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Easter 6
17/5/2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let it, then, be ours also.

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

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Easter 5
10/5/2020

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

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Easter 4
3/5/2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and be merciful that we might receive mercy.

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Easter 3
26/4/2020

1 Peter 1:13-25
Psalm 116
Luke 24:13-35

In a sentence
Though the world shakes around us, though even the faith of God’s people might be shaken, God’s call to life remains constant

Ours is surely – for the moment – a shaken world.

At the same time, it is not quite straightforward to say precisely how we are shaken. Much is obvious, and many effects of what we are presently experiencing under the shadow of COVID 19 we will carry a long way into the future. Being shaken will stay with us for a long time.

At the same time, we expect that ‘this too will pass,’ and some degree of normality will return. Some things will be very different among us in the years to come. Yet we might have reason to wonder whether these will be truly revolutionary or merely evolutionary changes.

The present is revolutionary in that we have all suddenly been exposed to some of the deprivations which are usually only suffered by a minority, but we expect this only to be momentary. As a society, however, there is not a strong sense among us that there is really all that much which will change in the long term, despite what suffering and hardship is presently being felt in many homes and hearts. A return to some semblance of normality is our expectation, however long and hard that road might be. This will pass. We – most of us – will return to our feet again, even if with a bit of a limp.

1 Peter addresses a community which is also shaken, in three ways, and quite unlike what is happening around us at the moment.

The first is that they have been shaken out of one sense of self, the world and God, into another sense. This is the shaking of ‘conversion’. The new sense is hinted at in the contrast Peter draws between what desires are now appropriate to them, in contrast to those desires they ‘formerly had in ignorance’ (1.14). We hear of this shaking also in the language of purification (1.18). There is no sense of ‘going back’, of a return to normal. ‘Normal’ has been left behind for something else. Ears have heard what cannot be unheard, eyes have seen what cannot be unseen, and nothing will be the same again.

In this, ‘normal’ is now longer habitual or regular – what we are used to – but a standard, a measure. And the measure is sufficiently different that Peter can make strong the contrasts he does. Again, in the next chapter:

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy (2.10).

The ‘new normal’ has not arisen out of normality itself but out of God’s claiming of those to whom Peter writes. The new normal is that God says, ‘You are mine’, and we hear God, and it changes everything.

Conversion shakes us in this way. ‘Normal’ is what we are moving from, not what we are moving back to.

After such a conversion, the second shaking of Peter’s community is that, though they have changed fundamentally in their perception of the world, the world itself has not changed. And so the world becomes unexpectedly a more dangerous place, as we will see when we move further into the letter. Different senses for the measure of the world create great tension when there is nowhere else to go, when we remain bound together with our different perceptions.

We are surely shaken when, finding that God has claimed us as God’s own, this doesn’t seem to make things very much better or easier but even makes things more difficult. The temptation becomes strong, then, to return to the old normal – to ‘the desires that you formerly had in ignorance’ (1.14), as Peter puts it.

And so comes the third shaking which Peter’s community must endure, which is a re-conversion. And it is a third shaking into something yet new again, and not a mere return to what first turned their world upside-down. For the experience of testing and temptation itself has now become part of what they believe.

The better thing we reach for in coming to faith reveals of itself more in our experience of the difference it has from the ‘normal’ we have left behind. This is to say that to come to faith – that first shaking in conversion – is not to have ‘arrived’. The life of faith itself shapes faith. Faith in God is always faith in the world – faith within the world – a world constantly in flux and ever ready to sweep us along in its flow.

In this shifting space it is not what we believe which is constant but God’s address to us. The word of the Lord which – as Peter puts it – ‘endures forever’ (v.24) as the world withers and fall, endures in its continually being put. It is continually spoken because our relationship to God is constantly under challenge in this shaking world.

And so, despite the strong affirmation Peter makes of all which his people have received and are from God (e.g., 1.3f, 8, 22), there remains the need for the imperative: become what you are, live as though this One really were God: ‘discipline yourselves’ (1.13), ‘obey’ (1.14), ‘be holy’ (1.15), ‘live in reverent fear’ (1.17), ‘love one another’ (1.22).

That is, be mine, God says, as I have called you. God’s word is a ‘relational’ word, is always a word which addresses and, in that address, creates again and again in its very being spoken. Only in this do we have any constancy.

What cannot be shaken is that God claims us as God’s own, and calls us to own that claim. This is faith, wherever we are: to see ourselves with God’s own eyes, looking not longingly to yesterday’s normal but hopefully for what God will do tomorrow with what is cracking around us today.

For this God, cracks in the order of things as our foundations are shaken are not to be quickly plastered over but become means of letting in the light.

That light is our faith and hope.

Let us, then, open our eyes.

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Easter 2
19/4/2020

1 Peter 1:1-13
Psalm 16
John 20:19-31

In a sentence
The resurrection gospel is hope not merely from the past or for the future, but a call to live fully the lives given us here and now.

Christ is risen – he is risen indeed!

What does this ancient affirmation mean?

We noted last week that the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus was something which was very much dependent upon the context within which it was first experienced.

The context immediate to Easter morning would have been the circle of the disciples themselves – the men and women who knew him, who were devastated by his death and for whom his unexpected return was both astounding and sheer joy. In the simple declaration, ‘Jesus is risen’, the emphasis falls at this point on the ‘risen’. He who was lost is found, he who was dead is alive again: Go and tell his disciples, he is risen.

The proclamation of the gospel then moved into a wider context – that of first century Judaism itself. Here the emphasis shifts from ‘risen’ to ‘is’: Jesus is risen. Jesus’ resurrection is now not merely surprising but is of consequence. It matters that, a resurrection has taken place because of the broader religious context within which Jesus’ resurrection is first declared. First century apocalyptic thought linked resurrection with the end of the world and the rectifying judgement of God. To speak of a person having been raised in the way in which Jesus was raised was to prompt thoughts about the end of the world.

We noted last week that the connection between a resurrection and the culmination of all things was quite specific to that context. Beyond the edges of Palestine such a connection would have been missed and talk about a resurrection would raise different questions.

But the gospel didn’t need to move in space for the resurrection to have to be stretched into new and deeper meaning. Even for those first Jewish believers who could make an ‘end of world’ connection to the resurrection of Jesus, the simple passage of time required a different way of speaking about the resurrection, a different set of associations with the message. For the end did not come as expected, so that the meaning of ‘end’ itself had to be thickened, and so also the perceived meaning of what pointed to that end had to change: the meaning of the resurrection itself.

While Peter begins the letter with joyous celebration of the ‘great mercy’ God has given us in the birthing of a ‘living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead’ (v.3), the resurrection per se fades from immediate view as ‘various trials’ (v.6) come to the fore in the letter. In fact, as the letter unfolds, we hear that these trials are quite arduous, being a matter of persecution of those who – on account of their ‘living hope’ – find themselves strangely ‘exiles’ and ‘aliens’ in a place in which they were once quite at home (1.1,17; 2.11). The ‘end’ of the resurrection gives way to the ‘middle’ of extended – and painful – history.

The ‘living hope’ Peter refers to here cannot be reduced to what resurrection is typically reduced to: the affirmation that there is ‘life after death’. If this is all that Peter means, then we might wonder why there is so much tension between these Christians and their local community. That I hold there to be life after death – at least life for me – is not the kind of thing for which a community would be actively persecuted.

As the letter unfolds, we will hear that the tension is not because of a mere ‘belief’ but because of different behaviour among the new Christians: they now won’t do some of the things they used to do. Peter links, then, the ‘living hope’ springing from the resurrection of Jesus to a particular – and culturally new – way of being. More strongly than that, he sees the very possibility of such a different mode of behaviour as springing from the resurrection:

…[God] has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…

The resurrection of Jesus, then, is no mere thing in itself – an event which we do or do not believe in. It is also no mere ‘message’ about the end times, these end times being a new given towards which we might order ourselves. The ‘living hope’ which the resurrection effects is decidedly social and political. It affects behaviour and so changes relationships. This will be experienced as being for the better or for the worse, according to which particular behaviours are being changed and who is affected by them. As it happens, the focus of Peter’s letter is on the experience – in the culture – that the Christians are changed for the worse.

Be that as it may, Peter reminds us that it is the resurrection of Jesus which is at the heart of the matter – which caused the behavioural ‘problem’. If the end-time meaning of the resurrection was moderated as the gospel moved into new cultures and languages (new times) with their own meaning systems and associations, the person of Jesus himself does not diminish. It is the link of resurrection-talk to Jesus which is crucial for the New Testament.

And so the emphasis in the simple proclamation, ‘Jesus is risen’, makes a final social and political shift to the first word: ‘Jesus is risen’.

We saw that the ‘risen’ is the sign itself – the ‘pay attention’ to this. We saw then that the ‘is’ is the ‘weight’ of what is declared – this is determinative. It has to do with the whole, the goal of all things.

And now we see that the ‘Jesus’ is the content. The end is come in the person of Jesus: Jesus is the goal, the purpose and so the appropriate mode of all things. This is to say, what happens to Jesus becomes in the resurrection the mark of what will happen to us.

What is discovered by Peter’s congregation is that this includes also what happens to Jesus before the resurrection. The resurrection is a vindication of all that Jesus was. And so we will hear Peter draw a connection between suffering and glory which will be both a challenge and a relief – both then and now.

But it is enough now simply to be reminded that the ‘living hope’ of the resurrection gospel is not a fixation on an event long past, closed in on itself. And it is not a wish about a distant future, far enough away that we cannot reasonably take it into account.

The resurrection of Jesus has to do precisely with where we find ourselves right now. It is the significance of one life for all lives:

one life as the way of being to which all God’s people are called in a world in which we will know suffering;

one life as the source and goal of all;

one life as joy for all.

If Jesus is Lord – which is to say, if Jesus is risen – life in the thick of things cannot be merely what we think we see to be happening.

For the resurrection points to the cross, and the cross points marks God’s being in the very midst of our lives – in joy and in sorrow – calling and carrying us to richer and deeper humanity with each other, in God.

These are things, Peter says, even the angel long to look into.

Let us then, in words and deeds, look with them, and learn, and love, and live.

Amen.