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4 February – God is not a god

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Epiphany 5
4/2/2018

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147
1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Let us consider the following proposition: if God is God, then God is not a god.

Chances are that makes no sense to almost anyone – yet – but it matters. It matters because we need constantly to work on how we speak about God, and it matters because we how speak about God affects how we speak about ourselves, and how we act towards each other. A sense for God is implied in how we relate to each other.

Last week we noted that polytheism – the belief that there is more than one god – is the natural environment of the Scriptures. In such an environment religious conviction is not about whether you believe “that” there is a god (our contemporary question), but about which of the many candidates for divinity in your life you’ve committed to. In such an environment, the Scriptural imperative is: believe in this god – the Lord, Yahweh – for this is the one which matters.

Of course, things which concern us deeply are never that simple. At the same time, parts of the Scriptures do insist that there is only one god and that the other candidates are not gods.

This, however, has very a strange effect. If the others are not gods, then God – the one god – is not a god either. In order for there to be “a” god, there has to be more than one.

To justify this assertion, let’s consider the less controversial matter of the plurality of “Davids.” Davids are useful for our purposes because they are everywhere. On account of this, we might say “Oh, we have a David in our congregation” (or, in our case, four or five Davids). A David is a kind of thing, of which there are many instances.

By contrast, we don’t say that we live in an Australia. There is only one Australia (at least, as a geographical entity); it is not a kind of thing which Australias are, and so the name and the thing coincide.

As it is with Davids and Australias, so it is also with gods. If there are many gods, each is god; if there is but one God, God is not “a” god, but a name of a unique “thing”.

This brings us to Isaiah’s vision of God this morning. The second half of the book of Isaiah is characterised by an extraordinary sense of the uniqueness of the God of Israel, summed up in verse 25 today: “To whom shall you compare me?”

But an enormous theological problem is now beginning to open up. If there is nothing with which to compare God – if God is not a god – then from where do we get our ideas about God’s godness? We might think we know what “a” god is, but if God is not a god, then… what? With Davids, it’s easy. There are many Davids because Davidness is comparable and transferrable; this is why they were named David in the first place. We bestow something when we name a child: perhaps we honour an ancestor and hope for something of the same in our son, or perhaps we simply resonate with a cultural vibe which mysteriously communicates that now is the time for more Davids (which is why Davids tend to come in generational clusters).

But Isaiah’s vision pulls this rug out from under us. If the one which Israel and the Church designates as “God” is not a god, then what we think a god is, or whether we think we need a god, tells us nothing useful about this One: “To whom shall you compare me?” To no one, and to nothing.

The biblical answer to the whence of a proper sense for God is God’s words and actions: God is what God says and does. But I don’t want to develop this much further today. Rather, I want to move to how the incomparability of God affects the way we relate to each other, for there is political or social effect of such a sense for God.

Last week we noted the relationship between the plurality of the gods and the plurality of our fears. The gods divide us along the lines of our fears. This has always been recognised. A single religious conviction is a useful political concept for stability within national borders (cf. the post-Reformation notion, Cuius regio, eius religio, which stabilised nations by allowing monarchs to specify which of the warring religious factions would be “the” religion of that country).

But unity of conviction for political or philosophical convenience simply shifts the problem of divided hearts and minds, or just ignores it. The political solution of a single religion with a single god moves the problem of division from communities within the national borders to the borders themselves. The philosophical solution of a single god or the naïve proposal that there is no god are both abstractions which simply don’t take seriously how we actually are.

For how we are is that we are divided. But it’s important that we are not divided simply because we have gods; we also have gods because we are divided. The gods are extensions of us. They are ourselves with our contrary fears and aspirations, writ large. It is because I can compare myself with you that I can invoke a contrary god against you; the gods are many things to many people. This comparability and contrariness runs very, very deep. The political and philosophical solutions don’t work because the divisions are not overcome; they are either pushed into the background or ignored.

By contrast, consider Paul’s declaration in our epistle this morning: I have become all things to all people. He speaks here of his particular vocation as evangelist but, adapted for each particular vocation, this is how each Christian disciple is called – and enabled to be – if the God of the church is truly “incomparable”.

Paul’s being “all things” is not in any sense about him being “flexible”. It is about seeing the barriers between himself and all others as broken down. He sees others not in terms of their difference from him – the comparability of their fears and gods – but in terms of their commonality with him, in Christ.

This would be socially and religiously arrogant were it not that Paul himself has been subject to precisely the same redefinition. What he once thought was a matter of comparative wisdom and strength in himself – his God over against the gods of others – has been stripped away. What he has met in the crucified and risen Jesus is the sovereign freedom of the One who does not fear the cross, who is not bound by death. The incomparability of the God Isaiah proclaims is the freedom of the God of encountered in Jesus, and this is the God in whom Paul now lives and moves. It is God’s divine freedom which frees Paul, on the one hand, and binds him to his neighbours, on the other.

God does not divide because he is free to be against all who would wrongly claim him as an ally, and free to be for all who can do nothing other than simply wait on him. This for-ness and against-ness – of the same people – is the incomparability of the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ. All other putative gods are for us and against our enemies, such that we can only be some things for some people.

This God enables and calls us to more.

With Paul, then, let us allow ourselves to be found within the incomparable God, that we and those we meet might know something of the blessing of the God who keeps his distance from any one of us, that he might be the God of love for all of us.

Amen.

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28 January – On the fear of God

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Epiphany 4
28/1/2018

1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Psalm 111
Mark 1:21-28

To endeavour to learn a new language – particularly to speak it – is to wander into dangerous territory. Even when the words are not lacking, nuances of meaning are often hidden from the learner. Great confusion and embarrassment await those brave who risk a strange tongue.

The world of Scripture is a new language, even when translated into the vulgar tongue. It, also, is riddled with nuance and hidden meaning to trip up the presumptuous novice.

Let’s consider the closing thought of our psalmist this morning: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” If a beginning in wisdom is taken to be a good thing, is “the fear of the Lord” the best – or even a good – way to such beginning? Ought we not rather love God? We know fear as a basis of relationship, and we agree that love is a much more desirable way to relate. Or, perhaps, we might try to bridge the gap between fear and love by reading “fear” as “respect.” “Respect” allows that God could be feared but need not be.

Linguistic refinements like this make an apology for how the psalmist portrays God here. If love is good and fear is bad, then relating to God on the basis of fear is unpalatable. We refine the text to do God a favour. We ought, however, to keep in mind that God generally gets along quite well without our help, and that the text generally means what it says: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This doesn’t yet make the sentiment any more palatable but, like any strange mode of expression, it might give us pause: what could this mean?

The distance between our culture and context of Scripture is often obscured by things we imagine we have in common, like cognates between two languages. The Bible is interested in God, and we are interested in God, thus we presume that when the Bible refers to God it does so in the same way that we do. Yet “God” – as a concept – is for us something quite different from its conceptualisation in the Scriptures. In particular, we tend towards the idea that there is only one God, and “God” is in fact a viable name for God. Strictly speaking, God can only be God’s name if there is one God. In the Scriptures, however, the basic assumption is that there are many gods – as we heard from Paul this morning – and that “God” is not so much a name as a type of thing.

In fact it’s much messier than that, but this much helps us to get inside our psalmist’s thinking. For we can say that, in the Scriptures, a god stands for something the present or absence of which we fear. Do we fear the absence of life or money? Then Death and Mammon become gods. Do you fear the absence of power? Then that which gives power, mythologised as a god, becomes what we fear, lest it withdraw that power. Because there are many who fear such things, and often in contradiction of each other, there are many gods. The important thing is, then, not whether you fear “God” but whether you fear the right one among the many feared gods: the god properly feared if we are going to fear anything.

For us today, “God” means almost nothing like this. Whereas the atmosphere of the Scriptures is polytheism, philosophical pressure has driven us to monotheism. It is this monotheism which makes us squirm – especially in the churches – when it comes to “the fear of the Lord”. Because the gods are no longer a given, we imagine that “mission” is about making the gods – or just “God” – palatable again, and love is more palatable than fear.

But the Scriptures know us. Even if our modern world is emptied of gods, it remains filled with fears. And these fears work on us as they always have. The “‑isms” of our world indicate our new pantheon: racism, sexism, nationalism, fundamentalism, conservatism, progressivism, scientism, Islamism… each invoked out of fear. Knowing the human to be a creature which fears, the scriptural question is simply: What is best feared?

For this reason the psalmist proposes fear not of a generic “God” but of “the Lord.” It is a subtle nuance which the novice in religious language will miss but it is crucial, and is really only evident in the speaking: Not “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” as if we might relate to the Lord in some other way but “the fear of the Lord,” as if there were other things we might fear. This nuance moves the declaration from our concern about the appropriate emotional response to a God who might or might not be there, to the question of which realities in our life are actually worth worrying about.

“The Lord” – Yahweh, Jehovah – is the name of one God among many, one candidate for our allegiance among many. “There are many Lords and many gods”, Paul says, “but for us the one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Do you fear? Fear this one.

But why? Precisely because of the love which we might want prematurely to edit into the psalmist’s thought to make him declare that the love of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. There are as many lords and gods as there are contradictory fears and desires in us; these things we serve and invoke over against each other. In Paul this morning we saw the logic of fear and love set in their proper place in relation to God. Yes, there are real fears – real enough to cause division in the young Christian community about what could be eaten, and so who could eat with whom. A fear of the gods of old and a fear of a loss of freedom clashed to fracture the community; dividing the communal mind and rendering asunder the communal body is what fear does.

The unity of the body, or its division, is the sign of the Spirit active within it, the sign of what is feared. There are many lords and many gods, Paul acknowledges, but for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. All things are from and to the Father; this we might call the “generic” function of a god: the beginning and the purpose of the world. The specifically Christian nuance is in the “through” used with respect to Jesus: “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”

To live in and through the crucified Jesus is to live in and through the victim of human fear. It is to see where fear takes us – the cross – and what it takes from us, even the God we might think demands the cross.

But, just so, to live through the crucified Jesus is also to see grace in action because our fear and loathing is not met with God’s own. In the world fear begets fear; in heaven, fear is just one more human characteristic God can use to reveal love and bring healing. The fruit of fear is a broken body and blood poured out. Grace is the broken body raised and given to teach that with this God there is nothing to fear.

To learn a new language is to wander into dangerous territory. Even when the words are not lacking, nuances of meaning are often hidden from the learner. But when God speaks our language – takes our words and actions seriously – there is no embarrassment, even when God uses those words and or interprets our actions in the wrong way. God’s creative work with us is to change our grammar, to speak our words and ways in such a manner as to re-make us and, in this, to make possible us a new beginning in wisdom and in love.

The fear of this Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever. (Ps 111.10).

[Amen.]

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21 January – God’s new soundtrack for our lives

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Epiphany 3
21/1/2018

1 Corinthians 7:29-32a
Psalm 62
Mark 1:14-20

It is very strange to watch a movie with the soundtrack turned off. You see the action and hear the dialogue but the clues as to how to interpret it all are missing. For the soundtrack serves to tell us how to “feel” about what we are seeing.[1] It colours our experience of the drama.

From Paul we have heard this morning not, of course, about soundtracks but about the way in which Christians live most faithfully.

…let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it.

Live “as if not,” Paul counsels, although this is not a stoic counsel. He proposes here not a detachment from the world’s challenges and disappointments but rather an awareness of what time it is:

…the appointed time has grown short… the present form of this world is passing away.

What has happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus causes a re-reading of the time in which we live, and so a re-reading of the end or goal towards which we are living. To live “as if not” is to change the meaning of what we see and do. It is to change the soundtrack behind the action of our lives.

The action itself doesn’t much change, at least to begin with. Our relationships continue, our sorrows and our joys, our buying and selling and the other dealings which make up our lives. But a changed sense of the times, and so a changed sense of our end, changes also how we experience what happens around us.

And so Paul does not say Do not mourn but mourn “as if not”: for there is a joy in Christian conviction which colours all passing sadness. He does not say Do not rejoice but rejoice “as if not”: there is a realism in Christian conviction which recognises that the Kingdom is not yet fully come. He does not say Do not deal in worldly things but deal “as if not”: as if they were not merely worldly things but realities within which God might dwell, with blessing.

For the times, and the world in time, are different if Jesus is Lord: they are not closed in on what we can only see. This is why we can tell the story of a crucified man “as if not” an abject failure but the very triumph of God. It is why we can eat and drink “as if not” bread and wine but the very substance of God’s life with and for us. We can see in what we have not possessions but common wealth. We can see in another’s need not merely their misfortune or fault but our responsibility.

Christian discipleship is life to a particular soundtrack, a particular set of interpretations. It is an experience of life as charged with God, coloured by God, resonating with more than the old sound track will allow us to hear.

And, in the end, the change of sound track will be involve more than simply a different beat, a different mood. The action itself will begin to change because of the different experiences. Different relationships will develop, different experiences will cause mourning or joy, different things will be bought and sold, because values shift when the times change and the end is something different. To live “as if not” is to begin to change the world. Live like this, Paul says.

When the psalmist declares You, Yahweh, are my God, and Jesus calls Follow me, we hear precisely what we’ve heard from Paul: live as if the world where not what you have imagined so far but according to God’s own imagination.

And the world will move.

And you will begin truly to live.

By the grace of God, may this world and life be ever more fully ours, to God’s greater glory and our richer humanity. Amen

[1] For a demonstration of how easily a story can be manipulated with a bit of careful cutting and a different soundtrack, it’s worth looking at some of the spoof movie trailers on the internet, casting such as Mary Poppins or Frozen as horror movies, or The Silence of the Lambs as a romantic comedy.

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14 January – Samuel’s Ear

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Epiphany 2
14/1/2018

1 Samuel 3:1-20
Song of Hannah
John 1:43-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

Listening is a virtuous act. It takes a deliberate choice, to stop talking, to stop offering your own point of view. It is a part of ‘loving your neighbour’. ‘Listen, my son’ is the first line of Benedict’s Rule, the guide for monastic communities around the world. Careful listening prepares one for life.

Listening for God is part of this. Generations in the biblical stories have listened for the voice of God in their mind, in their dreams. Creation began with such a word: ‘In time beyond our dreaming, you brought forth life out of darkness’, our prayer at the Table today will say, echoing John’s Gospel. God spoke, and the Word became flesh.

Do modern people listen in the same way? We may have outgrown the pieties of the past, but have we also ceased paying attention? If we have rejected the idea of hearing an actual voice, because people who do are put in mental hospitals, are we not ourselves rather too literal? Do we listen to the word of the scriptures, to the word in hymns and prayers – as well as those of our friends and lovers? Listening for a word which will change our world, the world in which we have sometimes confined ourselves.

For myself, I have never ‘heard’ God speak in the literal sense, but I am who and where I am because of the unmistakable conviction one morning in Queen’s College Chapel that the Law was not my calling.

Do you remember this children’s hymn?

Oh, give me Samuel’s ear.
The open ear, O Lord,
Alive and quick to hear
Each whisper of Thy word!                 [Hushed was the evening hymn]

This morning, we have sung Frances Ridley Havergal’s Master, speak, thy servant heareth, also a touch sentimental and decidedly an expression of individual piety, but both imprison this story in childhood, safe and secure childhood. Such words and quivering tunes remove the sting from a biblical story, and that is a heinous crime. Sentiment can be the enemy of truth.

Our own modernity can also stand in the way of hearing the word from God. I studied in an era when we were told to search for holiness on the streets of the ‘secular city’. We were told that the Bible had nothing to say because it was written for a ‘pre-industrial world’.  So, listening for the word of God in a book begun some 28 centuries ago is a challenge.

We must acknowledge that Samuel’s is a different world from ours, yet by no means strange. Of course, their gods have unfamiliar names, but people of power tried to harness them to their own ends, using human beings as sacrifices in more ways than one.  Of course, it is odd that the Ark of the Covenant should be wheeled about in battle as if it were a nuclear weapon (I Sam. 5 & 6). Fertility has different issues around it in our own times, and so on – but we are naïve if we think that it is not the same human world. Even the desire for a king, which YHWH was so reluctant to deliver, yet bade Samuel do so, was called for because the tribes would like to see ‘Israel made great again’. In fact, that is the deep purpose behind the whole book of Samuel. But it’s not strange. Its translation needs thought, and imagination, because we too pray for change.

Samuel’s saga begins with a tale of a man with two wives, the first with several children, the second with none, and the very recognizable way in which the first exercises emotional blackmail. Then Hannah prays for a child.  The text says, ‘As she continued praying before the LORD, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was speaking in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard’; many people today would recognize that way of praying – ‘charismatic prayer’. Eli thought she was drunk; so the crowds thought the disciples were at Pentecost! And we cannot sing Hannah’s song of triumph, from chapter 2, without Mary’s song in the Gospel echoing in our minds, their celebration of a God who does new things.

The story of the boy Samuel is a kind of dream sequence in the middle of some hard political facts.  There are Eli’s family problems: ‘Now the sons of Eli were worthless men; they had no regard for the LORD’ (2:12). There is the ongoing conflict with the Philistines.  A mysterious visitor pronounces doom on Eli’s priestly line. A story we thought suitable for children now engages the adults. The LORD has spoken to Samuel.

The first thing is that the relationship of Samuel to Eli has been reversed. Samuel has gained authority, and Eli has lost it. The youth is now in charge; the ancient priest must serve him. Eli told Samuel how to listen; and Samuel stands now in God’s presence, his ears open.  Truly, as Hannah had sung: the Lord raises up and brings down.

Samuel kept silence that night. Next morning, Eli called for Samuel, with the familiar response: ‘Here am I’. Did you hear the state of the nation? (3:1-2) ‘…the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision’. The times were about to change.

The second thing is what he heard. Samuel had listened to the oracle which is the point of the whole story – and it is against Eli, his sons and the future of his priestly house. The house of Eli, which had been promised ‘for ever’ (2:30) will be punished ‘for ever’. No sacrifice or offering can countermand that fate. No ‘comfortable word’ this, for the LORD said, ‘Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel, at which the two ears of everyone that hears it will tingle’.

Remember the strange voice in the wilderness, crying to God to make his paths straight? From John, son of a barren woman – and a priest? Calling the world for a radical change of direction?

We too live in a world where regimes rise and fall, after wreaking havoc among their peoples, killing and maiming, and exiling more. Think Mugabe. Think, the present Ayatollah in Iran. Remember Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, ISIS/Daish. Eli’s fall is just as complete; just as sudden. Eli’s wastrel sons die in battle with the Philistines.

So, what are we hearing here? The writer of I Samuel is clear that the word of God comes through a human voice, is enacted on the ground by human hands. Samuel – no more than the Gospel writers or Paul – is no mere automaton, speaking an infallible word from God, reliably predicting the outcome. There is a distinction between the word of God, and of those who deliver it: ‘God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe’ wrote St Paul (1Cor. 1: 21b). And, he adds, the weakness of God is stronger than human strength (1Cor. 1: 25b).

God is doing a new thing, and God keeps God’s promises. We may think our time is one where there is no vision, when the word of the Lord is a rare thing. O for ‘frequent vision!’ Samuel’s story gives us encouragement and hope. For Samuel is one of a long line of people whom God raises up in history, who are not elected to office because of their genius, or their useful information, or their political clout, or their muscles. God has no time for such things, as the psalmist often reminds us. God is a creator, and he makes things happen where nothing was possible. God can even work with a David!

Walter Brueggemann, the great Old Testament scholar, writes this:

In the midst of all these seductions, however, there is a season of naiveté when a young boy can receive a vision, an old man can embrace a relinquishment, a surprised mother can sing a song, the ear of the conventional can tingle, and life begins again.’

That should be no surprise to readers of the Gospel, or the followers of the Crucified One. The task of the ancient prophets and ours is the same: to discern what God is doing, and listen for the God who is living and active among us, yesterday, today and forever. That is why we read old stories in church.

Because they knew God’s history with their people, Philip and Nathaniel recognized who Jesus was, and followed him. We too may listen and learn to be a people of hope in Christ.

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7 January – A Secret Epiphany

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Baptism of Jesus
7/1/2018

Genesis 1:1-5
Acts 19:1-7
Psalm 29
Mark 1:4-11

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, help me by your Spirit to reveal who you are, and help those that listen to reveal what is left obscure. Amen.

Yesterday was epiphany: the day we remind ourselves to check our star signs — just in case. More straightforwardly, epiphany reminds us of the surprising revelation of God: that moment when the incarnate Christ is revealed to Gentiles, represented by those star-gazing wise men from the East.

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark tells the story of Jesus’ baptism. This seems at first glance something quite removed from epiphany. There seem to be no Gentiles to speak of, just a wild desert preacher and a young Rabbi about to take his mantle.

In fact Mark’s account, when set aside the other Gospel accounts, is the most restrictive of all. In Mark’s account it seems only Jesus can see the Spirit descending like a dove. John and the crowd are not privy to this divine revelation, as they seem to be in Luke and John’s Gospels.

The divine voice from heaven is likewise restrictive. It addresses Jesus directly: “You are my beloved Son.” The indirect and public declaration of Jesus’ divine sonship, through the mouth of John the Baptiser, or a booming Heavenly voice is absent.

The first Sunday after epiphany here we are: no gentiles, no public revelation. And worse: as soon as Jesus’ divine sonship is revealed he is drawn out into the desert. Upon his return he begins a ministry, dare I say, marked in this Gospel by a messianic secret. No one is allowed to publicly utter that Jesus is the son of God.

This is turning out to be the worst Epiphany ever.

If epiphany is about God’s surprising revelation to the gentiles, and we have today no Gentiles and no public revelation, perhaps we can see in today’s reading something of a surprise.

Or perhaps it’s simply unfair to frame this text as an epiphany text when in fact it’s simply the story of Jesus’ baptism. This is, perhaps, an instance of setting unfair expectations.

Be that as it may, I really want to press just how surprising the story of Jesus’ baptism is. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, it is so surprising that the Gospel accounts written after Mark – as the others were – felt this story needed to be retold differently. The other accounts broaden the audience of revelation. Matthew’s Gospel even inserts a short conversation between Jesus and John the Baptiser, acknowledging the awkwardness of John baptising Jesus.

The baptism of Jesus by John is awkward – and surprising, a point we will return to.

But what it is also surprising that Jesus’ baptism by John is not Jesus’ first baptism. At least, not according to some Theologians – particularly from the rich and broad Eastern Orthodox tradition.

These theologians suggest that the first baptism of Jesus was his conception. There the Spirit enabled Christ’s participation in humanity. Recalling the great birthing waters over which the Spirit hovered in the beginning, God came to dwell fully in and with our humanity.

The idea of baptism in which, through the symbol of water, we participate in Christ, is mirrored in the Spirit’s enabling of Christ’s participation in humanity.

We might say that the liturgical period we have just passed through – advent, Christmas, epiphany – narrates the first baptism of Jesus. We have taken time to marvel at God becoming human. What, to recall last week’s sermon, is the marvel of the big God coming close. The Creator God becoming human.

And yet … Is this not old news? Good news, to be sure, the Good News: but we have already understood this much.

Indeed, this much is captured in our reading from the book of Acts. What we need, above all, is the same outpouring of the Spirit that enabled God to become human. This same Spirit that hovered over the waters of creation, hovering over the waters of our baptism.

Hallelujah!

But today we are more narrowly focused on Jesus’ second baptism. Not a baptism into humanity, but a baptism of repentance.

Baptised by John: not proclaiming the new creation, but proclaiming repentance: the ruin of the old creation. John proclaims the same note of judgement that was a feature of Jewish eschatological expectation. That is, the judgement associated with the end of days, when God would wrap up this creation and begin a renewed creation.

This is the judgement that we recalled last week in recognising that in the context of the sheep and goats, we are goats. In the context of the hungry, the naked, and the stranger: we are least of all.

The broad Jewish expectation was that the Messiah would come and mete out this judgement. Dispensing God’s wrath on the enemies of God, as this created order fell into ruin and a new one emerged. Perhaps this is why so many thought that John the Baptiser was the Messiah. He came, after all, proclaiming judgement, calling people to repentance.

And yet in all of this, John points beyond himself. He points to someone else. He points to the Messiah who is yet to come.

And this is the surprising bit: when this Messiah arrives he does not meet the expectations of the people. He does not come as a Messiah dispensing judgement. He comes as one who submits himself to being baptised. A baptism of repentance.

What on Earth does Jesus have to repent of?

Having already been baptised into human form, Jesus further humbles himself, by being baptised in repentance, bringing himself under judgement.

In doing this Jesus subverts the expectations that he would come to give out judgement, by suggesting that instead he would undergo judgement.

And as Jesus does this, as Jesus is submerged in repentant waters, and rises out of them, the Spirit that hovers over the waters of creation comes down. As Jesus enters into our judgement he brings new creation, all of a sudden, very close.

At that moment, the new creation is begun – not at the end of time, but at the beginning of the Good News of Jesus the Messiah – the new creation is begun at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. At that moment a voice from Heaven reveals Jesus to be the Son of God.

Not only is it surprising that God would become human. But even more surprising that God would become fully human: mired in our failings, our sufferings, and our tragedies. What is most surprising is not simply that God would become human, but that God would become even the least among humanity.

Is this surprising revelation of the lengths God has gone for us an epiphany? The surprising lengths that lead to us being reconciled with God, and with each other? Is this an epiphany?

Or perhaps, we have to wait for that moment.

Mark’s Gospel, written with sheer genius, has us wait until what seems the end of the story, to truly have our epiphany. That moment when a voice once again declares – in public – that Jesus is the Son of God. That moment on the cross. When it is no longer a voice from Heaven, but the voice of a Gentile Centurion.

Jesus does not simply show us an icon of perfect humanity. But by becoming subject to judgement, by placing himself in a state of abandonment and dereliction on the cross, he shows us how to be imperfect humanity. Jesus shows us how to live as those under judgement. To follow the way of Christ, the way of the cross, is not to abandon our fragile humanity, but to more fully acknowledge and embrace it.

To follow the way of the cross is to stand in relationship and solidarity with those who are also mired in failings, in sufferings, and in tragedies. And it is from that sharing in weakness, that sharing in the suffering of Christ, that we follow the way to new creation. The way of surprising revelations of God – perhaps even in star signs, or strange tongues.

What Jesus acknowledged on our behalf in his baptism by John is the surprising way of the Spirit hovering over birthing waters. A way that is mired, to be sure, by blood, and tears, and pain; but a way that also calls new life into being.

When Jesus stands under judgement, crying out in abandonment, in dereliction, he no longer connects himself with God, but connects himself with us and us with him. It is at that moment that a human voice can finally confess to his divinity. We are bound together by this act, by this event. And as we walk the way of the cross, we are all bound together as a community of solidarity, reconciliation, and love.

Let me finish with a quote from Lilla Watson. A Gangulu elder, artist, and indigenous activist from Queensland.

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.

But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

…

Amen.

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31 December – The Judge Judged in Our Place

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Christmas 1
31/12/2017

Revelation 1:1-6a
Psalm 8
Matthew 25:31-46

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, help me to say what is helpful, and help those that listen to judge what is not. Amen.

Those of you who follow the lectionary closely will have noticed that our Gospel reading for today has not been gone for long. A month ago the Christian liturgical year ended with the feast of Christ the King, and with it came our reading from Matthew 25. Today marks the end of the year within the civil calendar, and with it Matthew 25 is back.

And if it is back, let it come back with a vengeance.

In fact I mean that quite seriously.

The texts that accompany Matthew 25 today set the mood rather differently than the feast of Christ the King.

Our Psalm of praise expands our imaginations to a cosmic vision. Everything – all of creation – is caught up in the sovereign majesty of God. From the mouths of infants, to the moon and stars in heaven. Humans and beasts, over the earth and under the sea:

“O Lord, our Sovereign,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Ps. 8.9)

The persistent rhythms of this created order are expressed in today’s well-known reading from Ecclesiastes. There is a time for everything: living and dying, loving and hating, throwing stones and gathering stones, mourning and dancing, embracing and casting out. And standing above the constant hum of these rhythms of creation is the sovereign God. God who’s good gifts consist in our eating and drinking, and taking pleasure in work.

This background sets the scene of a God many people are familiar with. We have here a God that reflects much of what we confess in the first article of the creed: the article of God the Father, creator of Heaven and Earth. Who stands sovereign over the created world, seemingly at a distance.

And yet our psalm begins to question this distance: “what are human beings that [God] is mindful of them, | mortals that [God] cares for them?” (Ps. 8.4)

What is, dare I say, revealed, in our reading from the Revelation of John is precisely that this God is not distant. The home of God is among us. Our hope is that God will dwell with us, and we will be God’s people. The old rhythms of living and dying, mourning and dancing will be interrupted. And the sovereign rule of God shall come down into a new and renewed earth – a new creation.

Today, Matthew 25.31-46 needs to be read with this background in mind. We have a building sense of two things:

On the one hand, a grand vision of God’s sovereignty over all of creation. The story we tell about God is cosmic, it expands to incorporate everything.

While on the other hand, this sovereign God seeks to dwell among humanity, this God seeks to embrace us as God’s people.

God is at once very big, and at the same time very close.

The coming together of God’s bigness and God’s closeness finds articulation in Jewish and Christian eschatological hope.

Eschatological: a term referring to the end times. When the normal rhythms of our world will be interrupted. When all of this big wide world will be wound up. And when the God who stands sovereign over this world will become – all of sudden – very close.

In much of the Jewish and Christian traditions this coming close of God is thought to involve a significant amount of judgement. As it turns out not everything for which there is a time is good. As one quite well-known writer has suggested: “the time is out of joint.”

And so when I suggested that Matthew 25 was back with a vengeance, I meant it. The whole chapter forces us to reflect on the quite harsh message of the Kingdom of Heaven – what other Gospels call the Kingdom of God. What we might simply refer to as the bigness of God coming close.

It is in Jesus that we see God closest of all.

And as God comes close in the ministry of Jesus many are left out in the cold.

The parables Jesus tells leave maidens wandering darkened streets for lamp oil, slaves have what little they have taken away. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, the wealthy and poorly dressed are shut out from a banquet. In today’s reading, the careless are cast out, gnashing their teeth in everlasting torment.

Jesus meek and mild I think not.

Jesus’ teaching cannot be understood as saying that there is no inside, and no outside. Jesus does not fail to give voice to eschatological judgement. Jesus does not fail to take seriously what it means for the bigness of God to encounter us closely, bringing with it judgement.

In light of these teachings about judgement many commentators note that what is distinctive about Jesus is the basis of his judgement. Unlike the religious leaders of his day, it is not righteous adherence to religious law that will sway the judge. Rather, it is love: enacted love is what sets some aside for embrace and others for casting out.

And so we have inherited a tradition marked by the command to love others.

But, we might ask: a command to love who? Who are the others?

In the most exhaustive study of the interpretation history of this text Sherman Gray sheds some surprising light on answers to this question.

Up until the 8th century, less than half of commentators addressed the question of who we are called to love in Matthew 25. But of those that do: only 13.5% suggested we are called to love everyone — 86.5% suggest we are only called to love other Christians.

This overwhelming majority continues through the middle ages and into the modern era.

When I first discovered this I found it unsettling, to say the least.

Could the command to love really be so narrow in its focus?

Perhaps, the Gordian knot of this parable is not so easily untied.

The standard interpretation of this parable calling us to the command to love locates us at the centre of the parable. It is our moral virtue – wittingly, or more likely unwittingly – that counts in the end. In this we are at risk of losing the cutting edge of judgement that has run through this entire chapter – and many of Jesus’ parables.

Have we forget so quickly that we ourselves are under judgement?

Have we forgotten that we are the needy; we are the least.

We are the maidens left wandering darkened streets, slaves who have what little we have taken away. The wealthy shut out from a banquet. We are the careless gnashing their teeth in everlasting torment.

Christians are rightly the recipients of the command to love: for we are the needy; we are the least. And if it were a test of moral virtue we would almost certainly all be goats.

It is when we realise that we are such needy people as these that God comes the closest of all. We are not the righteous, following the command to love out of righteousness. We ourselves are the needy that receive love out of unrighteousness.

We see Christ in our experiences of suffering and loss when we remember that Christ too experienced suffering and loss on the cross for us. Suffering and loss we remember with cup and bread.

As we see ourselves as the least, we see a God big enough to hold our weakness, and close enough to care.

We see from behind the closed door the resurrected Christ – who passes through that door towards us.

As we see ourselves as the least, we see Christ as the big God who comes close, by himself becoming least.

We can take from this a moral lesson, indeed that same lesson of love. But no longer out of our own righteousness. No longer our means to sway the judge. For the judge is judged in our place. In today’s reading Christ the judge literally stands in our place.

Our love flows from our being loved. Our giving from our receiving the love of God. Love follows the way of Jesus, the way of the cross. It is our means of becoming like Christ, like the one who too became least.

And so if we are to find ourselves wandering the streets in darkness, let us clothe those we find there. If we find ourselves shut out from a banquet, let us provide food and drink for those also outside. If even what little we have is taken away, let us take ourselves to visit and care for the sick and incarcerated.

If we are to fall under judgement, let us follow the way of the judge who is judged in our place — let us follow the way of Christ, the way of the cross, the way of love. Amen.

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25 December – Christmas against Christmas

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Christmas Day
25/12/2017

Hebrews 1:1-4, 5-12
Psalm 98
John 1:1-14

With Christmas comes, without fail, the poignant reflection piece of the newspaper columnist.

The first I read this year was by Amanda Vanstone. It was a disappointment and the others didn’t improve much from there. But then what else could these pieces be if indeed there is any truth in what the church confesses about the baby in the manger? For we confess that everything we desire is given there. It is scarcely believable, but nonetheless it is the point of being in church on a Monday. So if, with Vanstone, most of the rest of the world, and most of the church most of the time – if, with all, we turn away from that gift, we must then find something to give ourselves. What that self-gift might be is precisely the subject of the Christmas reflection piece: the discovery, the revelation, of the stillpoint in the chaos. If the church is hypocritical and irrelevant, if family traditions are too burdensome or evaporating before our eyes, if gift-giving is corrupted by materialistic commercialism, if death looms to overshadow our celebrations, then how desperate we become for the one thing which will transcend all of this. Where is the infinite thing, beyond the failure of our best efforts, our ideals and our dreams, which will meet our yearning for something solid and reliable and enduring? It will not be found in average newspaper Christmas reflections. These, like all exclusively human endeavours, merely propose more that we can do for a better experience of the world. And they imagine that, for the first time in history, this new utopia will not sink beneath the waves of moral failure, our failure to do. The poignancy of such reflections at Christmas (or any) time is in their necessity – for they speak a truth – and in their hopelessness, for they cannot realise any further truth.

As a way towards the answer of Christmas to all our disappointment with Christmas, a reading from the Danish thinker, Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s concern here is what a believer looks like; this believer he names “the knight of faith,” in the sense of “champion of faith.” What features distinguish her from anyone else? How does the “heavenly” manifest in the way he conducts himself in the world? How does the longed-for infinite occur in the desperately finite?

“I candidly admit that in my experience I have not found any reliable example of the knight of faith… People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men … and they think they have seen something. This does not interest me. But if I knew where there was such a knight of faith, I would make a pilgrimage to him on foot, for this prodigy interests me absolutely…

“As I’ve said, I have not found any such person, but I can well think him. Here he is. Acquaintance made, I am introduced to him. The moment I set eyes on him I instantly push him from me, I myself leap backwards, I clasp my hands and say half aloud, “Good Lord, is this the man? Is it really he? Why, he looks like a tax-collector!” However, it is the man after all. I draw closer to him, watching his least movements to see whether he shows any sign of the least telegraphic message from the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, a note of sadness, a smile, which be­trays the infinite in its contrast with the finite. No! I examine his figure from tip to toe to see if there might not be a cranny through which the infinite was peeping. No! He is solid through and through.

“One can discover nothing of [an] aloof and superior nature … He takes de­light in everything, and whenever one sees him taking part in a particular pleasure, he does it with the persistence which is the mark of the earthly man whose soul is absorbed in such things. He tends to his work… He takes a holiday on Sunday. He goes to church… In the afternoon he walks to the forest. He takes delight in every­thing he sees…

“Toward evening he walks home, his gait is as strident as that of the postman. On his way he reflects that his wife has surely a special little warm dish prepared for him… Actually, she hasn’t, but strangely enough, it is quite the same to him.

“…he is interested in everything that goes on, in a rat which slips under the curb, in the children’s play, and this with the nonchalance of a girl of sixteen. And yet he is no genius, for in vain I have sought in him the incommensurability of genius. In the evening he smokes his pipe; to look at him one would swear that it was the grocer over the way vegetating in the twilight…

“And yet, and yet—actually I could become furious over it, for envy if for no other reason—­this man has made and every instant is making the movements of infinity. …he has drained the cup of life’s profound sadness, he knows the bliss of the infinite, he senses the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest things he possesses in the world, and yet finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher, … as though the finite life were the surest thing of all.

“…He constantly makes the move­ments of infinity, but he does this with such correctness and assurance that he constantly gets the finite out of it, and there is not one moment when one has a notion of anything else.

“It is supposed to be the most difficult task for a dancer to leap into a definite posture in such a way that there is not a second when he is grasping after the posture, but by the leap itself he stands fixed in that posture. Perhaps no dancer can do it—that is what this knight does.

“…to be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—that only the knight of faith can do—and this is the one and only miracle.[1]

Kierkegaard points us to a humanity which lives the freedom of the eternal and yet looks just like an ordinary piece of the world: the one and only miracle. But as a miracle, it is beyond us. This is the pathos of all exhortations to do better at Christmas time, or any time: only a miracle will do, and we are not miracle workers.

Yet this is precisely the miracle of Christmas.

The church has long spoken of the “incarnation” of God in Jesus, imagining for the most part that there would have been something about him indicating that he was different – Kierkegaard’s cranny through which the infinite peeps. Even the Scriptures do this in their Christmas narratives, trimming the story with glimpses of heaven: a virginal conception, choirs of angels and a star of wonder with royal beauty bright.

Yet to say Jesus was human is to say, with Kierkegaard, that he was solid though and through, that he was in every respect like us – unremarkable but for the way in which he met God and God met him. This meeting was the play of the finite and limited with the infinite and unbounded such as Kierkegaard describes. What we’ve come to call the “divinity” of Jesus was evident only in his extraordinary humanity, which was his extraordinary meeting of God – for what meeting God does is cause the world to be itself. Our poignant Christmas reflections spring from the experience that we are not ourselves, and exhort us to perform the miracle of creating ourselves.

But for us to be ourselves is for us to be relieved of the burden of performing miracles, relieved of the requirement that we make real for ourselves the sublime in the midst of the mundane, relieved of the demand that we cause the infinite to be visible through some cranny.

This is incarnation, and sacrament. This is Christmas against Christmas: gift against our tired exchanges, grace against hard-earned favour, aid against wearing demand; the infinite in the finite, dwelling among us and us invited to dwell in it.

In the beginning was the Word, John writes.

In him was life, and the life was light.

The Word became Flesh. And we have seen his glory: the glory of a human being fully alive.

Would this not be everything we need? Do we not long to be our very selves, and yet to be located in, connected to, part of the whole – the more than us – but not overwhelmed by it?

Christmas marks just such a humanity as the gift of God in Jesus, whether under a crown, on a cross or in a cradle, whether with sceptre, under scourge or in a stable (TIS 321): the miracle of a leap of life expressed in a mere walk, the sublime in its natural habitat: our ordinary.

Christmas would give us heaven because it would give us the world, each without poignant loss.

Now, and in the year about to begin, let’s take them both.

***

[1] Largely drawn from the translation of Walter Lowrie (Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Doubleday 1954, p49ff), although emphases added and language “adjusted” for a modern ear, with some guidance from Robert Payne’s OUP translation (pp.48ff).

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17 December – The God who brings death and life

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Advent 3
17/12/2017

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11
Psalm 126
John 1:6-8, 19-28

Good news to the oppressed, binding up of the broken-hearted, proclamation of liberty to the captives, release to the prisoners; a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit; the garments of salvation, a robe of righteousness, a garland, jewels…

The word of promise in this language is surely extraordinary in the ears of those who have lived through hell. Isaiah proclaims a great reversal, a turning upside-down of the experience of the people of God – the return of God to their midst as blessing.

But what about those for whom the world is not horrific, for whom life’s biggest challenge is along the lines of negotiating a shopping centre carpark a few days before Christmas or waiting out a kitchen renovation? What does Isaiah have to say to any whose life is largely devoid of oppression or ashes or unrighteousness? Because, for most of us – in and out of the church – life is mostly ok most of the time, and so Isaiah’s proclamation comes like icing on what was already a pretty good cake.

One way of hearing Isaiah under these circumstances is to imagine that he speaks not to us, but as us: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me,” or us. The word to us becomes our own word and, going further, we take it upon ourselves not simply to speak of the coming of God but to be those who realise God’s peace. We have received the Spirit, and we are to pay that forwards, for others.

Certainly, those who “have” are under a moral obligation to share and bless those who have not. But if this is all it’s about, then there is no possibility that God has anything more to say to us. Is there a word of the Lord – a blessing, heart-raising word – for the relaxed and mostly comfortable?

The question of our redemption is not pressing today, either in the church or in society more generally. Certainly we are constantly working towards something, and something better than we what we presently know but this kind of progress is not the business of Christian worship or faith. The heart of our confession is not the offer of a nudge from worse to bad, or bad to good, or good to better. We speak, rather, of life out death, of the creation of something out of nothing. Christian faith is, at heart, concerned with miracles, with the impossible. For when God comes, what he brings is not only the kind of healing we think we need but also revelation of the full extent of that need. In the breadth of Isaiah’s preaching God speaks such words of comfort as we read in worship this time of year, but also divine rage and accusation against the people for things about themselves they would scarcely recognise or be aware of.

When God comes, it is always as life out of death, as creation out of nothing. This means that when God comes it is always with bad news as well as with the good, the good revealing the bad. The broken-hearted may not know, or have acknowledged, that indeed their hopes have been dashed; the captives not know that they are imprisoned, the comfortable not know just how insecure they are.

We mark just this dynamic in our worship each week. We call on God, whether we are feeling we need God or not. We hear that we are forgiven, often of things we had not imagined we were guilty of. Perhaps quintessentially, we gather around a table at which is served a victim through whom salvation is somehow won.

All of this “works”, however, only to the extent that the bad comes with the good. If we speak of the coming of resurrection, we speak also about the coming of death. But we have to be careful here. The proclamation of resurrection is not for the dying but for the dead. We noted last week that we all know that we are dying. This knowledge, however – our mere mortality – is not the question answered by resurrection. Resurrection reveals death – a death we do not yet know – it does not merely nudge us through what we already know. Resurrection doesn’t answer our sense for death because we have not yet asked the question well enough, despite our mourning and ashes, as real as they are. The resurrection with which the church is concerned is that which identifies who is dead, including us dead who are still walking.

This is enacted also in the Eucharist. The Eucharist “works” only to the extent that we who receive the body and blood admit a culpability in its having been broken and spilt. There is no “nudge” here into a better life by taking a spiritual medicine which treats some disease in us, and so which could be substituted for a generic brand which is not called “body” and “blood”. The ritual kills in the accusation of our complicity in death, and raises in the creative grace of God. Death is but a means by which God can bless; the Eucharist is death and resurrection – Jesus’, and our own.

“The spirit of the Lord is upon me,” Isaiah proclaims, with the emphasis falling on the spirit, and not on the “me”. For it is the spirit of the Lord which creates and renews the face of the earth. This is the light John announced, which enlightens everyone (John 1.9), even those who do not yet know they are living in shadows. When God comes, the dark places appear and are flooded with light. And God is coming.

For this spirit, this light, all thanks be to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and always. Amen.

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10 December – God is coming. And it is the end of you.

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Advent 2
10/12/2017

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85
Mark 1:1-8

To those looking for peace comes the cry,

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

“Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.”

God is coming! Make the way straight! “Cry out!”

And what shall we cry?

“All people are grass, their constancy is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades, when the breath of the LORD blows upon it; surely the people are grass…”

You’ve gotta love the Old Testament prophets for their capacity to punch, square in the face, any easy forgiveness or cheap attempts to leap out of the world as it is into sentimental notions of paradise on earth or of eternal life! Isaiah declares: God is coming. And No One. Gets Out. Alive. Comfort, O comfort my people…

How do we respond to this? Horror, revulsion or terror would make sense to any normal person who took it seriously. But what about the people gathered here today? Does this horrify, terrify us as well? Are we “normal”?

The abnormality to which we are called as conspirators with Isaiah and disciples of Jesus is that we not be horrified here. Rather, we are to find ourselves set free with the realisation that we are not divine. That we are grass, that we are mortal, is the mark of our creatureliness.

We need, of course, to speak carefully. There is here no exultation in our mortality. It is not a thing to celebrate; it is just “a thing.” “No one gets out alive” is the law. It is, simply, the case. The function of law is to limit: only drive this fast, only drink this much, keep your hands to yourself; that far and no further. The law constrains, which is precisely what Isaiah declares here: you are constrained. You are flowers and grass, and will wither and fade.

We all know this, of course. What matters is the impact we allow the fact of our mortality to have. If our mortality is fundamentally offensive to us, then we labour to keep it at bay, to preserve ourselves as long as possible, to hold death at a distance by whatever power or influence we have. Life understood in these finds Isaiah’s mortal realism horrifying, terrifying, or repulsive. Who needs – or wants – to be reminded of the enemy when the work of our lives is to keep us hidden from that enemy for as long as possible? We see this in ourselves and in others, and we might characterise it as a deathly mortality. It knows only the law and its limits.

But Isaiah’s proclamation does not call us to this but, rather, to a lively mortality. This is a mortality – a creatureliness – which knows the limit and exults not in it but in the freedom which comes with it. This is the freedom not to have to survive, the freedom of not being necessary. The gospel in Isaiah’s proclamation is not simply that Israel’s “sins are taken away”. The content of those sins was the drive to make ourselves necessary, the denial of death’s final claim on us and of the possibility that we might cease to be. Isaiah’s gospel is that when God comes that kind of striving and anxiety is no longer required.

A deathly mortality is reflected in the corresponding deathly life: a life lived at heart in fear of – or revulsion at – the God who defines us as creatures, as grass. This is a life which finds it insufficient to be in the form or image of God and grasps at more (Genesis 3; Philippians 2).

A lively mortality is one which would live life to its fullest. A lively mortality celebrates the approach of God because it is when God comes as Creator above, and beyond, and yet for, us that we come to ourselves.

Here the law finds its end – its purpose: God being God, creature being creature, in the same moment. (This is, of course, what we say is the meaning of Christmas: the coincidence of God and the world, Christ as the end of the law, not only in his death but in his birth.)

In neither the lively nor the deathly experience of our death is that death any less real. All that matters is which way death’s shadow falls.

If it falls towards us, on this side of our inevitable definition in death, then our life is lived in a valley of death’s shadow. We live and die in a twilight; aware of the hint of more but not able to do much more than light candles and fires against the encroaching gloom.

But if death’s shadow falls away from us, on the other side of death, this means that death is obscure, that we cannot see what is beyond it, what it holds for us. This is to say that death is incomprehensible. And this is to say that we – who are mortal – do not yet now what we are. What it finally means to be a creature is still hidden from us, even if we walk now in the light. But we need no longer be jumping at the shadows.

This is the death – and the life – to which we are called, in all its incomprehensibility. And the word about all this is given in Isaiah for our comfort: when God comes, we become as we are created to be.

In the church, of course, we also hear rumours of resurrection, of death overcome and of life without end. At heart, this way of speaking is to say the same thing with a different emphasis or accent. Resurrection does not deny our death but only changes it; the “only”, however, is momentous: freedom from fear, life along straight and level pathways.

The gospel is that God is coming. And this will be the end of you. And a new beginning.

God comes that we might know that we are not God, that we are not necessary and do not need to try to be. More than merely necessary, we are loved, desired, by the God who created us in order that he might come to us, and we to him.

And God will come, and come, and come, and come… until we are his.

Now and always, all praise and glory be to the God who creates, sustains and sets us free. Amen.

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3 December – Hope and Prayer

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Advent 1
3/12/2017

Isaiah 64:1-9
Psalm 80
Mark 13:24-37

Every day we read, we hear, something new in the news: some new political furore, the unprecedented weather event, the surprise that he is suddenly outed as an abuser, or that she was abused, the economic bubble or burst, the bomb blast.

Yet, in this way, so also is the news pretty much always the same. There is a persistent staleness about the newness of the news. The same kinds of things keep happening, if in ever-changing form. And we respond to them in the same kinds of ways. Royal Commissions, witch hunts, further regulation, lower (or higher) taxes, better medication, more surveillance. We are ever active, ever responding, although always with the same kind of response because it is the same kinds of things to which we are reacting.

We can “dress” this experience with the colourful language of Isaiah’s lament this morning: “we have become like one who is unclean”. The sense of the text is almost certainly of the ritual uncleanliness described in the religious law, but it remains the case, even in a secular context, that we are unable to wash ourselves of the things which cling to us, which require constant scrubbing, which keep us busy and distracted and weary.

It is out of this experience that there springs the extraordinary lament which opened today’s text from Isaiah: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down”. For what else could heal us?

In the text, this bidding springs from a recollection of the past, although not in any nostalgic sense. It is not that there was a golden age, a “good old days” to which they long to return. Nostalgia is delusional escapism, of which the Scriptures can never be accused. Longing for yesterday gets us nowhere because it forgets that, even if things felt better back then, that “then” is what delivered us the present in which we now live, whether the present of the church or of society more generally. The past for which we might long was the seed of what we now long to escape.

The prophet recalls instead God’s working of “awesome things we did not expect”. What has been lost is not the golden past, but the unexpectedness of God. It is only in the presence and action of this one that the world breaks out of the cycles of stale newness.

And so what is required is not more manipulation of the world around us, but prayer such as we hear in the prophet today. What we seek is something which cannot be rightly expected, something we don’t know how to tease into reality. Hope is not concerned with what we can see or touch or even imagine, for these are the very things which bind us. Hope springs from the unexpectedly new, the unseen, the unknown.

The text dresses with this reality in language we scarcely dare entertain today, convinced as we are of God’s boundless love and, so, of the easy access we have to God. But we must take seriously the prophet’s declaration that God has “hidden” himself: “for you have hidden your face from us.”

Whatever else this means, it means that prayer is not a kind of spiritual “technology:”  not a thing we need to do, in just the right kind of way with just the right words and condition of heart, in order to get God to act as we would like. “About that day or hour, no one knows”, we have heard in the gospel reading today, making the same point: God cannot be calculated. The hiddenness of God – that God has hidden himself – is God’s inaccessibility on any terms other than God’s own.

If this is the case, then what we need for the radically new and refreshing is not better science, more open hearts or gentler politics. None of these should be scoffed at, but they are appeals to variations in the quantity of what we think we have or need. The prayer of Isaiah today is a prayer for something of a different quality.

And this different quality is marked by a different method: a different orientation and expectation and so a different way of being. It is a humble waiting on God in the “fervent breath of prayer,” as our closing hymn puts it. As prayer, it is not inactive or passive. There is much we can do, not so much “in addition to prayer” as giving body to our prayers. We do not pray “and” act. Our prayers are surely actions, for in this way we mark before the world that we need more than we can say or do, and our actions are surely prayers, for in this way we show to God how we desire things to be and seek more of it.

Advent is not about “waiting” for God, as if at any other time of the year we are not waiting. It brings to the fore the character of our relationship with God as one of grace, in which things unexpected or unmerited are given, that we might live. This characterises all Christian existence as marked by hope, embodied in prayer and action. God has acted, and so we pray, and God acts, and we pray.

So, let us pray…

Posted in Sermons
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