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Pentecost 5
13/7/2025

2Colossians 1:1-14
Luke 10:25-37

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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The winter edition of Mark the Word was recently circulated among members and friends of the congregation and, as usual, it made for interesting reading.  I was particularly interested in Craig’s observations about structural, resourcing and leadership challenges in the life of the church, and the sense in which these challenges invite good administration.  Craig suggests that good administration is not simply the correction or improvement of previous efforts, but good ad-ministry – a “ministry-to” – and a service to the gospel and its God.  He continues: ‘I don’t know what that might look like for our next moment, but it will at least convey that ours is a conviction about a God who, even when pushed out of the world onto a cross, nonetheless remained God of that world, for that world.  More than this, it is precisely as God stops being part of the world, stops looking like anything that the world values, that God is truly God and that we might learn what we are as children of such a God.’

At a time when congregations are closing and resources are dwindling; it could be argued that the church has new opportunities to become what it was always meant to be.  Perhaps, as the church continues to decline in power and privilege, it may glimpse a fresh perspective of the God who was pushed out of the world onto a cross, and a fresh understanding of how that one remains God of the world, for the world.

The parable of the Samaritan is perhaps the most familiar of them all, such that secular culture mistakenly interprets it to describe an unusually heroic act.  This parable has been universally lauded for its moral imperative – that we too should be good, responding with compassion and generosity to the suffering of others.  But it’s interesting that the parable nowhere describes the Samaritan as ‘good’.  Even if the parables of Jesus do have ethical implications, they are not primarily morality tales.  Rather, they’re stories that must be viewed through the lens of the cross to glimpse the life that God wills for the world.  This parable emerges within the context of a conversation between Jesus and a lawyer, whom we’re told wants to test Jesus.

The lawyer asks:  What must I do to inherit eternal life?  Jesus responds by inviting the lawyer to recall the Jewish Law: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.’  Clearly, the lawyer understands that the reference to loving one’s neighbour as one’s self is integral to the commandment; he knows it’s impossible to love God without also loving neighbour.  So, the lawyer takes a different tack, by splitting hairs over just who qualifies as a neighbour.  Once again, the narrative explains the lawyer’s motivations; that he wishes to justify himself.

Rather than argue the case from a legal point of view, Jesus offers the parable.  A man is beaten and left for dead.  A Priest and a Levite, exemplars of the Law in their community, see the victim and do their best to evade him and avoid their responsibilities.  On the other hand, a Samaritan, though hated by the Jewish community, is moved with compassion and offers the victim care and life.  The Samaritan embodies the spirit of the very law by which he is alienated, as he embraces the victim in healing love.  Like the Priest and the Levite in the parable, the lawyer also represents the religious authorities of his day, and yet he recognises that it is in fact the despised Samaritan who acts as a neighbour.  Jesus confirms that the mercy of the Samaritan is indeed the fulfilment of the Jewish Law.

Note the irony in this – though himself a Jew, Jesus will later be treated like one beyond the Law; he will be condemned by Roman imperial authority and crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem.

This irony is not lost on the apostle Paul, whose letters encourage new Christian communities to hold fast to the way of the cross.  We’ve heard today the opening verses of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, in which he offers greetings that both encourage and challenge.  First, he offers them the grace and peace of God, and assures them of his prayers, in which he gives thanks to God for their faith and love.  Then he affirms the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, as proclaimed by his colleague, Epaphras.  He again assures them of his prayers, this time for their wisdom and understanding, that they may lead lives that are worthy of the Lord and bear the fruit of the kingdom of God.  Finally, he encourages them to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father who has rescued them from the power of darkness to live in the kingdom of his beloved son, through whom they are forgiven.

Before turning to the particular issues of concern, Paul reminds the Colossians of the inheritance which they and he share.  Though his greeting begins with frequent references to ‘them’, by the time it concludes the grammar has shifted – from ‘them’ to ‘us’.  Paul wants to emphasise the sense in which the gospel of Jesus Christ is the story of God’s grace for all.  In Christ, there is no us and them; there is only ‘we’.

It’s interesting that the question at the heart of the gospel passage appears again in Luke 18, when a rich ruler, calling Jesus ‘Good Teacher’, asks about the path to eternal life.  Jesus replies: ‘Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone.’  When Jesus advises the rich ruler to sell his possessions and give the money to the poor, the man departs in sadness and his community laments the impossibility of salvation.  And Jesus declares: ‘What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.’

In today’s parable, the Samaritan’s mercy crosses intractable cultural and religious barriers.  Indeed, within the context of first century religiosity, the mercy of the Samaritan is impossible.  What a sadly ironic commentary this is on contemporary middle eastern politics.  And yet, the parable is offered as a proclamation of the mercy of God revealed in the gospel of Jesus.  This is a gospel in which God crosses the intractable barriers of our humanity to achieve the impossible.  This is a gospel, not of legal purity or moral rectitude, but of reckless, lawless, and prodigal faithfulness.

In Jesus, God comes to us, not as a respectable, clean, law abiding, citizen of status and standing, but as a despised and demanding refugee whom we’d prefer to ignore and avoid.  Amidst all that leaves us naked, beaten and abandoned, Jesus, himself beaten and abandoned, comes to embrace us in healing and hope.  Christ crucified and risen is the mercy of God, setting us free from judgement and its demands on us, so that we may live as God’s reconciled people, not needing to justify ourselves, because, in Jesus, God has already justified us.

Thanks be to God for the mercy that comes via the cross to embrace us in divine compassion and bestow the peace that passes all understanding.  Thanks be to God for the impossible mercy that makes all things possible.

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 4
6/7/2025

2 Corinthians 4:1-6
Psalm 27
John 14:8-13

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I don’t know how many of you here are fans of the sitcom. Perhaps it was I love Lucy, or Fawlty Towers, Seinfeld, Friends, or Big Bang Theory.

A feature of the sitcom is that the actors specialise in a kind of personal “transparency”. This means that, were you to turn the sound off and just watch the action, you’d pretty much be able to tell what is going on, and how everyone feels about it. What you need to know is in the face, in the stance, in the gesture. The characters in the story are transparent: we know close enough to exactly what she feels on the inside by how she looks on the outside.

Contrast this with the murder mystery. Opacity – the inability to see below the surface – is central to this kind of storytelling. For the most part, the investigating officers themselves are quite transparent, but the various suspects aren’t. The story is a process of getting under the deceptive surfaces which people present. Very often – and satisfyingly so for the viewer – the baddie turns out to be the one who looked the least murderous.

In a sitcom, we are set at ease to enjoy everyone’s suffering. We know where everyone stands by how they manifest in front of us, and so we know what to expect from them. But in the murder mystery, our experience is much more anxious because, as a rule in these stories, murderers don’t look like murderers.

This is all of interest because it seems to me that what we experience of each other – and more broadly of life in this world – is very much a matter of whether we think we are living in a sitcom, or a murder mystery.

How we feel about that depends, of course, on where we are. At home, it’s mostly sitcom, unless we live with a deceptive or manipulative person, which is going to get not-fun real quick. But in most of our natural exchanges outside the home, we tend to act as if we’re living in a murder mystery. We don’t know who we can trust, or to what extent. We take small steps, risking small things before we risk larger ones.

This caution matters because the world can be a dangerous place to those who are not paying attention. Conmen (and -women) don’t look like swindlers. They can scam us because they project a false transparency which sets us at ease. Like a trompe l’oeil painting on a wall which makes us think we see a window opening onto a garden, the scammer projects false transparency, so that we think we see depth but in fact it’s just superficial, and there is no garden, no intention to fulfil the promise the scammer makes in exchange for our money.

But this dynamic doesn’t play out only in the distance between our exposed faces and our hidden hearts. Over the last 200 years or so observers like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud have shown that our reading of our society and economics, of our history and morals, and even of ourselves is quite superficial. These self-readings miss hidden dynamics among and within us. We are more than we can see, and the “more” is mostly bad news. Behind the bright and sunny image on the wall is cold, hard brick: dark economic powers, untested assumptions about ourselves, and everything I’ve suppressed about what mummy and daddy did to me.

Where can we find confident clear-sightedness when opacity like this is so deeply ingrained into our experience of the world? Where do we see clearly into the depths, so that we know truly where we stand?

Nowhere, perhaps.

But in connection with all this, we might consider what Jesus says in this morning’s selection from John’s Gospel. “Lord, ” demands the disciple Philip, “show us the Father, and we will be satisfied”. Show us the heart of the matter – let us look behind the veil, let us peer inside – and then we will know what we are dealing with.

To this, Jesus responds, But, what do you mean, Philip? “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. ”

This is perhaps the most extraordinary thing said in John’s Gospel. Or, better, it’s a restatement of the extraordinary thing John says in many different ways: that Jesus is the coincidence of the superficial and the deep, of the world and God, such that to see the one is to see the other. To see Jesus is to see God; to seek God is finally to find Jesus.

The problem with this is that we don’t believe that the heart of God could be visible in this way. We are accustomed to closing our eyes to seek God – when praying, for instance. What we see – the superficial world – seems precisely not to be the heart of the matter, and so we close it out, as if what we see is the last place God would be found.

Against this – articulated by Philip’ question – Jesus declares: to see me, tangible here and now, is to see God.

This is an astounding assertion. But even it were true, how is it true now? If Philip and friends should have seen the Father in Jesus, what of us? Is Jesus himself not now obscured behind the surface of 2000 years, and the revelation of the heart of God with him? Where is the coincidence of God and the world now?

The problem now becomes, What does it mean for us to “see Jesus”, given we are not in the room with Philip and Peter, Mary and Martha? “Where is God? ” becomes “Where is Jesus? ”

God was once present to the disciples in Jesus himself. This presence only continues if Jesus continues to be present as the window into God.

Where, then, is Jesus present?

The answer is…here, in this place. Or, that’s almost the answer. Perhaps more accurately, Jesus is what we are becoming, by being in this place.

We spoke a few weeks ago of the Holy Spirit as the means by which we learn the humanity of Jesus in the church, in the life of forgiveness, reconciliation and community. In the community of Spirit, we are formed into that humanity. So, though our creed runs from the Father to the Song to the Spirit, our experience of God runs the other way: from life in the Spirit, being formed into Jesus’s own humanity, into an experience of the Father, the heart of God.

When Jesus says, Who has seen me has seen the Father, he says also that Who has known me as the Father knows me becomes as I am, experiences what I experience, is with the heart of God as I am.

We have here, then, no proposal merely about Jesus and God, but one about ourselves as well. God is about what happens between us, is about our formation in and our manifestation of the humanity of Jesus.

The God which matters is not hidden away in the past experience of Jesus, or behind our eyes closed in prayer, or lurking somewhere under or within all things.

God appears on the surface of life, is manifest in things said and done, and in how they are said and done.

God is something done, lived, enacted.

And so, not to be theologically mysterious but to be plain and open, Jesus says, Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. I work the works of God, speak what God speaks. There are be no hidden surprises. What you see in me is what God is.

This matters because what is true for Jesus is true for us. Or, it could be true for us. It is our vocation, however well we hear and respond, to live sitcom-like – transparently – in a murder mystery world: openly, honestly, without guile. We are called – and are being formed – to say, What you see in us is what God is.

This is surely a terrifying thing. How could we be that important? Who among us wants to be that important? How much more convenient, if the truth of God were hidden somewhere else other than in our faces, if the truth of God were indeed opaque.

But No. Whatever depth and hiddenness might correspond to God, it is one with the surface, with the life that Jesus was, with the lives we are to be in him, with him.

Let us, then, recommit not to merely “believing” in God, as if this were to assent to some theory or inner conviction about what and where God is, buried under the face we show to the world.

Let us do God in word and deed that the world might see, shining in our faces as in Jesus’ own, the knowledge of God which is the light of the world.

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Pentecost 3
29/6/2025

Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Psalm 26
John 6:22-34

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A couple of weeks ago, I attended the Wesley Centre’s most recent “Conversations that matter” session. The theme was “the ethics of drug reform”, which included attention to questions of decriminalisation and the provision of safe injecting spaces for drug users. It was a comment on the latter which caught my attention and prompted a line of thought which led to today’s sermon.

In speaking of an attempt by the Sisters of Charity religious order to establish a safe injecting centre in Sydney, one of the speakers spoke of the nuns describing how they approached such proposals. First, they would ask themselves, What would Mary Aikenhead do? (Aikenhead was the founder of the order). Second, they would ask, What would Jesus do?

What struck me was the second question. The chances are that you’ve all seen “WWJD? ” logos somewhere – T-shirts or coffee cups (a friend even gave me a pack of Post-it notes, each with WWJD on them and a picture of Jesus looking as if he didn’t know! ). WWJD? – “What would Jesus do? ” – is a question often put by the more activist parts of the church as a dimension of moral reflection, but most of us have probably wondered something along those lines at one stage or another: “I don’t know what to do; What would Jesus do? ”

What struck me, however, was quite at odds with the intention of the nun and the session speaker telling her story. I realised that there is an important sense in which Jesus doesn’t ever “do” anything, or at least, Jesus does nothing along the lines of what anyone who asks, WWJD? , wants to do.

More simply and provocatively, Jesus never does anything “moral”, in the way we usually think about morality.

This needs a little unpacking, for which we’ll turn to a verse from this morning’s reading from John’s Gospel – a question to Jesus from the crowd: “What must we do to perform the works of God”? (6. 28). Notice how similar this is to WWJD. The crowds, ’ “What must we do? ”, asks, “What would you do, Jesus, to perform the work of God? ” What is the “right” thing to do?

There are a couple of reasons we might ask a question like this. Perhaps we simply want to do the “right” thing – to act justly or fairly, not to be prejudicial, or whatever. Yet it’s rarely that simple. To be able to demonstrate that I have acted rightly is very important to me. I want to know that I’ve acted rightly and I need to be able to prove it you, should you challenge me. A family spat or a long, drawn-out case in the law courts is a struggle to establish correctness of behaviour because establishing righteousness secures us against negative judgment and its consequences. To do the “right” thing is to be able to point to some common sense of what rightness is, and have others agree that we are right: “I did it because…” – and you nod your head with understanding.

“What must we do to perform the works of God? ”, the people ask Jesus. This is a question, particularly for that crowd, about how to be confident that I am living in accord with God. And this is, mostly, an enquiry into how to keep God at bay, how to keep ourselves safe from God.

But this is not simply a religious concern. If it’s not God we fear, it will be diminished reputation, or judgement or marginalisation by others. Think of all the virtue signalling that goes on today: greenwashing, or the often mindless repetition of the latest social and political memes. This is an attempt to satisfy whatever wrathful god-like power lurks in the secular social and cultural machine at any moment.

“What must we do to perform the works of God? ” asks the anxious people of Jesus, and we anxious people ask with them.

Helpfully, Jesus has an answer to this heartfelt question: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom God has sent” (6. 29; cf. 15. 8).

…Which is perhaps not so helpful. To a question about what to do, Jesus apparently proposes “having faith”, which seems to be rather a not-doing kind of thing. Consider the kinds of moral questions we ask: about safe injecting rooms, or going to war, or getting out of a marriage (or into one), or keeping money or giving it away, and so on. We ask here, “What would Jesus do? ”, in a serious search for moral guidance. But Jesus’ response, “Believe in the one whom God has sent”, doesn’t seem to take our questions seriously. Nicodemus’ exasperation from a little earlier in John’s Gospel is pertinent here, and indeed right through this Gospel: “How can such things be? ”

We must choose between two readings of all this. Either Jesus’ answer is unhelpful – by which we mean, wrong – or he is right, and the crowd has put the wrong question. Of these two options, the latter is the more interesting, because the question of that crowd way back then is still our own question. And given that, after all this time, we still ask, “Jesus, what must we do? ”, and never really know the answer, let’s wonder whether this might just be the wrong question, or asked in the wrong way, or for the wrong reason.

In what way could we be wrong here, as serious as our question might be? The answer is surprising, and it is what I proposed in passing earlier: that Jesus never acts morally. He seems moral because he often does what seem to be kind things. And because he acts with decisiveness, we get the impression that he, at least, knows what the good is. On this basis, the question “WWJD? ” looks to be a good one to ask.

But to be a miracle worker is not to be moral. It is not a moral act to turn water into wine, to walk on water or to raise the dead Lazarus. Perhaps the healing of the lame and blind looks to be a little more moral, but this would be so only if we think that we ourselves are commanded to do such things, in the same way we are commanded not to steal or tell lies or covet our neighbour’s donkey.

Jesus doesn’t act morally; rather, he creates. He fills what is empty and orders what is chaotic. He doesn’t balance up the dimensions of a problem as a self-defence against charges of being wrong or to develop a proof to God and others of righteousness. Jesus just does. He just does because of what he most fundamentally is: one with the God who sent him. This relationship exceeds any particular thing Jesus does. If we ask, how must we act to be righteous, Jesus simply acts because the question of righteousness is already answered.

To do as Jesus says, then, to “believe in the one whom God has sent” is not have “a” belief; it is to be as Jesus himself is: to live as one who fears no judgement because there is no judgement which could separate him from the God who sent him. Belief is here not “about” or “in” some assertion; it is a freedom in being, a freedom to act without the fear of judgement. What we do is not done in order to impress God; God is already sufficiently impressed by God’s own love for us.

“The truth shall set you free”, Jesus says elsewhere in John’s Gospel (8. 31-32). And what truth is this?

The truth that

God.

Loves.

The world (3. 16).

Not to “believe” in Jesus is not to be as Jesus is. Not to be in Jesus is to live in fear of God (or whomever), and so is to get God and ourselves wrong, and so is to be and to remain condemned (cf. 3. 17-21).

“What would Jesus do? ” is an anxious question, which has to do with the fear of being wrong before God or before others. “Believing in Jesus” frees us from this, if such believing is a becoming like Jesus: confident that God has us, whatever we do.

Morality still matters, of course. Doing what good we can matters, and any one of us could likely do more. But we no longer act out of fear of judgment, fear of getting it wrong. To believe in the one whom God has sent is to do as Jesus does, and what Jesus “does” – if we can call it that – is first of all to measure himself by the love God has for him. Everything else is just details.

So it is also for us: measure yourselves not by some calculated rightness of what you intend to do but by the love God has for you, and act in light of that love. What then comes from the details of our actions is God’s problem and not ours.

This is what Jesus would do, and he set us free that we can do it too.

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Trinity Sunday
15/6/2025

Romans 5:1-5
Psalm 8
John 1:1-13

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I remarked last week that “spirit” is the second most useless word we have in Christian-speak, and also that “religion” is our third most useless word. To complete the set, I remind you of what I’ve also previously said: that the most useless word we have is “god”, to which we’ll return a little later.

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Our psalmist this morning marvels that the human being seems to feature so centrally in the divine ordering of the world: “What are humans that you are mindful of them?”

But we might ourselves wonder, What indeed, is the human? To be sure, as the psalmist sings, we apparently “have dominion” over the world. But what kind of dominion? What are we with our politics and economics, our passions and desires, our loves and our prejudices, our vigour and our mortality, our potentials, our failures, our innocence and our culpability? What holds all this together? What the human is and what it feels like to be human can change with the hours. If we were to “think” the human, what image comes to mind?

What is the human, when we care to be mindful of it? This is less clear than it might first seem, so that perhaps “human” is our fourth most useless faith-word.

Let’s hold that thought for a moment as we turn to the first verses of John’s Gospel, which I’ve set next to our psalmist’s wonder. In fact, it’s only the first few words of John we’ll consider closely: “In the beginning was the Word”.

This sounds like a rather straightforward declaration, something like “the first thing was the Word”. But taking the text as it presents itself, while we don’t know what “the Word” is yet, we must see that whatever it is, this Word is not the first thing. The Word is that through which all things come into being, but it is not itself a thing. Or, if we insist that the Word must be “something”, it is not the same kind of thing as every other thing. Or, to put it differently again, if created things are “there”, we might say that the Word is not quite there.

The Word with which John begins is a not-quite-there not-thing. This makes it quite difficult to think the Word, for we must think something which is not a thing – we must think a no-thing (…“nothing”…).

And it gets worse (but only so that it might get better, so bear with me!).

This first not-thing is evocatively named “the Word”. But the thing about words is that there are no single, unique, isolated words. Every word floats on a sea of other words. Any word that does not have a dictionary-load of other words that give it contextual sense is not a word at all; it’s just a noise. And John does not say, as the physicist might, In the beginning was static.

So, while he seems to declare that the Word is the no-thing before all things, if it is a word – a thing spoken, a thing sensible – then there must be other words as well. Or, we might say, the Word suggests not a thing spoken, but a conversation. Necessarily, this conversation itself is also not a thing, because there aren’t any things “yet”. But if John’s before-all-things no-thing is “the Word”, this Word must have had something even before it, a different no-thing which is not the Word and without which the Word could not be itself (as Word). This no-thing before the Word speaks the one Word in such a way that the Word has sense – in such a way that the Word is not the first no-thing – but can be the no-thing by which all things come into being.

Now, I’m going to stop there not, because it’s not fun to say such circularly silly things but to draw attention precisely to the silliness, because it touches upon a kind of divine nonsense at the heart of Christian confession of God. This is a meaninglessness like the meaninglessness we’ve touched upon a few times lately – the meaninglessness of not having a location. The Word, and the one who speaks the Word, don’t have a location in the usual sense. There is nothing – no-thing within which they fit. God has no “in”. The God of Christian faith is not-quite-there because this God is a “thing” like no other thing we know. This is a God who is before all things, and after them, and perhaps even between them, but is not one of those things.

This is where the word “God’ begins to manifest its deep uselessness to Christian faith-talk: we tend to assume that God is a thing like every other thing and then struggle over where – or whether – the God-thing can be found among all the other things. But this is not to look for God at all, but for an idol – a thing in the world which could not have been before it and could not be after it.

If we wanted to, we could press all this into a fuller exposition of the kind of no-thing which God is, and see roughly how this accords with the trinitarian confession, in deference to this particular day in the church’s calendar.

But let it be enough to hear that we tend to mistake the kind of thing the word “God” points to. And, with that in mind, let’s get go back to our poet’s, “What are humans that you are mindful of them?”

How silly, he proclaims: how marvellous; what a wonder!

But this is not only wonder at the place of the human in God’s eyes. It is the conviction and wonder that it is indeed God’s eyes that see us in this way. Not us but God is the miracle here: God sees us like this, and so this is what we are.

Why does this matter? Because when God looks at us, what God sees is an “image” of God’s own self, of God’s own being (Genesis 1.27f). How does a thing image a no-thing? We image God in the mode of not quite being “there”, of no longer quite being “things”.

As God is not quite there, so also are we not quite there. There is a no-thingliness about us, as there is about God. We are properly more (or, we could just as well say, less) than all the things we touch and use and love and fear. We are not merely our chemistry or biology, our impulses or our effects, our loves or our loathings. These things are part of us, but there is a crucial no-thingness about us – a “dimension” which doesn’t match the mere thingliness of the rest of the world.

This means that, properly, we can’t say what we are in worldly terms, in the same way that God cannot be said in worldly terms.

This is a bit different from where we started, when I suggested that we struggle to sort the many things we are into an order, to say finally what we are. We struggle in this because we tend to think only in terms of the confusing array of things we do and are done to us, and then try to make sense of them.

But the mistake here – the sin, even – is to imagine that we can calculate ourselves, that we can reduce ourselves here to mere cogs operating according to complex laws and that there is somewhere a hidden solution to all we feel is unresolved about ourselves.

Everything we do and everything which is done to us is, indeed, part of us. And matters.

But we are more than this. There is a proper “not yet” about us, an appropriate “not quite there-ness”, an unthinkable-ness, a built-in incompleteness which is our being in but also somehow “above” everything else. This above-ness originates in God’s distinction from all things but being for all things. And it has its worldly reality in our distinction from each other, while also being given to be there for each other. We cannot say what we are, we are not-quite-there yet, because there is another not-quite-there sitting next to us who needs us or can give us what we need. And this is our incomplete completeness.

The word “God” is the most useless of all our religious – and non-religious – words unless, when we say it, it sets us free from ourselves – from our fears and anxieties, our calculations and controls – and, in all this, overcomes our distance from the God who is not quite there and opens us up to the not-yet-there other who shares this world with us.

It all sounds pretty complicated, I suppose, but this is not because God is complicated but rather because we have made ourselves so, imagining God wrongly and so getting ourselves wrong.

To put it all more simply, as John the Evangelist does: Love. Love one another, and everything else will fall into place, and you will be complete.

This is the God in and by which we live and move and have our being.

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Pentecost
8/6/2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In part adapted from February 9 2014 [Off RCL]

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Easter 7
1/6/2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———-

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

We want to argue the morals here.

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

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

———-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Easter 6
25/5/2025

Psalm 67
John 2:13-22

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One light,

one life,

one home

for one family in God.

God’s zeal is for this.

Let our zeal be for the same.

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Easter 5
18/5/2025

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

Sermon preached by Elika Schaumkel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

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Easter 4
11/5/2025

John 2:13-25

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Easter 3
4/5/2025

Psalm 30
John 1:1-13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, indeed!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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