigned, or predictable within those stories which drain life away to nothing.

Let us become God’s miracle, for the fuller, richer humanity of us all, and for God’s greater glory.

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Pentecost 4
20/6/2021

Ephesians 1:1-14
Psalm 85
Mark 4:35-41

In a sentence
God offers a more profound peace than we think or dare to ask for

‘Grace to you, and peace, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’. This is how the Apostle addresses the people of God. Every New Testament letter under the name of Paul begins with words like these.[1] And so do our worship services each week.

In terms of function, these words look something like a gracious ‘hello’. But Paul’s benediction and that which begins our worship are more than pleasantry. What is a play here is an invocation of the gift of God, and so the naming of our need. We speak the whole of the gospel in these two words, and Paul’s letter to the Ephesians can be read as an extended teasing-out of the meaning of this benediction.

To most people, peace is probably the more familiar of the two concepts. Peace is the motivation of most of what we do; to act is to strive for peace. All our desires are for a peace we don’t yet experience, and are reflected in things like wanting the bombs to stop falling, wanting a place to escape to when it all feels too much, wanting to be warm in this cold weather, or a safe neighbourhood for our children, or a reliable vaccine, or a quiet corner in a café. We act to make such things happen. ‘All we are saying’, we sang 50 years ago, ‘is give peace a chance’.

As desire, then, peace is something of a negative concept: it begins with a ‘not this’, ‘not here’, ‘not now’, ‘not her’, ‘not them’ – all in relation to the feeling that something is out of place. We are displaced, disappointed, dissatisfied, and peace is being properly placed, appointed and satisfied. Curiously, it is only of the dead that we say that they are ‘at peace’, which must be as about as negative a statement of the possibility of ‘peace in our time’ as we can make.

The ‘not’ hiding in our notions of peace is important because it makes it possible to see that our enemies also desire peace. For that enmity springs from them saying of us: not them, not that, not now. Our peace is often the desire that other people, in their pursuit of their own desires for peace, go away, for their peace conflicts with ours, their heaven competes with ours.

This is to say that our ‘un-peace’ is not as simple as the presence of a dangerous enemy who brings discord or threatens war. When we say ‘not this’, ‘not now’, ‘not them’, so also do those we distance. And the distancing, the reduction of those others, is the un-peace against which they react. Only the stupid act in such a way as contradict their own desire for peace, and those who oppose us are not usually stupid. But they see us as their un-peace, the shape of our peace as cast against the shape of theirs.

Seeing the desire for peace in those who oppose us might cause us to grow suspicious of our own visions of peace. What does our peace deny in the desires for peace in others? This is a question at the heart of struggles such as those between colonists and indigenes, oppressors and oppressed, the homed and the homeless, or within tense family relationships. We’ll probably see some of it in our efforts to find a new home for the congregation. The peace we long for now becomes much more difficult to define or to visualise, if indeed it is something we are all to recognise as peace. It is not merely irony that the church as a whole is most grievously divided at the Eucharist, the sacrament of peace; our visions of peace are the problem.

And so we come to a surprising and troubling possibility: that to link arms and sway back and forth as we sing ‘Give peace a chance’ might not point to the solution so much as manifest our confusion. More starkly, it might be that war is not so much overcome by peace but caused by it: the shape of my peace in conflict with the shape of yours.

What then of grace? In a place like this it is strongly emphasised that grace is the nature of something freely given, with particular reference to what God gives. God gives reconciliation with God grace­‑fully, freely, under no compulsion to do so other than from God’s own character.

The thing about a gift – a true, no-strings-attached gift – is that it doesn’t spring from need, or at least, it does not spring from the need of the giver – from the giver’s vision of unfulfilled peace. A true gift is not about an absence in the giver, a desire for what is not there. Such a gift, then, is unlike desire, in that it carries no potential for competition or conflict. There are no competing desires here, no competing shapes of peace.

This is to say that God has no peace-idea in competition with ours. Competing shapes of peace are dealt with on the cross. To crucify someone is to cast peace in a certain shape – again, negatively: not you, not like that, not now. To crucify someone is to declare, Peace is the absence of you. To be crucified, if this is something to which a person freely submits – if, we must say, it is a gift – this denies nothing, demands nothing. Jesus on the cross is in conflict with nothing and no one.

And so, when we say that here, on the cross, there is grace, it is not yet the gift of any particular ‘thing’. There is no vision of heaven imposed over against our vision, no demand made of us over against our demands on God. The letter to the Ephesians will take us further into the cross, but for today let us note that when Paul greets his churches in this way, ‘grace’ precedes ‘peace’: ‘Grace to you, and peace, from…’ The gift precedes the desire, so that the gift and not the desired peace determines the shape of what is given. This matters because the word of peace from grace is spoken not only to us but also to our enemies. The peace given does not negate our un‑peace but exceeds it. True peace is more than we have thought to ask for. True peace springs from grace.

Perhaps we will say more of this in the next couple of months with Ephesians.

But for now we might say that grace – what God gives – is the knowledge that we are seen. Grace is that the Lord lifts up his countenance, and we see ourselves reflected in the eyes of God. The peace which this knowledge will finally realise is that it is the one God in whose eyes we all see ourselves reflected. What unites us comes from beyond us and our visions of peace. God’s peace exceeds our desire for it.

Heaven is being seen by the God who binds all things together, and the work of peace is calling others to turn towards that gaze.

Grace to you, and peace, from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, that you might know again your need, and God’s gift, and the call to become peace-makers, the very children of God.

[1] See a collection of these greetings in Paul’s letters here: http://www.thegracestation.com/2012/07/03/grace-and-peace-pauls-introductions-to-his-letters/ .