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Pentecost 7
3/7/2016

Galatians 2:15-21
Psalm 30
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

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Why did Jesus die?

The mundane answers to that question involve the ways in which Jesus came into conflict with religious and political authorities: he rubs people up the wrong way. The children’s “Important God Thought #3” – that God sometimes gets in the way – is very much what we see in the person of Jesus. He is a great disturbance to the religious authorities and, behind them, there are hints that the broader political opposition is also going to be great.

And so, just like countless thousands – perhaps millions – of other martyrs, Jesus is crushed by the machinery of synagogue or church or mosque, or the political or economic system.

While it is a very natural thing for this kind of account to occur to us in our time, it is not the way the New Testament thinks about the death of Jesus. And so this morning we heard from St Paul of the “Christ who loved me and gave himself for me”. This is a very different account of the “why” of Jesus’ death. Unlike the institutional murder of being crushed by the synagogue or by Rome, here we have an intentional death on Jesus’ part: “loved me and gave himself for me…”.

This way of talking about the death of Jesus invokes the difficult category of sacrifice: Jesus “giving himself up” for me. The modern western mind, and not least the modern Christian mind, has a lot of trouble with the idea of sacrifice. Again at the mundane level, we are pretty squeamish these days when it comes to blood. Most of us would probably be vegetarians if we had to get our own meat from the farm to our tables, rather than buy it already styrofoamed and cling-wrapped. Blood is just not part of our everyday experience, and we are uncomfortable with it.

But there are some deeper objections to the notion of sacrifice as it is used theologically; in particular: the idea that God demands the shedding of blood – particularly the shedding of the blood of one named as God’s own Son. What kind of god is it that requires this kind of exchange to take place? We will even hear from time to time objections about the implied “divine child abuse”. The objection is a natural one, and it is a serious objection.

But the more profound objection, so far as Paul would be concerned, is that this understanding of sacrifice implies a kind of economy outside of us and outside of God which ties everybody’s hands – that somehow even God cannot move until blood is spilt. That is the most serious problem with the notion of sacrifice, whether the sacrifice of a son, or a lamb or even a dove.

The idea of sacrifice is there in the Old Testament because that is how people operated at the time. The children’s Important God Thought #4 is that “God is always somewhere”. For the Hebrews the Somewhere was a context in which sacrifice was used as a means of speaking about how we relate to God. And so it is as if God adopts that and refines it, turning from a means of exchange by which gods might be satisfied into a sacrament. It now looks like a buying of life from God, but the ritual of sacrifice is now given to us as a sign of what is involved in reconciliation – that God is doing the giving.

Paul takes up the Old Testament imagery of sacrifice when he talks about the Christ who gave himself up for me. But he is not saying that You understand about sacrifice, and sacrifice is about an exchange, and that explains Jesus.

It works the other way: that Jesus gives the full and proper meaning to how sacrifice works. There is nothing that ties God’s hands. There is not a Deep Magic which must be performed in order for God to act in love towards God’s people.

And so God is not looking for Jesus’ blood. Jesus’ blood is not a currency for salvation which changes hands.

Jesus is simple gift. He doesn’t give himself because that will affect something else in the way that we give money to get something else. His is not an “economic” sacrifice. What we have here is a sheer giving. Jesus’ whole being is giving. He is, as a previous generation spoke of it, the One for Others. That is the heart of what he is. So there is no economy operating here. That is why Paul says that circumcision, in the way it is insisted upon by the Judaizers, is not an item of on list of things you have to pay God in order for God to accept you.

The cross, then, doesn’t cause something to happen. It is a totally different kind of economy. Jesus doesn’t come in order to die. Jesus comes to live. It just happens that living in that different economy – that gift-economy – in which you know yourself as fundamentally belonging to God and not as having to acquire or prove that belonging – is potentially to come into conflict with those who require that we establish or prove, ourselves, that we get the religion right, or the politics right, or the economics right.

Jesus died because he lived in that way that he did. He lived knowing that his fundamental being comes from the one who loved him and sent him. And so he denies things which limit that fundamental being. This gets him killed.

This is not easy to get our head around. As I said last week, our lives are very much about acquisition, about trading and growing. But Paul says “I have died to all of that”. It has all been crucified to me, and I have been crucified to it. Now I seek to live out of what it that Jesus himself has. And we’ll see a little later in the book how Paul uses the nothing notion of adoption: Jesus is the Son, and I become “son-ified” (so we might translate the Greek) – I become one who exists in the same kind of way that he did, existing not with a view to acquiring God’s love but out of that love.

This is the fundamental word of the gospel: that God’s love comes to us before anything else. (This is our justification for baptising little children who can’t yet Yes or No: God loves us before we can love). And our call is simply to live out of that gift: to stand before each other already justified by God, not demanding of one another but living a life of gift.

I died to those other things. It is no longer I who lives but Christ who lives in me.

By the grace of God, may we ever more fully grow into this gift, and take on its form as our own.

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(Slightly edited transcript from recording)

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Pentecost 6
26/6/2016

Galatians 2:11-20
Psalm 77
Luke 9:51-62

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Paul puts a fairly stark choice to the church in Galatia: it is either hypocrisy or death.

The theme of hypocrisy comes up because Paul has had a problem with Peter (or “Cephas” in our reading morning) in Antioch. After he has recounted the way in which he had gone to Jerusalem and put his proclamation of the gospel before those how preceded him as apostles, to test that he wasn’t “running in vain”, Paul now finds that Peter – while originally being happy as a Christian Jew to join in table fellowship with Gentile Christians – subsequently withdraws from that fellowship when others come from Jerusalem whose expectation is that male Gentile Christians would be circumcised, taking on the mark of the covenant God made with Israel.

When we speak about hypocrisy, we tend to have in mind a very strong moral sense of the term: a person who seems to say one thing and yet acts another way. In the best of cases it is a matter of self-delusion: a person who can’t see that her actions and her words don’t cohere. In the worst case scenarios, it is a matter of deliberate deception: a person saying one thing and doing another, perhaps as an exercise of power over others.

But that moral sense of hypocrisy doesn’t really apply to Peter or to Barnabas, and certainly not to those who came from Jerusalem to Antioch. This kind of hypocrisy is distraction from the heart of the matter.

In the case of the “Judaizers” – those who were trying to make Jewish the Gentile Christians – that distraction from the heart of the matter took the form of treating faith in Christ as an item which has to be added to a list of things we do in order to stand right before God. They had been Jews from birth; they had come to Christian faith and have understood that they have “added” this faith to their Jewishness. And they look at the Gentile church and say, Well, they’ve got Christ, and now they need to add to that the mark of the covenant – treating faith in Christ as a matter of an item on a list. Later on in Galatians Paul adds other items he’s heard the Galatians think matter: the observation of certain days or seasons or celebrations, and so on.

To this kind of hypocrisy – distraction from what is truly the heart of the matter – Paul says a very strong No! He says, theologically, that Jesus is not just one more thing to add to yourself in order to be whole before God. The second thing he says – or implies – is an anthropological or human consequence: you are not the sum of things you have acquired. In this letter and in others Paul gives an account of the things that he himself had acquired. Born of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; circumcised on the eighth day; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the law a Pharisee and faultless. He says of these things, I consider them all crap – a very strong word in the Greek! – I consider them all absolute rubbish compared to the value of knowing Jesus.

Our lives as individuals and as a community are very much a matter of acquisition. I acquire language, an education; I develop relationships, I take on a vocation, I have a family, earn money, I gather possessions, reputation and influence. And I do each of these things (assuming that I am free to do them) because I think that they are the right things to do. And so it is very easy then to imagine myself as righteous because of the way I’ve added those things and because of the thing I have added.

As a community we go through the same kind of process. Last week many of us gathered to consider the things we value in our life as Mark the Evangelist – the things we’d like to see carried over into whatever our future might be. We talked about location, aesthetics, worship, theology, mission and evangelism. These are things we imagine we need to retain or acquire in order to be a church – and they’re very important. But we ought not to imagine that our being as a church is the sum of all those things – that our standing before God is now secured because we can tick all the boxes on “the list”.

Paul says, You are not the sum of all the things you have acquired. And he doesn’t mean that therefore you should have less; he doesn’t mean that you should have different things. What he says you have to do to unhook yourself from your acquisitions is, die: “I died to the law” – I died to the lists – “I have been crucified with Christ.” The metaphor of death is perhaps the only one which is really going to work for Paul here. He is talking about grace, and one thing about the dead is that they haven’t got anything – they’re dead. “You can’t take it with you”, conventional wisdom says; it is very important theological wisdom as well. The dead don’t have anything, and you can’t add anything to them either; they cannot acquire anything. You can’t add anything to the dead.

But what Pauls says happens is that, whether we literally or metaphorically dead – God adds us to Christ. “I have died to the lists; I have been crucified with Christ” and so “It is now longer who live but Christ who lives in me”. I haven’t added Christ as one more thing I have to have; I have been added to Christ.

Christian faith is an exercise in death and resurrection, an exercise in dying and being added to the life of Christ.

Our lives are processes of acquisition. This is part of what it means to be an historical being: we accumulate things. But the important thing here is that these acquisitions are merely what give us shape and contour, making us the individuals and communities that we are. The difficult thing is to acquire but not to evaluate ourselves by what we have – to have and, at the same time, not to have. It is extraordinarily difficult, for we choose what we do because we consider them to be the right choices, and we would want to say to God and to those around us, I chose the right things.

But Paul says, you are added to Christ; he is not added to you.

This is difficult, which is why we have the book of Galatians. Distraction from the heart of the matter is difficult to avoid. And because it is difficult we practice it each week. We gather around this table. We come and receive. We eat and we drink. But unlike most other food, we are not adding to ourselves in that eating and drinking. Rather we are being added to Christ. As we eat and drink we are made part of the Body of Christ; we are grafted onto that Body. Around this table we receive (Augustine says) what we are, in order to become what we receive: the Body of Christ. To learn what that means – what it means to be added to Christ – would be to get to the heart of the matter, without hypocrisy.

And so it ought to be our prayer that, as we hear and repent, as we eat and drink, as we are added to the Body and then are sent as food for a hungry world, God might continue to teach us who are as we are added to the Son, and so how we are to be with each other, and before God.           Amen.

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(Slightly edited transcript from recording)

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Pentecost 5
19/6/2016

Galatians 2:1-13
Psalm 43
Luke 8:26-39

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One of the reasons for focussing, in the way on one particular biblical book, and working our way through it, is that it enables to understand what is really going on in the exchange between the writer and those to whom he writes. That is a special benefit in relation to reading the book of Galatians because it is not exaggerating things too much to say that we are gathered here today in the way that we are because of the book of Galatians. The great reformer Martin Luther spoke of having wedded himself to this book. It here that he discovered, for his own desire and needs, the sense of what it means to speak of the grace of God. So we are going to try to understand over the next few months what that grace is all about – how it is different from other ways of relating to God, and what kind of ethic leads out of our experience of being embraced by God through such grace.

Out of that protestant reformation one of the great slogans was, indeed, that we are saved by grace alone. But the problem with slogans is that they get drawn out of particular historical contexts and take on a reality which is sometimes very different from what they meant in that original context. And so, for we protestants 500 years later, we often experience grace as somehow being the “easier” option – easier than the option which is being denied here, “salvation by works”. We might be given the impression that we don’t have to work very hard; God, instead, wants to embrace us. It is easier this way.

Paul himself knew of this reading of grace. He was himself accused of trying to please people rather than please God. His doctrine of grace rather than works was heard as letting people off the hook. The particular point of conflict – the point of conflict really for the New Testament, as the gospel begins to spread from Palestine into the wider Roman and Greek world,  was the question of circumcision: certainly for those Gentile men who were becoming Christians, a difficult “work”! Paul is being heard so say, You don’t need to worry about that, and so is being heard to be saying, There is an easier way.

And yet it is a great struggle. It is not an easy thing for the church to get its head around. Paul is having constantly to defend himself and his apostleship. Whatever grace is, then, it is not about things being easy.

Why not? Why this great struggle? We have this morning how Paul is arguing that he is on the same side as the other apostles and yet I am different. Why this great struggle?

There are probably two things going on. One is that, for those who are bringing the circumcision doctrine to the Gentile Christians, that there is a question of the faithfulness of God. Has God not commanded this? Why are the laws being changed now? It is great for us if the rules are changed in our favour, of course! However, the trouble is that if the rules are changed, and we accept this, what if God changes them again? So the question of the faithfulness – the reliability of God – is the theological dimension of what is going on here. Now, we’ll hear more in a few weeks’ time of how Paul deals with that particular question.

But there is another important dimension to the whole debate. This is not so much the “vertical” one of our relationship with God, but the “horizontal” one of how we relate to each other. Another characteristic of the Reformation – particularly as it came through Luther – is that it tends to reduce the whole question of the relationship to God to my relationship to God: How to I find a righteous God? And Luther (re-)discovers the doctrine of salvation by grace, through faith. The problem is that it is not just I who might be saved in this way; it might also be you. And that is what creates the question. If you are save but you are different from me, how do I know that I am saved? Or do I know that you are saved, or that you are safe. How do I know that you are not somehow contaminating me because you aren’t saved enough?

The question of circumcision, as a mark which distinguishes the people of the covenant with Israel from those previously outside that covenant is just one of those questions: Are we actually standing before God in the same way?

For the doctrine of grace says that God accepts you as you actually are. And we will hear a little later in the book of Galatians about how Paul declares, so far as stance before God goes, there is no Greek or Jew, there is no slave or free, there is no male or female. You have to be some combination of those things in order to be an historical human being, but the doctrine of salvation by grace says that God takes what you are and accepts what you are, and then you move on in some new direction after that.

But that is the difficulty of grace: it doesn’t lift us out of the world. It calls us into a different kind of relationship with those who are not me. We have lots of ways of relating to others: they are part of my family (therefore, they are special); they are part of my community, or my country, or my religion or my faculty or my workplace. These are ways in which, in one sense, we rely upon “law” to relate us to those around us. But the problem being wrestled with in the early church is that grace is that grace is also mediated “horizontally” and not just “vertically”.

The effect of this – the very hard thing with which the church is wrestling in these texts – is the fact that we are called, as those who have received grace, to be gracious. Christian discipleship is about growing – not just in the grace of God, that we might actually receive and realise how rich that gift actually is. It is also about growing in graciousness. It is about being in a God-like way to those who are around us.

This is what we embody week after week as we gather around this table. We embody grace in the sense that we recognise that we are invited. We come forward, recognising that we are not invited because of what we have done. We are invited because what is on the table is a sign of our capacity for violence toward each other – the capacity of the people of God to want to kill God. And so we persist with “body” and “blood” – as icky as that language is – because it reminds us what we are capable of and it shows us what God is capable of overcoming. So there is grace for each one of us, to come forward, to receive that, no longer as an accusation but as God’s embrace of us.

And as we are embraced in our reception of the bread and the wine, we embrace those who gather around the table with us. For we are not invited alone. We are invited to accept graciously the person on our left and our right, and also those on the other end of the line who always sit in a different part of the church. There is not Holy Communion which is not communal. God’s grace to us is always doubly mediated: through Jesus, but Jesus appears among us with the face of another person. “God is always somewhere” concrete and tangible – to recall our children’s address this morning. That is the gift and the call.

Grace is God’s word for those who are heavily laden. It is a word which brings with it a light and easy yoke. We are here to receive that gift, to take on that yoke, that peace and love and hope might have a chance in a world where the righteousness we think we have earned leads too often to judgement and division.

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(Slightly edited transcript from recording)

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Pentecost 4
12/6/2016

Galatians 2:15-21
Psalm 5
Luke 7:36-8:3

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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On this third Sunday of hearing the text of Paul’s Letter to the churches in Galatia, and which is now coming indirectly to us, we hear this verse:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

With these words, indeed with the whole passage from Galatians before us today, we are at the very centre of the preaching and theology of St Paul. Equally certainly, we are also at what has been the same centre of the history of both Catholic and Protestant churches since the days of the sixteenth century Reformation. Then the controversy was that of how human beings might find themselves “right with God”, or – in more technical language – how one could claim to be “justified” before God. We know of Martin Luther’s anguished question in the monastery: “How can I find a righteous God?” – anguished because he knew only of his failure in experiencing what he was told should be his salvation. And this because of the burden of a religious life lived under the constraints of  a required obedience to ecclesiastical law.

The resolution came for Luther, as indeed it has for countless others before and since, in his discovery of a different gospel of liberation found in the proclamation of the Apostle Paul. And ever since, Protestant proclamation has echoed Luther in endorsing a similar individual preoccupation with justification in the face of human sin and guilt, and their counterpoint in redeeming grace and faith.

Although the mature Luther quickly came to broaden his anxious search into a celebration of its proper foundation in the person of Jesus Christ, what Luther set in train with his anguished question and his revolutionary discovery five hundred years ago has meant that generations of readers of Paul since the time of Luther have understood that to be “saved” one must “have faith in Jesus Christ”, not in any effort, work, or merit of one’s own. Even more, generations have been reminded that it is not enough to give merely mental assent to God’s work in Jesus.  Rather God’s work of justification is completed in the individual only through whole -hearted trust in Christ, and his atoning sacrifice for sin on the cross. This righteousness, found in one’s faith in Jesus Christ alone, is then imputed to the sinner, who is thereby enabled to stand before God without guilt or shame.

Does that sound familiar? At least to those of us over seventy! So we have today’s text as a classical location for such a gospel. Here it is again:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

What is happening here?  We can readily see with such a reading why  “being saved by faith not works” has been so central to Christian understanding. What is not so clear is where the true initiative lies in this relationship. What has happened in practice is that Jesus Christ has become the object of our faith; that is to say, our faith is the way in which Jesus Christ and his benefits are received by us as subjects.

And to make sure that we have got it, this is what has been called “good news”, gospel.

This story’s deep entrenchment in Protestant theology is familiar to all who have had some minimal induction into our Uniting Church traditions, even if this voice has been more than somewhat muted for the last forty years.

So there is surely some irony in the fact that the unchurched culture around us has now learnt, and loves to sing, about “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” sung presumably in ignorance of the costliness of what it was that its author, the reformed slave trader John Newton, was confessing.  Perhaps what has become a vacuous “amazing grace” is all that is left of what was once a totally encompassing existential celebration of the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant; the celebration encapsulated in the word: justification.

But now comes the tricky part – so here is where I have to encourage you to take a deep breath and try to hold on a bit longer. It was not always so, this picture we have painted. Early editions of the Authorised Version of the Bible of 1611 followed the tradition since the fourth century translation of the Greek text into Latin – known as the Vulgate – rendered the Greek phrase in two preceding verses in the passage we read not as faith in Jesus Christ but as the faith of  Jesus Christ.  So also in the verse before us, the Greek is ἐν πίστει ζῶ τῇ τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ: “in the faith of the Son of God”.  πίστει is the Greek word for “faith”, “τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ is the genitive, or possessive, form “of the Son of God”.  In fact, then, the translation “of” as in “the faith OF the Son of God” is the literal meaning of the Greek words.

More recent editions of the Authorised version, and subsequent translations ever since, went back to Luther’s translation. But if you have a New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and you look up this text you will see in italics at the bottom of the page that “the faith of…”  is offered as an alternative reading to “faith in…”.

The significance of the substitution of the prepositions is monumental.  If we were to make such a substitution, we now have this text in a new and quite different form. Here it is:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith OF the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” 

See what has happened. Now it is not my faith that takes centre stage – my faith which may be confident, weak or non-existent – but now it is the faith of Christ that we are being invited to appropriate and to live by. The difference is of considerable moment. We have surely all had experience of a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a colleague who has had faith in us when we struggled to have any in ourselves. And with that assurance, the world changed for us. That is what is at stake when “of” becomes the substitute for “in”.

Why does all this matter?  We are forever being told that we live in a post-Christian society, and the accuracy of that acknowledgement is daily being forced on us. Our society and our churches are a long, long, way from Luther’s anguished cry: How can I find a righteous God?  Who asks that question anymore? Now the cry might well be: How can I find God? Or at worst, the assertion uttered either triumphantly by the Ditchkens (the Dawkins and Hitchens ) of this world, or at best as a resigned sad conclusion to life’s ambiguous experiences: There is no God.

The grim truth is that what we have witnessed in the lifetime of most of us has been the fact that Christianity no longer generates a wider culture of an embodied context wherein faith can be lived as more than an act of individual defiance to the prevailing superficialities of the day.  More and more, the place where culture matters most of all – the home, the parish, the community, is frayed and in tatters. Christianity, as it is popularly understood, has for the wider community simply ceased to be life-giving. The mission, the place, the presence of Church which was once at the centre is now ever more marginalised, the ubiquitous coffee shops we pass to get here being the place where “congregations” gather.

But – and here is the good news. While all this is happening we have resources that remain largely untapped. We have tools of which we are largely unaware. The theological advances of the past seventy or so years lie mostly dormant, even to the minds of  vocal retired clergy writing in “Crosslight”: those Christological, Trinitarian, and sacramental resources that could readily provide the ground work for a new springtime of faith. There is a secure path waiting for us to walk beyond a present captivity to secular mantras.  In a society that is not only all about “me”, but also where faith is understood to be believing a whole lot of things that are implausible, the faith of Christ surely trumps my faith in Christ every time.

This is why the reconfiguration of today’s text is of crucial significance in the days to come: crucial remember, comes from the Latin cruxis, cross- bearing.  Such a reconfiguration could achieve a new reformation of equal significance to the old.

We need to be much more aware of all this not least as we wrestle with the legacy of our property, which appears to speak so loudly of a world that has gone.  But in the light of our reconfigured text: what about this?   And here even preachers find themselves surprised by the implications of their texts.  A possible implication is this. The church next door, suitably modified as it has been by the sixteenth century Reformation, was shaped like the ancient cathedrals that preceded it in an age founded on the faith OF Christ, not so much of  OUR faith in Christ. What might that mean for the fate of that building for the future if the case we are making holds up?  Would our reconfigured text help or hinder what we should do with it in a radically secularised society? That, if nothing more, might surely be an interesting question.

Whatever we decide about the future of our property, this much is certainly true. Our text today is a truly foundational resource.  It could once again make faith a lived reality on the ground.

So, with Paul, I offer it to you again in its radically reconfigured form:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith OF the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

This is a ground quite other than the fragility of our personal faith.  This is a ground from which a massively revitalised grasp of the mission of all our churches could be launched. And though other foundations might well be shaky, of this foundation the promise is sure: that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

 

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Pentecost 3
5/6/2016

Galatians 1:6-24
Psalm 146
Luke 7:11-17

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“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel!”

Paul has an issue he wants to sort out with the church in Galatia!

And yet, before dealing with this, he feels that he has to defend himself:

“For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

No less than 6 times in the first chapter of the book Paul insists that his apostolic vocation is not something of human origin but is a sending by God through a direct revelation of Jesus Christ. He has to defend himself in part because his proclamation of the gospel itself is challenged, and in part because his status as an apostle was questioned.

In response, Paul reasserts both the content of what he believes and his authority in the matter. But the important point for today is that these are not two separate things, but are inextricably linked. What Paul knows cannot be separated from how he knows it, for both the knowing and the knowledge itself are matters of interruption. In contrast, the “human” method of knowing – the pleasing people of which Paul is accused – is a matter not of interruption but of continuity.

What is at stake here is how we know the things of God.

On the question of how we come to knowledge in general, the theologian-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once drew an instructive distinction between a teacher and a midwife (in Philosophical Fragments). In the learning model of the midwife, we come to knowledge of something by its already being within us, and being skilfully drawn out. As a demonstration of this Kierkegaard recounts a story in which the philosopher Socrates “draws out” from an uneducated slave boy Pythagoras’ theorem about the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. Without telling the boy anything, but only by asking him questions, the boy is able to deduce something akin to our familiar a² + b² = c². In this way, Socrates thinks he establishes that everything we can know is already inside us, and simply needs someone or something to help it out – like the midwife helps out the baby.

Kierkegaard contrasts this midwifery acquisition of knowledge with the teacher. The teacher brings something new to the student which the student could not otherwise have known or discovered. The knowledge is not induced from the student; rather the student is, in a sense, interrupted by what the teacher brings.

Kierkegaard’s distinction is helpful because illuminates the distinction Paul draws between “from humans” and “from God.”  For Paul, what he preaches is not what we might already know, but what only God could bring through what Paul calls “a revelation of Jesus Christ”. This was for Paul himself a profound interruption of his world. It turned him from persecutor of the church to evangelist, from devout Jew to being willing to eat and work with Gentiles as a sign of the gospel.

Belief in Jesus, as a kind of knowing, springs from just such an interruption, just such a revelation.

But it is not enough to say just this. Christian faith is not related to normal knowledge merely as interruption is related to continuity. Were this the case, anything which interrupted our world could be construed as an act of God: a heart attack, the terrorist’s bomb, falling in love, a market crash, an unfaithful partner. These things are rarely true discontinuities; they are much more often just the signs of deeper continuities of which we were unaware.

The relationship between what is continuous, and so natural to us, and what interrupts because it is truly outside the possibilities of our world, is put better for faith in terms of the relationship between law and grace. More specifically, Paul’s struggle with his opponents at Galatia (or in Jerusalem) has to with the order of law and grace. Paul rejects the way these are ordered by his opponents. The specific crisis is the question of the relationship between circumcision and Jewish and Christian identity. For Paul’s opponents, circumcision is a sign to God. Paul sees it as a sign to Israel. The difference here is that, for his opponents, circumcision tells God that this people belongs to him. For Paul, it tells the people that they belong to God. Those who want to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians consider that it amplifies God’s favour whilst, for Paul, circumcision is the sign of God’s favour which comes before the sign.

Because of this different reading of circumcision, Paul is portrayed as weak, as pleasing human beings by allowing the Gentiles to avoid the inconvenience(!) of circumcision. By putting God’s grace before anything we do Paul seems to be let everyone off the hook.

Yet Paul knows his own experience: a zealous persecutor of Christ claimed by God to become Christ’s proclaimer. When he defends himself, then, he defends the gospel, because he himself is a kind of interruption, a sacrament of grace, an apostle born out of place, out of order, so far as his critics are concerned. God made Paul to become, to represent, to embody what he was to speak of.

For it is only the free who are able to set free. This is the closest thing the people of God have to a fundamental law.

Only the free are able to set free. The question then becomes, Who is free?

Paul’s answer to the Galatians is, only God.

What does this mean?

Positively, it is impossible to say because, in our experience, absolute freedom is self-contradictory. And so we place limits on freedom. We write laws which seek to constrain as much as to liberate, which indicate how deep (and no further) freedom can go. But with God freedom goes all the way down. This is what is so hard for the circumcision party to fathom: did God not command the sign of circumcision? How can God be free here? We’ll hear how Paul accounts for this in the weeks to come, but at the heart of the matter is God’s capacity to create new things, truly new things, and God’s not being bound by what is already in place, to have to draw something out of that.

What God’s sovereign freedom means negatively is a little easier to say. It means that God does not owe us anything.

It surprised me when I first wrote that. It surprised me because I realised that I (and probably you too!) tend to imagine that God does owe us something. If we make the right sacrifices the right way or, in modern terms, get the strategic plan right, or the governance oversight, or the budget, or the building, or the location, or the worship music, or the outreach program, and if we are prayerful and faithful enough (or at least, sincere), then…

It is the “then” which limits God’s freedom, which nails God down (or nails him up, as the case may be). The “then” which follows the “if” is our expectation that we can midwife something out of God, some benefit which is already there, just waiting for us to ease it into the bright day. We just have to get the angles and the timing right: Push, God… Breathe…

This is not the God of the gospel. There is nothing we need to ease out of God, for God willingly gives us what we need.

When Paul says, Christ alone, he declares just this: what God gives is enough. What we do in return is just the particular form in which that gift is acknowledged: whether circumcision or uncircumcision, whether we marry or choose to remain celibate for the kingdom, whether we fast or feast, whether we worship under a spire or in hard to find catacombs.

It all begins with the gift, to which any imagined or prescribed obligation must simply point. What we do is an answer to our sense for the gift.

When this truly is the case for us then, as it was for Paul, they will glorify God because of us.

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel!”

Paul has an issue he wants to sort out with the church in Galatia!

And yet, before dealing with this, he feels that he has to defend himself:

“For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

No less than 6 times in the first chapter of the book Paul insists that his apostolic vocation is not something of human origin but is a sending by God through a direct revelation of Jesus Christ. He has to defend himself in part because his proclamation of the gospel itself is challenged, and in part because his status as an apostle was questioned.

In response, Paul reasserts both the content of what he believes and his authority in the matter. But the important point for today is that these are not two separate things, but are inextricably linked. What Paul knows cannot be separated from how he knows it, for both the knowing and the knowledge itself are matters of interruption. In contrast, the “human” method of knowing – the pleasing people of which Paul is accused – is a matter not of interruption but of continuity.

What is at stake here is how we know the things of God.

On the question of how we come to knowledge in general, the theologian-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once drew an instructive distinction between a teacher and a midwife (in Philosophical Fragments). In the learning model of the midwife, we come to knowledge of something by its already being within us, and being skilfully drawn out. As a demonstration of this Kierkegaard recounts a story in which the philosopher Socrates “draws out” from an uneducated slave boy Pythagoras’ theorem about the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. Without telling the boy anything, but only by asking him questions, the boy is able to deduce something akin to our familiar a² + b² = c². In this way, Socrates thinks he establishes that everything we can know is already inside us, and simply needs someone or something to help it out – like the midwife helps out the baby.

Kierkegaard contrasts this midwifery acquisition of knowledge with the teacher. The teacher brings something new to the student which the student could not otherwise have known or discovered. The knowledge is not induced from the student; rather the student is, in a sense, interrupted by what the teacher brings.

Kierkegaard’s distinction is helpful because illuminates the distinction Paul draws between “from humans” and “from God.”  For Paul, what he preaches is not what we might already know, but what only God could bring through what Paul calls “a revelation of Jesus Christ”. This was for Paul himself a profound interruption of his world. It turned him from persecutor of the church to evangelist, from devout Jew to being willing to eat and work with Gentiles as a sign of the gospel.

Belief in Jesus, as a kind of knowing, springs from just such an interruption, just such a revelation.

But it is not enough to say just this. Christian faith is not related to normal knowledge merely as interruption is related to continuity. Were this the case, anything which interrupted our world could be construed as an act of God: a heart attack, the terrorist’s bomb, falling in love, a market crash, an unfaithful partner. These things are rarely true discontinuities; they are much more often just the signs of deeper continuities of which we were unaware.

The relationship between what is continuous, and so natural to us, and what interrupts because it is truly outside the possibilities of our world, is put better for faith in terms of the relationship between law and grace. More specifically, Paul’s struggle with his opponents at Galatia (or in Jerusalem) has to with the order of law and grace. Paul rejects the way these are ordered by his opponents. The specific crisis is the question of the relationship between circumcision and Jewish and Christian identity. For Paul’s opponents, circumcision is a sign to God. Paul sees it as a sign to Israel. The difference here is that, for his opponents, circumcision tells God that this people belongs to him. For Paul, it tells the people that they belong to God. Those who want to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians consider that it amplifies God’s favour whilst, for Paul, circumcision is the sign of God’s favour which comes before the sign.

Because of this different reading of circumcision, Paul is portrayed as weak, as pleasing human beings by allowing the Gentiles to avoid the inconvenience(!) of circumcision. By putting God’s grace before anything we do Paul seems to be let everyone off the hook.

Yet Paul knows his own experience: a zealous persecutor of Christ claimed by God to become Christ’s proclaimer. When he defends himself, then, he defends the gospel, because he himself is a kind of interruption, a sacrament of grace, an apostle born out of place, out of order, so far as his critics are concerned. God made Paul to become, to represent, to embody what he was to speak of.

For it is only the free who are able to set free. This is the closest thing the people of God have to a fundamental law.

Only the free are able to set free. The question then becomes, Who is free?

Paul’s answer to the Galatians is, only God.

What does this mean?

Positively, it is impossible to say because, in our experience, absolute freedom is self-contradictory. And so we place limits on freedom. We write laws which seek to constrain as much as to liberate, which indicate how deep (and no further) freedom can go. But with God freedom goes all the way down. This is what is so hard for the circumcision party to fathom: did God not command the sign of circumcision? How can God be free here? We’ll hear how Paul accounts for this in the weeks to come, but at the heart of the matter is God’s capacity to create new things, truly new things, and God’s not being bound by what is already in place, to have to draw something out of that.

What God’s sovereign freedom means negatively is a little easier to say. It means that God does not owe us anything.

It surprised me when I first wrote that. It surprised me because I realised that I (and probably you too!) tend to imagine that God does owe us something. If we make the right sacrifices the right way or, in modern terms, get the strategic plan right, or the governance oversight, or the budget, or the building, or the location, or the worship music, or the outreach program, and if we are prayerful and faithful enough (or at least, sincere), then…

It is the “then” which limits God’s freedom, which nails God down (or nails him up, as the case may be). The “then” which follows the “if” is our expectation that we can midwife something out of God, some benefit which is already there, just waiting for us to ease it into the bright day. We just have to get the angles and the timing right: Push, God… Breathe…

This is not the God of the gospel. There is nothing we need to ease out of God, for God willingly gives us what we need.

When Paul says, Christ alone, he declares just this: what God gives is enough. What we do in return is just the particular form in which that gift is acknowledged: whether circumcision or uncircumcision, whether we marry or choose to remain celibate for the kingdom, whether we fast or feast, whether we worship under a spire or in hard to find catacombs.

It all begins with the gift, to which any imagined or prescribed obligation must simply point. What we do is an answer to our sense for the gift.

When this truly is the case for us then, as it was for Paul, they will glorify God because of us.

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Pentecost 2
29/5/2016

Galatians 1:1-5
Psalm 96
Luke 7:1-10

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When compared to the way in which we might begin a letter today, it would have to be said that Paul’s letter makes an extraordinary beginning.

Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— ² and all the members of God’s family who are with me,

To the churches of Galatia:

³ Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, ⁴ who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, ⁵ to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

That is how to start a letter!

Grand as it is, it is closely correlated to the way in which letters were begun then and so not really over the top for the time. Even if we are not so grandiloquent today, how we address each other – whether in person or by correspondence – is usually fairly closely prescribed. When you learn a new language, almost the first thing you learn will be how to greet another person, and it is not long before the local rules of letter-writing are also taught.

Even though we are not so full in our customs of greeting today it remains the case that the rules are very well defined, and because of this we are also well attuned to occasions when the rules are broken. And the usual response to the broken rules is at least surprise, and quite often offence – if a greeting is not returned or, more positively, if someone greets us who we didn’t expect would. This applies even in the most reduced forms of communication, such as email. An email which comes without at least a “hi” at the beginning or a “thanks” or something similar at the end feels harsh.

We sometimes dismiss the typical exchange of greetings as a kind of necessary “social noise” which has to happen to send and receive signals that things are OK and likely to go according to the usual pattern. But in fact most greetings have hidden within them not simply custom but a wish.

To say “Good morning” to someone is not to comment on the weather; it is to wish her a good day, or afternoon, or evening. To say “farewell” to someone is not to dismiss them, but to say “go well; travel well”. “Goodbye” is a contraction of an older saying, “God be with you”. The Romans would greet each other with “salv­é”, (meaning “health” whence our English “salve”, “salvation”; cf. French salut), and so expressed a wish for the well-being of the person met. The same can be found in other languages (French bonjour, salut; German Guten Tag, Hebrew shalom [peace], etc.).

The important point about all this is that it changes the meaning of what happens when the customs for greeting are violated. If there is deep in our cultural memory the notion that we are to greet another by expressing a wish for the other’s well-being, then to deprive another person of the right greeting is not simply to be impolite but in fact to deprive them of your good wishes or, to get to the heart of the matter, to deprive them of your prayer.

For “God be with you” – “goodbye” – is not simply a “wish” but is in fact a prayer, as can be understood all the other similar greetings. “A good morning to you” is not addressed to you but to the one “in charge of” good mornings. In the same way when Paul declares “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…” he is now addressing not the Galatians but God or, perhaps more profoundly, he addresses both God and the Galatians at once.

To break the rules of greeting is to address someone without such a prayer being said or implied, and so is make a demand of them without offering anything in return. It is to overlook that we have a responsibility to wish the well-being of others. In Paul’s case there are very serious matters he wants to raise with the Galatians, and he gets to them in the very next verse following this opening greeting. But there is no getting past the pastoral, human, theological necessity of beginning as he does: declaring himself, identifying those he intends to address, and binding those two parties together in speaking a prayer for blessing for the Galatians. To have done anything else than this would have been to contradict the whole point of the letter, which is that the Galatians are in peril of depriving themselves of just such a blessing.

If we push this thinking, then the failure to greet properly is not simply a matter of impoliteness or lack of civility, at least not in the usual sense. To be uncivil, which comes from the Latin civitas for city, is more profoundly a matter of failing to contribute to the creation of the city as a community of mutually responsible and well-wishing persons. The same applies to being “impolite”, which is linked to the Greek word for city (polis) and can be re-read in the same way: failure to set our relationships in the context of prayer.

All of this is to suggest that how we greet each other, and any unwillingness to wish the best for each other, is not simply a moral failure or a matter of bad manners; it goes to the heart of what we are and where our well-being will come from.

We can draw all this to some kind of conclusion by bringing it into play with two aspects of our expression of faith in worship today – the liturgical act of passing the peace, and that aspect of the creed which speaks of “the communion of saints”.

To say “peace be with you” is not merely to say hello, but is to utter a prayer, so that the passing of the peace in worship is in fact a practising of prayer, and a preparation for the serious work of praying for each other. We might speak, then, of the passing of the peace as a kind of sacrament of intercessory prayer: it looks like we are greeting one another but God is also addressed.

And so this turning to each other brings us to a filling out of what it means to speak of the communion of saints. It is easy, perhaps even natural, to think of the communion of saints as a given, static community of believers – a collective of sanctified persons. But the communion of saints is rather more a dynamic communion, a movement of mutual concern in which we address God for each other as we address each other. To be with each other is to be the means – the source of the prayer – by which God blesses us.

Let us seek to become a community of blessing such that, whether or not our language expresses it directly, our speaking to each other is like a prayer with a view to building up the one we address. Anything less than this falls short of the source of all blessing the Christian knows, as Paul reminds the Galatians: that Jesus has given even himself, and so become a prayer for us – become the prayer for us – that we might be lifted out of the mire, to know peace.

By the grace of God may we too be made such pray-ers, and prayers, unto the healing of all we encounter. Amen.

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Trinity
22/5/2016

Romans 5:1-5
Psalm 8
John 16:12-15

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Most of you have probably had a child try to describe to you the plot of a story she has heard or read, or a film she has seen.

She begins to tell the story, and then stops and says something like, “No, no, no; I forgot, I have to go back, there’s something else…”, as she remembers an important detail she should have told at the start. Only then does she go on, before cutting back again to something else which she also forgot to mention but which you need to know to understand the next bit, and so on.

In the end you may well have no idea what the story was actually about, or at least be in no position to tell someone else what it was about, but you know that you did get all the bits and that it was important to hear her tell it!

It’s kind of like that when the church talks about God; talk of God as Trinity has that kind of jumbled-ness about it.

Listen again to part of today’s very trinitarian-sounding gospel reading:

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Wherever you start to speak about this particular God, there will always be something else you should have said before, something about the Spirit or the Son or the Father which you now say too late, but it has to be said somewhere for everything to be said: “No, no, no; I forgot, I have to go back, there’s something else…”

*

Now, if you’re not already asking the question, let me ask it for you: So what? So what if God is like that, circles within circles? As neat a way as that might be of accounting for the church’s tortuous trinitarian confession, what does it have to do with anything, really?

The “so what” of trinitarian talk of God is in the contrast such a sense for God has with other senses for God or god-like things in our lives.

Most of us, for example, have a very strong desire for simplicity. This is why we don’t tell stories as children do. Simplicity is ground to stand on. It is firm and reliable. Simplicity is (has?) a reference point: a point before which nothing else needs to be said, and after which all that I say and do is justified, so long as it is levered from that reference point, that fulcrum.

Our lives are filled with these reference points. They are philosophical, economic, social and political. They are manifest in those strong sentences which begin with “I am…”, “You are” or “We are…”. I am a man. I am white. We are Muslim. I am, You are, We are Australian. I am free. We are true believers. These are reference points, assumptions, bases, before which nothing else need be said, and after which all that I say or do is justified.

These reference points are the ground we stand on. They simplify the complex world. They are where our sense for the world begins. You – woman, Christian, Muslim, disabled, child, beggar, refugee – you are measured from that simple and sure starting place. You are less than me, because you don’t have the basis I have, are not what I am.

These reference points are very often unrecognised, simply because they are obvious not only to their beneficiaries but also to their victims. Think of the operation of ideas like maleness, whiteness and citizenship in our contemporary social and political life. That concepts like this work in a quasi-divine kind of way indicates that the simplification I am speaking about is not just a “religious” thing. The only difference religion might make here is to propose to stick God under the “I am/we are” statements as a reinforcement: I am, you are, we are, this or that crucial thing because God has made it so (“So there!”).

A simple god, simple economics, simple politics corresponds in Christian thinking to a stark legalism, in contrast to the life of grace.

Law is a secure place, before which nothing needs to be said, and after which what I say and do is justified. “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God” (John 19.7) – no two ways about it.

By contrast, grace always has something more to say. Something new is always being said. The sign of this is the Resurrection. The law has worked through its logic – “he ought to die” – and then it’s as if God says something like, “No, no, no; I forgot, I have to go back, there’s something else…”

Simple gods see people crucified because those people don’t connect to the story told so far. “Woman” does not connect in a Man’s world, or black or yellow in a White world, or muslim or christian in a Secular world, or a foreigner in a Sovereign State, or a prophet drawing attention to the freedom of God among a people who have God all sewn up.

Simple Gods see people crucified because those people don’t connect to the story told so far. But the God of Israel, the God who gives the Christ by the Spirit, the God of the church – this God always makes the missing connections. The exclusions are overcome: the crucified first, and then the crucifiers; the outcast, and then those who rendered him so.

This is what the Holy Spirit speaks in reminding us of the things of Jesus, the things of the Father: What the Father gives the Son, and the Son gives us in the giving Spirit, is a making of connections, a re-visiting of foundations, the adding of another detail which has not yet been spoken but which illuminates everything.

And so the church confesses faith not unlike how a child tells her story: constantly being reminded of something which should have been said before.

Is this good enough for us? This is a crucial question.

‘Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to us, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever stands before God as a little child does is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (cf. Matthew 18.3f).

Let us, then, tell – and glory in – the story by which God makes us children – his children.

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Pentecost
15/5/2016

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

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“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”

Are these not very troubling words, considering some of the things Jesus is said to have done: healings, nature miracles, resuscitations from the dead?

Our immediate thought would then be that this is just the kind of thing we too are expected to perform. Yet such things as these we do not do.

The next step is then to accuse ourselves or others because, if Jesus spoke the truth about what his disciples would be able to do, something must have gone badly wrong: we do not have enough faith, are not spiritual enough, are not obedient enough in order to be able to exercise the power which Jesus exercised, the power to do such “greater works”.

Yet, in fact, when Jesus comes actually to talk about the work he came to do, things like the miracles don’t really feature at all. According to Jesus, the work of the Son is to make God the Father known. The opening prologue of the gospel concludes, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (1.18). And we hear this kind of thing repeated again and again in John’s gospel. The things of the Father have been entrusted in their entirety to the Son (5.22), who thereby brings the Father to the world: “if you knew me, you would know my Father also” (8.19); “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14.8). Jesus attends not to his own agenda, but to that of the Father (5.19, 8.38; 12.48-50; 14.10; 17.8); he speaks what he has heard from the Father, and his word is the Father’s (8.25-28, 14.24, 15.15). Whereas our focus will usually be on the power to do great works (or our apparent lack of power as a church), Jesus’ focus is on the purpose of the works – the revelation of the Father. This is not to rule out the possibility of such miracles still happening today, but it is to say that miracles aren’t the point. The miracles point to something else. John speaks of Jesus’ miracles as signs – things which point beyond themselves, through Jesus to the Father who sent him.

It may indeed be the case that Christ’s church doesn’t do the works that Jesus did, and certainly not greater works than he did. Yet this is not because we lack miraculous power. It is because we very easily fall into the trap of thinking that miraculous power is what it is all about: power to change things, to “make a difference”, to “have an impact”.

We might not cast it in terms of wanting to be able to perform miracles; in denominations like ours, at least, we imagine ourselves too “mature” and “progressive” to expect miracles! The power we seek might be social, by becoming a welcoming community; or aesthetic, in a certain style of building or music; or cultural, by cleverly manipulating the icons of the age; or political, seeking to make a high profile impact in the surrounding community. We look for the “hook” which will re-catch all those fish which have escaped the net of the church. We must admit that there is not a little of this in our current thinking about what our congregation ought to do with the resources at its disposal.

But the question which arises for the church from this text is not in the first instance, “Why do you not have the power, have the magic?” but “Do you know what magic is?” In terms of our gospel text, the question can be put this way: “are you able to let your work as individuals and a church to be simply to continue with Jesus’ work of making the Father known?” The problem here is not that which we might have with the word “Father”. The question is about whether Jesus’ own task of making known the one who sent him is sufficient also for us today. Are we willing to trust the future of the church to such a seemingly impotent action?

This is a question we must answer, at least if we imagine ourselves somehow to be the church of Christ.

Of course, I haven’t said anything specific about what this might look like in our life as a church. In fact it may not be possible from surface features to distinguish between the church which longs after lost power and the church which simply understands and continues in its true work. The church whose purpose is to continue to work in the Spirit for the revealing of the Father will certainly have social and aesthetic and cultural and political dimensions. Yet it will differ from the power-seeking church in the way that being led differs from being driven. A led church does not quite know where it is heading, other than that it is to the place where God is; a driven church has a specific goal in mind which it must hit, whatever the cost.

A led church differs from a driven church in the way that hope differs from optimism. Christian hope does not know the shape of its future but trusts in the one who has promised; optimism knows what it wants and expects to get it.

A hopeful church differs from an optimistic church in the way that the uncertain differ from the anxious in the face of the same challenges and threats. The uncertain simply do not know what the outcome of any particular situation might be; the anxious are afraid of particular outcomes.

The uncertain but trusting church differs from the anxious and fearful church in the way that getting radical differs from becoming reactionary. The radical church knows its calling, and is happy to step out in response to that call despite what it sees going on around it; the reactionary church is shoved from pillar to post by every change to which it imagines it must react.

It is worth asking ourselves from time to time why it is that certain things dominate our conversation about our churches, or feature so prominently on our meeting agendas and so occupy so much of our time. “You will do even greater things than these”. Not a little of what occupies us is the drivenness, optimism, anxiety and reaction which develops in us if we imagine that Jesus was effective because he had a great bag of tricks, and now, in his absence, if only we knew where that he left that bag!

But the effectiveness of Jesus was in his trust in the one who sent him, in his willingness to be named by the Father’s address to him, and in his being willing simply to point back to the Father.

This is the extraordinary thing about the church – its existence arises out of something so impractical as the relationship between the Father and the Son at God’s heart.

What has all this to do with the gift of the Holy Spirit, which we mark today with the festival of Pentecost? The church has historically understood that the to-ing and fro-ing between the Father and the Son is the work of the Holy Spirit – even is the Holy Spirit. What passes from Father to Son and Son to Father is Spirit.

This is the Spirit God gives us: not “power” to do “works of power”, a kind of divine weapon in our hand, but God’s own heart: the love the Father has for the Son, and the Son for the Father.

This is what makes the church, and is also what our life as church is to be – a sharing in that pointing to and from God, a sharing in the Spirit, a sharing in God. And so Jesus says to us in our anxious reactions to our apparent powerlessness in the world,

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. Do and be as I have done and been. What I am, and what I have done, is the way to the Father, the way to the truth and the life you so earnestly seek. If you know me, you will know the Father also, for the Father will send the Spirit, that you might be where I am, and know the Father as I know the Father.

May the one who promised this indeed send us this Spirit that we may be where he is, do what he does, and share in his peace.

Amen.

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Easter 7
8/5/2016

Revelation 22:12-21
Psalm 97
John 17:20-26

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last week about our meeting last Sunday, and what we have been doing as a community before and since then.

And I feel that I have to say… that You People are Wonderful.

Why does the preacher dare to declare such an unlikely thing?

We have committed to a once in a generation process, and it probably feels to some of you that it seems to be taking a generation to wind up!

Last week’s meeting was kind of clunky. We made a clear decision or two, although not necessarily the decisions some thought we were making. We’ll probably have to backtrack a little, which may become confusing or simply exasperating.

In the weeks leading up to the meeting, and even more so since, there have been some rather “frank” conversations in the working group and church council and other places on questions of procedure, content and interpretation, although no blood spilt.

It is all very time consuming, and there are other things we’d prefer to be doing.

And yet you’re all back here again today, smiling!

In fact, as long as the process has been even to now – and as expensive – and as murky as the future seems at this point, there has been much encouragement and gratitude and understanding of what we are all confronted with. This has meant that there has been a strong sense that it is we who are doing this, working together, seeking a common mind.

And so I’m more than happy to declare that if I had a choice as to who it would be with whom I would be doing something like this, it would be you.

But it is important that that declaration not be heard as sentimentality. I’m not saying that I think that you are particularly nice (although some of you really are). I’m not saying that you are right in what you want to come out of this – some of you are probably quite wrong, if rightness and wrongness can actually be determined here.

Sentimentality sees only what it wants to see, or wishes to be seen only in a particular light. It mistakes the absence of war for peace, the lack of resistance for assent or consent. Sentimentality imagines that you want what I want. Sentimentality white-washes.

The wonder of the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist, for the moment, at least, is not a matter of sentimentality so much as a theological wonder – something of a miracle even.

For we are in the process of choosing a future or perhaps, more strongly, of creating a future, and this has the potential to be very dangerous.

A safe approach to this would be to imagine the future to be much the same as the present. This is the sentimental approach: because it is, it is right; what we have and can carry over, is enough. It is the safest approach, if we can pull it off, because it is the least disruptive.

But I doubt that we can. Too much is up for grabs for sentimentality to win the day in the end, but it may still seriously cloud our vision and thinking if we are not wary of it. Shifting back to UMC will not be the same kind of thing as moving from there to here was. Refitting this place and continuing to worship here will not be the same as what we’ve experienced here in the last 6 or 7 years.

None of this is to predetermine which we should choose. The point is simply that we understand what lurks in the future, behind those choices. And I don’t mean simply that the future is always unpredictable, and therefore potentially dangerous. This is the risk of the future as the proverbial bus, not seen until it is too late. We can’t do anything about that kind of future risk, except decide that we will not fear it simply because it might happen.

The particular risks in the future which confront us as a congregation are we ourselves, the members of the congregation. The scariest thing about tomorrow is always the people we will meet there, or that some will not have come with us to that new time or place. It does not have to be the case that these threats are realised, but only sentimentality would deny their possibility.

If it seems that I’m getting a little overdramatic and pessimistic here, imagine … a Thursday night. It has been a taxing week – more so than usual. But finally you can withdraw to a safe place, out of sight. It’s the Passover again, and you need to focus. Jesus seems to have a little more to say than usual. “Love one another, as I have loved you”. Yes, you think, as you look around the group. We can do that. Something which doesn’t make sense happens between Jesus and Judas, but both Jesus and Judas often don’t make sense. We can sort that out later; maybe Saturday or Sunday. Jesus continues, now praying: As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

It’s a nice prayer, you think, although you wish Jesus would pray in a nice straight line for once, from here to there, and not go on and around in circles like that.

When Jesus’ disciples hear this prayer, the betrayals and denials and doubts – the crucifixion – are yet to happen; there is more than a little reality checking about to kick in. Prior to all these things, the experience of love in the community of disciples, and then the command to love, and then even Jesus’ prayer for a united community, might just be more warm fuzzy sentimentality. The desperate need of Jesus’ love command and love prayer is not felt until “it” all hits the fan.

The Futures Project small groups in April were asked about what they would consider “deal breakers” with respect to any option we might consider for our future. The two things most often identified were maintaining our theological, liturgical and communal integrity, and the preservation of Hotham Mission.

I think that these commitments will be a great guide to us as we think together.

But the question is: are these sentimental commitments? They don’t have to be; but do they reflect a glossing over of what we really do and or really are as a congregation? In fact, we can’t really say until we are confronted with the possibility of cutting Hotham Mission or the possibility of a fracture in the congregation if it seems we can’t find a way forward.

It is one thing to be warmed on a cool spring Thursday evening by good wine, confident that because Jesus is on my side I’m on his. It is another thing, when that confidence is undermined and we have to deal with what has not yet come to the surface.

This is the marvel of what we have done to date.  Minds are changing, visions are shifting, in all directions. We have done well so far, but there is still a long way to go, whichever of the many options before us we choose. Making the choice itself will threaten to consume us, let alone then acting on it.

How then to approach what still lies before us?

We can simply resign ourselves to the hard slog. This is a bad idea. Resignation and sentimentality are basically the same, in that both are without hope: the resigned are sadly hopeless because nothing will change and the sentimental are happily hopeless because nothing needs to.

This is not the outlook of the people of God.

We are seeking to act because we must. This “must” is not the something-must-be-done-about-the-church “must”; that’s just resignation again, brightened up a little with a sense of responsibility.

The “must” which causes us to act is indicated in the snippet of Jesus’ prayer we heard in our gospel reading:

“that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

That is, the “must” is not the buildings question; the buildings are just the material – the object – around which we are gathered.

The “must” of what we are doing concerns the “we” ourselves who are gathered.

When we first began this process I proposed that we are not in the process of preparing for mission by sorting out such mundane things as buildings and budgets, positioning ourselves for some as yet unstarted missional push. We are, rather, in this very process, engaged in mission.

How is this this case? Because in this process we are “proving” the gospel, understanding “prove” here as much in its older sense as in its usual modern sense. To prove something – in its older sense – is to test it; consider how car manufacturers test their new vehicles on their “proving grounds”.

We test: Will the gospel expose to us where we are being more sentimental than truthful in our sense of who we are and what is required of us? And, having so revealed who we are, will the gospel enable in us a step further into the unity for which Jesus prays?

We must prove – test – the gospel in this way, for it is only so that we ourselves are tested, proved.

In this proving of the gospel which is our testing of its capacity to work among us, there opens up the possibility of the second (more familiar) sense of proof, which Jesus also implies in his prayer:

[…may they] become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

We are not “preparing for” mission in our difficult deliberations. If that were what this was about we would be in the realm of sentimentality again, happily bulldozing our way to what is – to me – the “obvious” outcome.

“Love one another” is our mission. That is so difficult that Jesus imagines that it requires even him to pray for it.

The gospel question to us is whether we believe that the unity of believers can communicate to the world that the Father sent the Son. Put differently, the question is whether we believe that gathering around the table each week “remembrances” – makes present to us and the world – Jesus himself, sent from God. These are the miracles God offers his people today.

You have done well so far. You are wonderful. If you won’t take my word for it, ask the God whose Christ thinks you are worth his prayer.

Continue to be such a marvel, that we the church and the world around us may know that the Father sent the Son.

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Easter 6
1/5/2016

Revelation 21:9-22:5
Psalm 67
John 14:23-29

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“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.”

Did ever a text seem so apt to the occasion on which it was read, considering the business of the meeting to follow worship this morning: “I saw no temple”?

The problem is that whenever what a text seems to be saying is obvious, we are at great risk of not hearing at all what the text is saying, but what the text confirms about what we were hoping it would say. That is, we never read the Scriptures innocently. We come to God with agendas. What joy when God’s agenda seems to be ours!

And so what “obvious” thing does this text say to us about the matters before us? “Obviously”, no temple means no temple. This, “obviously”, means no church building.

Or, perhaps, something else is obvious here. Immediately following this verse we hear: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.” It is obvious that our city – here and now – does have need of a sun and moon. These texts, then, “obviously” cannot be about us in this time and place, which is not yet heaven and so requires still a people “called out”, distinct in politics and presence from the rest of world. (The Greek word for “church” is ek-klesia, “out-called”). It is, then, not at all obvious that there is no place now for temples.

So, given that two potentially diametrically opposed conclusions are “obvious” from John’s declaration about the people of God and their temples, let us set the obvious text for today aside and pick up another which is rather less so.

“They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads”.

What is not immediately obvious, but a moment’s thought makes clear, is that the people and God are looking at each other. This is one of the ways in which John characterises heavenly relationship to God – gaze: God in ours, us in God’s.

From our perspective, there is something new here. At the start of John’s gospel (probably a different John [author] from the seer of Revelation), we hear, “No one has ever seen God…” This echoes the Old Testament understanding that no one can look upon God and live, not even Moses. Here, however, something new takes place. “God’s home is with mortals”, as we heard last week (21.3). Heaven is seeing God – face to face – and seeing by, or via, God: there is no sun or moon.

But why is God’s name on our foreheads? For whose benefit is this? If heaven is about the gaze – ours into God’s, God’s into ours – who is supposed to read this name?

The only candidate is God himself. It is God who reads God’s own name on our foreheads.

Why does this matter? Is it possible that we might get lost, and God might have to rummage through a lost property box to find us, and know that we are his because we have his name on our forehead?

If the divine name merely labels us, then the implication of the text seems to be that God still might forget us or lose us: that there might yet be more death and mourning and crying and pain (contra 21.4), all of which are supposed to have been wiped away.

But the name written on our foreheads does much, much more than this. When God looks at us, he reads not our names but his own. It is as if God sees God when looking at us.

We have to say that it is as if God sees God when looking at us, not merely because we must preserve God’s dignity, but also because we have to preserve our own. It is still we who bear God’s name, we who remind God of himself and his promises, who call God to faithfulness. Whereas believers are accustomed to thinking and proclaiming that our life is inseparable from God’s, the gospel puts it the other way: God’s life is inseparable from ours. God, after a fashion, needs us if heaven is going to be heaven.

“The home of God is among mortals” (21.3) is not a declaration that God might live somewhere else and still be God, yet just happens to live here. It is a “property” of God – something appropriate to God – that God’s life is with ours: with us who mourn what has been lost, who hope in things which cannot be realised, and who cause others to mourn and despair.

It is God himself who writes his name on our foreheads, and so nothing can wipe it away: no choice, no failure, no success.

And so in all things we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor tent nor temple, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In all things, God will “out” – and out as God for us.

This is the gospel, out of which we look to the future, out of which any choice can be a choice for life.