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Pentecost 9
10/8/2025

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

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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…]

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Pentecost 8
3/8/2025

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

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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.

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Pentecost 7
27/7/2025

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

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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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.

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Pentecost 6
20/7/2025

Psalm 15
John 3:1-10

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As we watch the world fall apart around us, it is increasingly heard in the analyses of what is going on that we are seeing the end of the “rules-based order”.

We live according to rules – little (and not so little) expectations by which the world is a predictable, and so a safe, place. The rule might be which side of the road to drive on, which colours should and should not be worn together, how to place the bowls in the dishwasher, and who we can and can’t drop bombs on.

Of course, we have always experienced violations of the rules. Dishwashers have been poorly stacked, cars have run red lights, and terrorists have driven trucks into crowded night markets. But there’s generally been a sense that we at least agree that these are violations and that those who do such things should be shown to be wrong with punishments that signal rules-based normality.

But in what we see in headline places like Ukraine, Gaza and the US – and many other less well-known instances – the “rules” seem to have been violated in such a way as to deny the continuing applicability of the rules, the possibility of a return to “normal”. At the geopolitical level, those rules set in place by the establishment of the United Nations are crumbling. The bullies on the block were always there but were once more constrained. At the levels of local political and interpersonal relationships, there is a contemptuous edge to our interactions and a noticeable absence of restraint correlating to that on the international stage.

I’m not describing anything here you don’t already know, of course: we’ve all seen and felt this over the last decade or so, and the sense of a disruption of the rules of political relationships has been intensified by the pandemic and the growing awareness that Mother Nature is governed entirely by rules we can’t change, and crossing her will not end well for any of us.

The sense that there were rules in place might have been, of course, simply delusion. This is one of the critiques from the rule breakers: the rules were made by the powerful Western and liberal political system, which is itself now in decline. In this sense, they weren’t the real rules but only a temporary expression of one interest group’s order and advantage, which is now crumbling.

There’s a lot of analysis of all this to be found in the op-eds and longreads, and my purpose today is not to try to sift through all that to some “solution” to a return to order.

Instead, I wonder how we might think “Christianly” about what we are experiencing, how we might characterise what is going on and respond from a Christian perspective.

For this, let’s reference the disorientation of Nicodemus in his encounter with Jesus, and Nicodemus’ exasperated exclamation, “How can these things be?”, for John’s Gospel is the Gospel of the end of rules-based order.

Nicodemus knows something is going on with Jesus and so seeks him out, although “by night”, for such an approach is itself against the rules, and best done with stealth. The Jesus he finds specialises in non-sequiturs and answers to questions which haven’t been asked: “Very truly”, Jesus remarks, “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again” (or “from above”). While there is a simple metaphorical reading of this rebirth, John has Nicodemus taking it painfully literally: Jesus speaks nonsense.

Nicodemus’ literalism is important here, because a soft metaphorical hearing of the re-birth might see the central point lost in a weak spiritualism. The central point is that, for Jesus, none of the old rules apply. He speaks non-sense, which becomes clearer as he continues in response to Nicodemus with a pun on a (Greek) word which could be translated as “wind” or “spirit”: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the wind” (or the s/Spirit).

The wind, so far as casual observers are concerned, follows no rules. If this wind – this s/Spirit – has any order, it is a non-rules-based order. We can’t tell what will happen next, where it will carry us. This is the disordered order Jesus announces as the order of the kingdom of God, the order by which the people of God are placed in the world.

Not surprisingly, Nicodemus responds in a way that anticipates our own experience of the disorder developing around us today: How. Can These. Things. Be?

We might recall what we’ve noted a couple of times lately about meaning – that meaning is location. Nicodemus asks, How does such disorder “fit” with everything else I know? Or, to put the same question around the other way, How or where do I fit within such disorder?

This is a question about predictability, security, safety. When I know what and where I am, and what is happening around me, I’m best placed to survive life’s ordeals. In such circumstances, meaning abounds. But there is none of this for Nicodemus here. The cover of darkness under which he sought to discover how Jesus fits now reveals another kind of darkness: that of the uncertainty, the unfittingness, of the wind, of the s/Spirit.

Nicodemus approaches the strange-looking Jesus from the perspective of a rules-based order. But as he seeks to understand, he finds that he can’t fit Jesus in, which intensifies the disorder Jesus seems to be.

It is, of course, the rules-based order of the religious and political leadership that finally kills Jesus: “We have a law, and according to that law he must die, because he claimed to be the Son of God”. This is how the religious leaders advise Pilate at Jesus’ trial (19.7).

And, again “of course”, Jesus’ death is central to the theme of salvation in Christian confession. It’s just a little beyond what we heard this morning that the well-known “John 3.16” appears: This is the love of God, that he gave his only Son – this “giving” being in Jesus’ death (3.14).

But what does this salvation look like? Do we think it takes the form of a reordering, a reestablishment of the rules? Is salvation moral clarity and observance, the world now behaving as it should, according to the rules?

That’s perhaps the “standard” way of thinking about what being “saved” means. But if those whom Jesus saves are to become like Jesus himself, then being “born again” is not about being delivered from damnation into a blessed and well-ordered world (into “heaven”, as we usually name it). Salvation is about becoming unruly Jesus-like people, of whom it is said, “How can such things – how can such people – be: disordered, born of the wind?”

This deeply and richly human disorder is not like the disorder we see playing out on the world stage. Worldly disorder is never really disordered. The violent are never merely violent; they always justify their violence by appealing to rules which blame the victim: look what you made me do.

Look what you made us do, Ukraine. Look what you made us do, you Aborigines, you Gazans, you Jews, you refugees, you “coloured’ person, you who are weak and vulnerable, you everyone-who-is-not-a-United-States-of-American. How could we not have done what we have done? The ever-present, violent disorder of the world is always based on an appeal to some deeper rule that the violent claim justifies the violence. Later in John’s Gospel, the high Priest Caiaphas will declare, It is better that one die, than that everything be lost: Look what you made us do, you disordering Jesus.

This is all to say that the alleged breakdown of our rule-based order might just be the displacement of one rules-based violence with another, of a convenient violence with a less convenient one.

Against all this, the disorder of the “born again” or “born from above” Jesus speaks about is an abandonment of those orderings of the world which violate human being in the name of order.

The disorder of the wind, of the Spirit of Christ, is not a random and capricious thing. It is love’s insistence on rejecting the violent and self-interested orderings of the world. The disorder of the Spirit is grace, in place of the harsh claims of justice. It is abundance, in the face of economically ordered scarcity. It is unruly gift, in place of carefully calculated exchange.

In the end, Nicodemus’ “How can these things be?” is turned around: the problem is not that Jesus doesn’t fit; it is that Nicodemus’ well-ordered, good-fitting world limits and constrains and kills – even Jesus himself.

And so the question becomes, How can it be that – again and again in echo of the cynical Caiaphas – we reject the free and freeing life in the wildly unruly Jesus?

This is the love of God: that he gave…love.  God’s gift is not “salvation” in some future time and place. God’s gift is life: life as love. This is a gift that doesn’t fit our sense of order and is precisely what we need in the midst of our rules-based orderings of ourselves and each other.

Though it seems that the rules are breaking down, they are really only re-adjusting. And what is required of us now is what has always been required: recognition that someone is always crushed by the rules and acting in love to set them free. This is what it means to be reborn, to be born from above, to be born of the gusty Spirit.

With the stunned Nicodemus, we wonder about the God who doesn’t fit, who seems to have no meaning, who disrupts our order: “How can these things be?”

God replies, If you are to know the truth, and be set free for life in all its fullness, How could these things not be?

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Pentecost 5
13/7/2025

Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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The winter edition of Mark the Word was recently circulated among members and friends of the congregation and, as usual, it made for interesting reading.  I was particularly interested in Craig’s observations about structural, resourcing and leadership challenges in the life of the church, and the sense in which these challenges invite good administration.  Craig suggests that good administration is not simply the correction or improvement of previous efforts, but good ad-ministry – a “ministry-to” – and a service to the gospel and its God.  He continues: ‘I don’t know what that might look like for our next moment, but it will at least convey that ours is a conviction about a God who, even when pushed out of the world onto a cross, nonetheless remained God of that world, for that world.  More than this, it is precisely as God stops being part of the world, stops looking like anything that the world values, that God is truly God and that we might learn what we are as children of such a God.’

At a time when congregations are closing and resources are dwindling; it could be argued that the church has new opportunities to become what it was always meant to be.  Perhaps, as the church continues to decline in power and privilege, it may glimpse a fresh perspective of the God who was pushed out of the world onto a cross, and a fresh understanding of how that one remains God of the world, for the world.

The parable of the Samaritan is perhaps the most familiar of them all, such that secular culture mistakenly interprets it to describe an unusually heroic act.  This parable has been universally lauded for its moral imperative – that we too should be good, responding with compassion and generosity to the suffering of others.  But it’s interesting that the parable nowhere describes the Samaritan as ‘good’.  Even if the parables of Jesus do have ethical implications, they are not primarily morality tales.  Rather, they’re stories that must be viewed through the lens of the cross to glimpse the life that God wills for the world.  This parable emerges within the context of a conversation between Jesus and a lawyer, whom we’re told wants to test Jesus.

The lawyer asks:  What must I do to inherit eternal life?  Jesus responds by inviting the lawyer to recall the Jewish Law: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’  Clearly, the lawyer understands that the reference to loving one’s neighbour as one’s self is integral to the commandment; he knows it’s impossible to love God without also loving neighbour.  So, the lawyer takes a different tack, by splitting hairs over just who qualifies as a neighbour.  Once again, the narrative explains the lawyer’s motivations; that he wishes to justify himself.

Rather than argue the case from a legal point of view, Jesus offers the parable.  A man is beaten and left for dead.  A Priest and a Levite, exemplars of the Law in their community, see the victim and do their best to evade him and avoid their responsibilities.  On the other hand, a Samaritan, though hated by the Jewish community, is moved with compassion and offers the victim care and life.  The Samaritan embodies the spirit of the very law by which he is alienated, as he embraces the victim in healing love.  Like the Priest and the Levite in the parable, the lawyer also represents the religious authorities of his day, and yet he recognises that it is in fact the despised Samaritan who acts as a neighbour.  Jesus confirms that the mercy of the Samaritan is indeed the fulfilment of the Jewish Law.

Note the irony in this – though himself a Jew, Jesus will later be treated like one beyond the Law; he will be condemned by Roman imperial authority and crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem.

This irony is not lost on the apostle Paul, whose letters encourage new Christian communities to hold fast to the way of the cross.  We’ve heard today the opening verses of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, in which he offers greetings that both encourage and challenge.  First, he offers them the grace and peace of God, and assures them of his prayers, in which he gives thanks to God for their faith and love.  Then he affirms the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by his colleague, Epaphras.  He again assures them of his prayers, this time for their wisdom and understanding, that they may lead lives that are worthy of the Lord and bear the fruit of the kingdom of God.  Finally, he encourages them to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has rescued them from the power of darkness to live in the kingdom of his beloved son, through whom they are forgiven.

Before turning to the particular issues of concern, Paul reminds the Colossians of the inheritance which they and he share.  Though his greeting begins with frequent references to ‘them’, by the time it concludes the grammar has shifted – from ‘them’ to ‘us’.  Paul wants to emphasise the sense in which the gospel of Jesus Christ is the story of God’s grace for all.  In Christ, there is no us and them; there is only ‘we’.

It’s interesting that the question at the heart of the gospel passage appears again in Luke 18, when a rich ruler, calling Jesus ‘Good Teacher’, asks about the path to eternal life.  Jesus replies: ‘Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone.’  When Jesus advises the rich ruler to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, the man departs in sadness and his community laments the impossibility of salvation.  And Jesus declares: ‘What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.’

In today’s parable, the Samaritan’s mercy crosses intractable cultural and religious barriers.  Indeed, within the context of first century religiosity, the mercy of the Samaritan is impossible.  What a sadly ironic commentary this is on contemporary middle eastern politics.  And yet, the parable is offered as a proclamation of the mercy of God revealed in the gospel of Jesus.  This is a gospel in which God crosses the intractable barriers of our humanity to achieve the impossible.  This is a gospel, not of legal purity or moral rectitude, but of reckless, lawless, and prodigal faithfulness.

In Jesus, God comes to us, not as a respectable, clean, law abiding, citizen of status and standing, but as a despised and demanding refugee whom we’d prefer to ignore and avoid.  Amidst all that leaves us naked, beaten and abandoned, Jesus, himself beaten and abandoned, comes to embrace us in healing and hope.  Christ crucified and risen is the mercy of God, setting us free from judgement and its demands on us, so that we may live as God’s reconciled people, not needing to justify ourselves, because, in Jesus, God has already justified us.

Thanks be to God for the mercy that comes via the cross to embrace us in divine compassion and bestow the peace that passes all understanding.  Thanks be to God for the impossible mercy that makes all things possible.

To the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, be all glory and praise, dominion and power, now and forever.  Amen.