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Pentecost
31/5/2020

1 Peter 4:1-11
Psalm 104
John 20:19-23

In a sentence
God ‘ends’ sin by refusing to pass it on; our calling is to do the same

Breaking open the Scriptures is never a straightforward process.

As we open the book, sometimes we find things which are difficult because it is clear what the text says and means, and we don’t like what it means! Other times we struggle even to follow the text because, from this distance, the flow of thought and character of the references or illustrations the writers use are so alien to us.

Something of this latter is perhaps what we strike in our passage today from 1 Peter. Peter writes of the suffering which indicates that we are finished with sin, of the time lost in pursuing things which don’t really matter, of the nearness of the end and of the possibility of living and acting as if we ourselves were the God of grace. And he moves from the one to another in such a way that it reads a little like a grab-bag of throwaway ideas not quite clearly following on, one from another.

Yet these are a constellation of reflections from a central light – the light of what God has done for Peter’s community in the person of Jesus, and what they might then expect for themselves, and what they owe each other.

‘Whoever suffers in the flesh has finished with sin’, Peter writes, not as a general observation about the relationship between sin and suffering but with direct reference to Jesus. Suffering, in itself, is not the reason we are finished with sin – as if we earn forgiveness and wholeness through suffering. Suffering is the way we put sin behind us, the form such a putting-away will take. Jesus on the cross – God on the cross – is sin stopped. Sin is rendered powerless by its inability – in Jesus – to force the reaction of sin in the other. Sin is a virus jumping from one to another in these reactions. Yet Jesus ‘absorbs’ the fear and brokenness of those around him, rendering sin without power beyond what suffering it might mean for Jesus himself. The matter of the conflict between God and God’s people ends with him.

To refuse to respond to human brokenness by causing yet more brokenness is to set sin and its power behind us. The destruction sin brings stops with Jesus because he refuses to participate in the faulty dynamic of power which nailed him to the cross; Jesus refuses to respond in the terms in which he is attacked.

In this way, though his time is cut short, it is time spent oriented towards God and the full possibilities of life in God. It is towards such an experience of time’s possibilities that Peter calls us: you have already spent enough time doing what ‘the Gentiles’ like to do. Do, rather, what is really creative, what will really fill the times; do what is life, richer in every way than the death which will bring it to a close.

For this is the ‘end’ of all things of which Peter write (4.7) – the goal of creation which has been glimpsed in Jesus and now is a possibility for those touched by him. Creation turned in on itself and its own designs is creation without a goal, moving in cycles of fear and destruction, of mere life and death. This is creation without a purpose other than to continue at whatever cost.

To live as if the end were near is – Peter surprises us – to become ‘as if God’. ‘Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength God supplies’ (4.11). In this way we are ‘stewards of the manifold grace of God’. A steward is one who apportions within the household – on behalf of the master – the appropriate share of the wealth of the house. The Greek word here for ‘steward’ is oikonomos – from which we have our word ‘economy’. In God’ household – in God’s economy, God’s grace is the currency, and God is the effect. Peter does not call his people merely to continue in suffering because that in itself has value. The value is in the gift which ‘absorbing’ sin might bring – the presence of God’s peace-making in the midst of a violent world. Peter calls us to do and speak as if God, apportioning God’s grace to whomever we encounter.

This letter has continually turned our attention away from what we might think is going on in and around us, to see what was going on in and around Jesus. With that in mind, Peter then turns us back to our own time and place with the invitation to respond not merely to direct experience without Jesus, but to what is happening as a sharing in what happened with Jesus.

Jesus himself spoke and acted as the presence of God’s grace to those he encountered – both to the poor in spirit who received him as a blessing and to those proud in spirit who found his God too strange.

Enabled by the Spirit God gives to and make Jesus present among us again, God’s life with us takes the shape of Jesus’ own,

By the power of that Spirit, then, become the presence of God to those among whom God has placed you, with whatever joy or suffering this brings.

Only then does brokenness begin to recede behind us as we begin to move towards God’s end for us: life in love, together in Christ.

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Easter 7
24/5/2020

1 Peter 3:8-22
Psalm 68
John 17:1-11

In a sentence
Fear causes us to act in ways which reduce us and those around us

A quick reading of Peter’s first letter gives the sense that it is his advice to his church as to how it might respond to the difficulties it is experiencing as a community which doesn’t quite fit within its wider social and political context. The advice would seem to be something like this: ‘make yourself a small target by living a life which all will recognise as upright’.

Yet, as we noted last week, Peter’s is not a passive-aggressive survival strategy. In fact, it is the way Peter proposes they behave which attracted the ire of the wider community in the first place: their good behaviour and actions within the wider community are the problem so far as that wider community is concerned.

The life to which Peter calls his community is, then, not a response to the difficulty they are having with their neighbours; it is the cause of their difficulty. Unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, a humble mind, not repaying evil for evil but repaying with a blessing – these are not a solution but the problem. His moral instruction, then, is not something new they should adopt to fend off their persecutors. He calls them to stay the course, to continue in the way they have been going. Peter’s advice is, Do not stop being a problem!

This may be difficult to see because the ethic Peter calls for looks like the kind of thing all communities value, to some greater or lesser degree. Where are humility, sympathy and tenderness not valued? But if humility and sympathy and tender hearts are what all communities commend, then we get the impression that there might be in Peter’s community ‘too much’ tenderness and humility and sympathy.

Certainly such traits as these can be badly distorted, but unhealthy humility is neither what Peter demands nor likely to be offensive to those who oppose his congregation.

We get a clue as to what might be at the heart of the matter in the middle of today’s passage: ‘Do not fear what they fear’. Fear is a great motivator for us. We behave at least as much according to what we fear – what we seek to avoid – as according to what we hope to gain or give.

The reference to ‘fear’ in verse 14 is matched with the word ‘sanctify’ in the following verse. What we fear is what we sanctify. Our fears indicate to us what is most sacred to us: our fears create and call upon the gods. This is as much the case for the Christians as it is the non-Christian neighbours. We confuse the matter if we imagine that for Christians we no longer fear God but love God. In the Scriptures, fear is not a matter of shaking in our boots but a matter of what is most honoured in our lives, what it is we imagine will secure us against the many things which seem to threaten us. Peter says here, then, do not honour what they honour, do not consider sacred would they consider sacred; rather, sanctify Jesus as Lord.

Peter illustrates this with Jesus’ own way. Here is one who does not fear what most of us fear, who willingly submits to God alone, even if that leads to death by crucifixion. Here the crucifixion is not about some economy of salvation which makes it possible for God to love us again; it is about knowing what is truly sacred in the world, what is to be sanctified, and what not.

In Jesus we see a life of humility and sympathy and unity of spirit, of love for the other, of tenderness – a life which submits to those who fear the wrong things but does not submit to the fearsome things themselves. Jesus submits to the powers and institutions and fears in place around him, but without himself fearing anything they might take from him, even should they seem to win in the end. In this way, the cross is itself the victory of Jesus, whatever might have happened on Easter day.

Peter calls his community – and us – to the same humility before those who hold power over us, without submitting to the powers which might cause our overlords to be ungracious and without hope.

In this way, what is truly of God in the world – the human creature made in the image of God – is honoured, even if that human creature is subject to all sorts of dehumanising powers and perhaps even becomes an agent for the dehumanising of others.

This is no easy thing. Peter does not give the answer we seek when we ask the question about dealing with evil in the world. There is here no strategy for alleviating the suffering of his community, although that suffering is radically reinterpreted. Peter reminds them that they suffer because there is a conflict in the world – a conflict between the God from whom all things come and to whom all things will return, and those gods which have us in their grip because we fear death, or fear the loss of some lovely thing, or fear just having to get up in the morning and face the day.

There is a lot we will do when we are afraid. Much of it is hidden in the fabric of our economies and political systems. And it is likely that an awareness of this and a refusal to participate is what causes disruption for Peter’s community: they won’t share any longer in the injustice inherent in the common life of the city. They refuse to participate in dehumanising practices – financial, or relational, or political. And the nuisance value of this will sometimes be very high for the powers that be.

But being a nuisance is not the point. If Peter’s people are refugees and aliens in their own community, it is ultimately for the sake of those who persecute them. To continue to be a problem is to continue to model a true peace, and to make it possible. Only humility, sympathy and love for one another can bring true humility, sympathy and love for one another. And it is scarcely the case that we have too much of these things.

Jesus suffered, Peter says, as God’s stirring nuisance, to bring us to God. We ought not to be surprised, then that we are called to do the same, so that all might see how fear only reduces us, and how only love will expand us.

Let us, then, live lives which conform not to the fears of the world but the freedom of Jesus in the love of God.

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Easter 6
17/5/2020

1 Peter 2:13-25
Psalm 66
John 14:15-21

In a sentence
God heals us by overcoming what is weak in us, and calls us to be healers in the same way

Do we not take offence at Peter’s exhortations in the passage we have just heard? Perhaps even more difficult are the verses which follow from today’s text, which – in the same vein as what is said to slaves – call wives to submit themselves to their husbands. Today we struggle to enforce human rights in relation to poverty and bonded labour, sex slavery, and gendered power dynamics within families and in wider society. And we scarcely hold that every civil authority deserves our humble submission.

Yet, Peter writes: ‘humble yourself before every authority, slaves obey, wives submit’. There are a few things we need to clear out of the way if we are going to hear anything of the gospel in what Peter writes here.

First, Peter does not in any way justify the plight of slaves in that kind of economy, or of women in patriarchy. Certainly what he says has been interpreted in this way, and blasphemously so, as if social oppression were part of God’s ordering of the world, or as if what a civil authority does is justified just because it is the civil authority at the time. Yet Peter himself does not mean that the prevailing order is thereby a just order.

Second, Peter is not addressing those who might be able to advocate for another whose plight is like that Peter describes. If we today imagine we see wrong we can right, Peter is not addressing us. Rather, he writes as one unable to do anything to change the circumstances of those he addresses, just as they can do little to change their circumstances.

Third, Peter is not laying out a general social or moral theory here. He is addressing Christians. These are likely mostly people of low status in their community; certainly they are persecuted. He appeals to them on the basis of what they profess – on the basis of how Jesus was in the world, and what God has done for them through Jesus. This is a word to Christians about the fact that they are Christians, and that this might matter for how they relate to others.

Central to our faith is that God does not work according to the patterns of the world. What is power in God’s work does not look powerful to us. It doesn’t look powerful because it doesn’t operate within the power dynamics familiar to us. God’s power is a power which moves the world rather than merely moving within the world. What moves within the world is merely creaturely. This is the power of the clever, the strong, the vigorous, the rich. But to move the world itself requires something from outside, a Spirit which moves over the chaotic deeps of our lives and brings light and life. Whatever powers operate within the chaos are subverted – the rules of such power are broken – and a new creation emerges.

If we were to characterise what Jesus does, we might say that he refuses to engage with the brokenness of the world by means of the world’s own brokenness: Jesus does not deal with his opponents in the way that they deal with him. If indeed the crucified Jesus is Lord, then there can be no mistaking that this has nothing to do with his being clever or strong or sneaky or even merely lucky in the way that everyone else who claims lordship is. Jesus being Lord has nothing to do with the normal ways of the world; he does not ‘overpower’ the world in the way that gods are supposed to and so doesn’t win in any way we would recognise as winning. (How is the crucifixion a victory, according to anyone’s expectations on Good Friday?)

And yet, Peter’s community – and ours – is built on the experience that something is won here. Though all the rules are broken, we are not. More to the point, because all the rules are broken, we are not. This is what we mean when we say, ‘salvation by grace, not works’: grace breaks the rules of work and reward, so that we should not be broken if we fall short of the righteous demands of the law.

Peter’s call is to manifest in our lives what God manifests in Jesus’ own life. Peter calls us to become the kind of rule-breakers Jesus is. This is different from the rule-breaking of the social reformer. According to the pattern of the world, today’s radicals simply become tomorrow’s conservatives, against whom the next generation of radicals will rage. It is against such unholy rage that Peter writes. If there is a rage for justice in Jesus’ work, it is holy rage – a passion entirely different from the motivations and methods of the world to fix what is wrong.

For us to be ‘holy as God is holy’ (cf. 1.15f) is to do what and how God does. And so Peter writes, ‘Honor everyone. Love the family of believers; have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind… Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing (2.17; 3.8f). Or, to sum it up in a word or five: ‘submit yourselves to one another’. ‘Arm’ yourselves not with the power of the world but with the same intention by which Jesus himself lived: to let God be god, allowing God’s creative way in the world to be our own, wherever we might find ourselves (cf. 4.1)

Peter addresses each of us in our situation – not only those who might be in a lowly place but also those more highly placed, as we usually measure such things. For us – low and high – to submit ourselves to circumstances which don’t reflect God’s demand for justice is not to declare those things right. Rather, this kind of submission makes present what the situation itself could not naturally produce: God’s own subversive creativity.

The ‘hard’ justice we look for always breaks things – including us. God’s justice, rather, is ‘soft’. It is the unexpected creativity of mercy: God’s turning toward us when we turn away, God’s persistence with us when we are stubborn.

Whether we are lowly or powerful, to submit ourselves to one another is to enact this kind of soft justice. It is to present to each other a mercy which sets aside hard justice to build bridges, reconcile and re-connect what has been separated.

This is not the only way by which we might be in the word but, if the crucified Jesus is Lord, it is God’s way.

Let it, then, be ours also.

Be holy as I am holy, says God, merciful as I am merciful.

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Easter 5
10/5/2020

Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31
John 14:1-14

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

The Acts of the Apostles is volume two of Luke’s history of the life of Jesus and the infant church. We call volume one a gospel, a royal proclamation of good news, but in terms of how Luke began each of his books, he was intending to publish under the genre of history. The giveaway for this assertion is the introductions. He addresses his books to Theophilus. Historians of the day commonly addressed their books to a noble patron. Was Theophilus a real noble patron? Difficult to know. The name means ‘lover of God’. Now, that could be any of us who love God. Maybe that was his intention – address his history to all of us who love God. Hold onto that thought. Keep in mind that Luke, indeed all Scripture, is addressed to us.

Keep in mind also that historians of the day wrote more along the lines of a modern historical novel than what we require of academic historians of today. This is significant in Acts because Luke includes many speeches and sermons delivered by lots of different church leaders, all of whom seem to have the same speech writer. We do not so much get inside the minds of Peter or Paul or Stephan than we get inside the mind of Luke. That is not a bad mind to explore. It does not contradict the minds of the saints we find in their letters.

In Acts Luke tells of Stephen. In literary terms alone this account is a master stroke. It marks a watershed in the life of the church at a number of different levels. Stephen wins a number of gold medals – he is the first deacon, the first non-apostolic evangelist and apologist, and, tragically, the first martyr.

It is of his martyrdom that we read this morning. It comes at the end of two chapters about Stephen – his appointment to serve as deacon, his words and works driven by the power of the Holy Spirit, his confrontation with an antagonistic synagogue, his arrest, his very long defence speech (which is not included in our three year lectionary, probably due to its length), culminating in the frenzied attack that killed him.

Reading Luke’s account it is not unreasonable to imagine that as he remembered Stephen’s story, he was also remembering Jesus’ story. He includes some tell tail parallels. To secure an arrest false witnesses testified against Stephen – the same ploy used against Jesus. As Stephen died, he prayed for his attackers, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ Jesus prayed from the cross, ‘Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.’ In no way is the death of Jesus equated with the death of Stephen, or any other martyr. Nevertheless, the church has held its martyrs in the highest regard. Their deaths are regarded as a supreme witness to the gospel of Christ. Indeed, the root word in Greek for ‘witness’ is ‘martyr’.

So, what led to this savage death? What had Stephen been saying that so enraged people? He recited parts of Israel’s history pointing up the times of opposition to the leadership God had given them, especially ways in which Moses had struggled to maintain political control during the exodus. Then he related the account of the building of the temple in Jerusalem, a house for a God who needs no house built by humans. He reminded his opponents of the ancestors who persecuted the prophets and capped the whole speech off saying that they had not kept the law ordained by angels. The antagonists got so incensed they covered their ears and shouted, ‘la la la’. OK, Luke doesn’t add the ‘la la la’ bit, but he might well have done. Luke likes fine detail. He remembered that stoning someone to death was hot work and he had the executioners take off their coats and lay them at the feet of the young man, Saul. This has to be one of the great segues in literature. This is why the story of Stephen is the watershed of Acts. As Stephen exits the main stage, Saul, who will become known as Paul slips quietly from prompt right. Paul will hold centre stage for the next 20 chapters interrupted by brief accounts of other missionaries like Philip and Peter.

At the scene of Stephen’s martyrdom, the young man minding the coats heard the prayer, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ St Augustine wrote, ‘If Stephen had not prayed, the Church would not have had Paul.’

Well, thank God the church has Paul, but Luke would certainly want us to thank God that the church has Stephen.

Thankful for what? Thankful for the order of deacons. Many branches of the church have orders of deacons and deaconesses. The Uniting Church went through a season of examination as we came to a more settled understanding of place of the order of deacons in our polity. In the deaconate established according to Acts the church is reminded that the language of the gospel is not confined to the spoken word but is told in acts of service that imitate the life of Jesus whose hand of care was extended very particularly to the poor, the oppressed, the sick and disabled.

The church can be thankful for the fulness of Stephen’s long-winded defence at his trial in which he reminds his detractors of the history of Israel’s propensity to reject leadership given them by God and to accuse factions of his generation of doing the same thing. What the church can go on to be thankful for is Luke’s reminder to the Christian church through the ages, that this propensity to do violence to God’s leading did not stop with the birth of the church. Our capacity to crucify and stone all over again has not gone away.

In this time of crisis we might remember Stephen’s determination to do and say what was right in the face of his own death, as we watch television accounts of men and women attending to the well being and health care of others, and do so in fear of their own wellbeing, in fear of their own lives.

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Easter 4
3/5/2020

1 Peter 2:1-12
Psalm 23
John 10:1-10

In a sentence
Mercy makes the church, that it might speak and act out of God’s mercy, that others might know of that mercy

‘You are a chosen race’, Peter writes, ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people’. Whatever we make of this – and the assessments will vary widely! – it is surely strong language and strong enough to be uncomfortable for many, even for those in the church. One reason for this is the ring of arrogance in the claim for a distinctive quality for one historical entity among all. Another is that the church has rarely looked like anything which approaches Peter’s description.

These cautions are all valid. At the same time, they also tend to consider Peter’s language in isolation from the rest of the text, which is precisely what is done when his language is abused. Towards the end of the reading another account of the church is given, this time as a community which is ‘alien and exiled’ within its own space. If Peter’s high church language is a displacement ‘above’, this ‘exile’ is a displacement ‘below.’ Peter’s community of believers is not exalted out of the world but is still very much within it, and even uncomfortably relegated within it.

And there is yet a third marking of the church Peter gives which sits between the ‘royal priesthood, holy nation’ language and the ‘alien and exile’ language, and bridges them. This is the church as the community of those who have received mercy.

It is mercy which spans the space between the high and the low locations of the community of believers. Mercy elevates what is lowly and cannot elevate itself. In so doing, mercy creates. It makes out of nothing. The language of mercy is the language of gift. Mercy sets in place what could not have been there without the gift: now you have received mercy, now you are God’s people (v. 10).

Yet mercy does not merely create or establish. That it might be thought to do this is the source of the danger in Peter’s high account of the church: that the church might stand now as something above and over against all other historical institutions.

Mercy does not merely create but sets in place a relationship between the merciful one and those on whom that one has had mercy. The question with which the whole sweep of Scripture wrestles is, What then is the nature of the ongoing relationship between the merciful and the ‘mercy­‑ed’?

With the rest of Scripture, Peter’s answer is that mercy creates a people whose purpose is not to be ‘above’ the world in splendid isolation but to speak of, and act out of, the mercy it has received.

And so Peter’s high language for the church simply says that the church has a high purpose: to speak of God’s mercy, God’s ‘mighty act’ (v. 9), even as the church itself is that mighty act:

Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy (v. 10).

Perhaps the thing which ought to surprise us most in what we’ve heard from Peter today is not his language for the church but the effect he expects the mercy-ed high-and-low church to have.

In particular, while it makes sense that those who have received mercy might praise God, Peter expects that even those who have not received mercy and who oppose his community will glorify God on account of mercy’s effect in the believers:

Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge (v. 12).

This is to say that both the community which receives the grace and those who reject it have as their end and purpose the glorification of God.

This, of course, could make no sense to those outside Peter’s community, for those inside the community can scarcely believe it either.

Believer and non-believer alike trip up at this point, for surely here is the height of arrogance: that not only is the church in some way ‘special’, but that its specialness displaces the ordinariness of all other things. More concretely, not only is the believer ‘chosen’ but her being ‘chosen’ means that others will be too, whether or not they seek or acknowledge it. God’s mercy will out us all.

The ‘great mercy’ which has birthed the church into a new hope (1. 3) by turning us to honour the God of mercy is mercy not only for those who know it but also for those who do not.

The offensiveness of the church – often enough even to the church itself – is that it is a sign that all things have their true being in their being called into being by God – mercy-ed into being – and in seeking to remain in that relationship.

This is not arrogance. If it implies that those outside the church don’t know what the church knows, at the same time the church continually forgets what it ought to know, whether for pride or fear. Not much separates the believer and the unbeliever when it is God who stands between them.

Peter reminds his community of the high priestly calling they have in their low station as aliens and exiles: a people who once were ‘nothing’, placed among others who are ‘nothing’, in order that all might come to something in their honouring of the God whose name and nature is Mercy, the source and goal of our being.

Let us, then, accept mercy that we might be merciful,

and be merciful that we might receive mercy.