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15 April – Not afraid of the dark

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Easter 3
15/4/2018

1 John 1:5-2:2
Psalm 4
Luke 24:36b-48

It is an assumption at the heart of contemporary Western religious (and non-religious) thought that God is simple. This means that God is one, undivided, without paradox or complexity in Godself. Not all religious thought holds to the simplicity of God as a basic principle (think, for example, of the complexity of the Greek mythological world) but it is fundamental for people like us in places like this, and it has ancient roots.

(To say that God is simple is not to say that speaking about God is always thought to be simple, but the difficultly of speaking of God is usually attributed to our poor articulation or the built-in poverty of human language rather than to how and how God actually is).

An instance of the idea of the simplicity of God appears in our reading from 1 John today: ‘God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all.’ This is not much different from, ‘God is one, and in God there is no division’ or ‘God is pure, without blemish.’ Christians need have no particular problem with such ways of talking about God, although this will depend on the consequences drawn from a particular statement of God’s simplicity.

Such consequences are just the issue with which John wrestles in our text today. Any statement about God which is worth making will have consequences for us. More specifically, anything we say about God will imply certain things to be said about us: theology implies anthropology.

Reading between the lines in our passage this morning, the general affirmation that ‘God is light’ has been extended by some in that community to imply that there is light without darkness in those who believe in, or reside within, or walk with such a God. The simplicity of God is extended to a simplicity in God’s people: God is whole, undivided, pure and light – and so are we, the people who know this about God.

To this John has to say, No: ‘if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us’ (1.8). But crucial here is why John says this. The reason is not, to get just a little anachronistic, paedophile priests. John is not looking around at the church and seeing that it is still caught in the grip of sin. It is undeniable that sin continues in those who confess that God is light, but the good news about Jesus – that through him sin is forgiven (1.9, 2.2) – is not an answer to our sense for the sin which is in and about us. If it were, the sinfulness of humankind would be the first word of the church. Indeed, the church sometimes begins here but without benefit for anyone, because God is then constructed out of our darkness.

But John doesn’t contrast an idea that God is light with an idea of human sinfulness, one abstract thought to counter another. Rather, his awareness of human sin comes from the God who is light: ‘if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar and his word is not in us.’ (It’s not quite clear whether the ‘him’ here refers to God or to Christ but the distinction does not matter much for John’s argument). God has said something, and the question is whether what has been said is true or not.

What, then, does God ‘say’?

God ‘says’: Jesus, in the flesh.

For John, the nature of God as light and the sinful character of human existence are not contradictory ideas to be balanced with each other but are, rather, to be found together in the person of Jesus. It becomes clearer further into the letter that the problem of how to understand human sin is caught up with the question of who Jesus is and how he was. In particular, the question of the humanity – the fleshliness – of Jesus seems to have been the basis of split in the community: those who denied that Jesus was the full, fleshy incarnation of God and died a fleshy death on the cross left John and his community. (We will likely consider that more closely as we move further into the letter).

But John insists that the cross cannot be set aside; whatever the brilliance of the light which God is, there is a bloody mess in its midst. If God is light, then the crisis of the cross is light, is part of a Christian experience and understanding of God. When John says ‘God is light’ he means that the ‘crossed’ God is light – the God and Father of, and with, Jesus the crucified.

And if the cross is a part of what we have to say about God, then it is part of what we say about ourselves before God. Which is why the centre of all Christian conviction is not human sin left behind, but forgiveness – the point at which light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it, though the darkness continues (John 1.5).  ‘We have an advocate with the Father,’ John says, ‘Jesus Christ the righteous.’

Life in this God is a confessional life – a life which confesses how God is (this is our Creed) – and then confesses whatever shadows in us God’s light shows to require the confession of contrition. If Jesus Christ the righteous could be crucified by those who saw the cross as God’s righteous judgement on him, then the power of sin in human life is more than can be imagined.

John is in no doubt – and neither should we be – that if anyone is in Christ then she or he ought no longer to sin. But the ‘ought’ is contravened not only by moral weakness in us; this is too simple. The ‘ought’ awaits also the final consummation of all things, when God’s light does not transport us on a rainbow out of the world but makes us-in-the-world new.

Our part is simply to be made new, and new, and new, as often as it is necessary, and so to become a pointer to the promise that God will restore all things. We are then, not afraid of the dark – the dark in us or around us – because God overcomes it, and will overcome it.

As John says, ‘We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world’. On him we ever rest, as we get on with the business of living.

Let us, then, rest in him, and get on with it.

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8 April – Evangelism as Desire

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Easter 2
8/4/2018

1 John 1:1-4
Psalm 133
John 20:19-31

The first four words in our translation from 1 John this morning make all the difference to the sense of the text, and not for the better. Rather, they suck most of the life out of it.

The opening words of the passage in the English – ‘We declare to you’ – are not in the Greek text (they are repeated here from later in the text [v2a]), and their insertion flattens the passage into a kind of creedal statement: this was from the beginning. We heard it, we saw it, we touched it, it was the word of life, and so on.

But the Greek is breathless, almost ecstatic: ‘That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we have looked at, that which our hands have touched…’ With each phrase the reader’s – or listener’s – interest builds up: what is the ‘that’ to which John refers? An answer is then given as a kind of plateau – ‘the word of life’ – before the build-up continues: this life was revealed, and we have seen and we testify and we declare to you… And finally comes the climax, that which is to be declared: this is the eternal life that was with the Father.

But as important as the what which is declared here is the why of his interest in those whom John addresses. The why is, perhaps, surprising. The work of prophets and evangelists is generally cast as being for the benefit of those to whom the message is directed. The evangelist proclaims, that you might be ‘saved’, whatever ‘saved’ might mean: Repent now, lest the proverbial bus take you out tonight on your way home and it is then too late (although no skin off my nose!)

There is some of this in the letter from John: eternal life is with the Father; our fellowship is with the Father (and with his Son); we declare these things so that you may have fellowship with us and, so, with the Father. There is a clear interest in the well-being of those to whom John writes.

But there is another driving motivation, perhaps even the dominant one: ‘We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete’. John needs a positive response to his proclamation so that his community’s own experience of God might be filled out, so that their joy may be complete. It is not that those to whom he writes have something which John’s faithful community needs. This is certainly implied in many churches today, where the recent rediscovery of the call to mission is affected (or even effected) by the decline of the church and the need for more people in the pews to keep the show on the road. This kind of desire for the other springs from a lack of confidence in the gospel, and often has us questioning what once we thought was from the beginning, what we had heard, seen, and touched.

John’s desire is nothing like this. It springs not from doubt about God’s work in Christ but from confidence: this is the word of life, the eternal life which was with the Father, and we have seen it. The message itself compels John to write and to invite.

But he also has an interest in the response of his readers: ‘I want to be joyful, but I can’t be joyful, till God makes you joyful too!’ John hungers for those to whom he writes. This is not a hunger which would see them consumed, and turned into John himself. We can’t always affirm this some of the mission strategies anxious churches might adopt. John’s hunger is for the joy that begets joy.

Imagine if the church’s call to ‘mission’ were not merely to express God’s love for the world – what God ‘gives’ the world – but to express God’s desire for the world – what God ‘needs’ from the world? Mission as desire is how God works in the world. The work of Christ is the expression of the desire of God for the ‘chosen’ people and, through them, for the whole of the world. Without them, God’s own joy is incomplete. This is the internal necessity of the resurrection, that the extent of God’s desire for the world not be left denied in the cross but be manifest to all who could bear it.

It ought not to surprise us that, if God’s desire is what makes it possible for us to gather to this place, it is Godly desire we are also to take from it.

In the Scriptures of desire – the beautiful Song of Solomon – we read,

3.1Upon my bed at night
I sought him whom my soul loves;
I sought him, but found him not;
I called him, but he gave no answer.
3.2 ‘I will rise now and go about the city,
in the streets and in the squares;
I will seek him whom my soul loves.’
I sought him, but found him not.

Interpreting the Songs is notoriously difficult but we could with good reason surmise that the one who rises from bed in search of ‘whom my soul loves’ is both the God who again and again ventured out to find his lost people, and those people themselves, when they are most Godlike, who do the same in God’s stead. Evangelism as imperative, as command, is mere law – and is as boring and as terrifying as laws tend to be. Evangelism as desire makes our address to the world something entirely different. Such evangelism might still be hard work but it would also be, with John’s, breathless, filled with anticipation, bordering on the ecstatic:

that which we have heard, that which has penetrated to the depths of who we are,

that which has known us and yet loved us, that which has washed us and fed us and fitted us to speak this word – the very word of life – this we declare to you, that you might know it too, that our joy might be completed by yours, in God.

She who arose from her bed in the Songs to search for “him who my soul loves” finally finds him. ‘When I found him whom my soul loves…I held him, and would not let him go.’

This is the meaning of the resurrection – the Father finds again the lost Son. This re-discovery is hidden from us, as the event of the resurrection itself is hidden, but we see its effect in the appearance of the re-found Jesus to his disciples. Jesus appears that they may be surprised by joy: surprised to find their hearts’ desire in him whom they rejected, and so discover in him the depth of God’s desire for them.

If the risen one is the crucified one – if he bears the marks of the nails in his hands and the spear in his side, as Thomas knew that he should – then what must finally be heard on our lips is something like John’s own testimony:

What we have heard, what we have seen, what we have touched and tasted – the very word of life – to this we testify, and we invite you: listen, and look, and touch and taste, and see that the Lord is good.

It remains, then, only that such a lost-and-found people – even we gathered here today – grow not only in desire for God but in the desire of God, in Godly desire, ‘that the world may know’.

Let us, then, pray to grow.

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1 April – Resurrection as forgiveness

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Easter Sunday
1/4/2018

Psalm 118
John 20:1-18

‘Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb,’ came to the place of the dead. There was nothing left to do but what is always done for the dead, and Magdalene came for that. She discovered, on this occasion, that it was not a place of the dead, after all.

This is the story of the resurrection of Jesus, and it is one the church has believed since that day. But how we believe the story is crucial, for it is surely unbelievable – so unbelievable that even belief will not always believe it well.

Let us, then, for argument’s sake, allow that Magdalene is addressed by a living Jesus after his death on the cross, in the way described by John. How do we enter into this experience, today?

What typically happens for us at this distance is that the location of the resurrection remains in the story – in the past. Whereas Magdalene returned to the tomb for the dead Jesus, we tend to go to the story, Magdalene-at-the-tomb, for the risen Jesus. She looks for him in the tomb, we look for him around her and what is said to have happened to her (and to the others). Our approach to the resurrection, then, ends up being quite close to Magdalene’s approach to the crucified Jesus, a sorry march to the past, to the place of the dead. The only difference is that for her it is Jesus who is entombed and a thing of the past while for us it is the resurrection itself. And now we are surely lost, because a past resurrection is no more useful to us than a corpse. In the end, we have to entomb them both for the sake of our own safety. Thus the confession ‘on the third day he rose again’ is uncomfortable, even on the lips of many Christians.

All of this brings us to the need for a subtle but important distinction: the church does not believe in the resurrection of Jesus; we believe in the continuing presence and address of the crucified Lord. The past event of any purported resuscitation may be of no interest except as a curiosity: so what if Jesus or someone else stopped being dead? But if the content of the resurrection is that Jesus continues to address and engage with his disciples, then we are dealing with something wholly new.

The distinction the resurrection in itself and the continuing presence of the crucified Lord can be put differently: when we speak of Easter we speak not of the idea of a general resurrection from a general death. We speak not of the possibility of resurrection in itself, although this is where we nearly always start. The specifics of the story are crucial (note, in passing, that ‘crucial’ literally means ‘of a cross’): it is the crucified Jesus who is raised, and no other.

This is to say that the risen Jesus only has interest for us if the crucified Jesus does; the resurrection only does something to or for us if the cross did.

What then, did the crucifixion do? In the light of Easter, it manifested the misunderstanding and fear which arises in God’s people when God comes too close. ‘Crucify him’ becomes the imperative, and it is done. The resurrection of Jesus answers not his mere death but our rejection of him, of which his death on the cross is a sign.

All of this is important because it moves the resurrection out of the realm of a magical subversion of natural law into the sphere of history: how we relate to each other and to God. The resurrection now becomes an answer to an answer, a judgement of a judgement. It is the rebuttal of the cross, understood to be the failure of Jesus, for that is what it signified to his friends and enemies alike. The resurrection is the re-presentation of the cross, now understood as the failure of God’s people.

What passes between Good Friday and Easter is, then, not death and life in themselves, understood as the beating, and cessation, and beating again of a heart. What passes between Good Friday and Easter is sin and forgiveness.

To say that Jesus is risen – in the way that his is risen in the gospels – is to say that we might be raised, which is to say that we might be forgiven. Life after death is not for Christian faith primarily about what happens after we die; it is about the possibility of forgiveness, the awakening of the walking dead.

And so, to return to our reading this morning, Magdalene hears from Jesus: ‘Do not hold on to me’. To paraphrase: ‘What has happened is not that you have gotten me back, lucky you, give me hug!’ What has happened is that I embrace you and others again, despite it all – despite the fear, the anxiety, the distrust, the over-enthusiasm, the opposition, the despair. I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. We are restored, reconnected, reconciled to each other, in God.

Here the catastrophe of Good Friday is overcome, here the fearful disciples are forgiven and re-embraced. Here the great prayer of Jesus that the disciples be one in him (John 17), in God, is answered.

And so Magdalene runs to the disciples with the message, I have seen the Lord. He takes us back. And God is ours.

And ours.

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30 March – Seeing that we are blind

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Good Friday
30/3/2018

Isaiah 52:13-53:8
Psalm 22
Mark 15:1-15

In the light of Easter, Good Friday lays bare the mystery at the heart of Christian confession.

And yet, what is laid bare is a confounding thing. What we come to see clearly is that we are blind when it comes to God. It is the burden of today’s (rather short!) sermon to make some sense of such revealed blindness.

We begin with the affirmation that, for the church, the story of Good Friday reveals something; we come to the story in order to see. The trial narratives of the gospels relate a struggle over the identity of Jesus. The who of Jesus – his name – is clear enough but the what is not, which is why such titles as ‘king’, ‘son of God’ and ‘son of man’ feature at this point in the story.

As later readers, and most of us already being of Christian conviction, we read the gospel accounts with the knowledge that Jesus is the Son of God, the Son of Man, the King of the Jews. And so it might seem that our eyes have been opened, that we are at least quantitatively different from those in the passion narrative, that we have had added to us knowledge of what they only hoped for, or flatly denied. From this distance, it seems that we see and know as they did not.

To imagine this, however, is find ourselves outside of the passion narrative. The story of those people’s struggle with Jesus is not, now, our story. If that struggle is not ours, then neither is the blessing ours, which at least some of them finally received.

For the story to be good news – for it reveals to us that Jesus is the Christ – it must also reveal that we are those in the story who do not recognise this. We come to see and yet at the same time we see that we do not see, that we are blind. The revelation of something about the identity of Jesus himself is not a sufficient outcome of the passion narratives, if they are to be good news for us. There is bad news which comes with the good. Jesus is only Christ to sinners; the recognition of who Jesus is brings the recognition of how we are. For Jesus is always only Christ as the crucified one – crucified by the likes of us.

Perhaps this sounds like hopeless pessimism and a radical denigration of the human. It is, in fact, precisely the opposite. It has been said that there is blessedness in knowing that, before God, I am always in the wrong (Kierkegaard, Either/Or II). The blessedness is that there is nothing upon which I can depend but God’s loving grace. This would be a cause for great anxiety if we then had to wait for that grace, wondering whether in fact it would ever come. But it has already come. The grace of God, in the form of the risen Jesus’ return in love to his disciples, is precisely what reveals that I am in the wrong in the first place. To know myself to be wrong before God is to know myself to be forgiven, for it is the light of forgiveness which cast the shadows of sin.

If Jesus is Lord – which is what the resurrection shows – then I am blind to the fact, and that is good news because the resurrection which reveals the catastrophe of Good Friday is not a random nature miracle but an affective moral one. There is no justifying the cry, ‘Crucify him,’ which will be found on the lips of all whom God approaches too closely. But, thanks be to God, God is not just: sinners will be forgiven.

What a difference it would make, were we to believe that.

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18 March – Forgiveness as good as innocence

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Lent 5
18/3/2018

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51
John 12:20-33

…this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

This is surely a prophecy most beautiful. It is perhaps surprising, then, given how moving Jeremiah’s account of the new covenant is, that the New Testament makes little use of Jeremiah’s saying. There is a reference to a new covenant in some of the sayings of Jesus around the last supper but this would make perfect sense if Jeremiah had never spoken of a new covenant. And the whole passage we have heard from Jeremiah today is quoted in the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, but there it is used for the letter’s own particular polemical purposes.

This is not to say Jeremiah’s prophecy is not known, or is largely forgotten by the New Testament, but to say that it is not necessary for the New Testament. Rather, the New Testament’s understanding of what happens with Jesus as much interprets Jeremiah, as Jeremiah might help to interpret Jesus. Put differently, Christians don’t get to God on the basis of the promise in Jeremiah alone; we have to read Jeremiah here through the cross.

Jeremiah promises a new covenant ‘unlike’ the first. The ‘unlikeness’ is that the first covenant was broken but this one will not be. The sign of the unbreakability of the new covenant is that the law will be written within the being of the covenant people: ‘I will write it on their hearts’. Alongside this we hear, ‘no longer shall they say to each other, “Know the Lord,”’ for all shall already know the Lord, because God will have forgiven ‘their iniquity, and [will] remember their sin no more.’

Jeremiah piles up a new covenant, an interior covenant, a heart covenant, a new kind of knowledge of God, and binds this up with forgiveness of sin. If we are to comprehend this, and find ourselves comprehended by it, then each element must carry its full weight: new, interior, heart, knowledge, forgiveness of sin.

We could tease out each of these elements one at a time, but instead we’ll come at Jeremiah’s new covenant from the angle of its unbreakability. How can the covenant be unbreakable when there is nothing new about the human covenant partners themselves?

The unbreakability is not in that the covenant is made of very tough stuff – a diamond standard covenant. The covenant cannot be broken because it is made of brokenness, of what is already broken. Jeremiah’s prophecy is not a utopic vision. It is spoken into the devastating fall of Jerusalem, interpreted as the cost of breaking the covenant with God. ‘I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more’ is the basis of the heart-covenant God promises. These are broken hearts, restored. And so the knowledge of God promised here is not immediate, direct-line awareness of God without reference to world or history. This intimate knowledge comes through the agony of the broken covenant. The heart which knows God in this way knows forgiveness, knows itself as a heart which has been torn apart but is now restored. Jeremiah does not speak a word of comfort to hurting people; he proclaims forgiveness to sinners.

The unbreakable covenant is unbreakable because it is made of such brokenness. This is the interiority of the new covenant; this is how the new covenant gets inside of us.

It is here the cross becomes important because, if nothing else, it stands for the harsh realities of human being. But this harsh reality is not the physical suffering of crucifixion. It is, rather, precisely the kind of covenant-breaking against which Jeremiah and the other prophets preached. The resurrection of Jesus presents to us that Jesus was the embodiment of the covenant, the presence of God actively reigning in a human life. The resurrection opens our eyes to the fact that the cross was sheer catastrophe: the rejection of the covenant embodied in Jesus. The fall of Jerusalem and the cross of Jesus are the same kind of thing: signs of the broken covenant.

In what way is the new covenant ‘in Jesus’ blood’ made from brokenness? Here the liturgy helps, and the breaking of bread and blessing of a cup in particular. In the distribution of the elements of bread and wine, we hear that they are the body and the blood of Christ broken and poured out ‘for you’ in a new covenant. In its own way, this is quite right. But it doesn’t mean that the body and the blood are a kind of ‘price’ God pays for us to be reconciled: ‘God did this for you’. If this were what it meant then we would be right to object to the cross and the body-and-blood language, although not for the reason many do.

We typically object to the notion that God might have killed someone on our behalf – particularly God’s own ‘Son’, and then to the ‘icky-ness’ of the implied cannibalism. But these are secondary distractions which arise from a more fundamental misunderstanding, which is to imagine that what happens between us and God is in fact external to us, a transaction between God and we’re-not-sure-who that doesn’t quite involve us even though we are the beneficiaries. This is the problem with the ‘for you’ language: it suggests that we are beneficiaries of a third-party exchange.

But if Jeremiah is right – if God does go to the heart of the matter in dealing with us – then the body and blood of Jesus are broken ‘for’ us only if they are also broken by us. Here is the ‘interiority’ of the new covenant. Our failure in our relationship with God – the cross, of which the bread and the wine is the sign – is the stuff out of which God builds a new relationship, a new “Body of Christ”. The new covenant is made of the broken shards of the old covenant.

This can be so only because this is the kind of God we are dealing with here. God is most God when creating something out of nothing. The nothing in Jeremiah’s preaching is the broken people of Judah. The nothing in the resurrection is the broken body of Jesus. The something created is the new covenant, the Body of Christ made again from the broken body of Christ.

To receive bread and wine at the Lord’s Table is to participate in an act of forgiveness. It is to be forgiven for what the bread and the wine represent – rejection of the law of love and the freedom of God.

Two thousand years later, of course, it is not possible for us to be personally accountable for the crucifixion of Jesus. But the demands of the law of love remain and we cannot be confident that we have lived, loved, given ‘enough’. (Even this way of putting the problem creates the problem again – as if there could be ‘enough’ love). And the terrifying freedom of God continues to rampage, asking more than we want to give, seemingly even breaking God’s own commandments.

The bread and the cup are all bodies broken by anger or neglect, all denied requests for love, all refusals of mercy. The bread and the cup are all fallings-short of the law of love.

But the bread and the cup are also employed in this space as the sign of God’s freedom to forgive – that most fundamental violation of demands of justice and the point at which love breaks free of law and is just love: God inside us, we inside God.

This prophecy most beautiful of Jeremiah is no sentimental longing to be over it all. It knows that we are caught up in ‘it all’ – as much perpetrators as victims. This being the case, it declares that forgiveness is as good as innocence and it invites us, then, to be forgiven, and to forgive.

This is the new covenant Jesus brings.

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11 March – Snake therapy

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Lent 4
11/3/2018

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107
John 3:14-21

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life”.

For obvious reasons most of us don’t like snakes. We’re not the first to have this reaction. Our forebears in the faith first had to contend with snakes in their wilderness wanderings. We hear that they were rebellious with their lot: “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” There is no food, no water. Then the story goes: the Lord sent poisonous serpents among them, and they bit the people and many died. Moses got the job of getting rid of them by making a bronze serpent, putting it on a pole, so that whenever a person was bitten they would look at the bronze serpent and live.

What do we make of that? Well, the story comes from a very early source in which magic and magical cures are prominent. But the form in which we have the story shows that it is now used to emphasize the capacity of a beleaguered people to discover a trust in Yahweh despite all appearances.

It is worth knowing not only that the snake was a well known reptile of the wilderness, but was, in fact, worshipped by many of the Hebrews’ neighbouring tribes. The crucial thing to recognise, however, is that, unlike for us, the snake represented not only evil and destruction but also healing and hope. This symbol of the healing snake is still alive for us in what you might recall as the physician’s symbol – once shown on a car’s number plate – which shows the snake entwined around the wand of Esclepius, the god of healing. The symbol of the snake was also associated with the Greek god Hermes, the messenger god, who for the Romans became the god Mercury. A doctor in our not so distant past, who making home visits driving a Ford Mercury, was literally a god of healing!

To recognise this double significance of the snake is crucial, because only on this basis will we understand the gospel today: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up that whoever believes in him may have eternal life”.

The point is that Jesus now takes the place of the serpent. When the Gospel of John uses the phrase “lifted up” that is a synonym in the first place for the Cross. Somewhere else Jesus says: “I if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all people to me “. Hearing this it is almost certain that we will assume that this being lifted up refers to his resurrection or ascension.  But for John being “lifted up” carries the powerful image of an immobile – but at the same time of a consenting – Christ, arms and feet pinned to the Cross, passively crucified, physically lifted off the ground by the imperial forces of Caesar with the connivance of the Jewish religious authorities. Immobile, but glorious in his immobility crying: “It is accomplished”.

So this “lifting up” carries the same twofold significance as does the bronze serpent. The man on the Cross, like the raised up serpent, represents not only evil and destruction, but also healing and restoration.  Jesus is bitten by human poison, yet is at the same time the antidote of that poison.

However, though the texts appear to be similar, there is yet this significant difference. The ancient healing of the serpent benefitted only the immediate Hebrews, whereas the healing effected by the raising up of the Son of man is to be universal.  This we are promised in the “whoever”: “whoever believes in him may have eternal life”, or perhaps the even better translation,” whoever believes may have eternal life in him”. The Hebrews had only to look at the bronze serpent to experience healing. The “whoever” – you, me, anyone – must also see, see now not with the eyes of the body since that is not possible because the lifting up of the physical cross is an event long lost in the mists of time. But we, too, must see – see with theological eyes. For John, this “lifting up” on the Cross is not for such eyes something that happened a long time ago in a far different place. Rather, the eyes of faith see the origin of the “lifting up” in the eternal love of God for his creation, and its intention as the healing of all who believe. For John, “to see” is in this sense “to believe”, and “to believe” is “to see” – really see in the very depths of what is happening here and now. What matters is what is happening in the present act of believing, not what happened however long ago.

How significant this insistence on the present is when we reckon with the fact that most people imagine that faith is about whether or not they can believe in the so-called facts of a long departed event. How can we get people to see this difference? In the final analysis, it is the basic task of mission today, yet it seems to be the hardest task of all. For our culture is mesmerised by the claim of facts, and as far as it understands Christian faith, past facts, once to believe them, increasingly to deny them.

This is why today’s text is so important. It could be as revolutionary in the 21st century as it was in the 2nd. What it offers is a gift that is open- ended. For the “whoever” is not merely someone else – it is held out again and again to contradict whoever has assumed that the decision of faith is something always to be settled once and for all. The “whoever” stands as a permanent potential destruction of the assumed gulf between insiders and outsiders. It calls in question all who have replaced the act of faith with a settled “belief”, whether that be positive or negative. That is to say, it calls in question all who are happier with the noun “belief” rather than the verb “to believe”. The gospel is always about verbs, not nouns. Nouns, you recall, describe a state or condition; verbs speak of action, always holding out a prospect of new possibilities.

Such we have here – whoever “believes”, not whoever “has” belief. We hear from time to time of someone who has, as the saying goes,
“lost their faith”.  What that really means is that they never had faith in the first place, since faith is something that, by the definition of the gospel, is not possible to lose. It simply ceases to inform one’s life.

Arguably the promise of this “whoever believes”, compared with the conventional view of belief as a noun, is responsible for so many indifferent, sad or angry people on the boundary. But it also might reassure anxious people at the very centre who, for example, unhappy with Creeds, are not quite sure if their belief is justified.

So it is salutary to have this text before us in Lent – this time of penitence and reflection. It brings the truth of God and the truth of our lives into a living union. “Who God is” is taken care of in the lifting up of the Son of man, in his own body imbibing our poison and achieving our healing. “Who we are” is taken care of in the “whoever” which invites us to this exchange in the always renewed act of faith, transforming the perishing, often poisoned, experience of our existence into a permanent offer of abundant life which nothing can harm.

So – have a renewed respect for snakes!

 

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4 March – As good as it gets

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Lent 3
4/3/2018

Exodus 20:1-17
Psalm 19
John 2:13-22

Last week I spoke about How not to Fall on Your Face before God or, at least, how to minimise the pain of the gift of being in the presence of God.

A first falling on your face before God is unavoidable. This is the form of meeting with God and knowing that it is God we meet. Such a falling marks the gift of God – that God wills to meet us with grace and blessing.

But, in the stories of Abraham and Peter, we saw a second kind of falling before God which marked not God’s gift but human presumption. Given that falling on your face is a painful experience – even when in holy awe – the best way not to fall on your face in this second way is not to get up again after the first fall.

Yet it remains the case that we do get up again. And again. And again, even if each time it – and the subsequent fall – is in quite different ways.

Our readings today relate to two of the gifts of God – the gift of the law and the gift of the Temple – two occasions for an appropriate falling before God. These are marks of God’s covenant with Israel, pointers to God’s presence to Israel, and to how Israel is to be present to God. Each is, unequivocally, a blessing, conveying the Who and the How and the Where of God’s relationship with Israel. The life of the people of God is filled with such markers – commandments and ethics, temples and liturgies, creeds and confessions.

But, having been bowled over by the gift of God, the people of God then climb to their feet. This is what we do. Commandments become separated from the one who commands them. (We might think of all those lists of the Commandments in churches which omit the crucial opening lines telling who it is who gives the commandments, and what he has done). And the life of a Temple becomes separated from the One to be met within it; we don’t need gospel readings to tell us that this happens. This is the cause of the wrong kind of falling on our face: separating the gift from the giver.

There is nothing wrong with Temples and creeds and liturgies and codes of conduct. In fact, all human existence is filled with them in one form or another, so it ought to be no surprise that God uses such things to deal with us, or provides them that we might deal with God. In fact we are right to be suspicious of talk about God which denies that God uses – even needs – words and community and buildings in this way.

This is to say that the Temple and the Commandments matter more than we are likely to imagine, for they are sacramental. Sacraments are things which look like one thing but are in fact something else. What is important in this is that the ‘something else’ is not inherent in the sacrament; it comes from God. God gives the sacrament and it only ‘works’ when it remains God’s. God uses the mundane – a bath for baptism, a meal for thanksgiving, a temple, an ethical code – to get to us, and that we might get to God.

The basis for our saying this is in what Jesus throws to us religious in the Temple story this morning: ‘Tear down this temple, and I will build it up again in three days’. Christians, of course, know what this means because the text tells us: Jesus casts himself as the temple, and there’s a hint here at his coming passion and resurrection.

But this is not enough. There is more here than the shift of the presence of God from the stones of the temple to the flesh of Jesus. ‘Tear this temple down, and I will build it up again’. The temple to be built up is the same temple which was torn down. The Jesus who is resurrected is the Jesus who is crucified, who stands before the temple authorities and the freshly minted disciples in all his ordinariness. This is tantamount to saying, ‘This is what the rebuilt temple will look like: it doesn’t get any better than this’.

And that is why Jesus is crucified: because we want it to be better than this. ‘What sign can you show us for doing this?’, comes the challenge to Jesus after he has taken the whip to the temple marketplace, and he responds, ‘Tear it down and I’ll build it up’. But the sign is not the dazzling miracle of a resurrection – a neat enough trick in itself.  The sign is that the risen one is the very one who stands before them in the Temple courtyard. Knock me down, and I will get up again. God looks like this ordinary Jesus. Or like a Temple. Or like Commandments on stone tablets.

The extraordinary character of the work of God in Jesus is in the ordinariness of Jesus: this body, this flesh, this hungry stomach, these dirty feet, this bloody nakedness on a cross. All these things God can make a temple. To declare as we do at Christmas, that the Word became flesh, is not to say merely that it became meat. This flesh was not only body and blood but was all that become body and blood, and all that body and blood become. The Word became all that we need in order to be ourselves, and all that we create.

I am, Jesus says, what the Temple and the Commandments and the prayers and the sacrifices and the festivals – or even you – can be when God is active in them, and in you.

To fall on our face for the wrong reason is to have separated the gift from the giver, and usually precisely because we think that this is required for God’s own sake. Think again of Abraham’s derisive laughter and Peter’s rebuke of Jesus, and their proposals of how God might do things better. And so in the end a crucifixion seems necessary for God’s own sake, for here we assert that Jesus could not possibly be the sanctuary of God.

The gospel, however, is that God will not be separated from the gift, and comes and comes and comes again to reclaim our flesh as his own. This is the resurrection of Jesus. Here God declares not only who Jesus was, but that how Jesus – his ordinariness – is part of his identity as the divine Son. In this sense, the resurrection must be of a recognisable ‘body’ with a history, and not merely a ghostly apparition.

Having reclaimed the gift of fleshliness as his own, God then gives the gift again. And this is our resurrection. We are raised into the ordinariness of our lives: our work, our relationships, our temples and codes. These are the places where God will meet us because they are where we are.

You have torn it down, God says, but I will raise it up again and give it back to you. And then you will know me, and be amazed.

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25 February – How not to fall on your face

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Lent 2
25/2/2018

Genesis 17:1-10, 15-19
Psalm 22
Mark 8:27-38

Conventional wisdom has it that falling on your face is, generally, not a good idea.

And yet in our story this morning, in which God repeats the covenant promise to Abraham, the patriarch falls on his face twice – once for better, once for worse.

For the better, Abraham’s first fall is in holy awe. God declares ‘I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous’. This is, for Abraham, a very good thing. Falling on his face is an appropriate response to the presence of one whose intention is sheer, overwhelming gift.

But then, for the worse, Abraham falls on his face with laughter at the suggestion that he and Sarah would now share a child. This is not happy laughter but derisive, and Sarah later laughs in the same way (Genesis 18.12ff). ‘Come on God, let’s not be silly’, and he takes God aside to show him Ishmael: ‘The son I already have can be your means.’ And God says, No. So much for at least one human reception of divine gift.

Yet, when we swing across to the gospel we see the same dynamic. In response to the question about the identity of Jesus, Peter apparently answers perfectly: You are the Christ. In Matthew’s more expansive account Jesus congratulates Peter for recognising who Jesus is. We are here at the midpoint climax of Mark’s gospel: Jesus accepts the title ‘Christ’, and the very next episode is the Transfiguration of Jesus: This is my Son; here is the sheer gift of the God. Peter’s declaration is a falling down moment of holy awe, even if he remains upright.

But then comes the derision. Jesus tells of his coming rejection and suffering at the hands of the people and Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him – another falling down in mocking laughter. And Jesus says, No.

If, on account of their significance in the biblical stories, we were to take Abraham and Peter as types – as models or patterns – of how the holy people receive the holy God – then there is something about us which both enables us to recognise God, and causes us not to.

What are we to do with this? I’ve titled this sermon, How not to fall on your face, to which we now come: the ‘application’ of what we’ve seen in the readings today.

It hurts just as much whether you fall on your face with holy awe or with derisive dismissal of God’s proposals. But there is a difference between the pain of these two falls: one is God’s gift and the other is God’s curse.

The gift is the shock which wakes us up in the way that only a fall can. And we need to be woken up, sleepwalkers through life that we are.

The curse is God’s response to our presumption to speak too quickly. Having just woken and opened our eyes, we imagine they are already adjusted to the light. No longer asleep but blinded, we find God to be a stumbling block and we hit the ground again, now unnecessarily.

Falling on your face for the better is an entirely appropriate response to a God whose approach fills and illuminates and completes far beyond your wildest dreams.

The way to avoid falling on your face for the worse is simply not to get up after the first fall. Presumably Abraham recovered from his initial shock and climbed to his feet before he hit the ground the second time. For Peter, the difference between a fall for the better and one for the worse is the difference between answering a question Jesus had asked him and presuming to answer a question Jesus had not asked.

Christian discipleship is about not getting up after falling on your face that first time. This is what it means to take up a cross and follow Jesus.

This is all metaphorical, of course. I’m not talking about ‘giving up’ or refusing ‘to get back on that horse,’ or staying on the ground as a doormat for others or even for God. It is important to counter such defeatist mindsets when we meet them but we are far beyond the power of positive thinking here.

Carrying our cross, or falling on our face for the better, is a matter of adopting an appropriate posture before a God who draws the world as it is into the world which is promised by such crazy means as a Geriatric Conception (let alone a virginal one) and a crucified Christ. For these are the same thing: God pressing through what we believe him to be, to become the God he wills yet to be.

To take up a cross and to follow Jesus is to look up from the ground and to blink into the light at the sight of an impossible child in an impossible place – Jesus on the cross. It is to let the light which that sight is slowly to wash out the shadows, slowly to come into focus. It is to see that the last thing God should do is the only thing God does.

To take up our cross and follow, or to remain prostrate in holy awe, is to live in thanksgiving, that even the unholiness of the holy people of God is no barrier to the overwhelming gift of God.

According to your preference, then: Take up Your Cross and, or just Fall on Your Face, and watch as God calls into existence things as yet unimagined and raises the dead – even us.

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18 February – Living with a forgetful God

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Lent 1
18/2/2018

Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25
Mark 1:9-15

Noah-and-the-ark is perhaps the best known of all Bible stories, not least because it involves animals, and animals make great toys, and so nearly every kid gets to play Noah-and-the-ark at some stage or other. But what we all know about the story is typically the form and not the substance. The form of the story is Noah and the animals and the rainbow. The substance is, How to keep God under control or, perhaps better, Living with a forgetful God.

Of course, notions of keeping God under control, or God’s forgetting of his promises, are impious. But, as it happens, that such thoughts are necessary comes from God himself. We know well enough the flow of the Noah story. There is sinfulness across the face of the earth, except for Noah and his family; God resolves to wash away all humankind but them; the flood comes and goes; God resolves not to do this again and gives the rainbow as a sign of this resolution. It is the rainbow stage of the story which matters for God-control purposes.

As a sign, the rainbow is not a mere sign, in that it could have been something else. A rainbow bends in the way an archer’s bow bends; more than a sign, it is a symbol, in that it resembles and so reminds of an archer’s bow. The rainbow signs that God has laid down his weapon and will not attack again: “I have put my bow in the sky.”

But notice to whom the sign-symbol is given. Specifically, it is not given to us that we be reminded; it is given to God, in order that God not forget the promise, Never Again. The rainbow declares that the people stand only when God remembers the covenant; only God can control God. The point at which heaven and earth meet is marked with something of such scale that God cannot miss it, and in such a way that we know God cannot miss it.

This pre-historical story with its ancient mythological symbolism seems a long way from the much less mythical gospel narratives of the ministry of Jesus. Yet it is not so far as we might first think. For Jesus is himself the point at which heaven and earth meet; Jesus is himself the New Testament’s rainbow.

But at the same time Jesus’ ministry culminates in the cross, a crisis of divine forgetfulness: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, forgotten me? (Mark 15.34). It is all the more poignant that Jesus should cry out so with the baptismal declaration still ringing in his ears: You are my Son, the Beloved. The cry from the cross is precisely a challenge to God that a covenant has been forgotten, despite the faithfulness of Jesus. Such a death for Jesus ought to be impossible, for how can God forget the Beloved? Yet the chaotic flood of human politics, religion and morality washes him away. This was not “the plan” as if it were supposed to happen; nothing is supposed to happen except that God remembers.

Has God forgotten, forsaken here? Yes, and No, as it always is between us and God. Yes, for what else could the cross be but God turning away? No, for what else is a resurrection but God remembering a beloved? The cross and the resurrection, the forgetting and the remembering, have to be held together in this way.

But it is a tight tangle of thought threads here, almost nonsensical. The language of forgetfulness and remembering makes no sense if we begin with the conviction that God knows everything and so cannot forget. But the Scriptures reduce neither God nor us to such simple notions. Simple ideas cannot reflect the experience of what passes between God and the world, between life and death, between remembrance and forgetfulness. These are never poles between which applies a strict logic; God-and-the-world requires its own way of thinking, part of which is a tangle of remembering-and-forgetting.

Jesus is baptised into our world, into the realm in which it is imagined – and so experienced – that God has forgotten. And so his being in the world is, specifically, as one of being forgotten and being remembered by God. The very baptism of Jesus at the outset of his ministry involves the recognition of Jesus by God – the re-cognition, the re-thinking, re-calling of him: You are my Son, the Beloved. God re‑cognises, remembers, Jesus as the Beloved, and this is the basis of Jesus’ own life and joy: the joy of finding himself thought again by God.

And us? God recognises us as beloved in another sign, given for divine and human remembrance. The sacrament of broken bread and blest cup is a drama of remembered forgottenness: a broken body, healed.

Do this for the remembrance of me.

The remembrance here is no mere “thinking about old stuff”; it is a more potently a making real and present here and now what Jesus is. What is Jesus? The forgotten, forsaken world, remembered. And, when remembered, healed, because healing is what happens when God remembers.

The rainbow is an enormous sign at the point where heaven and earth meet. God cannot not but see it and be reminded of how he has promised the two shall be related.

The enormity of the sign which is Jesus himself is not spatial but relational: My Son, the Beloved. This God cannot forget, and it is God’s remembrance of Jesus which is the sign given to us. We break bread and bless a cup, we eat and drink, that God’s remembering of the forsaken Jesus might again be among us, that we-in-him might know the joy of being remembered.

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14 February – Light for the dark

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Ash Wednesday
14/2/2018

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Psalm 51
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-20

Over the next six weeks we take time to reflect on “treasure,” the theme of our reading from Matthew this evening.

Our readings thought Lent will take us through the unfolding of the covenant of God with Israel, and this we will hear in the context of Jesus’ ministry of engagement with Israel, fulfilling and renewing that covenant.

It is a story of love and conflict, of confusion and re-orientation. But it is not simply a story of to-and-fro; it goes somewhere. The scriptural story is an unfolding revelation, an account of gradually dawning light.

We gather this evening to mark the beginning of this process as a beginning in darkness, symbolised in the imposition of ash. We are from dust, and we return to dust, and there is no treasure to be had along the way which will endure. All that is earthly goes the way of all the earth. This ancient sign of the ashes speaks of the frailty and uncertainty of human life, and marks the penitence of a people prone to treasure the wrong things.

But the gospel is also that there is light – a treasure which shines in the dark and will not be overcome by it. The light illuminates, and calls forth, and makes clear the path which leads not to more dust but to life.

Our repentance, then, anticipates God’s forgiveness – our recognition of our breaking of the covenant takes place in the light of its renewal.

With this in mind, let us make our confession…

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