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Reign of Christ
26/11/2017

Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24
Psalm 95
Matthew 25:31-46

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Today’s semi-parable of the coming of the Son of Man in judgement is a familiar one to most of us. Through this story we have learned to see the need of Jesus himself in the needs of the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, those imprisoned. This lesson comes at the climax of Jesus’ teaching in Matthew’s gospel, which makes the point all the more point‑y. Let us hear the call to love again, today.

I want, however, to draw attention to something about the parable which is less obvious simply because the moral lesson is so obvious: those who are commended for doing the good did that good in ignorance that the needy they served were, in some sense, “Jesus”. In this the blessèd “sheep” of the parable are different from us, because we have heard the parable, which creates for us a motivation alien to the blessèd in the story. This has the potential to distort our sense for what we are called to do and to be.

Put most simply, the moral and theological problem is this: to love someone else because they are, in a sense, Jesus, is not to love them because they are themselves worthy of love; it is to love something other than what we think they manifestly are. This is where things go wrong, for in this way we try to perfume the stink of needy humanity. While the “lovers” of the parable love and serve those in need simply because they are in need, our knowledge of the parable may cause us to “add” something to those we are to love. In this we seek to make them more “lovable”: Why help the needy? Because it is really Jesus we serve, and surely we want to serve him, if not these themselves.

The problem is that to make something “more loveable” is to turn it into a means to an end. It is to turn it more into what I need. So far as our reading of the parable is concerned, the “end” here might be our own salvation: seeing Jesus in others makes us more likely to serve them in their need, putting us in a better light before God. More broadly, the end in mind might be some other seemingly laudable but ulterior motive – perhaps the growth of the church – or just something salacious.

But people not means to ends; they are, properly, an end in themselves. We might risk to say that this is the basis of divine law, and that violations of the law are instances of people – or God – being made a means to an end. What are idolatry, blasphemy, murder, adultery and theft other than strategies to get to something other than God or the violated person?

This kind of relating to God and to others is certainly a live option for us. But we are to deal with each other without manipulation, for this is how God deals with us, first of all in the person of Jesus. The life of Jesus himself was no means to an end. If he was truly human – truly one of us – his purpose was none other than to live a life of love, for that is our purpose, however badly we might sometimes manage it. Atonement theories which propose that the life of Jesus was strategic, that he “had” to die for a reason different from the rest of us, diminish the freedom of God and diminish Jesus’ own humanity. They diminish God’s freedom by imposing an economy of salvation which ties God’s hands, such that God “has to” do something to achieve salvation other than simply determine that we be saved. Such theories also diminish Jesus’ humanity by turning his life into a means to an end other than his own self – his own liveliness, his own enjoyment of God and neighbour.

In the same way, our love of God – if we do – is not a means to an end. Again, we look to Jesus here. Jesus does not love God “in order that” – in order that he lived a charmed life, in order to secure life after death, or for another other end we might imagine God might facilitate. Living in God, living for those around us, is the end of it all.

We could, then, overstate the matter – although only slightly – by saying that love has no “point”, no purpose, other than the life together of the lovers. The difference between the sheep and the goats in the parable is the difference between the beloved as an end in herself and the beloved as a means to an end which finally leaves her behind.

[ASIDE: For those of you who are still wondering what on earth I was talking about last week, the difference between the sheep and the goats in the parable is the difference between “We did not know God was there but loved anyway” and “We knew God could not be there, so did not bother to love”. The “sheep” lived and loved “as if God were not there”.]

And this brings us to the end – the dead end – of all love which has is aimed at anything other than the beloved. Love which is manipulative, which does not love the person him- or herself, finally renders us alone. We surpass the beloved, stepping on or over or through him to something else, some vision of what we should be or have. But is it lonely. We have left the one who thought herself loved behind. And God is not there, either; for God loves persons, not other ends achieved through persons. This is eternal punishment: life alone.

As archaic as the language is, the church speaks of Jesus as king not because this is a quality which resides in Jesus for himself, but because his is an active kingship, and active reign, which does what it commands: loves without ends, that our love might be without end. We gather around a table at which is served the signs of a life manipulated, a life turned into a means to some end, and so discarded and left behind. To what end does God say that these signs can heal? To no end but us ourselves. God’s desire for us draws us together, love opening up the possibility of love.

Being, then, drawn together in this way, let us love without ends, be this in the case of the fellowship of the community gathered here today, the work of Hotham Mission, your love for your parents or children or spouse or neighbours or colleagues or some unhappy soul sitting out his day on the footpath. In this way we do not only love Jesus but love like Jesus does. What else does the world need?

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Pentecost 24
19/11/2017

1 Corinthians 3:18-22
Psalm 90
Matthew 25:14-30

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“Do your best with what you’ve been given, in the time you’ve been given!” Is this not the moral point of our reading this morning? Perhaps, and there’s nothing wrong with that lesson, although we might say two things about it.

First, it’s boring. Or, at least, it would be boring to hear any expansion on such a moral point from the pulpit. There are plenty of others to tell us to do the best we can with what we have been given. This is why we have parents, teachers, coaches, shock jocks and the members of Her Majesty’s loyal opposition. These all say with one voice: don’t waste the opportunity life has given you. Let’s hear that lesson, and recognise also that we have an opportunity today to hear something different.

And, second: on top of being boring, the moral reading of the parable is tedious, in that any moral precept encourages us to self-righteousness, and the self-righteous are always tedious. I’m reminded of a tussle – necessarily, a gentle tussle – I once had with a widow about the Bible texts to be read at her husband’s funeral. Today’s text was the one she wanted because she felt her husband had lived his life as the first two slaves in the story. Thus, the Scripture reading was to be an extension of the eulogy. The problem here is that, again, the reading is then only telling us what we already know, so why bother reading it?

Acknowledging, then, the importance of doing well with what we have been given, let’s put the moral reading to one side. What is said in word or action in the church should never be boring or tedious, despite all evidence and tendencies to the contrary.

Instead, let’s consider the parable as a statement about the presence and absence of God, which is surely an interesting question in a world where mocking atheism struggles with zealous faith.

We begin with a passing remark about the word “talent” in the parable. What is doesn’t mean is what we usually mean by “talent” – as in “we have a talented organist” or “he spent the afternoon at the beach checking out the talent”. The Greek here is “a thing measured out” – say, gold or silver. In the parable the “talent” is certainly money, although as a symbolic text it could mean for us any blessing or responsibility which we might imagine has been given us.

Let’s look, then, to the experience of the first two slaves. When their master is present, they are given some duty or grace, 2 portions to one, 5 to the other. This much is straightforward. The story begins to get interesting when we hear that, in the absence of the master, they receive exactly the same – 2 for the slave with 2 and 5 for the slave with 5. This is to say that, in his absence, it is as if the master were not gone. For the lives of these two slaves, the absence of the master is like the master’s presence: accruing the very same responsibility or blessing. And, surely, we can also say this the other way around: the master’s presence is like the master’s absence, for if they are the same why should we privilege the one over the other?

When we then allow ourselves to read the parable allegorically and become more theologically explicit, so that the master “stands for” God, we might dare to imagine this: for the first two slaves there is no difference between God’s presence and God’s absence: God’s absence is like God’s presence and God’s presence is like God’s absence. Because the master in the parable takes his leave, and then returns to see what has happened in his absence, it’s typical to read this story as a lesson in the importance of living our lives “as if God were there” even when – like the master – God apparently is not. But the experience of the slaves in the story suggests another, equally valid reading: if God’s absence is like God’s presence and God’s presence is like God’s absence, then we are called as much to live as if God were not there as we are called to live as if God were. Or, to pull out the unexpected bit to stand by itself: we are called to live as if God were not there.

What on earth could this possibly mean? At the very least it signifies that what we mean by the ‘presence’ or the ‘absence’ of God is less clear to us than we imagine. If that’s all we take away from this morning, important work will have been done.

But we can tease this out a bit further. I remarked earlier that, in a world of mocking atheism and over-zealous belief, the question of the presence and absence of God is an important one. Or so we usually imagine. But what happens in this dispute if suddenly atheism (the purported absence of God) and belief (the purported presence of God) begin to look very much alike. What could we be arguing about if the absence and the presence of God are not diametrically opposite?

What we are doing here is shifting what ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ signify when used with respect to God. Beliefs and atheisms – and the corresponding presences and absences of God – are like cholesterol: there’s the good kind and the bad kind. The good kind of belief and atheism is what we see in the first two slaves, in which the question of the presence or absence of God (or their master) is no distraction from who they are and what they are to do. Whatever the presence or absence of their master is to them, it is something other than being able to see and touch him, or not.

The bad kind of belief, with its corresponding atheism, is what we see in the third slave, who slips into and out of and back into belief as his master comes and goes and comes.

Most of us are the third slave: believing, not believing, sometimes as much on account of how long we’ve been sitting in traffic as on account of some deeper reflection or experience. That is, God tends to be as present or absent as the talent of hours we’ve slept, or the talent of food in our cupboards or the talent of grief it has been given us to bear.

This is simply how it is: this is what we are like – believers and non-believers. The question becomes, then, just how seriously we take this condition. Just like the question of God’s purported presence or absence, we can take our condition with deadly seriousness, or with light interest.

Deadly seriousness here involves recognising that the life of the third slave is buffeted by secondary things – the constantly shifting signs that God might or might not be present – with a constant shifting in behaviour or expectation in response. The deadliness here relates to what we do in response to this condition. Recognising our condition ought to bring us to a place like this one, now, on a regular basis. (Weekly, for example!)

Light interest in our condition, however, is what we should take with us when we leave. For we gather in this way each week to hear and to see in what way our lives are like the third slave in the story, and to be shown what God will do to and for us – all of which is good, regardless of our condition.

Not surprisingly, what we should see and hear in Word and Sacrament is quite like the strange overlap of the absence and presence of God in the parable: our very humanity in Jesus, yet not ours but more human (if that were possible); a God on a cross; a future in the past of the resurrection; a life though death in baptism; a broken body giving rise to a whole one in the Eucharist. A God absently present.

This is the life of the first two slaves, which is the life to which we are called. Such a life takes its bearings not from our fleeting questions but from God’s demonstrated presence where he ought not to have been – in the cross – and demonstrated absence from where he was purported to have been – in the grip of the self-righteous who imagine that they know just where God is and have aligned themselves accordingly.

Our psalmist this morning put it thus: God is not an object in our world; God is our dwelling place, God as God is, and not as we imagine he ought to be.

The effect of this we have heard from Paul this morning (1 Corinthians 3.18-22), as he challenged the Corinthians in their confidence that they knew where to find God. The wrong kind of confidence divides the world up into places where God is and is not, into believers and non-believers. But if, Paul insists, God confuses wisdom and foolishness, and strength and weakness, by bring salvation through a crucified human being, then everything is God’s, and everything is ours.

For all things are yours, whether … the world or life or death or the present or the future—all belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

Nothing can separate us from the loving presence of this God.

This is the gospel, given to become our lives, that we might live in the very joy of God.

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Pentecost 23
12/11/2017

Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25
Psalm 78
Matthew 25:1-13

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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So, which God is it to be?

All of life calls us into making choices — coming to decisions that mean eliminating other options. As I choose to go down this path I eliminate the possibility of following that one. In a world in which we are surrounded by possibilities choosing can become a daily chore — but always there have been the life decisions, the moment comes past which it can be too late.

The ancient people that Joshua led were faced with choices. They were living in the land among the Amorites. Each nation of people had its own collection of gods. Doubtless there were attractions in getting involved in different cults. It probably helped with diplomacy and trade — good for peaceful race relations, a shared understanding of each others’ culture — all good reasons for adopting a broad spectrum when it came to religion.

But Joshua pointed out to his constituency that there was a problem. Sure, it  was OK to get involved with the cults, but Joshua was to point out to the tribes that had come out of Egypt, you have to make a choice. You either serve Yahweh who rescued us from slavery or you choose the Amorite gods or the Egyptian ones our ancestors had come to know. And the choice is to be made today.

Joshua told them to put those gods away. It sounds like he was suggesting that they put them away in a cupboard as if they were things rather than deities – which is what they were – little household ornaments, family gods, idols.

You can begin to understand how difficult it must have been for the escaped slaves to change so radically their understanding of religion. They had been captive to a foreign power and were now living side by side with people whose gods were inventions of their own minds and who were the constructions of their own hands. Then Moses came along and announced that Yahweh was their God and, no, I’m sorry, I don’t have so much as a photograph of him to show you. But Yahweh is different from all other gods because he is known, not in the images that might be made for veneration or in make-believe stories of the fanciful activities in the invisible places where gods live. Yahweh is known by his saving activities for his people.

Is it any wonder when they were out in the desert and Moses had climbed up Mount Sinai and he had been gone such a while that they could only assume he wasn’t coming back. Moses was gone. God was gone. What were they to do? Of course they did what anyone would do under the circumstances. They made a cow so they would have something nice to worship.

It was not a straight forward choice that Joshua put before the people. ‘…choose you this day whom you shall serve…’, the family statues that can be put away in the cupboard, the things you made, or Yahweh, the God who made you and who is known, not by what he looks like but by what he does, and by what he calls us to do in his service.

It has to do with where we place our trust really — trust in the inventions of our own minds and the constructions of our own hands, or trust in the one who has made us at a word from his mind and who holds us in the hollow of his hand.

Joshua said, ‘who will you serve, as for me and my family, we will serve Yahweh.’ All the people knew how to respond. After all, this was like a political rally wasn’t it. Don’t you just go along with the man of the moment up front who is making the inspiring speeches?

But Joshua was not after a popularity vote for himself, nor lipservice for God. He wasn’t just asking a rhetorical question. Joshua said, ‘you are just saying that, you won’t be able to sustain your promise. You will slip away and get the little figures out of the cupboard again, then your faithlessness will be shown up and it will be too late.’ But the people said, ‘We’ll be good.’

Joshua was not asking a rhetorical question — not like the prison chaplain who was preaching on the parable we read from the gospel this morning. He concluded his sermon by asking, “What would you prefer, to be in the light with the bridegroom or out in the dark with the five foolish virgins?” The answer of his all male congregation was at variance with what he intended as the message for the day.

It was a great bachelor party.  But about midnight some of the guys left. The rest of us stayed till 3 am. just playing cards and telling stories. The wedding the next morning was at 10.  We dashed out to the car at 9:30 to get to the church in time to be ushers and groomsmen.  But the car wouldn’t start.  We’d left the lights on the night before.  No one seemed to be around to help us.  We called the church to get the other guys to come pick us up. “Sorry,”  they said.  “If we come to get you, we’ll all be late.  It’s better that some of us be here to cover the job than have all of us over there starting your car.”  Well, by the time we got there, the wedding was over.

I find this a very disturbing story. It is disturbing like Joshua’s story when he said that the people would give their service to God but they wouldn’t be able to sustain the promise and their lives would come seriously unstuck.

It is a disturbing story because it is told by the same Jesus who told us how open God’s love is, how accepting. This is the same Jesus who told the story of the workers called into the vineyard and the ones who started work late got the same pay as the ones who worked all day. The story is disturbing because there is a cut off time. Do I get a feeling that there is a cut of time to God’s graciousness? Is that why I’m disturbed? Where is the good news in this bit of the good news of Jesus Christ?

The good news is that all have been invited to the wedding. The good news is that God had brought all of his people out of slavery. The new age has begun and in God’s time his new creation will come to completion. We live in the waiting time, the time when you and I are called on to accept God’s invitation to be part of that kingdom and to participate in its new culture, which means being open to the guiding of the Spirit, of participating in Christ’s ministry of feeding the hungry, setting the oppressed free, healing the world’s brokenness. You and I are invited to participate in those Kingdom values and that is good news.

Joshua, the old cynic, he would say that we won’t be able to keep the pace — we’ll go back to trusting in our home made gods. Matthew reminds us that God’s timing is a whole lot longer than we might have hoped and that the completeness of the Kingdom has been a long time coming, but that its coming is in God’s time, not in our time. God is not waiting for us. If that were the case the time would never come when all of broken humanity and creation is healed and restored. Our hope is in God who is faithful, not in procrastinating humanity.

Choose this day and every day whom you will serve.

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All Saints
5/11/2017

Joshua 3:7-17
Psalm 107
1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Matthew 23:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Howard Wallace

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Today we celebrate All Saints Day. Actually it was last Wednesday, 1 November, but we celebrate it today, the nearest Sunday after.

In Catholic Churches today is a day of celebration in particular for those deemed to have attained ‘beatific vision’ – ultimate direct communion with God in heaven. It is a national holiday in some Catholic countries. In many places the day is one for people to visit the graves of their relatives, lay wreaths and light candles.

Some of the traditions attached to All Saints Day can be dated back to the 8^th century, for example the date on which we celebrate the feast, 1 November. But the idea itself and other associations could be much older.

While All Saints Day is often associated with people of faith of the past, Protestant tradition especially has brought a present aspect to the celebration with the idea that all of the faithful, the dead and alive, the past and the present, are saints. So the celebration of All Saints Day is not only a remembrance of those of renown who have gone before us, but a celebration of all the faithful, dead or alive, of the present community or one of the many of the past.

This idea of a broader definition of saints is not strictly a Protestant innovation. The idea is present to an extent in Catholic thought and the idea that those in heaven as well as those on earth constitute God’s saints can be traced back even to the Book of Daniel. Nevertheless, the emphasis in many Protestant denominations has been on a more democratic notion of sainthood.

But as we think of All Saints Day this day, I wonder whether the real concern for the church, given our context, is not so much on the celebration of faithful lives of the past or the present, but on where and how will such faithful lives arise in the future?

The story from the Book of Joshua today is concerned with an issue pertinent to our celebration of All Saints Day within our present context. It is the question of the certainty and continuity of faith in times of change.

The leadership of the people of Israel as it moves from Egypt toward the promised land has just passed from Moses to Joshua. God says to Joshua at the start of the reading today that he will exalt him, not just to promote this new leader himself, but in order that the people may know that God is with him and them, just as God was with Moses (v.7). It seems that the purpose of leadership in that community of faith, and by implication the key point about belonging to the community, was knowing that God is ‘with us’. It had to do with the awareness of the presence of God in the midst of life’s experiences.

This point is driven home by the writers of the Book of Joshua again and again. They stress at the start of today’s reading but also earlier in the book that God is with Joshua in a direct way, even as God was with Moses directly. Indirectly God is seen to be with the people still in the fact that the description of the crossing of the Jordan into the promised land strongly parallels the account of the crossing of the Reed Sea as Israel left Egypt. The land Joshua leads the people into is the very land which was promised to Moses. And earlier in the book, Joshua had been called to act in accord with the law Moses had commanded him and the others (Josh 1:7). Moses’s law was to be the foundation of Joshua’s activity and leadership.

This stress on continuity is not an end in itself, nor is it there just to underline the future success of the larger enterprise. Rather it is a symbol of the continuity of the presence of God with the people. That very presence has been the subject of many passages regarding Israel’s wandering through the wilderness. The people have questioned it when they hungered or were thirsty; Moses himself doubted it at time and even wanted assurance of it late in Israel’s sojourn at Mt Sinai.

It was the thing that was essential for the people’s liberation from the powers of Egypt. It was the thing that was essential for their survival in the wilderness. And now it would be the essential thing in their taking hold of God’s promise to them.

But as with Moses, so it was now with Joshua. Moses’s leadership had not been a matter of whether Moses knew the Lord, but that the Lord knew him and was present with him. So it was too with the people. It would not ultimately be their faithfulness that mattered on their journey but rather the faithful presence of God with them.

The repetition of the statement of God’s presence with the people in today’s reading and other passages around this story stresses that God journeys with the people from start to finish. Indeed it is God’s presence that is the guarantor of the completion of the whole exercise.

But while there is this promise of presence and completion in the text there is also a warning. A warning that the hardship of the wilderness journey – the doubt, the difficulty and even the disobedience that has plagued them – will still be with them as they enter the land. The life of faith (so often described as a journey even in our Basis of Union), is one where beginning and end are inextricably linked; where release from captivity of whatever form at the start is bound to promised liberty in the end. The promised hope of a life of faith is foreshadowed, embodied, in the journey itself. Our Christian pilgrimage already embodies its promised end. And the presence of God toward which we move, that ‘beatific vision of the saints’, the thing for which we all long, is already with us on the way, the guarantor of the fulfilment of our personal life of faith, of the life of the church, indeed of the whole of creation.

As we celebrate All Saints Day today we do not just remember God’s faithful people of the past or of the present. We celebrate the presence of God with them as well as with us – a presence that transcends the limitations of this earthly life, the doubts, the difficulties and even the indiscretions we commit along the way. It is a presence that transcends even our uncertainties about the future of our community of faith. If there are to be saints in the future it will be because God will continue to be with us and them. Our task is to maintain that tradition of presence even in the face of doubt and to continue to open ourselves up to that saving and sanctifying presence in our lives. Amen

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Pentecost 21
29/10/2017

Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Psalm 90
Matthew 22:34-46

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God, help me by your Spirit to proclaim Jesus as Messiah and Lord; and help those who listen to proclaim him where I fail. Amen.

In our Gospel reading for today Jesus offers his two great commandments: love God with the fullness of who you are, and love others as you do yourself. In a sermon I once heard on this text the preacher compared the two commandments of Jesus with the ten offered by Moses. The preacher summarised glibly: “there used to be ten commandments, now there are two; times change, what are you going to do about it?” While for me this was less than helpful it raised two important responses:

First, not every sermon is a good one – this could be one of those.

Second, it raises a question pertinent to our first reading today from Deuteronomy: is Jesus really trying to bring an end to the law of Moses by instituting his own commandments? As it were, taking the death of Moses further by replacing Moses’ law.

Many commentators have noted the parallels between Moses and Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, suggesting that this Gospel paints Jesus as a new Moses figure. Motifs from Moses’ life recur in the way Matthew’s Gospel tells the story of Jesus:

A ruler ordering the murder of firstborn Jewish sons, time spent in Egypt, and then a flight into the desert, delivering commandments from atop a mountain.

Is Jesus, then, simply a new Moses? Replacing the old with the new for a changed time and place?

Our Psalm for today, Psalm 90, cautions us against this suggestion. This prayer, ascribed to Moses, tells us of the God Moses and Jesus worshipped. Standing before all of creation — “from everlasting to everlasting” — for the God of Moses a thousand years is like a day. This God is a dwelling-place for all generations, overwhelming our afflictions with endless gladness.

It doesn’t seem that the God of both Moses and Jesus is subject to the changing of the times, in need of replacing and updating the old law with the new.

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees isn’t first and foremost a question of changing religious law – not least because it repeats commands already present in the Mosaic law. If there is a parallel between Moses and Jesus in today’s reading we should not think of the Jesus preaching from a Mountain, proclaiming new commandments. If there is a parallel, it is with the Moses who plays a central role in the foundation story of Israel: the Exodus out of slavery in Egypt, into God’s reign over the promised land. In Matthew 22 Jesus’ encounter with religious leaders expands this same story of God’s reign: from the promised land to this veiled notion of the Kingdom of Heaven. What Jesus begins to explain in the parable of the wedding feast — (about which Craig preached a couple of weeks ago) — is further developed in Jesus’ responses to the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Jesus’ teachings on the greatest commandment and the question about David’s Son is not a demonstration of Jesus as legal and Scriptural exegete. Rather, these teachings shape the identity and place of Jesus within the story of Israel – a story over which the God of Moses reigns. Indeed this is the same story in which Moses played a central role. This is the same story in which King David is heralded as the great King, mediating God’s rule over the promised land. The same story into which God reveals the very commandments that Jesus cites in retort to the Pharisees.

The Catholic New Testament scholar Brendan Byrne notes that it was not unknown within the Judaism of Jesus’ time for the law to be distilled to a single principle or all-embracing command. But what is particular about Jesus’ teaching is that he distills the law to two deeply connected commands: love God with the fullness of who you are, and love others as you do yourself.

The rejoinder Jesus offers to the Pharisees in today’s reading is not that they have misunderstood the law. Rather, they have misunderstood the story of God’s people into which the law enters. As we read this passage Christologically, and with the foreknowledge of where this story is headed, we can see that it is Jesus who carries this story in his own life. Jesus’ expression of his love of God coincides with his love of neighbour, on this basis he is able to counter the Pharisees’ myopic focus on questions of law.

Tying together the commandment to love God with fullness, and to love your neighbour expands our vision of righteousness. The demand for personal piety before God is incomplete without a concern for one’s neighbour. Allowing these two commands, taken together, to shape our imagination of God brings focus to the central event of Christian faith: the cross. In this event Jesus’ own love for God draws him fully into love for neighbour. And so the two great commandments of Jesus are not abstract commands, but in an odd sort of way they narrate Jesus’ own life, death, and resurrection. These commands place Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection at the centre of the drama of God. These commands tell of a God who is ultimately known in the salvific act on behalf of neighbour: the salvation of humanity and the world on the cross.

The God who draws together the love of God with the love of neighbour is none other than this Jesus, the Jewish Messiah.

“What do you think of the Messiah?”

As I reflected on this text in preparing this sermon I was drawn more and more to reflect on the second part of today’s reading. The questions Jesus poses became my questions:

“Whose son is the Messiah?”

“The Son of David?”

“How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord | If David thus calls [the Messiah] Lord, how can he be his son?”

Jesus the Messiah is the culmination of the story of Israel, the same story in which Moses played a central role, the same story that continued after Moses’ death with the reign of God in the promised land. Connecting the identity of the Messiah to David, the great king of Israel, connects the Messiah to the ongoing reign of God in the world. What Matthew calls the Kingdom of Heaven.

The question about David’s Son makes clear that the Messiah is the one that ushers in an expanding vision of the reign of God. Jesus does not deny that the Messiah is the Son of David. Indeed Jesus is introduced in the opening line of Matthew’s Gospel precisely as Messiah, the Son of David. But insofar as the Messiah continues the role of David in mediating the reign of God into the world he takes this reign further. The Messiah is somehow more than David. The Messiah further unfolds the story of God’s reign – the story of the Kingdom of Heaven. Beyond the people of Israel to all peoples and the whole world.

For those of us in the Reformed-Protestant tradition, gathering on the Sunday before the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, these are not idle or distant observations. We ourselves are heirs to the idea that the Good News is still unfolding, and we are called to participate in this unfolding. Responding by proclaiming like David that the Messiah is Lord — in fresh words and deeds. Recognising that our proclamation is shaped by what has gone before us, but always seeing in Christ a growing and ever expanding vision of righteousness.

The Good News is the story of Jesus Christ in whom the story of God’s people is brought to its culmination. For in Christ the love of God has been brought together with the love of neighbour, for our gain and Christ’s loss. This is Good News! We are the neighbours that receive the gracious love of God. We are brought into the story of the people of God by the Jewish Messiah who carries that story in his body. And in response we are called to proclaim as true what is true: that Jesus the Messiah is also Lord. We are called to participate in the righteousness that Jesus offers us, the righteousness that brings together the love of God and the love of neighbour. We are called to proclaim the Good News not as a lifeless end, but as an ongoing story that generates Hope, that expands the reign of God, the reach of love, and the care for neighbour.

May we, like David, proclaim by the Spirit that Jesus the Messiah is Lord. May we receive the gracious love of God. And may we tell the story of Jesus until we too are caught up in the drama.

Amen.

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Pentecost 20
22/10/2017

Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:17-4:7

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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Exodus 33: 20 “The Lord said to Moses; you cannot see my face, for no-one shall see me and live” and then: “While my glory passes by I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you will see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

2 Cor. 4: 6 “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.

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Our texts offer two perspectives of God’s anatomy: back and face. They are texts peculiarly relevant to the times that we are living. Both are far removed in popular culture from whom or what God is thought to be – if God is thought about at all. We read these texts in a day when the most serious of the three daily papers that are available to us presents an extended essay under the title: “Is God Dead?”  Whatever be the truth of the matter, many testify to the conclusion that, at the very least, God is imprisoned in a dead language, if not so much dead.  It all seems to be confirmed by the fact that since the previous census, 30% of the population, and the number is growing, ticked what has now become the first box of the 2016 Census: “No Religion”.

Both our texts, of course, are rich and colourful metaphors. The striking imagery of the Exodus text was the only way that the Hebrews could think to express the ineffability of God: not a face as a beginning, but only the back after the event.

We might have learned something from these our forebears, not least that even the glory of God is too incandescent an experience for myopic human eyesight, such that the cleft of a rock and a covering is required until – let us be clear about this – until God has passed by. While the world’s history unfolds, the backside of God, not the face, is the only human possibility. We hear that that is all that the people of Israel were promised, and for them that was more than enough. God as a hint in history was sufficient, whereas all that the culture has left three thousand years later is at best the headline question: “Is God dead? Or, at worst, the statement “God is dead”.

We have just sung “Immortal, Invisible, God only wise” which has been our Western way of saying the same thing as this ancient text – namely what God is not: not subject to death, not visible, not accessible and so on and so on. Much more will soon need to be said, of course, but with our Hebrew forebears we start only with the back of God not with the face.

The point is that whereas the reality of the God of the Exodus is entirely positive, these intriguing images now have an increasingly negative character. We live in a day when what was a majestic safeguard to Moses: “You cannot see my face and live, for no-one can see me and live”, has now become a self evident commonplace. What if in the 21^st century we read this text not as safeguarding the majesty of God but as the narrative of the sad demise of the history of God over the last two thousand years? Of course there have been occasional brief moments of illumination – one thinks of Thomas Aquinas in the C12, of Martin Luther in the C16, of John Wesley in the C18th and of Karl Barth in the C20th. But otherwise we have experienced the last two millenia pretty much as the passing by of the glory of God, while we have sheltered in the darkness of the cleft of a rock – until now it is virtually too late.  We can presume that from God’s side we are still covered by his hand, but for an apparently increasing number of our contemporaries, God has well and truly “passed by” leaving only a rumour of his past traces, They conclude, either sadly or triumphantly, that God has taken away his hand, so that all that the culture is left with is the residue of an absent deity. Western culture is indeed living in the cleft of a rock.

It is possible to assume that all this is an exaggeration. But let’s rehearse the sad religious history of the West and its prevailing domestication of God.  Think again of what we have done with God.  God has been used to fill gaps when human knowledge was lacking; God has been used to solve, or more likely to fail to solve, admittedly real, but nevertheless contrived problems – earthquakes, tsunamis, cancer and the like; God has been used to accommodate our projected human needs powerfully exposed by Sigmund Freud; God has been used to solve the problem of insurance claims; God has been used as a mascot to accompany crusaders; God has been forced to adorn the belt buckles of  German soldiers, “Gott mit uns”, to accompany the opposition’s rally cry: “For God, King and Country”. God is presently required, though not for much longer, to open Parliament in what, in an ever more shrilling mandate, is an avowedly secular country.

This is the God who has come to an accelerating end in our day.

I have recently been given a book about the life of one of the most effective Anglican chaplain at Gallipoli in the First World War. It tells of a constant request for his services in the trenches in the middle of battles, usually the Eucharist. It tells of the request of soldiers by the thousand wanting Church parades. Remember, this is only a hundred years ago. What I found most remarkable of all was this statement of the Commanding officer to his fellows: “The most important officer we have is the Chaplain! And why? Because for the military machine he was there, not to perform religious duties, but “to build up morale”, to “endorse battle strategies”. Surely here is the most telling illustration of the eclipse of God in the guise of God.  But the really sad disclosure was that this brilliant selfless chaplain, who put himself on the front line over and over again, mostly burying corpses, survived the war only to become an agnostic. Why sad? Perhaps because he accepted his role as a “morale booster”. It is a puzzle how a priest ordained to a ministry of a bloody crucified Lord could not see the connection between the Lord of his calling and the grisly fate of young men sacrificed to the war machine.

I speak as the son of a father who was seriously wounded at the third battle of Ypres, and who later sought ordination precisely because he saw the congruence of Christian faith and the catastrophic human misery being played out, of which he was a part.

Well, so much for the death of God in our culture.

But what of Paul this morning? Here not the backside of God, but now the face. Yet even here, things are not as straightforward as we tend to presume. I imagine it likely that you can call to mind an especially significant personal biblical text. This is mine, for this reason.

Twenty five years ago I joined a bus tour travelling from Athens to Corinth. Greek light is intense, so naturally our guide reminded us that Apollo was the Greek god of light. A little further on, she told us that Diogenes, a famous philosopher of the day, lived in Corinth.  A contemporary of Plato, whom he loathed, Diogenes embodied the Hellenistic ideal – “to know the self”. To that end, he repudiated all the paraphernalia of civilised society, and lived in a barrel – actually it was a large amphora – with his dog, a kynikos in Greek, our word cynic. Now Diogenes preceded Paul in Corinth by four centuries. Why am I telling you this? Because only knowing this background will you understand what Paul is doing in this text, or indeed everywhere. Hear him this morning:

“God who commanded the light”: implication: ‘light’ is not a deity as the Greeks embodied it in the figure of Apollo, but now light is merely a player in nature. Light can be commanded: “God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness – then this – has shone in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge, not of the self, as Diogenes advocated was what the pursuit of knowledge was all about, but now the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

See how Paul creeps up on the sacred mystery. It is bracketed all the way. Not God as a problem solver, a need fulfiller, a gap filler, but the only God there is. Here it is for the first time – now not the backside, not even its veiling, but the very face of God.

Putting all this together twenty five years ago, which from the guide’s side was merely inconsequential information, I wept – tears not only at this stunning revelation of Paul’s brilliance, but equally that I had wasted half a life time in ignorance of what this text has transformed: no longer “No-one can see my face and live”, but precisely its denial: “the light of the knowledge of the glory in the face”.

I hope that this revolution might be something for you too.

Because the truth is that for the coming days, all we have to do is to live with Paul in this miracle of light, and tell the darkening world:  this is God.

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Pentecost 19
15/10/2017

Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Matthew 22:2-14

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Our gospel reading this morning is something of a dog’s breakfast of a text. The general story is well known to Christians, although we’re much more familiar with the simpler version Luke gives us. In Luke, a feast is prepared, but many excuses are given as to why the invited guests can’t come. The insulted host then sends out to the streets and lanes, and has anyone encountered compelled to come and take the place of the original guests: end of story, with a clear moral – don’t miss the invitation, because your place will easily be filled.

In Matthew it is rather more complicated. The host is a king, and the feast a wedding banquet for his son. The invited guests don’t simply dismiss the invitation (twice); they mistreat and even kill the servants sent to announce the feast. This much is straightforward, at least. But, notwithstanding that the food is presumably sitting on the kitchen bench about to be served, the enraged king then enters into a small scale war to destroy those evil-doers and their city. He then sends out again into the streets to gather in all they could find, “both the good and the bad”. And finally we have a strange encounter between the king and a guest who has no wedding garment on. It’s strange, because presumably none of those who were plucked from the streets were wearing their wedding-best at the time. Yet only this one features as offensive. The dumbstruck guest is then cast out to weep and gnash his teeth. And the text concludes with one of Matthew’s little summarising lines: “for many are called, but few are chosen”

It’s quite a lot to get your head around! Some scholars account for the strangeness of the story by proposing that here Matthew weaves together a couple of different stories, retold this way for reasons and a context quite different from Luke’s account. Yet, while that makes good sense in terms of accounting for the text as we now have it, it doesn’t really help us with understanding it as Scripture. The historical and critical tools we have for understanding texts these days are only relatively new. Until they were discovered, the church dealt with these difficult passages with their apparent contradictions and all. We also have to receive it as having its own authority, apart from how we might explain away its contradictions. What the historical approach allows us to do is to break the text up and explain each of its parts. But to explain the story and its oddities by these means is to render it of no use to us. What we can explain is something we already know – because we know the things in terms of which we explain it.

The truly interesting question is whether or not there are things in the text which we can’t easily explain, or which sit somewhat uncomfortably with us. Such things call us into question. They confront us with thoughts we don’t yet comprehend. It is only such things which lead us into new realities, new ways of seeing.

So it’s easy, for example, to draw “morals” from the story: take care to respond to God’s call when it comes. And when you do accept the invitation, take care to “dress” yourself appropriately by living a life worthy of one called by this God. But there is no real gospel here. This is all law – all imperative – do this, don’t do that. There is no liberation here except possibly the news that we are called. If it’s a calling to do things we don’t want to do, then it’s hardly good news.

What is the good news? The good news of the gospel has to do with Jesus Christ, and so if there’s any good news in this mixed up story of the king’s banquet, it’ll be ours only if we read it christologically – or if we allow it to read us christologically. We have to ask: how does the parable speak to us about Jesus Christ, and about us in relation to him? If the story of the king’s banquet tells us what the kingdom of heaven is like (22.2), and if Jesus himself is the presence of the kingdom of heaven, how is the story about Jesus and not simply about us as we accept or reject God’s invitation? The good and the bad are gathered to replace those cast aside. How is this so, christologically? The guest is inappropriately dressed and cannot speak for himself, and is cast out for that reason, and not because he is one of the “bad”. How is this so, christologically?

To answer these questions most succinctly: to read this parable christologically is to see that Jesus is both the invitation to the wedding banquet, and the wedding garment the guests are to wear. What does this mean?

The first part – that Jesus is the invitation – probably makes sense to most Christians. We are used to the thought that the kingdom is open to all – to both good and bad. Once the original guests refused the invitation, the banquet was thrown open to all, and Christians can understand this to be about God’s grace in Christ.

But what then about the guest who is thrown out? He gets in the same way everyone else did – in Christ, by grace, good or bad. The typical explanation here is that, having received grace, this chap did not rise to the challenge of decking himself in righteousness by growing in grace with good works. This is an important lesson, and it echoes themes in the earlier part of the parable where the invitation is rejected outright. Put differently, and more technically, this sees the parable as being about the importance of growing in sanctification after having received justification: coming to look like a “wedding guest” in good works after having received the gracious invitation.

But, in a specifically Christian reading of the parable, we can’t just leave the matter there. The separation of an initial justification from the subsequent sanctification is convenient for theology but, probably in direct correlation to that convenience, it is just not going to work. What we end up doing is turning justification by grace into a ticket with an expiry date such that, while we get into God’s good books by his grace, we stay there by our good works. (Recall here the problem we met a couple of weeks ago in the parable of the workers in the vineyard). We imagine that while we might get into the wedding banquet dressed only in street clothes, once there we have to cobble together something to dress ourselves more respectably, lest our host ask us some uncomfortable questions about our attire.

But this, in fact, is not how we order our lives as church. We gather each week not to compare moral achievements but to be lifted up, once again: once again to be invited to the wedding feast. This is named in our opening prayers and hymns. Each week we hear afresh that God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, and loves us nonetheless. This is named in the preaching, the confession and the declaration of forgiveness. Each week we hear that even the breaking of the body of God by us is made – by grace – a breaking of God for us. Each week we gather as we are around a table abundant with symbols which speak the extraordinary thing we are going to become: Christ’s very Body. All of this contradicts any simple notion of an initial justification followed by a life of sanctification. If sanctification is something into which we are growing, then it is a very strange growth indeed. For what we grow into – if it is grace – is an increasing awareness of our ongoing need of justification, of our need of being set right again despite having heard the gospel a thousand times before. Our holiness increases with our increasing awareness of our need for mercy. In terms of the parable, our growing in grace is a growing in awareness of just how poorly we are dressed for this wedding reception.

Of course, there is much to be said for trying to put a special stiches into our ragged outfits. Even on our own we can do better than fig leaves. But whether we are good or bad matters less than whether we know what gives us a standing before the king who would ask us how we dare to attend his banquet unadorned. When the question comes, such a king – such a God – is to be answered according to his own decree:

I stand before you in the wedding robe which is the groom himself: Christ, in whose honour this party is thrown, and for whose honour I was called from my business to be here; Christ, for whose honour this world was created, and into whose image I am being conformed.

The grace of God in Christ is not simply the invitation, the way into God’s kingdom. Christ is also our wedding garment – our way of eating and drinking and laughing and dancing our way through the celebration – what we are to be wearing when our host greets us in the mingling. The confused guest in the parable is thrown out not because he answers wrongly but because he is struck dumb with fear. It is not that he wears no wedding garment, but that he doesn’t know that in fact he does; he doesn’t know the grace by which he could stand in confidence before the king. For none of us wears garments appropriate to the kingdom, save the garment we wear when we put on Christ. In Christ we are always well-dressed.

So then, may the Spirit of this Christ enliven the people in this place and all places to hear again the invitation of God: be yourselves in the Christ in whose name you are called, and by whose grace you stand.

And for the boundless grace in this invitation, all praise and honour be to God, now and always. Amen.

Amen.

 

 

[This is an extension of an earlier text distributed but not actually preached at MtE]

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Pentecost 18
8/10/2017

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Matthew 21:33-46

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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Today, the lectionary places in front of us the Ten Commandments. In an era when all law seems to be under challenge, from the law regarding marriage, to gun laws to the laws of ethnic minorities in Spain – and here. And challenging law is legitimate. After all, the Basis of Union of the UCA says,

The Uniting Church will keep its law under constant review so that its life may be increasingly directed to the service of God and humanity, and its worship to a true and faithful setting forth of, and response to, the Gospel of Christ.

That is a noble sentiment with noble ends. The ‘service of God and humanity’ is something we do well in the Uniting Church, and here ‘law’ does not mean endlessly tinkering with regulations. But the interesting part is that it mentions ‘worship’ – law as it keeps our worship a ‘true and faithful setting forth’ of the Gospel. Few people realise how important that law is, or that it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

If church law rapidly descends into regulations, worship laws soon focus on rubrics – the directions of how to do it. Perhaps that’s because people find small things easier to deal with, but they will soon lose hold on the Big Picture. The Big Picture is that we gather, not primarily for human fellowship, but to worship God. Interestingly, the Basis says very little about that, but it does name the centralities. It describes Word and Sacrament in dynamic terms, not theoretical ones. It doesn’t get into centuries of arguments stemming from Reformation disputes over what has been called the ‘Supper strife’. And in any case, we have the two editions of Uniting in Worship to guide us.

Trinity College asked me if I would help teach ‘Prayer Book Studies’ this semester. It’s been an interesting experience. For three centuries Anglican worship was characterised by the use of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. For three centuries, Presbyterians and Congregationalists have defined themselves over against it. I remind you that 1661 was the year that the King – Charles II Stuart – returned to the throne after a couple of decades marked by civil war – the worst kind of all war – and Cromwell’s experiment at a republic, the Commonwealth. Whatever you think of Cromwell, it was a bold vision, but it failed. What it did was to bring all the Puritans – our forebears – outside the Church of England where we could be seen. With the return of King and Bishops, we were exposed as the enemy. King Charles did have to restore order, but he did it with an Act of Uniformity and by imposing a Book of – literally – Common Prayer on all subjects. Folk memory is a powerful thing, and it explains why our church traditions are so opposed to liturgical books, to bishops, and to uniformity. There were no alternative ways of legally being an English Christian. Over two thousand clergy lost their livings, including my personal hero Richard Baxter, a Presbyterian, and both grandfathers of the Wesleys. Why? Because they agreed either to use, without change, the BCP, or they claimed liberty in worship and paid for it. On that date, two new traditions were born: Anglicanism was invented, and Nonconformity defined – by law.

Of course, things are very different today. If in the 17^th century we had been presented with A Prayer Book for Australia (1995), there would have been no crisis of conscience, and no divided church. Even the liturgical laws the Anglican church has, have their counterpart in our authorized worship books. They are slightly more insistent on priests using the prayers laid down in the book, but they already represent a variety.

But we are all now facing a common challenge. Ever since Anglicans began translating the BCP into the languages of their former colonies, there has been no uniformity, because languages express ideas differently. Think how different Tudor English is to us today. But we are all affected by two further, connected, revolutionary inventions – the computer (with the internet) and the photocopier. My first liturgical experiments were facilitated by a very grumpy greasy Gestetner (remember?).  The writing of liturgies and sermons, the choice of music, the use of images, are all now immeasurably assisted and expanded, and we are grateful for it.

But now it is possible – and a fact – that any worship leader can find any prayer anywhere on the internet, from any theological tradition or none, and copy it, and edit it, as s/he drops it into the Sunday leaflet of the congregation. Uniformity is inconceivable. But what of the faith of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church? What of the integrity of a Uniting Church or an Anglican one? What makes our worship the faithful inheritor of what our forebears fought to retain? What makes it Christian?

Many of my former students quote back to me a remark I often made; ‘In liturgy, there are no laws’ and I did say it. That’s partly because there was a consensus, a deposit of faith, doctrine and liturgical customs which could be trusted to express worship which carried the worshippers’ consent. We have been blessed in this congregation by a series of pastors with very great ability to articulate the faith and to create the texts and acts of worship for our use. We may trust Craig Thompson, but what about his successor?

My ‘no laws’ quip is unpacked by an article one of my teachers wrote, which he headed, ‘You are free – if…’  If you know what a liturgy of baptism is intended to achieve, you are free to draw together the resources you need (always remembering that congregational assent). The same for a marriage, or a Christian funeral, or a service of lament for a broken world. You could say that the whole of Uniting in Worship consists in providing models which our leaders are trusted to use or adapt. It stands in the tradition of the first Nonconformist Directory of Public Worship in 1644 – not a required book of common prayer. How many of our present ministers own or consult a UiW?

There is in fact one liturgical law, and it is more of an observation. Lex orandi lex credendi, which in its efficient Latin means, ‘The way we pray determines what we believe’. Not the particular words, but what we do in worship sets the pattern of what we believe.

So the fact that we do Word + Sacrament every Lord’s Day here, already speaks volumes about who we are. We hear the scriptures in an orderly way (lectionary) and we break bread as the body of Christ, and we sing all those responses. That we praise the Triune God in hymns and songs, and pray prayers of confession and hear words of assurance, and prayers of intercession, keeping our ears open to the cries of the suffering and needy of the world, adds up to a book of practical theology. The pattern is our tutor, our connection with something deeper. True, it is very fragile indeed, but so is faith in a crucified God.

Our foundations are there, but they are also being undermined in this increasingly dominant secularist and selfish culture. I don’t think we have begun to address the deeper questions of our futurity.

This may not be a biblical sermon, but it is a ‘church’ sermon, for it concerns us all – and let me end by showing a connection.

The Ten Commandments have a long history of us in Christian worship, but their very presence raises questions. I don’t just mean the ones that are daily broken across our present sad humanity. I mean the laws themselves. How do we use them in worship?  Thomas Cranmer, the composer of the Common Prayer, set the Commandments to be read before a prayer of confession, the law as a canon to judge ourselves by; Calvin placed them after the Assurance of Forgiveness, the law as a guide to right living. You need not choose between them! Ancient patterns still have creative things to say to us.

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Pentecost 17
1/10/2017

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Psalm 25
Matthew 21:23-32

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In our gospel reading today the elders and the chief priests ask a question which seems reasonable enough: by what authority do you do these things – “these things” including the overthrowing of the temple marketplace? We understand that particular answers might be dangerous for Jesus but, still, we listen for a straightforward answer from him. What we hear, however, is a clever answer which seems simply to allow Jesus to avoid the hard question. Yet the point of the story is not that we might remark, “Clever Jesus.” The text lays before us a challenge about the relationship between how we think the world is or ought to be and how we actually live in that world.

Jesus counters with a question of his own, about the authority of the now dead John the Baptist. The elders and chief priests carefully weigh up their answer-options: if we say John’s ministry was from God, we’ll be shown up as in error, for we did not welcome him as a prophet; but if we say John’s ministry was of human origin, we risk the anger of the people. Finding both of these outcomes equally unpalatable, they are forced into a public and dishonest agnosticism: “…we do not know…”

The public nature of their refusal to know is critical. They know very well what they think privately, for we see it in their earlier rejection of John. But they dare not think this out loud. For fear they refuse to declare the truth as they see it. In this dishonest turn the elders sever the relationship between their “internal” and “external” selves: what I am in myself and what I am in public are here demonstrated to be two different things. My private self is created by my own thoughts, experiences, emotions, desires, etc., and those of the people close to me. My public self is what I think I need to be in order to protect my private self. The elders and the chief priests protect themselves in their private beliefs by refusing to have a public opinion about John.

Things are very different when it comes to Jesus himself. God reigns in a certain way “inside” Jesus and in the same way “outside” him: internal motivation and external action are the same. In Jesus, God’s kingdom is come and will is done, “on earth, in heaven”. Jesus is what we see him to be; he has what we might call a “plain sense”, nothing hidden.

This is not how it is for the rest of us. Whereas the duplicitous religious leaders could think one thing and say or do another, Jesus could not because God does not. There is no distinction between how this God is in himself, and how God is and acts among us; there is a cohesion between God’s private life and God’s public life.

And this brings us to a surprising connection: this exchange between Jesus and the elders hinges on what the church has sought to mark with its classic confession of God as Trinity. This is surprising, first, because neither Jesus nor the elders have any notion of the church’s later trinitarian confession. It surprising, second, because few Christians actually believe that trinitarian doctrine is about anything that matters, believe that it is more than some strange thing we are made to say and believe.

What is the church’s confession of God as Trinity?  It is not, in the first instance, that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the form or “shape” of the confession. More fundamentally, the confession of the Trinity is concerned to affirm that the “inside” and the “outside” of God are “the same”. The doctrine says that God is-in-Godself in the same way that God is-in-the-world. There is no deception, duplicity, or dissembling. With God it is not “What you see is what you get”; this is the game of the elders and the chief priests, and ours with them. With God, it is “What you see is what there is”. So far as what we see can be labelled, those labels happen to be “Father”, “Son” and “Holy Spirit”, but this is just so that we can say something about these identities as they converge in Jesus. The matter of central importance is that the way in which Father, Son and Spirit “play” before us in the person of Jesus is how they play when they’re not in front of us. How God is in the world is how God is in Godself.

The importance of this here is the contrast between this divine way of being and that of the chief priests and the elders – and of us with them. They, and we, are different in ourselves from what we are in public. I don’t refer here to those things which are properly personal and not appropriate to public space. I mean rather those circumstances when we find ourselves doing the kinds of calculations the chief priests and the elders do in response to Jesus: knowing what we think but sparing ourselves the grief which would come from speaking it, choosing to divide ourselves into two identities – the one I think I know and the one I dare to show. God gives us each one face, and we divide it into two, each side looking in different directions, each ear listening for different things.

The counter-question of Jesus demonstrates that, in their dissembling, their deception, the authority of the chief priests and elders to ask their question evaporates. They know two authorities, Jesus knows only one. Authority rises from a single voice, from both ears hearing the same thing. It is on the divine cohesion of his own inner life and outer ministry that Jesus’ authority is founded.  In contrast, the priests and the elders – and we with them – are divided in themselves; they are spiritually “schizophrenic” (Greek: “divided mind”).

Such dishonesty about myself before others arises from fear: I don’t trust the world with my true self. Fair enough: the world is a dangerous place and a self-preserving instinct does not always deny God. But at the same time dishonesty like this also gives rise to fear, because no one really knows what’s lurking beneath the surface. Fear breeds dishonesty and dishonesty dissolves community.

In contrast, honesty – being the same in myself as I am in public – gives rise to love and trust. It is not easy, and often dangerous. I have to put myself at risk by revealing who I am so that you can know what to expect from me when the relationship between public and private is pressed. And when you know what to expect, your world is safer. Love – community and a safe public space – grows from honesty, and enables honesty.

The gospel is that Jesus – and the God working in him – is not different in himself from what he is in relation to those around him. He names fearful dishonesty and calls it to account. He loves with a creative honesty otherwise unknown to us.

The gospel is further that, while we will fail at being Jesus – of which the cross is the sign – God remains inside as God is outside: ever for us. God is faithful to Godself and to the creation which was, and will again become, “very good”. The body of God – the convergence of Father and Son and Spirit in the person of Jesus – the body of God broken by us is still God’s body for us. And so we take and eat and drink, and declare in these actions that what we have seen in God’s work in Jesus is how God is in Godself: love on the outside, love on the inside. This love we take to our insides that our outside might begin also to become love.

So fed, we are made to become, however fleetingly, ourselves the body of Christ: a community in which the public is built up by the private, and the private is built up by the public, a community not of fear but of faith and hope, in love.

This is the gift of the gospel, and its call to us.

All thanks and praise be to the one who loves us inside out, calling us to this love and making it possible among us.

To God’s greater glory, and to the richer humanity of all God’s people, let us, then, look to be made love, inside and out.

Amen.

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Pentecost 16
24/9/2017

Jonah 3:10-4:11
Psalm 145
Matthew 20:1-16

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[There is something is very troubling about God’s economy. It’s bad enough that those who work only an hour are paid the same as those who’ve worked the whole day. But the point is made without apology, and events unfold so that the unfairness is emphasised and made unmistakable to all. The landowner deliberately pays first those who’ve worked only an hour, so that there’s no possibility that anyone misses the point. We’re expected to be offended. Now, clearly what we have here is not a proposal for an economic or industrial relations policy, but a statement about what it is to deal with the God who sent Jesus. The concept which is usually thrust forward here to help us understand what is going on is “grace”. God freely does with people as he wishes, and he wishes to bless. But we need to think more deeply than such an all-too-easily applied theological label as “grace” might suggest.]

One thing we understand straightaway in Jesus’ story of the workers in the vineyard is that those who’ve worked the whole day are horrified at what has happened. At the same time, we are supposed to see that the all-dayers have received exactly what they contracted for, and so the landowner rightly rejects their objections. It’s his money. If he wants to fritter it away with such extravagant payments, he may. And so we might see that the parable points an accusing finger at those pious and upright people who would deny that God can be gracious even to those who have not contributed much in God’s “vineyard”. The point seems simple enough: do not presume to limit God’s freedom to be gracious to whomever he chooses.

But this is still all too simple if we think the point is merely “grace to late comers”. For if God shows “grace” to those who start work at 9am, noon, 3 and then 5 o’clock, what does God show to those who began work at the start of the day (6am)? Simplistic talk about the grace which God shows to the late starters actually turns his relationship to the early starters into a graceless contract of work and reward. The late starters were told: “go into the vineyard, and you will be paid whatever is right”. But the early starters were later reminded, “did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Did we not have a contract?” On this reading, while the late starters receive more than they would normally be due, it seems that the early starters receive only what they were due. The late-starters have been gratuitously blessed, but early starters have been paid.

Simplistically naming as “grace” God’s blessing of the late-comers leaves us with a problem: some seem to receive what they need on account of what they have done, and some receive irrespective of what they have done. If the lucky latecomers get into God’s good graces simply because God chooses to bless them and does not require that they do as the all-day workers have been doing, what does that say about the work the all-dayers have been doing? Or, more generally, if grace is overwhelming, what is the value of work?

The only answer which makes any sense of the paradox of work and grace – here and elsewhere – is an extraordinary one: the work we are given to do is the form of the grace we receive. The lavishness of the landowner shows clearly that he doesn’t measure the workers’ value by the quantity of work they do. Yet all have been put to work. At the same time, the landowner is able to bless the workers whether they’ve put in a full day’s work or not, for he clearly doesn’t need what they produce in order to bless. If the owner does not need the work to be done in order to pay the workers, then the work must actually be for the workers’ sake, and not for his.

The “grace” here, then, is not the generous payment at the end of the day. The grace is the invitation to see our lives as lived in the vineyard of this master. Here, the payment is not for the work done but is the sign of what they have been engaged in. It is easy to read this story as a parable of the “end-times”, so that the real pay-day is at some time yet to come. But the very opportunity of working in this vineyard, now, is itself the grace.  The early-starters thought they were merely toiling away, earning what was really a freely-given blessing. Their error is not that they moaned about the others being blessed. It was that they thought that they themselves worked in order to be paid. (Cf. the parable of the two sons [the prodigal son, Luke 15.11ff], and in particular the protests of the elder son at his father’s response to the return of the younger, and the father’s response to this objection.) In fact their work was their pay, only they did not experience it as such.  The day’s pay is the sign, the meaning, of the work which has been done, not the consequence of it. The work to which God’s people are called is blessed work because in it – in the concrete and tangible necessities of daily life – the kingdom of God becomes present.

The parable challenges us: Reassess your understanding of the work you have been given to do. You are engaged in the work of grace. What you do is a participation in the very act of creation. What else is grace but the calling into being of things which do not exist? A life lived in grace is no different.

More typically, work is associated with fear. We fear that the work we do will not be good enough to warrant our pay. We fear what others will think if we don’t get it just right, or even fear our own judgement of ourselves. We fear for our prospects if it seems that neither present nor future work will deliver the kinds of resources we think we need for life. We that what we are required to do might not, in the end, actually matter.

But if, as in the parable, the owner of the business of life doesn’t really care how much we produce but pays us regardless, the fear in the labour of our lives disappears. Work becomes activity in grace – even “toiling in the hot sun”. Work becomes something we are freed for, rather than by which we are bound.

Divine grace is not about our standing before God in some as-yet unspecified future, receiving then our daily bread. It is about God’s standing before us now, inviting us to work in the vineyard, redefining for us what we are doing, sustaining us in that work with the manna of grace. The work God gives us to do is central to the way God blesses us. This is the case for us as we make our way through Christian life by attending worship or giving of our resources as we are able. It’s the case for a church council which is confronted with the challenges of maintaining properties, paying stipends, making ends meet, growing congregations. It’s the case for a congregation having to deal with the revelation of abuse in its midst. It’s the case for an individual who finds herself moved to share faith with a neighbour. It is the case for the difficulties of coming to terms with our property challenges here, and for the hard work of Hotham Mission. It is the case for the struggle of dealing with overwhelming illness and grief.

How often these things are for us imagined as sheer burdens we have to bear. And, if we manage to bear them, how often we then secretly imagine ourselves worthy of reward. But if Christian existence is a burden which we bear in order to be rewarded by God, or by those around us, then it is not Christian existence. Taking up the cross, as Jesus invites us, is not a matter of subjecting ourselves to heavy burdens in order to achieve righteousness. The cross is a lens through which we see what a true life is like, in the world and before God.

What do we see through this lens? The life of Jesus himself, grace in the midst of ungrace, given to us our very own life. We see that we are co-workers with Christ in the vineyard which will be God’s heaven. We are co-creators with God. Our work is a share in the calling to order of the chaotic world around us, a calling to fullness of the void of meaningless effort.

That is the blessing of the gospel. It is this to which we invite others, and it is because they will also be blessed in such work that we celebrate should they join us.

So let us, then, rejoice that God gives us a life to live, work to do, a vineyard in which to labour. And let’s get on with it, looking to see what good God might do with our efforts.

Amen.