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Easter 5
18/5/2025

Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
John 13:31-35

Sermon preached by Elika Schaumkel

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When I crossed the familiar shores of Tonga to embrace a new land, I felt like a small canoe sailing great, uncharted waters. Being a fisherman’s daughter, the ocean was my heritage and teacher. My father didn’t just talk to us about the sea, which was for him both a source of livelihood and a lifelong lesson in adapting to the elements and accepting any fate they brought. The ocean has no fences, it invites all who would dare to sail upon it, he used to say. Trust its size; it reflects God’s infinite love.

This knowledge conditioned me for the uncertain, instructing me to share my heart with new circumstances and individuals. Just like the ocean allows all rivers to its embrace; when we love and hold others in our hearts without questioning, we transcend the shackles of unfamiliarity and fear. This acceptance voyage mirrors the course that the early church had to chart, as God guided them to an ever-greater embrace of humanity.

During easter season is a time to reflect and rejoice as we ponder the triumph of Christ over the grave and the life-changing impact of His resurrection. Today, as we reflect on Acts 11:1-18 and John 13:31-35, I wish to draw our attention to the word “Acceptance” a theme that shines through the two passages: “Acceptance” and its deep relationship to the kind of love Jesus is reminding us to embody and to cross all the “boundaries” that have kept us away from one another.

Peter also talks about a visionary experience from God that had caused him to violate Levitical law by eating with non-Jews (Acts 11:1-18). His divine vision, though it contradicted his cultural and religious mores, also was the means to introducing him to God’s larger story of acceptance into his people. The way that Peter is led to Cornelius, a gentile centurion, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, is the story of how a human centre can switch from exclusion to inclusion. Initially, it was resisted by the Jewish believers, but it was the door thrown open wide to the Gentiles.

In John’s Gospel (13:31-35), after Judas’ exit from the Last Supper, Jesus addresses his disciples regarding the extent of his love and his glorification through the cross. He gives

them a “new command”: “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Jesus makes love the distinctive badge of his followers and holds them to a standard of acceptance and mutual caring.

The Acts and John passages focus on this revolutionary idea of love and acceptance. Its acceptance in Acts is reflected when Peter himself realises God’s love does not play favourites. This was an important step in transcending cultural and religious barriers to include all in the family of God as demonstrated in the baptism of Cornelius and his family.

In Jesus, love becomes the commandment, the basis of a community built and defined by self-giving. The love of Jesus demonstrated by his sacrifice, sets a pattern for us, both in how we treat people and in what we tolerate.

Today, these references invite us to reconsider our borders and openness to others. In a world so often defined by social barriers and cultural chasms, we should seriously consider if our congregations reflect this radical hospitality modelled by the first generations of God’s people. Acceptance is not passive, and it is not tolerance; acceptance is engaging in approaches to destroy the walls of racism, religion, and culture.

Acts challenges to welcome those who are different from us, calling us to see God’s presence in the development of relationships. But for us to get out over the walls we’ve built, and to recognise that others are created by God in the same form as we are, as Peter recognised that about Cornelius, we must be willing to break the limits of our comfort zones, and to trust God is with us in the journey.

John is urging us to love as deeply and genuinely as Christ himself does – love that moves, forgives, and unites. Both as a church and as individuals; are we willing to make friends in these uncomfortable places?”

The good news in both passages is that God’s love is always bigger and wider and deeper… and more amazing than we think it is. The Resurrection gave the apostles the power and it gives us the same power to tear down dividing walls. In love and acceptance, we do actually ‘obey’ Jesus’ command and manifest God’s kingdom here on earth. Both Peter’s vision and Jesus’ command expose a divine acceptance, revealing a God who is actively reaching towards every human heart.

As we absorb these truths, I invite you to ponder on these urgent questions:

• How can we actively work to break down prejudices that impede acceptance?
• Are we willing to be like Peter, ready to stretch past our culture and religion and welcome others?
• How can we make sure our love stays vibrant, sacrificial, and reflective of Christ’s example?

Perhaps by opening our hearts as wide as God’s embrace, love all people and welcome them, and declare that we will break down any boundaries from now on through radical love. Let us be an Easter people who practice revolutionary love, living our faith as one that beholds the divine even in the eyes of others.

Amen.

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Easter 4
11/5/2025

John 2:13-25

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Our life begins again with the cold, hard love of God. (I’ll come back to this! )

“Many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing.”

Is this the reason that the government of Anthony Albanese has been re-elected with such an overwhelming majority, that “many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing”?

This is a half-serious question – even more than half serious! As we noted last week, ours is a world in which we are constantly seeing signs, fitting them into frameworks of meaning and determining whether or not to trust them. Despite most conviction to the contrary, “believe” and “trust” are not religious acts. They are social and political – deeply human necessities. We are always engaging with signs and committing ourselves because of them.

Of course, the dynamics of politics and voting are complex, and it’s not quite clear what signs the Prime Minister was making or how they were understood by those who voted for his government. But politics is very much about signalling: “See what we have done”, “Hear what we promise to do”.

Last Sunday, our interest was in meaning, which we took to be a matter of location. Something has meaning when it is located within the way we experience the world. The crowd in the reading placed the signs – located them – and so they placed Jesus also. And we might note here in passing the challenge the religious authorities throw at Jesus after his attack on the Temple economy: What sign can you show us for doing this? , which is, again to recall last week, a question of how Jesus “fits”.

So also with our politicians. They become meaningful for us when their signs (or at least the promise of signs) are meaningful to us and how we think the world is, or should be, or shouldn’t be.

But unlike how it works in the political system, the belief of the many in Jesus because of the signs he has been doing is balanced by Jesus’ own scepticism: “Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them because he knew them. ” The word the Greek text uses for Jesus “trusting” himself is the same word which it uses for the crowd’s “belief” in Jesus, so that we could then translate the Greek something like this: Many believed in Jesus’ name because they saw the signs that Jesus was doing, but Jesus himself did not believe in them. That is, Jesus and the crowd disagree about the signs he is making.

Perhaps this is obvious, but less obvious is that it’s quite different from what takes place in our political processes. The politician must necessarily cast herself as one with those who have voted for her; we “believe” in her, and she implicitly believes in us. Our voters and our elected representatives agree on what the signs mean. In more extreme political systems, such as those tending towards fascism, it becomes necessary that there is an even closer identity between the political leadership and the populace than mere mutual belief and trust. Vladimir Putin is Russia, Donald Trump is America, and Viktor Orbán is Hungary. In such places, it is not so much that the opposition is excluded; it is that the opposition is unnecessary: everything is order, such is the agreement of the people and the leader, such is the mutual trust, such is the sense for the signs.

The crowd’s belief in Jesus is this type of identification, and Jesus’ unbelief in the crowd is the rejection of this identity. A little later in the story, we will hear,

When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world. ” 15 When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.            (6. 14f)

“Jesus, Jesus, he’s our man! He’ll Make Judah Great Again. ”

But crowds, of course, are fickle. The turn of the story in the Gospels testifies to this, as does the strange quiet that has doubtless descended in the kitchens of the Dutton, Bandt and Daniels households, among others. We might wonder whether the signs change, or the framework of meaning within which we try to locate them changes, or whether it’s we ourselves as interpreters who change. Whatever the case, we with our signs and meanings are highly unpredictable, and it’s here that our signings and believings part company with those of Jesus.

Because if the scriptural text expresses scepticism about our capacity to attribute meaning correctly and about our shifting allegiances, the same text nonetheless insists on God’s persistence with us. If Jesus does not believe in those who believe in him on their own terms, he nonetheless loves them.

For the many, trust and love are equated, so that we can only love those we trust. But for God, lack of trust is not grounds for lack of love.

Last week we heard that the world “did not receive him” and today that “he knew what was in everyone”. By themselves, these are dismal declarations about the human being, but only if we read them by themselves. Because the point of these observations is not to emphasise the darkness in the world but the persistence of the light: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (1. 5). Despite our wrong reading of the truth, still that truth persists with us. God’s unbelief – untrust – in us is no barrier to God’s active, persistent love.

And so, to emphasise out the contrast, we might risk putting it this way: God’s love is a “cold” love. If warmth describes the affection of the electors and the elected, of lovers who recognised and trust each other, then the love of God in Jesus is “cool”, cold.

But it is no less love for that coolness. Cold love is the love which comes before trust, the love which loves another despite herself, the love which is not reciprocated on love’s own terms.

Warm love generates itself out of the positive feedback of fire for fire. This is nature’s love, and it matters deeply because it’s the love that keeps the world turning, if only as a wheel on a cobblestone road.

Cold love is not natural. It is the love which is commanded.

It is the love which is not yet reciprocated and might have to suffer misunderstanding and rejection.

It is the love that persists not for its own sake, as warm love often does, but first for the sake of the beloved.

Cold love matters because warm love’s turning of the world is often cruel and towards darkness, and the fires of warm love are easily extinguished.

But it is the gospel, and it is the reason we are here today, that cold love sees and acts, persists and overcomes.

If we mistake the signs God makes, God just keeps making them. And making them. And making them.

This is love, John says elsewhere:
1 John 4. 10…not that we loved God but that God loved us.
And loved us
And loved us
with a love as hard and unwelcome as the cold of a tomb,
until the love which affronts us like death proves itself, in fact,
to be the source of life in all its fullness.

If God in Christ knows us, knows what is in us, this is not the bad news of exposure under harsh light but the good news of a love hard enough to undergo anything, durable enough to overcome anything.

Jesus comes not to condemn us but to love us, to death.

This is the cold, hard, persistent love by which our life begins again, in which we have our meaning, and with which we are sent into the world: to love as God has loved us.

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Easter 3
4/5/2025

Psalm 30
John 1:1-13

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Most of you probably noticed that I set some homework for this morning, as preparation for what I want to do with our Gospel reading for today. The homework was to look at an editorial in The Guardian on Good Friday, the editors having succumbed to the seasonal temptation to express an opinion about the Christian Easter confession.

I suspected at the time that the editorial was probably good ground for a sermon, as some of the best sermons are those that respond to silly things that seem to be entirely reasonable and rational.

Just in case “the dog ate your homework”, a quick summary: the article proposed an answer to the “ultimate question” – the meaning of life – and this for all those who can’t anymore cop the Christian answer. The problem with the article is that it doesn’t wonder about the meaning of meaning, and so it finally offers a solution which simply restates the problem.

Meaning has to do with location. This is not simply the coordinates of a thing. It is how a thing fits into what matters to us. Most of the time, our perception of what is going on around us is highly selective. We only see what matters. As you walked into this space this morning, there were a thousand things you might have noticed, but you only noticed a few – that the place was laid out as it usually is, who was in it to say hello to, and whether anyone was sitting in your seat.

If anything unusual crosses our view, either we simply don’t notice it or, if it asserts itself and demands our attention, we process it in terms of what we already know, for better or for worse. That is, we find a way to locate the new thing among our old things, and so give it a place. It’s in this way that meaning is location. The meaning of things has to do with their location within our particular story of the world.

This is not all that remarkable, but it helps us to see the pathos of The Guardian’s question about the meaning of life. This is not about how we attribute meaning to some new encounter “out there”. It asks rather, what is the system of meaning itself by which we can experience the world around us? Put differently, a question about the meaning of life admits that we who ascribe meaning to things by locating them in a wider picture have lost the picture. And, in the process, we have lost ourselves and now are just one more thing bobbing around in a sea of possible meanings, wondering whether there is such a thing as an ocean. To ask with Kenneth Williams (in The Guardian piece), “Oh, what’s the bloody point?”, is to declare, I don’t know what story I’m in; I don’t know where I am.

We all recognise the pathos of this, and most of us probably feel it; Christian faith doesn’t make us immune here. The experience of meaninglessness, as an experience of displacement, is almost endemic. Ours is a “post-era” that understands itself to varying degrees to be post-Christian, post-patriarchal, post-colonial, postmodern, post-truth, even post-human. If you find yourself wondering whether or not you’re a racist, or what a man or a woman is, or suspecting that these “were and always will be” the sovereign lands of the Wurundjeri people, or maybe even why we don’t now have a hung parliament in Canberra, you’re experiencing a loss of meaning – a “post”-induced loss of location. Our era has rendered us “psychic” refugees: dislodged in our hearts and minds, if not literally forced to flee our homes.

Having lamented this meaninglessness and that it cannot sing Easter Alleluias, The Guardian’s conclusion is to restate the problem, only now as the solution. The article proposes that we just have to live a “fitting” life, and that a “life well lived has its own logic”.

Yes, indeed!

But the very crisis of meaning is the crisis of not being able to “fit” things. What is a fitting life? – This is the question with which the article began. The crisis of meaning is precisely a crisis of being turned back upon ourselves to construct our own story, and our lacking the wherewithal or the references to do it. And this crisis forces us, for sheer sanity’s sake, either to withdraw into binge-watching other people’s lives or to construct lives with their “own logic” – lives, that is, of competing and conflicting ideas about what “well-lived” actually means. Such a half-brained solution to so serious problem is just more fuel to the fire.

For the problem is a real one. An un-storied human is a dead person walking; this is the meaning of crucifixion. And if “a life well lived” is no solution, it’s because the problem is not understood. And so neither are Easter Alleluias in The Guardian’s understanding a solution.

And this brings us, finally(!), to our snippet from John’s Gospel today, for it touches upon the crisis of meaning, then and now.

[Jesus the Word] was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. (John 1.10f)

He was in the world, and the world had its being through him, yet the world could not place him. Jesus arrives as himself the “location” of the world, as its meaning, as that which gives us our orientation and place. What then occurs does so between our inability and our unwillingness to recognise this.

Yet, to those who could place him, the text continues, he gave “power to become children of God” – power, that is, which locates us, power which brings meaning. But the word “power” here is misleading. The Greek text has a word which is usually translated “authority”, although not in our version just here. Because we typically equate power and authority, a distinction between the two seems a bit pedantic. But power and authority are better distinguished. A bulldozer has the power to stop traffic by virtue of simple physics: it’s big and heavy, and there’s no getting around it. A petite police officer, however, while having no physical advantage over moving traffic, has a uniform that indicates her authority to call a halt, and the cars still stop. Authority has to do with agreement, with location and with meaning. An authorised police officer has been author-ed into the lore of the road – she has been written in.

To those who did receive the Word, John says, that Word “authorised” them – wrote them in – as children of God. To believe in Jesus, on John’s understanding, is to have found yourself written into the story, to have been located, to have been made meaning-ful.

The Christian meaning The Guardian purports to “envy”, then, is not the promise of a postmortem eternal life which, by its very nature, dislocates us from here to some future time.

The true “meaning of life” in Christian faith comes from being authored by the Wordly God. Most of John’s Gospel has to do with the dislocation of meaning – “How can these things be?” cries the exasperated Nicodemus, the “teacher of Israel”, the expert in meaning (John 3.4,10).

To be authored as children of God is to be storied in the story of Jesus himself. This includes Easter’s resurrection glory, but also Good Friday’s glory of the cross. It includes the gift of love’s embrace but also the hard command to love. It includes the promise of meaning but also the disorienting upheaval of a rebirth.

The meaning of life is a question we ask when we’ve lost our story, when we’ve lost ourselves. And there’s no finding our way home again on our own, there is no “fitting” into what has no shape.

But it’s another story – now our story – if when we are lost someone comes looking for us. We are then the found, and this is where our story begins – precisely as those found, and not as the lost.

To have been found, to be written in as loved; this is the meaning of our lives: lost but now found, dead but now alive.

And so we are called to love as we have been loved, precisely because love is the only way anyone has a meaning and place which accords with what they are: those destined to be authored as the meaning of God.

Love then. Love and love. This is our meaning. And God’s.

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Easter 2
27/4/2025

Genesis 3:1-10
Psalm 32
Mark 16:1-8

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Another week, another violation of a ceasefire, another woman dead because a man thought she crossed a line, another despairing suicide. So it seems to go. For the most part, these things wash over us, for we are accustomed to the presence of death.

On any ordinary day, of course, our own failures or excesses are generally much less dramatic than all that. Yet here too we are constantly assimilating and normalising human frailty and failure.

In Christian thinking, human weakness has generally fallen under the catch-all category of “sin”. Sin has encompassed simple “naughtiness” at the trivial end of its spectrum, through to total depravity at the oppressive end.

But, in the book many of us considered in our recent Lenten studies, theologian Rowan Williams beautifully undercuts this too-easy moralising of sin: “Our failures are all about our wanting to be somewhere else”.[1] Sin is about our unwillingness to be true to where we are and to do the things which are demanded of us here; our problem is we are too often simply unable to be “present”. Marital infidelity seeks to be “somewhere else” than with this person and what he or she needs or can give. “Just one more episode” shifts us into another place where there are no phone calls, visits, or housework awaiting our attendance. Comfort food and escaping into retail therapy are very much our strong desire to be elsewhere.

By such means, we strike a bargain in life by which we settle for a shrunken world and experience, what Williams calls “peace before light”. This is a peace in which we escape into a relatively safe space by denying inconvenient truths about ourselves in the world. It is a kind of peace, in the sense that we survive. But it’s not an illuminated or liberated life.

Another week, another broken ceasefire, another buried truth, another crucifixion. So it seems to go.

The responses of Jesus’ friends to his arrest and crucifixion – their desertion of him in particular – can also be seen to be assimilations and rationalisations. They too wanted to be “somewhere else”. We can imagine the confused self-justifications of those who had been so close to Jesus and so bravely imagined that they would stick with him: I had to do it. I couldn’t stop them. It was only enough that I could save myself.

And then comes the sad existence of the mere survivor. Now it is done, is passed, can’t be changed. And so I must find a way to live with myself. Life without truth. Peace without light.

There is tragedy in the way we grow accustomed to living with the corpses of missed opportunities – things taken from us or things we have denied ourselves because we have not been able to be where we are, because we have missed the moment out of a desire to be somewhere else. Peace before light.

But what if the corpse of one of our missed opportunities were to move? What if that which we have somehow managed to put to death for ourselves refuses to remain dead but rather returns to us? What if our dead refuse to confirm our version of how we have come to be where we are, why we are justified in our failures, why we had reason to be afraid, why it we though it necessary to deny what we truly believe?

Were one of our buried failures to move, to return to us, then a new possibility emerges: peace after light. This light would be a piercing one, cutting through every shade of grey, causing us to squint for its brilliance. To borrow language from Mark’s gospel this morning, this is a light which would see us to turn and flee from the tomb, “for fear and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid”.

Why this strange response to what is supposed to be overwhelmingly good news?

[1] Rowan Williams, Christ on trial: how the gospel unsettles our judgement. (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2003), p.133.

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Easter Sunday
20/4/2025

Isaiah 25:6-9
John 20:1-10

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“A certain flock of geese lived together in a barnyard with high walls around it. Because the corn was good and the barnyard was secure, these geese would never take a risk.

One day, a philosopher goose came among them. He was a very good philosopher, and every week they listened quietly and attentively to his learned discourses. ‘My fellow travellers on the way of life,’ he would say, ‘can you seriously imagine that this barnyard, with great high walls around it, is all there is to existence? 

I tell you, there is another and a greater world outside, a world of which we are only dimly aware. Our forefathers knew of this outside world. For did they not stretch their wings and fly across the trackless wastes of desert and ocean, of green valley and wooded hill? But alas, here we remain in this barnyard, our wings folded and tucked into our sides, as we are content to puddle in the mud, never lifting our eyes to the heavens which should be our home.’

The geese thought this was very fine lecturing. ‘How poetical,’ they thought. ‘How profoundly existential. What a flawless summary of the mystery of existence.’

Often the philosopher spoke of the advantages of flight, calling on the geese to be what they were. After all, they had wings, he pointed out. What were wings for, but to fly with? Often, he reflected on the beauty and the wonder of life outside the barnyard, and the freedom of the skies.

And every week the geese were uplifted, inspired, moved by the philosopher’s message. They hung on his every word. They devoted hours, weeks, months to a thoroughgoing analysis and critical evaluation of his doctrines. They produced learned treatises on the ethical and spiritual implications of flight. All this they did.

But one thing they never did. They did not fly! For the corn was good, and the barnyard was secure!” (Søren Kierkegaard)

(Hold that thought!)

The difference between Easter and Good Friday is not the difference between life and death.

The difference between Easter and Good Friday is not the difference between now and some distant, promised future.

And the difference between Easter and Good Friday is not the difference between a question and an answer.

Good Friday and Easter do not differ in any such way, despite how often we hear them contrasted like this. The difference between Good Friday and Easter is just the mode in which they say the same thing. To speak of Good Friday and Easter is to extend an invitation to answer a question: What is the nature of the time in which we live?

On Good Friday, we saw Jesus’ refusal to take seriously the time-telling of Pilate and the other worldly powers. These had determined that now is the time of death’s shadow, and our lives should be ordered accordingly. But Jesus refused to be untrue simply because of the threat of death. In this, his death was a triumph and no simple moral catastrophe. The cross indicated in its opposite Jesus’ sense of the times as alive.

The Resurrection similarly re-reads the time of the world, which

brings us to our text from John today, and in fact just the first few words in the Greek: “…on the first day of the week”. In this seemingly harmless little detail we can read the whole significance of the Easter event. Early in the morning, while it was still dark, the news of the resurrection begins to break. Or, more profoundly, in that still-darkness of this particular “first day”, God says once more, Let there be light.

This particular “first day of the week” – is the first day of the new creation, when again the chaotic deep and void are disrupted by divine order, when death is shown to have been defeated as a life-denying power and shadow over human life. With the resurrection of Jesus, the times change: our experience of the nature and potency of our time changes.

This is the equivalence of Good Friday and Easter: Jesus’ freedom on Friday is now revealed as our own possibility, if we would accept it. The Resurrection is no mere “nature” miracle – no mere display of divine power over natural death. It is a vindication of the Jesus whose death looked like the triumph of barnyard fear, which makes the resurrection less a natural miracle than a social and political judgement. The point of the proclamation of the Resurrection is not that anyone might have been raised from the dead, but that Jesus was risen – a re-assertion of the one who was discarded. Jesus’ refusal to acquiesce to the life-denying, death-imposing powers is vindicated: the one who is said to have been raised is declared – in that raising – to be one who died innocently and unjustly, but also freely and without fear of death.

The event of Jesus’ resurrection, then, is not simply the undoing of the death anyone of us might die. It shines a light back on him and says, Die like this – which is not to say, Go and get yourself crucified, but rather, Live not in the shadow of death.

This is to say that Easter doesn’t present to us a problem about whether or not the dead can rise; this is just too abstract, too preliminary. Easter rather presents a question: “What time is it?” Is it the time of death and decay, or the time for life?

Or, to put it differently, together Good Friday and Easter pose a stark and real challenge: Do we believe that anything truly new is possible? Because if the dead no longer stay where we put them, everything is up for grabs.

“It was the first day of the week…” It is today the first day of the week, not because it is Sunday but because a new kind of day has dawned – the day of the new creation, a time alive with possibility. And so, in a sense, every day becomes that first day of the week because in the new creation all days are now days on which we might hear that Christ is risen; all days are now days in which, if we would allow it, we too might be drawn into the light of the new creation; all days are now days in which hope might be lived and rejoicing might be heard.

It is usually the case that, under the threat of death, of failure, of loss, we search out places where the corn is good and the barnyard is secure.

But, in Good Friday’s Easter and Easter’s Good Friday, all that belongs to Jesus is given to us: the cross, the grave, the sky.

And so the new time of Easter is the possibility that we might fly.