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Advent 1
1/12/2024

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25
Luke 21:25-36

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The Doctor is a time traveller. And if you’re wondering, “Doctor who?” – precisely! In a cunningly disguised time machine, Doctor Who, the last of the Time Lords, travels from the very beginnings of all things to their very end.

Even if you’re not particularly interested in the time-travel/science fiction genre, you likely know the apparent paradoxes of time travel. One of the first questions to which the possibility of time travel generally gives rise is, What would happen if you were to travel back in time and kill your own parents before you were born? The paradox, of course, is that if I kill my parents and so am not born, how could I kill them?

Storytellers have sought to think through this and other time travel paradoxes with varying degrees of success, although, in the end, none of it really makes any sense. And, often enough, making sense isn’t really the point – certainly not in the case of Doctor Who, at least, where the point is more enjoying watching a crazy person and his sassy sidekick do their stuff.

What has this got to do with today’s text from Luke’s gospel, with its apocalyptic foretelling of the end of time? Just this: New Testament apocalyptic thought is a time machine with its own set of paradoxes and contradictions.

The word “apocalypse” relates to the uncovering of the end of the world – the revealing of the goal towards which God draws it – quite apart from the dramatic form apocalyptic thought took. New Testament apocalyptic serves as an itinerary for the end times, by which we might know where we are up to as that time approaches.

Yet the most apocalyptic thing in the New Testament is not any of its “watch-for-this” predictions of what is yet to come but the already-happened resurrection of Jesus.

Resurrection as a general “idea” was an apocalyptic concept at the centre of the religious and political atmosphere of Jesus’ time. The details varied in the different accounts, but the point was not that resurrection was a miraculous return to life. At the apocalypse – the revelation of God’s righteousness – a general resurrection of one sort of another was anticipated as part of a great judgement; it was how the final setting-right touched upon everyone – the living and the dead.  This meant that, in late biblical times, if someone were to stop being dead, this would be a sign that the end of the world had come. By affirming Jesus’ resurrection, then, the church affirms not life after death but that we have seen the end of the world: the goal towards which God is drawing us, even Jesus himself.

This is where the time machine of New Testament apocalyptic kicks in with a couple of temporal twists of its own. The first of these is that the resurrection does not reveal Jesus in the future. Unlike the Doctor and all other time travellers, Jesus doesn’t move through time into the future. Rather, the future is seen in him, here and now. And if his disciples sense that Jesus continues to be present to them long after the events of Easter, then their future is also present to them, here and now in the presence of the future-containing Jesus.

More than this, the Jesus the disciples see in the resurrection is the same Jesus they knew in his prior ministry. The preaching, teaching, exhorting and challenging Jesus was the same as the Jesus encountered in the resurrection. The resurrection was merely(! ) the apocalypse – the uncovering, the revelation – of who Jesus was and how he was related to God. It was not, then, so much that our once-future moves in the resurrection to be relocated in Jesus; it was always in him, even as he walked the dusty roads of Palestine. This would seem to be the point of the Transfiguration of Jesus one ordinary day on a hilltop: here, for a moment, the meaning of Jesus’ extraordinary ordinariness is seen.

The paradox of the New Testament apocalyptic time machine is that the now of Jesus, in whatever condition he might be met, is the future. And the gospel is that this now future might be ours.

Now, as interesting as I hope you’re all finding this to be, I admit that it is not yet very useful! What I’ve tried to say is that time is a central notion in the New Testament’s wrestling with the person of Jesus, and that the outcome of that wrestling is a notion of the past, the present and the future which is quite confounding of ordinary understandings. To confess the resurrection of Jesus is to remember our future, and this must qualify our reading of New Testament apocalyptic such as we find it in texts like today’s from Luke.

The importance of all this – its usefulness – is that, for the New Testament, a Time Lord is not one who controls time – who can wind it forwards or backwards. A Time Lord is one for whom the present time is no impediment to life. Such a one has no need to wind forwards or backwards; now is always good enough. Life does not have to wait for tomorrow (or even return to yesterday, to recall last week’s thoughts).

This, of course, messes with our usual sense of time. The time which matters here is not the ticking of clocks, as it usually is in sci-fi time travel. It can be that, but this is scarcely a very interesting type of time. The biblical sense of time is entirely social and political – and so is utterly interesting if we are paying attention – and we come closer to the truth if we say that time is what passes between persons. Such time is more a quality than a quantity. The ticking of clocks is a mere medium for that human passage, that human exchange.

If a Time Lord is properly one for whom time is no impediment to life, then this means that my set of relationships here and now are not merely where I happen to live. The here and now – and not the tomorrow – is where I can be truly alive, God’s will done on earth, as in heaven.

It is our failure to live in such a timely fashion which bears in on us from all sides. Time – in the mode of our current relationships – is something from which we constantly seek to escape. This is the meaning of Israel in Gaza, of Russia in Ukraine, of the rhetoric of our politicians, or of our dismissal of the insufferable neighbour, colleague or spouse. It is the meaning of lonely old souls in nursing homes, of binge-watching streamed TV series and of comfort chocolate. In our fractured relationships with each other and our lack of reconciliation within our very selves, true life is only to be found in the kind of future which comes from the further ticking of a clock. Peace, reconciliation, oneness – heaven – are always put off till tomorrow.

It is in contradiction of this that the risen Jesus is the future, here and now. In him, longing for the future is met with his fullness of life in the present. Jesus is lord over time by reconfiguring the relationships around him. He reconciles, heals, joins, uncovers new possibilities, overcomes without destroying. The future in him is now because God is able to work with our now. It is as Lord over this kind of time that Jesus is Lord over all time, which is to say that the Incarnation is the meaning of the Resurrection.

And us? Unlike the Doctor, Jesus is not the last of the Time Lords, the only one who can pull off life in the midst of death. By God’s grace, he is the first among a great family of Time Lords, called to live the future in the present, to find life in all its fullness in the midst of the change and decay which surrounds us. The Body of Christ is called to be timely in the way of Jesus himself.

If the point of watching Doctor Who is to enjoy a Time Lord and her sassy sidekick do their crazy thing, then the point of Christian discipleship is to be Time Lords. This will often make us seem crazy. For most of the world, it is well understood that if the life of heaven were our destination, we would be poorly advised to try to get there from here.

But our call is the call to the Now.

And even if it is crazy, we do our reconciling, relationship-renewing, time-bending thing anyway. This is because our sidekick is especially sassy: Jesus the Christ, who is first and last, who is today, yesterday and forever, and in whom we now and finally live, and move and have our being.

With a God like this, every time is God’s time, and ours.

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Pentecost 26
17/11/2024

1 Samuel 2:1-10
Psalm 16
Hebrews 10:11-14, 19-25
Mark 13:1-8

Sermon preached by Yoojin Song

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Have you ever watched a Superman movie or read the comic? Most of us have probably heard of him or know his story.

In 2013, another Superman movie was released, called Man of Steel, directed by Christopher Nolan.

In the movie, Superman wears a suit with an ‘S’ symbol on his chest. For a long time, I thought this ‘S’ stood for ‘super.’ But there’s a scene in Man of Steel where Lois Lane asks Superman what the ‘S’ really means. Superman explains that it’s not actually an “S” but a symbol for hope in his world.

While many focus on Superman’s superhuman powers, his true role is to bring hope to seemingly hopeless situations. In moments of crisis, disaster, or danger, people look to Superman with hope, waiting for him to appear and save them. In fact, in the Superman series, we often see scenes where people wait for his rescue in their most desperate times.

Not just in movies, but in real life, many people try to hold on to hope in the face of an uncertain reality and future. But where people place their hope can be very different. Some place it in wealth, others in their own abilities, but what really matters is if our hope is in the right place.

Just as people look to Superman in moments of crisis, trusting in his power to rescue them, we, too, have a Savior who stands ready to respond to our needs. Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus is always with us, deeply understanding our struggles and listening to our prayers. Our hope in Jesus takes shape as a daily reliance on His presence, His strength, and His unchanging love.

This hope allows us to do our best in what we can control, while entrusting what we cannot to Jesus, finding peace in knowing He is always near. Like the words of Psalm 23, we can trust that He will lead us in goodness. With this trust, we find true peace and freedom here on earth, knowing that He is guiding us faithfully each day. Just as Superman’s symbol represented hope, the cross of Jesus reminds us of a far greater hope: a Savior who not only hears our cries but walks with us, offering peace in every circumstance.

Today’s reading from Mark chapter 13 connects back to events in chapter 12. In chapter 12, while Jesus was teaching in the temple, He criticized the scribes. Their actions were not just small mistakes; they had twisted their religious responsibilities, making faith seem confusing and shallow. Jesus spoke out against their hypocrisy and empty show, and then He pointed out a poor widow who was giving her offering in the temple.

While the wealthy gave a portion from their abundance, this widow gave all she had to live on. Jesus praised her offering, teaching that the true value of giving lies not in the amount, but in the heart of faith and sincere devotion behind it.

In Mark 13:1, one of Jesus’ disciples says, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Admiring the beauty of the temple, he was impressed by the grand stones and impressive structure. This reaction makes sense because the temple was the center of Israel’s religious life. The temple in Jerusalem, built by Herod, was known for its grand and beautiful appearance. The Jewish historian Josephus even described it as being made of white marble stones, carefully arranged to look like waves flowing across the walls when viewed from a distance.

But Jesus responds differently. He says, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” He is foretelling the complete destruction of the temple—a prophecy that was fulfilled in A.D. 70 when Roman soldiers destroyed it.

Hearing this, the disciples ask Jesus when these things will happen and what signs to look for. Here, it’s important to understand that biblical prophecy is not given to simply satisfy curiosity about the future. While prophecy may indeed point to future events, its purpose goes deeper: it calls believers to respond in the present with faith and a renewed commitment to live according to God’s will. This is what sets biblical prophecy apart from secular predictions or fortune-telling, which often aim to exploit fears about the future. Biblical prophecy always carries a message that urges us to live faithfully now, no matter what lies ahead.

So in Mark 13:32, Jesus says, “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Jesus didn’t focus on the outward beauty of the temple building. Instead, He saw the inner corruption and predicted its destruction. This message reminds us that the true temple is not a building, but the community of believers, created through Jesus’ sacrifice, resurrection, and ascension (Acts 2:44-47). It also reminds us that our own bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). Our true hope and trust should rest in Jesus Christ alone.

In our lives, we might also rely on things that are ultimately temporary, like the temple that would be destroyed. Jesus warns us in verse 6, saying, “Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.” We should reflect on whether there are things in our lives that we hold onto as if they could replace Jesus.

In Counterfeit Gods, Timothy Keller, the former pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, explains that our modern society is not so different from ancient cultures. He says that each culture has its own idols. For example, places like offices or gyms can become “temples,” where people pursue blessings for a happy life and try to ward off misfortune. In our personal lives and society as a whole, we can find gods of beauty, power, money, and achievement, all holding a near-divine place. Keller points out how young people today, especially young women, often struggle with depression or eating disorders due to an extreme focus on appearance. Many prioritize money and success as the highest values, even at the cost of family and community.

Similarly, the temple in Jerusalem during Jesus’ time was created for a good purpose—to connect God and His people. Yet, over time, an obsession with the temple itself led the leaders to become addicted to wealth and status, while the people suffered under misguided teachings.

He also shares the story of Chris Evert, a top tennis player in the 1970s, who idolized success. With the highest career win rate in history, she considered retirement with great fear. She once said in an interview, “I was afraid of letting go. Who would I be and what would I do without tennis? Winning gave me a sense of worth and applause, and I needed it to feel like someone.”

Yet, in times of crisis, wealth, status, and achievements often fail us. Wealth, status, and achievements cannot protect us from war, famine, economic instability, or natural disasters.

Like the disciples who admired the beauty of the Jerusalem temple, it’s easy for us today to be swept away by the glamorous progress of modern civilization without stopping to question it. Yet, as Christians, we are called to see beyond the glamour of the world and recognize the increasing corruption and moral decay hidden beneath.

Just as Jesus reached out to those who were marginalized and became a source of hope, our purpose as God’s children is to love God and love our neighbors. Jesus’ cross may have seemed like a failure in the eyes of the world, but it became the foundation of our hope and the beginning of new life.

Jesus, who became fully human and experienced life as we do, is not a distant observer of our struggles and pains. Even now, through the Holy Spirit, our heartaches and burdens are brought before Him. He sees our sorrow and suffering as His own and desires to show us a way forward in hope. When we bring our frustrations to Jesus in prayer, He listens to our stories and responds with compassion.

Following His example, may we, both as individuals and as a community, look around to see where help is needed and live as a light of hope, sharing God’s love and justice with the world. Amen.

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All Saints
3/11/2024

Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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Over the past few weeks, the lectionary has drawn passages from the middle chapters of Mark’s gospel, and also from the letter to the Hebrews.  This letter explores the obedience, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus as the one begotten by God and appointed as great high priest to appear forever before God on our behalf.  The many significant declarations made in this letter follow the no less significant introduction: ‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.  Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.’

In order to speak this powerful word, Jesus arrives in the midst of human history, gathering a community of disciples and engaging in a ministry of healing, truth telling, justice seeking, and restoration.  As this journey unfolds, Jesus teaches his disciples about the kingdom of God, a kingdom that he inaugurates through his own humble self-giving.  Over and against assumptions that kingdoms are created and sustained only through the exercise of oppressive imperial power, Jesus inaugurates the kingdom of God by submitting to that power.  Three times in Mark’s gospel Jesus describes his impending passion, and on each occasion the misunderstanding and fear of the disciples beckons to us across the centuries and invites us to wonder about our own discipleship.

On this day that recalls the All-Saints tradition of the church, we shift briefly away from Mark’s gospel to read from the gospel according to John.  We read about the raising of Lazarus, and the apocalyptic literature in Isaiah 25 and Revelation 21, in which God’s oppressed and persecuted people hear words of hope about how God will wipe away all tears and swallow up death forever.  I suspect that much of the church’s most precious literature was written by those who were facing the end of life as they knew it.  So perhaps that’s the key for how we should read that literature in our own place and time.

There are many things in our own context that threaten life as we know it:  the obscene profit of those who peddle weapons of war;  the unaccountable exploitation of the politics of fear;  the loss of confidence in, and commitment to, shared truth;  the blind reliance on economic growth to build common wealth;  the rampant greed of industries that refuse to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  And just recently, the word apocalypse has been used to describe the shocking devastation of life, limb and infrastructure in Gaza, and the flood ravaged Spanish city of Valencia.  These things certainly threaten life as we know it, but do they also constitute an apocalypse in which the hiddenness of God is revealed to sustain God’s people in faith and hope?  Indeed, what would such an apocalypse look like?

In the gospel passage we hear the pain of Mary’s grief when she says to Jesus: ‘Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.’  And we also note the deep irony in the lament of her community:  ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept Lazarus from dying?’

How does this connect with your own experiences, feelings and fears about the things that threaten life as we know it?  Can you imagine yourself lamenting:  ‘Lord, if you’d been here, the things that threaten life as we know it would not cause so much anxiety and grief?’  Friends, if you can ask this question, then I hope you can also believe that, just as Jesus wept for the family and community of Lazarus, so too does he weep over your uncertainty and disorientation.

But note that his weeping in the gospel passage is not the end of the story.  It’s not enough for him to draw alongside Mary and Martha and their community in empathy and compassion.  He prays for that community, but not for some vague blessing, or that God will draw near in comfort and peace, or that God will journey with them and sustain them in hope.  These are all fine sentiments, and I’ve used such words myself many times, but this is not what Jesus offers in his prayer.  Rather, he declares that the purpose of his prayer is that those hearing him may believe that he has been sent by the one to whom he prays.  And it’s because he’s been sent by the God of life that, upon the command of Jesus, Lazarus comes out of the tomb.  We’re told that many people who see what Jesus has done believe in him.  They come to faith in Jesus, not just as a great teacher or miracle worker, but as the one who has power over life and death.

Indeed, this is the real and only purpose of miracles in the gospels – miracles are signs that Jesus is himself the embodiment of the kingdom he proclaims.  Apocalyptic literature graphically recalls the life denying forces in our world, but it also affirms that these forces have been overcome by God;  the God, according to John’s Gospel, whose Word became flesh to speak life into the world.  This Word, silenced briefly upon a cross, now speaks forever through an empty tomb, breathing the peace of his Spirit upon his fearful disciples in every age.

The crises of our time are deeply challenging, and it’s tempting to define them as an apocalypse.  They certainly seem to threaten life as we know it, but it’s not clear to me how they also declare hope in the God who draws near.  In fact, the most significant crisis before us is also the most unexpected one, because it comes to us through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The phrase ‘lurching from one crisis to another’ is sometimes used to describe a person or an institution that is out of control and about to descend into complete chaos.  This phrase reflects the notions of control and power that are so desired in our society, and in which a crisis is something to be avoided or managed.

But the Gospel declares the crisis of the cross;  not a crisis to be avoided or managed, but a crisis by which we are invited to recognise the tombs of darkness, doubt and despair from which Jesus yearns to release us.  Thanks be to God, whose Word gathers his saints in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, welcoming them to his banqueting table, where he offers himself in bread and wine, and raises us into life as his body.  Thanks be to God for the one who declares: ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’

And now to the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, be all glory and praise, dominion and power, now and forever.  Amen.

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Pentecost 23
27/10/2024

Hebrews 7:23-28
Psalm 34
Mark 10:46-52

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“Teacher, let me see again”, asks Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, sitting by the roadside as Jesus left Jericho.

Most of us know this story pretty well, so I won’t spend too much time on the details, other than to note that the miracle in the story – the opening of Bartimaeus’ eyes – is the miracle we are ourselves to expect when we gather in this way to hear and consider these accounts of the ministry of Jesus. The question to bring to the text is not whether Jesus “could” open a blind person’s eyes, but whether we are sure we can see.

The religious and the secular

So, rather than unpack our text directly this morning, I want to invite you into a space about which I’ve been recently pondering. This space is the rise of what is being called “Christian nationalism”, in the US, as well as in Europe and part of South America. What is there to see here?

What is interesting about this resurgence of religious identity at a political level is that is is happening now, after several generations of a predominantly secular outlook in the modern liberal West. In Western societies, religion has been reduced to an optional concern within the wider range of human pursuits which make up the secular city. Secularity has served as a kind of political and social neutrality which allows for religious conviction but does not require it. The secular is the universal – common to all – and the religious (and other things) are options within that universality.

On the face of it, the resurgence of religion within some social and political spaces looks to be a simple anti-secular move in which religion is reasserted as having public relevance: the churches (or mosques, etc.) are fighting back. But the resurgence of religion can be read to have less to do with conventional religion than the rejection of social, political and economic universals which deny local interests and commitments. This includes the rejection of many of the conclusions and impositions of Western secularism.

Religion is a useful means by which local or national communities can protest against a prevailing universalist order. If the religious are outsiders or a subset within a secular national or international liberal polity, then we can reject an imposed universalism like Western secularity by appearing more religious. The intention here is less to be religious than to be politically and culturally particular, against perceived imperialisms imposed from without. Such communities are not so much “religious” as just non-secularist, if acceptance of secularism means assent to a set of political, economic and anthropological narratives which we experience as oppressive or alien.

The irony here is that the secularism of Western liberalism has started to seem rather parochial, rather limited, rather like a religion, despite having no commitment to a god conventionally understood. And so as certain polities claim their religious heritage, they do it explicitly against the West: the West is not our religion.

Everything turns into religion

Of course, the secularist doesn’t want to look religious. Yet if, as the secularist holds, religion is divisive, it is reasonable to characterise what is divisive as broadly religious. And so it has become almost passé to observe that we “now live in broad settled ideological tribes,” which tribes “demand from us a devotion to orthodoxy and they abide not reason, but faith.” (to quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2022 Reith Lectures [the BBC])

Faith and religion are usually invoked in this way to signal decay; the notion is usually that common experience and rationality have been abandoned and we are back in the realm of metaphysics and credulity. But it is just as possible that this new religi‑fying of human existence is less a zombie-esque paroxysm of the previously suppressed disease of religion than the re­‑cognition of an ineluctable reading of the human – homo religiosus, the human tendency to construct fractious, religio-cultural political systems and, through these, to project universalised transcendences which suck the rest of the world into them.

The important point is that modernist secularity, with its intention to bind with certain social and political norms, is experienced by many as divisively religious in this sense. Adichie’s suggestion, then, that we “now” live in broad settled ideological tribes, is inadequate; the difference between “now” and the implied non-tribal “before” is not the recent emergence of religion-like ideological tribes but the re‑cognition of what was previously de‑cognised: the human as tribal, ideological, religious. The old turtles are now displaced by pieties and devotions: it’s religion, all the way down.

“Religion”, of course, is redefined here as what develops when two or three of us gather with intent. But if the redefinition holds, the current resurgence of religion in politics is not the political problem to be treated. Rather, this resurgence is simply the resurfacing of our Midas-like capacity for turning everything into religion, even our secularity. If I – a nation even – wish to resist the imposition of someone else’s idea of what I should do or be, religious identity is an effective means of resistance. Contemporary religious resurgence takes a nationalistic shape because borders are convenient fault lines for breaking away from oppressive socio-political impositions. In this, nations are less claiming themselves as profoundly Christian, Muslim, or Hindu than they are simply being polities with majorities having a particular religious heritage, which is useful for reinforcing a distinct local identity.

This is to say that politics becomes inherently theological. To say that religion is both universal and problematic is to say that the political problem is the religious problem; there is no neutral politics, certainly not “democracy”. And it is to say, further, that conventional religion is no convenient scapegoat for explaining our fracturing political compromises, as if human religiosity were a disease which could be treated. The resurgence of religion is a response to secular religion itself. “Christian” nationalism is not the problem; the deep-rooted and divisive religion of nationalism is: Make [America / Hungary / Brazil / Poland / Russia / etc.] Great Again.

Any lamenting of the resurgence of religion, then, misses the point. If it is true that our tendency is always to be divisively religious even as we try to be secular, the political question becomes not what to do with religion but which is the best kind of religiosity for the future of humankind. This is because it is the best religiosity which gives us the best secularity, the best political unity.

Eighty years ago, the Christian thinker Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting in a Nazi prison in Tegel, thinking through the relationship between particular religious experience and universal human experience. In his own case, he asked how Christian religion could be more than just for God-botherers, or the weak or the fearful? How does the God of all things break out of the confines of local religious identity into the wider world, speak from a particular tradition into all traditions?

Central to Bonhoeffer’s tentative thinking here was the idea of “religionless Christianity”. To modern minds, of course, this is a contradiction in terms, for what is Christianity if not a religion? And so what is it but limited and divisive?

The simplest explanation is to look at the example of Jesus himself, whose own existence we could say was “non-religious religious”. Again, this seems a contradiction in terms: as a Jew, Jesus looks to be thoroughly religious. And he is, in the way that we all are, one way or another.

Yet the Jesus who matters here is not the one defined by synagogue attendance but the one who stands simultaneously for and against his religious tradition, necessarily religious in some mode but not limited by that religiosity. This is a religiosity “for” others rather than over against them, a particularity which connects rather than isolates. Jesus stand as one for others, rather than against them. As a man who sees, Jesus is “there for” Bartimaeus, the one who does not.

This, of course, is precisely what is not happening in the resurgence of so-called Christian nationalism. Nations are doing what they have done pretty much since the rise of the nation-state – making themselves great. And, as has also been the case since the rise of the nation state, religion has been pretty useful for this – so useful that the nation and the religion tend to coincide and feed from each other.

What can we do about this? Jesus’ own fate is sobering – his purported resurrection notwithstanding – as was Bonhoeffer’s own fate. This may be what Christian maturity – religionless religiosity – looks like in a radically religious world: an actual or metaphorical death at the hands of the dominant religion, society and politics of one’s day: a death for God at the hands of the gods, a death for the other at their own hands.

Thinking this way about what is happening with religion in the world at the moment (and all moments) doesn’t give us an easy out. It simply clarifies what is happening and what is at stake. Whether it is conventional religion, or secularist and philosophical variants, religion is everywhere, and it’s killing us, as it always has.

We are in this place today to hear about Jesus only because we hope this might be a place where we might, with Bartimaeus, see such things a little more clearly. And if we do, then the invitation is clear: Let us, again with Bartimaeus, throw off the heavy cloak of religion and follow Jesus “on the Way”.

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Pentecost 21
13/10/2024

Isaiah 25:6-10a
Psalm 116
Revelation 21:1-6

Sermon preached by Alisha Fung

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What do you imagine?

We are given a scripture today of tangible and tasty images from the Book of Isaiah.

The only place in the Bible, in fact, where we’re given this much description of food and drink.

And so, it’s a scripture we’re meant to really sink our teeth into.

But it’s also a scripture we were meant to sing.

And in its rhythm and reverberations we just heard read, maybe we can even begin to imagine this day of celebration and restoration.

A time where all people are gathered on the mountain of God, sitting at the table of God with rich food filled with marrow and well-aged wine.

A time where the covering of sorrow and suffering, despair and death is lifted.

Where every tear is wiped dry,

where death will be no more and

where we will be glad and rejoice at last.

But do we really let these images sink into our minds, mold into our muscles and become a part of our marrow?

Do we let hope become part of our body, our breath and our being?

Or do we, like the wealthy guests invited to a master’s banquet, turn away?

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While I was doing my period of discernment a few years ago before candidating with the UCA, I was encouraged to take an improv workshop.

Even though I was new to improv, never having done drama in my life, there was something about it that was deeply intuitive.

It reminded me of my early childhood days in a way that I had completely forgotten; some of which were the most nourishing times of my life.

It wasn’t because of the clubs I was a part of, the vacations I went on or the kinds of toys I had.

It was because of my imagination.

I remember how easy it was to jump in and out of different personas like becoming a witch with my friend next door, making potions out of her mother’s herb garden.

To becoming one of the Spice Girls and performing in the corner of a playground. (I was Posh Spice if you were wondering)

But my fondest memory by far was spending the weekend creating a world with a bucket full of street chalk.

I remember the freeness of my imagination as I drew out railways, roads, and restaurants on the blank canvas that was the driveway.

And when the masterpiece was done, I remember taking a cardboard box and making it into a car as I drove around the world I created.

I didn’t care that in rainy Vancouver, the clouds would come and wash away my world as quickly as I had created it.

It was just an excuse to do it again the next time the sun came out.

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Looking back at it now, there was nothing that filled me with more joy than the simpleness of creating something out of nothing.

And it made me realize that, as children, imagination is as natural and as necessary as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

It was second nature to me and my hunch is, it was second nature for you.

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And then something happens.

We grow up and we enter the real world.

In the song ‘Aint no rest for the wicked’, Matt Shultz sings: “Money don’t grow on trees, we got bills to pay, we got mouths to feed, there ain’t nothing in this world for free.”

In other words, we set limits on our lives, boundaries around what’s possible.

We let the fast-paced rat race and the frequency of our news inform our world view of what’s fact, what’s fiction and what to be frightened of.

But this doesn’t just happen during our Monday to Fridays.

We often bring this temperament to the places we worship, not wanting it to disrupt us too much from our real world.

And so, if we’re not paying close attention, church can become a tempered and tame animal, within our calculated control.

And when a hint of imagination does surface, we might feel that it is either too dangerous or too disillusioned.

We mock it, we smother it but, at worst, we crucify it and leave it in the realm of our childhoods.

And yet, as Carl Sagan the American scientist said, “Imagination can carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”

————-

And this is the wisdom our scripture in Isaiah is tapping into:

that our imaginations are necessary for the fullness of life and are often stimulated, if not necessarily activated, in the presence of nothing.

For this was the context in which the prophet of Isaiah was writing from, amidst a time where the Jewish people were covered in sorrow and suffering, despair and death, exiled from their home and their place of worship.

In other words, a time of extreme change and extreme loss.

Does this sound familiar? As we look at the state of our church, our country, our world or maybe even our own lives in a rapidly changing 21^st century and as war and death reign overseas?

Imagining hope seems like it should be the last thing on the menu;

and yet, as we hear in our scripture,

this defiance despite reality

is actually what begins to change hearts, lives and, eventually, leads God’s people into new ways of experiencing God in seemingly desolate, despairing and desert times.

It’s like how Jim Wallis, the founder of the Sojourners magazine, says it “trusting God in spite of all the evidence, and then watching how the evidence changes.”

—————-

Now hear what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying that we should use our imaginations to escape the realities of this world.

I’m not saying imagination should take the place of acting for justice in the world.

And I’m not saying that imagination is reserved for those with nothing.

What I am saying is when we give our imaginations over to God, it becomes the key that connects us to God’s real-world.

George MacDonald, the Scottish author, poet and minister of the 19^th century, says it this way: “It is by imagination God enters into our world, so that through imagination we can enter into the world of God.”

And it is through this kind of imagining we can begin to join in God’s feast.

But it might not be as comfortable as we think it is.

It is a feast, after all, that reorients all are misconceptions of who gets to take part:

It’s a feast for all the wrong kinds of people, of Pharisees and foes, sinners and Samaritans, the disenfranchised and the desolate.

But this is the song that’s being sung in Isaiah today, and it’s not the only place where it’s sung.

Hannah echoes this deep knowing in 1 Samuel by singing, “Those who were full hire themselves out for food, but those who were hungry are hungry no more.”

And again this tune is carried by Mary in the Gospel of Luke when she sings, “The Lord fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty.”

And our scripture in Revelation takes these songs of God’s feast of celebration and restoration, of wiping away tears and swallowing up death forever and riffs them and reverberates them into the here and now.

Notice the present tense in our Revelation reading, “It is done”.

Because the thing about our Christian story, about the Christ event, is that time and space collapses in itself so that the day of God’s feast is not just in the end, not just in the beginning but here amongst us now.

That is, the Alpha through to the Omega, the beginning to the end.

————-

God who, from the beginning, made creation out of nothing makes Jesus out of the nothingness of this world, dust of the earth, matter from an unmarried Jewish teenager.

He had Isaiah’s, Hannah’s and his mom’s song sung to him while he was bouncing on his mother’s knee.

He lived out these imaginings in his ministry, eating with all the wrong kinds of people and every uninvited guest, feeding the hungry, healing the hurt, freeing the enslaved, wiping away every tear from every eye.

And it was the power of this imagining that led him to his death and resurrection where he swallowed up death forever.

And here’s the wild thing: we are left with the rhythm and the reverberations of this imagining now.

———

So when we participate in communion, we are meant to make real the fact that we are participating in God’s holy feast where every tear is wiped dry,

where death is no more, and

where gladness and rejoicing is realized at last.

When we eat what, sometimes, tastes worse than nothing in these small bits of bread, we are eating the rich food filled with marrow at God’s table where all things are made new.

When we drink this ordinary juice, we are drinking the well-aged wine from the spring of life where the covering of sorrow and suffering, despair and death is passing away.

These are the bits of nothing, the mustard seeds, the pinch of yeast that yields a radical celebration and restoration in God’s real world

A feast that will happen on the last day, has happened since the beginning of time and is happening here and now.

———–

You see, communion isn’t just about eating these visible signs of God’s promise, it’s about embodying them.

While we’re standing idly, we’re invited to imagine wildly the glass ceilings to our imaginations being shattered in light of what is possible.

We’re invited to join in these songs of old sung by these prophets so that we might live this radical feast in our lives.

And we’re invited to let these visions melt into our minds, mold into our muscles so that it might become part of our marrow.

———-

Because when we come to the table in a moment, we have a profound opportunity to partake in the new heaven that is coming to this world.

A world where all will gather at God’s feast on the last day, from the beginning and even here and now.

——–

So whether it be through a bucket full of street chalk, a mustard seed, some bread or some wine….

What do you imagine?

For it is the power through which we can participate in God’s feast at last.

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Pentecost 20
6/10/2024

Job 1:1, 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Mark 10:2-16

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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What was your childhood like? My memories of my childhood are pretty good really – when I think about the times and places that I grew up in – the experiences our parents provided for us, the adventures we got into, the stories and music that surrounded us. It would be pretty easy to reminisce through the happy filters of my memory and forget many of the realities of childhood. Just for starters – time went so slowly. We had to wait such a long time for anything to happen. There were so many things that we longed to do but we couldn’t because we hadn’t learnt how, or we weren’t big enough or strong enough. Kids weren’t allowed, we couldn’t go on our own, we didn’t have our own transport. Don’t forget the sting of the grazed knees, the terror of the dentist, the fickleness of playground friendships and the awful taste of wintertime tonics that were supposed to keep you safe from the hazards of poorly heated drafty classrooms.

Childhood was good to me, but it does not need to be idealized. The bible certainly doesn’t do that. Reports of children in scriptures usually involves then getting sick and dying. One was very nearly sacrificed by his father. Another was given away by his mother to be a trainee priest. Another was found in a basket on the Nile. Baby boys in Bethlehem were massacred. Aged 12 Jesus got into big trouble for going AWOL in Jerusalem at festival time. Jesus’ disciples turned the children away when they were brought to see him. Who would want to be a kid. It’s all pretty typical. You can’t come here because you are not old enough, or strong enough, or clever enough. You are subject to the authority of big people who have power.

In the bible, when you talk about children, you are talking about the most vulnerable, the most in need of rescue from a dangerous world. They are the ones whose survival is most precarious, yet they are the ones on whose shoulders the survival of the future depends. These were the ones that the disciples turned away. These were the ones on whose behalf Jesus rebuked the disciples. These were the ones that Jesus received. These were the ones that Jesus enfolded in his arms and blessed them.

By means of this story children have had a special place in the life of the church. Children were especially blest by Jesus, therefore the church has felt a call to provide blessing for children. What many churches lament these days is the lack of children it has to bless.

The department of Government Services wrote to me a few weeks ago.

Dear Peter Blackwood, Your Working with Children Check [long convoluted number] expires on [a date about a month away].

To continue doing child-related work, you will need to renew your Check. The renewal process is online and includes uploading a new photo.

The photo you upload must be less than 12 months old and of passport quality. To view the Requirements for an acceptable photo for your Working with Children Check, go to – and a link address was inserted. I know you will be relieved to hear that this week I got another email to say that my new working with children card is in the mail. I passed the photo test.

In my last job as a church bureaucrat one of my tasks was to attend settlement negotiations in which the church was required to compensate people for abuse that they experienced from employees of the church while they were in our care, and I was instructed by our church to offer an apology on behalf of the church for what happened to them. As far as I know the UCA was the only denomination to have senior staff attend these conferences with the lawyers and offer a personal apology on behalf of the church.

In my last job as a church bureaucrat, I was required to attend a state parliamentary inquiry into institutional child abuse. Our church, in response to Jesus’ example to receive children and care for them, inadvertently harboured a culture in which abuse flourished, and in our naivety that escalated into criminal negligence our church stood culpable in the eyes of society.

When his disciples turned away children they received a corrective word from Jesus. When the church of Jesus Christ has been implicated in the abuse of children the corrective word of God has come by way of government requirement. I am not complaining that I am required to renew my working with children check. This is a good thing the government requires of me.

It is kind of annoying and certainly embarrassing that the word of the Lord reminding us that Jesus received children and blessed them has its best effect, not by hearing this story every three years by this lectionary reading, but by social requirements imposed by government.

Let’s turn back to these few verses from Mark’s gospel. The disciples got it wrong and they needed correction. So what is being proclaimed into our context?

I dare to suggest two things.

Firstly, and obviously the gospel proclaims that the least powerful, the ones least endowered with life’s wisdom and experience and time to gain accomplishment in good deeds or virtuous endeavour, the ones turned away, are the very ones that Jesus received to be touched and blessed. Not only that. The kingdom of God belongs very particularly to them. This we learn from the account of the disciples, the children and Jesus but it is not only the children who are found to be powerless, denied opportunity to accomplish or are turned away. Other accounts in Scripture reveal those who were especially prized by Jesus, the Samaritan woman at the well, Mary Magdelene, the man, sick for 38 years who lay by the pool at the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, the Gerasene demonic who lived among the tombs, to name just a few.

Of course, God didn’t just invent this particular concern when the Father sent God’s Son. Hebrew Scripture prescribes it. The Torah lists requirements of social behaviour and interaction that is especially directed for the benefit of the widow, the orphan and the stranger. This is most beautifully illustrated in the story of Ruth and the gleaning laws at harvest time that deliberately leaves grain that falls from the reapers’ arms, and corners of the field left uncut for the widows, the orphans and the stranger, the foreigner, the refugee.

God requires that the little ones, the powerless, are provided special care.

Secondly, our experience as the church, not just the UCA, but churches across the world facing government instigated inquiries and commissions into abuse and neglect of the powerless, comes as a reminder that the gospel that God declares in Christ is sometimes born down upon the church, not by bible readings, prayers, hymns, liturgies. It is this sobering thought. The society in which the church exists so often requires of us the same things that God requires of us. Sometimes it is our duty to remind society of what God requires and sometimes we need to humbly hear society reminding the church what God requires.

I will conclude with this little story concerning two school students. During this week I have been preparing this sermon. I had remembered the gleaning laws that helped Ruth and Naomi survive when they were most powerless. Friday was the saint’s day for Francis of Assisi who taught about the care of the poor and powerless to an extreme degree. On Thursday and Friday I was conducting a school holiday program attended by six young people who wanted to learn about painting icons. I had decided that they would learn by painting an icon of Mary the mother of Jesus. Two of them decided they didn’t want to paint Mary. They were our little rebel corner. I swallowed my old schoolteacher self that would usually not tolerate such defiance and decided to help them do what they wanted. The result was two beautiful icons, one of Ruth and the other of St Francis.

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Pentecost 19
29/9/2024

Romans 6:3-14
Psalm 122
Mark 16:14-20

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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Over the years I have noticed that certain important topics, which ought to be preached about in a regular congregation are not, or hardly ever.  It’s rarely a practical thing to preach a solid sermon at a baptism – though if we baptized more adults, it would simply be necessary, and they would not disrupt as infants sometimes do.

In this, we at Mark the Evangelist have been privileged, since we have had a succession of ministers who have been thoughtful theologians as well as pastors.  But the matter or baptism has been occupying my mind lately, chiefly because it is the sacrament which joins people to Christ and the Church, and we are not alone in rarely celebrating it. Is this one of those signs of the times we had better take notice of? Is it not also a prophecy?

I fear that that the Uniting Church has generally failed to grasp the call to reform which church union opened to us.  Some have noticed that in the UCA we do things differently from our previous denominations; very few will have noticed that UiW-2 moved forward from its predecessor.

The Basis of Union says (#7) that “The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ incorporates people into his body by Baptism. In this way Christ enables them to participate in his own baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and resurrection and which was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.”  That is a rich statement of the very Gospel itself, and baptism proclaims it, in a sacred action, a “visible Word”.

The baptism of a child cannot convey all the Basis holds out because it is built on their parents living the baptized life. It may preach the inclusion of children into Christ’s kingdom, but the mothers of Salem knew that. The accounts in the New Testament of children being baptized only occur at the baptism of their parents (and their slaves) which is what “household” implies in the text. That communal understanding of family carried the logic that all who live depending on each other should also share in the blessings of the God who is our Father and our Mother. But the fact is, theologically and historically, that baptism is for adults. (Yes, after all those years, the Baptists were right – at that point!)  It is a response to the Gospel by adults. It is for mature-enough human beings working out their faith in fear and trembling.

Both Uniting in Worship books set new standards in word and action, in 1988, to take the step from our three traditions into the new union; in 2000, to learn from the ecumenical renewal. They both offered baptism by immersion as the first option. Of “the mode of pouring”, the rubric (the little directions in red) reads “the minister pours the water visibly and generously on the candidate’s head three times, once at each name of the Trinity.”  The mode of sprinkling officially disappeared from the UCA in 1988.

Of course, there is a danger in rubrics: in the Nonconformist tribal memory is a deep-seated fear of anything imposed and I share it – except for when the Gospel demands it. Yes, rubrics diminish the ability of ministers to “do it their way”. They may reopen old arguments, but there may be fresh freedoms in our time.  It may be that we just don’t like change, so we blame the Anglicans or the Baptists because it was one of their peculiar ways.  They, by the way, have similar fears of us.  The Gospel itself demands a new way of life – and expects we will live it in the way of Jesus, and we accept that obligation as part of our faith.

Other churches are also making changes to reclaim a believable baptismal practice. On the front cover is one way of doing a normal Catholic baptism; on the back cover are two serious modern fonts, one in a Catholic Church just off Oxford Street in London, which regularly baptizes adults as well as children; the other is in the beautiful cathedral at Salisbury, UK, designed by William Pye in 2008 and he has now supplied a new moveable nave altar in the same style.  It can also accommodate a child or an adult.

Inside its rim are the words of Isaiah 43: 1-2,

‘Do not fear for I have redeemed you.

I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.

And through the rivers,

they shall not overwhelm you.’

This font preaches. Every presbytery should have one!

Our inherited suspicions of “show”, both religious and Australian – have reduced what was simple and beautiful even under the Puritans to a harsh minimalism.  When I visited Methodist Churches in England, I used to play the game “Find the font”. In my native Cornish chapel, it was in the vestry and contained a pencil and a ping-pong ball. But without display, colour and beauty can find its right place in a Uniting Church. If they draw attention, let it be to central things and let their symbolic language be clear. Let what we do also critique the gaudiness and commercialism of our current culture. But there are further issues.

Some now object to baptism in the name(s) of the Trinity, because of our new and proper sensitivity to destructive relationships based on masculine predominance, and it is right that we have sought fresh expressions. But that trinitarian formula has been a test of Christian authenticity from at least the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), and if we want baptisms in the Uniting Church to continue to be accepted as true baptism in other churches – which has been one of the great ecumenical and pastoral victories of our time – then we will need to find ways both to keep it and express it acceptably.

Of course, the Nicene Fathers knew well they were trying to define a Mystery and were concerned to maintain both the unity of God and the distinctiveness of the ways God has revealed Godself.  I am not saying the questions need not be pursued: the Mystery was set for us by God, by the very nature of God, and the Spirit opens our minds to the truth. But tread gently, in next year’s seven-century celebration of the Nicene Creed, lest we lose everything.

The UCA is not face this alone – and the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church has shown what can be done. The great Pope John XXIII called for aggiorniamento, a wonderful Italian word meaning “up to today-ness”.  The Vatican Council startled us all by its thoroughness, holding together its high view of doctrine, church, liturgy – and evangelization. Then, it made a priority of educating the clergy and the laity in the implications of the reform.  (We have never done that thoroughly. After my Guide (1990), we had to wait for Pilgrim’s Anglican professor of liturgy to produce a most commendatory book on Uniting in Worship[2012] !)^[1]  In the process, the Vatican Council challenged all the other churches to reopen old debates and re-examine old prejudices, and to “up-to-today” it all, led by Uniting in Worship.  UiW-2 was published in the year 2000, a quarter of a century ago.  We no longer seek a UiW-3, but nor is there the slightest sign that we are providing material to inspire worship for the middle of this century, of a church which declares itself to be ecclesia reformanda, reformed and always being reformed.^[2]

This great work will fall to hands other than ours.  Our congregation, by its weekly eucharist, with its worthy preaching, and in its courageous outlook, is in the vanguard. We should continue to make sure that everything we do is the very best we can offer.

God will honour our sacrifice.  Christ will call disciples. The Spirit will be our

[1] Stephen Burns, Pilgrim People, An Invitation to Worship in the Uniting Church, 2012.

[2] At the very least, we should have material prepared to put into the hands of enquiring adults. The Catholic catechumenate has been adapted by Anglicans, Lutherans and Baptists.

helper.

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Pentecost 14
25/8/2024

Ephesians 6:10-20
Psalm 34
John 6:56-69

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“…for our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers,
against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”
(Ephesians 6.10)

Paul’s talk of spiritual principalities and the powers strikes most today as quite alien. Even for many believers, it is embarrassing language, the residue of an earlier time we are keen to leave behind.

Yet, any embarrassment we might feel here about Paul’s language is in strange tension with what doesn’t embarrass faith – the very belief in God. There is a tension here because, recalling what we said last week about the God of Israel and Jesus Christ as one God among many, this God is a kind of principality or power. We find ourselves, then, in the strange situation that we can believe in God as a “spiritual” goodie, but not in Paul’s spiritual baddies – the principalities and powers. The spiritual realities Paul refers to in the first couple of verses of today’s reading are not something we now consider to be “real”, but God as spirit is.

And yet we know that there is real evil – at least in the “historical” world, if not in any sensible way in the “spiritual” world. This suggests that in much common religious belief, Good is fundamentally a “spiritual” thing insofar as it springs from God, but Evil is a secular or historical thing – something which springs from human activity and not from outside. Paul’s distinction between good and evil – between God and the “principalities and powers” – becomes for us a distinction between spirit and world.

This is much of the malaise of Christian faith today, for what has the spirit to do with the world? To throw away the principalities and powers as “spiritual” realities is to throw away any connection between God and the world, if God is “just” spirit.

Now, the point here is not that faith in God as spirit requires that we believe in evil spirits, as Paul seems to believe in them. Rather, the point is that our belief in God floats off and away from the world if what we will or won’t believe leaves us with an idea that the things of God are “spiritual” and so outside the world, and that whatever evil is it is something which resides in the world as only a historical, secular or human reality. If we really can’t believe in evil spirits – and I doubt that many of us actually can – then we must also dispense with the idea that God is a “spiritual” reality if the idea of “spirit” separates God from the world. We need to think the tangible world as the realm of spirit, or spirit as the worldly realm.

It’s not overstating the issue to say that the future of the church hangs on an understanding of what this means – not only the future of our congregation but of Christian faith itself.

The critical point has been that God deals with us as we are, here and now – not with a view to changing us into some perfect ideal of a human being, but to bring life to the kinds of people our particular history has made us. It is as we are – formed by our particular culture and history – that God addresses us. It is through the ideas and expectations of our particular world that we are called to faithfulness and trust.

This means that if, as is largely the case in our society today, there is really no other intangible “heavenly” world where powers for good and evil reside, then it’s in this very tangible and real world that we will meet God, in and through what we touch and do.

If God has no other heaven than the world in which we now live and move and have our being, then that world becomes the means of God’s work with us. If, as our modern society has come to understand, evil can only be believed to exist in the ins and outs of the historical world – and not in some spiritual realm floating above us – then this is also the place where God is found. God is found nowhere else but in the wo rld we can touch and see, because there is nowhere “else” for God to be. The battlefields of heaven and hell are the battlefields of our lives here and now. It is in the very midst of our lives that Paul’s “spiritual” battles take place. Or, to put it more clearly, our struggles in the world are precisely spiritual struggles.

In view of the struggle of faith Paul describes, he calls us to  “tool up” – to be equipped with the armour and the weapons which God provides for the purpose of standing firm in the promise of the full humanity of Jesus Christ becoming ours: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, as shoes whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

But just as the forces for good and the forces for evil are not wafty spiritual entities doing their thing in some invisible space, so also the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness and the shield faith and so on are not just nice Christian ideas to nod our heads at. They are not “spiritual” things in heads and hearts. These are disciplines – practices – which will necessarily mark every believer who is seriously engaged in the struggle for an authentic human and Christian existence.  If God’s place is in the world, so also are God’s ways with us “worldly”. We find a firm footing in life by attention to God’s calling, through practice and discipline, through study and prayer and fellowship and lives lived in accordance with God’s patterns for how we ought to relate to each other. As we can learn and be influenced and trained by negative influences, so also we must continually be learning and training ourselves in faith.

Paul’s claim is that it is hard work being a Christian because, the forces arrayed against human freedom are they are powerful in a very worldly sense. There is much to hold us back, much to limit us, much to tempt us into less than the fullness of life for which we were created.

We are called, then, to stand firm in all that God has given as resources for growing in faith and understanding, for defending what God has already made of us, and for working with God in making further inroads into the realms of darkness and captivity, that the world might take hope in the promise of light and freedom.

Paul ends his letter to the Ephesians with a call to them, and to us: Stand firm. Grow. Do not look back. Look only forward to the life to which we are all called, secured by what God has given us for the purpose.

This doesn’t happen as if by magic. One Christian commentator has remarked that one of the reasons our Christian faith often doesn’t make sense to us is that we lack practices which reflect it and make it real. If God is only a matter of head and heart – and in this sense only “spiritual” – then the things of God will make little sense in a world less about spirit than it is about what we actually do, touch and manipulate. Christian faith rests on habits and patterns which will strengthen us in lives of love and righteousness.

God is faithful.

If God will meet us with grace when we fail in our discipleship, how much more will God meet and strengthen us if we seek earnestly to be shaped by growing in knowledge and understanding, in the practice of prayer, in love and service, and in active commitment to peace in the world which God is healing.

Stand firm, Paul says to us. Continue not only to “believe” but to look like people who believe – people whose faith is not realised elsewhere but in the shape of the lives they live.

It is by God’s own grace that we might do this; let us, then, claim that grace, and give it form in lives which claim this world as God’s own.

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Pentecost 12
11/8/2024

2 Samuel 18:5-15
Psalm 34
John 6:35, 41-51

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Most of you here this morning probably have in your pocket or bag a device which is capable of recording and storing thousands of photographs and tens of thousands of books.

These days, information is cheap – recording the details of our lives is cheap, and easy. We can click a picture of every meal we eat and upload it to share for others (for reasons not entirely clear), or write posts on all sorts of platforms, sharing instantly and perhaps forever what thought has just arced from one place to another in our minds.

We know that it wasn’t like this in the “olden days”, of course. But what is less obvious is what this meant for recording information back then. In the times that the Scriptures were written, materials were expensive, and the labour required to transmit a written story was enormous.

One effect of this was that you would keep the details down to just what needed to be said. While we – at a whim – can afford to store high resolution images and detailed texts we might never look at or read – the writers of what are now our Scriptures had to be sure that what was recorded actually mattered.

This being the case, what do we make of all the detail we have about the life of David in the scriptural narrative – for the detail abounds?

Today’s reading from 2 Samuel skips over a lot of the Absalom affair, precisely to be brief. But, to fill in some of that detail: Absalom’s sister Tamar was raped by their half-brother Amnon. Knowing this, David nevertheless refused to act against Amnon. Eventually, Absalom kills Amnon and flees into exile, later to be reconciled to David. Absalom, however, has high political ambitions, and campaigns to replace David as king, forcing David to flee Jerusalem. Absalom pursues David but, despite David’s insistence that he not be hurt, the young man is killed, as we heard in today’s reading. In the midst of all this, there are defections and spies, passion and suicide – all the makings of a great TV series.

Whatever judgement we might make about all that, we might wonder, Why even tell the story? Why do we need to know the “days of our lives” of these 10th Century (BC) Israelites? Of course, we can moralise happily about this or that event in the story. But if that was the intention of the writers themselves, then perhaps they might have given us a bit more of their own moralising because there isn’t very much of that in the text. Mostly, we hear what happened but not what it means or what judgement we should make of it.

Why, when it was so difficult to record and reproduce this information, risk leaving it to readers to work out the moral of the story for themselves?

The reason for the detail has to do with the very humanity of the story. We might imagine those early editors looking at all the material they have in front of them, ranging from the innocence of David as a young shepherd and his courage in fronting up to Goliath, to his abuse of Bathsheba and murder of Uriah and his loss of strength and sense in the face of Absalom – looking at all this and simply wondering how it could all be so.  How could God’s favourite be all this?

And so they write it all down, or enough of it to make the point. Here is the breadth and length, the height and depth, of the life of any one of us. Even though the story has comparatively little detail compared to what we might tell about ourselves today, in a context where recording and storing information was so expensive the story displays an extraordinary interest in the details of human relationships and the impact of those details upon those people themselves. That David is the king makes the story all the more compelling because, as we have noted before, David serves here not simply as one person among the many billions of us who have lived before and since but as a representative figure.

When we come then to speak of God’s dealings with us, we must remember that it is with this kind of humanity that God engages. We are brave and beautiful, we kill and steal, we plant and build, we are neglected and raped. We are no mere “stars” which descend from heaven for a time before returning, as is sometimes sentimentally said, as if our core reality were the simplicity of a single light. We are – each of us – whole galaxies of hopes, experiences, achievements and failures.

Yet, for the most part, we prefer either to oversimplify the complexity of the good and the bad which we are. Such oversimplification is akin to the sentimentality we considered last week. It speaks a partial truth: “stop the boats”, “a woman’s right to choose”, “from the river to the sea”, “God gave us this land”, “but Absalom is my son” are partial truths, wishful oversimplifications of deep and complex human realities. Sentimentality omits inconvenient details about what we are.

But even if oversimplification serves us nicely in distracting us from unpleasant details of our reality, this doesn’t work for God. God will consider us without reduction, without covering over. There are no fig leaves adequate for shielding us from the God who already knows what we look like uncovered.

This is not necessarily good news. We oversimplify and distract ourselves and others from the details of our personal and collective humanity for good reason: we would rather others did not know, often enough even that we ourselves did not know. We don’t what this, not here, not now. The complex mess which we are – now right, now wrong, now strong, now weak, now sure, now unsure – makes the world more than we can bear. We simplify to survive.

But we are not in this way brought to heaven. And the result is that we cease to be either properly of the world or of heaven. Rather, like the unfortunate Absalom hanging in the fork of a tree, we are strangely suspended: hanging between heaven and earth. This is where we live most of our lives.

And so anything worth hearing of God and gospel must acknowledge this. The Old Testament narratives don’t just tell us “what happened”. They show David – and everyone else – now ascending a little, now descending a little, neither properly divine nor properly human. For whatever other reasons we might value the Old Testament, we have to love its realism.

And it’s because of this that the place Jesus himself occupies is our actual place: hanging on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, seeming to be neither human nor divine. God know us here, as we are.

To say with John that the Word became flesh is to say God becomes our flesh in all its messy, suspended detail. And now the detail which matters most about us is that we are known better than we know ourselves. The detail which matters most is God’s very knowledge of us, and its purpose: that we be loved as we are, caught between what we wish we were and what we see ourselves to be.

The details of the stories – David’s and ours – matter first because they are what make us us. This is us. But the details also matter because they are known by a God who – sometimes in spite of the details, sometimes because of them – loves us and cherishes us: for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.

This is not a simple God for a simple people. God is complex and variable because we are. And God is this, in order that we might simply be his. The scriptural writers invest so much in the detail of David’s life because it is the life of one of us, as we are; and it is a remarkable thing that such a one as he does not simply fall within God’s capacity to love, but is in fact the focus of that love.

And so also for us. This is a love which shines in our darkness and yet is not overcome by it.

For such an all-searching, all-comprehending and all-embracing love, all thanks be to God.

And let our thanksgiving take the form of turning to the messy, suspended world, and loving it as God does.

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Pentecost 7
7/7/2024

2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Psalm 48
Mark 6:1-13

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

As I begin this sermon two things give me some encouragement:

Following the Gospel reading, I am very glad to be preaching in Melbourne. I was born in Ōtautahi Christchurch. This is not my hometown, so there is some hope!

Second, my focus today will be on our reading from 2 Corinthians. As I prepared for this sermon I went back over some of my notes from the class I took on this epistle. I found a quote I wrote in a reflective piece we were asked to write about our major exegetical essay:

“The sense of the Bible’s distance can be surmised from the immense struggle I had with the major exegetical essay – submitting work I was unhappy with. My sustained engagement with the text revealed it to be far more complex and foreign than I had hitherto appreciated. It stood against me…”

I have been in the depths with this text before. So at the very least the thorniness of today’s reading isn’t new!

The challenge in engaging scripture is that the text always pulls us in two opposite directions.

On the one hand, the closer we look at the text, the more we wrestle with its language, the historical context, the sweep of its ancient rhetoric, the subtle references to other texts within and beyond scripture, the more and more we appreciate its complexity. So far as I can tell all of scripture was written by aliens. People whose lives and understandings of the world are so remote from me that I can scarcely imagine what their world was like. The texts which we have received are utterly distant and strange.

On the other hand, because what we have received in these texts is, “prophetic and apostolic testimony, in which [we] hear the Word of God and by which [our] faith and obedience are nourished and regulated.” (Basis, 5) Because these texts are a witness to our living faith in a living God, they are the most intimate of texts. Not alien, but deeply, deeply personal. Not distant, but close.

This is the mystery of what it means to encounter the Word of God in the scriptures. To interweave the intimacies of our relationship with God with the stories of alien, yet fellow, believers long ago. There is a sense in which the way we understand the world itself needs to be pierced through by the light of our experience of faith.

Part of what makes the Apostle Paul quite difficult to read is that he is often reconfiguring our understanding of the world itself. In part this is because of his own transformative encounter with the Risen Christ. In light of this encounter Paul was forced to reevaluate everything he knew about himself and the world. Such a radical transformation led him to reinterpret his personal, as well as cultural and religious, identity and history. In this way many of us can identify with Paul: knowing for ourselves the indelible mark our encounter with Christ has left on who we are and how we make sense of ourselves and the world.

And yet, the more alien dimension of Paul’s reconfiguration of history arises out of his place within the particular historical, cultural, and religious moment in which he lived. While Paul, in today’s reading, offers a parody of mystical experiences of the heavens, Paul very much lived in a world in which journeys through the heavens were a live option. Part of what makes the parody work is the assumption of a multilayered heaven – with estimates ranging from 3 to over 300 layers … And the place of paradise among these heavens.

Our challenge as those listening for the Word of God in the Scriptures is to understand just how Paul’s reconfiguration of the world helps us to do the same.

Paul adopts the posture of a mystic trying to argue for the validity of his ministry. Arguing that he has seen through the veil of the world, and ascended to the third heaven. We might never really know which schema of heaven Paul had in his head: 3 layers of heaven? 7? 10? Much of this text is still too alien to really know so.

But it is fairly clear that Paul is using a fair bit of irony here. This mystical experience has not, in the end, filled Paul with mystical insight: he declares only that he is a fool. Whatever he learnt was unutterable anyway. So too, this experience has not made Paul the strong decisive leader who peers through the veil to the truth of the matter. Paul is weak, and has a thorn in his flesh.

We might imagine that when Paul says this mystical journey ended up in Paradise that he arrived late to an empty Eden. Elsewhere Paul uses the interplay of Adam and Jesus to talk about the way the world has become captive to sin. Perhaps in this story Paul arrives to find Paradise already lost. Paul is whisked up to see the mysteries of all of time and space, and returns with nothing.

In the end the best Paul could hope for is a t-shirt that reads: “I got whisked up to heaven and all I got was this lousy thorn in my flesh.”

The whole point of Paul’s story about traversing the heavens seems to be how irrelevant that whole journey is. How little it matters supposedly understanding all the mysteries of the world.

What ultimately matters is the piercing of the thorn in his flesh. Again, we’ll never really know what this thorn was. But we might make something of the fact that thorns pierce the flesh. At least rhetorically for Paul, the thorn draws him back to the experience of Christ. Pierced flesh, suffering in the flesh, weakness which holds a hidden power.

Ultimately the great mysteries of the world are not to be found or solved by some insight into the riddle beneath all things. Rather, it is always back to the cross which we must return. The power of that weakness, the strength in that pierced flesh.

So what, then, as we move from this quite alien story to our own lives of faith?

Perhaps we can be so bold as to imagine our own journey through the heavens.

“I once knew a Church which was so enamoured by its own moral clarity … that was able to see that protecting its place and influence in the world was like recreating Paradise … that had left a large legacy in society …”

But all of this, in the end, counts for very little. What the Church needs is a thorn in its flesh. A piercing which reminds us of the crucifixion, which is the true axis of history. A thorn which — and we should be a little bit bold here — helps us to hold lightly the idea that, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice.” Not because God is not sovereign over the world, but because no one uses this quote as a word of repentance. We must allow the thorn of the cross to pierce the flesh of the Church, and remind us that we do not see through the veil of the world when we are convinced of the Church’s self-importance. We see through the veil when we are reminded that it is the cross which pierces the veil.

The cross which transforms our lives, and leads us to the kinds of service which are for their own sake — not merely to secure the success of our various political projects. It is the cross of a living God: the Risen Crucified One, who ultimately transforms the stories of our lives. So that We do not seem to protect or sustain the institutions of the Church, but the resurrection life in the crucified bodies of the world.

This is the secret behind the veil. Not a glimpse into paradise. But the vision of the cross in this world, with all its chaos and confusion. This is the world which needs the piercing, saving power of God. No other world and no other salvation. Not an institution sustained for its own sake, but a people formed by the transforming power of God. People who know hope, and live love, and seek fresh mercy every day.