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17 March – Chasing the wind

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Lent 2
17/3/2019

Ecclesiastes 8:14-17
Psalm 27
Luke 13:11-35

In a sentence:
We are not called to chase the wind but to become the wind

Human history – the sphere of decision and action – is the sum of our responses to the world as we see it to be, or imagine it to be, or as it has been described to us. The world works – or is supposed to work – in particular ways, and history is what happens as we anticipate and respond to that perceived order of things.

The problem is – as Qohelet and we know well enough – that things don’t always go as expected. And so, as an example from today’s text: there are righteous people who are treated according to the conduct of the wicked, and wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous. We don’t have to look far to confirm this. As a righteous response to what we have heard from God, we might go to prayer in the mosque, or the church, and find ourselves not in heaven but in hell.

This violation of what would seem to be the appropriate order is part of what Qohelet means when he names as ‘vanity’ our attempts to manage life. Such vanity is not a matter of stupidity or foolishness but has to do with the nature of things: ‘no one knows what is happening under the sun’, we have also heard from him today.

‘No one knows’ because the true order of things – which we never quite grasp – manifests itself among us with the character of ‘wind,’ which cannot be held still to be measured or calculated. And so history – our effort to discern the order of things and to secure ourselves – becomes a matter of ‘chasing after wind’, one of Qohelet’s favourite phrases.

Through Lent we’re reading Qohelet in dialogue with the set gospel for each Sunday to see how Qohelet illuminates the ministry of Jesus, and vice-versa. At first sight, the relationship between the two readings today might seem pretty obscure, but let’s see…

Jesus receives visitors from the Pharisees who carry a warning: King Herod seeks to kill you. In response, Jesus names Herod ‘that fox’ – the cunning one, the calculator, the strategist. As a ‘fox’ Herod suddenly looms large as Qohelet’s vain schemer – the one who thinks he or she knows the order of things and plots a future according to that knowledge. Herod’s calculation has measured Jesus and plotted a future without him. Again we might think of angry men with guns in a mosque.

What Jesus doesn’t do in response to Herod is enter into a reactive scheme of his own. Jesus has no plan. We heard last week of his temptation in the desert, in which he is offered a number of strategies for making his case as Messiah to the people – feed them with bread; impress them with miraculous demonstration; let the end justify the means. Each one of these would be in its own way the kind of vanity which Qohelet decries: an attempt to catch the wind.

To all of that Jesus answered no, and the same answer is implicit in his response to Herod. Rather than a counter-strategy, Jesus sends the messengers back to Herod: ‘Go tell that fox, I am the wind. I must be on my way, and he will not catch me until he can say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”’.

The true order of the world which Qohelet names the wind is Jesus himself. Everything we chase after – everything which matters – looks like Jesus. Here is what we strive after and what we cannot catch. This is what we seek in our churches and our mosques and our synagogues, our universities and our stadiums and our shopping centres, in our sea changes and tree changes and mid-life crises. Whether we go to these places in order to ‘pray’ according to the pattern of that particular place, or go there to kill, in all this we are chasing the wind, trying to catch up with God, and so with ourselves.

What hope is there for us? Only the hope which is Jesus himself, one of us and yet the wind, tangible yet ungraspable, what we work so hard for and yet an unearned gift.

Qohelet’s answer to those who exhaust themselves chasing after wind is sometimes criticised as defeatist, a mere resignation in the face of life’s difficulties, even self-indulgent. We heard this morning:

I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.

Read most positively, Qohelet’s ‘enjoyment’ is a letting go of our ever-frustrated attempts to catch the wind. It is a coming-to-terms with life as it just incomprehensibly is. In a world which runs in the way that Qohelet describes – from pillar to post, from prayer to cold-blooded murder – in such a world Qohelet’s ‘enjoyment’ amounts to becoming something like the wind itself – an incomprehensible contradiction of what seems to so many to be to be natural purpose of life: chasing what cannot be caught because we cannot grasp what is happening under the sun.

For the gospel it is the same, although we have a different way of saying it. The gospel draws links between the body of Christ which was Jesus’ own body before Herod and on the cross, and the body of Christ on the communion table, and the body of Christ which we are made to be as we receive him in the bread and the wine. To become entangled with Jesus, then, in the way that we are called to be, is not a matter of making sense of the order of the world, not a matter of chasing after wind. It is a matter of becoming, in him, the wind.

This is not a solution to the problems of life under the sun; ‘solutions’ (so-called) are a chasing after wind, as will be almost everything which is said in response to last Friday’s horror. Jesus is not a solution to the shocks which life sometimes presents but it is an answer to them.

Jesus must haste to Jerusalem because that is – vanity of vanities – where the prophets die. His mode of being does not solve the problem. The catastrophe of the cross, of the just being treated according to the conduct of the wicked, is not averted. But is catastrophe and not tragedy. Jesus has already died to Herod and Caiaphas and Pilate in his commitment to continuation on the path that God set before him, wherever it might lead. The cross is the sign that Jesus is no chaser after wind; he is the wind, the free one, despite everything which happens to him.

Jesus’ commitment is Qohelet’s ‘enjoyment’ – not hedonistic indifference but the embracing of a way of being which will strengthen us ‘in our toil through the days of life that God gives us under the sun’.

Do we not need such strength, to toil, to resist, properly to enjoy and to grieve, according to the season?

In our baptism, we entered into the death of Jesus himself – not simply the death he died on the cross but that death to chasing the wind which was the mark of the whole of his life.

Let us, then, look to Jesus not as yet another a chasing of the wind,
but that we might further grow into our baptism by learning the wisdom he is,
and begin to become for the world what he is becoming for us.

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10 March – With Christ in the desert – aflame with the Spirit

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Lent 1
10/3/2019

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

You’ll have noticed that I am not wearing seasonal purple. A few years ago, my artistic sister presented me with this stole, as a surprise. It was, because it was not in the tradition – except that it takes its central theme from the desert, the red and brown ochres which make our land so essentially Australian.  Like the Australian desert, it is not barren. The tree represented in fabric by the leaves of the Tasmanian Blue Gum, and their shape recurs beyond the flowers in red and brown thread, leaves becoming flames. And more of them come down from the top, an abundance, the glory of our gum trees whose seasons never end.  And twelve gum nuts, which are real, and happen to have a small Greek cross in their centre. All of Lent is here.

The passage from Deuteronomy, a book quoted in both New Testament readings as well, is about bringing the first fruits of the harvest and presenting them at the Temple as a solemn thanksgiving. You may wonder why a harvest festival is an appropriate reading for the beginning of Lent! But behind the thanksgiving is the desert of the Exodus, the wilderness and its immeasurable forty communal years of deprivation, suffering – and trust. That the children of Israel were delivered from that, to a land flowing with milk and honey, is the ground of Lent and this of thanksgiving, this eucharist.

The ritual part of the reading is a kind of creed, a solemn remembrance of the Hebrews’ extraordinary journey with God. It begins, ‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor’ – so says the modern translation, but the original says ‘Father’ and means it – for it takes the corporate memory back to that wanderer Abraham. The stories from Abraham to Moses are full of strife and battles and jealousies, of loyalty and faithfulness, of sin and suffering, enough to keep us sleepless for 40 nights. And now they have come to a land of milk and honey – in a land given to them, but which they do not own.

Thus in Deuteronomy they are called to thanksgiving, and the offering of their ‘first fruits’ – the very best that can come from the harvest, which is not theirs. Perhaps the question is: What is the appropriate ground for thanksgiving? What is the context of praise? The recollection of that wandering Aramean requires that thanks be given for the good and the bad, the sufferings of Egypt and the Lord’s deliverance, the years in the desert and the safe arrival, in the land of promise. Memory is not enough: it requires us to do something, to give something of what we are, of who we have become. This is the challenge of the Lenten journey.

We offer our first fruits, symbolically, every Lord’s Day. In my other congregation (St Mary’s), when the collection plates and the bread and wine are brought together to the Lord’s Table, this prayer is offered:

‘Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation.
Through your goodness we have this bread to offer,
which earth has given and human hands have made.
It will become for us the bread of life’.

For myself, the less said about the role of human hands the better; it suggests that we somehow improve on God; – but there is a point. The work of the farmer, the guardians of river systems, the makers of machinery, the carriers and the storage places, the markets, the merchandisers, and we who carry the hessian bags home – all this human work is involved, and who would not say that there is sin and suffering and deprivation built into that equation? But, as St Paul remarks, God made it grow.

It is also risky that the symbol of first fruits we bring is money. That is how humankind decided – many millennia ago – to facilitate trade. Craig and I wondered last week how long we would continue to take up collections in church, when many (more fruitfully) choose to do it by a bank draft. Perhaps we could give those thanks at the Table, as long as what we say sounds like the old song we used to sing:

We give thee but thine own
whate’er the gift may be;
all that we have is thine alone,
a trust, O Lord, from thee.

And it’s worth adding that the thanksgiving by the Israelites is done in conscious acknowledgement of the presence of ‘the Levites and the aliens who reside among you’, our neighbours, the strangers, the modern wanderers.

Today’s Gospel story comes in three versions, Matthew, Mark and Luke’s. They are different, and we read them in a cycle. This year, ‘C’, it is Luke’s.

Luke reminds us that ‘Jesus returned from the Jordan’ from his baptism, where the Spirit was seen ‘descending on him in bodily form as a dove’ (3:22), and a voice was heard declaring him to be God’s beloved.  Luke keeps that event in mind as he writes of the journey to the desert. He does not say, as Mark does (1:12), ‘The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness’, or even as Matthew does, more mildly, ‘Jesus was led up by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil’ (4: 1).  No.  Luke says, ‘Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness’. There is a Puritan saying that ‘Christ is the oil in which the Spirit lies.’ So that it is Jesus aflame ‘in the Spirit’ who survives the wilderness, and who faces the demon. Hence the leaves which turn into flames on my stole. And in Luke there is no angel to help him. He has no such need.

Jesus ate nothing, remember; chose to eat nothing during the forty days, a true fast, and that provides the reason for the first temptation. At the end, Luke says ‘He was famished’ (NRSV). The tempter offers the thought: With the present help of One who created the cosmos out of nothing, a stone into a loaf of bread would be easy. Jesus replies, as he does in each Gospel, with a scriptural quotation, from Deuteronomy, pitting God’s word against his prosecutor.

The second temptation is the stuff of a certain kind of movie: world domination, but then, truthfully, at the cost of becoming a vassal of the Satan (the Hebrew word for ‘devil’). Recently, the Pope’s attribution of the sins of the clergy to the devil’s work was not intended (as the media suggested) to lay the blame elsewhere.

It is the last temptation, the climax of the series, which is the most demonic of all, for it is to tempt God. We often hear of what God requires of us – but what can we require of God? And this time, the devil himself begins with a Scripture quotation: ‘for it is written, “He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you”, and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone”’, both of which are from Psalm 91.It is no more than a test; there is no promise attached to it. I dare you, says smiling Satan.  ‘But this you do not do’, says Jesus, quoting Deut. 6:16, and Satan vanishes – but note the ending of the sentence: ‘he departed from him until an opportune time.’ Gethsemane perhaps.

This last sober truth is why we observe Lent. For many of us, most of our life is spent in a land of milk and honey. We have enough bread. We don’t need to compete with a neighbour for scarce resources. The Homeland Security ministry means we live in relative peace and quiet. Which should remind us that we gain most of this by bowing the knee to the gods of this world, Mammon, and those who make the world secure by threats and intimidation.

They haven’t delivered what they promised: even in our part of the world, as one commentator has put it, ‘we still bury too many of our young thanks to accidents, disease or plain foolishness’. We would like some messiah ‘who could leap not just the Kidron Valley, but the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the Chasm of Cancer, and the Abyss of Accident and Tragedy, so that we could all have our threescore years and ten and die in our beds, with grandchildren all about to sing us a sweet benediction.’ But that’s not where we live.

Last week, we noted that the wonderful story of the Transfiguration was followed by Jesus being confronted by a boy in the clutches of a demon. We do not live on the mountain, but in a real world, and it is there that we must offer our thanksgiving, in the presence of God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in the presence of desert trials. That is our context of praise.

As Andrew Gador-Whyte movingly said in his sermon last week,

‘And the Father says to each of us as he says to that boy: “You are to me as my Son Jesus is to me.  Though in the world’s darkness your glory is hidden, yet from the foundation of the world, I have known you as daughter, as son”.

If anything separates us from life as child, as heir, of this God, Jesus has been there for us at Golgotha.  Though we have forgotten our glory, Jesus has remembered who we are.’

The challenge of this Lenten journey is once more to hold on to that truth, and to do likewise.

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6 March – Better a living dog than a dead lion

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Ash Wednesday
6/3/2019

Ecclesiastes 1:1-18
Luke 6:27-38

In a sentence:
To be seen by God is its own reward

This evening, we have heard two accounts of how to be which seem to be quite unrelated. Yet, at the very least, what they do have in common is than each draws a contrast between two options and commends the one over the other.

From Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), we hear of the priority of the living over the dead: better a living dog than a dead lion. For him death holds no promise beyond the shadowy existence of Sheol and, although living is comprised by ‘vanity’ – by the ungraspability of being – it is living, and we are to make the most of it.

From Jesus we hear something which seems a whole world away: how to ‘practice piety’. Paramount here is the question of who ‘sees’: do we pray or give to be seen by those around us, or to be seen by God?

Before going too much further it will help to recall how we are reading Ecclesiastes in these Lenten reflections. We are holding two things in a creative tension – what we hear from Ecclesiastes and what we hear in the gospels. In this we allow that what one or the other might seem to mean by itself may come to mean something quite different when impacted upon the other. The tension is creative – out of it comes something that was not there before (or, at least, not seen before).

When Qohelet contrasts death and life, there is no tension, and there is none in the contrast which Jesus draws between those who sees us. But if we allow that both Qohelet and Jesus are speaking about the same kind of thing – how to be in this life ‘under the sun’ – and with the same kind of scriptural authority, then what each commends needs to be considered in relation to the other.

This means that Qohelet’s couplet of ‘life’ and ‘death’ correspond to Jesus’ couplet ‘being seen by God’ and ‘being seen by other worshippers’.

To match these things up, then, Qohelet’s ‘to be joined with the living’ corresponds to Jesus’ ‘being seen by God’: to be seen by God is to be joined with the living.

When we come then to think about the ‘creative tension’ which stands between these ways of understanding how to be, being alive and being dead are not only about whether my heart is still beating. While Qohelet doesn’t hold to anything which looks like a Christian account of a joyful afterlife, he can use biological death as a way of characterising the half-life he has lived to this point, and the half-life which most of us live most of the time. I have done it all, he says, and it is just a chasing of the wind. Not to recognise the vanity of our efforts to overcome the human condition is to be dead, to have ash in our hair rather than oil, sackcloth rather than white robes. His question is, Why die before you are dead?

And it is the same with Jesus. To be seen only by those around us, those who intentionally or unintentionally confirm our own chasing after the wind, is its own reward. It is as much as we will receive and is not yet to be seen by God. This is its own kind of living death.

To consider our context tonight, we will hear in a little while, ‘You are dust, and to dust you will return’. What does that mean?

We are not to lament that we are dust, only to remember it. If Lent is a season of repentance, or (literally) ‘re-thinking’, then it is a season not of lamenting that we are dust – which we do often enough – but a season of learning again what happens when God looks upon dust.

Jesus contrasts not what we see and know but who sees and knows us. Merely to be seen through the eyes of those around us is its own reward – ashes upon ashes, dust upon dust. (We are ash to ash and dust to dust, but we are not to build with ash or dust; it is just this which Qohelet seeks to name as pointless.)

And to be seen by the eyes of God is its own reward. For the gaze of God raises the dead, enlivens even the dust.

Lent is a season of Easter, a life-giving season. As we observe Jesus on the path to the cross, we are seeing God looking at one of us and, in that, knowing us and persevering with us. The path to the cross is dust made lively under the gaze of God.

To speak of resurrection, which we will come to do, is to say that God still sees Jesus, even on the cross, and this gaze continues to be life-giving. Because the heart of our faith is that Jesus is joined to us, so too then will we be raised.

Qohelet himself will finally affirm that we are dust (12.7). But affirms also what God gives to us: approval and time.

Remember that you are dust, and rejoice that that is enough for God to work with.

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3 March – The divinity of the humanity of God

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Transfiguration
3/3/2019

Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-43a

Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte

In a sentence
“The Transfiguration reveals that in the darkness of the Cross, God has claimed the world as his kingdom and disclosed our nature in Jesus as his daughters and sons.”

Today all mortal nature shines with the divine Transfiguration

            And cries with exultation:

“Christ the Saviour is transfigured to save us all!”

This is one of the hymns of the Orthodox Church.

The Transfiguration, which we are celebrating today, is the event where the disciples see Jesus revealed as God.

It is the event that reveals Jesus’ coming suffering and death as his coming to reign on earth, and as the fulfillment of the hope contained in the Law and the Prophets.

And it is the event that reveals the glory of God in every human face.

In identifying with the life of his creation, God has unveiled the divine light shining in everything that he has made.

In their Transfigured Lord, the nations not only find their salvation, but are themselves unveiled as a means of God’s saving grace, as sharers in God’s own life.

The Transfiguration sits between the feeding of the five thousand and the healing of an epileptic boy. Luke connects the Transfiguration with abundant life in Christ and the restoration of bodies and relationships to the fullness of life.

But just before our narrative, Peter names Jesus as the Messiah. And Jesus claims this title in a disturbing and disorienting way.

The anointed one, the heir, the Son, is the one who will be rejected, suffer and die, and on the third day, rise. And being his disciples means taking up his cross.

This is the disturbing context for the Transfiguration.

Luke wants to show that the revelation of Jesus as God is bound together with his suffering. In his divinity, Jesus does not stand apart from the alienation of the world.

The Transfiguration shows that the way God has come to reign among us is by taking up the cross. In the place where Jesus shares completely in our weakness, alienation and death, on the cross – that is where he will be most fully revealed.

Jesus goes up the mountain with the three disciples. Suddenly Jesus is visible shining with the light of God. Moses and Elijah are there speaking to him, and speaking about his Exodus. Moses represents the Law, Elijah represents the Prophets.

Here God reveals that everything that Moses spoke in the law was addressed to Jesus Christ.

Everything God spoke through the prophets was the Word coming to dwell in the life of God’s people.

From the beginning, God’s word in Law and Prophecy was revealing Jesus’ reconciling suffering and death.

The Word who was in the beginning with God is the thread running, sometimes hidden, through the life of God’s chosen people.

In the Transfiguration, that thread is now revealed as a seamless robe.

Seeing Jesus in glory with Moses and Elijah, all Peter can stammer is ‘let me pitch three tents for you’.

But perhaps he recognises that at the Transfiguration, the whole story of the chosen people – their wanderings and living in tents, their worship and their sufferings – is gathered up in this person.

But here the disciples are terrified by the voice of the Father, and the Holy Spirit descending like a cloud.

Luke picks up the Exodus story.  In the cloud, Moses hears God speak the beginning of the Law – ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt’

At the transfiguration, the disciples hear God speak the beginning of the Law, the word before all things. ‘This is my Son, My Chosen; listen to him!’

On this person, on this Word, hang all the law and the prophets.

Those who look and hear and obey his voice are daughters and sons of the covenant.

Here God has made possible a life of unbroken fellowship with him, simply and only through entering into life with this person.

This Son is the one from whom every daughterhood and sonship in heaven and on earth takes its name.

Now when Jesus and the disciples descend the mountain, they are immediately confronted by a man crying out to Jesus: ‘This is my son, my only child – Look at him!’

The child is in the grip of a spirit that threatens to destroy him.

When it seizes him, his voice and movements lose their meaning. He can no longer do what sons do.

Jesus simply speaks. When he rebukes the spirit, he calls the boy back to his life as a son.

Jesus gives him back to his father. He restores him to life and communion.

It is as though Jesus says to the unclean spirit, ‘This is my son, my chosen – listen to him.’

And the Father says to each of us as he says to this boy: ‘You are to me as my Son Jesus is to me. Though in the world’s darkness your glory is hidden, yet from the foundation of the world, I have known you as daughter, as son.’

If anything separates us from life as child, as heir, of this God, Jesus has been there before us at Golgotha. Though we have forgotten our glory, Jesus has remembered who we are.

In being born among us, Jesus became as we are.

At the Transfiguration, for a moment Jesus was shown to us as he most fully is.

His life was revealed to us there, as an unbroken and unchanging exchange of love with the Father, as perfectly attuned to the love and the will of the Father.

And here Luke foreshadows that soon our nature as daughters and sons of God will be disclosed.

Because the divine Son will go before us to the place of the Skull.

There everything that hides our nature as God’s children will be pierced through by the light of God.

The Transfiguration reveals Jesus’ identity as the eternal Son of the Father, who revealed his glory in sharing absolutely in the suffering and alienation of the world.

Like the crowd, we see one who gathers up all the promises of the Law of Moses.

Yet he will go to the place where he will share with us utterly in our being outcasts under the law.

When we saw the light of the Transfiguration, the light of God exposed the darkness of our life. We look to the transfigured Jesus, and find our lack of love judged by the love of God.

And at the same time, we find ourselves clothed in baptismal radiance.

Here the darkened rooms of our hearts have been flooded with light, and we have become a dwelling place, not only for Moses and Elijah, but for God himself, and five thousand or so hungry Galileans.

At our baptism, we too were robed in dazzling white. We were claimed with the same voice that claimed Jesus on Mount Tabor.

In baptism, and at this table, we have been incorporated into life together as God’s children.

Here, at his table we are transfigured.

Here he makes us to shine with our true nature, which is to be a source of God’s grace to our neighbour and our enemy.

Jesus is with us at his table, as guest and host, as the very stuff of life, as the forgiving neighbour who makes possible life together again.

In the Transfiguration God has adopted us simply as those he created in Christ.

We belong to him through his love alone, in spite of all our strivings to free ourselves from guilt, from death, from association with evil.

God has adopted us so that we might live as sources of reconciliation and healing, as means of others’ coming in touch with the reconciling love of Jesus Christ.

However scarred and distorted our lives are, God makes each of us a means of others being restored to life and to relationship with one another.

God has called us his children so that we might know the joy of sharing in the suffering love of Christ, the joy of joining him on the road from Mount Tabor to the Cross.

In the Transfiguration, we saw Jesus revealed as God.

We saw Jesus coming’ suffering and death as the fulfilment of God’s promises and the coming of God to reign among us.

We saw Jesus claimed as God’s Son.

And we found ourselves shining with the light of Christ, adopted as God’s children, becoming sharers in God’s life, and sharers in the sufferings of Christ.

May we become in Jesus a source of others’ healing from everything that hides their nature as God’s children.

May our lives become to all nations an invitation into the light of Christ.

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24 February – Love, for no reason

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Epiphany 7
24/2/2019

Ecclesiastes 1:1-18
Psalm 37
Luke 6:27-38

In a sentence:
Love is not a technique, not a means to an end; ‘just do it’

We have all at some time reached out to touch the lowest part of a hanging mobile, then watched as it bobs and turns above us, each of the arms and hanging baubles twisting to re-adjust under the extra momentum we have just introduced to the system. A mobile is a marvellous demonstration of a network of balanced forces. To change a weight or the length of some of the supporting arms is to change the way the mobile will settle. To simply remove one of the weights would to be see much of it collapse.

A hanging mobile provides us with a marvellous metaphor for the Christian Scriptures. The predominant metaphor we have for the Bible is, of course, ‘book’. It clearly is a book, but with the notion of a book comes a sense of how the elements hold together – the concept of a narrative, a movement from a beginning to an end. This is a helpful way of understanding how the Scriptures work but it is not the only way.

Let us consider, instead, that the Scriptures are not so much a linear narrative but a mobile on which hangs the 66 books which make up our Bible. In this understanding, it doesn’t matter where each is hung: they are no longer ‘in order’. Rather, they are hung in such a way that they balance each other out. Now we no longer have a more-or-less continuous unfolding of a history but a set of interacting accounts of life under God. If we change one of them – not by adding or subtracting content but by giving it more weight as we improve our understanding of its testimony – then that extra weight requires that everything else in the system shifts accordingly, in order to keep the balance.

On this understanding, every Scriptural book impacts upon every other scriptural book: Genesis upon Revelation, Song of Songs upon Romans, Ecclesiastes upon Luke’s Gospel.

And this brings us to our project for the next couple of months. The book of Ecclesiastes, for most of us, sits rather strangely in the Bible. To many it is pessimistic, nihilistic, acquiescent, world-weary – none of which seems appropriate given the apparent orientation of the whole of sweep of the Scriptures towards the hope of joy in Christ. This is probably why, in the version of the lectionary we use, only one passage of Ecclesiastes appears: on New Year’s Day we might hear the poem of chapter 3, ‘for everything there is a season…’

But there it is – Ecclesiastes as a whole – the Bible. On the metaphor of the book, we might think we can exclude it by saying that it is overtaken by the flow of the story, that Jesus is an answer to Ecclesiastes, an overcoming of his conclusions. But we can only say this on the basis of that particular metaphor. The metaphor of the Bible as a hanging mobile – a system of mutually affecting testimonies – calls for a different reading. If we exclude Ecclesiastes, why do we imagine that we understand the gospel of the crucified and risen Jesus, on which Ecclesiastes acts? It might be not so much that Jesus overtakes Ecclesiastes as that Jesus echoes him. If this were the case, would it not expand enormously our understanding of the cross? Could there be a relationship between the central theme of Ecclesiastes – ‘vanity’ – and the central theme of the gospels – the cross? Could we dare to imagine ‘the vanity of the cross’? That it seems so impious to do suggests that it might make a good title for a Good Friday sermon!

As with all things which really matter, this will be a matter of definitions. Let us, then, look to what Ecclesiastes means when he speaks of vanity, and consider what this might have to say about we have heard from Jesus in today’s set reading.

‘Vanity’ is the standard translation in Ecclesiastes of the Hebrew word ‘hebel’. And it is an unfortunate translation, because the modern sense of the English word is too narrow and specific to capture Ecclesiastes’ point. To speak of vanity is to speak of self-absorption, narcissism. Socially this is an empty, pointless pursuit, and such emptiness is part of what Ecclesiastes is getting at but there is rather more. In fact, he uses the word in several different ways. If we try to find a common thread which strings his various uses together it is something like the notion, ‘ungraspable’. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is ‘mist’ or ‘vapour’. Ecclesiastes extends this metaphorically to characterise our attempts to make sense of how the world works. For he finds ‘life under the sun’ to be ungraspable, incomprehensible. The unjust are rewarded when the just are not. We toil to gather the things we need, then die and someone who has not worked for them squanders them. A buffoon might become king. A good man can be crucified. This is not, of course, always the case. Yet Ecclesiastes sees that we cannot guarantee tomorrow. We cannot reliably extrapolate, we cannot confidently manipulate. There is no clear rhyme or reason to the world. And so there is no real movement, no progress: there is nothing new under the sun.

We will hear more of this as we consider Ecclesiastes’ reflections over the next couple of months but for now we will take a first test on his declaration of vanity – not by discussing abstractly whether or not he is a depressed pessimist but by turning to the gospel to see what resonance we might find between Ecclesiastes and what Jesus says and represents there.

Jesus puts to his disciples – and presumably also to us – ‘love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, turn the other cheek, don’t worry about who has your stuff’ (Luke 6.27-38). These are confronting commands. And because they are so confronting, there wells up in us the question, Why.

But there is no why. Jesus makes no promises in relation to this other than that you can expect no better than what you give.

We ask Why? because we know we might receive less than we give. The Why hears Jesus’ commandment as a means to an end. But Jesus promises no end. Chances are we’ll end up like he did – the cross is never far from his teaching. Asking ‘Why’ turns ethics into a technique, a method by which we obtain an outcome.

Yet this is precisely what Ecclesiastes says we cannot have. When we act we cannot guarantee the consequences. Calculation and prediction work in simple systems like natural science (at least up to a point) but they don’t work in history, in real human existence.

We will hear Ecclesiastes say again and again that there are things to be done, even if we can’t know that we’ll do them well or that we doing the right thing. We should just do them, nevertheless. Jesus doesn’t say this explicitly but it is there in the starkness of the command. Why one would do as Jesus commands is ungraspable, is beyond the capacities of any reason.

To put it differently, love is not a method. It guarantees no outcome, and it might be crucified. Doing to others as we would have them do to us is no guarantee that they will do to us in the same way.

This, I expect, is more than most of us want to hear. It is ungraspable, incomprehensible. We tend to love ‘in order that’ – in order that the loved one might change. But Jesus adds the disorienting ‘and expect nothing in return’; we could imagine that from the pen of Ecclesiastes (cf. Eccles 11.1-6).

This is not pessimism. It is a different handle on life – that life does not have reliable handles. Ethics – how we act – is not about technique, is not means to an end. It is about character, about the way in which we conduct ourselves in the world.

Love, Jesus, says, because there is really nothing else which matters.

Love, expecting nothing in return.

Love, for no reason.

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17 February – Rooted, Resilient, Reconciled

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Epiphany 6
17/2/2019

Jeremiah 17:5-10
Psalm 1
Luke 6:17-26

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

Our readings today are a little bit full on. Each of them puts into stark terms what is at stake in hearing and responding to the call of God.

Happiness and blessing are set in contrast to wickedness and woe.

As the Psalmist writes:

“Happy are those | who do not follow the advice of the wicked, … but delight in the law of the Lord, | on which they meditate day and night.” (Ps 1.1-2)

“The wicked … are like chaff that the wind drives away. | [they] will not stand in the judgement, | nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.” (Ps 1.1a, 4b)

Wicked sinners are advised that this would be the time to step outside.

This theme from Psalm 1 of the blessed and the cursed, those who trust in mortals and those who delight in the Lord, is echoed in Jeremiah 17.

In both cases we hear the faint echoes of the ancient Jewish Wisdom tradition – which we see most clearly elsewhere in texts like ​Proverbs and ​Ecclesiastes​. This tradition within our Scripture emphasises the right or wise way of living, underneath the sovereign gaze of the Lord above.

Texts within this tradition emphasise the importance of living in a way that respects the eternal wisdom of the Lord. And these texts call on human beings to acknowledge their weakness and limited knowledge in the face of our common mortality.

Jeremiah reflects on these themes in reference to the weakness of mere flesh, and the devious and perverse nature of the human heart. We are led, in response, to trust in the Lord above who tests the mind and searches the heart.

All of this seems rather familiar to anyone who has read the advice of Scripture to live an upright life. To attend to an ethical standard in one’s conduct. To be moral, and wise, and good.

There is enough wisdom in simply saying that we should all seek to do what is right and moral, under the gaze of the sovereign Lord.

Perhaps this should be a short sermon.

However, … what struck me in Psalm 1, and in Jeremiah 17, was not the reminder of the sovereign Lord above. But rather this common image – which recurs in other parts of Scripture: of a tree planted by a stream of water.

Those who trust in the Lord are rooted by a stream. A stream that feeds, and nourishes. A stream that nurtures resilience. A stream that helps us to bear the fruits of goodness, even when the rains do not come, and the sun bears down upon us.

What struck me in the call to a good and wise life in our readings was not the sovereign Lord above, but the Lord below: in whom we are rooted, and nourished, and fed. From whom flows all goodness, and through whom we are able to bear good fruit.

There is a not so idle point here in how we should read these texts from the Hebrew Bible that are also part of our Christian Scriptures. An older attitude saw in the First Testament an emphasis on law and the call to right living, and therefore an emphasis on our own efforts and moral character. What we see in this image of being rooted next to a nourishing stream is, in fact, the deep well of love that runs through the Hebrew Bible. The love of God for people who seek to remain rooted, and trusting in the Lord.

These readings do not call on us to rely on our own strength. Quite the opposite. They call us to be rooted next to the stream of God’s love, from whom all goodness flows: that we might be resilient, and that we might bear good fruit.

The call of God is not first and foremost to aspire to the lofty heights of perfection. But to settle into the rooted nourishment of the love of God.

Settled here the power of God flows out for healing and comfort.

…

This is where we pick up our reading from Luke’s Gospel.

Gathered on a level place, people come to gather around Jesus. We are told that the people tried to touch him: the power of God flowed out of Jesus for healing and comfort.

And so the people gathered to sit alongside the one who elsewhere offers a wellspring of living water.

And this is what came out from the mouth of the river:

“Blessed are you who are poor, | for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, | for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, | for you will laugh.”

(Lk 6.20-21)

What struck me in our Psalm, and in our reading from Jeremiah 17, strikes me again here. Not the God who is above, but the God who is below. The God who offers blessing to the poor, to the hungry, and to those who weep.

What Jesus offers here, as the power of God flowed out from him, is healing and comfort to the poor, and to the lowly.

Jesus makes clear where the stream of God’s love flows. Jesus makes clear how the river marks the borders of God’s new kingdom.

The river of God’s love, flowing out with healing and comfort, twists and bends towards the poor: they are within God’s kingdom.

The river of God’s love, nourishes and nurtures the land, that those who are hungry should be fed by the land.

The river of God’s love washes away the tears, and becomes a babbling brook in which to splash and play with joy.

Rooted by this river, following where the stream flows, we “shall not fear when heat comes, | and [our] leaves shall stay green; … and [we will] not cease to bear fruit.” (Jer 17.8)

Jesus offers us here an echo of what we find in our Psalm, and in the words of Jeremiah. Not simply a path which we must travel alone to moral perfection. But a grounded, rooted resilience.

Jesus’ teaching is not first a statement about what we should do, but is first a statement about the contours of God and God’s love.

The challenge this teaching poses to us is whether we will allow ourselves to be caught up in the contours of this love of God, flowing through the world. The challenge is whether we will live out our participation in Christ, through our baptism in water: a grounded, rooted resilience. In Christ we have the hope of new leaves, and new branches, new fruit, and new life.

Jesus tells us clearly in today’s reading what this participation, this rootedness, in the life of God’s love will look like. And he places in stark terms what failing to participate in this love will mean.

Will we heed the calling of God, to settle by the river? To gather together and nourish and feed one another, and so be fed by God? Will we follow as the streams of God’s love ebb and flow, carving a shape into the landscape: bending towards the poor, and the hungry, and those weeping? Will we be rooted next to the river of the resilient love of God?

I want to finish with a short quotation from the chorus of a beautiful song by two artists, Laura Marling and Johnny Flynn:

“The water sustains me without even trying
The water can’t drown me, I’m done
With my dying”

This is the new life of baptism, the new life offered in Christ. Amen

————-

We offer thanks and praise, O God, because you have created and sustained us and all things.

And yet, merciful God …

Forgive us when we have failed to be rooted in you Seeking to fix the world in our own mortal strength
Relying on ourselves and not you, Lord

Forgive us when we have failed to follow your ways
Following the advice of the wicked
And not reflecting on your wisdom

Forgive us when we have failed to listen to your call Like shrubs in the desert that refuse the rain
And those who live in wilderness that refuse help

Above all,

Forgive us when we have failed to be sustained by you
Failing to live out our baptism
Failing to be fed at your table

For failing to be your beloved people
For failing to love the poor, and the hungry, and those who weep

Forgive us, O God

Amen.

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10 February – ‘Forgiven’ is ‘commissioned’

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Epiphany 5
10/2/2019

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 138
Luke 5:1-11

In a sentence:
To be startled by the call to follow but not by the declaration of forgiveness – this is not yet to be forgiven.

The story of the call of the disciples must be one of the more terrifying passages of the New Testament: ‘…When [the fishermen] had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed Jesus’ (Luke 5.11).

If this is intended to demonstrate what it is to be a Christian, it is a very hard word for most people to hear, ourselves included. Yet it is Jesus who makes the call; and we have heard it – some of us – scores or even hundreds of times. To be free to follow – although we romanticise it hopelessly – would this not be marvellous? For many of us, our memories of Sunday School or similar are of heroes and heroines of the faith who seemed to do the kind of thing these disciples did. And yet many of us are not free, at least in the way that the disciples seem to be in the story.

Still we do not despair, for we can rationalise their response to Jesus. Perhaps they heard him many times before and it is just that it is this time, after a long period of reflection, that they happened to put everything down and follow him. Or perhaps it was their understanding of the nature of the world which made the difference. You would be much more likely to drop everything and follow the prophet of the impending doom if you believed that the world was soon coming to an end. Or perhaps the fact that these men didn’t have very much in the first place meant that it was easier for them to cast it all aside. With arguments like this we finally reach a comforting conclusion: they are freer than we because their situation and expectations were quite different from ours: there is no fair comparison to be made between them and us.

Yet this way of thinking denies the text of the Scripture as it stands. If we were supposed to understand that the disciples’ thinking along these lines we might expect that the Scripture would say this but it doesn’t. Instead of trying to explain away the actions of the disciples here we need to shift our focus from a timid hearing of the text to the theological centre of what happens when God meets the world in Christ.

It is our tendency to want to place conditions on our response to God’s call. Yet, while we approach God with our terms and conditions, the church declares that God approaches us unconditionally. There is no calculation on God’s part of achievement, no reckoning of debt or interest or repayment. This is the meaning of the word ‘grace’ which is so loved by Christians.

Now, the question is: despite all of our attempts to rationalise our response to it, can the call to follow – when it comes – also be a word of unconditional grace? When we try to rationalise our response to God’s call, we demonstrate that we hear it only as law – as mere demand, and so as bad news – for rationalisations are simply the application of laws. I suspect that this is typically how we approach the question of God, or God’s questions to us. We hear a command – perhaps to follow Jesus, or even ‘simply’ to believe – as bad news, and we seek to see whether, on balance, we can find any good news in it for ourselves; ‘balance’ is what it all comes to be about.

But, can the call of God be a word of grace and not merely a demanding command? Church talk about God’s ‘unconditional grace’ is usually talk about our access to God: by grace we are free to approach God. But unconditional grace is not about our access to God – our freedom to find salvation; it is about God’s freedom to find us. There are no conditions which might separate the love of God in Jesus Christ from us, and so no conditions which God has to meet before he may heal us; God’s ability to heal is simply a matter of his choosing to do so.

Now, if God is free to approach us to heal, he is also free to approach us to call; there are no conditions God needs to meet to call us to follow. So we must say not only the part which appeals – that ‘by grace we are saved’. We must also say what unsettles: by grace we are called – the same grace as that by which we are saved.

And it is the same grace. To defend ourselves against God’s freedom to make a claim on us is to deny that we are saved by grace. To say No to the call to obedience – whether it is obedience in dropping everything in response to a ‘special’ call or merely obedience in following God’s ‘standing orders’ – is to deny the salvation by grace we claim so strongly. To be startled by the call to follow but not by the declaration of forgiveness – this is not yet to be forgiven. To be uninspired by the direct call of God is to have become bored with his forgiveness.

To be called to follow, then – to be commissioned to ‘fish for people’ – this is the shape of healing and forgiveness from God. There is no forgiveness which then seeks an action in response – which looks for something to do – and actually might not get around to finding an action; the one who knows herself forgiven is the one who is free to respond to God’s call. ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ cries the frightened Simon Peter after the great and unexpected haul of fish. But the decision of Simon to follow Jesus is the response of a confessed sinner who nevertheless has also heard that he is deemed fit for the service of God’s unfolding kingdom. That is, Simon has received God’s welcoming grace in the call to mission: he is commissioned to God’s mission in the word of forgiveness.

This is what we miss in our allergic reaction to the disciples’ following Jesus so seemingly carelessly. ‘From now on you will fish for people’ is not simply a task given to these disciples but the word of acceptance by God – the demonstration of forgiveness. What seems to us to be a careless and risky throwing away of their lives in launching after Jesus is in fact their taking up of the free offer of a share in God’s healing work in the world, a healing which begins with their acceptance of the invitation to participate.

In contrast to the idea that this commissioning is itself the word of forgiveness, our own reality is too often that we freely embrace what we consider the gracious gift of God – his forgiveness – and quickly name as an affliction what we consider the unreasonable conditions of discipleship: that we should follow.

But we explain away the first disciples’ response to Jesus at our own peril, for to save ourselves from participation in God’s mission is to insulate ourselves from God’s salvation. It is the call to be available to God which is the word of forgiveness.

Surprisingly, perhaps, what is needed to be able to say yes to God’s call is a greater sense of our unworthiness: ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinner’. For the call to service in God’s kingdom would then entail a greater sense of forgiveness, and so of gratitude, and so of freedom to say yes to the one who has given without bounds.

We have heard the response of those few disciples to the call of Jesus, and now it is over to us.

May God’s people not baulk at the invitation to follow but embody the grace of God toward them in service towards others, and this not in fear or resentment but with joy. Amen.

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3 February – God comes to us, to save another

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Epiphany 4
3/2/2019

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71
Luke 4:21-30

In a sentence:
My neighbour is the shape of my salvation

Jesus stands before the good people of Nazareth and tells them: I have not come for you.

Things had started well: ‘all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth’ (v.22). But they have missed the point – not that we could blame them – and Jesus goes on the attack. First, we hear two proverbs as direct challenges thrown to the congregation: ‘Doctor, cure yourself’ and ‘no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s own town’. The first names the people’s not unreasonable expectation that Jesus would perform among them acts of power he had been said to have worked elsewhere. The second then accuses them of being unable to receive him.

As confronting as this might have been, the clincher is the two biblical stories Jesus retells. In both cases great prophets from Israel’s past – at times of great need in Israel – bring God’s healing power not to Israel but to Gentiles. And the crowd goes ballistic – or intends to – with Jesus!

But why does Jesus go on the attack in the first place? There is not here the holy righteousness of, say, his attack on the money-changers in the temple, or his anger against the attitudes of the Pharisees and scribes. This is not an attack on a moral failure – something the people had or hadn’t done.

Jesus’ assault is not on what the people had done but rather on what the people were – as the good people of Nazareth. Jesus accuses the people as a class. They have, in fact, not done anything yet – right or wrong – other than expect that what Jesus had done elsewhere he might also do at home. And so their initial response to him is not unbelief but actually what we might even call faith.[1] The expectation of the congregation seems to be that they will receive from God through Jesus and yet, in a manner seemingly uncalled for, Jesus tells them that not they but others will be blessed.[2]

What are we to make of this? Of the four evangelists, Luke is the most overtly ‘political’ to modern ears. It is Luke who most uncomfortably confronts the comfortable with what has been called God’s ‘preferential option for the poor’. And the class distinctions which Luke draws are unqualified. It is not a matter of some of the religious leaders having lost the plot, or some of the poor and outcast having received God’s favour. Rather, we hear from Luke (chap 6): blessed are the poor; blessed are the hungry; blessed are the weeping; and woe to the rich, those with full stomachs, and so on. There is no careful distinction between those who are poor because of the injustices of an economic system and those who are poor because of their own stupidity, and no distinction between those who have full stomachs because they have taken advantage of others and those who have full stomachs because of long and hard work.

The obvious danger in this is that individuals are treated according to how we’ve sorted them, according to their ‘class’. But a Muslim is not, thereby, a terrorist; a poor person is not, thereby, righteous; a politician is not, thereby, unreliable; and to be sitting in the congregation at Nazareth when Jesus speaks is not, thereby, to be ruled out of God’s favour.

And yet this is what Jesus says: as a group, these will be overlooked, for the blessing of others. We could only avoid this conclusion by attributing what he says to the unbelief of the people, but the text itself – in Luke’s account – doesn’t do this (even if Matthew and Mark do). It is not that they have not believed, for they have been impressed by him. It is rather that they are the good, religious people of Israel.

Yet, while there exists here the very serious dangers of racism and classism, addressing the good folk of Nazareth in this way (as a whole) and contrasting them with the Gentiles as a whole enables a central aspect of the gospel to be put in the starkest of terms.

It is easy and tempting – now, as then – to focus on the justification and healing of the individual, or on the class of individuals, separate from other individuals and classes. This leads to a focus on personal or communal righteousness, individualised. Here I would be saved independently of you if, say, I am the righteous Jew and you the unclean Gentile. Or, within the class I, as the righteous Jew am saved independently of you, the unrighteous Jew. This leads to that kind of judgementalism which is one person or group standing divided from and over against another.

And this is what makes the offence taken by the congregation is understandable: Are we not the keepers of the tradition? Are we not the observers of the rules? Are we not the donors to the cause? The language of ‘fairness’ and the earning of blessing creeps in.

But earned blessings are always a saving out of the world: isolation and insulation from that which is not saved. Salvation for what we have earned is always finally salvation in solitude – salvation into aloneness, for I may be the only one who has earned it.

The blessing of God is never for our isolation, even if we think that is what we want or need. The blessing of God – a blessing which is not earned – is always reconciling, and so always communal. It levels and equalises, without making the same. The love of God comes to the chosen people, that those who are not chosen may know the love of God.

This is a difficult lesson. Not the synagogue nor the church are safe-place refuges, and neither is anywhere ‘outside’ these communities. It is perhaps too difficult a lesson even for Luke himself, who doesn’t include in his gospel the story which best complements Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth – that rather uncomfortable account of the Syrophoenician woman’s meeting with Jesus. That story, found in Mark (7.24-30) and Matthew (15.21-28), has Jesus saying to a Gentile what he says here to the synagogue – I have not come for you: ‘it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs’. The difference – and perhaps the irony in Luke’s omission – is that she accepts this order of things (‘but bread has crumbs!’), and so receives the blessing Jesus was going to deny her. This is just what the Nazarenes do not do.

Jesus comes to us today to declare: ‘I have come to you in order to go to another. I have come not that you might be blessed, elevated and separated from the rest of the world. I have come to move beyond, to extend to, to open up. I have come to reconcile the Jew and the Gentile, the rich and the poor, the slave and the free. Your salvation begins today, in your midst, in this messily class‑ified world as it is; there is no plucking-out-of the world or a leaving-behind-of those you might think I do not love. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news, to announce liberty and a new vision, and to proclaim the Lord’s favour.’

The Lord’s favour is without bounds. If it were not so, we who imagine that God’s favour is ours would be without hope or salvation, because our imagination is just not broad enough. God comes to us to declare that he is leaving to bless our neighbour, and he declares to our neighbour just the same thing. It is only if this is so that we may speak with any sense of grace which is not reward and reconciliation in spite of what we have done: that we might be blessed through someone else being blessed. This is what it means truly to give and to receive, whether in the case of the grace of God, or a helping hand.

Jesus says, Your neighbour is the shape of your salvation. Let us, then, live as if that were the case: as if giving were receiving.

For the good news of the gospel – that God can turn even what divides us from each other into the very means of our salvation – thanks be to God.

[1] Note the difference here from the way in which Mark (6.1-6) and Matthew (13.54-58) tell the story, attributing the few works Jesus does in Nazareth to a lack of faith.

[2] Note also, the issue is not really one of inclusion or exclusion – except for the possibility that the good people of Nazareth might themselves be excluded (some commentators seeing here an objection to the inclusion of the Gentiles).

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27 January – Captive to freedom

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Epiphany 3
27/1/2019

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Psalm 19
Luke 4:14-21

In a previous life, I spent a couple of months in Freiburg in Germany, where I was learning some German as part of my postgraduate studies. There’s a large university there, and on the walls of one of its largest buildings are the words (in German!), ‘The truth will set you free,’ the motto of the university.[1] These words are a quote from Jesus (John 8.32), but I suspect that they were borrowed, or at least are typically read, through the filter of the modern mind as it imagines itself maturing, growing into truth – and out of untruths – and so becoming more liberated.

To be free has been a central concern of western society since the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century. And this aspiration would seem to many today to have been largely realised: we are, largely, free in comparison to our forebears. Most of us are free to pursue education in a field that interests us, free to marry someone who appeals to us (or to divorce them), free to have children or not, free to wear what we like, watch what we like, and so on.

The theme of freedom is at the heart of our reading from Luke this morning – Jesus comes to bring release to the captive, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed. Yet Jesus assumes that there is captivity to be overcome and so it is far from clear what he has to do with those who imagine themselves already to be well on the way to freedom.

But then, perhaps we are less free than we imagine. One of my favourite illustrations of this comes from the movie ‘The Devil wears Prada’ of a decade or so ago. The story takes place at the cut-throat edge of the fashion industry. In one particularly memorable scene the head of a fashion house takes on her new assistant’s impression that she, the assistant, had freely chosen to wear what she was wearing to work that day:

‘I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blindly unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic ‘casual corner’ where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…’ [2]

Perhaps that seems trivial but it could be extended much further. Have we been ‘selected’ to drive the car we drive, live in the locality we do, have the apps on our phones we have, vote the way we do, go or not go to church as we do?

For our free decisions are less free than we might imagine. Someone has chosen for us the language we will speak, the school we will go to, the people we will associate with, the aspirations we will have – all of this before we had the slightest inkling that we might want to have a say about such things. We are not free because of the parents we have and how they themselves have been formed, regardless of how much they might do to allow us a free and open upbringing. We are not free because even our modern talk about freedom has been delivered to us through a tainted political and social process which has privileged – or made ‘free‑er’ – some, while disadvantaging others.

And this brings us to the effect of being deluded about our freedoms: blindness to the violence which lurks in the world we think supports our freedom. Violence springs from the desire that others conform to my understanding of what it means for me to be free. If my freedom means the ‘right to bear arms’, then my community is free to die from the use of those arms at extraordinary rates. If my freedom is to consume at a rate which pretty much everyone agrees is totally unsustainable, then the fact that such consumption may cause enormous damage to the environment or require almost slave labour conditions in some far-away corner of the world is the price someone is just going to have to pay. This is the violence of men who presume that freedom is taking from women what they consider their right to demand, the violence of states which build walls to keep others out, the violence – even if it seems rather a strong word here – of those whose little screens are more important than the people standing next to them.

Freedom misconceived brings violence – gross or subtle – by requiring that my sense for freedom be the right one, and be defended.

Yet if delusion and violence spring from mistakes about what freedom is, then we might think backwards to an important question: if we live in a world where there is no shortage of delusion and violence – and surely we do – could this not have something to do with our being fundamentally mistaken about what it means to be free, or what freedom looks like?

In John’s gospel there’s a little exchange about freedom and truth between Jesus and some Jews who had come to believe in him. It’s here that we hear those words on the university building in Freiburg. Jesus says to some disciples: ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ But then they come back at him with, ‘We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?’

This is the response which many would want to make today, if perhaps not with the reference to Abraham: are we not already free? Jesus’ disciples find it offensive that they might need to be freed from something, as perhaps do many of us. Yet the unfolding of Jesus’ story is such that the clash of the freedom he announces and the freedoms which the social establishment values lead to violence – Jesus’ death on the cross.

Jesus’ work is God’s response to the captivities in which we find ourselves, even in our very aspirations to be free on our own terms. Defining our own freedoms is dangerous because we finally end up like little gods – or big gods if we’re powerful enough – with the violence to ourselves and others which such delusions bring. It’s we who make others captive, or oppress others, or keep others poor. And others do the same to us. In coming among us as one who attacks oppressive economic and social and political systems, and the blindness and lameness and imprisonment they bring, Jesus comes to set us free from ourselves.

The life of Christian discipleship is a life of growing into this freedom. It will take the shape of a life reflecting that of Jesus himself which, paradoxically, often looks like it gives up freedom. Jesus willingly becomes poor, and captive, and oppressed when that is what is required to be true, and not violent.

That Jesus is free is shown in the absence of violence in him, which can only be the reality of someone who has nothing to fear. This might be another definition of what it means to be human, if truth and freedom are also such definitions: fearlessness. Not even the fear of a godless death on a cross is enough to stop Jesus from being true to himself and the loving humanity which was his calling.

The truth which will set us free is not that we can become like gods, free of anything that bugs us, but that, in looking to Jesus for his truth in freedom from fear, we might actually begin to become human. The way to this truth is ‘continuing in Jesus’ word’ – growing into the free humanity which was his as we become more faithful reflectors of his light. The truth which will give us the freedom to discover this is to be found in what Jesus teaches and does for us: inviting us out of ourselves, into a new vision of God, the world, and each other.

Seek this freedom, then. Look to him, listen to him, and listen to him, and discover the liberating grace of God…

[1]‘Die Wahrheit wird euch frei machen’ – see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Universit%C3%A4t_Freiburg_Epitaph.jpg

[2] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg

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20 January – Mourning and Dawn

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Epiphany 2
20/1/2019

Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 36
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

In the revised preamble to the Uniting Church’s constitution we confess that:

‘The First Peoples of this country had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in [this] land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally and fully revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.’[1] (UCA Revised Preamble to the Constitution §3)

In the continuing attempt to listen to the particular insights of first peoples the national Assembly of the Uniting Church has set aside today as a day of mourning. A day that recalls us to the terrible history of the treatment of indigenous people in this country by second peoples. In setting aside this Sunday as a day of mourning the Uniting Church has sought to hear the voice of God through the voices of our indigenous brothers and sisters.

As we gather in this place, we acknowledge the commitment of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation to nurturing this sacred Land from time immemorial. We acknowledge their elders: past, present, and emerging. We strive to hear their voices.

The commitment to listen to the voice of God through the voices of our indigenous brothers and sisters sets the context for my reflection on today’s readings. This context challenges the very act of preaching and proclaiming the Gospel. The Uniting Church confesses that the very integrity of the Gospel was diminished by the church’s failure to speak the truth about Australia’s First Peoples, and in the church’s complicity in dispossession.[2]

I want simply today to proclaim the Gospel with integrity. And to explore the way in which the proclamation of the Gospel can be both good and mournful news.

Our reading today from the latter part of Isaiah shows us how the proclamation of God to the world carries within it both goodness and mourning. This is a poem written out of the experience of exile, proclaiming hope for God’s people. In holding together both the experience of exile and the proclamation of hope this poem may help to guide us to appreciate the mourning we are recalled to today.

Scholars have suggested that this latter part of Isaiah was written towards the end of the Jewish people’s exile by the Babylonian empire – or perhaps during the period the Jewish people had newly returned to their homeland. This text, therefore, speaks out of an experience of people being stripped of their land, stripped of their identity, stripped of the cultural and religious practices that sustained their relationship to God. If we hear the words of Isaiah 62 as the words of a people trying to find their roots again in their own land, we may hear the solemn undertones of grief beneath the surface that talks of hope.

Isaiah speaks a word of hope on behalf of Zion, the land of the Jewish people, and a word of hope for Jerusalem.

“For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, | and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest | until her vindication shines out …” (v1)

It is important to note the focus of Isaiah’s hope: vindication. In pursuing vindication Isaiah does not simply hope that God’s people would be happy in their land. But Isaiah recalls the period of exile and suffering through which God’s people have come. Isaiah at this point refuses to understand the period of exile as a sign of failure or unfaithfulness, as a simple punishment from God. Vindication is the revelation that God’s people are justified, are right with God, and have remained faithful through their experience of dispossession. In setting up this song of hope with a focus on vindication Isaiah carries the history of his people into this song.

Isaiah’s hope is not abstract. It is not detached from reality. It does not look up to heaven and expect everything to be washed away. Isaiah’s hope is rooted in the survival of his people. Isaiah’s hope is rooted in resilience and return to land: in people who are faithful to God. (Faithful to a God who in turn is faithful, as in Psalm 36, whose steadfast love reaches from the land to the skies.)

That Isaiah forges his hope out of the experience of survival during the exile adds a solemn undertone to his hope:

“You shall no more be termed forsaken | and your land shall no more be termed desolate…” (v4)

For God’s people have been through the many years of forsakenness in exile, the land still bearing the marks of their dispossession and of desolation.

The newness of life and name that are heard in Isaiah’s song carries with it the memories and scars of the history of exile.

Isaiah, I suggest, teaches us about the solemn grief we are called to share with our indigenous brothers and sisters. By holding fast to the hope of God, but not allowing that hope to easily erase true and painful history.

Our indigenous brothers and sisters too have experienced dispossession. They too carry with them a history of pain, trauma, and suffering. Many were killed by the white settlers that built modern Australia. Many were subject to slavery, and slavery like conditions. Many were treated as little more than animals. Refused the basic rights that others enjoy: citizenship, voting rights, land rights. Children were stolen from first peoples. Our indigenous brothers and sisters have been shaped by experiences of survival. Experiences of forsakenness and desolation. We cannot erase this true and painful history.

And yet …

Can we hear the ancient words of Isaiah’s hope for our indigenous brothers and sisters? Can we bear a hope that refuses to see the suffering of first peoples as a just punishment? Can we bear a hope that does not erase solemn grief, and yet brings new life?

This is the task we recall ourselves to today. As we mark today as a day of mourning we are challenged by the hopeful song of Isaiah, that yet carries within itself solemn grief. We are challenged to ask ourselves what the hope of the Gospel might mean for our indigenous brothers and sisters. We are challenged to proclaim the Gospel with integrity.

The Gospel is the proclamation that in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, the reign of God’s love has been established once and for all. This love is made visible through acts of mercy and justice. Through the Spirit we are empowered to faithfully participate in making this reign of love take root in this world. Like Isaiah we do not proclaim an abstract hope, detached from reality. But a hope rooted in the experiences of people who have suffered, people who have survived — and many who have not. We preach a hope that moves towards us in Christ, and catches us up in the movement of God in the world. We preach of a love the traverses chasms, and reconciles communities.

To proclaim this Gospel with integrity means we must commit ourselves anew to the experiences of our indigenous brothers and sisters. We must commit ourselves to hearing their stories. We must commit ourselves to telling the truth about our collective history.

In so doing we participate in the ever unfolding reality of God’s reign of love in the world.
Echoing Isaiah:

For Australia’s sake we must not keep silent, | and for the sake of our indigenous brothers and sisters we must not rest, | until their vindication shines out like the dawn …

We must learn to understand our Christian hope in the light of Isaiah. Pursuing concrete forms of love, through mercy and justice. Rooting our hope in the history and the land in which we find ourselves.

In this may we follow Christ to the cross, and be led to the hope of resurrection.

Amen.

[1] UCA Revised Preamble to the Constitution §3.

[2] UCA Preamble §5-6.

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