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Pentecost 3
29/6/2025

Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Psalm 26
John 6:22-34

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A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Wesley Centre’s most recent “Conversations that matter” session. The theme was “the ethics of drug reform”, which included attention to questions of decriminalisation and the provision of safe injecting spaces for drug users. It was a comment on the latter which caught my attention and prompted a line of thought which led to today’s sermon.

In speaking of an attempt by the Sisters of Charity religious order to establish a safe injecting centre in Sydney, one of the speakers spoke of the nuns describing how they approached such proposals. First, they would ask themselves, What would Mary Aikenhead do? (Aikenhead was the founder of the order). Second, they would ask, What would Jesus do?

What struck me was the second question. The chances are that you’ve all seen “WWJD? ” logos somewhere – T-shirts or coffee cups (a friend even gave me a pack of Post-it notes, each with WWJD on them and a picture of Jesus looking as if he didn’t know! ). WWJD? – “What would Jesus do? ” – is a question often put by the more activist parts of the church as a dimension of moral reflection, but most of us have probably wondered something along those lines at one stage or another: “I don’t know what to do; What would Jesus do? ”

What struck me, however, was quite at odds with the intention of the nun and the session speaker telling her story. I realised that there is an important sense in which Jesus doesn’t ever “do” anything, or at least, Jesus does nothing along the lines of what anyone who asks, WWJD? , wants to do.

More simply and provocatively, Jesus never does anything “moral”, in the way we usually think about morality.

This needs a little unpacking, for which we’ll turn to a verse from this morning’s reading from John’s Gospel – a question to Jesus from the crowd: “What must we do to perform the works of God”? (6. 28). Notice how similar this is to WWJD. The crowds, ’ “What must we do? ”, asks, “What would you do, Jesus, to perform the work of God? ” What is the “right” thing to do?

There are a couple of reasons we might ask a question like this. Perhaps we simply want to do the “right” thing – to act justly or fairly, not to be prejudicial, or whatever. Yet it’s rarely that simple. To be able to demonstrate that I have acted rightly is very important to me. I want to know that I’ve acted rightly and I need to be able to prove it you, should you challenge me. A family spat or a long, drawn-out case in the law courts is a struggle to establish correctness of behaviour because establishing righteousness secures us against negative judgment and its consequences. To do the “right” thing is to be able to point to some common sense of what rightness is, and have others agree that we are right: “I did it because…” – and you nod your head with understanding.

“What must we do to perform the works of God? ”, the people ask Jesus. This is a question, particularly for that crowd, about how to be confident that I am living in accord with God. And this is, mostly, an enquiry into how to keep God at bay, how to keep ourselves safe from God.

But this is not simply a religious concern. If it’s not God we fear, it will be diminished reputation, or judgement or marginalisation by others. Think of all the virtue signalling that goes on today: greenwashing, or the often mindless repetition of the latest social and political memes. This is an attempt to satisfy whatever wrathful god-like power lurks in the secular social and cultural machine at any moment.

“What must we do to perform the works of God? ” asks the anxious people of Jesus, and we anxious people ask with them.

Helpfully, Jesus has an answer to this heartfelt question: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom God has sent” (6. 29; cf. 15. 8).

…Which is perhaps not so helpful. To a question about what to do, Jesus apparently proposes “having faith”, which seems to be rather a not-doing kind of thing. Consider the kinds of moral questions we ask: about safe injecting rooms, or going to war, or getting out of a marriage (or into one), or keeping money or giving it away, and so on. We ask here, “What would Jesus do? ”, in a serious search for moral guidance. But Jesus’ response, “Believe in the one whom God has sent”, doesn’t seem to take our questions seriously. Nicodemus’ exasperation from a little earlier in John’s Gospel is pertinent here, and indeed right through this Gospel: “How can such things be? ”

We must choose between two readings of all this. Either Jesus’ answer is unhelpful – by which we mean, wrong – or he is right, and the crowd has put the wrong question. Of these two options, the latter is the more interesting, because the question of that crowd way back then is still our own question. And given that, after all this time, we still ask, “Jesus, what must we do? ”, and never really know the answer, let’s wonder whether this might just be the wrong question, or asked in the wrong way, or for the wrong reason.

In what way could we be wrong here, as serious as our question might be? The answer is surprising, and it is what I proposed in passing earlier: that Jesus never acts morally. He seems moral because he often does what seem to be kind things. And because he acts with decisiveness, we get the impression that he, at least, knows what the good is. On this basis, the question “WWJD? ” looks to be a good one to ask.

But to be a miracle worker is not to be moral. It is not a moral act to turn water into wine, to walk on water or to raise the dead Lazarus. Perhaps the healing of the lame and blind looks to be a little more moral, but this would be so only if we think that we ourselves are commanded to do such things, in the same way we are commanded not to steal or tell lies or covet our neighbour’s donkey.

Jesus doesn’t act morally; rather, he creates. He fills what is empty and orders what is chaotic. He doesn’t balance up the dimensions of a problem as a self-defence against charges of being wrong or to develop a proof to God and others of righteousness. Jesus just does. He just does because of what he most fundamentally is: one with the God who sent him. This relationship exceeds any particular thing Jesus does. If we ask, how must we act to be righteous, Jesus simply acts because the question of righteousness is already answered.

To do as Jesus says, then, to “believe in the one whom God has sent” is not have “a” belief; it is to be as Jesus himself is: to live as one who fears no judgement because there is no judgement which could separate him from the God who sent him. Belief is here not “about” or “in” some assertion; it is a freedom in being, a freedom to act without the fear of judgement. What we do is not done in order to impress God; God is already sufficiently impressed by God’s own love for us.

“The truth shall set you free”, Jesus says elsewhere in John’s Gospel (8. 31-32). And what truth is this?

The truth that

God.

Loves.

The world (3. 16).

Not to “believe” in Jesus is not to be as Jesus is. Not to be in Jesus is to live in fear of God (or whomever), and so is to get God and ourselves wrong, and so is to be and to remain condemned (cf. 3. 17-21).

“What would Jesus do? ” is an anxious question, which has to do with the fear of being wrong before God or before others. “Believing in Jesus” frees us from this, if such believing is a becoming like Jesus: confident that God has us, whatever we do.

Morality still matters, of course. Doing what good we can matters, and any one of us could likely do more. But we no longer act out of fear of judgment, fear of getting it wrong. To believe in the one whom God has sent is to do as Jesus does, and what Jesus “does” – if we can call it that – is first of all to measure himself by the love God has for him. Everything else is just details.

So it is also for us: measure yourselves not by some calculated rightness of what you intend to do but by the love God has for you, and act in light of that love. What then comes from the details of our actions is God’s problem and not ours.

This is what Jesus would do, and he set us free that we can do it too.

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Trinity Sunday
15/6/2025

Romans 5:1-5
Psalm 8
John 1:1-13

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I remarked last week that “spirit” is the second most useless word we have in Christian-speak, and also that “religion” is our third most useless word. To complete the set, I remind you of what I’ve also previously said: that the most useless word we have is “god”, to which we’ll return a little later.

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Our psalmist this morning marvels that the human being seems to feature so centrally in the divine ordering of the world: “What are humans that you are mindful of them?”

But we might ourselves wonder, What indeed, is the human? To be sure, as the psalmist sings, we apparently “have dominion” over the world. But what kind of dominion? What are we with our politics and economics, our passions and desires, our loves and our prejudices, our vigour and our mortality, our potentials, our failures, our innocence and our culpability? What holds all this together? What the human is and what it feels like to be human can change with the hours. If we were to “think” the human, what image comes to mind?

What is the human, when we care to be mindful of it? This is less clear than it might first seem, so that perhaps “human” is our fourth most useless faith-word.

Let’s hold that thought for a moment as we turn to the first verses of John’s Gospel, which I’ve set next to our psalmist’s wonder. In fact, it’s only the first few words of John we’ll consider closely: “In the beginning was the Word”.

This sounds like a rather straightforward declaration, something like “the first thing was the Word”. But taking the text as it presents itself, while we don’t know what “the Word” is yet, we must see that whatever it is, this Word is not the first thing. The Word is that through which all things come into being, but it is not itself a thing. Or, if we insist that the Word must be “something”, it is not the same kind of thing as every other thing. Or, to put it differently again, if created things are “there”, we might say that the Word is not quite there.

The Word with which John begins is a not-quite-there not-thing. This makes it quite difficult to think the Word, for we must think something which is not a thing – we must think a no-thing (…“nothing”…).

And it gets worse (but only so that it might get better, so bear with me!).

This first not-thing is evocatively named “the Word”. But the thing about words is that there are no single, unique, isolated words. Every word floats on a sea of other words. Any word that does not have a dictionary-load of other words that give it contextual sense is not a word at all; it’s just a noise. And John does not say, as the physicist might, In the beginning was static.

So, while he seems to declare that the Word is the no-thing before all things, if it is a word – a thing spoken, a thing sensible – then there must be other words as well. Or, we might say, the Word suggests not a thing spoken, but a conversation. Necessarily, this conversation itself is also not a thing, because there aren’t any things “yet”. But if John’s before-all-things no-thing is “the Word”, this Word must have had something even before it, a different no-thing which is not the Word and without which the Word could not be itself (as Word). This no-thing before the Word speaks the one Word in such a way that the Word has sense – in such a way that the Word is not the first no-thing – but can be the no-thing by which all things come into being.

Now, I’m going to stop there not, because it’s not fun to say such circularly silly things but to draw attention precisely to the silliness, because it touches upon a kind of divine nonsense at the heart of Christian confession of God. This is a meaninglessness like the meaninglessness we’ve touched upon a few times lately – the meaninglessness of not having a location. The Word, and the one who speaks the Word, don’t have a location in the usual sense. There is nothing – no-thing within which they fit. God has no “in”. The God of Christian faith is not-quite-there because this God is a “thing” like no other thing we know. This is a God who is before all things, and after them, and perhaps even between them, but is not one of those things.

This is where the word “God’ begins to manifest its deep uselessness to Christian faith-talk: we tend to assume that God is a thing like every other thing and then struggle over where – or whether – the God-thing can be found among all the other things. But this is not to look for God at all, but for an idol – a thing in the world which could not have been before it and could not be after it.

If we wanted to, we could press all this into a fuller exposition of the kind of no-thing which God is, and see roughly how this accords with the trinitarian confession, in deference to this particular day in the church’s calendar.

But let it be enough to hear that we tend to mistake the kind of thing the word “God” points to. And, with that in mind, let’s get go back to our poet’s, “What are humans that you are mindful of them?”

How silly, he proclaims: how marvellous; what a wonder!

But this is not only wonder at the place of the human in God’s eyes. It is the conviction and wonder that it is indeed God’s eyes that see us in this way. Not us but God is the miracle here: God sees us like this, and so this is what we are.

Why does this matter? Because when God looks at us, what God sees is an “image” of God’s own self, of God’s own being (Genesis 1.27f). How does a thing image a no-thing? We image God in the mode of not quite being “there”, of no longer quite being “things”.

As God is not quite there, so also are we not quite there. There is a no-thingliness about us, as there is about God. We are properly more (or, we could just as well say, less) than all the things we touch and use and love and fear. We are not merely our chemistry or biology, our impulses or our effects, our loves or our loathings. These things are part of us, but there is a crucial no-thingness about us – a “dimension” which doesn’t match the mere thingliness of the rest of the world.

This means that, properly, we can’t say what we are in worldly terms, in the same way that God cannot be said in worldly terms.

This is a bit different from where we started, when I suggested that we struggle to sort the many things we are into an order, to say finally what we are. We struggle in this because we tend to think only in terms of the confusing array of things we do and are done to us, and then try to make sense of them.

But the mistake here – the sin, even – is to imagine that we can calculate ourselves, that we can reduce ourselves here to mere cogs operating according to complex laws and that there is somewhere a hidden solution to all we feel is unresolved about ourselves.

Everything we do and everything which is done to us is, indeed, part of us. And matters.

But we are more than this. There is a proper “not yet” about us, an appropriate “not quite there-ness”, an unthinkable-ness, a built-in incompleteness which is our being in but also somehow “above” everything else. This above-ness originates in God’s distinction from all things but being for all things. And it has its worldly reality in our distinction from each other, while also being given to be there for each other. We cannot say what we are, we are not-quite-there yet, because there is another not-quite-there sitting next to us who needs us or can give us what we need. And this is our incomplete completeness.

The word “God” is the most useless of all our religious – and non-religious – words unless, when we say it, it sets us free from ourselves – from our fears and anxieties, our calculations and controls – and, in all this, overcomes our distance from the God who is not quite there and opens us up to the not-yet-there other who shares this world with us.

It all sounds pretty complicated, I suppose, but this is not because God is complicated but rather because we have made ourselves so, imagining God wrongly and so getting ourselves wrong.

To put it all more simply, as John the Evangelist does: Love. Love one another, and everything else will fall into place, and you will be complete.

This is the God in and by which we live and move and have our being.

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Pentecost
8/6/2025

Romans 8:14-17
Psalm 104
John 14:12-17, 25-27

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You’ve heard me say before, but it bears repeating again, that the word “spirit” is the second-most useless word in the Christian vocabulary.

But more than just repeat myself, I want today to connect this with the kinds of things I’ve been saying over the last few weeks about meaning and location in time and space: that meaning is location. In particular, I want to extend this to spirit is location.

The reason “spirit” is so unhelpful as a “Christian” word is that, in our modern context, it arrives as an idea alien to our deeply materialist understanding of ourselves and the world. It’s an “outside” word, and “spiritual” people seem either to be reaching out of the real world or wanting to escape from it.

The problem with this broadly predominant way of thinking is that we are all – so-called “spiritual” or not – always animated by some spirit or other: we are deeply spirit-ed. We speak of the “spirit of the age” – a very real thing which connects us to each other, passes between us, carries our words and gives meaning to our actions. We live according to a capitalist spirit or a socialist one, a patriarchal one or a more egalitarian one. Like meaning – even as meaning – spirit is location, is society, is politics.

To be human is to be spiritual in this broadest sense. “Getting spiritual” is about changing spirits, not turning from some unspirited reality into a spiritual one. And so the only – only – question about spirit is what the spirit is which animates us, what that spirit tells us about ourselves,and whether our particular spirituality enhances life – our life and others’ – or diminishes it.

Though we’ve heard from John’s Gospel on the Holy Spirit this morning, we’ll not look directly at that text but keep it in the back of our minds as we consider the spirit in (and of) the ecumenical Creeds we often recite together in worship, and will again in a little while in a slightly adjusted form of the Nicene Creed.

A principal characteristic of the Creed is its apparent chronological structure: it seems to move from a beginning to an end. Thus, creation of the world comes first, then history and its salvation, and then finally the “end things”. The creed reads like a history. And we say of the claims in the creed that we “believe” them (at least, more or less! ), including the way they are presented.

But while, at the end, we say that we believe “in the Holy Spirit”, what we said earlier about our always being “in” a spirit still applies. That is, it is from within some spirit-ed sense of the world, that we say that we believe in the Spirit.

This sounds rather tangled, but the point is that what we believe is tempered by our location – the meaning or the spirit we bring to that believing. Perhaps more simply: what we think “spirit” is affects what we think we believe. In our modern situation, this means that something like the Creed looks like a “spiritual” commitment, unlike the other commitments we have. As “spiritual” people, here’s a list of stuff we subscribe to.

But, if we are all – “religious” or not (religion being the third most useless word Christians have) – living out of some spirit, then Christians do better to claim their own peculiar spirituality from the outset by beginning with the third article of the Creed and not the first. In view of our all having a spirituality out of which we experience and act in the world, starting the Creed here declares from the outset: this is the Spirit in which we live. And, “We believe in the church”: this is the kind of human community this Spirit makes possible – forgiveness, communion, the marginalisation of death as a power. And so we might understand that third article as a whole slightly differently, as well: less we believe “in” the Holy Spirit than we believe “within” the Holy Spirit.

Now, instead of three sequential stages of history from creation through redemption to consummation, we are opened up to a different experience of ourselves and of God. To believe within the Holy Spirit is not then to believe “in” the church or the community of saints, the reconciled life or the overcoming of the power of death (as the Creed continues), it is to believe “within” these things. The social and political space of the church and the kinds of relationships we are called to become is oriented towards a particular kind of humanity.

This humanity is that which the second article treats: the humanity of Jesus himself. The Holy Spirit is precisely the spirit of Christ, and so forms us into human beings in the world as Jesus himself was human in the world. And our formation in the likeness of his humanity is a formation in the likeness of his experience of God.

A people spirited in this way begin to look and feel like the humanity of Jesus. This is quite a different “outcome” of reading the Creed than the usual top-down way, by which Jesus appears as a kind of “link” to the end things.

And all this changes also our experience of God. On a reading which begins with the Spirit, the faith of the Creed doesn’t begin with the increasingly controversial declaration of faith in God the Father or with the widely misunderstood notion of creation. These are now the last things the church comes to grasp, and not the prerequisites of all belief. The so-called “Fatherhood” of God has nothing to do with masculinity but with the possibility that we might experience God as Jesus did, who just happened to use “Father” to name the one who sent him.

And, perhaps most surprisingly, “creation” is now not what comes first but what comes last. That is, we now know the world as a creation only when we share in the humanity and devotion of Jesus himself. Creation is now not the basis for all that happens in history but the goal of all that happens in history: we become creatures when finally, in this Spirit, we know God as Jesus did – entering into Jesus’ own free and open-to-God humanity.

Much more could be said about this but it is enough today if the creed might become for us more than simply a well-ordered list of things which should be said about God.

Thinking the creed backwards can be a kind of “Spirit-ual” relocating of ourselves by which we might catch a glimpse of something new in what is so familiar.

Starting the creed – or at least, starting unthinkingly – with the first article can be to get to the beginning too soon. Or be to read it in the wrong spirit. Our confession is not only what we believe but how we have come to believe it, which is also about what we have, or are, to become. Instead of reading the creed as a kind of world history, a “macro” history from a chronological beginning to its end, thinking the creed “backwards” tells a history which is not so much a providing of in-formation as it is the beginning of a reformation – a re-form-ation.

It is God the Spirit who enables us to confess, that it might, in the end, indeed be God that we confess.

Let the spirit in which we confess our faith then, be the Spirit which is its very possibility, that our faith be not simply stuff we believe but what and whose we are to become. Amen.

In part adapted from February 9 2014 [Off RCL]

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Easter 7
1/6/2025

Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 36
John 12:1-8

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The best thing about my car is the sound system. A 2010 Renault Koleos comes with a Bose sound system with a 5.1 speaker configuration. This is to say that it has 5 tweeters and mid-range speakers arranged across the front of the cabin, and a subwoofer at the back, nestled inside the spare tyre under the cargo area (you have to remove the speaker to get the spare wheel out).

In addition to this impressive hardware – and this is for those who’ve seen that movie – you can turn the volume up all the way to “32”! Not that I often push the sound to 32 because, at that level, things do start to distort a bit. Although, because it’s a Bose system, it’s not the speakers that are distorting but the panels and contents of the car (occupants included). Or that’s what it feels like.

The point of all this is just to say that, at a more moderate setting of about 20, it’s possible to create an enveloping cocoon of sound in the cabin, whether it’s the soundtrack of Mission Impossible 2, a thumping Icelandic rock blues band, or something more…refined.

A couple of weeks back, I was returning from a meeting across town in the more refined mode. As I pulled up at some traffic lights on Alexandra Parade, Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” was playing – in English, “Mirror in the mirror” – an exquisitely simple piece made of piano and violin. As with Mary’s perfume in the gospel reading today, the sound of the music filled the cabin of the car, wrapping around me as I waited for the lights to change.

And then there stepped out, in front of the first row of cars at the red lights, one of those street-performer juggler people, dressed in a striped t-shirt, mounting a 4- or 5-foot unicycle and beginning to toss and catch his skittles in what he hoped would be a pay-per-view performance.

And I could not help but laugh out loud at the incongruity, at the mismatch of the soundtrack with the moving images!

But it wasn’t that the juggler was out of place (or that the music was out of place), as if the presence of the one diminished the other. It was what they were together: each an elevation of the other, each heightened, enhanced and enriched by the other, each now inexplicably more than itself because the other is there. And as important as the experience itself was that the moment could not have been planned, and could hardly be repeated. It was an instant, an event, a “revelation”.

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Our Gospel reading today is a familiar one to most of us. Familiar too is its disorienting effect, because we might well find ourselves uncomfortably by Judas’ side in his criticism of Mary. And this would be to find ourselves the target of Jesus’ response to Judas and having to make sense of what feels like a deflating declaration: “You will always have the poor with you”.

We want to argue the morals here.

But, as with last week’s episode in the temple, so also here: moral divisions miss the gospel point. The smell of the perfume filled the whole house. And, again, as we saw last week, this house is more than the few rooms in which everyone was gathered. It is the house – the “oikos” in Greek – which extends to the dimensions of the “oik”-onomy, our environmental “oik”-ology and our social and political relations in the “oik”-umené. For just a moment, Mary’s oil sanctifies everything.

But if perfume were sound rather than smell, Judas’ response would be that the soundtrack and the images don’t match. He divides the world as moralism always does: now is not the place, not the time, for that. Whether from the perspective of his own purported greed or from the point of view of a genuine concern for the poor, for Judas the time and place are wrong: the context diminishes Mary’s devotion and that devotion diminishes the context. There is here no mutual elevation by which the needy world is lifted along with the lifting up of Christ; Judas simply does what moral thinking always does, divides what should be together. The elevation of Jesus in the anointing looks to Judas to be a dismissal of the needy world rather than an embracing and elevation. Jesus’ response contradicts: what is done to the poor is done to me; what is done to me is done to the poor.

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I could not help but laugh out loud at my traffic light juggler, and I knew instantly that he’d earned what he’d performed to receive. I passed him a 2-dollar coin through the window just as the traffic began to move with the green and he had to scoot to safety as the traffic began to move again.

But as I pulled away myself, I realised I’d missed the opportunity to do what Mary did: I should have given him the fifty I had in my wallet – not because he was that good but because it’s not often we get to see the deep truth for which the world is made: that each previously contradictory part elevate every other part, like the image of a mirror in a mirror, reflecting again and again, back and forth from greater and greater depth, the perfume of truth enveloping us, filling our senses, not despite whatever else is going on but because it is going on.

I should have given him the fifty, because that would have been the best way to respond, not to him but to the gift of such a world when it comes. This is because he’d have had no idea why I’d given him so much, would himself have been taken by surprise, elevated, given a story to tell of an unexpected ecstatic moment he’d experienced in the midst of the mundane. He too, for at least that moment, would have been made to stop and to notice in wonder: the world can be like this – a gift can be given. And this casts everything in a new light.

The ordinariness of our houses and lives is fit to be filled with the perfume of this truth. It is for this reason that Mary so lavishly anoints the one who raised her brother Lazarus, the one who overcomes the divisive power of death and its lethal echoes in our own dividing up of the world into bad and good, then and now.

The ordinariness of our houses and lives is fit to be filled with the perfume of this truth. It is for this reason that Mary so lavishly anoints the one who raised her brother Lazarus, the one who overcomes the divisive power of death and its lethal echoes in our own dividing up of the world into bad and good, the worthy and the unworthy.

And we are to become the same: present in the world as those elevated by grace to become the possibility of elevating grace for others. Not only our lives but all lives are fit to be filled with the perfume of grace.

Let us then live that this might be more fully realised, to God’s greater glory and to the richer humanity of all.