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Pentecost 17
5/10/2025

Psalm 42
John 13:1-35

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ForeWord

Last week, we recalled the genre of comedy, noting among other things that a comedy is not necessarily a funny story. It is, rather, a story that follows a particular narrative arc, opening at a comfortable emotional level before the protagonist is pushed into some uncomfortable situation, before a final resolution of some sort. Most of the stories we tell are comedies, even if most of those stories are not necessarily very funny.

But today I want to pick up on the concept of “funny”, and to come at this from some reflection on what we do when we laugh.

What’s so funny?

Why do we laugh? The obvious answer is that we laugh because we’ve seen something funny. But then we have to push the question a little harder; what is it that makes something funny?

When we watch a movie intended to be humorous, we laugh at the point at which everything goes wrong. The funny thing is that the protagonist finding herself in some difficult situation. We laugh at her vain attempts to get herself out of that situation and the silly faces that she draws as her situation gets worse and worse despite her best efforts. In a humorous story, laughter is our response to the trough in the comedic arc.

And so, the laughter stops once things begin to settle again. That final settlement might well be a place of relief, but it’s no longer a place of laughter. We might be happy there, but we don’t laugh because we’re happy. We’re happy because we have laughed and no longer need to. What makes us laugh – what is funny – is displacement. Someone is suddenly and unexpectedly where they should not be. Our laughter points to that being out of place, to that being wrong, and we stop laughing at the end because the wrongness has been resolved, and we anticipate “happily ever after”.

There is, then, something slightly sadistic about laughter. The object of the laughter – the displaced protagonist – is not the one laughing. It is we who watch them. There’s nothing that the protagonist wants to laugh about when he or she is at the bottom of the trough. She doesn’t know she’s living a comedy and fears the tragedy of never getting out again. Laughter, then, is one of our responses to suffering.

This, I think, is unexpected and provocative. But laughter gets still more interesting. We know very well that laughter is contagious but it’s not the case simply that we laugh because somebody else laughs, like catching a cold.

Laughter is invitational. It proposes a community. By noticing that something is going wrong, we invite others also to notice the wrongness, and so we create a space within which a certain sense of normality is implied. This normality is stated negatively in laughter when we see something outside of that zone: “Hey, look at him – ha ha”. Joining in laughter is not catching a cold, it is expressing agreement – “Yeah, that’s pretty weird”. Laughing with others creates community over against that weirdness.

Funny as exclusion

This is why laughter can hurt – it’s socially exclusionary. It is inherently critical and exclusionary, although of course in varying degrees. There is a place for the gentle and good-natured gibe, but the nature of laughter as invitation to community also operates in more malicious circumstances, where laughter indicates mockery. Mocking laughter invites us not only to notice that the funny person is outside the group’s norm, but to reject him because of this. We laugh here because he is not one of us, and the laughter marks this outsideness. Mockery makes fun of – makes funny – a black person in a white space, a woman in a male space, a captive in a free space, a native in a colonial space, a poor person in a rich space, a short person in a tall space, an awkward person in a graceful space, or a saint in an unholy space. We know all these tropes from our comic stories, funny or not.

We might wonder then, if it is a reconciled and inclusive place, whether there is any laughter in heaven. Laughter would have to be something else if there were to be.

So, with all that in the back of our minds – the dynamics of laughter and its connection to inclusion and exclusion from a community – let’s listen to a passage from John’s Gospel about community and the laughable Jesus.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 13.1-25)

Word: Proclamation

The laughable Jesus

As is usual in John, a lot’s going on in the passage we’ve just heard, but there are two things we might notice today in connection with comedy and community.

First, the funny thing – the odd, wrong thing – which happens in the story is that the rumoured messiah takes the role of the servant. No one bursts out laughing, of course; it is more a case of shock, as Peter expresses. Jesus is funny – in a funny peculiar, rather than funny ha-ha, kind of way. And this peculiarity, this outsideness, is something all the disciples see, as all Jesus’ opponents have already seen. (Judas the betrayer is woven through this story, and while we don’t know his internal motivation, his actions are consistent with a mocking rejection of the ministry Jesus has exercised.) The community of disciples has in common that what Jesus does is not common but is strange. In terms of the comedic arc, Jesus is here at the low point, has fallen from the messianic perch, from normality, from his place in the community. This is the cross.

But, as we noticed last week, though Jesus has bottomed-out here, the arc of the story doesn’t do the natural comedic thing. He isn’t persuaded by Peter, and so doesn’t stand up straight, apologise and get on with being a proper messiah. And if this humility is the equivalent of the cross, there comes here no equivalent of a resurrection fix, swung in to salvage the moment now that Jesus has lost his mind.

Rather, Jesus pushes further into the humiliation:

What I have done down here in the lowly place is odd, strange, funny, mockable. And you are to do and become this as well. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another – love such as I have shown you.

This is not a call simply to do what Jesus did. It is a call to be strange, as Jesus was. It is an invitation to be remarkable by not avoiding the humiliation of the comedic protagonist who then desperately wants to get up and out again, but by becoming intentionally displaced. This displacement has something to do with the oddness of the command to love we considered a few weeks ago. And so the imperative here is not to be “loving”, in a moral sense, but to enter into an ethic of strangeness.

The community of the laughable God

More pointedly, the call to discipleship is a call to be laughable, in the mode of the laughable God – the God who does weird, ungodly things. The thing about the gods is that they are all about order and appropriateness, insideness and outsideness. The gods define and guarantee the nation, or the religion, or the class, or the race or the gender, or whatever. And so the gods tell us what to laugh at, in the mocking and exclusionary sense.

The God of the gospel, however, is laughable, is the definitive outsider who does strange things. This God kneels to wash our feet, is mocked under a crown of thorns and a purple robe, is crucified outside the city.

Love is strange. In a world like ours, specialising as it does in mockery and exclusion, love which reaches further than the community of the local gods. And to be of this particular God – a disciple of Jesus – is to be learning to be as Jesus himself was. “As I have loved you” means “Remarkably”, “Strangely”, “Laughably”.

But things are twisting now, so that what was laughable and excluded becomes the means of community and inclusion. A new kind of community is proposed, in which being laughable – being different, being outside, being less than others – is embraced.

Laughter is now being transformed, rehabilitated. Instead of the laughter of the many which expresses oneness by marking the outsider, the wrong, Jesus’ action is a Laughter-of-One which proposes a community, a oneness, a normality, which is not yet there.

Because it is properly always particular, love always isolates – always laughs. Yet this is a laugh which does not exclude but embraces the funny other, the lost, the not-fitting, and gathers them in. And so, unlike with the other strong, mocking gods, this laughable God’s laughter creates a new kind of community and calls us to laugh with him, to laugh as he does, to laugh into being what does not yet exist – the community of peace and justice which comes from loving as Jesus loved us.

Laugh, Jesus says, as I have laughed you.

And all God’s people laugh, Amen.

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Pentecost 16
28/9/2025

Psalm 23
John 5:19-25

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ForeWord

There is an old joke about asking for directions, which comes in many versions but generally runs something like this: a city slicker finds himself out on the back roads in some sparsely inhabited part of the countryside, trying to find the church at which his cousin is being married that afternoon. Exasperated, he pulls up to ask directions from an old farmer he sees leaning on a fence. Hearing where the cousin wants to go, the farmer responds, “If that’s where I was wanting to be going, I wouldn’t be starting from here. ” The local then proposes how the visitor might get to the point from which one should begin such a journey.

The reason for telling the joke is fairly obvious, and it’s often told to mock the Irish or some other national identity. But if we look past the mockery, we can see something of ourselves in the lost cousin – having a very strong sense that we should be somewhere else, but also having no idea how to get there. We knew where we were, but now we don’t, and we want to know again.

We’ve noticed before that this sequence of good-bad-good-again reflects the literary form of the comedy. A comedy is not just a funny story – not even necessarily a funny story. It’s a story the arc of which moves from a happy beginning through a troubled middle into a happy – often happier – resolution at the end.

In a comedy, the good guys ultimately triumph, no matter how catastrophic the odds. And the vast majority of stories we tell are comedies, as distinct from bad-guys-win tragedies which never rise out of the catastrophe. We see the comedic in the children’s classic, in the latest easy-watch rom-com, the smash hit sci-fi action flick, and even in your average horror movie.

The joke about the yokel farmer’s directions has the city slicker stuck in the middle of a comedy. But he doesn’t know this, doesn’t know whether he’ll get to the wedding on time. And this is one of the problems with recognising the genre of a comedy. Our stories generally follow the comedic arc, so that in the end at least someone survives and lives happily ever after. But, as we live our own lives, even if we imagine that they might be comedies, we don’t know how or in what way our story will be positively resolved. In the middle – and pretty much the whole of our life is spent “in the middle” – it feels like it might yet turn out to be a tragedy.

We’ve also noticed before that comedy is very much the genre of the biblical narratives. Consider the stories of Ruth, or Abraham and Sarah, or of Israel taken into exile and then restored it again. Even the book of Job follows the comedic arc. More broadly, the whole biblical narrative moves from the paradisial Garden of Eden, through the struggle of fallen human life, to the promised reconciliation of all things in the book of Revelation. And, within all of that, is the story of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, which also appears to follow the comedic arc.

When I spoke a few weeks ago about the reference a Christian funeral makes to a “second story” within which ours is placed, this indicated the greater divine comedic arc within which we live our own personal story. And that is all very good and true. But along the way, our lives are mostly lived in that trough between the happy and joyful promise we were at our beginning and the promised eternal life at our end, whatever that looks like.

And, in this middle, we find ourselves very much in the situation of knowing where we want to be, but not being in the right place to start from to get there.

(With all that in mind, let’s hear a short passage from John’s gospel in which Jesus speaks to the where and what of our life and action)…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 5. 19-25)

Word: Proclamation

“. . . whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me”, Jesus says, “has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. ”

I suspect that our hearing of this declaration typically falls on the first part: that we need to hear and believe Jesus. This is true. But what comes at the end of the declaration is unexpected: not that there “will” be life for the believer, but rather that the judgment has already been set aside. The one who hears and believes has already crossed over from death to life. Such faith doesn’t secure a future but effects a new present.

The strangeness of this is not unlike the strangeness we’d hear had our yokel farmer told the lost fellow that he was already where he wanted to be, when that was clearly not the case. How can “here” be “there” when it doesn’t look like there? In the terms in which Jesus speaks, how can what feels here and now like the comedic trough be its elevated resolution? How can the uneternal now be eternal life?

In this connection, we also noted a couple of weeks ago that the resurrection of Jesus didn’t “add” anything to him. Jesus’ death was not an incompleteness; he was as much king upon the cross as he was when risen from the dead.

This is why Jesus can say that eternal life is already present to those who understand the gospel. If there is nothing to be added to Jesus beyond his death, there is nothing to be added to us either if, like Jesus, we are doing the works of the one who sent us. Now is enough to be whole. Unlike the lost cousin on his way to the wedding, we are already precisely where we need to be. By the word of Jesus, the eternal life typically held over until some distant future becomes a possibility here and now.

Jesus says this to those of us whose experience of day-to-day life is probably closer to being lost on the way to a wedding: feeling that we are not where we need to be, or want to be. And the incompleteness in this is made worse by the feeling that we need to be somewhere else in order to begin to become ourselves. There are no signs to tell us where we are or where to go. We don’t know whether the serial killer is still in the house. We don’t know whether we should go through with our convenient engagement for marriage, or let it be swept aside by the new and disruptive love interest which has suddenly appeared. We don’t know whether our fairy godmother will arrive in time to lift the witch’s curse. We don’t know what the good is we should be doing. This is what it feels like to be told we’re living a comedy when we’re still only in the troubled middle.

And it’s this experience that Jesus addresses: “who hears and believes my word has eternal life”. To believe Jesus is to hear that you are already where you need to be.

The gospel has much less to do with the promise at the end of all things than with the promise which might be realised within the uncertain, messy middle of all things. The gospel is concerned with the fullness of the here-and-now life Jesus once lived, and the continuing presence of Jesus’ word so that we might also live here-and-now in the same kind of fullness. That word doesn’t point beyond the life we live but directly to it. Eternal life is less what happens tomorrow than what happens today. And what happens today is not what we do to bring about or earn ourselves a happy tomorrow. It is testimony to the truth of human being: fullness of life is for now, whatever our circumstances , not later.

There is, then, a kind of collapsing, or reaching back, of the comedic ending into the unhappy middle, so that there will sometimes be something quite unfunny about the comedy of the gospel. Sometimes it looks and feels like a cross.

But the cross is now not the triumph of the tragic but the refusal of life to give up, a testimony to a different way of seeing.

And so the struggle is no less the truth, no less a fullness of life which contradicts its uncomfortable form to declare: God is already here, in the messy middle. Eternal life, then – the life of a different time – is a life we can live now, a life which can make our times different.

This is God’s call to us, and God’s gift.

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Pentecost 14
14/9/2025

Psalm 98
John 15:1-17

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ForeWord

If there is any place where we might expect that love could most confidently be taken to be present, it is surely at a wedding. And yet, we begin today by noting something about the standard Marriage Service which is both surprising and deeply significant.

I hadn’t noticed it myself until preparing a particular wedding 15 or so years ago. Wedding preparation includes meeting with the couple a few times before the day to discuss the nature of marriage, what will be done and said on the day, and so on. This often involves tweaking the vows a bit for personal preference, within some set limits.

When I received back from the bride-to-be one of the service drafts I’d sent her, there was something unfamiliar in the suggestions for the vows that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then I saw it: she had inserted a couple of lines by which the couple would express how much they loved one another, or something to that effect.

Why not? , you might ask. But this was novel at that point in the service, and the penny dropped on what I hadn’t seen before: the Marriage Service doesn’t care whether the people standing at the altar love one another. This is the case in both the broadly catholic “religious” service of the Uniting Church and in the civil service used at the State Registry Office. The only question asked of a couple about their being present on the day is whether they have come willingly, which is not the same thing as “Do you love one another? ”

Of course, in a modern liberal society, we expect that, if there is a wedding, there are no shotguns in sight and that the wedding has been convened because of the couple’s affection for one another.

But the Marriage Service itself doesn’t ask about that. The substantial question put to the couple is not, Do you love? but Will you love? This is a place for promise-making rather than stating what is presently the case. Affection might still be expressed in any particular service, but it’s not prescribed. Whatever is at the heart of the wording of the traditional “religious” and “secular” marriage services, it is not affection.

Perhaps that seems rather a subtle distinction to make, given that, in societies like ours, couples tend to turn up at the altar based on their affection for each other. But it’s worth noting here that the Marriage Service could work just as much for a traditional arranged wedding as for a modern “romantic” wedding. It’s neither here nor there, so far as the Service itself is concerned, whether the marriage originates in romance or arrangement. What matters is the promise, and therefore the implicit command to love.

This bizarre notion – that we might be commanded to love one another even on that occasion – runs quite counter to our modern sense for what a wedding is about. But my concern today is not wedding vows but the simple strangeness to our ears of a command to love. Perhaps the wedding service is the only place we hear that command today in the secular world, if indeed we can hear it against the background noise of self-interpretation, self-love and exclusion of the other, which seems to be growing louder around us.

How can we be commanded to love? We return to this after listening for God’s word in a hearing of a passage from the Gospel according to St John.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 15:1-17)

Word: Proclamation

“This is my commandment, that you love one another”.

Clearly, the love at stake here is not the love we feel. It is not that kind of love that is our natural resonance with another person. Affectionate love, of course, is central to our being. Romance, family, friendship – these “felt” loves are as essential to us as they are inevitable.

But Jesus claims there is a love which is not natural, which is not innate, which is not an expression merely of what we feel or want. That claim must, therefore, come as a commandment, as something which contradicts what we think is normal or natural.

Yet, there’s a world of difference between what we are commanded not to do and what we are commanded to do. “Do not kill”, “Do not commit adultery” and “Do not lie” require that we recognise the other without requiring any recognition of our connection to that other. A “Do not” commandment is how we keep our distance, and an investment towards not being mistreated in return. “Do not” is generic: Do not kill means do not kill anyone.

But the command to love is not generic; it is specific. “Do not”. If we are not to lie to anyone, we are to love some particular one. The command is not to love “everyone” or “humanity” but some particular person, in front of you. “Love one another”, Jesus says. This is direct and personal: love that one there.

If this were easy, it wouldn’t be commanded. And sometimes we just can’t do it, even when everything began so well. There’s nothing to be said for getting judgmental here. And the imperative to love can be manipulated to force people to stay unwillingly in life-threatening relationships, which is also misses the point. Such ruptures of what was love show just how hard love is, and how the command to love understands our faltering capacities for love.

Perhaps all this is obvious, or at least familiar. But the question is, can such a commandment be heard today? What is a call to love in the midst of assassinations, inflammatory presidential blustering and gleeful anticipations of death penalties? What is the command to love while occupations continue and racism flaunts on our streets? We cannot help but be sceptical here. Can love really be a serious political option?

It can, but only if the work of politics is reconceived. Politics, particularly in its law-making and -enforcing mode, finds it easy to say what love doesn’t look like. This is what the “Do not” commandments are for, and a developed society like ours has thousands of them.

The politics of love would be entirely different. “Do not” is open-and-shut easy: he did it, or he didn’t.

But the work of love is hard to pin down, harder to identify. It is gift and invitation and response. And we don’t really know when it is done. Or how long it lasts. And so the command to love continues to be stated. “Do not steal” speaks to the opportune moment. “Love one another” speaks to the next moment, and the next, and the next.

We know when we’ve got the “Do not” right or wrong. But love both succeeds and fails at the same time. Even if it’s rebuffed, love has been right. And when it’s received as right, there is yet more love to be done.

The “Do not” commands are about quantities that can be counted – what has or hasn’t been done. The command to love is a quality, a value, a means of being present. “Do not” commands keep us safe for a while – if we have enough of them – like a heavy lid on a pot threatening to boil over. The command to love turns down the heat.

And is this not what we need – a turning down of the heat?

And do we not have a part to play in this?

And so, stop counting the rights and the wrongs, and hear the command: love one another.

Love one another. In the home. At the workplace. On the roads. In the shopping centre. In the Parliament. In the Church and the Mosque and the Synagogue. In the council meeting. In the university. On the tram. In the café. In the library. At the concert. In the park. In the queue. Even at the football.

Love. One. Another.

There is no other way out of all this.

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Pentecost 13
7/9/2025

Psalm 1
John 12:27-36

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ForeWord

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council is probably not a name any of you have ever had reason to invoke.

That said, some of you will have fond memories of having read or listened to the radio play versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Vogons feature, and which opens with the destruction of Earth to make way for an intergalactic highway.

The end of our world is announced with the arrival of a fleet of bulldozing spaceships. A line which has fixed itself in my mind ever since I first read the book describes the sight of these “huge as office blocks, silent as birds” ships: The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

Quoting more fully:

The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

The striking thing about this last sentence is that it’s both immediately clear, and then immediately not so clear, what is meant.

Clearly, bricks don’t hang in the air, if we take “brick” and “air” to mean what they usually mean. And a spaceship, in this description, corresponds to a brick. But it is clearly also not-brick, because if the air is just air, the spaceship should fall.

It matters here that the ship doesn’t hang in the air in the way a helicopter might. The noise a helicopter makes indicates how hard it is trying not to be like a brick. And, presumably, there would be a technological explanation for why the spaceships don’t do what bricks do. But this is not the point. The point is the “blasphemy against nature”. The ships don’t “fit”. They have no meaning in the sense we’ve considered before: we can’t “locate” them. And yet they are there, in such a way that we have to speak about their “thereness” as something sheer. They are wrongly, but starkly and strongly, “there”. And this sheer thereness corresponds to the shock of the news: the world is about to end.

My interest in all this is not the possibility of space travel or how advanced alien tech might be. I want instead to compare Douglas Adams’ description of those cosmic bulldozers to the crucifixion of Jesus.

Admittedly, this is a connection you’ve probably not thought much about until now, so let me fast-track you into it. An apparent difference between Jesus and the spaceships is that Jesus hangs in the air (on the cross) precisely the way a condemned criminal does. There is no surprise here. Seen it all before. People get crucified, and this is what it looks like.

If we think about the cross these days, it’s typically in terms of the suffering it entailed and so the “price” Jesus paid. But there’s not a lot of this in John’s Gospel. Disrupting once more our normal sensitivities, John doesn’t quite do suffering. He’s not dispassionate; he is just doing something else. (We might note in passing here that Jesus asks, ”…what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. ”)

Our Gospel text today has Jesus speaking of his being “lifted up”, in an apparent reference to his crucifixion. But, for John, this is not merely a crucifixion. While Jesus is made to hang there in the way that condemned criminals typically did, this lifting up also has Jesus hanging there strangely, in the way that bricks don’t.

But, before we go any further, let’s pause for a moment to listen for the Word of God in the hearing of the Scriptures…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 12. 27-36)

Word : Proclamation

Jesus speaks several times in John’s gospel of being “lifted up”. The expression is one of John’s many wordplays.

The lifting up is clearly a raising in the ghastly mode of a crucifixion. But the term also has overtones of a different kind of elevation. In particular, this elevation can also be a coronation.

And this changes dramatically what we are invited to see. The cross is now not a place of suffering or some saving transaction. The cross is here more like a throne upon which is “seated” (hangs) the king.

But, as an elevation, a coronation, the point is not quite that a king is crucified, whether intentionally or accidentally. To the extent that the crucifixion is a coronation, Jesus becomes king in the process of crucifixion. And so, on this reading, Jesus’ death upon the cross becomes the high point of the story, the point at which he comes to himself, rather than merely the point at which his executioners reject him.

But now a strange question presents itself. If the cross is indeed the high point of the story, what then of the resurrection? We have to say that the resurrection is no longer necessary for the story to be true or complete, although it’s essential if we are to know that the cross is the high point. We’ve seen this once or twice in our Gospel of John reflections over the last few months. The story peaks at the cross, but no one will know this unless something happens to give us a different way of seeing the cross, which is the work of the resurrection.

But if the cross is the climax of the story – the point at which Jesus becomes king – then the crucifixion is no longer a familiar tragedy but is suddenly deeply anomalous. Jesus, like those cosmic bulldozers, hangs “motionless, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature” – against everything by which we have measured what is right and what is wrong, what is divine and what is worldly, what is life and what is death.

Here, as with the arrival of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz with all his bureaucratic planet-destroying efficiency, is the end of the world, the revaluation of all values, a kind of blasphemy against what had been true until that moment. The cross is the least human, least kingly, least Godly of places. But it’s here that Jesus is declared to be the one in whom God reigns: the “king”.

This is not merely neat or even profound “theology”. Faith doesn’t interpret the stories of Jesus to make sense of them. Rather, out of those stories, faith interprets the world to make sense of it. The cross is to our sense of ourselves and our world what a suspended brick would be: a blasphemy against our typical ordering of things and, so, a new thought, a new vision.

How Jesus is, is how we are to be. The Christian – or, better, the properly and truly human being – will be strange like this, will be blasphemous like this, will surprise and shock.

The cross is what it would be like for all the guns and the bombs just to stop, without explanation. It is like the soldiers just packing their gear into their jeeps and going home, not because the war is over but to make the war over. The cross is the stunned, brick-in-the-air-like silence which such an impossible thing would require – before the ecstatic, jubilant, shout-out-loud joy.

The cross is like living as if death were not there, lurking, fearsome.

The cross is mercy which shatters the shackles of hard justice.

The cross is all such impossible things, hanging in the air in much the same way that a brick doesn’t, inexplicable, and utterly glorious. In the midst of death’s dismal order, this has the power to draw all people, to see and to marvel that such things could be (Nicodemus, again! ).

This is our faith. And to hold this faith is to hear that this is what we ourselves are to become: such impossible things, such unexpected blasphemy against the natural but oppressive order of the world – the light of the glory of God in a humanity fully alive, contradicting the reign of death.

This is our gift, our calling, and our prayer.

And all God’s people say…

 

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Pentecost 12
31/8/2025

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:7-14

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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A “Jeremiah” is a word for a pessimistic prophet who foresees a calamitous end. That is unfair to the prophet who addressed us so powerfully this morning. True, he lived through a disastrous time in the history of the people Israel, he saw the signs plainly.  He had his own exile in Egypt, but he knew the destructive power of the neighbouring nation of Babylon and in his last chapters, he returns to a message of hope.

The psalm we have just read has the same message in brief, and was written around Jeremiah’s time – so Howard Wallace assures me.  It begins “Sing merrily to God our strength”, recognizes that God’s people preferred their own counsels and were ‘sent away’, but ends with that intriguing image of the honey from the Rock. The moderns among you will also recognize a recent Hillsong hit with that name, which combines several such images to form a song of hope – there’s water from the rock too, and manna on the ground, all of them difficult to imagine, which is the point. Grace often appears in unexpected, even impossible places!  In the same spirit, in the early centuries of the Christian faith, the newly-baptized were welcomed to the Lord’s Table with a cup of milk and honey.

So between promise and hope, both the Old Testament readings remember the troubles of the journey of the Exodus. Jeremiah has hard words to say about their faithlessness as they marched towards the land of milk and honey.

The final verse of our reading sums it all up in a watery image:

¹³ My people have committed two sins:
they have rejected me,
the source of living water,
and they have dug out for themselves cisterns,
cracked cisterns which can hold no water.

These were the people who were called ‘holy to the LORD’ (2:3). This is covenantal language, expressing a sacred bond between the people and their God; yet they had abandoned the God who called them out of enslavement and had led them to a land where they could flourish in the freedom which faith in the LORD gives.  On the journey, they received the Ten Words to live by. It is unfortunate that they gained the title “Commandment”; the Hebrew simply has “words” and commandment opened the door to legalism and punishment; they were words of fullness of life. Yet, settled in the Promised Land, they strayed from their high calling and pursued what passed for religion where they now dwelt.

Thus the LORD’s question:

⁵What fault did your ancestors find in me,
that they went so far astray from me,
pursuing worthless idols and becoming worthless themselves?

The religion of the ancient East took many forms but the most popular was the fertility god, Baal, for reasons obvious to us!  It suited their most carnal desires and demanded nothing of their way of life.  One commentator (R. E. Clements) says, “Religion cannot remain true religion if it bypasses genuine moral concern for the welfare of society”.  Faithful believing and living demands the distinction between true and false, otherwise you are living an illusion.  The illusions are on offer every day in our present world culture, in the news, in the evening’s entertainment on TV, in the commercials, and through those mobile telephones.

So Jeremiah goes on to notice others who also lost their way:

⁶ The priests did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD,
who brought us up from Egypt
and led us through the wilderness,
through a barren and broken country,
a country parched and forbidding,
where no one ever travelled,
where no one made his home?’

His words even heighten the difficulty of their trek.

Perhaps the question “Where is the LORD” might be put differently: “What is the LORD doing?” Where is God in our experience, in our life, our culture, our nation? Where does the LORD discover himself to us?  It was the priests’ business to know that.

The “people who handled the law”, a nice phrase – and the prophets, all of whom had a holy obligation to the God of the Exodus, all failed. The lawyers did not know the source of justice and morality – they rejected the very source of living water; the prophets preferred to trust in Baal, a god they made with their own hands. Yet, ⁷ “I brought you into a fertile land to enjoy its fruit and every good thing in it”. So,

¹³ My people have committed two sins:
they have rejected me,
the source of living water,
and they have dug out for themselves cisterns,
cracked cisterns which can hold no water.

“Foolishness followed faithlessness” comments Howard Wallace, as it inevitably does. Of course, not all priests, not all prophets, not all rulers of the Law were faithless, as the scriptures themselves attest.

Jeremiah took care to address all of them, people, priests and prophets. He spoke to Judah and to the families of the house of Israel. With St Paul, he believed that “all have sinned and all are deprived of the divine glory” (Rom. 3:23 REB).

The lectionary’s choice of Hebrews to accompany Jeremiah is helpful. The chapter consists of a series of instructions to Jewish Christians. Every one of them deserves a sermon. They begin with the beautiful ‘Ἡ φιλαδελφία μενέτω”, “brotherly love, let it remain” – but that won’t do these days, so “let mutual affection continue”.  Be hospitable to strangers, Resist the love of money. Remember in prayer those who lead you in the faith. Live life as a continual sacrifice of thanksgiving to God.  Do not neglect to do good and share what you have.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is contrasting troubling table manners with what true hospitality involves: not the admiration of the wealthy and influential, but of aligning ourselves with “the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. This is the way to find happiness, because they have no way to repay you.” (14:13-14).  And with their modern additions: those who suffer from the wars of ‘strong men’, and all whose lives are turned upside down because of our neglect “to care for our common home” as Pope Francis put it.

No-one will pretend that this is any easier than some parts of the Ten Commandments, but we are bidden to remember the generosity of God, and the indiscriminate divine love in Christ Jesus – and how we live derives its truth and its strength from there.  Jeremiah has several more chapters of indictment. There will be a call to repentance, and there will be a final judgement, but not ours.

And so we come before God in repentance, that is, to turn our lives again on to the path of Christ, to make our offerings of our concern in prayer, and to offer our gifts in response.  And then to the table of the eucharist, the place of thanksgiving where sinners are welcome.