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28 June – Your kingdom come

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Sunday 13
28/6/2015

1 Samuel 17:57-19:9
Psalm 9
Mark 5:21-43

There is a trick to the reading of Scriptures which involves, well, actually reading the Scriptures, closely. By this I mean that what is going on in the stories is not always as straightforward as it might at first seem.

Our reading from 1 Samuel this morning follows on from the account of David’s victory over the Philistine giant “Goliath”. Most of us have probably heard sermons which conclude from the tale what David himself seems to conclude, which is that if God is with us, nothing finally can stand against us. This must be true. But what if it is the case that God is against us? If God is against us in the same kind of way that we believe God was for David, then we have no hope. This is obvious enough for Goliath, about whom most of us don’t give a second thought.

But there is another player in the story, against whom God also stands, who is a much more nuanced presence, and so who might play on our sympathies rather more profoundly than Goliath: King Saul. We can dismiss Goliath because he stands for all that is bad. We don’t have much sympathy for him or real interest in him because he is defined as the problem, and so he is rather a one-dimensional character. But Saul is much more complex or, more to the point: Saul is much more like us.

In the unfolding of the story, we now know that Saul has been rejected as king. Saul knows this himself although he doesn’t really seem to know what to make of it, and who would? Does the rejection mean that he should simply stop being king, and go back to farming? That’s hardly going to work for anyone, God included, for David is not ready to be king either.

But the text’s account of the shape of God’s rejection of Saul is in fact rather more terrifying than the expectation that Saul might simply step down. We heard that “an evil spirit from God rushed upon Saul”, whereupon Saul attacked David twice with his spear. It is the second time we have heard that Saul has received an evil spirit from God, the first time being even more strongly stated (see the end of the anointing of David narrative – 1 Samuel 16.13f – in which the spirit of YHWH comes “mightily” on David, leaves Saul, and an evil spirit from YHWH torments Saul.). I suspect that the sending of the evil spirit raises a serious moral problem for many of us. How is it “fair”, we might wonder, that Saul is actively influenced in this way? Do we not pray, Deliver us from evil, or similar, expecting that God will actually do this? What could one possibly do against a God who afflicts someone in this way? In what sense could this be the act of a “loving” God?

In fact, our moral objections here are likely to be somewhat confused and unclear even to ourselves. If God is for some things and those who do them, surely God is also against others. And, if God might act on behalf of those things God is “for”, might not God also act against those things God is against? But if we look to what happens in the story, it is more complex than this simple justification implies. Saul is as much the cause of his own downfall as anything God does.

We hear that Saul fears David because Saul perceives that God is on David’s side. This is rather strange. If God is on David’s side, and I want to be on God’s side, ought I not simply position myself next to David? Why not side with David rather than oppose him? This, of course, Saul does not do because, despite having heard from Samuel that he has been rejected as king he cannot, and does not, simply stop being king. And, in continuing in the role of king, he necessarily defends his kingship against perceived threats. It is seemingly a self-contradictory condition, but Saul can’t extract himself from it.

He does, then, the kinds of things which anyone might do in his situation. Perceiving him to be a threat, Saul removes David from the royal court, sending him out on military missions. David, however, is wildly successful, and this just further exacerbates the problem. Saul’s son Jonathon has already declared himself devoted to David. Jonathon has given David his own sword and armour and so has, perhaps, declared David to be Saul’s rightful successor. Further, Saul’s daughter Michal falls in love with David. This becomes the basis for another plan by Saul to deal with David. The wedding dowry demanded is the foreskins of 100 Philistines. Saul expects David to die trying to deliver, but he delivers 200 instead, further cementing David’s fame in contrast to Saul’s decline in the people’s imagination and David is now within the royal household as son-in-law. Saul grows more afraid of him and so, we hear, he becomes “David’s enemy from that time forth”.

If it is the case that Saul is tormented by an evil spirit from God, it is also the case that he makes perfectly rational and free decisions, each of which just makes the matter worse from his own perspective. He twists and turns against David – and so against God – each turn tightening the noose around Saul’s own neck. Every effort to destroy David brings David more strength. All of Saul’s political cunning works against him. He is, then, both destined to fail because God has abandoned him – as the story has it – and fails by his own hand; it is not possible to tease the two causes apart.

This is not exactly a heart-warming story but, whatever our emotional response, what does it have to do with us? Why might it be valuable to hear this story still today?

It is ostensibly on Saul’s behalf that we object to the suggestion that God sent an evil spirit to torment him, or even that God rejected him. Yet, if we are honest, we protest not on behalf of a long-dead Saul but on our own behalf. What if we are more Saul than David? What if God has abandoned us, only that we had no Samuel to deliver the news. Or perhaps our Samuel did come, and we did not know how to handle the announcement, as Saul himself clearly did not, or perhaps simply didn’t notice. Is this why things are as they are, why we are in this situation, why this or that has happened to us or to me or to you? What I mean by “this situation” could be anything: the condition of the mainstream church in the 21st century, or my failing health – anything for which we might be tempted to attribute some kind of divine judgement as the cause, anything in which an outcome might be thought somehow to be an “act of God”.

How baffling is the thought that not simply I might be against God but that God might be against me; for God must be against some, and not only one-dimensional nasties like Goliath but perhaps sometimes even against his own anointed, Saul. It is baffling because we tend to imagine that we are – whether as church, or as a nation, or as individuals – in some way, God’s anointed, enjoying the rights and privileges of God’s elect. We live in the expectation of the favour of God, or the world more generally. We live as if we are right.

The point of all this is not to make accusations. It is rather that the story of Saul and David suggests that, in fact, I do not know whether, when, or how God is for or against me, or you, or us here and now. Saul could not really know this. David could not really know it. As we noted last week: no one in the story has read forward to the end. For us in the midst of our own stories – and who have not read forward to their conclusions – the crucial point is that it is God who is at work in Saul and David, and here. The kingdom which is beginning to take shape in these stories is not that of Saul or even of David, but God’s own kingdom. As this unfolds the players are not mere pawns on a chessboard, directed here and there against their will, and neither are we. David and Saul are both free agents, both just doing what comes naturally under the circumstances. And yet, not their kingdoms come, not their will is done but, finally, God’s.

Is this not what we pray for each week: “…your kingdom come, your will be done…”? Perhaps, mindful of what the unfolding of God’s kingdom among us might look like, we might pray that prayer with a little more fear and trembling. It may well be that for God’s kingdom to advance, we need to be removed. Yet this is the prayer we are called to pray. To pray for the coming of the kingdom of God is not to presume with Saul that we will reign with God against all pretenders to our position and privileges. It is a prayer which asks that we will be humbled, as were both Saul and David.

This is not, in fact, bad news. To be humbled in this way is to shift interest from the anxious enacting and telling of our own story to the awareness, or confidence, that there is another story to be told, another who acts in and through and, sometimes, against us. This actor plays so that, whatever we might do, he will be found to be faithful to the promise of blessing. For we cannot bless ourselves. Saul was rejected as king because he presumed to become a blessing to God, and so to himself. David, on the other hand, does nothing to bring about his ascent to the throne and, as we will see next week, even laments what it takes for God’s promise to him to be fulfilled.

Through Saul’s waverings in and out of madness and David’s struggle simply to stay alive we see the slow process of the revelation of God’s own reign. There is no predicting of outcomes, no reading of signs from the events around us. No cleverly devised strategy or business case will guarantee us a future. We will not finally be sure whether God has worked with us or against us. We can know only that God always works through us, his kingdom to bring. We can only know that, in the end – sometimes because of us, sometimes in spite of us – God will triumph.

Even as we must calculate, risk, act or not, succeed or fail, our faith is that with this God the poverty of human morals and politics will be overcome – life out of death.

And, thanks be to God, we will wonder that it could have happened.

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21 June – A heart after God’s own

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Sunday 11
21/6/2015

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20
Mark 4:35-41

When it comes to hearing such a Bible story as the one we have heard this morning – the anointing of David as king – we are at a disadvantage in making sense of it: we know how the story ends. The disadvantage here is that the story then becomes simply a story. It might be an interesting story – perhaps providing a good structure for a TV miniseries – but there is nothing much here but history, nothing much here but the past. And the thing about the past is that it is easy – we have it already sewn up; it is already comprehended. What is hard is not what these stories seem to convey to us but our own stories, for these are not yet finished, not yet past, and so we don’t have the comfort of knowing how it all ends up.

Our reading this morning is one filled with the tension of change and not knowing what is going to happen next. Samuel, who initially opposed the establishment of the kingship in Israel, has come to have a lot invested in Saul and now grieves that Saul has been rejected by God. At the same time, he is afraid of Saul, and goes to anoint the new king under the cover of fulfilling a religious duty. Samuel is convinced that he can see in David’s brothers the qualities he noticed also in Saul, but is told not to look to appearances. The principle contrast between the impressive-on-paper Saul and David is the contrast between the strong man and the man with heart. And from this point to the end of 1 Samuel the story is filled with the tension of the struggle between David and Saul.

These tensions are not what we are used to calling “creative” tensions. This is a messy business. It is the tension of shifting times, the uneasiness of knowing that something is changing but not quite knowing what or how. None of the players in the story have read forward to end; they are like us: David is no better a bet than Saul was. No one knows where things are heading, what tomorrow holds, who will live or die. The tension is going to last no small number of years for the actors in the story. David is anointed in the episode we’ve heard this morning, but then nothing actually happens in relation to the kingship for years, and even after Saul dies there is an ongoing struggle between him and Saul’s son and military commander as to the appropriate succession. At the same time, even though he has been told that he is to become king in Saul’s place, David remains devoted to Saul, even as Saul declines into a kind of manic-depressive madness.

The story is about the presence of the new in the midst of the old but there is more going on than simply the cycles of history, with fresh green growth replacing that which is withered and dying. Theologically, there is underway here is the process of establishing in Israel God’s own “heart” (cf. 1 Samuel 13.13f; 16.7).

The story of Saul and David is unfolded in such a way as to display the stark contrast between the two. David is something new in the history of Israel; there has been nothing like him before, and nothing like him again until Jesus. David is vitality and freedom, contradicting king and priest as it is necessary simply to survive, that God’s own promise be fulfilled. He moves through the pages with passion and energy. In contrast, Saul is heavy and slow moving, caught in up in ritual and sacral duties, even summoning for advice the dead Samuel via a witch, twisting and turning, seeming never to “get it”.

Of course, David is far from perfect. The labels “adulterer”, “coward”, “murderer”, “vengeful” could all be applied at certain times, and a few other labels besides. The Hebrews were not afraid to tell the truth about the great figures in their sacred stories. Yet, for all this moral imperfection, there is something extraordinary taking place here – something of such scope that it provides a large amount of the backdrop to the attempts of the early church to speak of what it had met in Jesus (who was himself proclaimed the “son of David”; see, for example, Matthew 15.22; 20.30; 21.15). Flawed as he is, David trusts himself to God. By contrast, Saul lives by transactions with God. It is an economy in which he fails miserably and he ends up bewildered as to what has happened. But David at his best is simply alive – vibrantly alive to God and to what is happening around him. Trusting himself to God, he is secure. And so he is free. And so he can act – not with impunity but without fear.

David can act in this way because, in return for his trust of God, God trusts him. This is not say that David is trustworthy: there are no shortage of instances to be cited where David fails. And yet – and yet – God gives over to David “the kingship” of which he was previously jealous. God effectively gives up his own claim to be king and settles for “having” a king, one who will stand in God’s place in the world.

Here our familiarity with these stories almost blinds us to just how extraordinary a shift is taking place here. God invests in David in a way which hasn’t happened before and will not happen again until the humanity of Jesus himself. Biblical scholars even suggest that David himself was the model the Scriptural writers used to give shape to the humanity of Adam in the garden, created in God’s image to have dominion over creation in communion with God (Cf. Brueggemann, W. (1973). In man we trust: the neglected side of biblical faith. Richmond, Va., John Knox Press, p44. The ideas of Brueggemann in this book have been important for developing this sermon). The kingship under David, and much more so under Solomon and the many who then followed, was certainly an imperfect work, but it became the sign of a new humanity – a humanity which bears the image, the kingship, of God. Perfection of this humanity was coming: a shoot from the stump of Jesse, the key of David, as we sing in Advent. Jesus himself is the one who finally trusts completely, and in that trust finds himself fully secure, and fully free.

But staying with David for the time being: if there was one true actor in the story of Hannah – God himself, as we noted when we looked at the birth of Samuel a few weeks ago – there are now clearly two on the stage. The first remains the God who continues to be faithful to the people despite their turning from him in their request for a king, and the second is the actual king who now steps onto the stage. This one is a game-changer because he has the elements of the kind of heart which is required for God to be free to be God and the king himself to be free to be a human being. For David does not know what will happen next, whether Samuel’s anointing is the action of a true prophet or a crazy old man. He doesn’t know whether all Saul’s efforts to kill him will succeed or not. He knows only himself in relation to God, and this is enough for him and for God. Everything else is only a matter of detail.

What else do we need but this – God in God’s place, and we in ours?

The story, then, is not told to tell us about God and his kings, but about us ourselves. It is not David’s kingship which matters here but the new, partly formed humanity seen in David’s career: a humanity after God’s own heart in the heart of David and offered for us all – a humanity which is learning not to fear, which is learning how to love, which can acknowledge its failures and seek forgiveness, and keep moving with God.

In Saul we see a man who did not know himself trusted, but sought always to do the “right” thing – the thing which “God” would do, were God in his place. This is an anxious place to live – always running back to check that I’m doing OK, that Mummy or Daddy or mentor approves. There is no sense of trust here, only a sense that there is but one way – “God’s way” – and it is required of us to read (or guess) God’s mind. A large part of the church even has a slogan for this, cast in the form of a question: WWJD? – “What would Jesus do?” The implication here is that Jesus always did exactly what God required. Faith – our faith – then becomes a kind of religious science by which we discern or “divine” what would be the godly act in any situation. This is not a free life but a fearful one: I am ever wondering whether I am doing the right thing.

But in, in contrast to Saul, we see in David one who is free to say Yes or No, to fight or not to fight, to act or not to act, because his relationship to God is not on the basis of what he does, but on the basis of a common heart: being a son to a father, and not a servant to a master, as it were.

The point here is not that we ought to have a heart “for” God, as Christian lingo sometimes puts it. Rather, such heart as David had does God: the glory of God is a human being fully alive (paraphrasing Irenaeus, d. c. AD 202), fully aware that as a daughter, a son, we are trusted, loved, free.

The gospel is that God looks not to appearances and efforts but to the heart, and declares that the human heart might yet belong to him: that we might know ourselves as God’s children – brothers and sisters of David and David’s greater son Jesus, the sign and promise of such a life.

By the grace of God, may all his people be open to such renewed and cleansed hearts by the implanting within us of God’s own Spirit, for the sake of life and of love. Amen.

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14 June – Give us a king!

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Sunday 10
14/6/2015

1 Samuel 8:1-21
Psalm 138
Mark 4:26-34

In modern western societies which still concern themselves with kings and queens, the principle function of royalty seems to be to have babies, in order to increase magazine sales from the supermarket check-out aisle.

This being the case, it is not straightforward for us today to appreciate what is going on in Israel’s request for a king, and the shock this creates in Samuel and in God. There is a failure of some kind taking place here. But the nature of the failure is rather less clear than the simple fact of it suggests, and this is not least because the kingship becomes such an important part of the way in which God relates to his people.

But before we get to that, it is worth thinking a bit more about what is taking place in the request for a king itself. Why the request for a king, and what exactly is being rejected? Most fundamentally, the request for a king is a request for a kind of security which has been lacking in Israel up until now. Since the time of their arrival in Canaan, the Israelites have basically been a loose confederation of tribes with not much binding them together other than some common beliefs, stories, practices and language. From time to time, when there have been crises, certain figures known as “judges” were raised up to respond to particular issues, and then disappeared again from view. Samuel is effectively the last of these judges. In the face of harassment from local warlords and more organised groups such as the Philistines, the sense that Israel needed something more substantial and reliable than the occasional strong leader was a natural one. They first looked to Samuel’s sons, but saw that they were not up to the task. The prospect of a kind of dynasty of prophets or judges not being realistic, the request for a king is the natural next step.

When the request is made, the first things we hear are Samuel’s lament, and God’s – both feeling rejected by this request. The warnings are given to Israel – effectively, “be careful what you pray for” – but the request is, somewhat surprisingly, granted, and God already has in mind the man he wants to do the job.

While it is clear, then, that the Israelites are seeking some political security in their request for a king, what exactly is the theological crisis this creates? What is wrong with this? God claims that his own kingship is being rejected – which we have to take at his word. But in what way could God be in any helpful sense “king”? The language of God as king, or King Jesus, is familiar enough – it is right through our hymns this morning – but what it actually means is much less easy to say than it is common to say it. Something of what the people are rejecting is suggested in what they expect the king to do: the king is to “govern us and go out before us and fight our battles” (v20). Gods are not particularly reliable when it comes to these practical matters. Who today would want “God” running the economy, directing the troops, or setting social policy? Even if we did like the idea we would not be likely to agree that God’s “helpers” in these matters were doing what God required, and therefore not be likely to agree that God is actually in charge.

It seems, then, that the people bring to Samuel a necessary but impossible request. Good order is necessary for the well-being of the people, and they seek such good order and security, but it is impossible that good order flow from something other than God.

And yet God grants the people a king. Why? Because God is able to work without a king, or with one.

We get a sense from the text that God is almost indifferent to the mode of government the Israelites ask for themselves. The failure of the people is not so much their request for a king but the naïve belief that life under a king would be any better than life as they have already known it (vv10-18). The rejection of life under the judges and prophets is thought by the people to be the choice of a better life under a monarchy – a centralised governance, rather than a co-operative one; an established political order rather than one which needs constantly to be re-negotiated by tribal leaders.

The stories told in the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, of course, relate just how unhelpful a monarchy can be. Life for the people of Israel doesn’t seem to be any better under the kings than under the judges. But this is not the end of the story. For even though God begrudgingly grants the people’s request, the kingship becomes one of the central motifs of the Scriptural story. God chooses the first kings – Saul, who is soon rejected, and then David, to whom God promises an eternal future. On account of this promise, the language of kingship becomes part of the theological language and expectations of Israel. And so the kingdom – or kingship, reign – of God comes to central to the preaching of Jesus, a thousand years later. The identification of Jesus as Son of God, Christ and Messiah is a use of royal language from the kingship tradition to identify what it is Jesus embodies and represents (re‑presents): to say that Jesus is “Son of God” is not so much to say that God is his “Father” as it is to say that Jesus is king.

The request for a king is a catastrophe because it rejects the order of things up to that point, understood to have been ordered in that way by God. In this sense, God is rejected. But perhaps even more catastrophic is the imagining that a different ordering would be more godly, more likely to give us what we think we need, just because it is a different ordering. The mistake is not simply failing to trust God but putting too much trust in our own sense of what we need – thinking that we need only to imagine a different future, and that our imagining makes it righteous.

As we noted at the beginning this morning, kings and queens are not much to us these days. But deciding for a better future does matter to us: having it better, as “the world” seems to, being safer, more comfortable, these are constantly on our minds.

As we reflect as a Synod on the future of the church we are, in a sense, seeking a “king, like the nations”. Once the review is done, we will be better placed to move forward, stand on firmer ground, be safer. Perhaps we will. The point is simply that “strategy” and “sustainability” are supremely kingly concepts.

 

As we reflect as a congregation on our future accommodations, how best to use the resources we have, we are doing the same thing: seeking stability, security. We are seeking sustainability by strategy in the same way as the Synod, only on a smaller scale.

It is not that we must not do this. Created in God’s image, we do as God did: we create, we shift things around, we change our world. The point is, though, that to decide – to choose one way of being rather than another – is not to make ourselves more righteous; it is to throw ourselves on the mercy of God. That is, to decide is to ask that God make good the work of our hands, whether the demand for a king or the development of a new risk management regime.

The form of our life before God is much less important than the God himself before whom we live. With a king, or without a king, with clear strategy or living wholly (holy?) unsustainably, the question of God’s relationship to us and ours to God does not change, only the form in which the question is put.

For this God will take whatever shape we give ourselves and make of it both a means of judgement and of grace. It is for us simply to receive that judgement and that grace, to confess and to give thanks, and so to give glory to the God whose ways are not our ways, and whose very difference from us is the possibility that we might be blessed with more than we could have expected.

This is the God we worship – the God who loves us as we are, that we might become so much more. For this God’s love and devotion to us, despite all our twistings and turnings, all thanks and praise be given. Amen.

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7 June – When God comes

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Sunday 10
7/6/2015

1 Samuel 1:1-2:10
Psalm 16
Mark 3:20-27

We have noted before that in history there are no true beginnings. Everything always happens in the messy middle of the unfolding of the complex human story. When we seek to tell a story we have to choose where to start, to limit how far back we will go in declaring “it all began when…” The best place to start is one which sets the tone we think appropriate to make sense of the story which is to follow. It will tell us how to read the story, who is most important, and what kinds of things we might expect as the story unfolds.

Our lectionary over the next few months traces the establishment of the kingship in Israel. It is, in large part, the story of David. Yet David’s story is preceded by that of the prophet Samuel. Samuel is the last of the great “judges” of Israel, those figures like Deborah and Gideon and Samson who rose up at certain times in Israel after the conquest of Canaan to meet some occasional need of the people. Samuel is a complex figure. He can grieve at the rejection by God of Israel’s first king, Saul, and he can remove the head from the shoulders of some foreign king who was bested by Israel’s forces. His is both a sensitive and a “muscular” faith. We will hear more of Samuel over the months to come.

But the prelude to Samuel himself is the story of his mother, which we have heard in this morning. The telling of the story of the kingship of Israel begins with a woman who, on account of her being childless, is tormented by her “sister wife”. This torment Hannah suffers in silence. She grieves; she weeps, and cannot express what is wrong to her husband. She begins to find voice as she turns in prayer to God. She is blessed by a fumbling priest, and is finally surprised to find herself pregnant. In the course of this unfolding of events Hannah moves from need, to trust, to submission and, finally, to gratitude. She moves from suffering silence to full voice in her final songful prayer:

2There is no Holy One like the Lord, none besides you;
there is no Rock like our God…
7The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
he brings low, he also exults.
8He raises the poor from the dust;
he lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes
and inherit a seat of honour.

Hannah has nothing more to say in the story after this; there is nothing more to say so far as the purpose of the telling the story is concerned. She has experienced, and now spoken, what happens when the God of Israel comes. And so she has spoken of what will happen in the establishment of the monarchy Israel: a lifting up and a humbling of humble and arrogant people. God is the principal protagonist in this story, and once Hannah has described this God and his ways in her song her part in the telling of the story ends.

This story, then, is not about how God might bless us if we are downtrodden enough or pray hard enough. Hannah’s story is not one we can repeat ourselves. There is here no formula for contriving the blessing of God, as if to be poor and to be oppressed is to be able to force God’s hand. There is no promise of a happy ending for us here and now.

Hannah’s story is simply an account of what happens when this God comes. It is the story of what happened for Hannah when God heard her prayer, and remembered, and blessed. In a different way it is a story of what will happen for David and the kingship, and so what happened for Israel, when God acquiesced to Israel’s demand for a king.

The good news, and what needs to be heard at the beginning of the story of David, is the announcement of the rule not of a king but of God godself. True beginnings happen in history when the kingdom of God becomes manifest. In relation to the stories of the kings, the kingdom of God is one which challenges our fascination with the personalities and the powers of our political processes. Despite our sense of the dismal state of contemporary political debate and process, we continue to remain captivated by it, as if it were – under the right circumstances – capable of delivering something new, fresh and finally life-giving. But the importance of celebrity and influence is relativised by Hannah’s fragility and surprise and faithfulness. The presence of the kingdom of God and the possibility of something new is cannot be “read off” the world around us. A childless woman is no promise of the coming of an extraordinary king like David, any more than a girl who was to sing again Hannah’s song 1000 years later was herself a promise of the coming Christ. (Mary’s song – the Magnificat [Luke 1.46-55] – is based on Hannah’s song).

In her final prayer Hannah sings of herself as one exalted and raised from the dust, made to “sit with princes”. And she anticipates what David himself will eventually have to suffer: a bringing low, even as God gives strength to his king. Whether we are David or Hannah, what is most important for us to know is that this is the kind of God who is working through our stories in the messy middle to lift us up or to humble us, to bring us to voice or to silence. All of this is that we might know what truly is life and power and a true beginning, and that we might be brought with Hannah and David to sing as they did their enjoyment and praise of God. By the grace of this God may we, his people, also be blessed with such faith and hope as had David and Hannah in the one who “gives voice to a silent woman, who empties a full king, who hears and answers.” (Brueggemann*), discovering in God our true beginning, and end. Amen.

 

*In W Brueggemann and P D Miller (1992). Old Testament theology : essays on structure, theme, and text. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, p.233. Brueggemann’s essay in this volume, “1 Samuel 1 – a sense of a beginning” has provided much of the material for this sermon.

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31 May – Trinity – Excerpts used in Worship

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Trinity
31/5/2015

Various readings

THE SPIRIT

“The Holy Spirit, in making real the Christ-event in history, makes real at the same time Christ’s personal existence as a body or community. Christ does not exist first as truth and then as communion; He is both at once….” (p.111)

“So we can say without risk of exaggeration that Christ exists only pneumatologically, whether in His distinct personal particularity or in His capacity as the body of the church and the recapitulation of all things. Such is the great mystery of Christology, that the Christ-event is not an event defined in itself—it cannot be defined in itself for a single instant even theoretically—but is an integral part of the economy of the Holy Trinity. To speak of Christ means speaking at the same time of the Father and the Holy Spirit. For the Incarnation, as we have just seen, is formed by the work of the Spirit, and is nothing else than the expression and realization of the will of the Father.” (p.111f)

John Zizioulas (1985), Being as communion: studies in personhood and the church. New York, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

 

THE SON

“The Father appears in biblical narrative of God’s life with us as the ‘whence’ of divine events, as the Given from which they come or to which they return…” (p.194)

“Correspondingly, the Spirit appears as the ‘whither’ of God’s life. Through the biblical story, the Spirit is God as the ‘Power of the future’… The Spirit is God coming from the future to break the present open to himself… The ‘whither’ of divine events is not their passive aiming point, but their emergence and activation from the future.” (p.194)

“If the Father and the Spirit are [such whence- and whither-] poles of the divine eternity, it is then the life of the Son… in which these rhyme, in which the unity of the divine life is accomplished. Death is time’s ultimate act; that God transcends time must finally mean that God transcends death. Normal gods transcend death by immunity to it or by being identical with it. The way in which the triune God transcends death is by within himself triumphing over it: by the Son’s dying and the Father’s raising him again. The whence and the wither of the divine life are one, and so the triune God is eternal, in the event of Jesus’ resurrection.” (p.195)

Robert Jenson (1995), Essays in theology of culture. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans.


 

THE FATHER

“Christ refers all homage from himself to the one who “sent” him, his “Father”, just so accomplishing our salvation and appearing as the Son. This God is the Father only as the one so addressed by the Son, and at his central appearance in the story he turns over divine rule to the Son and indeed ‘abandons’ his role as God, leaving the Son to suffer the consequences of godhead by himself. And the Spirit as God glorifies and testifies to, only the Father or the Son, just so enabling the proposition ‘God is Spirit’ ”. (192f)

“…if God is triune, then created time must be the accommodation God makes in his own life for persons other than the three he himself is. For in the biblical story of the divine life, the whence of the divine life is the whence also of creation, and the whither of the divine life is the outcome and end of creation. We creatures appear within that narrative whose agents—Father, Son and Spirit—between them enact God’s life. We inhabit the story that is the story of God. God is indeed the one ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ ”. (199)

Robert Jenson (1995), Essays in theology of culture. Grand Rapids, Eerdmans.

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24 May – The Spirit of the unbearable church

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Pentecost
17/5/2015

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 104
John 15:26-16:15

Jesus says to his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”

What are these “unbearable” things? The text is not explicit, and the neither do the commentaries seem to be very interested in the question either.

Why might this be an important question? It seems important to me at least because there is much today which the church finds “unbearable”: Decline in numbers, deteriorating, outdated unmanageable buildings, a much bruised reputation, the cause and effects of Uniting our Future, increasing exposure to risk in an increasingly litigious society, increasingly complex governance responsibilities. The Synod’s Major Strategic Review springs from the sense that these things cannot or should not, be borne further: they are “unbearable”.

These unbearable things being part of our common life as church here and now, what is the relationship between them and the things Jesus considers his disciples will not be able to bear? And how does the Spirit make such things bearable?

The nature of the unbearable things Jesus speaks of here becomes a little clearer when he refers to the work of the Spirit. Many things are said about the work of the Spirit in John, and we tend to pick and choose a bit between these things. John 3 gives us the Spirit which “blows where it wills”. This is the Spirit of a Major Strategic Review: open the windows, let the gale of the Spirit blow everything around; change. Then there is the Spirit of John 7, which bubbles and gurgles, springing up to do watery things for parched people. This is the Spirit for the weary minister or the jaded congregation. And then there is the Spirit of John 14-16 who “comforts”, advocates, defends: the Spirit for a church feeling under siege.

Towards the end of our text this morning, however, we heard of another Spirit – although, of course, they are all the same Spirit. This is the Spirit who “convicts”, who “proves the world wrong” about sin, righteousness and judgement. This is the least “spiritual” of the Holy Spirits we might choose to emphasise, at least so far as the popular contemporary interest in “spirituality” goes. This is a spikey Spirit that does not waft or flow or comfort but skewers us with the pointy end of sin, righteousness and judgement.

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” They cannot bear them “now” because the Spirit has not yet been given. The Spirit has not been given because Jesus has not yet been crucified. The truth about sin, righteousness and judgement will not be revealed until the crucifixion, and it is the Spirit which will reveal this and make it bearable, the Spirit who comes after the crucifixion and resurrection – in John’s case straight after them. The crucifixion becomes unbearable not because it was the loss of a loved one but because the Spirit reveals the cross to be a judgement on our judgement about what is sinful, about what righteousness looks like, about their capacity to make the right judgement. For, in its first movement, the crucifixion is a pious act, the worshipful exclusion of a heretic. Jesus tells them of their own future ordeals, and also of his own: “An hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God”.

The truth which the Spirit will tell about Jesus is a reinterpretation of the cross. And that interpretation is this: that the cross is for “the world” – including here, the synagogue, the church – the sign that Jesus himself is the unbearable thing: sinful, unrighteous, worthy of a judgement of guilty.

Jesus himself – that Jesus might truly be the Christ – is the unbearable thing, the contradictory, wrong thing. What the Spirit does in convicting the world – including the disciples and the church – about sin, righteousness and judgement is make Jesus bearable. The Spirit, then, does not deliver “a truth” about Jesus – a proposition or a doctrine; the Spirit truths Jesus to us, seals this Jesus to us. The Spirit causes us to see where we have been blind: to see that God’s way in the world is very, very strange indeed.

But it gets stranger still when we get back to why we asked about these unbearable things in the first place. What is the relationship between the unbearability of Jesus, and the unbearable church – the church even we, let alone “the world”, can scarcely bear? And if the Spirit helps with respect to the unbearability of Jesus, how does the Spirit help us with the unbearability of the church?

The unbearability of Jesus, the unbearability of the church and the work of the Spirit are bound up in this way: the Spirit points to the unbearable truth in Jesus by creating the unbearable church.

The truth about Jesus which the Spirit brings is not doctrinal fact; it is a truth which changes things. Jesus is crucified because he doesn’t look right, because he clearly cannot be true; the Word cannot become flesh in that way. And so the claims he makes must be sinful, unrighteous and rightly condemned.

Over against this the Spirit teaches the truth about Jesus, but it does so not by simply contradicting our condemnation of Jesus with a “No”. The Spirit tells the truth about Jesus by doing the Jesus again: now as the church – the unbearable church. The proof of the righteousness of the unbearable Jesus is the unbearable church.

When we condemn the church for its heresy or dogmatism or managerialism or incompetence or corporatism or wishy-washiness, or for its wealth or anxiety or triumphalism or self-interest or lack of faith, or whatever, we declare: surely this cannot bear the Word of God, be the presence of God, be even useful to God. Surely there is more of God somewhere else. This is the presumption and the engine of modern, popular nowhere-in-particular spirituality: that, of all places, the Spirit cannot be found here.

But the gift of the Spirit – the gift of this particular Spirit – is the gift of extraordinary ordinary. This is the truth the Spirit brings: here, now in the church – even this church! – is the presence, or the promise, or the possibility of “heaven”, which we declare not because what of we see but because of who chooses to name this place in that way.

It matters not whether the same might be said of other places. It matters for us only that this place – our place – is claimed by God as God’s own, embraced as if an Only-Begotten Child.

This is the gospel – that, even we as are, God wills to have us.

And out of this springs the imperative: love the church. Love the church not as an idea but as it is. Love your congregation; love not only the one you’re happy to sit next to, but the one who sits in front of you, or behind. Love your presbytery. Love your church council. Love your Synod. Do this not because they are lovely, yet. Any of these can sometimes be quite unbearable, entirely unlovely.

Love because it is the love which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things which makes the beloved lovely.

This is God’s way with us; by the power of the Spirit God sends, let it be our way with each other. Amen.

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17 May – Against the law

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Easter 7
17/5/2015

1 John 5:9-13
Psalm 1
John 17:6-19

At a first glance there is a beautiful simplicity in this, the first of the psalms: Happy are those who delight in the law of the Lord … they are like trees planted by streams of water, [whose] leaves do not wither. Who would not want to be such a “tree” – nourished and strong?

But, with closer attention to the whole of the psalm, objections leap up. Is not the poet just a little naïve when he declares that, the wicked are not so [blessed], but are like chaff that the wind drives away? Certainly the psalmist speaks of the failure of the wicked “in the judgement”, but experience is that “sinners” often stand “in the congregation of the righteous”, and it often seems that the way of the wicked does not perish – or not quickly enough for our liking.

One way of dealing with this contradiction is to cast it all to some end-time judgement when all things are sorted out, but this seems to strain the language of the psalm rather a lot. More than that, an end-time resolution isn’t particularly comforting for those who do delight in God’s instruction and yet suffer greatly at the hands of others, and such comfort would seem to be the point of the psalm in the first place. The apparent simplicity of the thought of the psalm is in fact not simple at all, and our objections on the basis of our experience or that of others can make it say almost nothing helpful. We might well wonder: what is the blessedness or happiness of those who delight in the law of God? A satisfactory answer hinges on our understanding of “law” held in God’s creative tension with “gospel”.

We know of “law” in two main senses. The first is law as it is written down for us as a moral code. This includes such things as the Ten Commandments, as well as the laws which our parliaments continue to create and modify so as to maintain some kind of moral order in the complexity of our day-to-day dealings with each other. These are laws which, we know, can be “broken”. To “break the law” is to fail to observe a requirement which God or society has laid upon us.

The other kind of law we know about is that implied by the expression “the laws of nature”. An important characteristic of these laws, at least at the level of our usual engagement with the world (“classical physics”), is that they are entirely predictable. The offence we might take at the miracle stories in the Scriptures arises from our sense that nature is orderly, and things necessarily happen only according to predictable patterns: people can’t walk on water and waves cannot be stilled with a command. Natural laws cannot be broken. If we really suspected that they could, we could not trust the seat we go to sit in, or the brakes we apply to slow our car, or the aeroplane we climb onto. Planes crash not because the laws of nature have failed but because they are relentless: gravity always sucks, and everything on a flying machine has to work according to natural laws which are just as dependable in order to balance gravity’s unforgiving character.

So we know of the breakable moral law, and the unbreakable natural law. But the important thing is this: we tend to assume, or even to desire, that moral law works like natural law. We desire that, should I do the moral thing – the right thing – it shall have the right result. We seek predictability in the results of our actions. And so also vice-versa: when the moral law is broken, we desire a natural law consequence: that “the wicked” be blown away “like chaff”, as our poet puts it. This is the kind of thinking we hear in our psalm today: to delight in the law of God and to meditate upon it day and night is to create the necessary and sufficient conditions for blessed and happy life, implicitly free of the ravages of those who delight in other laws. Whether it is moral law or natural law, law is, it would seem for us, about cause and effect.

And this is where the problems begin: because too often it seems that the “effect” we see is one of “bad” people doing well. The cause of this effect is not that God’s law is obeyed, but that it is not. It seems, in fact, more the case that some of “the wicked” (to keep using that slightly archaic term from the psalm!) understand the way of things better than the good, and have discovered just which law it is which needs to be observed in order to get ahead. They know how to manipulate the moral and the natural laws in order to maximise the desired outcome.

But perhaps it is too easy here to focus on the “bad” people. It’s always more interesting to consider the “good” people that we are (of course!), and how we are ourselves caught up in just these problems. What are we to do when with heart and mind we do delight in the command of God, and yet in the living of our lives we see that we do not observe it? Are we really any better off than the “chaff” the psalmist waves off into the wind? If we do fall short of what God calls us to be, and if even the moral law is really about cause and effect, are we not already lost? Who could rightly imagine themselves to be among the blessed the psalmist speaks of, if we are honest with ourselves?

In fact it is only those who know a deeper “law” which does not have to do with cause and effect who find themselves beside a flowing stream which provides the living water they need. This deeper law is what we might characterise as the law of love, but not our love for each other or even our love for God. It is the waxing and waning of our which love creates our anxiety in the first place. The law of love begins with God’s love for us, a love which precedes anything we might do, and so which is not dependent upon our actions but upon God’s simple decision to love. St Paul declares that those who seek to stand only by the things they have done are under a curse (Galatians 3), implying that it is in fact impossible to live a life of such righteousness. Surprisingly, then, and in contrast to the natural sense of our psalm, the “wicked” for Paul become those who are sure that they have done the right thing.

No doubt there is much we have yet to learn about how it is that we should live in relation to each other, and so much benefit to be had from looking to the specifics of what God demands. But if it is possible to “believe in vain”, as we heard St Paul suggest on Easter Day, we can also “act” or “obey in vain”, and this must always colour what we make of our own actions. If wanting to obey God’s commands is itself not enough to set us right before God, then the blessed one and the wicked one of our Psalm are the same person, both oriented around the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.

The love, or the justifying action, of God, however, sets the law in its right place, and a simple reversal takes place: our obedience to God’s command is not the context within which God loves and blesses us; rather, God’s love and blessing is the context within which we might tend to God’s commands.

In our gospel reading this morning Jesus prays, Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me (John 17.11f). This “name” is “Father”, which is important here because it makes those “protected” by it “children” in the same way that Jesus is “Son”. The streams of water the psalmist speaks of is the freedom of the children of God, who know themselves to be safe and secure because they are God’s children, and so who have no need to transgress, to live selfishly and without concern for the needs of others. It is when we believe ourselves already to have all we really need before God (cf. Ps 23.1) that God’s law becomes the best way to live.

Faith is knowing ourselves as the children of God. Freedom begins with faith – not faith that God “exists”, but faith that faith is enough to stand justified before God and those around us.

May we pray then, that God’s people discover anew the life which is already theirs in the Christ who is both the psalmist’s tree and stream – the Christ who is the sign of a life lived in God and the nourishment of such a life. In this, may Christ’s blessedness may be ours, that we might find our rest in him. Amen.

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10 May – “As I have loved you…”

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Easter 6
10/5/2015

Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
John 15:9-17

“This is my commandment: that you love one another.”

The rhetoric of “love” is often very vague, non-specific or ambiguous. It easily becomes sentimental on the one hand or, on the other hand, we broaden its meaning and application to things like “tough love” – that kind of love which declares to the one who is being “loved,” “This hurts me more than it hurts you!”

What is the love of which Jesus speaks? “… Love one another as I have loved you”. Okay. But Jesus then almost hopelessly confuses the matter with his next declaration: “No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”. This is unhelpful because Jesus himself literally does just this: he dies, as we have subsequently come to understand, “for his friends”. It is unhelpful because it lends itself to adoption into stories of heroism; we need only think of the way in which this Scripture verse has been taken up as an interpretation of the loss of life by soldiers in war. “Greater love hath no man” is inscribed on the Stone of Remembrance in the Shrine of Remembrance here in Melbourne, and doubtless in many other similar war memorials.

Whatever might be said about Jesus’ own laying down of his life, and the laying down by soldiers of their lives in war, the problem with what Jesus says for us here and now is the way in which it can be heard to over-dramatise the act of love. As a statement by itself it is true enough but it seems to locate the work of love in a place where most of us are never actually going to be: the heroic moment, the moment in which we are called to risk or even lose our life in the act of seeking to save another, as a father might do who swims into out to sea to retrieve the child dragged out by a rip, or a soldier might do to drag her wounded comrade out of enemy fire. Whether or not such moments are in fact real acts of love is not in question. But they are not, for the most part, real life – at least, the real life of most of us. To declare “no one has greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” can suggest that this is about the end of our life, the possibility of the need to die that others might live. In the Scriptures, however, thought about life and death is for the most part not thought about when or whether ours hearts are beating or not. Rather, it is a matter of how one’s heart beats – what rhythm it beats, according to which we then march.

To lay down one’s life for friends, as the Jesus of John’s gospel puts it, is put by the Jesus of the Synoptic gospels as “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me”. The laying down of one’s life is a manner of living and not simply the moment at which we finally die. This is a living which knows not only self but others, and not others as we imagine or want them to be, but others as they actually are, even when in this or that way they seem to be radically wrong and so to require of us more than seems “fair” or “reasonable”. To lay down my life for my friends is to allow where they are to be my problem – and not my problem to fix but the unavoidable cause of my “death”, so-called: the occasion of my cross to bear. This may be a literal death as in those rare “heroic” cases, or a metaphorical one, in the much more common and mundane challenges of everyday life together.

Any talk about self-denial runs the risk of being heard to suggest submission to abuse by others. But this is not the point. We need to acknowledge this danger in such talk, to watch for it in situations where it might arise, and to act where appropriate. But again, for the most part, these are extreme cases which cloud the issue for most of the rest of us most of the time. At the heart of the question of what it means to love is understanding why love is here spoken of in terms of a commandment. Our familiarity with love as sentiment, or even simply as lust in one form or another, also clouds our vision. These emotions and drives come naturally. We cannot be commanded to “fall” in love or even in lust; it just happens, and we generally like it. But the love of which Jesus speaks is not natural or appealing in this way. It must be called forth, commanded, because it contradicts the natural. It contradicts our over-estimation of the other, or our under-estimation, or even the presumption to estimate what another person is. The commandment to love contradicts our desires for them, and so our presumption to know what they think or desire or need.

But the command to love still remains abstract until a specific contradiction enters our lives – until we feel ourselves “contra‑dicted”, hear ourselves literally “spoken against”, have our own sense of the world and how it should fit together challenged. That is, the command to love comes as a command at the very point I feel unloved, when I have not been heard, when I feel disempowered, when I am disoriented by the fact that the world – which means those around me – is not as I imagined or desire. Drawing on an observation from Rowan Williams (Christ on trial): At such points I naturally tend to act out a longing to be somewhere else or, perhaps more precisely in such cases, out of the longing that you be somewhere else. For it is in this moment that the specific shape of what love demands then becomes clear in all of its unpalatableness. The command to love is the command to be where you are, with others who are not where you want them to be.

“No greater love has anyone, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” In this way Jesus describes his own way of being and, of course, the actual playing-out of his ministry in the cross. The logic of what I have said about love has its basis in the ministry of Jesus himself: “…as I have loved you.” We will miss this, however, if we remain with abstracted ideas about the love and death of Jesus – as if it were about Jesus’ love for “everybody”, or that Jesus “had to die” as part of God’s plan, so that he is a special case we don’t have to consider. Against this is the doctrine of the incarnation, which holds not merely that Jesus was God become “human”, but a specific human being in a specific time and place in the midst of specific people. Jesus the human being doesn’t just “die”; Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees and the scribes contradict him and plot his death. He is not merely “arrested”, but what he taught is contradicted in betrayal by Judas and denial by Peter. If Jesus’ life and death is a thoroughgoing act of love, then it is so within these specific relationships. If Jesus dies for love’s sake, it is for the love of Caiaphas and Annas, of Judas and Peter, of Mary and Martha and Magdalene and so on, all of whom are not just the potential beneficiaries of his death but, in different ways, the cause of his death: “This my body, broken by you…” Jesus dies in the way he does because he insists on being with them, “as they are”.

The cross, then, does not simply effect a divine salvation as if by a holy magic; it gives shape to love. It is Jesus “being where he is”. The shape of love Jesus’ persistence with and for both friend and foe. The Christian life, correspondingly, is cruciform – it is cross-shaped. It involves that kind of dying to ourselves which is necessary if any human community is to survive error and injustice – particularly the error and injustice of “someone else”.

And this brings us to the importance of the church. It does not matter whether other faith communities come to the same conclusion about love as the church, or whether the church generally fails miserably at living what is at the heart of its being. If others can know this truth by other means, we celebrate with them. If the church fails at living the truth, we are simply all the more reminded of how imperative it is that we continue to work at it. The church is a community which is learning not simply how to love, but the difficulty of love.

Love is difficult, and it is difficult for the church. It will be difficult for us to deal with each other when we have to make very concrete, far-reaching and doubtless very disruptive decisions about what to do with our property resources. It is difficult to deal with each other when we begin to express ourselves in relation to things we need to have in common – and we might think here of the conversation we have planned this morning about worship. And yet it is precisely in such potentially conflicted situations that we are called to do something extraordinary. This is not the heroic feat of agreeing to sell up, or agreeing to soldier on on this site, or with a stroke of genius achieving just the balance in worship that pleases everyone. The extraordinary thing is in the manner of engagement – feeling ourselves to be in the right, but not requiring that others recognise it. Or, in more evangelical terms – believing not only that I am justified by grace alone but also that you, who are clearly wrong in what you do or think, are also justified by grace and not condemned for the error I see in you. This is the fruit Jesus appoints us to bear “fruit that will last” (John 15.16) because it reflects that love which overcomes all things. This is the extraordinary thing.

There is not much between how we stand before God and how others stand before us. It is because we do not understand this that we often turn out to be lousy lovers. The command to love comes precisely because we need constantly to be called to love. This call comes again and again in God’s hope that we might see: as we are to God – claimed in grace – so others are to be to us; as God is to us – claiming through grace – so are we to be to others.

“…as I have loved you” is where we begin, and the end towards which we move, if the “love” which at is our heart is to be meaningful, and effective.

Let our prayer be, then, that our hands do not fumble the gift of such extraordinary trust – the gift of each other to love – that the work of our hands might finally be found to match where love began, and never ends. Amen.

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3 May – On Learning to Understand

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Easter 5
3/5/2015

Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22
John 15:1-8

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

Acts 8:29:   “Philip ran to the chariot and heard the Ethiopian eunuch reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading? He replied, “How can I unless someone guides me.”

You are eighteen. You have just completed VCE and are enjoying a gap year in Europe. Though usually travelling with a friend, you find yourself alone on a short Mediterranean cruise. Arriving in the port of Kusadasi in Turkey, you idly explore much the same shops you’ve seen everywhere, followed by an hour or two sunbathing on the beach. You hear about a short tour to Ephesus so decide to join it – without really knowing why. Yet more ruins, though certainly impressive. You go back to your cabin. Not much to do, so you switch on the TV to watch the same news for the 50th time on CNN. You switch it off. Nothing to read – open the drawer by the bed and there all alone is a copy of the Bible, apparently never opened. You read the page telling you who provided it, and what to read if you’re lonely, tired, or sad. But you’re none of these things. So you move on finding some letters to unpronounceable places including one called the Ephesians, but you make no connection with that to where you’ve just been. Flick over the pages. Come to Chapter 8 of the Book of Acts and read about a eunuch – never met one of those, so you shut the book and put it back in the drawer. A caricature? Perhaps – but perhaps not.

Our text then has some force: “Do you understand what you are reading?” Will you think to ask: “How can I unless someone guides me?”

So to the same enduring problem, but now with Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Every detail counts. Not least that we read it in the season we call Easter, while not forgetting that every Sunday is Easter Sunday. The text before us today, however, comes after the last resurrection appearance we call the ascension – which is still two weeks away in the liturgical calendar. Equally important is the fact that we read this text in the second volume of the two part work we call Luke/Acts – in effect, the gospel of the Church, following the first, the Gospel of the Lord according to Luke.

This second volume simply illustrates the unfolding of the ascension commission to the Church to be “witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and away to the ends of the earth”, that is, to the city of Rome, for with this pagan city the gospel has reached its goal. This, then, is the context for how we are to understand the passage before us.

This morning, though, we are very early on that journey. In the first volume, the gospel has been offered to Jerusalem, and been violently rejected. The first in this volume to bite the dust, quite literally, is the first martyr Stephen. So the focus shifts to Philip, not here the apostle, but rather one of the Greek speaking Christians set apart for administrative functions in the Jerusalem community. Philip is one of those who were forced to leave the city of Jerusalem following the martyrdom of Stephen. He fled to Samaria, the ancient enemy of the Jews, detested as a mongrel race of semi-heathen heretics. Here Philip is surprisingly successful as a missionary, including being the first to baptise a non-Jew there.

So the stage is set for Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, a potentially long, long branch away from the trunk of the vine. Although Eunuchs could be high officials, in Israel they were excluded from the covenant congregation, being considered as impaired or defective according to the ceremonial law. So this is the first highly unlikely impediment for his incorporation into the Christian community.

But the text is more interested in the fact that he is an Ethiopian rather than being a eunuch. As a geographical or ethnic term, ‘Ethiopian’ has an extended meaning, being used to give a vague designation for all peoples in Africa far distant from the Mediterranean basin. That a high official in the queen’s court – indeed the treasurer of her kingdom – should be able to read the Greek scroll of Isaiah is not a problem. That he had it, being neither a Jew nor a proselyte, might well be, yet as a court official he could well find a way. So this Ethiopian eunuch is, in fact, best understood to be a half-believer in Judaism, a “God-fearer” as is the case with other such Gentiles in Luke/Acts ready for a Christian reading of the Old Testament. The point of the passage is that as a eunuch, he serves as an example of one by nature “not my people” becoming “my people”. And second, as an “Ethiopian”, he represents the second impediment for inclusion, nevertheless the sort of foreigner understood in the tradition as a Gentile who “comes to the light”. And it is not stretching the truth to see him as a high official being the model of “a king that comes to the brightness of its rising”.

So we encounter this Ethiopian as he travels reading aloud – as was the custom – a pivotal passage about the meaning of Jewish salvation history – a far cry from our hypothetical 18 year old traveller desultorily dipping into the cabin’s Gideon Bible only being offered a treasure trove of helpful advice for a down time.

Both are equally puzzled by the book. The Ethiopian at least is puzzled by the heart of the matter. Is suffering merely a transient event in Israel’s history or is it at the very heart of Israel’s existence? But most puzzling of all: who is the figure who embodies it?

Hence Philip’s question: “Do you know what you are reading?” The only dispirited reply has to be: “How can I if there is no-one to help me?”

Is this not the pathos of every age, not least our own? We, of course, live in a culture that for the most part has given up asking the question about the meaning of the Bible. Now everyone is an expert, non-believers most of all. But the real pathos is that we have made them like this. Yet not all.

Three weeks ago I had a startling experience of the reversal of today’s text. I was invited to offer some leadership to a weekend gathering of most of the churches in Ballarat at Hall’s Gap Conference centre.

Some 130 people were present. I was pleased to accept the invitation, while indicating that I was reluctant to make the running with my own imposed agenda. Instead, I asked if they would draw up some questions which might provide a focus. I received about thirty, ten produced by the large group of children attending. Certainly this was an encouraging start.

The questions, perhaps predictably, fell into three broad areas – puzzles about the Bible, especially the status of the Old Testament; about Christian belief; and about the future of the Church.

With this as the agenda, I was then informed that a large number of Sudanese families would be attending, members of a Sudanese (Nuer) congregation. I became apprehensive, having absolutely no experience with African culture. I wondered to myself: how will this work? At the end of the first session, a group of Sudanese women came to speak to me. Fearing the worst, I was astounded by their enthusiasm for what I was attempting. Rarely have I encountered such an appreciative audience. I felt only shame that in my ignorance and arrogance I had anticipated that they would be to me as the Ethiopian is to Philip. Puzzled by this reception as I was, the presiding minister offered an explanation: “Unlike us Anglo-Saxons”, she said, “they carry no baggage” literally, in every sense of the word, having endured unbelievable deprivation and suffering.

They, if anyone, know exactly what is at stake in reading the suffering servant passages from the prophet Isaiah – far eclipsing my own ‘talking head’ understanding of the significance of such passages.

“Do you understand what you are reading? Philip asked the Ethiopian. All I, for one, could respond to the implicit question of my Sudanese Christian friends was this:

“How can I, unless someone guides me?”

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26 April – Christ our beginning and end

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Easter 4
26/4/2015

Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 85
Mark 1:1-15

There seems to be a general consensus that the beginning is a very good place to start: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”; so begins the book of Mark the Gospeller.

Beginnings, however, are rather less straightforward than we usually imagine. There are, in fact, no true beginnings in history. There was always something before what we choose as a beginning, so that – were we to be comprehensive – we would have to push back the start as far as our historical knowledge could reach. But, in fact, we don’t do this. While everything really begins somewhere prior to the beginning we choose, we nevertheless do choose: we do identify and magnify certain points within history as somehow being “the beginning” in a special kind of way.

In this process, what is likely to be less clear to us is that in such a naming of a beginning we are not so much identifying where things start as identifying the end from which we take our view of the beginning. The beginning is what creates us ourselves. The beginning we choose is chosen because it speaks us – not only speaks to us but speaks us, announces us, relates us. If a history and a starting place do not do this, then they are someone else’s story and not ours.

In the last few weeks, of course, and more intensively in the last few days, we have been reflecting as a community on the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli. Among the many angles of reflection, there has been no small amount written on this event as an Australian beginning. The language is sometimes quite extreme, and has been challenged from a different quarters, but it conveys the thought that this event defined the spirit of the nation. The event itself, and the way those soldiers conducted themselves, constituted the arrival of the nation on the world stage. In all sorts of often quite surprising ways, the ANZAC spirit is seem somehow to reflect what is “typically” Australian – even to have been the genesis of these characteristics. In this way they were us – our beginning – because we are them. Our Prime Minister remarked yesterday: “If they had not been emblematic of the nation we thought we were [read: “are”], Anzac Day would not have been commemorated from that time until this.” There is something fundamentally “us” behind the commemoration, and so it lends itself to serve as our “beginning”.

Whatever might be said about the continuing remembrance of the Gallipoli campaign, the point here is simply what sits behind the choice which is exercised in selecting this event as somehow being definitive and so somehow constituting a beginning: in this way we note ourselves.

What, then, of Mark’s sense for a beginning: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”? All that we have just noted about the choice of a beginning applies also in this beginning: this, too, is a choice about where the beginning is. In the opening passage there are intimations of other, prior events – the preaching of the prophet Isaiah anticipating John; the echo of the even earlier Elijah in John’s mode of dress; and perhaps even of the very creation event itself echoed in the movement of the Spirit over the waters of Jesus’ baptism (Genesis 1.1f).

Yet the beginning Mark chooses is the appearance of Jesus on the scene and the first thing we hear on his lips: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

If the need to choose a beginning – as Mark does – is a matter of expressing something of ourselves, expressing something of the end which is reflected in that beginning, how is that the case for Mark? What is the end – the goal – identified, chosen, in this beginning?

It is, again, us: Mark himself, or those to whom he writes – we are the end in mind here. The evangelist Mark writes to a community which is itself the fruit of the gospel which begins here. In the first instance it was a particular community: largely Gentile, probably in Rome, small in the face of the over-whelming presence of all things Roman, apparently under increasing persecution in the early to mid ‘60s. Some interpreters read the famous calming of the storm episode in chapter 4 as being a word about – and to – this little community, tossed about on the waves by seemingly irresistible forces of criticism and persecution, crying out to God, “Do you not care that we perishing?” (Mark 4.38).

The “beginning” which is the appearance and proclamation of Jesus makes sense of the identity and experience of that small community believers. They are different, off-centre. They are marginal to the dominant narratives which spring from different beginnings and imply different endings. As Palestine was marginal and problematic to the vast Roman world, so also are they, although living in the very heart of Rome itself. As wild-eyed crazy as the Baptist appears in his desert ministry, calling people away from the relatively safe city into the dangers of the desert with its “wild beasts” (1.12), so are these believers seen to be odd, eccentric. For this message – this gospel – speaks of a different centre. Just as the more jingoist readings of the ANZAC event see it as a characterisation of the Australian spirit – the centre of our identity – so for Mark the way the gospel begins characterises the community which is now formed by that beginning.

And just as any rampant nationalism, or fanatical extremism, or political ideology sees itself as finally arriving at the goal of human history – the “filling up” of history in this particular way of being human – so also Mark’s Jesus announces “the time is fulfilled” (1.15). Now, finally, it comes to completion.

And, yet, it is a strange “completion”, for it is an “incomplete completion”. This is because the filling up of the time takes shape in the creation of something which is not yet at its end, its perfection: the church itself – that community which sees its particular present springing from this beginning. For, despite occasional triumphalist outbursts, the church is scarcely “complete”; the very writing of the gospel itself as an encouragement to a troubled church is evidence of this, quite apart from the inadequacies of the church more obvious to us today.

The church’s end is in this beginning, but it is not there yet. This is because of the strangeness of this particular beginning: its call to repentance. This repentance is no mere turning from this or that “sin”, no mere saying “sorry”. It is, as the English word itself implies (re‑pent : re-think), a re-thinking: a re-perceiving of what matters. This call to re-imagine ourselves and our future is an address to us who tend towards crystallising a particular sense of what it means to be human. These crystallisations are hardenings, exclusions of other possibilities. It happens, continually, in churches as it happens in nations. In these imaginings of ourselves we imply that we have already reached what it means to be whole and human. Or, in the terms which Jesus uses, we imply that we have already reached “the kingdom”: God’s kingdom has come, and we are the proof of it. It is this sense of completeness in ourselves which drives us to conflict with each other: the claims we presume to make on others on account of their being less, or deserving less, than we because our beginning, our end, are the “true” beginning and end.

But the kingdom of God – our completion – has not yet come: we are not complete. As then, so now, this world “draws near” in the person of Jesus in whom alone there is a true beginning and a true end, and who calls us out of parochialisms, nationalisms, triumphalisms and the self-righteousness which justify selfishness and give rise to fear. We are called from our sense of our own perfection and the narrow beginnings from which this sprang to a beginning and an end which is not yet quite ours, but the approach of which is announced in order to unravel us a bit.

Our first reading this morning was taken from Isaiah:

How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news.

This announcement of peace in Mark’s gospel takes the form of the approach of a God who calls us out of our firm and fixed identities and centres into something as yet unimagined. This may not seem good news at first, and indeed Mark’s gospel is filled with shock and awe as the world meets the surprising, disorienting liberty Jesus brings. But it is liberty – a liberation from the powers and principalities which hold us in thrall and cause us to imagine that we need to distance ourselves from, or even kill, each other, and can then bless that as a beginning.

We give thanks, then, for Mark and for all who have told the story of this strange one in whom our beginnings and endings are re-worked to bring life and freedom.

May God’s people grow ever more fully into that story, becoming themselves new beginnings and endings which testify to where life and liberty are to be found. Amen.

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