View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 11
24/8/2025

Psalm 148
John 11:20-24

---

ForeWord

Some of you, of course, attended Norah’s funeral earlier this week.

I want to introduce our Gospel reading today by saying a bit more about what I offered in the sermon there, which has become an almost “standard” thought in my funeral sermons over recent years. (And so this could be an insight into what I might say at your funeral, should that privilege fall to me).

To remind those who were there, and bring everyone else up to speed, I observed on Tuesday, the obvious: that funerals are convened not least to remember the one who has died. But, when a funeral is intentionally “Christian”, a second story is also told. If the first story is the story of our experience of the one who has died, the second story is an account of God’s experience of her, and of us.

This seems to me to be a useful framing of what a funeral does for two reasons. First, it’s true. Christian faith sees our lives as resting in a larger work in which God is engaged. Second, this framing seems to be a gentle way to invite everyone gathered – believers and unbelievers alike – to think a little differently about their own story. Do I understand myself to be living within a bigger story? And what is that bigger story?

One of the things we’ve seen over the last 30 or 40 years is the growth of eulogies in length and number. This is undoubtedly true in non-religious funerals, but we see it even in the churches. And it makes perfect sense. If we don’t believe that we’re part of a grander story than our own, then it becomes imperative that we tell our own story as loudly and lengthily as we can. This is for sheer sanity’s sake, else what was it all for? If there is nothing that makes sense of us, then what little sense we’ve managed to make or be becomes even more important.

But my concern here is not how to do a good funeral. The two-story concept is a thought we might entertain at any time, and certainly long before we’re dead. The question is then only, What is the second story which justifies, which gives sense and meaning to, our own personal story?

Our Gospel reading for today tells part of the story of the raising of the dead Lazarus. Up to the point at which our reading begins, Lazarus has died and Jesus has arrived, and speaks with Martha and Mary, the dead man’s sisters.

We’ve thought about this text a couple of times before, with closer attention to the miracle itself, but today my interest is in what Jesus says about his relationship to resurrection and life, that he says this before his own resurrection, and what this might mean for our two-storied humanity.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 11. 20-44)

Word : Proclamation

Last week, we noted two related things about Jesus’ death and resurrection, one more straightforward than the other. The simpler draws on what we saw then in the exchange between Thomas and Jesus: the risen Jesus still bears the scars of the crucifixion, which seems to be the basis of Thomas’ extraordinary confession: “my Lord and my God. ” The risen Jesus is the crucified Jesus; the marks of Jesus’ life are not expunged with the resurrection. Jesus’ history continues into whatever resurrection life he now lives.

The second, more challenging thought was this: that the crucified Jesus is the risen Jesus. What this doesn’t mean is that the crucified Jesus is the one who will be raised. Rather, he is crucified as the risen Jesus. Or, still more pointedly, Jesus is “already” risen when he is crucified (and before the crucifixion). This makes little sense because we are accustomed to thinking about the cross and resurrection as sequential events, for the obvious reason that this is how the story unfolds.

But, as we’ve noticed before, the Gospeller John does not much respect our sense for things. What is at play for John is more who Jesus is than what he does or is done to him. Central to the “is-ness” of Jesus is that he does not change throughout the narrative (which John has in common with the other Evangelists).

To say that nothing of Jesus changes is to say that nothing is taken from him, and nothing is added, throughout the story. The Jesus calling disciples in chapter 1 is the Jesus raising Lazarus in chapter 11, is the Jesus being crucified in chapter 19, and is the risen Jesus in chapter 20. The stable thing throughout the narrative is the identity Jesus has from the one who sent him, and towards those to whom he was sent.

What this means for the cross and the resurrection is that Jesus is the same before the cross and after it; the resurrection doesn’t change anything about Jesus. (What does change at Easter is perception, but this is outside of him. We saw this last week in Thomas and Peter, and earlier again in Mary. )

To put it perhaps a little surprisingly, the resurrection doesn’t matter for Jesus. It doesn’t add anything to him.

It does matter for us, although not for the reason we usually think. The resurrection doesn’t tell us that there is a life which follows death. This would be resurrection-as-addition thinking: that the dead Jesus got a bonus extension, as Lazarus did, and so we might too. Rather, the resurrection matters for us because it is light by which we see now what Jesus was all along: he was always the presence of the reign of God in the world. And what else is the resurrection but just the sign of the presence of God in Jesus – which was always the case. Even before he died, then, Jesus was living resurrection life. His word to Martha – “I am the resurrection and the life” – is about now, not what’s to come.

This is not a straightforward thought, but an important one. But even if we can accommodate it, we might well ask, So what? This is all quite neat theology, stitching up who Jesus is (or was), but why do normal, sensible people (as distinct from theologians) need to think such curly thoughts?

The thing about neat, stitched-up theology is that it’s only properly neat when it makes a human difference. Here, to get our head properly around who Jesus is and what happens to him, is to get our head around ourselves.

Remember that we began all this by recalling a funeral sermon’s proposal that our experience of ourselves rests in the broader and deeper experience God has of us.

For Christian confession, this broader and deeper experience – God’s experience of us – is Jesus himself. As small as one person is, in the context of all the people who will ever live, this one person’s story is confessed to be the story within which all our stories are properly nestled.

For Jesus to be “the resurrection and the life”, then, is for him to be the possibility that we can be like him: living a “resurrection life” now, and not in some distant (or not so distant) future, as if we would be incomplete without a resurrection. The second story, God’s experience of us, is our completeness.

That Jesus is the resurrection and the life might be proven to be true by his resurrection, but it doesn’t become true at that point. It was always the case: he lived as if there were no death.

And so also for us; our second story becomes our first. Whether we think we’ve a little time left or a lot, whether it will be energetic time or now has to be less so, what matters is that the life we have now is given for living, now.

To believe in Jesus is to believe that we have been given all we need to live life in all its fullness. It is, then, time to begin to live.

Do not wait for heaven.

The resurrection and the life are much, much closer than you think.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 10
17/8/2025

Psalm 118
John 20:19-31
John 21:15-19

---

Gearing for hearing

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve set myself the goal of slowly working through the book, “1001 movies you must see before you die” – an exercise pitting cultural breadth against personal longevity.

One of the films I’ve recently seen from the list is the 1972 Academy Award winner for best film, actor and director (among other things): The French Connection. Some of you probably saw this when it first came out. For my part, it wasn’t a good film for a six-year-old. The French Connection is a gritty police drama treating the rise of the drug trade – in this case, out of Turkey through France into New York. It’s still well worth watching if crime dramas are your thing.

But I mention it because I had previously seen another movie on the same drug trade but set on the other side of the Atlantic: the 2014 French film La French, for which the English title was The Connection. You can see the connection!

The French film is also worth watching, but something which struck me about the two had nothing to do with the stories themselves, but a feature of the timing of the storytelling in each case. The 1971 film was shot in 1971 and told the story of things happening in 1971. This meant that, once the drama moved onto the streets, we saw a 1971 New York street just as anyone would have seen it as they left a New York cinema after watching the film during its first release.

The French film, however, tells the story of 1970s Marseille from some 40 years later. And so everything must be reconstructed to translate the viewer back to the 70s. They do a pretty good job. But the thing which struck me was the cars. While the production assistants of the 2014 film had done a marvellous job finding all sorts of 1950s, 60s and 70s French cars to stretch along the roads in the street scenes, every car is straight and shiny. The problem here is that only dedicated collectors keep old cars. And they don’t keep them “old” – they fix them up like new. Every second car lining the street in the 1971 version of the story is dented, rusted and muddy. Every car in the 2014 version of the story looks like it just rolled out of the showroom. The collector doesn’t want the dents; she wants the “real” car – the car before anything happened to it.

This might really spoil your enjoyment of new movies about old things because it happens everywhere. New movies featuring old streets seem always only to have new (old) cars. There’s no place movie makers can go to find a car that sits between the painstakingly restored classic and the rusted out, utterly unroadworthy equivalent languishing in some farm shed.

But at this point, I’m more interested in the collector than the movie maker. The collector identifies the real thing as that which is as close as possible to its original condition. Something is of greatest value when it is closest to what it was in the beginning. A mint-condition coin is worth more than one that has been spent, and collectable toys are worth more if the box has not been opened.

In all of this, it seems that the wear and tear we call life is a process of diminishment. At least, this seems to be the case with “things”: tools, clothes, toys, cars.

And what about people? If we ourselves were collectable, as dolls or stamps and Lego sets are, what would constitute the ideal of a person – the ideal of any one of us? What does the “collector” edition of a John, a Sue or a David look like?

It’s a stupid question, of course. But it goes to what we think we are, and so what is of value about us, and when we are most this valuable thing.

This brings us, finally, to our readings for today – two texts from John’s Gospel, from the resurrection narratives. In one, Thomas makes a statement about what he thinks the real Jesus – a resurrected Jesus – would look like. In the other, Jesus reminds Peter what his – Peter’s – reality is. Listen for how the scratches and the dents are handled.

(John 20. 19-31
and John 21. 15-19)

Extending the hearing

Most of us know those texts pretty well and so know also how they are typically interpreted. Thomas is the apparent sceptic who won’t believe unless he can see and touch; Jesus interrogates Peter three times, seemingly to drive home Peter’s earlier three-fold denial that he knows, loves, Jesus.

But there’s more to be found here. Thomas finally declares that Jesus is “Lord and God” when Jesus’ wounds are revealed, but it is precisely the scratched and dented Jesus who is praised there. The marks of the crucifixion are not marks like the colour of Jesus’s eyes or the shape of his nose. The marks are not the means by which Jesus is identified; they are his identity. The real Jesus is not the perfect “no crying he makes” baby in a manger, before he says or does anything, or before anything is done to him. The real Jesus is the “used” one: dusty, dented and discarded. What is raised is not a fully restored, just-rolled-out-of-the-showroom Jesus. The scratches and the dents are not “on” him; they are him. It is not Jesus, the confessing Thomas says, if he’s not marked with the marks of the crucifixion.

And as it is for Jesus, so also for us. In Peter’s exchange with Jesus, the great disciple learns this for himself. Our few verses today began mid-story, but the narrative commenced with Peter declaring, “I’m going fishing”: a return to Galilee, a return to the beginning. It’s as if nothing has happened, and Peter and the rest of the disciples have hit the reset: forget and begin again. And then Jesus appears, as if to affirm the re-fresh.

But, in what we heard today, Jesus draws the enthusiastic showroom-restored Peter to one side. And with his repeated question, Jesus presses Peter to acknowledge his own brokenness. There is no mere forgiveness here, in the forgive-and-forget mode. It is as the one who three times denied Jesus that Peter is installed as the shepherd to Jesus’ lambs.

This is one of our “know-ing” texts, which we considered last week. Lord, Peter says, You know everything; you know that I love you. But by the third posing of the question, Peter’s statement of his love is deepened, because with that third question from Jesus, two things happen.

First, Peter’s failure is revealed to him again – Jesus “knows everything”; Jesus knows that Peter has failed him in his threefold denial.

And yet, second, the Jesus who knows of Peter’s failure is also the one who now appoints him as pastor: feed my sheep. Peter says three times, “Lord, you know that I love you”, but the third is different from the previous two, because the Jesus who is loved has now changed in Peter’s perception. This is no longer the Jesus the enthusiastic Peter wants him to be. This is the Jesus who knows the dinged-up, broken-down Peter and loves him nonetheless, just as he is. And more than loves him, Jesus commissions him to continue Jesus’ own work.

And so the collection-edition Peter is not the strong, vital fisherman at the start of the gospel, is not the confident, sometimes over-reaching disciple mid-story, is not the fearful one at the end. The collector-edition Peter – the truly valuable Peter – is the one who – at each stage, in every condition – has been loved. Peter’s value doesn’t change with his changing behaviour and fortunes in the story. At his best and his worst, and despite his own attempt to go back to BNIB, what has mattered most is that he has been valued. We are not our best selves at any stage of life, but in life, in flight.

What does the collector’s edition you look like?

You are each, here and now, the best you’ve ever been. Now are your glory days, now matters as much as any other moment you imagined was more “you”.

And so this can have nothing to do with how you feel about yourself. God help us if we were worth only as much as we think we are. And God does help us here, because this is a scratch-and-dent God. Our here and now is our best time because, at each stage of his life, Jesus was the presence of God: in the heady days of the calling the first disciples and in the glory of a resurrection from the dead, but also when struggling with the powers and nailed to a cross. The crucified Christ is not the one who will be risen, but the one who is risen; the risen Christ is not the one who was crucified, but the one who is crucified. This is the point of Thomas’ insistence on the marks of the crucifixion. The marks are not “on” Jesus, but are him. It’s as if everything which Jesus does and everything which happens to him is coincident: it all occurs at once, in the sight of God, and each is as valuable, each is as much the true Jesus, as the other.

The gospel is that, as with Jesus, so also with us. All that we do and is done to us coheres in God. There is no better you than the you sitting here and now because your here and now is wrapped up in the God who draws near to us in all things and binds them together, to make all things God’s own.

Understand, then, as Thomas understood, and step up, as Jesus called Peter to do so. Because if, in all things – in our very best and our very worst – we are already seen and loved, then we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 9
10/8/2025

Psalm 139:1-6, 15-18
John 2:13-25
John 15:12-17

---

Sermon (Part the First)

I discovered something rather surprising last week, which I thought I’d share with you all via that very annoying process that more or less involves you guessing stuff until you get the right answer, which only I know (or until we all lose patience).

The first question: Consider for a moment the text of the Gospel according to St John, to the extent that you think you know it. Imagine that we were to remove all the little words – the “the’s” and the “ands” and the “have’s” the “was’s” and the pronouns and the helpful little conjunctions and whatever. Of the words remaining, what do you imagine is the most frequent substantive word we read in John’s Gospel? [Jesus]

The second question: What do you guess might be the second most common substantive word? [Father]

Third question – and this is the thing which surprised me – what is the third most common word in John’s Gospel?

The third-most common word in John’s Gospel is “know”. When you add the past tense “knew” to the count, this verb appears almost as often as the noun “father”.

Know-ing is everywhere in John – roughly a half dozen times each chapter, though it tends to clump up here and there. I thought I was onto something, that the word “know” appears so many times in John because John wants us to know something about knowing. And he almost certainly does. An influential and antagonistic background noise to John’s Gospel was the developing Gnostic movement – a broad range of mystery religions which emphasised the importance of a particular kind of knowledge. (It’s worth noting here that “gnostic” and “knowledge” have a common root in the Greek gnosis – one of the words for “knowledge”. And John may, in part, be engaged in a polemic about what it is to know).

But then I discovered something else. Not only in John’s Gospel is the verb “know” so frequent. It’s also the case in more general texts and speech. In natural language, the word “know” ranks in the top 50 words, and almost all the other top 50 words are just the little ones: “her”, “at”, “if”, “not” and so on.

I did not know how important knowing was. But now that I know – and that you know – I wonder, what do we know, now that we know this?

Or even better: given that knowing is so central to what we talk about, what does John know about knowing that might make a difference to our knowing?

Listen to some of the ways knowing appears in John:

^1.10 [The Word] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.

^1.18 No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

^4.22 [Jesus said to her, ] You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know… 

^6.69 [Peter said to Jesus, ] We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.

^8.31 [Jesus said, ] “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; ³² and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

^11.49 But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all!

^20.13 [The angels] said to [Mary], “Woman, why are you weeping? ” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. ” ¹⁴ When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus.

^21.17 [Jesus] said to [Peter] the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me? ” Peter felt hurt because [Jesus] said to him the third time, “Do you love me? ” And [Peter] said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. ”

In these texts, knowledge is sometimes the just grasping of simple facts. But more often, at least here in John, knowledge presses towards intimacy. To know something is here not to possess it but to be connected to it, to be held by it:

^10.14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me…

^17.25 “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these [disciples] know that you have sent me. ²⁶ I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them. ”

Those of you who grew up with a Bible translation in the King James version tradition have probably noticed what looks like the coy way in which those translations would speak of sex: “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived…” (Genesis 4. 1), and many other places besides.

“Knew” is, in fact, in the Hebrew, the word for ordinary knowing, so we don’t have an English euphemism here. We have here not euphemism but a metaphor: knowledge is intimacy and, just as much, intimacy is knowledge. And when the same Hebrew word for knowing is used elsewhere – say for God’s knowledge of Israel – it’s not directly sexual, but it is often deeply intimate. (See, for example, “know” in Hosea – a knowing both intimate and deeply compromised).

But this intimacy is not easy or natural, which brings us, at last, to the two texts indicated in our service order, which are both “knowledge” texts.

(John 2. 13-25; John 15. 12-17)

Sermon (Part the Second)

^2.23…many believed in [Jesus’] name because they saw the signs that he was doing. ²⁴ But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people ²⁵ and needed no one to testify about anyone; for he himself knew what was in everyone.

This too is knowledge as familiarity, as intimacy. But now the depth of knowing does not bode well. Jesus keeps his distance: “…[Jesus] would not entrust himself to them” because he knew them. We know(! ) this experience ourselves. We “know” others – at least we imagine we do – and often we hesitate. If intimacy is the possibility of being ourselves with another person, it has to do with the presence of (or at least openness to finding) trust, which further requires mutuality. But the intimacy in our text is one-sided. The people have seen something about Jesus – his impressive “signs” – but that is all. To recall what we said last week, they’ve seen the wrong kind of “there-ness” in him, and so they’ve gotten wrong what he is and what it would mean to know him appropriately.

And yet, the gospel is finally about a mutual intimacy:

^13.15 “[Jesus said to them, ] I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

In this passage, “servant” denotes the wrong kind of there-ness, a lesser knowledge, an absence of mutuality, over against the intimacy of what Jesus calls “friends”. The achievement of Jesus in the gospel is precisely this “friendship”. To say that God saves is – in John’s account – to say that God makes friends.

What the crowds do not know at the beginning of the Gospel is finally known at the end by the disciples. The knowledge which matters takes time. It requires the slow overcoming of misunderstanding and conflict. And it is because this knowledge takes time, that it can’t be the knowledge of mere facts. Facts are easy: “The surface temperature of the Sun is about 5500 degrees Celsius”. This is true, but the knowledge John is concerned about is what it feels like, mid-morning in late September, to stand under an open sky.

We are accustomed these days to separating knowledge and faith, as if faith somehow overreaches, beyond the limits of knowledge. But for John, faith is not contrasted with knowledge but is a kind of knowing. The faithful don’t hold to anything more than anyone else. They just order everything differently, feel everything differently.

And so the invitation to knowledge, to faith, is not an invitation to know some new thing. It is the invitation to a deeper knowing of everything we already know, a quality of knowing rather than a quantity.

^15.15 I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. ¹⁶ You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. ¹⁷ I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

Nothing is added to make a servant a friend, but everything changes. The “fruit that will last” is the knowing that is love, is the love which is a deepening of mere knowing. To bear such fruit is to struggle through what passes for knowledge in most of our talk – a disconnected knowledge – into a deeper, integrated knowledge, which is the mutuality of love: the knowledge of persons, not of things.

This is the call to faith.

Or, pun intended, faith is knowing better. Faith is knowing better because we have come to know ourselves as God knows us: a knowing which is indistinguishable from love.

Faith is knowing that we have been searched and known, as our psalmist will put it in a moment (Psalm 139). And we have been found wanting but still loved, nonetheless.

Let us, then, know better.

Let us press past the mere possession of facts about each other and the world, into the knowledge which integrates, into the re-creative love by which God is making all things new.

Pressing into that love, let us become that love.

[And all God’s people say…]

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 8
3/8/2025

Genesis 1:1-3
Psalm 107
John 20:11-18

---

Sermon (Part the First)

Artificial intelligence has been the subject of a couple of seminars in our church over the last couple of weeks, which have provoked my thinking in relation to the scripture texts we’ll hear in a little while.

There seem to be two basic concerns prompted by artificial intelligence technology. The first arises with all technology. As useful as it might be, to what extent does our technology threaten us, particularly given that it is handled by people we are not sure we trust? Yet AI presents nothing new here; it just poses again a question with which we’ve long wrestled: who has the monopoly on power and violence? This matters, of course, but it’s an old question in a new form.

The second concern is more interesting: that AI might become a kind of “alien equivalent” to us. By this I mean that AI might develop to threaten us in a way not unlike Little (and not so little) Green Men threaten us in science fiction stories. Or, more positively, perhaps AI will develop into something so like us that we don’t know anymore how we should relate to it. Would moral responsibility arise with respect to our machines, which are now possibly no longer “technology”, no longer objects but subjects?

These latter possibilities raise the question of what it means to be human, and this will be our focus this morning. What would we look for as an indicator that our responsibilities to each other as natural-born human beings should be extended to some other reality in the world – to an artificial intelligence, for instance? What makes us human? What is our unique thing? What would AI have to achieve or manifest for us to see ourselves in it, requiring that we relate to it as we relate to each other?

To think about this, we’ll start by noting what happens when we try to think what God is.

We have all wondered at some time, What is God? Or why is there a god, or why should God matter to us? We have each found answers to these kinds of questions, for better or worse. And yet, a problem quickly arises with answers to the God question. To find a “reason” for God amounts to finding something God does which we don’t already have other things to do. We find some necessity for God. The problem for a God so proven is that other gap-fillers eventually come along. And so this kind of God – the god who fills the gaps in our world – has a habit of getting smaller and smaller as we fill those gaps with clever new discoveries. Thinking ahead, it seems inevitable that God will eventually disappear as our self-confidence grows. And indeed, many have drawn that conclusion: why bother with an ice-box God when you’ve got a refrigerator and, indeed, a refrigerator which lets you sleep in on Sundays?

This is enormously important. If once, with no other recourse, we prayed for healing, now we have penicillin. If once we prayed for safety in the dark of the night, now we have security lighting. Who needs a God, given our ever-developing technological skill? Our empty churches have much to do with this way of thinking, not least because the churches themselves have leaned heavily on the purported usefulness of God.

But the God of Christian faith is not a god of the gaps, is not a soon-to-be-superseded technology to meet some presently felt need. To put it most strongly, the Jewish-Christian God is properly “useless”, neither an answer to a question, nor a solution to a problem. In his prison reflections on the problem of the stopgap god 80 years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer borrowed a Latin expression to propose that we need to live etsi deus non daretur: “as if God were not there”. This was not to say that God does not matter but that God does not have a “thereness” like the thereness of everything else in the world. God does not “fit” into the world because God is a kind of “thing” different from the other things in the world, having a different “there-ness”.

Now, imagining living with God as if God were not there is hardly straightforward. But it gets worse.

When AI prompts the thought that our machines might become too much like us, we search for what makes us us, in order to mark the distinction between ourselves and the human-looking things AI might become.

But, shifting now from thinking what God is to thinking what we are, we find the problem of locating God is a problem we have even for ourselves. Whenever we identify something about ourselves that seems uniquely human, we find it elsewhere. If it is our capacity to laugh, we discover that other animals also do something like laughter. If we think it might be tool-making, we find other non-human tool makers. If it is our capacity for grammatical language, we discover that other animals have something similar. If it’s our capacity to mourn or deceive, we find sad tricksters with fur or feathers.

All our attempts to find a specialness about ourselves end up in much the same way as our efforts to find the thing which makes God special and, so, useful. What is distinctly human shrinks in the same way that failed proofs of God see God contract. In the end, we find that there’s nothing unique about us. We differ from other things in the world only in quantity, not quality; being human is a spectrum condition.

So, in order to save ourselves from just being clever apes, do we not have to do the same for the human as we do for God? If we are to live in the world as if God were not there, etsi deus non daretur, do we also live as if the human were not there: etsi homo non daretur? Are we to live as if we were not quite “there”?

The short answer, from the Christian perspective, is Yes: to be properly human is to be not quite “there”, in the way that God is not quite there.

And surely we now want to recall old Nicodemus again, from Chapter 3: How can such things be? (See the July 20 sermon).

Now, if you’ve been able to keep up with me to this point, you’ve probably been working too hard to notice how long it has taken me to get to our biblical texts for today. It has taken this long because the text itself is not quite “there” in a helpful way until we’ve done some of this kind of work.

Let’s now see what the beginning of the old creation narratives and John’s account of the empty tomb and the resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene tell us about human thereness. As we hear the text, listen for how there-ness – and not-there-ness – lurks behind the action and exchanges.

(à Genesis 1.1-3 and John 20. 11-18)

Sermon (Part the Second)

The other disciples have been and gone, but Mary peers once more into the tomb. She sees “two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. ” That is, these angelic figures mark something of an absence: this is where the head and the feet of Jesus “were”. But what kind of absence, what kind of not-there-ness, is this?

A hint is given in what happens next. The angels ask Mary a seemingly stupid question: “Why are you weeping? ”, as if that weren’t obvious. She replies, “They have taken away my Lord”. And we see now that the angels’ question invites her to speak her truth – her wrong truth: she equates the there-ness Jesus’ dead body should have had with what she thought was the thereness of living Jesus she had loved. The poignancy is not just her very real grief but her mistaken grasp of what has been at play in Jesus.

Mary then turns and sees Jesus standing in the garden, but doesn’t see him, either: “…she did not know that it was him”. We’re accustomed here to psychologising the drama, imagining that she is blind with grief. But the Gospel-writer John doesn’t do psychology. Mary can’t see Jesus when he is not there (in the ordinary sense, in the tomb), but she also can’t see him when he is there in the ordinary sense, standing in front of her.

This is to say that there-ness – tangibility, measurability, probe-ability, objectivity – is not the appropriate way to think about Jesus. And this is not a special characteristic of the resurrection moment. We’ve noted before how John’s Jesus often seems to answer the questions that should have been asked rather than those that actually were. It’s as if those who engage him have mis-taken what he is, his peculiar there-ness, and so approached him from the wrong direction. They see him, but wrongly, because he’s not quite there in the way they think. This is has been the case long before Jesus meets Mary outside the tomb.

But if Jesus is the fullness of human being, and they cannot see him as he truly is, then they have mistaken even their own humanity. Looking for the wrong thing in Jesus, Mary shows herself to be the wrong thing. Jesus cannot properly appear until Mary herself does.

And Mary doesn’t properly appear – even to herself – until she is properly seen, and it is Jesus whose seeing of her is marked with the utterance of her name: “Mary”.

And now Mary sees him.

This recognition is from neither a familiar friendliness she hears in the tone of his voice nor the invocation of a special intimacy they might have shared. Jesus doesn’t catch Mary’s grief-distracted attention. He calls her into being. And God said, Let there be…Mary! And there was Mary.

And so she responds not with a familiar “Jesus! ” or even “Lord”, but with Rabbouni, “Teacher”, because now she truly sees.

And what does she see? Not the risen Jesus as a special event. It is what he has always been that now appears. Jesus never quite fits the expectations or questions of those around him in John’s Gospel because he is not “there” in the way everyone else is. They look for the wrong thing, for something that is there as they expect it to be.

But here in the garden, something else happens. Mary now knows that her being seen makes possible her own seeing. The “Lord” who, she laments, was taken from the tomb, is then not the one she proclaims to the disciples. She announces not “I have seen the Lord” as if he had not been visible before, but “I have finally seen the Lord, ” as he was always there to be seen, but we did not see: as the one who sees us into being, the one by whose seeing we finally come to be “there”.

To say that God is not quite there, after the mode of Bonhoeffer, is to say that God is not a gap-filling thing we can take up, not a tool, not an object we can manipulate but, so to speak, is rather always just out of our reach. This is not yet the gospel; it’s just a clear thought about what the word “God” could sensibly mean.

But the gospel is that if God is always just out of our reach, we are always within God’s reach. God is, as it were, always just ahead of us, calling us, drawing us, dragging us forward. We can’t reach forward to grasp God, but God reaches back to grasp us. God’s not-thereness is the kind of not-thereness of arriving-in-just-a-moment.

But because the arriving-in-just-a-moment God is not quite here, so also are we not quite here, but become properly here, there, when we lean forward into God’s call to the future. The uniqueness of the human is that we are not quite there, but always becoming. To be human – to be properly there as God creates us to be – is always to be on the cusp of being.

To think about the humanity of our machines requires that we understand our proper, cusping existence. But AI is not our most pressing problem. What presses in on us most is not our machines but that we ourselves don’t live on the cusp of God’s call into being.

We live, rather, in the shadowlands of what seems to be so, of everything we have done and that has been done to us, of the limits of what we can see and touch, of what we imagine to be there. And so we have our wars and our deteriorating natural environment, our political confusions and our domestic violence, our selfishness and our insecurities, our walls and our genocides.

All of this arises out of the quiet – and not so quiet – chaos of living out of the wrong kind of thereness, the chaos which arises when we mis-take ourselves.

But into this void, this darkness, this deep, God speaks to create once again:

Let there be…Mary

Let there be… (name)

Let there be… (name)

Let there be… (name)

Let there be … light.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 7
27/7/2025

Colossians 2:6-19
Psalm 138
Luke 11:1-13

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

---

God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

“The Uniting Church acknowledges that the Church is able to live and endure through the changes of history only because its Lord comes, addresses, and deals with people in and through the news of Christ’s completed work.” (Basis of Union §5)

These words come from the Basis of Union, the foundational theological statement of the Uniting Church. They point to a task to which the Church must always be attentive. To listen, discern, and hear the address of Christ coming to speak to us. It is only by being attentive to the continuing address of Christ that we are able to continue being the Church.

We can, after all, manage our significant property portfolio in smart ways to sustain much of our institutional life. We can sell property, and invest the proceeds to generate revenue streams capable of outliving the habitability of this planet. Mindful that much of the church’s wealth derives from claims on stolen land during colonisation, the Church may even find an appropriate regime of reparations. We may continue to fund local and in some cases quite large community service programs and organisations. And through all this ensure that the institution of the Church will live on in perpetuity.

And by no means do I think these are altogether bad things. After all, to whom much has been given, much is to be expected. Many of the smart ways the Church is seeking to use its resources, and reorganise its life are responsible and wise stewardship of the legacy we have received. Two large conversations about this work are currently underway within the Uniting Church: the Act2 project at a national level; and the Faithful Futures project across our Synod of Victoria & Tasmania.

And yet, it is not at all clear that responsible asset management is what the Basis of Union had in mind when it spoke of Christ coming, addressing and dealing with people through the news of Christ’s completed work.

What, then, might it mean to hear the address of Christ anew today? Not simply as the Uniting Church, but as the Church of Jesus Christ, and as a people who live for the sake of the world for which Christ died.

In the letter to the Colossians we get some clues. It is worth setting our reading today from Colossians 2 into context. In the previous chapter we were offered a hymn of Christ. Which speaks of Christ as the image of the invisible God, the firstborn among creation, the one through whom all things are held together.

Colossians, a letter written to a particular community at a particular time and place with their own issues to manage — presumably balancing the risk exposure of their own share portfolio between sheep and olive equities. And yet, for all the particularity of their challenges they do not receive a letter about the minutiae of church governance, but about the cosmic vision of a world in which a crucified Lord reigns. A cosmic vision in which all things are held together by the peace wrought by a bloodied cross, where even among the gallows God is pleased to dwell with our humanity.

If the church does not have a story of a God who loves the world even beyond death, then we have nothing at all. If we do not live by the story of the fullness of God going with us to the darkest of places to reconcile and redeem, then we have nothing at all. If we do not have Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, then we have nothing at all. If we do not have a vision for a just and reconciled world for all, then we have nothing at all.

It is from this cosmic story that Colossians is able to get its hands dirty to speak into the particular situation of the community at Colossae.

“As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith … abounding in thanksgiving.” (Col. 2:6-7)

As we have received Christ Jesus the Lord — and we might say the Lord of all creation — we must live by what we have received. Let us be clear, we have not simply received a set of moral teachings. Rather, we have received an account of God and a story of the world in which all things are being woven together towards an inclusive, connected and just future for all. We have received the way of Jesus Christ, who lived a life of mercy, who served the poor and fed the hungry, who proclaimed justice, and died in solidarity with the suffering of the world. This is what we have received.

It is interesting here that the warning which follows in our reading is not to become captive to philosophy, human tradition, and the “elemental principles of the world.” (Col. 2:8)

Commentators vary about what on Earth the “elemental principles of the world” actually refer to. Perhaps what is intended is the elemental spirits which swirl around the world shaping the goings on of things, to the ancient mind. Perhaps this is about the Colossians thinking that history is unfolding as a necessary series of things, with Christ’s death and resurrection as one mere event within a chain, and their task within history is to find the fullness of God somewhere altogether new.

Whatever the case, the warning is to remind the church in Colossae as much as the church in Parkville that to live in Christ is not to live in the world as humanity is want to see it. To live in Christ is to live in a world transformed. Where the lives that matter are the poor and the disregarded, the homeless and the sheltering, the devastated and the bombed, the grieving and the abandoned. Do not become captive to the ways of a world which puts profit over people, or self-interested politics above the lives of innocent children. Do not become captive to the human traditions which see precious lives as expendable.

Rather, remember that the fullness of God — the fullness of God is nowhere if not in the person of Jesus. Among the messy lives of those whom Jesus served, among the nameless millions whose deaths seem never to matter. There the fullness of God is found. That is where sacred things are to be sought.

If we remain in Christ, then we remain in the kind of community that opens itself, and expands its heart, to embrace all people in their vulnerability and fragility. If we remain in Christ, then we truly become a baptised people. A people who share in Christ’s journey among the suffering and dead. We become incorporated in Christ’s body as “one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy,” as the Basis of Union expresses it. This is the task of the Church, to be this kind of body. Not the body of Christ because we add to Christ’s work, but the body of Christ who are the benefactors of Christ grace, and so co-labourers with Christ in solidarity with and service to the world.

We must cultivate our capacity of living in this world as if the crucified one reigns. As if those who cry out in their need are the most holy and important of all. As if the one condemned in fact declares our unjust innocence. As if the powers of Empire, who put a man to death, are in fact subservient to the Lord of love and life.

We live as if these things are true, because our faith is that they are. That despite our own captivity to a world averse to risk, of seeking eternal life through technocratic mastery, of retreat into our self-enclosed community. Despite all of this …

We proclaim the triumph of a crucified Lord. That what is going on in the world is not merely the callousness we see each day, or the disregard with which people are treated. What is truer than all the ways the world seems to be, what is more real than what seems most real, is that this is a loved world that God has not abandoned. This is a loved world where God dwells fully. This world is not abandoned, but served by Jesus Christ who calls us to receive his grace and becomes his body for the world which he so loves. Let us then, abounding in thanksgiving, heed Christ’s address and proclaim with joy the news of Christ’s completed work for the sake of the world.

Amen.