Author Archives: Admin

13 January – Ends as Beginnings

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Baptism of the Lord
13/1/2019

Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

I imagine that many of us will know the celebrated words from TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “In my beginning is my end” or, even better in expanded form: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from”.  The older we get the more this truth becomes apparent. When we are young, and without a perceived end, we have no real awareness of those moments when a recognisable beginning in time might be happening that is the start of what will consequently really shape our life. Only as our lives mature to their end do the apparently disconnected arbitrary events in the past begin to assume a focus. Only then do we become conscious in a real sense of a personal history that in hindsight is grasped as being inevitable. Beginning and end become one. Not only: “In my beginning is my end”, but, equally, we eventually come to understand that: “In my end is my beginning”.

What is true of the lives of each of us is absolutely the case of the gospel. We can’t be told too often how it is that the gospel takes shape, and how it is contrary to everything that we assume is the way things work: the conventional assumption that life moves from a beginning to an end has to give way to a much richer journey – a rear view mirror from an absolute finality to what was originally a beginning whose implications were not yet transparent. As Eliot tells us: “The end is where we start from”.

In liturgical language this means that Easter precedes Christmas.  Having lived all the years of our lives where the opposite is relentlessly absorbed, that babies come before adults, makes it all the more mandatory to register without any hint of contradiction that Easter precedes Christmas. Or, if you like why, in the chronology of the New Testament, the apostle Paul precedes the narratives of the Gospels.  That is to say, there is a period of at least thirty years that bridges the gap between the event of the experienced end of Jesus of which Paul is witness, and the accounts of the beginning for Jesus as that is unfolded in the Gospels. Indeed, this temporal hiatus is the very reason why the gospels were written.

All that the earliest Christians needed to know was Paul’s declaration of the continued presence of Jesus after his crucifixion. This end expressed the finality of the whole purpose of his coming. But as the first generation of Christians died, this message of Jesus’ end was in danger of being divorced from its beginning in his earthly ministry. Which explains why a theological biography needed to be constructed, and why we today have the narrative of Luke’s account of this beginning in the baptism of Jesus.

In that day there were at least three distinctive racial and religious communities; first, Jews living in Palestine; then diaspora Jews living in the Greek and Roman cultures; and finally, outright non-Jews, the Gentiles. Each community required a different explanation within their own framework of how the beginning of Jesus needed to be unfolded. “Within their own framework” is the operative phrase. That is why we learn everything we need to know of these differences when we take account of where each of the gospels frames the beginning of Jesus. The earliest Gospel Mark, wanting to show how it came to be that Jesus finished on a Cross, establishes Jesus’ baptism as that beginning. The next Matthew, writing for Christians previously Jews, constructs a genealogy dating Jesus’ origin from Abraham, their founding Father. Luke, the Gospel before us today writing for Gentile converts, constructs another genealogy, dating Jesus’ origin from Adam: Why Adam? Because Luke is writing a truly cosmic history – from its earliest human origin in the Gospel to its geographical conclusion in the Book of Acts, foreshadowed as it is in  the ascension mission mandate at the beginning: witness away to the “end of the world”, the pagan city of Rome as the absolute antithesis of the city of Jerusalem. And then, finally, the Gospel according to John grasps that Jesus’ real beginning cannot be dated as world history at all, but arises in the very life of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.

So today, on the first Sunday after Epiphany, we make a real beginning in hearing of Luke’s purpose of the cosmic Jesus for the world – his baptism. But immediately we are told that this baptism has a context. The crowds came to be baptised by John the Baptist, a baptism of repentance. We live in a culture that has moralised the word repentance virtually out of existence. Repentance for this, repentance for that – always for individual acts on a scale either trivial or devastating.

This is not what the Gospel intends. Here repentance is altogether a much more encompassing symbol. It is essentially a theological, not a moralistic, necessity. Repentance is perhaps best understood as the need to make a U turn with the whole of one’s life; to engage the oncoming reign of God for our life by facing the other way; by a turning to glimpse a lifegiving future, not a dead past. And it is just this vicarious baptismal repentance which Jesus shares with us, and this we are told before he does anything else at all. But then everything which follows his baptism falls into place. Each of the Gospels as they unfold demonstrates how his baptism, as an apparent beginning in time, has the Cross as its end. This means that his baptism already encompasses that end. There is a seamless connection between the beginning, his baptism, and his end on the Cross. “In my end is my beginning” Eliot proposes. And if this is the truth of our life, how much more is it also of the life of God. What greater identification of the life of God with the life of the world could be made than this ending of a beginning – the end of a cross of blood concealed in a water of baptism?

It is this same identification that has already been proposed when we hear Isaiah say to Israel: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine”. For Luke, Jesus in his baptism is reaffirming: “you are mine”. But wait. The presence of the crowd offers much more. His communal baptism foreshadows the embrace of all humanity; Isaiah’s prospective “east to the west, the north to the south” are already incorporated in the real beginning being made in Jesus’ baptism, which for him turns out to already encompass his end. It is a baptism into death, even death on a cross, but which will take another three years to be realised. In very truth, Eliot’s words are as true for God as they are for us. “What we call a beginning is … the end”.

It is learning about just this end which is revealed in the passage from Acts. As Luke unfolds the spread of the gospel into alien lands, here into Samaria, a territory half Jewish half Gentile, he reports that “they had only been baptised into the name of the Lord Jesus”. That is to say, theirs was only the sort of baptism offered by the Baptist – a real baptism of water, and hence a baptism of repentance, a turning in principle but without a fruitful promise. As such it had no future, being merely a truncated sort of baptism. It was only when Peter and John laid their hands on them that “they received the Holy Spirit”. It is the Spirit which opens up a future. It is the Spirit which accomplishes the U turn, which makes baptism effective as the sign of an accomplished end. It is only the Spirit who can make an end of a beginning.

And so it is for the Church down through the ages, and therefore for us too. We receive these readings on this the first Sunday after Epiphany, that is to say, after the revelation of the Jewish Jesus to his future home in the Gentile world – our world.  Epiphany is that period when the Church reflects on the manifestation of Christ to all people. This first manifestation is his baptism; the last manifestation of the period of Epiphany will be his transfiguration. They belong together. A baptism at his beginning; transfiguration, as a disclosing hint on the way to his ending.

In very truth – as Eliot asserted – the end for Jesus reveals the baptismal place where he began. In the same way, as those attempting to become disciples, will we too find ourselves, sooner or later, confessing: in his conferred end – now made my own – is my beginning –  a beginning which is also my end.

Posted in Sermons

6 January – Another Way

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Epiphany of the Lord
6/1/2019

Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72
Matthew 2:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

“They left for their own country by another way”. Matthew 2:12

6 kilometres north west of Nazareth is a significant archaeological site. A few years before the birth of Jesus, Herod Antipas started to build his administrative centre at Sepphoris, a sort of Canberra in the Galilee. Before that, it had been a tiny village, said to be the home of Joachim and Anna, parents of Mary. If you are romantically inclined you might like to think that Joseph met Mary while he was working on the building of this new city. But that’s quite irrelevant to the point I want to make. Sepphoris was destroyed by an earthquake in 363. So it’s a time capsule spanning the period in which the early church lived. This is the picture that it gives. It was strongly Jewish. As a Roman city it cooperated with the punitive invasion Vespasian in 68 – 70 A.D. So Jews migrated there for safety. It was wealthy, as indicated by the exquisite mosaic floors in many villas. There was a large number of Gentiles, Roman officials, collaborators and traders. It was influenced by religions of the east, especially astrology, as indicated by the signs of the Zodiac on the floors of several first century synagogues. So a story about a star would go down well here.

No commentator actually suggests that Sepphoris was where Matthew wrote the gospel, but most agree it was near here, maybe across the border in Syria. See how the gospel, and this story of the Wise Men in particular, fit these characteristics. His 130 references to the Hebrew Scriptures would appeal to a Jewish audience. Unlikely foreigners, Gentiles, keep appearing unexpectedly. Gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh appeal to the wealthy, and a story about magi from the east following a star picks up on the connections to the east and the astrology.

Further internal evidence in the Gospel suggests that Matthew was writing for a congregation of Jewish Christians that was well established, but rather more concerned with their tradition than their mission. “Settled and content” says one commentator (Herman Waetjen), who then says that Matthew’s intent is to “unsettle, rather than endorse”. That is, he advocates “another way”. Look for example at the genealogy with which Matthew begins. It includes women, unusual women! They were foreigners, whose marriage involved scandal. There is Tamar, a Canaanite, Rahab another Canaanite and a harlot, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba (you all know about her), and Ruth, the Moabite, whose book we have just been studying. Straight down the line Hebrew matriarchs like Sarah and Rachel are overlooked.

Then we get the Magi, a recognised group in Eastern religions, a bit like alchemists in Medieval Europe, perhaps Zoroastrian priests, or maybe Persian shamans. Once you see this intent to challenge closed attitudes, you notice subtleties. For example, the Canaanite woman wanting the crumbs under the table shouts and is insistent in Matthew’s version, whereas in Luke she bows and is respectful. Or the centurion at the cross who proclaims “This man was the Son of God”. In Luke it is the centurion only, but in Matthew it is the “centurion and all those with him”. It all builds up to the grand finale, the great commandment that closes the gospel “Go and make disciples of all nations”. Show them another way.

When you read this story of the Magi, read it as a beautiful, if challenging, image. Some open-minded strangers see a light, a shining star, and they follow it. It is a difficult journey. “A cold coming we had of it. Just the worst time of year for a journey”. These were the opening words of Lancelot Andrews sermon around 1610, and which T.S. Eliot picked up in his poem “The Journey of the Magi”. The difficult journey crossed barriers of race and religion, it side stepped cultural norms and social status. It avoided government interference. It ends up with them going another way. But the centre of the story is sacrificial worship at the manger of the Christ child.

I began to tick off these characteristics in relation to Mark the Evangelist.

  1. We honour our tradition, especially in our worship. “Lift up your hearts” is attested as early as 252 A.D. by Cyprian. It works on 2 levels. We rise above the mundane to the sacramental, and we are united with Christians through the ages.
  2. We are on a hard journey where the development of our property is concerned.
  3. A large part of the work of Hotham Mission is with Moslem immigrants, many from the East, well, the Middle East.
  4. We have a vision, a star to follow, even a vision statement at the beginning of the Mission’s Strategic Plan

“Out of the goodness of God’s creation and in response to God’s continuing acts and promises to all, our vision is for abundant life in which our mission may be restorative and transformative, constantly responding to the gospel hope of cosmic reconciliation”.

  1. The Mission goes another way by not accepting any government funding, and in so doing has cut quite a lot of the red tape imposed by both state and church .
  2. And the central focus is always on the presence of Christ. There is now a cross and an icon on the meeting room wall in the cottage as well as the Christian symbols of font, table (Sacrament) and lectern (Word) here in the church.

As I ticked off so many good points I began to feel rather smug. It was then that I realised that the purpose Matthew has in mind is to disturb a church that is settled and smug. Perhaps our vision could be wider. After all there are many shining lights out there.

Let me tell you about one I saw in Ethiopia. In the town of Bahar Dar we visited one of the five Fistula hospitals now operating in Ethiopia. Catherine Hamlin, now in her 90’s, went there as a young doctor and saw the plight of women with this problem. She began to treat them, and witnessed the way these outcast women were restored to their families and villages with dignity and purpose. The work grew, and grew. First a specialist hospital, then another and another, till last year (2018) 5 doctors trained at the main hospital in Addis Adaba in order to help women in Madagascar, Ghana, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

There are many such stars shining: The Christmas Bowl supports some. The National Council of Churches is putting new energy into the fight against modern slavery. There is a glimmer of hope that Australia might recognise the Nuclear Ban Treaty.

The Magi followed a star, opened their treasure chests, worshipped with costly gifts, and found another way.

We read their story on the first Sunday in Epiphany. An epiphany is to see yourself as you are and then catch a vision of what you might become. There is always another way. When you see the light, follow the star, and become.

We are also at the beginning of a new calendar year, a time of refreshment and resolution. Don’t let your stars disappear with the fireworks. As a congregation Matthew speaks to us as a community. He honours the tradition, challenges our self-satisfaction, points to the real source of light and commands us to go into all the world – to find another way.

Posted in Sermons

30 December – Born of a woman, born under the law

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Christmas 1
30/12/2018

Galatians 4:4-7
Psalm 8
Luke 2:41-52

Our Galatians reading this morning has been carefully cut by the lectionary to turn it into something which makes it look like a “Christmas” text. And so we hear Christmassy things for the last Sunday of the Christmas season: “…when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman”.

Yet St Paul has no interest in Christmas as we know it. What he is interested in is Jesus’ relationship to us. And this ought to matter to us as well because unless there is something intrinsic connecting us to Jesus of Nazareth then there is no point in the church honouring him in the way that it does, commending him to the wider world, or celebrating Christmas.

Although Santa is now presenting as a serious rival, the dominant image of Christmas remains that of the baby. We like babies. We once were babies! Christmas reminds us that, as we once were helpless, and innocent, so also was Jesus, and so the sentimental song “When a child is born” has been added to the collection of what is likely to be featured at a Carols by Candlelight or be piped into the background to set the mood in supermarkets. As Jesus was once a tiny bundle of possibilities, and the focus of great hope for his parents, so were we and our babies. When Paul says of Jesus “born of a woman”, we can hear him saying that Jesus was as we are: he was one of us.

Paul goes further, however, in his statement of what Jesus shares with us. Not only is Jesus said to be “born of a woman”; he is also “born under the law”. Here Paul moves beyond basic biology and baby-induced sentimentality to stir us up a bit about our understandings of ourselves. “Born under the law” adds a dimension to human being which is less certain for many of us. It’s not that Jesus’ being born under the law makes him less human; it is rather that we mightn’t be so sure that being “under the law” is a necessary part of the description a human being.

‘Law’ here is not merely the divine instruction but what it becomes in our hands, and what other wisdoms and ways of being also become. To be “under the law” in Paul’s sense is not yet to be free; it is to be bound by something which limits us and not yet to have received the freedom still held in trust for us.

Yet while we know that we all begin ‘born of a woman’, for many in and out of the church it is scarcely believable that being ‘under the law’ in this way is also part of what it means to be human. Is not the freedom of the individual central to our modern self-understanding? And so Paul’s further suggestion that we are “slaves” – and that we move from being slaves to being children of God on account of Jesus redeeming us from being under the law – also doesn’t really fit our perception of ourselves. 

But by reading more broadly around the short section we have heard from Galatians today, we can bring Paul to bear on our own thinking about how we are constituted. The verses which follow on from what we’ve already heard are not so Christmassy, but matter at least as much:

Formerly, when you did not know God, you were enslaved to beings that by nature are not gods [that is, ‘enslaved by law’]. Now, however, that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, how can you turn back again to the weak and beggarly powers [literally: ‘elemental spirits’ (NRSV)]?

Paul’s particular issue with the Galatians is that they had found a peculiar freedom in Jesus – a kind of human maturity – which they were now giving up.

This freedom involves a shift from living under law: from knowing the rules, being subject to them and abiding by them (or not!), to living out of grace. Paul describes this shift in a little twist which passes almost without notice: “now…that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God…” The twist is very important.

For us the question is usually about who knows God, or does not know God – who knows the rules, who has measured where God fits in and how we fit into God. This manifests itself at this time of the year with concern in churches and in newspaper opinion pieces about such things as the “true meaning of Christmas” and who does or doesn’t know it and so does or doesn’t know God (or doesn’t need to know God). This is ‘under the law’ existence – human being as argy-bargy. But for Paul the critical point is God knowing us, or not knowing us.

God knows you, Paul declares; God has your measure, and this before you imagined that you measured and knew God. God knows those of us “born under the law”, enslaved to influences and powers even before we know ourselves as such. In this, God knows us better than we know ourselves.

The good news of the gospel is that God know us in this way, and yet loves us. On Christmas Day we sang of Jesus, ‘lo, he abhors not the virgin’s womb’. This is scarcely acceptable language today for a couple of reasons but that line sums up Paul’s point here, with the emphasis falling on ‘womb’ (Paul doesn’t seem to know or be interested in the story of the virginal conception). In the carol and in our reading today, ‘womb’ is a metonym – one aspect of our common humanity which stands for everything which we have in common: our biology and our broken, ‘under the law’ existence. The miracle of Christmas is that Jesus – True God of true God, light of light eternal – is born at all into our human messiness.

What all humankind has in common is not merely our biology but lives lived imperfectly under the law, and so lives enslaved, under the curse of death through sin. For Paul, then, Jesus-born-of-woman has in common with all humankind that he too came to stand under the curse of sin – “born under the law”.

There is, of course, a danger here that the whole sin-thing can be over-emphasised, as it has been too often in the church’s history. The bad news here – that we might be enslaved in this way – is not the starting point but a kind of end point: it is because a light has already shone for us that we are able to look “back”, as it were, and see clearly now how things were before the light was there, how law enslaved us, how we misuse it to try to save ourselves, how we were unfree.

The good news is that this light shines and reveals not to condemn but to liberate. God has already loved us in our very worst moments, and even in what we think are our very best moments but in which we are sometimes the most tragically deluded. Being Christian is a matter of learning to know ourselves as God knows us – less than we ought to be but loved nonetheless. It is only when we know ourselves so loved that we can know that “freedom of the children of God” which begins with being set free. It is only those who have been set free in this way who can become forces for liberation themselves.

The freedom of the children of God is that they know that God knew them before they knew God, that God’s knowledge of them created no barrier to loving them, and that this means they need not be trapped by their own poor assessments or grand assessments of themselves.

Instead, they may move into the future open to all possibilities, great and small, confident in God’s naming them and owning them as his children.

May this freedom reign in the hearts of minds of all God’s people this Christmas season, and always!

Posted in Sermons

25 December – Extraordinary Ordinary

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Christmas Day
25/12/2018

Isaiah 62:6-12
Psalm 97
Luke 2:8-20

The shepherds say to one another: ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing.’ As their journey was a response news of an extraordinary thing, so also is our gathering here this morning.

And yet, if we give it more than a moment’s thought, it is less clear than we might assume just how the birth of Jesus is extraordinary, for the extraordinary is elusive.

We encounter many extraordinary things in the world: the 10 year old musical prodigy, the resolution of the latest smart phone camera, Brexit, the terrorist’s bomb, 5 prime ministers in eight years (not necessarily in increasing order of extraordinariness!).

Yet, what we call extraordinary is typically something indeed out of the ordinary but on its way to being forgotten or to becoming ordinary. There are two things typical of such occurrences.

First, the extraordinary is typically distracting. Violence, political upheaval, talent and beauty cause us to turn aside from what normally commands our attention.

The second thing about the extraordinary is that it is typically fleeting. Either it recedes into the past – becoming a mere memory – or, perhaps more commonly, it remains with us and becomes the new ordinary. Terrorism is extraordinary, until we grow used to walking around the concrete blocks intended to keep weaponised trucks away from crowds. So also for the decay of political stability, the presence of the precocious talent or the ever-improving capacity of modern gadgets. If there is anything new under the sun, it is not new for long.

These two characteristics might permit us to speak, then, of an ‘ordinary extraordinary’ – the extraordinary as it ordinarily works.

It’s a bit of a mind-bend to try to think the ordinary extraordinary but the point here is that if this is how it works – if the glory always fades – then we do better not to speak of Christmas as something ‘extraordinary.’ Or, at least, ‘extraordinary’, or ‘special’ or ‘exceptional’, are less impressive characterisations of Christmas than we might imagine.

The heaviness and difficulties which seem to overlay our cultural experience of Christmas arise from the attempt to hold onto the fleeting extraordinary, to drag it from its receding past, and to retain it by locking it as an ever-returning calendar event. Thus we make the extraordinary into the ordinary, and empty it of anything which could make a difference.

What, then, breaks through the ordinary? The answer is twofold: first, nothing breaks through the ordinary and, second, God does. This is not to say that God and nothing are the same; it is to say that the ordinary is what God finally aims at. God does not break through the ordinary but rather embraces it.

We are generally not very impressed by the normal, although this is scarcely new. When Luke wants to give substance to the birth in Bethlehem he does not just say what has happened; he has a lead angel with a heaven-wide backing choir make the point to the shepherds. This is impressive – extraordinary – but what then do the shepherds expect to see when they get to the stable?

I found myself recalling during the week the opening scene of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Some of you have probably not seen this film for the sake of piety, though others of you would likely say that it was for piety’s sake that you have seen it (even numerous times!).

But for information, or as a reminder: the film begins with a night sky, across which travels the Star of Bethlehem. On the horizon we see the Magi (the three kings ‘of orient are’), whom we follow through the streets of Bethlehem to a stable where they find and kneel to worship a child in a manger and present their gifts to the child’s mother. (In all this the film mixes up the biblical story but the whole thing is Christmas-card correct). They then take their leave but very soon return and snatch back the gifts, for they have seen down the street another stable – but now one glowing with heavenly light – and they realise that they’ve visited the wrong place.

We get the joke because we’ve seen the Christmas cards and the icons and the stained glass windows and the sentimental life-of-Jesus films with their halos and attending cherubs and angel-choir soundtracks. But the thing is – if the story is true – the wise men should not been able to tell the baby Brian and the baby Jesus apart. Certainly Brian’s mother could scarcely be accused of being ‘full of grace’ but Mary is not the measure of Jesus in that way, either.

And so the shepherds, to whom the news of the birth of a saviour is extraordinarily delivered, trot off to see what any one of us sees in response to news of a birth – a baby. There is no heavenly light and no halo. Whatever a first century Palestinian nappy looked like, there were likely a couple of them waiting for service and we can rest assured that there is little truth in the suggestion that ‘the little Lord Jesus, no crying he made’. It is just… so… ordinary.

And this ordinariness is perhaps the way we need to recast the representations of Christmas as ‘extraordinary’. Halos and miracles make little impression in a sceptical and cynical age like ours. Ours is a blockbuster culture, which is to say that we have tamed the extraordinary. A choir of angels would still impress us, but we would finally turn it into a screen saver or a ring tone, and then hang out for the even more spectacular sequel.

And yet our hunger for the extraordinary, and our capacity to consume it in this way, leads us further and further from ourselves and the potential fullness of the lives given us to live. For we – most of us – are not extraordinary: our lives are not movie scripts, our decisions do not shift the course of history, our highest achievements will scarcely leave a mark. Our fascination with the extraordinary is an escape from who we are.

Yet this is the un-extraordinary normal into which Jesus is born, the ordinary he takes on. It is this normality which causes such great offence when he begins to wax larger in the religious awareness of those around him. ‘Who is this? Where did he get this from? Is he not one of the local boys?’ More profoundly, the question here is, How can the things of God be so ordinary?

If our usual experience is with an ‘ordinary extraordinary’ which eventually recedes or becomes a new ordinary, in Jesus we see the reverse: an extraordinary ordinary.

Jesus’ achievement is just to be a first century Palestinian Jew, an achievement which begins with his being a first century Palestinian Jewish baby. This is the ‘ordinary’.

The ‘extraordinary’ is that he does this ordinariness in such a way that God intersects via that very humanity. The ordinariness of Jesus is not something which leads him away from God, but the way in which he meets God and God meets him.

The glory of God in the story of Christmas is not in the distracting angels or halos. The glory of God is the living human being at its centre, an ‘ordinary’ which will be extraordinarily done.

his extraordinary ordinary is the gift of Christmas, and its invitation.

The gift is a human life in which the limitations of a particular space, time, culture, language, gender and social status become not mere limitations but the outer form of one person’s freedom to be a child of God.

The invitation is to take this extraordinary life ordinary as our own, to have in ourselves the mind of Jesus: to be free of the need to gild the lily which each one of us is, free of the need to grasp after a glory which seems brighter than us.

For what we are is enough to be magnificent, if we receive it from God not as a burden to be overcome but as a gift to be unwrapped and lived.

Every ordinary baby is a promise of great things: the promise of Godly things in human things – the promise of the glory of God. What is extraordinary about the baby in the manger is that the promise which every ordinary baby is is actually kept in his case: here is a human being fully alive, and so the very glory of God.

This is the gift of Christmas, and its invitation.

Let us, then, with the shepherds, ‘go and see the thing which has taken place,’ receive it as our own and, by the grace of God, begin to become it.

Amen.

Posted in Sermons

16 December – What we wait for

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Advent 3
16/12/2018

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Isaiah 12:2-6
Luke 3:7-18

‘Are you the one who is to come…?’

This question, at this part of the story, is very familiar to most of us – a familiarity like what we experience when we hear ‘What light through yonder window breaks…’ or ‘Frankly, my dear…’ or, more recently, ‘Ah’ll be bach’. These lines have a set place, and we wait for their beauty or poignancy or humour. So also the story of Jesus begins with the forerunner John and with the question – Are you the one who is to come?

Yet, while we know that the longing of the people is an integral part of the story of Jesus, their expectation is not ours and it cannot be. We are in a very different cultural place than they, not least because our culture is built on the assumption that the one to whom John refers has already come. Whatever we could expect now must be quite different from what John’s congregations expected because we are at a different stage of the story.

But apart from our being at that different stage, there is another sense in which we are different in terms of what we could possibility expect. In particular, and despite our Christian heritage (some would say, because of it), ours is an increasingly ‘pagan’ experience of the world. That is, our worldview has become an enclosed one. While we recognise that things change with time – that new(-ish) things appear – this experience is informed by our sense that change in the world is evolutionary. Internal conditions of environment and need work together to reshape and – if we are lucky – to improve us. Life in the world, then, is helical in character – like a corkscrew through time; if are lucky, we are always moving ‘up’ the helix. It is in this way that we are ‘pagan’ – everything which could happen is understood to be internal to the system and, in this sense, has already happened. The only ultimate end we can imagine today is the deep entropic cold which comes from the unwinding of a wound-up universe, of which our own more imminent deaths are the sacrament: whatever lesser ends we might reach for in the interim, the true end is not Goal or Purpose; it is Cessation, Nothingness.

This is very different from the outlook of John and his congregation, who saw history as moving to a climax, a determining moment. With the imminent arrival of ‘the one who is to come’, history comes to its end – its ultimate goal – however that end might be visualised (the book of Revelation being one such visualisation!).

Now the question is, Did they have it better than we? There was a messianic expectation into which John preached and out of which Jesus was interpreted, but is it necessary for the story? Is the expectation of that type of temporal ending necessary to hearing and believing the gospel?

This matters because we cannot re-enter into their anticipation, as much this or that religious sect manages to delude itself in this way for a what. We cannot hope again in this way, because that kind of hope is culturally excluded. They asked, ‘When will the world end?’; we ask, ‘What will make the world bearable?’

Yet these two questions are less different than they might first appear.

The earnest longing for the end of the world in John’s time and our earnest desire that the endless world be bearable meet in the scriptural testimony that the world is not God. Our goal, our purpose, our end is that we be creatures, and not God (mindful that the Genesis myth sees the primal human failure as the desire to be like God [Genesis 3]).

The confusion of God and the world – and our sense that this is wrong – is what makes John’s ethical teaching as striking and appealing now as it was then, despite our very different thoughts about the nature of history. The extra tunic given to one who has none declares that poverty is not a god to be respected; poverty is not ‘proper’ world. When the powerful act not against the weak but for them, they declare that power is not a god to be honoured. Generosity declares that greed is not a god to which we sacrifice the needy. There must necessarily be an economy but it is not a god, despite the sacrifices we make to it. There must necessarily be clans, tribes and nations but they are not gods, despite the sacrifices we make for them. Our children are not gods…and on it goes.

Everything we touch in the world, and everything which happens between us when touch each other, has for us the potential in that contact to be rendered either divine or mundane. When it comes to the things of the world, only the mundane is good, despite how miserable the word ‘mundane’ is for us these days. The world and everything in it is, properly, only world, ‘merely’ secular.

What ails the human heart in every time and place is its tendency to worship or fear some worldly thing as if it were divine: our money, our relationships, our kings, our power, our ambitions, our death. If we cannot any more expect that the world will end in the coming of a messiah, it is not because we are less naïve or more scientific, or even because the Messiah is said already to have come. It is because we feel that what is wrong with the world is too much a part of us to be properly treated. A thousand qualifications might deal with the inconvenience of a single God, but they are not enough to free us from fearing and worshipping the multitude of worldly things we turn into divine things. This is the Christian theological meaning of the every new book of regulations which issues from a Royal Commission or church enquiry: the gods being more tightly bound, morality merely evolving.

This dismal assessment is the same as that of John’s desert congregations: we cannot liberate ourselves. And John’s response to them is what we need also to hear now: it is only when God comes that the world finds its true end, its goal and purpose. This is why Christian worship properly begins with the prayer, Come, Lord. Again, it is only when God comes that the world finds its true end, its goal, its purpose. For God comes not to sweep away but to uncover – this is what you really are, this is how it all fits together: in me.

This is both a painful revelation and a creative one.

John declares, ‘The one who is coming baptises with fire’. Fire purifies by burning away all that is not solid and elemental, and there is much about us which must go in this way.

And John declares, ‘The one who is coming baptises with the Holy Spirit’. It is the Holy Spirit which puts things in their right relation to each other, which makes God God and us the creatures we are created to be.

What makes the world bearable is when we hear that all which can happen is not a mere – and often terrifying – extension of what has already happened, and that our even increasingly sophisticated methods of restraining the gods will not bring our liberation.

What we await is the clear declaration, and the initial signs, that there comes the fiery gift of God’s Spirit, which testifies to and makes real the Word which is the way, truth and the life for which God created us.

We wait in the words of the prayer, Come, Lord – the prayer of the church in every time – and we wait in actions which contradict the pantheon of powers which keep us in thrall and by which we keep others in thrall.

Let us, then, commit ourselves again to that prayer and to such works of love, that the glory of the coming of the Lord might be something to which all eyes are lifted.

Amen.

Posted in Sermons

9 December – God’s crooked way

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Advent 2
9/12/2018

Malachi 3:1-4
Luke 1:68-79
Luke 3:1-6

‘The word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.’

And what was that word? In fact, today’s reading cuts out before we hear from the Baptist himself (next week!) but his preaching is characterised with a few lines borrowed from Isaiah: first,

‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight’.

And then,

‘Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’

What we might miss here is that these two parts are in different verbal ‘moods’: ‘Prepare’ is in the imperative (‘Do this’) but ‘every valley shall be filled’ is in the indicative (what is or will be happening). This matters because Isaiah is not saying that God’s approach is dependent upon our preparing the way. The valleys shall be filled, the mountains and hills shall be made low. Whatever efforts we might make in this regard, only God can guarantee that it happens: God will prepare the way for God.

This is the kind of thing theological types – your preacher included – are likely consider to be a lovely little twist in the text. Yet, having shifted our hearing of Isaiah from an actionable imperative (which would at least keep us busy) to a promised indicative (which we might only need to wait for), we then have to deal with a troubling fact. For we have to say that, on the face of it, there is no way in which this filling, levelling, straightening or smoothing can be said actually to have taken place. Even if we allow what we must – that Isaiah speaks here metaphorically and not about Grand Canyons or Rocky Mountains high – there is little in the way of Jesus which is smooth and straight – metaphorically or otherwise. After an enthusiastic initial reception he quickly meets with opposition, and we know very well where he ends: precisely not a levelling or a smoothing but a raising up on what is crooked and rough, and a laying-down in a valley as deep as the grave of a God.

And so we are shifted suddenly to the thought that Isaiah’s valley, mountain, crookedness and roughness are metaphors of the cross of Jesus. It is the cross with which God must deal in his approach to us – even before Jesus’ cross has even appeared on the horizon. It is this which God guarantees will be overcome.

How can this be?

On a simpler metaphorical hearing of Isaiah, the valleys and mountains and challenging paths represent obstacles in us to be put aside so that God might draw near (or, slightly better, that God might put aside in order to draw near). Yet this is to imply that the human being is not one but two things – an inner self which is accessible apart from an outer self with its better and worse commitments and enthralments, its history of things done and suffered – all that might have been different, and better.

But God knows us better than this. The valleys and the mountains and the crookedness and roughness which get between us and God have not been swept away in any simple sense because they are us. They are not between God and the true us; they are not obstacles around which we could navigate (or God has to navigate) in order that the real God can meet face to face with our real selves.

These things are us: we are what we do. What the Gentile does to the Jew (and vice-versa!), what the free does to the slave, the male to the female; what the border patrol does to the asylum seeker, the coloniser does to indigenes, the rich to the poor; what the faithful do to their God – these are not ‘the devil made me do it’ moments, as if I and my actions were two separate realities. This is us and the powers to which we are subject bound in a symbiosis of such intimacy that the life and death of the one would the life and death of the other. To lay the mountain low and straighten the crooked way – in the simple metaphorical sense of setting aside the obstacles between us and God – this would be to end us, for there would be no ‘us’ left.

And so the obstacles stay in place and become manifest in the cross. The cross, then, is not an accident – something which just ‘happened’ to happen when God came. It is unavoidable without being either intended or desired or needed by God for salvation’s sake. The cross is God staying his hand, allowing the depth of the valleys and the height of the mountains to continue because they are what make us us.

And now we come to the sense in which Isaiah speaks the gospel of God’s way in the world. The valleys and mountains and byways are shown in fact not to be obstacles to God’s passage but simply features in a landscape in which God chooses to dwell. The salvation which ‘all flesh’ will see (Isaiah) is that we are saved as we are, here and now, valleys and mountains and crooked and rough ways that we are.

We hear more from John next week about what that salvation looks like, what life with such a crooked God looks like. But for now two final things, first a liturgical illustration of the point and, second, a poetic summation.

All we have been thinking this morning is why each week we take a sign of death as a sign of life – nourishment in bread and wine said to be body broken and blood poured out. It is ghastly imagery but we persist with it because the valleys and the mountains are not wiped away, the cross is not removed or forgotten. For these are part of us. The only question is whether such things divide us from God. The sacrament uses these things as signs of the gospel to say that they do not separate us, that they are no barrier. This is the way in which the valleys and mountains between us and God are overcome – they become signs of the power of God. And so this is what we mean when we declare that the kingdom and the power and the glory are of this God: nothing separates us from the love of God in Jesus Christ the Son.

And finally, the poetic summation: as I reflected on Isaiah’s word in our reading this morning, the word ‘crooked’ reminded me of a poem which, I realised, slightly modified would serve well to summarise what I’ve been trying to say about the God who deals somewhat crookedly with us, reckoning as righteous what clearly is not, calling straight and smooth what clearly is not. For those of you who would like to check the poem without my changes, the original poet is Mother Goose.

There was a crooked God, who walked a crooked mile,
Who found a crooked people and spent a crooked while;
They found a crooked staff and the crooked God unfurled
The crooked way a crooked God would save a crooked world.

Posted in Sermons

2 December – Advent: risen to a new hope

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Advent 1
2/12/2018

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25
Luke 21:25-36

In a sentence:
Hope raises dry belief

Advent is the season the church devotes to reflection on the promised approach of God, an approach which is often depicted in the Scriptures as we heard of it today – in apocalyptic language.

Whatever we might make of that way of thinking, it is worth noting that the modern notion of ‘apocalypse’ has moved considerably from the biblical sense. The word itself means simply ‘revelation’; the book of Revelation is sometimes called ‘the Apocalypse’ for this reason. Around this anticipated end-time unveiling the Bible depicts a range of extraordinary and – frankly – terrifying events.

Contemporary talk of an apocalypse usually corresponds only to the apocalyptic events themselves to the terror – and not to the revelation. Thus we might speak of an ‘Apocalypse Now’ – a nuclear apocalypse or an ecological apocalypse, by which we designate scale and intensity and effect.

This is clear enough to us as we use the word in its common sense but what might be less clear is that the effect of an apocalypse – understood in this way – is silence. The bomb has gone off, the biosphere has collapsed, worlds have collided and suddenly there is neither voice to be heard nor ear to hear it. There is only darkness, smoke and dust.

Yet, though the scale and intensity of the imagery of scriptural apocalyptic is great, it doesn’t anticipate silence. Those events anticipate a word, an address, a showing-forth. The force of the imagery is not violent destruction in itself, not the fire or the storm or the earthquake, but rather pushes to the force of the word to be clearly spoken. This is a world-shaking word but nonetheless one which the speaker expects will be heard because there will be ears to hear it.

The question biblical apocalyptic poses, then, is not how can such things be in the Bible but what is the word to be heard through them? If God is coming, what are we to anticipate?

The answer to this is simply that we wait for the revealing of God’s ways, as our psalmist today put it (Psalm 25). This is the revelation of God and of ourselves as we are – properly – together.

Now this is correct so far as it goes but we have not yet said enough, because it could all quite easily have been said by a ‘Before Christ’ Jew, and we are ‘Anno Domini’ Christians. What Jesus does and what happens to Jesus changes talk about God and ourselves, and God’s coming to us.

And so the apocalyptic event of the New Testament is not what Jesus foretells in our text today but what finally happens to him himself: the resurrection (resurrection being an apocalyptic category). Resurrection was not then – as it is typically now – the mere idea that the dead might stop being dead. Talk of resurrection arose from particular needs and led to particular anticipations: resurrection talk had a particular purpose linked to the purpose of apocalyptic thinking. The apocalypse would reveal the ways of God but not just to those who are still standing when the time comes. We wonder whether the dead can be raised but for apocalyptic thinking they have to be raised in order that we all might see the ways of God with us: the book God has written out of our stories (to recall our thinking from last week). Resurrection – at least in the Bible – is about revelation.

Talk of a resurrection in this context, then, is talk of the beginning of the end. The resurrection of Jesus is not a one-off thing in itself, an abstracted curiosity. In that context it heralds the approach of God. In this way, the resurrection is an ‘Advent’ event.

And this brings us to a surprising recurrence in the gospel narratives. On the one hand, the resurrection of Jesus heralds the approaching reign of God – the end has begun.

Yet, on the other hand, this is precisely where Jesus’ public ministry began, when everything was getting going and neither cross nor resurrection were in sight: ‘the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is near’ (Mark 1.14f; Luke puts this differently – cf. Luke 4.14-21) – the end has begun.

Jesus’ ministry begins with a heralding of the approach of the reign of God, and ends in the same way. Yet the kingdom doesn’t get nearer in the resurrection than it was in the early preaching, simply because a little more time has passed. Rather, that point is that, in being raised, the dead Jesus simply does what the living Jesus had done from the beginning: heralds the approach of God, the ‘kingdom come’ (-ing).

To push this a little further: for the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus on the one hand and, on the other hand, the preaching and ministry of Jesus (as the signs of the nearness of God) – these are the same thing. The New Testament’s answer to the question, Is God coming? is the same as its answer to the question, Is Jesus risen?

This is not a connection we often make, even as Christians. We find it easier to hold to the teaching of Jesus and to let the matter of the resurrection hang as an open question. Yet this is to miss the connection between them. Whatever the resurrection is, it does what the teachings do; whatever the teachings are they do what the resurrection does. What they each do is introduce hope into the world, a hope that God is yet coming, with ‘more’, with peace.

The difference between holding to Jesus’ teachings only and holding them in relation to the resurrection is the difference between belief and hope. Belief knows that there ‘is’ a God and knows some things about God. Belief can be greatly committed to godliness in thought and action. It can also be closed to God’s ‘more’.

Hope is repentant belief, belief which looks for yet more. The God of hope exceeds the God of belief; the God of hope is Spirit, which cannot be tied down. This is why Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry links the approach of God to repentance: the kingdom of God is near, repent and believe the good news – a word to believers. This is why the risen Jesus sends the Spirit. And it is why, in our gospel reading this morning, the coming apocalypse is good news: ‘when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.’

That God’s redemption is drawing near is the meaning of every action of those in Christ, whose every action had just that meaning. We do not merely believe. We hope, we wait for yet more light and truth, and we shape our lives now – in words and actions – to be ready for when it comes and to show others what they too, might look for.

Jesus is risen, God is coming: Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.

Posted in Sermons

25 November – The difference between a story and a book

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Reign of Christ
25/11/2018

Ruth 4:13-22
Psalm 126
John 18:33-37

In a sentence:
God makes of our stories a book, of our words a Word

Our Prime Minister advised this week that Australians are concerned about population: ‘The roads are clogged, the buses and trains are full. The schools are taking no more enrolments… They are saying: enough, enough, enough.’ Hearing ‘loud and clear’ what the people have said, the PM indicated that, to ease the strain, he would move to cut immigration to Australia.

Now, this was an economic assessment. It has to be admitted that pulpits are generally places which manifest economic incompetence and, were I to attempt to analyse what the PM said in economic terms, I would demonstrate that this pulpit is no different in that respect!

My response to the PM’s announcement, however, was not to its economics but to its devastating blandness. There is here no sense of a bigger picture, no sense of movement to a goal, no sense of history. There is apparently nowhere to go, nothing in which we are involved beyond what is already before us – or, more to the point, what is behind us. What we look forward to, or perhaps can really only expect, is an intensification of ourselves and what we have already achieved – even safer streets, even better healthcare, even quicker transit, more accessible and better tailored entertainment on a faster broadband network and, of course, longer battery life in our smart phones. These are the kinds of things our politicians promise us because, to be frank, they amount to about as much as we can imagine it is worth being promised. The kingdom has largely come and what remains to arrive approaches in the increments which come with the passage of time in a stable society.

That is to say, history is for us chronos – the tick-tock of a clock, the accumulation of events and achievements. The old Greeks knew that the god Chronos ate his children, and we new Greeks know just as well that we will be consumed. Our politics – our life together – is directed towards being consumed later rather than earlier, while we hope that – when our time comes – Time’s bite proves to be quick and his teeth sharp. In the meantime, we work so that time ticks over quietly – less traffic, more space – in a world in which there is nothing to see except what can be seen.

But time and history – what we are doing in the world – can be imagined differently. We see this in our readings from Ruth if we take care to note the distinction between the book of Ruth and the story of Ruth.

The story of Ruth is the sum of all she ever did. The story of Ruth more or less comes to its end with the birth of Obed. Most tellings of a person’s story would end in that way, be they comedy or tragedy: the achievement or tragedy of the protagonist is the end of her story. This is time and history as the sequence of events – ‘What Ruth did’ and ‘What Ruth did next.’ In the end, Chronos catches up, and Ruth does no more.

By contrast, the book of Ruth is the ‘value’ of the story. The story of Ruth becomes the book of Ruth with the addition of a few verses running on past her to David: ‘[and Obed] became the father of Jesse, [who became] the father of David…’ So far as the story of Ruth goes, these verses are unnecessary. Ruth and Boaz don’t know what happens next. David is their descendent but not their story. Things going as they usually do –especially then – people tend to have descendants; there is nothing new to see here.

The book of Ruth, however, places her beautiful but also quite normal and self-contained story within the larger context of David who – in his brilliance and brokenness – becomes a sign of God’s presence to the world. The book of Ruth requires her story but also moves beyond it or, more the point, re-casts it. Story becomes book, words become Word, time truly becomes history – a movement not merely from necessary beginning to inevitable end but from divine inception to surprising consummation.

As a society, we today know only our story; we do not know our book. We know time but not history. We have our gods but not God.

The church, of course, is not much different most of the time. If there is anything to be said for the church, it is not that our story is any better but that we expect our story – with the story of the world – to become a book. We expect to be surprised at what the plot actually turned out to be, at how inception found its way to completion.

For we hold that, while we spend our lives writing our story, God is writing a book. Growing in Christian faith is about recognising more deeply that our lives in this world are the stuff of God. These lives in themselves are not God but they carry a plot which is beyond our sense and yet which could not be carried forward without us.

This is the case whether we lives which appear worthy or unworthy of such extraordinary purpose. We noted last week that it cannot be the righteousness of Ruth and Boaz which saw them the forebears of the great king; the king was always coming, regardless. And there is plenty of human failure in the Scriptures – not least king David himself – which nevertheless becomes the vehicle of divine blessing.

But if we believe that our lives are the stuff of God – the means by which God becomes God for us and redeems us – why would we not live as if it were so?

Why would we not pray for our enemies for the sake of the book – for the sake of where history will end – rather than crush them for the sake of our own passing story? Why keep for ourselves what could be given, to link stories which will finally be bound together anyway? Migrant visas come to mind, as well as loose change dropped into a beggar’s cup. Why eat and drink mere bread and wine when it might be God himself by which we are nourished? Why would we not choose to breathe and move through Spirit instead of mere air?

In such ways we sign that our stories are more than we can yet see, that we trust in One who declares,

Where you go I will go, where you lodge I will lodge, your people shall be my people…

We trust in this One because when the promise is kept, we find ourselves caught up no longer in a bland hi‑story of a kingdom already come but in the advent of God’s anointed king.

This would be a story worth living.

Step out, then, not for more of our yesterday but for God’s tomorrow.

Posted in Sermons

18 November – Naomi, Ruth and Boaz: Glorious Ordinary

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 26
18/11/2018

Ruth 3:1-13
Psalm 46
Mark 13:1-8

In a sentence:
In the midst of all that goes on in the world, God is also ‘going on’

Something which is not immediately obvious in the story of Ruth, and yet becomes increasingly pressing once we notice it, is that God is pretty much absent from the story.

God is invoked for blessing, is blamed for Naomi’s tragedy, and is praised and thanked at the end but is not active in the story in a way which is typical of the other biblical historical narratives: God doesn’t say anything or do anything (the allusions to such action in 1.6 and 4.14 notwithstanding).

God’s part in the story is less as protagonist than as ‘context’. God is a frame within which the players in the drama do their thing, to which they refer, upon which they rest: God is the space within which Ruth and Boaz and Naomi live and move and have their being.

The effect of this is to render what actually happens in the story less important than it might first seem, or at least to shift how the action is important. Today we have heard something of what led to the marriage of Boaz and Ruth. But for the time to read it, we might have heard the whole book – for the whole of the story leads to the marriage and the birth of Obed and to the link this has to one of the very great stories of the Old Testament – the story of David. Yet if God is more context than agent in the story, then the purpose of narrating Ruth’s marriage to Boaz and the birth of their son becomes less clear.

If God were portrayed as directly active in the book, then the story would be more clearly one of the blessing of God on everyone still standing at the end, for whatever reason the blessing might have been given. This is perhaps the typical reading: Ruth and Boaz are blessed because their devotion and loyalty is something good.

But God is very much in the background. In fact, the story would be just as charming, and perhaps even easier to read and enjoy, were God not referred to at all. This suggests that the link between what the people do in the story and God’s own interest in these people is less direct than is often presumed.

It is possible to imagine that our generally very charitable assessment of the characters in the story rests on the basis of an assumption that God is responding to the situation of those characters – the tragic Naomi, the loyal Ruth and the righteous Boaz. A little more cynically, it does not take much imagination to recast Naomi as the embittered schemer, Ruth as gullible – or perhaps even as seductress – and Boaz as a good-hearted old fogy who suddenly finds he can’t believe his luck. We are far enough away culturally from the historical context that we cannot be at all confident that we understand what is really going on between Ruth and her mother-in-law, or between Ruth and Boaz on the threshing floor, or in the negotiations for Naomi’s plot of land.

The question is, does the lesson of the book as a whole change if Naomi, Ruth and Boaz are rather more morally ambiguous figures? The climax of the story would seem to be the birth of the child, and the link of the story to David. But the point cannot be that Ruth’s loyalty and openness to the God of Israel ‘earned’ her this connection to David, or even brought David forth. This is because David had six other great grandparents whose stories we do not know. We have no guarantee, and might well imagine that it could never have been given, that the story of each great grandmother and great grandfather of David was just as virtuous as we’ve been given to imagine that Ruth and Boaz were. We’ve no guarantee that they, too, are rewarded for their goodness with a link to David.

The point of the story then comes to be – or at least a point might be – that, as people go about doing what people do – grieving, promising, reaping and gleaning, scheming, seducing, marrying, giving birth – God gets on doing what God does. If it were the case that Naomi did scheme to manoeuvre Ruth into Boaz’ bed, that a simple Ruth just did what she was told and that Boaz then ran a ploy to secure her and her inheritance as his own – and then the baby was born – none of this change the context within which it all happened.

To put it differently, whatever seems to be going on in the world – for better and for worse – God also is ‘going on’ in the world. In the book of Ruth the lives of a few of us are given to us as the very life of God, the lifeblood of God. It is in and through these that God lives and moves and has his being.

This is the scandal of the incarnation: that our life could be the life of God. As we saw last week, the devotion of Ruth to Naomi – her ‘cleaving’ (1.14, AV) to Naomi – is how God is with us: where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge…

To speak of Jesus as both human and divine is not to say anything about the ‘stuff’ of which he was made, but to say that the life of God and the life of the world are properly bound together in this way. The life of God looks like the life of a human being, and the life of a human being is how God chooses to be.

This is not, however, a moral assessment; the point is not that only a ‘good’ human life is God’s lifeblood. For even Jesus is morally ambiguous; this is what the cross shows – that the life of God will not always look like the stuff of God, yet still it is.

This is the promise upon which we are to build our lives – that God makes us God’s own. This is the measure of us; there is nothing else upon which we rely to tell us who we are.

What we are and do is and is done in the God who, despite what little we can sometimes see and what little we sometimes see, brings forth from our lives the anointed one, the christ in its several guises – David the forerunner, Jesus the incarnate Son, and even the motley crew called, amazingly, Christ’s own Body. Sometimes it will look as if this happens because of us. Too often, we must confess, it will happen despite us but always and everywhere it is for us that God creates out of us, as if out of nothing (‘ex nihilo’…).

In God we have our beginning and in God we will find our end; in this way, God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.

This is Ruth’s story, and it is ours.

The story of Ruth declares to us: Do not be afraid; eat, drink, live and love – and God will take care of the rest.

Posted in Sermons

11 November – Ruth, the Christ

Posted on by

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 25
11/11/2018

Ruth 1:1-18
Psalm 146
Mark 12:38-44

It has been said of the book of Ruth that ‘the whole world takes this story to its heart’ (Naomi Rosen). It is a gently beautiful story. Tragic in its beginnings, it moves through hope to restoration. Ruth, Naomi and Boaz – the chief protagonists in the story – are filled with recognisable humanity, and the emotion and integrity of their responses to the accidents of their lives are no small part of what gives the story its charm.

Why we have Ruth in the biblical collection might be guessed from some of its principal themes. Ruth’s ‘foreignness’ as a Moabite is strongly emphasised, possibly as a counter to movements against the foreigner in Israel, such as we find in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. And there may be a lesson reinforcing the responsibility of family members to take up the cause of widows through re-marriage (‘levirate’ marriage responsibilities in which a man marries his brother’s widow). The story also serves as a prelude to the establishment of the kingship in Israel, with the last few verses identifying Ruth as the great grandmother of King David, whose story continues to unfold in the next biblical book. This last purpose is perhaps all the more provocative as it gives the very ‘Jewish’ David a very non-Jewish ancestry in a testimony to the startling freedom of God.

Whatever possible historical reason for the book or intentions of its authors, our reading of it over the next few weeks will be quite unhistorical, in usual sense of that word. We will cast the important aspects of the story as patterns for things yet to be fully revealed in the history of salvation and a long way from what could have been the intention of Ruth’s authors. This reflects the Bible’s ‘typological’ method, a patterning of one story or identity into another. A biblical ‘type,’ in this technical sense, is an event or identity which anticipates something yet to come – the ‘antitype’ (the Greek prefix ‘anti’ here meaning ‘in place of’ or ‘upon’). In this way the Bible links together events and persons which otherwise look quite different but are understood to embody the same reality, the same kinds of relationship or actions. Our question will be, In what ways might the story of Ruth, Boaz and Naomi be not simply hi/story and example but also reveal something of God in Christ?

Our focus today will be Ruth’s startling expression of devotion at the end of today’s reading:

‘Do not press me to leave you
or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people, and your God my God.
Where you die, I will die – there will I be buried.
May the Lord do thus and so to me,
and more as well, if even death parts me from you!’

This is an extraordinary promise; perhaps only the promises made in a wedding ceremony or implied in daring to bring a child into existence come close to it, although without exceeding it.

In fact, it is perhaps beyond any of us to make such an unconditional promise, fearless as it is – even reckless – and rising to contradict even death. Such is not the promise of a mortal but of a god. And here we uncover the first of our ‘unhistorical’, typological readings of this text: the word Ruth speaks to Naomi is the word God speaks to the world in the ministry of Jesus, the incarnate Son. For what else does God do in Jesus but demonstrate ‘where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God’? This is the shape of the Incarnation: Jesus is with us, as we are.

Ruth’s devotion, then, is a sign of the Christ, a ‘type’ or pattern of Christ. She – as he – is absolutely devoted to one who she is with. Reading the story typologically, however, takes us beyond seeing Ruth as simply giving a moral lesson in devotion or a call to acceptance of those who are different. These lessons are clear in the story but if Ruth’s words are what God expresses in the Incarnation, then the story puts to us that it is not Ruth (only) who is the surprising foreigner, but God.

This shifts the meaning of the ‘difference’ theme in the text. The foreignness of Ruth – or of anyone we reject as foreign here and now – is no longer a characteristic of her alone, with God beyond all our difference yet compelling us to accept what is different between us. The foreignness of those who are different to us is the foreignness of God, for it is God who is the true foreigner. The imperative to love our neighbours is an imperative to love God (which, by the way, reminds us of 1 John, with whom we’ve spent so much time this year).

In the Incarnation God commits to us fearlessly, even recklessly. This is not clear until God is revealed as the stranger, the one rejected as dangerously foreign – a revelation which must wait until even death itself is contradicted in the resurrection, and Jesus now holds a double strangeness – strangely persisting after death but still the same strange Jesus, calling us to the same repentance, the same strange vision of God-among-us.

Against our confidence that God fits – or should fit – our mode of thought, our way of being, our political aspirations, in Ruth the stranger becomes a sacrament of God.

This is why we gather each week around a table not our own, in response to an invitation we did not issue, to be fed – strangely – with the fruits of human alienation from each other and from God: the cross of a Moabite Christ.

We are so fed in order to become ourselves such strange food, foreigners devoted to those who live in alienation and grief, the unexpected possibility of reconciliation and peace.

Ruth’s word to Naomi is Jesus’ word to us, that it might become our word to those around us.

‘Where you go, I will go;
where you lodge, I will lodge;
your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’

The gospel and the law are that it cannot properly be any other way.

Posted in Sermons
« Older Entries Recent Entries »