View or print as a PDF

Epiphany 4
1/2/2026

Matthew 5:1-12

---

ForeWord

Background music

The soundtrack of a movie is an essential part of the experience of watching a film, so much so that it’s quite a strange experience to watch a film with the soundtrack stripped out. The experience feels empty because the soundtrack tells us how to feel about the action we see on the screen, intensifying the excitement, fear or sadness of the twists and turns of the story.

This is probably most powerfully illustrated when you watch something which has the wrong soundtrack associated with it. If you’re into falling down rabbit holes in places like YouTube, you can find mock movie trailers of Mary Poppins which splice scenes together against a new soundtrack to recast it as a horror movie (Scary Mary, perhaps? ), or which take The Silence of the Lambs, recut and re-music it into a Beauty and the Beast romance between the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter and the young FBI investigator Clarice Starling.

The music tells us what kind of thing we’re seeing. (The soundtrack is not always musical, of course; certain types of commentary voice-overs can do a similar kind of work, if perhaps usually more directed to our thinking than our feelings).

I raise all of this to propose that we are ourselves experiencing the world according to a particular soundtrack. We have known something of this now for a long time. The deep dive into the human psyche which began with Freud’s depth psychology discoveries from the end of the 19th century has revealed to us how much about what we are is not obvious to us. Just as the protagonists and antagonists in a movie don’t know what music is being played as the story unfolds, so also is there a kind of silent soundtrack informing how we experience the world and those around us.

Better to understand ourselves, then, the question becomes, What is the soundtrack according to which the action of our lives is being interpreted? And is it the right soundtrack? And what might it mean or feel to change the soundtrack, if that seems a good idea?

With those questions in mind, let’s listen to our reading today from Matthew, from the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: the well-known Beatitudes. And as you listen, consider the strangeness of these announced blessings – their contradiction of what is expected. For this contradiction is not unlike action observed according to the wrong soundtrack, and Jesus’ announcement is the reinstatement of the right one.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(—> Hearing: Matthew 5.1-12)

Word: Proclamation

Discord

These purported blessings, the Beatitudes of Jesus, strike us as jarring, at least as statements of what is clearly the case. The poor in spirit are not very likely candidates for coming into possession of the kingdom of heaven. The meek are not very likely candidates for inheriting the world. Mercy is risky or interpreted as weak. Purity of heart looks like foolishness in an everyone-for-themselves world. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness are rarely satisfied or slaked. According to the soundtrack which tells us how to experience our lives in the world, those whom Jesus names here as blessed don’t look as if they are living life against the background of cheery four-chord major key settings.

And so, if we are going to take them seriously, the Beatitudes require that we hear them as an alternative soundtrack, against which to observe and experience the world around us. Jesus proposes here a kind of recasting of our story like Scary Mary: same action, totally different experience: your condition is not a curse, but a blessing.

But one of the criticisms made of the Beatitudes, particularly those of Matthew when contrasted to those of Luke, is that they seem somewhat pacifist. Why does Jesus address the poor in spirit, the meek, and the hungry and thirsty, and not those who oppress them, are filled with pride, and do not share what they have with the needy?

At one level, a fair answer is that he does this elsewhere. But then we have to account for why Jesus speaks this way here.

The reason is not a comfortable one, at least at first. Jesus addresses those who are somehow “less” than the “more” of the world because the gospel does not expect very much to change in response to the ministry of Jesus. Things might change – people might be moved to act in ways which relieve the burdens others carry – but this might also not happen. Many people in faraway places have long suffered, sometimes for the whole of their lives, under oppressive powers and regimes within which the hope of any change in circumstance is pretty slim, and yet with Jesus’ announcement of blessing in their ears. And not only in faraway places. If not quite by overbearing political or social oppression, most of us most of the time are subject to powers which diminish our humanity. These powers can be oppressive personal experiences we cannot forget, the way the colour of our skin or the gender of our bodies is read, or the political and economic forces which drive our particular world.

If we wanted to measure the impact of Jesus’ inversion of values here, we’d have to admit that there is still a lot of inversion to happen, and that it won’t likely happen soon. And, because of this, it’s tempting to shift the location of the blessings to a distant future, beyond what we presently experience and feel.

But, then and now, Jesus speaks not to the future but to people standing around him and their immediate experience of themselves in the world. And so if Jesus does not speak in such a way to change the dynamics of what is happening around us – to change the action – he speaks to change the soundtrack: to change our experience of that action.

We don’t live in a world which values poverty of spirit, which rewards those who suffer, who do not self-promote, who are not strong enough to realise justice for themselves, who sacrifice their own interests in modes of mercifulness and peacemaking.

The blessedness of incompleteness

But the strange, contradictory beatitudes of Jesus propose a different reading of our experiences. Blessing – wholeness, righteousness – is not for the proud and the self-righteous, who typically triumph. Self-satisfaction is not the measure of wholeness. Indifference to injustice is not the way to fulfilment.

Rather, Jesus calls us here to courage. He calls us to live in contradiction of the prevailing colourings and soundings which value life-denying, freedom-limiting priorities. And so, strangely, the Beatitudes are as much about incompleteness as they are about fulfilment. Your incompleteness is a blessedness because you are seeing and feeling that the world is not ordered rightly, because you long for the whole and not the part.

The blessed are those who continue to struggle against what oppresses, what denies life, what closes off futures. Blessed are you if this is your way in the world.

And so Jesus announces this contradiction of the old soundtrack to give courage, calling us to keep at it: keep at the hunger and thirst for a broader justice, for a purer righteousness, for a true peace.

Don’t give up, don’t cease to struggle for life, for spirit, for freedom for all. For this is blessedness. And it is only by such blessed, incomplete ones as these – as you – that the world can know itself to be incomplete, and begin on the path to blessing and wholeness.

View or print as a PDF

Epiphany 3
25/1/2026

1 Corinthians 1:18-31

---

ForeWord

“Light will win”

Last week, many around the country observed a National Day of Mourning in response to the terrorist shootings at Bondi just before Christmas. The theme of the day, proposed by the Chabad community which suffered the attack, was “Light will win”.

This is surely a profound assertion. It is a statement of extraordinary scope: that the long arc of the moral universe bends towards justice (M L King, Jnr). It is, indeed, a god-sized declaration and so a very difficult one. The problem is this: what is the light we imagine will shine through here? And what is the darkness over against which this light will prevail? Perhaps this seems obvious. The darkness is precisely that manifest in the murderous intent of terrorists. And the light is what prevailed before the darkness arrived.

We see this understanding operating in the Prime Minister’s statement, made a month after the attack. The scene is set: The attack took place in an “iconic” spot in our “beautiful” country, with babies and their “doting grandparents” present. In response to the danger and tragedy was the “valour” and “remarkable, selfless courage” of the responders. The tragedy is cast as a “stern test of our national character”, in response to which test light shone forth in cooperation and mutual care.

This is all true, of course – the contrast of a community festival by the beach with the screams of terror, the contrast of the bravery of unarmed people against the violence of armed men. We recognise what the Prime Minister grasps after here.

But the problem is the PM’s confidence that he knows what the light is, that the light was shining brightly before the gunman struck, and that it will shine again, and all the more brightly for what the government intends to do in response to the disaster. Australia Felix – happy, fortunate, iconic, beautiful, relaxed Australia – is Australia Lux, Australia the Light.

Darker lights

Thinking this way, we risk playing into a deep sentimentalism in our response to crises like this, which shake our easy confidence that things are OK, that we are safe. Sentimentalism is the failure, or even the refusal, to see the bigger picture.

The idyllic scene of families coming together for a communal celebration is one with which we are all very familiar, and so its disruption with the sound of guns and screams of distress is a horror the rest of us might just be able to begin to grasp. But there are other things going on in the world behind what we see, and in darker corners of Australia the Light. Today, the Sunday before Australia Day, has for a few years now been designated by the Uniting Church as a Day of Mourning. This is in recognition that all the light most of us see around us shines within the darkness of the process and the continuing impact of the colonisation of this land. Our inability, at a national level, to hold this tension was indicated in the Referendum a couple of years ago. Did we not tell ourselves then, sentimentally, “Don’t mention the war(s)”? And we could list any number of other moral contradictions at play, in our political, economic and personal lives, outshone by whatever light we prefer to see.

To acknowledge the darkness in our light, of course, is not intended in any way to diminish the horror or the suffering of those targeted at Bondi or who had to respond to the catastrophe. The issue here is not whether that attack was darkness. The question is, What is the light? And what could it mean to say that “light will win”? The kind of analysis the Prime Minister has offered has to do with a faint, dim light – the light to which our eyes are already accustomed. We need more than that.

To think about all this differently, we’ll turn now to St Paul and what he had to say to the Corinthian church, a community pretty sure it knew what the light was, and against which knowledge Paul wrote in his letters to them.

(Today’s reading is actually from next week’s lectionary readings; I wasn’t paying enough attention when I began preparation this week and started working on them before I realised. I don’t think God will mind too much, and I hope you won’t either! )

As you listen to what Paul writes, note what he says about strength and weakness, wisdom and foolishness, and the importance he places on these contrasts for understanding God’s work in the crucified Christ.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: 1 Corinthians 1. 18-31)

Word: Proclamation

Filtered light

In what we’ve just heard, Paul is at pains to emphasise that if, viewing the cross, we look for power, we see weakness; if we look for wisdom, we see foolishness. Or to connect this to what we’ve just been considering, to see Christ crucified is not to see anything that looks like light.

And this, Paul asserts, is the way into understanding the order of things with this God. To look at the crucified Christ is to see not light but something rather more like darkness. Or, at least, this is what it seems when we bring our understanding of strength and wisdom to bear on what happens on the cross.

The Prime Minister’s statement on the events at Bondi speaks of the light we seek in terms of our wisdom and strength when confronted by darkness. Such things matter, of course, but they are not yet “light”. Paul would happily assert that “light will win”, but his sense for the light comes from the experience of God in the cross: the cross is the light which will win.

The crisis at Corinth was one of communal division. “We see the light” was not the literal slogan of the various parties against each other, but it sums up the dynamic pretty well. This misplaced confidence led to jealousy and competition, sexual immorality and the exclusion of the poor. The light perceived by each party was such that they could not see each other.

I spoke earlier of a “dim” light, but the intensity is not quite the point. A better metaphor is that of coloured glass, which stops us from seeing things as they “properly” are in clear, white light. To declare that “light will win” – if we mean it seriously – is to say that there will be a time when there are no more filters, a time when – as Paul says elsewhere (1 Corinthians 13) – we will see not as in a glass, darkly, but as God sees us.

If we mean seriously that “light will win”, it becomes now rather an uncomfortable proclamation. Not seeing some things because they’ve been filtered out can be pretty convenient. Or, to put it differently, a little darkness can go a long way. It does not go too far to say that, while we spend a great deal tending to our fear of the dark with laws and security measures of all sorts, we fear just as much the bright and clear light.

And this is why Paul insists that the cross be at the centre of our understanding of God and of ourselves. Our light – the light by which we think we see: our strength and wisdom – is filtered. We see, but we don’t see enough. This means that, if we were to depend solely on what we see, we would soon be lost. When Paul joins God to the crucified, he joins God to one who has no light, no power, no wisdom. And yet, this one – the crucified – is claimed to be the closest to God. God views and values outside of our own measurings.

In this way, Paul sees our humanity not as on a spectrum, along which we are each placed somewhere between dark and light, for condemnation or praise. Before God, we are not distinguished by strength or weakness, by wisdom or foolishness. Whatever power or effectiveness there is in the crucified Jesus, it doesn’t correspond to wisdom or strength or light. Jesus’ value is simply in God’s claiming of him despite all his apparent emptiness.

The God who sees in the dark

The bad news here is that we get light – rightness – wrong. But the good news is that God can see in the dark. And it is God’s capacity to see – God’s gaze – which is Jesus’ value, and ours. For what God sees is us, groping around, trying to feel our way to safety, or perhaps even hiding in the dark, thinking we can’t be seen. And God’s response is…mercy. Because what is our helplessness and fear, compared to the nothingness of the cross, which God has already blessed?

The Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard said something which can be paraphrased like this: “O, the blessed assurance of knowing that, before God, I am always in the wrong”. As pessimistic as that sounds, it is in fact profoundly liberating, because it restates just what Paul has said: your wholeness, your value, is not your own sense of righteousness but God’s determination to count you right. We are not what we see by our own light, for better or for worse. We are not our own judges. By the grace of God, we are more valuable than even we sometimes imagine.

This is not to say that we don’t do anything in response to the darkness, that we don’t act to make safe or to limit danger when we see it. We don’t dismiss outright any fault in ourselves or others; mercy is only mercy where there is fault identified and acknowledged.

But Paul’s identification of God with the cross relieves us of the temptation to judge, whether to accuse others or to defend ourselves. The cross opens us to light we cannot see.

And so the light which will win doesn’t radiate from some vision of our perfect selves, to which we are already closely aligned. The light which will win will burn more brightly than we imagine. And, just because of this, it will reveal to us things we might not want to see. The light which will win will expose things about Australia Felix and the felicity of our individual lives that will be painful and costly.

But anything less than such truth-telling under bright light would just be a program for more of the same: more injustice, frustration, violence and tragedy. The light will have won when we confirm that we have no light of our own, nothing according to which we can properly boast before God or each other, and so when we have begun to live with a humility, openness and love that doesn’t measure others but serves them.

God deals with us not according to how strong or wise or enlightened we imagine ourselves to be.

God deals with us according to a different light – a light which does not draw assuring distinctions but is love for one, and love for all.

This is how God has dealt with us; let us deal with each other in the same way, that the light might indeed win.

View or print as a PDF

Epiphany 2
18/1/2026

Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 40
John 1:29-42

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

---

What did the Baptizer mean when he saw Jesus and said, ‘Here is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’?

This has become one of the ordinals of the Eucharist, one of the texts that are common to every communion liturgy. These texts include the Kyrie (Lord have mercy), the Creed, and the Sanctus (Holy, holy, holy).

One of the activities that gives meaning in my life is singing in choirs. This is given me many opportunities for singing Latin masses. They always conclude with the Agnus Dei – Agnus Dei qui tolis peccata mundi, miserere nobis (Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us). It repeats this twice except the last time the miserere nobis is replaced with dona nobis pacem (give us peace).

Modern English versions of this can be seen in the liturgies of all the major Western churches including the Uniting Church, ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.’

For a metaphor like ‘lamb of God’ there needs to be some context or it does not make sense. This particular image can be a bit confusing because a much stronger image in the gospels, that is to say a much more frequently used image for Jesus, is that of shepherd. Matthew, Mark and Luke think ‘shepherd’ when they think of Jesus. Only John also thinks ‘lamb’ and only in the portion we heard this morning.

Understanding New Testament concepts often relies on knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. I remember a visiting teacher of liturgy telling us that if you need to leave out any of the set readings on a Sunday, don’t drop the Old Testament one. We can’t understand the gospels without knowing the Hebrew Scriptures.

That is certainly true for this metaphor of the lamb. However, we could start on this one without any ancient context to build on. The context of the story on its own stimulates interest and raises the eyebrow. John the Baptiser has been preaching that someone greater than he is coming along to step his mission to a higher level. In the next breath he points at the man he is talking about and calls him the lamb. Not the lion or the bear or the elephant but the lamb.

John the gospel writer talks of Jesus as lamb only this once, but John the Theologian in Revelation calls Jesus the Lamb 26 times. We could write a few doctoral theses on whether the writer of John’s gospel and that of Revelation are the same person, but the lamb metaphor does provide a link.

So, what was happening in the Hebrew Scriptures to help us understand what John was thinking? There are three that I have found and together they provide some of the richness and complexity for grasping the work of Jesus and his nature. Let’s go backwards through the books. This morning we heard part of the first of the Songs of the Suffering Servant of the prophet Isaiah. In Passiontide we often hear from the fourth Song of the Suffering Servant that includes the lines, ‘He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.’ (Isaiah 53:7)

We are reminded of Jesus silence at his trials. John is also the one who records Jesus words, ‘For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.  No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.’ (John 10:17-18) Was John thinking of Jesus’ posture of silence before his accusers, his do nothing to prevent his death is why we speak of Jesus’ self-giving for the sake of the world?

Let’s go back further to the book of Exodus, to the Passover lamb that was to be killed and eaten before the journey of escape. The blood of the lamb is given graphic mention in this story, but it is not sacrificial blood. This blood of this lamb is to be daubed on the door posts and lintels so that the angel of death will pass over the houses so marked, but the first born of households not marked with blood will be killed that night. John the Theologian lays great store on the efficacy of the blood of the lamb to maintain life for the faithful. Is this what John the Evangelist had in mind? Now to unwrap all that Revelation means of how the blood of the lamb works for the good of humanity would require a few more PhDs, so let’s leave it there.

Go back to Genesis to the strange and disturbing story of Abraham offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice. At the last moment a lamb caught in a thicket provides the substitute sacrifice. Was John thinking of Jesus whose death is our deserving?

Well, we don’t know what John the Evangelist was thinking or what John the Baptiser was thinking when Jesus was named the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He did not go on to say, ‘Now, what I mean by …’ and then give a detailed explanation so that what it means is this or that and nothing else. It is the power of poetry, music, parables and metaphors that they do not nail down the truth but allow emotions, current contexts and the movement of the Spirit of God to shape and reshape how we know what God has done and what God is doing and the life of Jesus in our world.

However the ancient texts of our Jewish heritage tells it, the image of the lamb as a metaphor for God’s love and desire and power to save us points to weakness and vulnerability. God’s saving act in Jesus is so risky. Put the salvation of the world in the life of a human born into world where the geopolitics and religious extremism is rife – what could possibly go wrong. A world so familiar to our own – what can possibly go wrong.

We know that just about everything can go wrong. That is one of the facts that prompts us into prayer. The churches in the Northern Hemisphere are praying for unity this week. Today marks the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Well may we pray for Christian unity because if the church is better at one thing than another it is disunity. Did you know that tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jnr Day, a day when the US remembers a saint of the church who preached and prayed and dreamt unity? The calendar of special prayer days asks us to remember the sin and trauma of the past, and this amidst current trauma of geopolitical chaos and natural disasters that would be less disastrous if we cared for the planet.

What goes wrong in our world yesterday, today and probably tomorrow? Just about everything. So we place our hope and trust in the vulnerable Christ who does not avoid his own destruction, who is caught in the thickets of the world gone mad, who marks humanity for life – to this one we pray:

Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, give us peace – give us peace.

View or print as a PDF

Baptism of Jesus
11/1/2026

Isaiah 42:1-9
Matthew 3:13-17

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

---

In 1990, my wife and I had been married for 8 years, and lived a happy and settled life.  We had just purchased a house in the bowl of a quiet court, down behind the Wheelers Hill pub, within walking distance of Jells Park.  We were the parents of a boy and a girl, and assumed then that our family was complete, though years later we welcomed another boy and another girl.  I was employed as a technical officer in the Telecom Research Labs in Clayton, and my wife had returned to primary teaching.  We were regular participants in the life of the Glen Waverley Uniting Church, and involved with a community of young families that met regularly for fellowship and conversation.  For the past 35 years, we’ve been enjoying an annual holiday with two of those families.

I was a naive young man with evangelical tendencies who yearned for moral rectitude, theological certainty and liturgical purity.  I considered leaving the Uniting Church to join a Pentecostal tradition in which I could fulfil all righteousness, but something unexpected happened.  The prayer and discernment of others pointed me in the direction of ordained ministry.  The report of the Presbytery candidates committee suggested that I was not as convinced about my sense of call as those around me but this did not seem to cause me any anxiety.  By the end of that year, I was a candidate for the Ministry of the Word and had commenced a most unexpected journey that continues to unfold.

What I didn’t understand then, and am yet discovering, is that the righteousness I so desired was not mine to create or possess, but rather is the righteousness of Jesus Christ that he embodies on my behalf.  This dynamic becomes clearer when we interpret the baptism of Jesus as confirmation that he is the one who will inaugurate the justice promised by God through the prophets.  This is why the location of John the Baptist’s ministry is a detail of particular significance.  In one of the most important narratives in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Israelites cross the Jordan River on their journey into the Promised Land.  Having fled from Egypt and wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, the crossing of the Jordan could be understood as the final act of their captivity.

In John’s time the people are captive once again, but not in a distant place; now they’re exiled in their own land by the occupying forces of Rome.  In the midst of oppression and persecution, John invites people to turn to God.  The baptism he offers prepares people for the coming of the Lord; the more powerful one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire.  Given that he’s been proclaiming the arrival of the Lord, John doesn’t seem phased when Jesus shows up to be baptized.  His only comment:

‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’

John is reluctant to baptise Jesus, but Jesus insists.  He knows the historical and theological significance of what John is doing in the Jordan River, and he knows that his own baptism will fulfill all righteousness.  It’s precisely because he is Emmanuel – God with us – that Jesus joins the queue, waiting his turn.

In his baptism, Jesus is identified as the one of whom the Lord says through Isaiah:

‘Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.’

In his baptism, Jesus embraces God’s call to be the righteous servant who will lead people home, from the wilderness of alienation into the peace of God.  In his baptism, the heavens are opened to him and he’s anointed by the Holy Spirit for his messianic vocation, while a voice from heaven declares:

‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with whom I am well pleased.’

Despite their different perspectives about the origins of Jesus, the four gospels all agree about the significance of his baptism.  His baptism signals the beginning of his ministry – the public proclamation of the kingdom of heaven that he embodies in acts of sacrificial love, costly service, and ultimately in his death.  All righteousness is fulfilled as Jesus is anointed through baptism as God’s begotten Son, becoming sovereign of a kingdom for which he will ultimately be crowned with thorns.

Jesus is baptised into God’s mission of self-giving love that leads him into suffering and death, there to be identified with all human misery and despair.  Jesus is baptised into life eternal, as his ministry of self-giving is vindicated by God and revealed to be the way to life for all of creation.

One of the great joys of Christian discipleship is sharing in communal discernment to clarify the implications of our baptism into Christ crucified and risen.  The Basis of Union (para 7) explains the baptism of Jesus, and what it means for us:

‘The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ incorporates people into his body by Baptism.  In this way he enables them to participate in his own baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial, and which was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Baptism into Christ’s body initiates people into Christ’s life and mission in the world, so that they are united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy, in one family of the Father of all in heaven and earth, and in the power of the one Spirit.’

We are baptised into the death of Jesus to proclaim the righteousness that he fulfills through his own self-giving.  And we are baptised into the life of Jesus to participate in the fellowship of his Spirit;  to share in the journey of faith, hope and love in which we die to ourselves and live in Christ.  Not all of us are elected or ordained for leadership in the church, but we are all called to serve, and the commissioning liturgy reminds us that:

‘Each one of us is given a gift by the Spirit:
and there is no gift without its corresponding service.’

As those baptised into Christ, we listen for the call of the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being; the one who makes us his sisters and brothers in the fellowship of his Spirit; the one who leads us from the wilderness of alienation into the peace of God.  Just as he hears the words of divine pride that confirm his identity and send him into ministry, so too does Jesus speak those words to us:

‘You are my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

To the God of all grace, who has called us to eternal glory in Christ, be the dominion forever and ever.  Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Epiphany of the Lord
4/1/2026

Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

---

I wonder how many of you have made new year’s resolutions.  Some new year’s resolutions are about doing less – consuming less food or alcohol, being less critical or cynical.  Other new year’s resolutions are about doing more – being more mindful, more encouraging, more joyful, more hopeful.  Some people make new year’s resolutions believing they mark a significant turning point in their lives, as the transition of one year to the next provides an opportunity for life to be reset and renewed.  It’s like a secular version of a declaration of forgiveness, in which the sins of the past are washed away through the dawning of a new year.  The arrival of January 1st is not merely the anticipation of the new but also the relegation of the old, perhaps to be ignored or even forgotten.

It’s interesting to reflect on this in relation to the story of Christmas.  The Christmas season usually features Luke’s narrative of the birth of Jesus, and the testimony of those on the margins of society who declare that his birth is a sign of God’s favour.  On this Epiphany Sunday, we hear Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus, and its characters are not merely marginalized members of society, but foreign magi who travel from the east and ask:  ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’  Gentiles announcing a Jewish king?  That’s a surprise, as is what follows: ‘When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him.’  Historians suggest that Herod was paranoid and this explains his fear, but why all Jerusalem with him?  It’s easy to assume that the residents of Jerusalem share the reason for Herod’s fear, but it could be that they’re actually afraid of its consequences; afraid of the suffering that his fear will cause them.

In this regard, we note world leaders in our own time who manipulate political discourse to justify their use of violence.  When they’re challenged, they lash out at those who look, live or think differently – immigrants, the marginalised, the poor, and those who seek justice.  This emboldens power hungry sycophants and patriots, and it silences ordinary people; stifling debate and dissent.  Fear and division abound.  Some might say it’s human nature to observe things we dare not challenge; human nature to believe things we dare not declare; human nature to avoid controversy and not draw attention to ourselves; human nature to be afraid of those who have the power to hurt us; human nature to seek opportunity in the suffering of others.  Some might call these the idiosyncrasies of human nature, but they are in fact born in the depths of our cultural formation.  We are part of a culture that teaches and forms us to be fearful of difference, and even to take advantage of it when convenient.

We share this in common with the community that first heard the words of the apostle Paul.  A Gentile community deeply formed by a culture of difference and disrespect with Jews now hears Paul declare that: ‘They have become fellow-heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.’  Paul claims that he’s been called by God: ‘to bring to the Gentiles the news of the boundless riches of Christ, … so that through the church the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known.’

‘The wisdom of God in its rich variety’ is nothing less than the reconciliation of all humanity in the peace of Christ.  One of Paul’s great challenges is to convince both Gentile and Jew that God has given him authority to proclaim a message that seems completely new.  But, even if the message seems new, it reflects an ancient promise.

Isaiah, chapter 60 declares: ‘Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the Lord will rise upon you, and his glory will appear over you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.’

In the Advent texts, Isaiah hopes for peace; not merely peace to bring an end to war, like a truce or ceasefire, but peace that means freedom from the compulsion for revenge and retaliation; peace in which enemies are reconciled in order to bear witness to the glory of God.  The gospel of Christ crucified and risen declares God’s peace, not by ignoring a history of brokenness, but by entering into it;  not by forgetting a difficult past, but by remembering it, because this is the true path to reconciliation.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the famous opponent of apartheid in South Africa, insisted that forgiveness was the only way to achieve reconciliation.  In response to those who demanded a more punitive response, Tutu argued that the nation could never be healed by vengeance.  Tutu believed that the truth about atrocities must be told, not to punish but to forgive; not to condemn but to reconcile.

In 2017, Australia’s First Nations peoples gathered at Uluru, issuing a Statement from the Heart that included reference to Makarrata.  This statement declares that: ‘Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination. We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.’  Again, this truth-telling does not wish to condemn or punish; rather it seeks to establish a story about the past about which all Australians can agree and be reconciled.

As members of the church, we receive God’s peace through a particular act of remembering.  One of the great signs of God’s peace is the Eucharist, as we submit to the sustaining activity of God by remembering and giving thanks for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  The practice of the Eucharist is a form of resistance against the fear of Herod and of all Jerusalem, in which we welcome the God who reaches out to reconcile a broken world.  Our participation in the sacraments sustains us in the ministry of Christ, a ministry that is founded upon the self-giving of God, through Christ, in the fellowship of his Spirit.  We gather at the table of the Lord, to be incorporated into the history of God’s act of self-giving love, and become part of God’s reconciling future.

Just as the Magi return home another way, so too does the revelation of the mystery of Christ send us on a new path of love and service, in which fear of self-giving is overwhelmed by God’s grace.  Let us, with the Magi, offer our richest gifts – the praise, thanksgiving, and adoration in which we participate in epiphany, and go home by another way, reconciled and renewed in peace.

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

View or print as a PDF

Christmas 1
28/12/2025

Psalm 148
Matthew 2:13-23

---

Foreword

Hijacking a story

One of the favourite family movies at our place over the years has been Shrek (2001), which is basically a beauty-and-the-beast story, with a few extra twists.

Shrek is the name of a grumpy but otherwise good-souled ogre, who is forced by the evil Lord Farquaad to rescue the beautiful princess Fiona from a high tower in a dragon-guarded castle somewhere, Fiona being whom Farquaad intends to marry. One of the twists, however, is that Princess Fiona has been cursed: while she is beautiful by day, she turns into an ogress at night. This she keeps secret.

Along the journey back after the rescue, Shrek and Fiona find themselves falling in love. Fiona, however, is bound by the need to release herself from the curse, which can only happen at true love’s first kiss. She presumes that, since Lord Farquaad instigated her rescue, he is that true love. For his part, Shrek is bound by the fact that Fiona is, as far as he knows, human and not ogre.

Finally resolving that he loves Fiona regardless, Shrek crashes the wedding. Shrek and Fiona kiss and, because it is love’s first kiss, Fiona’s curse is lifted: she is beautiful again. The twist here is that she takes the form of the ogress – that which Shrek would love all the more. And the two live happily ever after, as the saying goes. Or, at least, they’re happy until the crises arise which precipitate several successful sequels.

In the traditional beauty-and-the-beast story, of course, it is the beast who is transformed into the handsome prince, who then marries the beautiful maiden. A popular animated version of the traditional story was made by Disney a decade before Shrek. And the Shrek movie plays on this, taking the beast-to-human transformation scene of the Disney film and mimicking it, but with the opposite outcome. Whereas in both scenes a “beast” is levitated and spun around and transformed by the lifting of the curse in a circle of brilliant light, in the Shrek version, what descends is not the beautiful princess but the ogress.

You would probably still get the point if you’d not previously seen the Disney version, but to recognise the link between the scenes in the two movies makes the critique of our assumptions about beauty all the more pointed. Shrek says “no” to Beauty and the Beast, and it’s the interaction between the two which gives the later movie much of its grunt.

Now, feel free to forget most of that straightaway, except for the technique of plagiarising what has gone before in order to make a comment on it, or on something else. For this is exactly the kind of thing which is happening in our gospel reading this morning, with its account of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt and return to Nazareth. We can read these stories “cold”, and understand that this or that particular thing happened. But, to get the point, or even the joke, of what Matthew is saying, you have to know earlier stories of old Israel because Matthew is drawing on what the people already know, to tell who this child Jesus is.

If we miss this engagement with the earlier events and sayings, there is a danger of romanticising the stories and turning them into mere facts about the events of Jesus’ early life. But Matthew’s intention is not simply to tell us that all these amazing and terrifying things happened. More important are the links with what has happened before in the past. It is as if history is repeating itself, although with a difference.

Let’s, then, pause to hear from Matthew’s Gospel…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 2. 13-23)

Word: Proclamation

Once more, with feeling

Matthew tells us that Jesus and his family were forced to go to Egypt, not because he thinks that it’s something we’d like to know, or need to know so that we’ll be nicer to refugees in our own time. They go to Egypt so that they can come back, because when they do, it is just like when the Hebrews were set free from slavery. It is not the Holy Family’s itinerary we are to note but the resonance, and so the meaning, of their movements. In Matthew’s presentation, Jesus is like old Israel itself: loved by God as a parent loves her child, and “saved” from Egypt as Israel was.

Matthew also tells us about Herod’s rage and the killing of the young boys. Again, this is not so that we’ll be more sympathetic to people who suffer these kinds of atrocities. Matthew is more interested in drawing parallels to the well-known birth story of Moses, when exactly the same thing happened. To kill the rumoured deliverer of the Hebrews, the Egyptian Pharaoh had all the young Hebrew boys killed, although Moses escaped; King Herod does the same thing. And so in Matthew’s telling of the story, Jesus is cast as a new Moses.

And our Gospel reading finished with Jesus ending up in Nazareth. Once more, this is not given as mere information. Important for Matthew is that he is then able to call Jesus a “Nazarene”, which may have reminded Matthew’s readers of the Old Testament order of Nazirites, men specially dedicated to serve God. (In fact, the precise reference Matthew intends to make to the Old Testament is not clear, as there is no “He shall be called a Nazorean” line to be found there. The reference to the Nazirites is one possibility (cf. the birth of Samson, Judges 13.5); another is a play on the Hebrew word “neser” in Isaiah 11. 1 (“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch [neser] shall grow out of his roots…”). In any case, the point is the resonance with what has gone before. (And the story of the star of Bethlehem, and the gifts the astrologers bring, are also told not merely because they are actually supposed to have happened, but because they have an important Old Testament precedent, but that’s next week’s reading! ).

Matthew is saying to those to whom he writes: “You’ve heard all of this – this is your heritage – the story of Jesus is your very own story”.

The repeated history is not quite the same, of course. When the old stories and images are revisited, they’re given a new twist, and their meaning is intensified. So, for example, there’s an element of irony – something unexpected – which creeps into this new enacting of the stories: whereas in the original story it was a “foreign” power holding the Hebrews captive, or killing the children, here it’s the royal representative of the people of God himself; the people of God are shown to quite capable of the inflicting the evil they themselves have suffered at the hands of others. It’s not merely a matter of “once more, folks”; but a re-enactment of the old stories which digs deeper than the original did.

Now, if we’re telling a story, we don’t have to do it in this way. Tales which begin with the familiar “once upon a time” just get going, introducing the characters as required, to relate some happening or teach some moral. But it isn’t just accidental that Matthew tells his story in this way rather than in one of the other ways he might have told it. He tells the story this way because this way of telling reflects how God actually enters our lives. When God enters our lives, it’s not as one more piece of information. Christian discipleship is not about learning a lot of facts about God.

When God enters our lives, the things we already think we know – our stories, our histories, our hopes and dreams – are taken and made knowledge of something different.

But it’s not quite that something is added, or that our old knowledge was incomplete. Matthew is seeking to make sense of what otherwise makes no sense. In Jesus, he has encountered something which must be proclaimed, but how? What makes sense of life out of death, the continuing felt presence of the crucified Jesus? The old stories had meaning enough in themselves, but Matthew takes them and applies them to speak about what Jesus now represents. What hi s readers already knew about themselves becomes the basis for understanding what Jesus is: their story becomes wrapped up in his.

Our story for God’s story

But this works both ways. Matthew borrows the old stories to say what Jesus represents. But this changes the old stories in the process. In the case of the scriptural narrative, Matthew’s method makes the old stories look a little like prophecies, and this is probably partly how Matthew understood it. But we don’t have to commit to an overly simplistic prophecy-fulfilment process here. Perhaps a more accessible reading of this dynamic for today is to see what Matthew does as revealing that our stories are open to God’s story. Our stories are steps along the way in God’s own story. If Jesus is not prophesied by the Old Testament stories, those stories are still useful for understanding him because it is the same God at work before and in Jesus.

And the same applies since then. Faith does not look back 2000 years to an experience constrained by the categories of the time. Jesus is the new Israel, the new Moses, for those to whom those identities are absolutely central. Matthew effectively colonises these ideas, borrowing them, hollowing them out and filling them again with Christ. In this way, he makes the history of Israel point to Christ, be oriented towards his appearance.

For us, now, the requirement is not that we become first-century Jews and think about Jesus in the same terms they did. Rather, to come to faith is to begin to see our own stories as the material by which Jesus can be experienced and known. What we have been taught, and have done and suffered, are the basic elements by which Jesus takes shape for us, and so these things become part of Jesus’ own story.

Jesus is given as the key to unlocking our own stories, recasting what has happened to us and reshaping what might yet come of us.

The continuing presence of the crucified Christ, which the Easter church celebrates each Sunday, is an invitation to see our lives re-shaped and re-modelled in this way. This is to recast our past not as a thing which limits us but as something which, in this God’s hands, can become our liberation and the liberation of others. It casts our future not as uncertain and so threatening but as the place where we will meet God, and so as sheer opportunity and possibility.

What we have and are now is where God begins, but God will end in a surprising and enlivening filling-out of who we are, making of our lives in Christ the very presence of God, whether we look like a princess or an ogre. For our story to become entwined with the story of Jesus is the transformation of true love’s first kiss.

Christmas is an invitation: Open yourselves to this one, allow his story to become the true meaning and goal of your own story, and begin being the people of love and hope you were created to be.

This is the gift in Christmas.

Let us receive it, become it, towards our own richer humanity and God’s greater glory.

View or print as a PDF

Christmas Day
25/12/2025

John 1:1-18

---

ForeWord

The playwright Dennis Potter once remarked, “The trouble with words is, you never know whose mouth they’ve been in.”

Our words are always second-hand. They come with fingerprints on them, with scratches and dirt. By their associations – by the other mouths which have uttered them – words always say more, carry more, than we intend or hear.

We hold our words in common, of course, otherwise they’re of no use to us. But they pass between us, virus-like, picked up, replayed, amplified, mutated, infected. And so some words even seem to require that the speaker utter a “trigger warning” before the main event – a kind of pre-word word. The warning flags words which might catch us unawares, upset us, cause us to spill over somehow, because of other mouths they’ve been in.

I’ve been wondering this week about the words which have flowed from the horror at Bondi Beach eleven days ago: “terrorism”, “Australia”, “community”, “hero”, “condemnation”, “innocence”, “antisemitism”, “protest”, “values”, “resistance”, “solidarity”. These seem to be the right words, but they are contested: What is a terrorist? What is antisemitism? What are our values? What is peace?

We understand why these words present themselves. Like ants from a nest upon which some tormenting child has jumped up and down a few times, we are suddenly darting around everywhere, grasping for understanding, out of both a recognition of the crisis and the sense that we must do, must say, something.

But we end up saying again the kinds of things one always says at times like this: words of sorrow, of comfort; words of pain, of condemnation; words of commitment and promise. And so, for all the necessity of such expression, our all too human, Large Language Model AI-like response kicks in with words we’ve all heard before: tired words, for dismal times.

This is our desperate – indeed truly hopeless (Latin: de-sperare) – attempt to wrap in words an experience which has to do with the very failure of words. For what is the violence of guns but precisely the bankruptcy of words – a swearing, a cursing, to signal an otherwise inexpressible hatred or frustration? And do not screams and tears indicate another failure of words to touch the truth, bodies now expressing what words cannot?

Words as law

We use words to grasp, to take hold, but they slip and fail us in this. Because, for our words truly to grasp, they have to be our own words only: fresh, not yet mouthed by others, and so still uninfected with other meanings which cause confusion.

And so, from despair that there might be no fresh words which could break everything open, we reach for the narrowest of words – the words of law: of commissions of inquiry, of prohibition of ownership and gatherings and certain slogans. Law seeks to exclude ambiguity and the risk inherent in having room to move. Law secures. Law is old words, the words of foundation, the rule according to which things should unfold. Law says before we speak. It is the mouth that uttered our words before we came to say them for ourselves.

We need laws, of course. But if the trouble with words is that they’ve always already been in someone else’s mouth, then we who imagine that we have “freedom of speech” have already been spoken before we speak. And so we say, and hear, nothing new, nothing truly free or liberating: merely law, untempered by grace. There is here, then, no penetration to the heart.

Perhaps all this seems rather dismal for Christmas Day! But Christmas is not the time for sentimental wishing away of hard things, for a forgetfulness of the realities of the world in which we live. Guns can menace at Hanukkah, bombs explode at Christmas, missiles rain down in Ramadan. Whatever we are doing here, today, it should not be a hiding from the world, a fearful withdrawal into the shadow of half-truths.

Because it’s into precisely our space – the space of the human with its tainted, slipping words – that our Gospel text today speaks of a certain and unique annunciation, a certain en-mouthing, of [a] Word.

Most of us know this text pretty well – at least, its themes and rhythms. But let’s listen again, towards hearing something new about words, and light, and life, and grace, and truth…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1. 1-18)

Word: Proclamation

The Word among words

In the beginning, the Word.

Note that John doesn’t declare, “In the beginning was ‘a’ word” but rather, the Word. It’s “word”, but not one word among many. And, being in the beginning, it’s [a] pre-word Word – the first thing said – but now not as a trigger warning. This Word-before-all-words is not only the first thing said – the firing of a shot – it is also the last thing, the target. This untainted Word at the beginning remembers not each prior utterance to warn us of what’s coming but remembers rather its future, final use – its purpose, which reaches not backwards for its meaning but forward.

This is the miracle of Christmas: that this child in the manger, this God on a cross, is a new language-ing of our words. By this, I mean that it poses a new and strange grammar for our old words. This grammar is new in that it joins the wrong kinds of things: the human to God, flesh to spirit, grace to law, death to life. It takes what is old, familiar, tired and worn out, and poetises it into something fresh, something new.

Christmas is the possibility of a new thing being said with old, overused words. When John declares that the Word became flesh, he’s not making a statement about a mixing of God-stuff and world-stuff. He’s talking about light flickering forth out of darkness. He’s talking of order taking shape in chaos. He’s talking about a resurrection of the dead, not at the end of the world but here and now, bringing new life and truth to stale words and the chaotic account they effect.

It is less that the Word becomes flesh than revivifies it, makes it alive again. Flesh itself – our flesh – now bears, becomes, the Word, becomes the location of grace and truth.

At least, this is the promise of Christmas, the promise of any decent talk of God’s coming to the world which seeks truly to touch us, to make a difference.

The murders at Bondi unleashed a furore, as they should have. But, like all furores, this one will bring us no closer to grace and truth. We cannot agree on what our words mean, so many mouths have they filled. The furore is really about the words themselves. For this is the trouble with words: they are compromised: they pro-mise contradictory things in different mouths.

Our words are not inherently bad. They are stale. They retain a taste of truth, perhaps, but without grace. But it is the grace we need. It is grace which breaks through as light in darkness; as the sudden, overwhelming appearance of life in the midst of death; as the sur-prise of joy in the midst of despair.

It is of this grace and truth that John writes, identifying its possibility in the appearance of Jesus. We are here today not necessarily because we have felt much of this, or because we have this joy. This is part of the compromising of Christmas: that, these days, Christmas continually tells us that we should be joyful. We are here because we lack but still we long for relief, finally being ourselves but different, our words and actions made new, shifted from a staleness to fullness of life.

And so, we don’t gather today merely to remember – if we even do that. Christmas, rather, poses a question: What would it look like if the fullness of life occurred not despite all that has happened to us or we feel will happen, but in the form of all that? What would it look like if what had been stale now tasted like the best we’ve ever tasted? What would it look like if we, with history’s dirty fingerprints all over us, were nonetheless brought again to fullness of life?

Flesh becoming Word

This is what John means when he speaks of the Word become flesh: grace and truth in the midst of the whole catastrophe. The world looks the same – a baby in a cot, an innocent man murdered – but it feels different. And by “feel” I don’t mean to return to mere sentiment or a denial of the hurt the world often is. “Feel” means, here, a re-entry into our compromised words, but now struggling in speech and action against the confusion all around: grace and truth against law and compromise.

This is not an easy calling. In Jesus’ case, it leads to the cross, and it might feel like that for us, as well. But, one way or another, God kills us all in the end, and so the question is really only, What should we say and do until that time, what shall we be?

Seeing what Christ is, coming into the world, let us seek to be what he is and what he makes possible: Light. Life. Grace. Truth: the unfolding of the very heart of God in the midst of a compromised and contradictory world.

This is the gift, and the call, of Christmas.

View or print as a PDF

Advent 3
14/12/2025

Isaiah 35:1-10
Matthew 11:2-11

Sermon preached by Sesi Taunga

---

Malo e Lelei and Good morning, Church!

Today is the third Sunday of Advent, a Sunday when the Church invites us to rejoice. Sometimes, just hearing the word Rejoice! can feel a little overwhelming.

Life isn’t perfect. We are tired. We are worried. We are still waiting.

Some of us are hopeful, and some of us are quietly panicking. Advent holds all of that together. It reminds me of Advent in Tonga. Families begin preparing for Christmas months in advance. I remember my grandmother telling me and my cousins. “If we start preparing for Christmas now, by Christmas we will have enough food to feed the whole village.”

My cousins and I looked at each other with worried faces and asked, “Grandma, won’t it all go bad before Christmas?” She laughed and said, “Ah, my grandchildren, that’s Advent. Advent is about hope, preparation, and a little panic.”

We laugh because we recognise ourselves in that story. Advent is life as it really is, messy, joyful, anxious and hopeful. This is exactly the place where God meets us. Not because we are perfect, but because God draws near to our humanity, our fears, our weaknesses, our doubts, and our joy.

Isaiah 35: God Comes to Our Humanity

Isaiah speaks to people who are weary and afraid. He speaks. “The desert shall rejoice and blossom. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knee. Say to those who are of a fearful heart. Be strong, do not fear. God will come and save you.” (Isaiah 35)

When we think about that:

• The desert blooms.
• The weak are strengthened.
• Fearful hearts hear good news.

This is not just poetry. It is eschatological hope, a vision of God’s kingdom breaking into the world as it is. God does not wait for us to be perfect. God does not wait for us to be strong. God comes to the deserts of our hearts, the places where we feel tired, uncertain, or afraid.

But notice something important. Isaiah’s vision is not only for the broken. It is for all of humanity.

God comes to heal what is wounded, but God also comes to bless what is already good. Where there is happiness, God deepens it. Where there is laughter, God joins in. Where there is celebration, God delights. Advent is about God entering the full spectrum of our humanity, not only our mess, but also our joy.

Transition: From Promise to Human Struggle

Isaiah paints a beautiful picture of hope, deserts blooming, weak hands strengthened, fearful hearts comforted. Yet even as we hear these promises, we know life is not always so clearly filled with joy and renewal. Sometimes we long for God’s presence, yet doubt creeps in. We wonder if God’s kingdom will truly break into our world.

This tension between promise and human doubt is where Matthew 11 begins. John the Baptist, the prophet who prepared the way, finds himself in a place of uncertainty and fear. Sitting in prison, he wonders if the One he has proclaimed is truly the Messiah.

He sends a question to Jesus. “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Jesus answers him. Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receives their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” (Matthew 11:4–5, NRSV)

Jesus is showing John that the kingdom Isaiah promised is breaking in, and that God’s nearness is visible in these signs of healing, hope, and transformation. This is Advent theology at its heart. God draws near to our humanity, in doubt and in faith, in weakness and in joy.

Reflection: God’s Nearness in Real Places

When we say that God draws near to our humanity, we do not mean this only as an idea. We mean it in real places, among real people.

God’s nearness echoes in our church when we gather to worship, when we pray for one another, when we sing, and when we sit quietly together in silence.

God’s nearness echoes in the hospital, in waiting rooms and hospital beds, in whispered prayers, in the courage of patients, in the compassion of doctors and nurses, in hands that hold other hands.

God’s nearness echoes in our families around kitchen tables, in celebrations and laughter, and also in moments of pain, conflict, and silence.

These are holy places. Not because they are perfect, but because God is present there. This is the mystery of Emmanuel. God with us, in pews and hospital rooms, in living rooms and waiting rooms, in joy and in sorrow, in strength and in weakness. Wherever humanity is deeply felt, God is already drawing near.

Here, the wisdom of a Pacific theologian, Sione ʻAmanaki Havea, resonates deeply. He reminds us that God is never distant from the people. In Pacific life, God’s presence is felt not in separation, but in shared life, in communal meals, in stories told together, in waiting alongside one another, in pain and in celebration. Hope, he says, is something we carry together as a community. This is Advent, God drawing near to our humanity, not in perfection, but in presence.

Reflection: Advent in Our Lives

Advent is not about waiting perfectly. It is about faithful waiting in the midst of real life.

God meets us,

• in our weakness
• in our doubts
• in our imperfect preparations

But God also meets us,

• in family meals and friends’ visits
• in quiet reflection
• in everyday blessings

Think again of that Tongan grandmother’s feast. It may be messy. It may involve a little panic. But it is full of life, full of hope, full of joy.

And in the same way, each of us has our own story. Some stories feel full and loud right now. Some feel quiet, fragile, or unfinished. Some carry grief and loss. Some carry gratitude and celebration. Many of us carry all of these together.

That is exactly how God’s joy enters our lives, not in perfection, but in presence. Not only in our mess, but also in our happiness. This is a deep spiritual truth.

Emmanuel. God with us, is here in all of it. Even in silence, even when we do not know what to pray, God hears the desire of your heart. Your story matters to God. Your waiting matters. Your joy matters. Your pain matters.

Application: Living Advent Joyfully

So, what does this mean for us today?

1. Notice God in the ordinary
   Pay attention this week to God’s presence in simple moments, in meals, conversations, laughter, and silence.
2. Offer God your humanity
   Bring everything to God, your weakness, your doubts, your joys, your fears. Nothing is too small or too messy for God.
3. Rejoice with confidence
   Rejoice not because life is perfect, but because God’s nearness is real. Rejoice because God delights in you exactly as you are.

Call to Rejoice

So today, let us rejoice

• not because life is perfect,
• not because we have no doubts,
• not because our preparations are flawless

But because

God draws near. God is faithful. God meets us in our humanity, our mess, and our joy.
God is Emmanuel, with us.

Let us lift our hearts with joy. Rejoice, for the God who draws near meets us in our humanity

View or print as a PDF

Advent 2
7/12/2025

Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 104
Matthew 3:1-12

---

ForeWord

High spirits

Our little Monday Morning at the Movies cinema group met last week to see The Edge of Life. If you only see one movie per month for a quarter or per year, this is probably one you could afford to miss.

The movie is a documentary concerned with the state of mind of people who have a terminal illness diagnosis, and the possibilities of prescription psychedelic drugs to assist them in their emotional health after such news.

The state of mind of people with such diagnoses is, of course, very often greatly disturbed. And so thinking about how best to assist people in these circumstances must be of the highest order of priority.

And psychedelic drugs sound like they can be pretty good fun, which would surely help at such a distressing time.

Both the experience of knowing how close our death might be and the impact that such drugs might have on our well-being are surely things to be studied closely. But, to me, the most interesting thing about the documentary was the way it interpreted what the drug did for those who have such difficult news to negotiate.

Because the drug has a psychological effect, with various visions and felt impressions, the language of “spiritual” was invoked to interpret the experience of these dying people. The drug, it was proposed, connects ut to something deeper, perhaps, or to a different, spiritual dimension. This was reinforced by crossovers to indigenous cultures in South America, where drugs with similar kinds of effects are routinely taken as part of what is called their spirituality.

Certainly, the illness suffered by the various patients is very real, and we have no reason to doubt their testimony as to what they said they saw in their psychedelic trances, but this is quite different from making connections between their experience and any “reality”. Why should what we experience when lying down on a comfortable bed, wearing noise-cancelling headphones and under the influence of a drug that alters perception – why should what we experience there be any more “real” than the world in which we usually live?

And yet, for no particular reason, the assumption behind the presentation of these various experiences in the documentary was that what happens inside minds loosened up by psychedelics is more real than what happens in our here-and-now world. Such experiences might well be more comforting, but this isn’t the same as it being more real, even if we call this reality a “spiritual” one.

Disturbing spirit

At one level, perhaps, none of this immediately matters: the interest in the use of the drugs was the same as the use of all drugs: to alleviate suffering, which it seemed to do. And it would be fine if we left it at that. But the invocation of a notion of “spirituality” connected to this experience touches upon what we do when we gather like this. And this led me to consider again something you’ve heard me say several times over the years: “spirit” is the second most useless word the church has in its faith vocabulary.

Like all of our god-words, “spirit” is a borrowed word. It has meanings beyond what it might mean, for example, in the church. And we easily succumb to the temptation to jump from one place to another, taking the meaning from the first place to the next, as if the meaning stays the same. “Spirit”, of course, is a church word and so, to that extent, the church is interested in “spirituality”. But words take their meaning not from some internal, fixed notion but from an informing grammar the word takes from its context. And so spirit is not always what we think it is.

In the case of the movies, “spirituality” is a human thing conventional medicine can’t yet measure, a kind of “opposite”, then, of medical science. And so it becomes there a kind of mystical catch-all. Add to this that these unfortunate people are trying to negotiate hard news about the end of life, and “religion” kicks in – the third most useless word the church has.

So, with those thoughts about spirit in mind, we come to our Gospel reading today which, as is the case each Second Sunday of Advent, features the preaching of John the Baptist. The Baptist comes as the forerunner, the herald of Jesus. But more than just announcing that Jesus is coming, the Baptist also announces what Jesus will do. Let’s listen, then, to what it is that John says Jesus comes to do, and this in particular with reference to “spirit”

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 3.1-12)

Word: Proclamation

Cleansing spirit

Who John is and what he is doing is of great interest to everyone, and so they stream out to see and to hear. John’s role, however, is not to be noticed but rather to point to Jesus. And he characterises what Jesus will do by contrasting Jesus’ work with his own: “I baptise you with water for repentance”, John declares, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me… He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”

This always surprises me – that, in view of all that Jesus does and is said to be in the Gospels, this is the summary statement the (synoptic) Evangelists make of his ministry. Matthew, Mark and Luke each begin their Gospel with this characterisation of Jesus’ ministry: Jesus is the one who will baptise with the Holy Spirit (to which Matthew and Luke add, “and fire”).

Here we have an idea about Spirit – about spirituality even. And what does it have to do with the warm spirituality that comes with noise-cancelling headphones and psychedelic drugs? We might suspect, “Not a lot”. There surely is a place for quiet, for withdrawal – for the spirituality of the Sabbath, perhaps. But the Sabbath is only one day in seven. What has spirituality to do with the other six days? It is these days that Jesus comes to address.

Recall what we said last week about apocalyptic thought. This arose from the very pressing existential and political question: How can such things be happening? Where on earth is God? And it is, as such, a “spiritual” question. But it was not asked as a prelude to a retreat from the world, in order to find God; the apocalyptic mind didn’t expect to have to go anywhere. The expectation was that God would come into the world, into the midst of everything. And so apocalyptic thought was an urgent prayer: Come! The later texts in the prophet Isaiah verge on apocalyptic urgency: “You who remind the Lord, take no rest, and give God no rest until Jerusalem is re-established… (Isaiah 62.7)”.

This is spirituality, but now it has to do with the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the times in which we live, the shape of our lives together (German Zeitgeist: time-spirit) – and with the whole of that time and life. But as a spirituality of the whole of our time, it doesn’t propose that God will be sitting around somewhere, that God will become a visible, tangible thing in the world like everything else we see and touch. It proposes the world not as containing God, but as becoming the glory of God.

Human spirit

And what does that mean?

The glory of God, one of the old saints declared, is the human being fully alive. And what does “fully alive” mean? It means something like what Jesus looked like. He baptises with the Holy Spirit because he himself lives in that spirit. And so everything he does is spiritual: the teaching of the people, the arguments with the authorities, the exhaustion after a long, hot day, quiet Sabbaths with his friends, the emerging possibility of his being crucified – surely a terminal diagnosis – and his very dying on a cross. This spirituality is not always comfortable, but when did “spiritual” come to mean “comfortable” in its usual, thin sense?

The spirit to which John points – the Holy Spirit – is a spirit which burns away what is not real, what denies life as distraction or hidden power. Spirit is already everywhere, long before we realise we’re going to die, and so spirituality as escape is not only active in the taking of drugs to ease our troubled minds. It’s there also in drinking ourselves stupid, in weekends lost to unplanned binge-watching, in sexual gratification through porn, comfort chocolate and retail therapy. These are all spirituality as oppression and avoidance.

And, as appealing and fleetingly comfortable as the spirituality of withdrawal usually is, it’s a sign that we are not exactly human beings fully alive.

We know this, I suppose – that we are not fully alive. But the gospel point is that it’s into the normal, troubled humdrum-ness of life that the Holy Spirit is given. And so the apocalyptic vision was not of withdrawn, disembodied, disengaged souls. The vision was of a city – a living, bustling place. We cannot imagine this: that heaven could be bustle – a city with sirens and sewers. We cannot imagine “your kingdom come”, earth as heaven.

But this is the proposal of the gospel, a different kind of Spirit, manifest in the glory of God in the face of one of us, Jesus of Nazareth.

We cannot imagine this. But surely, we want it. We want not to live under the shadow of death and his many friends. We want that the glory of God be manifest in us, in our faces: a light shining and burning as promise of life, even here, even now.

And so we pray with the wild-eyed, apocalyptic prophet and with the church ever since: come, Holy Spirit, come fire, and make us whole.

And all God’s people say…

View or print as a PDF

Advent 1
30/11/2025

Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Matthew 24:36-44

---

ForeWord

The bad-news apocalypse

Those of you who peruse The Conversation online may have noticed a piece last week reflecting on the impact of AI on writing, and this within the threat of an “AI apocalypse” bringing at least that aspect of human creativity – writing – to an end.

I don’t want to spend too much time today on the question of the AI apocalypse, but rather to note the way in which the word “apocalypse” is used here.

We’ve noted before that the Greek word which gives us our English “apocalypse” has the basic meaning of “from hiddenness” or, more simply, “revelation”. This is lost in our modern usage, where apocalypse is not about revelation but about just one feature of New Testament apocalyptic thought, which is the end of the world as we know it, and the great overcoming of satanic power in the battle at Armageddon.

 

To speak of an AI apocalypse is to reference this kind of radical destruction of the familiar order. On this hearing, an apocalypse is always a bad thing: the AI apocalypse, the nuclear apocalypse, the environmental apocalypse, the zombie apocalypse. These are breakdowns in the order of things, usually springing from some very human miscalculation.

The good-news apocalypse

This is not how the apocalypse works within the scriptural testimony. Apocalyptic thinking begins to appear late in the Old Testament, where it serves the purpose of answering a pressing question: Where on earth is God?

The question of the faithful was, Why, if we are faithful, do we continue to suffer as we do? This was a question about whether God is faithful, reliable, and righteous, and about where God’s righteousness will be manifest. The hoped-for apocalypse was the revelation precisely of God’s righteousness. And the apocalyptic mind imagined that righteousness would be revealed in the near future: God is imminent.

The classical prophets answered the same question differently. For them, suffering was the result of the people’s sin. The marauding Assyrians and Babylonians who decimated old Israel and Judah were God’s punishment. But the apocalyptic mind separates suffering from guilt and looks for an alternative accounting for the suffering of the faithful: God is absent, away, but coming. The anticipated arrival of God – and with it, the apocalypse of God’s righteousness – was then something to which the faithful looked forward with eager anticipation. All things will then be well.

Of course, such a setting right involves a judgment against what is not right, and those responsible for any not-rightness in the world. This is to say that the coming apocalypse is only good news for those who suffer unjustly, and is bad news for those responsible for the unjust suffering of others.

With this orientation around apocalyptic thinking, then, let’s now listen to the reading from Matthew’s gospel set for today. The first Sunday in Advent always begins with a reading about the approach of God, in apocalyptic terms. Listen for whether the text comes as good news, or perhaps not.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: Matthew 24. 36-44)

Word: Proclamation

God’s coming as threat

Things arriving at unexpected times are not usually all that welcome: unannounced guests. A heart attack. A stock market crash. A shark in the bay. A fire in the apartment building. Psychologists tell us that our brains are prediction machines: they constantly survey what is happening around us to anticipate what might happen next, and this as a survival technique. Surprises can be dangerous.

It’s in this key that we hear from Jesus, “Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your lord is coming”.

We don’t get the impression that this is good news. The hopeful anticipation of the arrival of God to set things right is overshadowed by the arrival of God as the threatening thing: “Therefore you must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour”. This is the apocalypse we might not want. An element of threat and fear is now introduced. God is coming; shape up. There is something dangerous here.

The idea of the fear of the Lord is politely understated or even dismissed in many modern Christian circles. We would rather say, not that we should fear God, but rather love God: fear is surely bad, and love is good.

But this misses the biblical polemic (for the Bible is always polemical). When the Scriptures speak about the fear of the Lord, the emphasis falls not on “fear” but on “the Lord”. Recalling the notion of “the fear of the Lord” from the Old Testament, the expression “the Lord” is the name of one particular god, among other gods. The point is, Fear the Lord, and not some other god-like thing. It’s like saying, don’t eat chocolate, eat an apple. The assumption is that we will eat something – or fear something – so the question is, What is the best thing to eat, or fear? To speak of the beginning of wisdom as the fear of the Lord, is to say that if you’re going to fear anything in the world, let it be this one.

In this way, the Scriptures pose a theory about us: that the human is a being profoundly given to fears. And these fears make us do things which reduce our humanity and the humanity of those around us. If this is the case – if it is not possible for us to stop fearing – we might as well at least fear that which is ultimately life-giving rather than life-denying. The fear of the Lord is not an addition to whatever else we might already fear, but a revaluation of our fears.

Fear against fear

And so when it comes to our Gospel text today, with its implication that the day and the hour of the coming of God is a time to be feared, the thought is not that God will arrive like AI or a thermonuclear weapon or a roasting climate to disrupt our comfort. It is that our comfort itself is already built upon fear. AI, massively destructive weapons and climate change all have to do with responses we have already made to the fears and desires that drive us. The fear of each other that drives arms races, or the vulnerability and fear of dependence which drives the capitalist economy, or the fear of inconvenience and falling behind which drives the carbon economy – these fears are all very real for us. The fear of rejection by which we push others away. The fear of being overwhelmed by which we justify not doing what we can to help. The fear of judgement which keeps us quiet when something should be said.

But Jesus’ call to be ready for the arrival of God is not the announcement of another front on which to defend ourselves. If the arrival of God is to be feared, it is not for fear’s sake. It is in order to be released from other fears.

Why we do what we do is very much a question of what we fear. If we think and act wrongly – and moral thought and action are important undertones to what Jesus says here – it is for fear of what happens if we don’t. And so the issue gospel apocalyptic seeks to address is less what we are or aren’t doing than why: what fears and anxieties do our moral failures address?

God’s arrival, then, is not merely about reward or punishment – if at all. For those of us – most of us – in the wrong place, God’s arrival is a setting free. What we need from God is that God might set us free from our fears, and from what we do to settle those fears. To fear the Lord is to stop fearing other things. It is to see that we are often in the wrong because we have feared the wrong things.

But freedom from fear is not easy. Freedom from fear is hard just because we have so much invested in keeping fear at bay. Sovereign borders, financial investments, insurances, locks, passwords and secrets – such things protect our way of living, secure our health and longevity, ensure our reputation, safeguard the stuff we might still need.

For most of us, this is all so deeply embedded in how we live that we have forgotten that it’s there. But the revelation – the apocalypse – of God is a revealing also of the nature of the world and the powers within it. It’s because these powers are great and oppressive in the world that we have vivid biblical images not of “apocalyptic” struggles but of liberating struggles. Freedom from the powers we fear in the world is the revolution we need. The biblical apocalypse reveals not only the searing righteousness of God but the freedom of the children of God.

Do we not need to be set free? If we pray, is it not precisely for liberation from fear and oppression?

It is into such a world as ours that God does not threaten but promises to come.

As we hear Jesus’ call to stay awake, then, let it not be for fear’s sake.

Let us, indeed, examine ourselves – our commitments, our investments in life, our permissions, our hesitations – but not for fear that God might catch us unawares.

Let us rather do this towards the freedom from fear we need, and towards becoming ourselves signs of the proximity, the in-reach, freedom and fullness of life God will bring.