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Pentecost
8/6/2025

Romans 8:14-17
Psalm 104
John 14:12-17, 25-27

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You’ve heard me say before, but it bears repeating again, that the word “spirit” is the second-most useless word in the Christian vocabulary.

But more than just repeat myself, I want today to connect this with the kinds of things I’ve been saying over the last few weeks about meaning and location in time and space: that meaning is location. In particular, I want to extend this to spirit is location.

The reason “spirit” is so unhelpful as a “Christian” word is that, in our modern context, it arrives as an idea alien to our deeply materialist understanding of ourselves and the world. It’s an “outside” word, and “spiritual” people seem either to be reaching out of the real world or wanting to escape from it.

The problem with this broadly predominant way of thinking is that we are all – so-called “spiritual” or not – always animated by some spirit or other: we are deeply spirit-ed. We speak of the “spirit of the age” – a very real thing which connects us to each other, passes between us, carries our words and gives meaning to our actions. We live according to a capitalist spirit or a socialist one, a patriarchal one or a more egalitarian one. Like meaning – even as meaning – spirit is location, is society, is politics.

To be human is to be spiritual in this broadest sense. “Getting spiritual” is about changing spirits, not turning from some unspirited reality into a spiritual one. And so the only – only – question about spirit is what the spirit is which animates us, what that spirit tells us about ourselves,and whether our particular spirituality enhances life – our life and others’ – or diminishes it.

Though we’ve heard from John’s Gospel on the Holy Spirit this morning, we’ll not look directly at that text but keep it in the back of our minds as we consider the spirit in (and of) the ecumenical Creeds we often recite together in worship, and will again in a little while in a slightly adjusted form of the Nicene Creed.

A principal characteristic of the Creed is its apparent chronological structure: it seems to move from a beginning to an end. Thus, creation of the world comes first, then history and its salvation, and then finally the “end things”. The creed reads like a history. And we say of the claims in the creed that we “believe” them (at least, more or less! ), including the way they are presented.

But while, at the end, we say that we believe “in the Holy Spirit”, what we said earlier about our always being “in” a spirit still applies. That is, it is from within some spirit-ed sense of the world, that we say that we believe in the Spirit.

This sounds rather tangled, but the point is that what we believe is tempered by our location – the meaning or the spirit we bring to that believing. Perhaps more simply: what we think “spirit” is affects what we think we believe. In our modern situation, this means that something like the Creed looks like a “spiritual” commitment, unlike the other commitments we have. As “spiritual” people, here’s a list of stuff we subscribe to.

But, if we are all – “religious” or not (religion being the third most useless word Christians have) – living out of some spirit, then Christians do better to claim their own peculiar spirituality from the outset by beginning with the third article of the Creed and not the first. In view of our all having a spirituality out of which we experience and act in the world, starting the Creed here declares from the outset: this is the Spirit in which we live. And, “We believe in the church”: this is the kind of human community this Spirit makes possible – forgiveness, communion, the marginalisation of death as a power. And so we might understand that third article as a whole slightly differently, as well: less we believe “in” the Holy Spirit than we believe “within” the Holy Spirit.

Now, instead of three sequential stages of history from creation through redemption to consummation, we are opened up to a different experience of ourselves and of God. To believe within the Holy Spirit is not then to believe “in” the church or the community of saints, the reconciled life or the overcoming of the power of death (as the Creed continues), it is to believe “within” these things. The social and political space of the church and the kinds of relationships we are called to become is oriented towards a particular kind of humanity.

This humanity is that which the second article treats: the humanity of Jesus himself. The Holy Spirit is precisely the spirit of Christ, and so forms us into human beings in the world as Jesus himself was human in the world. And our formation in the likeness of his humanity is a formation in the likeness of his experience of God.

A people spirited in this way begin to look and feel like the humanity of Jesus. This is quite a different “outcome” of reading the Creed than the usual top-down way, by which Jesus appears as a kind of “link” to the end things.

And all this changes also our experience of God. On a reading which begins with the Spirit, the faith of the Creed doesn’t begin with the increasingly controversial declaration of faith in God the Father or with the widely misunderstood notion of creation. These are now the last things the church comes to grasp, and not the prerequisites of all belief. The so-called “Fatherhood” of God has nothing to do with masculinity but with the possibility that we might experience God as Jesus did, who just happened to use “Father” to name the one who sent him.

And, perhaps most surprisingly, “creation” is now not what comes first but what comes last. That is, we now know the world as a creation only when we share in the humanity and devotion of Jesus himself. Creation is now not the basis for all that happens in history but the goal of all that happens in history: we become creatures when finally, in this Spirit, we know God as Jesus did – entering into Jesus’ own free and open-to-God humanity.

Much more could be said about this but it is enough today if the creed might become for us more than simply a well-ordered list of things which should be said about God.

Thinking the creed backwards can be a kind of “Spirit-ual” relocating of ourselves by which we might catch a glimpse of something new in what is so familiar.

Starting the creed – or at least, starting unthinkingly – with the first article can be to get to the beginning too soon. Or be to read it in the wrong spirit. Our confession is not only what we believe but how we have come to believe it, which is also about what we have, or are, to become. Instead of reading the creed as a kind of world history, a “macro” history from a chronological beginning to its end, thinking the creed “backwards” tells a history which is not so much a providing of in-formation as it is the beginning of a reformation – a re-form-ation.

It is God the Spirit who enables us to confess, that it might, in the end, indeed be God that we confess.

Let the spirit in which we confess our faith then, be the Spirit which is its very possibility, that our faith be not simply stuff we believe but what and whose we are to become. Amen.

In part adapted from February 9 2014 [Off RCL]

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Easter 7
1/6/2025

Isaiah 43:16-21
Psalm 36
John 12:1-8

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The best thing about my car is the sound system. A 2010 Renault Koleos comes with a Bose sound system with a 5.1 speaker configuration. This is to say that it has 5 tweeters and mid-range speakers arranged across the front of the cabin, and a subwoofer at the back, nestled inside the spare tyre under the cargo area (you have to remove the speaker to get the spare wheel out).

In addition to this impressive hardware – and this is for those who’ve seen that movie – you can turn the volume up all the way to “32”! Not that I often push the sound to 32 because, at that level, things do start to distort a bit. Although, because it’s a Bose system, it’s not the speakers that are distorting but the panels and contents of the car (occupants included). Or that’s what it feels like.

The point of all this is just to say that, at a more moderate setting of about 20, it’s possible to create an enveloping cocoon of sound in the cabin, whether it’s the soundtrack of Mission Impossible 2, a thumping Icelandic rock blues band, or something more…refined.

A couple of weeks back, I was returning from a meeting across town in the more refined mode. As I pulled up at some traffic lights on Alexandra Parade, Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” was playing – in English, “Mirror in the mirror” – an exquisitely simple piece made of piano and violin. As with Mary’s perfume in the gospel reading today, the sound of the music filled the cabin of the car, wrapping around me as I waited for the lights to change.

And then there stepped out, in front of the first row of cars at the red lights, one of those street-performer juggler people, dressed in a striped t-shirt, mounting a 4- or 5-foot unicycle and beginning to toss and catch his skittles in what he hoped would be a pay-per-view performance.

And I could not help but laugh out loud at the incongruity, at the mismatch of the soundtrack with the moving images!

But it wasn’t that the juggler was out of place (or that the music was out of place), as if the presence of the one diminished the other. It was what they were together: each an elevation of the other, each heightened, enhanced and enriched by the other, each now inexplicably more than itself because the other is there. And as important as the experience itself was that the moment could not have been planned, and could hardly be repeated. It was an instant, an event, a “revelation”.

———-

Our Gospel reading today is a familiar one to most of us. Familiar too is its disorienting effect, because we might well find ourselves uncomfortably by Judas’ side in his criticism of Mary. And this would be to find ourselves the target of Jesus’ response to Judas and having to make sense of what feels like a deflating declaration: “You will always have the poor with you”.

We want to argue the morals here.

But, as with last week’s episode in the temple, so also here: moral divisions miss the gospel point. The smell of the perfume filled the whole house. And, again, as we saw last week, this house is more than the few rooms in which everyone was gathered. It is the house – the “oikos” in Greek – which extends to the dimensions of the “oik”-onomy, our environmental “oik”-ology and our social and political relations in the “oik”-umené. For just a moment, Mary’s oil sanctifies everything.

But if perfume were sound rather than smell, Judas’ response would be that the soundtrack and the images don’t match. He divides the world as moralism always does: now is not the place, not the time, for that. Whether from the perspective of his own purported greed or from the point of view of a genuine concern for the poor, for Judas the time and place are wrong: the context diminishes Mary’s devotion and that devotion diminishes the context. There is here no mutual elevation by which the needy world is lifted along with the lifting up of Christ; Judas simply does what moral thinking always does, divides what should be together. The elevation of Jesus in the anointing looks to Judas to be a dismissal of the needy world rather than an embracing and elevation. Jesus’ response contradicts: what is done to the poor is done to me; what is done to me is done to the poor.

———-

I could not help but laugh out loud at my traffic light juggler, and I knew instantly that he’d earned what he’d performed to receive. I passed him a 2-dollar coin through the window just as the traffic began to move with the green and he had to scoot to safety as the traffic began to move again.

But as I pulled away myself, I realised I’d missed the opportunity to do what Mary did: I should have given him the fifty I had in my wallet – not because he was that good but because it’s not often we get to see the deep truth for which the world is made: that each previously contradictory part elevate every other part, like the image of a mirror in a mirror, reflecting again and again, back and forth from greater and greater depth, the perfume of truth enveloping us, filling our senses, not despite whatever else is going on but because it is going on.

I should have given him the fifty, because that would have been the best way to respond, not to him but to the gift of such a world when it comes. This is because he’d have had no idea why I’d given him so much, would himself have been taken by surprise, elevated, given a story to tell of an unexpected ecstatic moment he’d experienced in the midst of the mundane. He too, for at least that moment, would have been made to stop and to notice in wonder: the world can be like this – a gift can be given. And this casts everything in a new light.

The ordinariness of our houses and lives is fit to be filled with the perfume of this truth. It is for this reason that Mary so lavishly anoints the one who raised her brother Lazarus, the one who overcomes the divisive power of death and its lethal echoes in our own dividing up of the world into bad and good, then and now.

The ordinariness of our houses and lives is fit to be filled with the perfume of this truth. It is for this reason that Mary so lavishly anoints the one who raised her brother Lazarus, the one who overcomes the divisive power of death and its lethal echoes in our own dividing up of the world into bad and good, the worthy and the unworthy.

And we are to become the same: present in the world as those elevated by grace to become the possibility of elevating grace for others. Not only our lives but all lives are fit to be filled with the perfume of grace.

Let us then live that this might be more fully realised, to God’s greater glory and to the richer humanity of all.

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Easter 6
25/5/2025

Psalm 67
John 2:13-22

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The housing crisis will likely kill us all (a thought to which I will return!).

The housing crisis in Australia featured as one of the central issues in our recent federal election, with the major parties making the kinds of funding promises they hope voters will not recognise are likely to make matters worse.

My interest today is not to propose any solution to the problem, but to unpack a bit how we think about this (and other) challenges we face. I remarked a moment ago that this was “a” central issue in the lead-up to the election. Putting the matter this way might be the real problem: that we think this to be a single issue, treatable in isolation from other pressing concerns which we think about in the same, isolated kind of way.

How might we think about this differently, speak the problem in a new way?

It has long been observed that there are things which can be said in one language that are difficult to say in another. This is sometimes the motivation people have for learning different languages: books are different in their original languages, and we can even find that we are ourselves different when we speak a language other than mother’s tongue.

With respect to the housing crisis, it would help us to speak a little Greek. In fact, we need just one Greek word – a word buried in a group of English words that designate the biggest challenges we face not only as a society with a cost-of-housing problem but also as humankind as a whole. That little Greek word is oikos, which means “house” (not surprisingly!). In the English words of interest today, the Greek oikos has morphed into the letters E-C, which form the first part of economy, ecology, and ecumenism. These are, more literally, oikonomy, oikology, and oikumenism. Literally, they mean something like the rule (Greek nomos) of the house, the plan (Greek logos) of the house, and the house inhabited (Greek menō, “abide” – etymology guessed).

This is to say that what we call “the housing crisis” is connected to the biggest crises pressing in on us: the perpetual financial crises of our economy, our looming eco-environmental challenges, and ecumenism (generalised from its narrow ecclesial application to local social and wider geo-political relationships). These are all “housing” issues, having to do with where, how and with whom we live.

The house, understood most generally as the space we inhabit, is fundamental to human being. And each house is related to or within every other house, so that any “housing crisis” is a crisis of how we are connected to our systems of production and exchange, our environment, and our social and political relationships. The scarcity of resources, the rising seas, and the wars that threaten to kill us are all “housing” crises. We can’t house ourselves locally because we can’t live appropriately in the broad inhabited world.

And this brings us, finally, to our text from John’s Gospel today: “Zeal for my Father’s house”. This is a classic Gospel text. On an “obvious” reading, the point seems to be, Don’t make the temple into a place for exchange which takes advantage – money-changing, profit-making and rent-seeking. This is a “holy” place, within which only certain words and actions are appropriate.

Those of us who know the story well also know well this understanding of its meaning. But it’s much less helpful a reading than it first seems. This is because it fails to take the next step to ask, Well, where should the money-changing, profit-making, and rent-seeking take place? Is God less annoyed about rapacious economics outside the temple than inside of it?

This is to ask, what does “my Father’s house” refer to? Does the demand for sanctity and holiness relate only to the temple, to the partitioned “religious” space? Does the contaminating marketplace within the temple threaten God with a housing crisis, displacing God from the “holy” place? Or does God have a broader accommodation than this, outside the temple as well as inside?

This bumps us out of mere moral thinking. Moral thinking is always about location in time or space – what I do when or where. Our text today seems to pose a moral question of the “where” kind: what can I do in the temple? An example of the “when” dimension of morality is the prohibition of adultery: No, you can’t have sex with him/her/them when you’re married to someone else (cf. Romans 7.1-3). Morality divides the world into different times and places.

To imagine the temple to be one place and the world to be another is to say there are different moralities operating in those two spaces. This is the problem with the standard reading of the cleansing of the temple, and why the housing crisis will probably kill us all. We imagine that Jesus’ attack upon the temple is about where God lives and what is required when in the presence of God, as if there were places where God is not present. The holy oikos (house) doesn’t really touch upon the wider oikonomy, oikology or oikumenics which constitute the rest of our lives.

And so also for the housing crisis: we treat it as if what has precipitated the crisis in affordability and availability of an oikos is different from the wider economic, ecological and ecumenical crises. But recognising the “house-ness” which operates across the whole of our being makes all places the “same”: all connected, all affecting each other, all sharing in the same problematic.

We don’t have enough houses to live in because we don’t live appropriately in the one house we’ve been given: this world with its exchanges and communities and environment. There are money changers, profit-makers and rent-seekers in God’s worldwide temple. Honesty requires that we admit that we are often enough these ourselves. We are a house divided against itself, and so there are not enough houses. This is the heart of our housing crisis: the assumption that my house has nothing to do with yours, that God’s house is just another building on the street, that the many spaces of the world are more important in their difference than the one space we co-inhabit.

While Jesus’ attack, then, looks to be focussed only on a single place, it has to do with everything, everywhere, all at once. This is not zeal “for my Father’s house” but zeal for my Father’s world. And this is what will get him killed.

And us, too. If – to moderate slightly my sensationalist headline – the housing crisis per se won’t kill us, we will all die in the midst of a housing crisis, whatever Mr Albanese or anyone else manages to achieve, because our economic problems are ecumenical and ecological ones: we don’t know how to live together with justice and peace.

I remarked to some colleagues recently that my preaching seems to be getting a bit “darker” as time goes on. By this, I mean that I’m increasingly aware of the risk of saying stupid things – stupid in the sense of not taking reality seriously. Faith and unfaith alike too often happily skate along sentimental surfaces as if the ice were not paper-thin and the world below not dark and cold. Faith, at least, should not do this; let us leave that to those who believe lesser things.

But political pessimism about what we might be able to achieve is what the gospel would call realism: God’s house – the world – has been made a marketplace, the abundance of the earth has been filtered through the economics of scarcity, and our common humanity has morphed into a competition for survival.

The bad news of the gospel is that the one through whom the world came into being as God’s own home has himself come into the world and been rejected. This is God’s true housing crisis: not that worldly things would push God out of the temple, but that the world itself refuses to be God’s temple. And so God is pushed out of the temple of the world onto a cross. The bad news of the gospel is that our homelessness unhomes God.

The good news of the gospel – as John’s Gospel puts it – is that God claims the cross as a crown (cf. Joh 12.32); even here, homeless, God reigns. There is no pushing God out of the world because there is no “outside” of the world; there is only God, in whom all things have their being in God (1.3).

And so the resurrection has to happen, because God insists that the world continue as God’s own home, because God insists that even at our lowest ebb – the crucifixion of Christ – we know ourselves as God’s own.

God insists on being light in the darkness, life in the midst of death, home for the homeless.

One light,

one life,

one home

for one family in God.

God’s zeal is for this.

Let our zeal be for the same.

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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.