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Pentecost 18
1/10/2023

Philippians 2:1-11
Psalm 25
Matthew 21:23-27

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In a sentence:
We are true to our calling when our words and actions reflect our convictions

The divided self
In our gospel reading today, the elders and the chief priests demand of Jesus, By what authority do you do these things? (“these things” including the overthrowing of the temple marketplace). Rather than answering directly, Jesus poses a counter-question about the perceived authority of John the Baptist, now dead. Fearful of the consequences of answering honestly, the elders and priests are forced into a public and dishonest agnosticism: “…we do not know about John’s authority…”

The public nature of their refusal to know is critical. They know very well, of course, what they think privately but they dare not think this out loud. In this dishonest turn, the elders sever the relationship between their “internal” and “external” selves: what I am in myself and what I am in public are here two different things. My private self is created by my thoughts, experiences, emotions, desires, and so on. My public self is what I think I need to be to protect my private self. The elders and the chief priests defend themselves in their private beliefs by refusing to have a public opinion about John.

Most of us do the same. We can be different in ourselves from what we are in public. I don’t mean here to things that are properly personal and inappropriate for public spaces. I mean rather those circumstances when we find ourselves doing the kinds of calculations the chief priests and the elders do in response to Jesus: knowing what we think but sparing ourselves the grief which would come from speaking it, choosing to divide ourselves into two identities – the self I think I know and the self I show. God gives us each one face, and we divide it into two, each side looking in different directions, each ear listening for different things. Jesus’ challenge to the religious leaders (and to us) leads to a similar affirmation to what we considered a couple of weeks ago – that we are what we do in the dark. When we speak of a person as having integrity, we mean that she is in the light as she is in the dark.

Authority as integrity
The clash in our reading today is not quite about personal integrity but is about authority. The effect of Jesus’ response here is to assert that authority rises from a single voice, from both ears hearing the same thing. Jesus’ opponents – with most of us – know two authorities, while Jesus himself knows only one. Jesus’ authority is founded on the cohesion of his inner life and outer ministry.  In contrast, the priests and the elders – and we with them – are divided in themselves; they are spiritually “schizophrenic” (Greek: “divided mind”), subject to multiple voices. Our authority evaporates in our dissembling and deception, for we are shown to be divided.

Such dishonesty about myself before others arises from fear: I don’t trust the world with my true self. And perhaps this seems to be fair enough: the world is a dangerous place and a self-preserving instinct does not always deny God or our true selves.

Yet, dishonesty like this does not only arise from fear but also gives rise to fear, because no one really knows what’s lurking beneath the visible surface. We are what we do in the dark, and we have reason to fear what that is. This fear breeds dishonesty, duplicity and suspicion, and all this dissolves community.

In contrast, being the same in myself as I am in public gives rise to love and trust. This is not easy and is often dangerous. I have to put myself at risk by revealing who I am so that you can know what to expect from me when the relationship between public and private is pressed.

Now, all of this is very nice, but it’s just not how the world works. And so we suffer and find we cannot trust. The debates about the Voice at the moment, our constant preparation for war, our refusal to act decisively in relation what might be a looming climate catastrophe – these have to do with the absence of authority, the lack integrity.

The cross as authority
The touchstone in Christian confession for understanding this tension in us is the cross of Christ. The cross is Jesus subject to the effect of what is revealed in the debate about authority in today’s Gospel text. The religious leaders, divided as they are in themselves, reject the possibility that what Jesus says and does is integrated with God, and he is crucified. The cross marks the powerlessness of divine authority in the face of worldly power. And the story should simply end here – one more tragic effect of human fear and loathing. And it would, were it not for Easter – for the resurrection.

This is not to say that the resurrection is a happy ending for Jesus which promises us also that, whatever happens, we’ll end up smiling. That might be true but it’s not very interesting, because we have to live here and now, not there and then. The resurrection of Jesus is not a happy ending but the invitation to look again at the cross, now not as failure but as triumph.

The gospel sees the cross as the sign of Jesus’ authority – the sign of his integration of inner call and outer action. On the cross, Jesus remains true to his calling, which is not to be crucified but, in all circumstance, to be true to the God who sent him. This integrity with his calling, however, is not a “power”; it is authority as authentic being. Power, in the sense we usually mean, springs from the kind of division in the leaders as they avoid the truth in responding to Jesus. Our division of ourselves is an act of power – a manipulation – and this kills.

The cross is powerlessness; there are no two ways about it. In terms of worldly power, there is nothing to see in the cross but the tragic crushing – again – of the powerless. But the gospel is not about power but about authority and authenticity; on the cross, Jesus stays true despite the divided self of the world.

This hardly seems like good news. When Jesus calls us, someone said, he bids us, Come and die. Only those who lose their life will save it. Is this good news? It is only good news against the backdrop of two things we don’t often admit. The first is that we are going to die anyway, and the second is that the divided self of an inner heart hiding behind an outer façade is its own kind of premature death. In light of this, the question becomes, Where is true life to be found?

Authored by God
The gospel’s response is that true life is found in integrity. The cross is where Jesus triumphs in the face of evil by being true to the love of God. And so, for Christian confession, the cross is the authoritative event in human history. The resurrection is the evidence that true human being is possible even in a death on a cross (Philippians 2). And so it is here that true human being is authored. Here, God writes (with a “w”) what we are to be, for we are to live as if the world of duplicity and disintegration cannot keep God out.

Authority in Christian confession is anything which declares that God will be near even in death and decay.

God will be near when bombs explode and forests burn and referendums fail.

God will be near when she dies, and when the church doors close for the last time, and when the divorce papers are signed.

God will be near when the diagnosis comes, when the weight of shame threatens to crush, when  the money falls short.

By what authority does Jesus do what he does? Who “authors” him?

Jesus – rejoicing with his friends, clashing with opponents or gasping on the cross – is authored by God.

And so also for us. Our authority – our integrity – springs from being and doing what God calls us to be and to do. Our faith is true when it is matched in our actions.

This is what God honours.

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Pentecost 17
24/9/2023

Exodus 16:2-18
Psalm 105
Matthew 20:1-18

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

What is the point of the Church? The building, the ritual, the symbols, the music, the week in and week out? What are we trying to achieve with all this? And not just the weekly service, the whole apparatus of it all: the theological college, the books in the library, the Bible studies, the agencies, schools, the Synod offices? What is the Church for?

The Church exists in an intermediate space within history. The time between what some theologians call the “already” and “not-yet” of divine salvation. After the “already” of Jesus’ saving work through cross and resurrection; and before the “not-yet” of the final consummation of all things.

This eschatological horizon frames the life of the Church as it plods along through the mundane rhythms of history. By “eschatological” here I mean the grand end towards which history is ultimately aimed: the end and goal which is the reconciliation and renewal of the whole creation; the end and goal which is God’s complete dwelling all in all within and among creation itself — walking in the garden with humanity once again.

The church’s life is sustained in this intermediate space, so the story goes, by the foundation and promise established by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And the Church is carried forward by a future hope: the final enthronement of this same Lord, where every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

In this intermediate space the Church is perhaps a vessel which carries faithful souls from saving promise to final consummation. A vessel which seeks to add as many souls as possible to the voyage. And to make of the passengers a good crew for the journey.

To what end, then, the Church? To be the lifeboat for a world bound for destruction, and an enjoyable cruise for those aboard the ship? All these rituals, and songs, and sermons, a series of onboard entertainment for the cruise?

Our daily lives together mere small, trivial, fleeting fancies awaiting God’s making good on Jesus the divine down payment.

Is that the point of the Church?

Set in the context of grand — eschatological — history, the parables of the Kingdom can help guide the Church’s life between the times. Parables like the one we have heard in today’s Gospel reading, of day labourers working in a vineyard. These parables can be a kind of key for addressing the questions raised by the Church’s place between promise and fulfilment, between the already and the not-yet, between the foundation and future. Like all good parables, the story of the day labourers in the vineyard helps to unsettle and recast our understanding of ourselves, and our place within God’s redemptive project. It can be read as a parable of the long day of the Church’s existence in history.

The parable of the vineyard workers takes place in the context of a long, but single day. The vineyard owner goes out early to the marketplace and hires workers for the day. The practice of day labouring was fairly common in the ancient world, and indeed is fairly common around the world today. A day’s work should guarantee a day’s pay at the price of a day’s provisions.

Labourers intent on ensuring they get the work they need to survive are wise to get to the marketplace early. Ready to accept an offer of work, lest they arrive late and all the work is gone. Labourers who are late to the marketplace risk missing a full day’s work and going without. In the great reversal of this parable even those who are late to the worksite are given the full day’s wages — much to the chagrin of the diligent workers who stood ready and waiting early in the day.

In the context of the early Christian communities who first heard this text we can imagine the kinds of issues which come to mind. The tensions between the Jewish believers who stood ready for the coming Messiah early in the day, as it were; and the Gentiles, who came untimely late.

The Jews, of course, had spent their lives in hopeful anticipation for God’s vindication and arrival: the coming of the Messiah, the outpouring of the Spirit, the liberation of Israel and the wrapping up of history. Their deep devotion, recalling the stories of Exodus and Exile, kept alive the flickering hope of God’s reward. They had been eager to take their place in God’s harvest, keeping alert from the earliest dawn.

Who, then, are these Gentiles, those untimely born, who only recently came into the fold of this Jewish renewal movement — as if only at the end of the day? Not even with a requirement for circumcision, nor food laws, nor seemingly much else beyond the confession of the Risen Jesus.

The point here isn’t so much about the disjunction between law and grace: Torah observant Jews supplanted by Gentile converts — there is enough evidence of Jesus’ own Torah faithfulness throughout Matthew’s Gospel to put that idea to rest. Rather, the point is to pay attention to the basis of inclusion in the workforce. It is the needs of the vineyard and its harvest, and the generosity of its owner; not to the work or the pay of the labourers that really matters.

That new labourers are brought into the vineyard late in the day perhaps suggests that the abundant harvest demands even more work than the labourers can provide. The harvest is plenty but the labourers are few. The vineyard’s harvest has more than enough for everyone.

So too the generosity of the vineyard owner is not tied to the work of the labourers, but to their need. Regardless of whether a worker begins in the morning or at dusk, their need for wages and the provisions those wages pay for does not go away. The generosity of the vineyard owner is not simply in paying everyone what they deserve, but in returning again and again to the marketplace, seeking out new labourers so that none would be without.

The work of the church, like the work of the labourers, does not serve first and foremost our own satisfaction. The church does not exist merely as an elaborate hobby to while away the time before the miraculous return of Christ. Rather, in this parable is a vision for a community which models to the world a proactive concern that all would have enough, and their needs met. The church ought to be the community which seeks to include everyone in the generous harvest of God.

Set between the time of God’s planting the vines, and the great feast of wine and celebration, the great labour of the Church is to harvest the vines of God’s present work in the world. To align our own need as human beings, with the need of God’s kingdom flowering and fruiting in the midst of the world today.

The church’s life, in this sense, exists not simply between the “already” and “not-yet,” but as a labour which stitches together the promise and fulfilment. So that the gap between them might be revealed to be no gap at all. Not to build God’s Kingdom, which is God’s alone to build, but to be ready at the present harvest to gather in and celebrate the fruits of God’s work in the world.

The task of the church, then, is not to be the keeper of safe passage through a world bound for destruction. The task of the church is to be co-workers with God in the fruiting work of reconciliation in the world already. To be witnesses of joy, to be partners in justice, to be doers of mercy. The church’s life is caught between the times, but it is not defined by an absent past and distant future. The church’s life, and all its apparatus, serves the harvest of plenty where God calls all humanity into the present work of new life. Where there is more than enough work to do, and plenty enough to be enjoyed by all.

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Pentecost 15
17/9/2023

Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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History bears witness to the primordial human reactions to being threatened, offended or hurt – aggression, retaliation, vengeance, retribution, saving face. These are the basic instincts of our humanity, and they have terrible consequences for families, communities and nations; terrible consequences that we see throughout our world.

These basic instincts provide a context in which we hear Simon Peter seeking to clarify the leadership responsibilities given to him by Jesus. He asks: ‘Lord, how often should I forgive? Should I forgive even seven times?’ To which Jesus replies: ‘Not seven times, but I tell you seventy-seven times.’ This reflects the tradition of Psalm 130 that, with God, sins are forgotten and forgiveness is unconditional and unlimited: ‘If you, O Lord, should remember sins, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be worshipped.’ Jesus knows that keeping count is not true forgiveness, but merely the postponing of vengeance until an opportunity arises to inflict a more painful retribution.

He tells a parable about a slave who owes his master 10,000 talents. Given that a talent is more than 15 years wages, this is a debt of such magnitude that it could never be repaid. The slave falls on his knees, seeking his master’s patience and claiming that he will repay the debt, which is completely ridiculous. And yet, in an extraordinary act of mercy and forgiveness, the master cancels the slave’s debt and sets him free. The former slave swaggers off, and happens to meet a fellow slave who owes him a much smaller debt. But the forgiven slave is not forgiving. He assaults and imprisons his fellow slave. The forgiven slave has received mercy, yet he doesn’t practise it. He’s been set free, but he ignores the obligations of this unexpected and undeserved liberty. His community is so distressed by this injustice that they tell the king, who summons his former slave, and rebukes him: ‘You wicked slave, when you pleaded with me, you received mercy and forgiveness. Why haven’t you shown mercy and forgiveness to others?’ The king orders that the slave be tortured until he can repay his entire debt.

And just as we imagine that the slave has received his just deserts, we’re interrupted by Jesus offering his commentary on the parable: ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ It may sound like hyperbole, but Jesus knows that the practice of forgiveness offers liberation from the seductive power of vengeance that breeds violence and disfigures all that God has made good.

We recall that, in Matthew chapter 6, Jesus teaches his disciples a prayer that has the practise of forgiveness at its core. At first glance, this prayer seems to imply that forgiveness is transactional – that we are forgiven only if we forgive others, or that forgiveness is proportional – that we are forgiven in equal measure to our forgiveness of others. But the Lord’s Prayer actually proclaims the reign of God, whose heavenly will arrives on earth among those for whom forgiveness is the source and destination of covenant life. Jesus is not merely offering his disciples another spiritual resource; rather, he teaches them a prayer that expresses his own faithful ministry, his own trusting death, his own newness of life. Indeed, it’s a prayer in which he himself is present and active. The will of God being done on earth as in heaven is nothing less than the forgiveness and reconciliation that leads people into the life of Christ, crucified and risen.

This is the point being made by the apostle Paul when he writes to the church at Rome, to challenge disunity in this new Christian community. Paul encourages them in this way: ‘We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.’

I noticed in this week’s order of service some words by a grieving widower expressing his appreciation for the care he’s received and his ‘deep feeling of belonging in a covenant community’. Belonging to Jesus Christ is a privilege and a responsibility’; it offers much and it expects much. Indeed, it invites the surrender of our own basic instincts in order that we might participate in Christ’s disruptive insistence on forgiveness, through which we’re drawn into God’s future for all humanity. A couple of weeks ago, the Rev. Tim Costello, wrote an open letter to church leaders on the Voice, in which he recalls how the gospel is proclaimed through the church’s distinctive lifestyle. He writes: ‘From its earliest days, the church has navigated conflict and inequality. Jewish Christians insisted they would not eat with Christian Gentiles, until the apostles made it clear that transcending those divisions was at the heart of living out the gospel. They had the courage to overcome resistance, and the message of freedom in Christ and one family in Christ soon carried across the world.’ ¹

In the book of Genesis are two stories that I find particularly moving, and both are stories of unexpected forgiveness and reconciliation. Genesis 33 recalls the reunion of Jacob and his bother Esau, who’d parted years before in bitterness because Jacob had stolen his brother’s birthright and their father’s blessing. Believing that the passing years will have done little to diminish his brother’s rage, Jacob anticipates their reunion by sending numerous gifts to Esau as a peace offering. On the eve of their encounter, Jacob wrestles through the night with a shadowy figure, and is blessed by a transformed destiny as he is renamed Israel. As Jacob limps towards his brother, Esau breaks into a run, not to attack Jacob but to embrace him, and Jacob declares: ‘To see your face is like seeing the face of God, since you have received me with such favour.’ And Gensis 45 recalls how Joseph, the son of Jacob sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, is now in a position of enormous power as governor of the Egyptian Pharoah. The brothers arrive in Egypt seeking food to take home to their famine-stricken community. Joseph now has the opportunity and power to make his brothers accountable for their violence towards him, and for a while it seems like he might do precisely that. But he becomes distressed by their suffering, and ultimately embraces them in reconciling grace, later declaring to them: ‘What you intended for evil, God intended for good.’

These ancient stories deeply reflect the purpose of God in Christ, crucified and risen, who forgives without limit, cancels all debts, and offers the life of reconciliation and peace. The psalmist declares: ‘If you, O Lord, should remember sins, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be worshipped.’ And Charles Wesley explains how this works in the life of community: ‘All praise to our redeeming Lord, who joins us by his grace, and bids us, each to each restored, together seek his face.’ In the midst of all that seeks to divide and conquer, may the Lord of grace give you courage to pursue his peace, as we share in his ministry of reconciliation.

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

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Pentecost 15
10/9/2023

Romans 13:8-14
Psalm 119:33-40
Matthew 18:15-20

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In a sentence
The ministry of Jesus in the world’s dark places is a call to us to be, ourselves, light

As in the day
Though it is night, St Paul declares, live “as in the day”.

Clearly, he doesn’t mean, Sleep less! Rather, he takes the natural division of day and night and uses them metaphorically to develop a subtle account of the human situation after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The day-night metaphor serves Paul in two principal ways. The most obvious is the suggestion that the night is nearly over, and that it is time for sleepers to wake. Dawn – the expected return of Christ – is about to break; awaken, then, and prepare for it.

But it’s important that Paul’s call here is not built on the threat that God is about to arrive, so you’d better look busy at good works. (Although, more good works is always good! ). The possibility of living day-fully despite the night is found in the ministry of Jesus. For Paul, even Christ on the cross is night inhabited “as if in the day”. This is God in the world’s night. The resurrection of Jesus reveals not only(? ) that heaven is coming but that, in the person of Jesus right through his ministry, heaven was already present, in the world’s night. It is just this Jesus whose future is coming.

Night as day
This means that Paul’s metaphorical night and day are now not a thing which will pass or arrive but are interwoven here, in the moment within which we live. Time now no longer “flows” – second by second, hour by hour – from bad night to good day. Time is now a choice: to continue to sleep is now to acquiesce to the dark, letting it tell us what to do or to be. To awaken is to contradict the night, without wiping it away.

When Paul reminds us, then, “You know what season it is”, it is not to present the threat of the proverbial bus which might run me down tomorrow, so that I might get right with God now. He means rather: though it feels like night, life is possible here and now. The day is not so much “coming” as an addition to night, or its completion. The day is an overlay of the night, with the implication that we are what we do in the night.

Paul’s own account of what constitutes night-like activities is somewhat moralistic, although covering the kinds of things most people would think should be avoided – drunkenness, debauchery, jealousy, and the like. To these, we might add other modern immoralities operating under the cover of darkness: the anonymous internet troll hides in the dark, as does the hidden-in-plain-sight child molester and the online scammer.

But darkness is also active in more subtle ways. Consider our modern denial of death, treating it as a night we would rather pretend is not there. Or consider our next month in politics in terms of a struggle over what is night and what is day in the form of debates over the question of the Parliamentary Voice. What are we to do with the dark colonial history and its continuing effects? We cannot simply declare – as elements of the No campaign do – that the night is overcome with the passage of time, and we are now in a new day. The night continues, but the glimmer of day is possible.

And debates about global warming will themselves doubtless heat up if the coming summer here is like what it has been in the northern hemisphere this year. What does Paul’s “as in the day” look like in the deep night of an intensely carbonised economy?

Being day
Of course, living “as in the day” is not always straightforward. But Paul calls us from any refusal on our part to see, as if we had grounds to claim that we are blinded by the night. Christ on the cross is the presence of God in the dark, God’s kingdom come. It is by this strange light that the church sees. The call to discipleship is the call to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13. 13), and be such light in darkness. Take up your cross and follow: be day in the night. Be hope calling to despair. Be forgiveness where it is not sought. Be mercy.

None of this is because “God is coming,” and we better be ready. It is because God has already come, light shining in the darkness, revealing the truth and destiny of us and all things. God’s approach in the night of the world is the only thing which will light the darkness in and around us. For God is neither afraid of the dark, nor hides in it, nor simply washes it all away. God is the possibility of day in the night.

And this is what the disciples of Christ are to be as well. We are here today because we suspect that – though it is night – day is more than a rumour.

More than a rumour, it is a revelation – in the ministry of Jesus – and a calling – live “as in the day”.

Let us live, then, as in the day, as light in the midst of darkness.

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Pentecost 14
3/9/2023

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105
Matthew 16:21-28

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In a sentence
We cannot (re-)construct ourselves, but find wholeness in God’s construction of Godself

“Who am I?” asks Moses. Who am I to do what you have asked?

Moses was many things. He had Hebrew roots but was probably raised as something like an Egyptian prince. He was a known murderer who now hides in the hills. He was married to Zipporah, who was neither Hebrew nor Egyptian, and now watched over his father-in-law’s flock. It is this multi-fractured Moses who asks, “Who am I?” as counter God’s request.

We are all fractured like this, perhaps increasingly so in late modern society.

The fundamental fracture in our lives is natural: the knowledge and experience of death. Death tears at us and through us. If I was a child or a parent, a spouse or a friend, death forces the “Who am I?” question upon us: Who am I? What am I now that she, he is gone?

Alongside this natural fracturing of our identity are myriad social, political and historical ones. At a national level right now, we are wrestling with the re-discovery of what it means to have a colonial history. The question of how to respond to this discovery has driven a wedge between us – between the post-colonial peoples and the indigenes of the land, as well as within both of those communities themselves. If, a couple of generations ago, mainstream Australian society knew what “Australian” meant, that is now under renegotiation, whatever the outcome of the approaching referendum.

The church has experienced a massive fracturing of identity since the 1950s. If once it was the engine of much of what happened in society – or at least partner in that action – the church is now often simply overlooked or perceived to be an obstacle. “Who are we?” is a question hidden within a lot of talk in small congregations and shrinking denominations. We ourselves at MtE have something of this question in our minds as we begin to find what it means to have sold our historic property and now to be sharing this one.

And there are myriad fractures in social and economic experience which are similarly shaking our sense of human identity. The deeply anti-social possibilities of social media come to mind, or the impact of telephones and cars on the integrity of local communities, or the raging debates about race and gender.

That Moses’ question is over 3000 years old reminds us that, in fact, the fracturing of identity is scarcely new. The “times” – where we find ourselves – are less the problem than we ourselves. The looking glass is cracked, and its angled shards now fracture the image of God in our own image. But it has always been so.

We are here today, as always, seeking an answer to that irrepressible and urgent question: Who am I? Who are we? We ask this because the answer tells us “what to do”. If I am a parent, I know that I should care for the kids; if I am a consumer, I know that I should buy and consume; if I am a leader, I know that I should lead.

Moses, of course, has a working theory on who he is, something out of the mix of being Hebrew, Egyptian, murderer, fugitive, husband, son-in-law, shepherd, and the rest. Not being dead yet requires such a theory if we are to be at all – if we are to do some next thing. But the encounter with God casts his working self into question. “Who am I to do what you ask, God? How do my many parts become that one person?”

Left hanging, this question would be enough to let Moses off the hook. He could, like many of us do, just bob around on a sea of possible identities, never taking one up or living into it – just bobbing, up and down.

But Moses dares to press the matter by asking God, “And who are you? Who would I say sent me?”

God has already been identified in the story as “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. This might be heard as similar to Moses’ own fractured self-identification: I am what I have been – prince, fugitive, shepherd. But now God recasts this identity by giving the divine name: “Yahweh” (“Jehovah” in the old money). The Hebrew here is typically translated as “I am” or “I am who I am” – “Tell them, I Am sent you”. Yet this is too static. “I am” is the old God: I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel. “I am” is the God of the fractured past out of which uncertain Moses has arisen, with his “Who am I?”.

But Hebrew grammar – not to say, the very nature of how this God interacts with God’s people – requires that the translation be more open: “I will be who I will be”. This is more than grammatical correctness. The Moses who is constructed as a pastiche of unreconciled human fragments is met by the God who claims to be utterly self-determining. The Hebrew Moses whose Egyptian name was the first fracture in his identity is drawn towards wholeness as that name is spoken now by the undivided God: “Moses, Moses, come and be made whole”.

It is God’s self-determination which overcomes the divisions in Moses, God’s       open nature as “I will be what I will be,” which integrates the divided heart.

While Moses is trapped in – or trapped between – the clamour of many identity-voices, one voice addresses him as a whole and draws his many parts together. This is the God not only of the Hebrew Moses but of the Egyptian; not only of the shepherd but of the murderer, not only of who Moses was but of who Moses will be.

And so it is for us. The divided national heart, the unmoored church and congregation, the multiply-intersectioned soul, the dissipated spirit, the unresolved yesterdays that keep us from reconciliation within ourselves and with each other today and tomorrow – these are met with the call to rest in God’s own resolve: “I will be what I will be”

Moses is called to be more than the sum of his parts or, perhaps more evocatively, he is called to be less than the sum of his parts. He is no longer to be all things in competition with each other, consuming him in their contrast and conflict. He is called to be one thing – God’s “thing”. So now, though he will still burn, he will not be consumed with the work of making himself. Moses is no longer to exhaust himself in the construction of a soul out of pieces which don’t fit together, as if each piece mattered as much as the other. God’s call is to leave this drive aside, and to live. Recalling Jesus’ call to take up the cross – Moses, with each of us,  is called to lose his life in order to save it.

With me, God says, you are to be what you will become. Because I will be, says God, so will you be.

My being is the gift of your life. So live.

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Pentecost 13
27/8/2023

Exodus 1:8-2:10
Psalm 124
Matthew 16:13-20

Sermon preached by Chris Booth

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I think that what we have head in our reading from Exodus is a story of new life flourishing in the midst of death. It starts off by setting the scene: the people of Israel are living in Egypt, but a king has risen to power who does not remember Joseph. He doesn’t remember Joseph, the Israelite slave who became one of the most powerful people in Egypt, who brought his people into Egypt so they could survive the famine and find a homeland. This king doesn’t remember Joseph. And yet he rules using Joseph’s methods. Joseph was a shrewd ruler, buying up all the grain on behalf of the king, because he knew that a famine was coming. When the people came asking for grain Joseph made them sell their land so they could eat, then made them sell themselves into slavery. If we’ve just read straight from Genesis into Exodus, it’s hard not to hear that this new king is doing the same kind of thing. When he notices the Israelites, another nation living among the Egyptians, he feels afraid, and so he enslaves them – and puts them to work building storage cities for storing up wealth.

The king is worried that these foreign people living among the Egyptians cannot be trusted – that they might rise up and join Egypt’s enemies in the event of a war. And he becomes more and more afraid, because enslaving them and putting them to work at hard labour has not made him feel any more safe. In fact he now feels like there are even more of them and they’ve spread to every corner of the country. Everywhere he looks he sees a potential threat. And so he feels he has to treat them more harshly, forcing them to work harder and harder.

It seems the king feels particularly threatened by Israelite men, and so he goes to Shiphrah and Puah, who serve as midwives to the Israelite women, and he tells them to kill all of the Israelite boys as soon as they are born – commanding them to participate in genocide against their own people. The thinking would be not just that there would eventually be no young Israelite men for the king to be afraid of, but also that this would mean young Israelite women would need to find Egyptian men to start families with, and this would dilute Israelite identity. This is the same kind of thinking that informed policies of removing Indigenous children from their families in these lands that we now call Australia. An attempt to erase culture and identity.

The king does not appear to be afraid of women, or suspect that women might conspire against him… He may be the most powerful man in the land… but he knows nothing about childbirth… Perhaps he’s never been present at the birth of a child. And so Shiphrah and Puah are able to take advantage of this power that they have, the knowledge of bringing life into the world. And so they disobey his orders, they are able to make something up, and he has no idea, he can’t question it because he knows nothing about birth. And they manage to do it in a way that messes with the fears and prejudices that are swirling around in his head, the fears about Israelites being stronger than Egyptians – able to give birth in a flash, before a midwife can even get there. The king may think he has the power to kill, but Shiphrah and Puah are more shrewd in their protection of new life. And it seems that God is pleased with them. God blesses them in their trickery, in their conspiracy to protect the lives of children.

This doesn’t stop the forces of death. The king sees that the Israelites are continuing to multiply and grow stronger. And he demands that all the little Israelite boys be thrown into the river, the great river that flows down from the mountains of Ethiopia and Uganda, through Sudan, to irrigate and fertilise Egypt. This river nourishes the earth and makes life possible, but the king wants to use it to kill. Once again we are told a story of Israelite women’s resistance against genocide. The mother of one of these little boys keeps her child hidden – I don’t know how – until he’s three months old. And then, at three months, she knows she can’t hide him any longer. So she comes up with a plan that will allow her to keep her baby. She makes a basket for him made out of papyrus, makes it waterproof, basically turns it into a little boat or an ark. And she takes him down to the river in the basket, right near where the king’s daughter is bathing, and places the basket in the water, leaving him there in the river. She’s done what the king has said. Obviously, when the baby notices his mum is gone, he starts bawling, the king’s daughter hears the cries and comes and finds him. The child, Moses, is adopted into the royal family, but raised by his own mother, who ends up receiving a parenting payment to raise him. Moses ends up being raised in such a way that he knows both worlds, the world of the Israelites and the world of the Egyptians, and this prepares him to lead his people out of slavery, into freedom.

Is there somewhere that you can think of, where you have witnessed new life flourishing in the midst of death?

In the gospel reading we heard about Jesus asking the disciples who they think he is. All of their initial answers are things they’ve heard others saying, suggesting that he is someone who has somehow overcome death. Some say that he is John the Baptist, who they remember being executed by the king. Some say that he is Elijah, an ancient prophet who never died, but was whisked away to heaven. Some say that he is Jeremiah, or another long-dead prophet. All of these speculations point to Christ’s death and resurrection later in the story – as though the crowds are anticipating it without realising. And Simon Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. We aren’t told here what kind of Messiah though.

What kind of Messiah is Jesus? Jesus is the kind of Messiah who comes to us and joins us in a world where human life is fragile and resilient. We have heard this at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel. Like baby Moses, baby Jesus also risks being killed in a genocide by a paranoid king. His family flee and find refuge in Egypt, where they can raise him safely. In this story Egypt is a hospitable place, sheltering the baby Jesus and his family from harm.

In our church, and I actually believe in all the churches, there is a lot of fear about death and decline of churches. That’s a real concern, and I think we need to be present to the grief of dying. But in the midst of that, I think we also need to be present and attentive to where new life may be growing. Jesus reassures us that the gates of death will not stand against the church. As we continue our worship today and throughout the week, lets be present to the grief of death, and alert to the signs of new life springing up in the midst of death.

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Mark the Evangelist Uniting Church @ St Mary’s, North Melbourne; 24/8/23

2 Corinthians 4:16-18
Psalm 121
John 10:11-15, 27-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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 Jn 10¹¹ [Jesus said,] ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

And the verse before it, which we didn’t hear:

¹⁰ ‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’

When we read John’s Gospel, we are aware that it has a different scope. As we say on one of our Uniting Church prayers at the Table, ‘In time beyond our dreaming, you brought forth life out of darkness, and in the love of Christ your Son you set man and woman at the heart of your creation.’ So begins the work of the Trinity of love.

And the stories he tells are not so much about events in Jesus’s life as reflections on the meaning of that life, that death, that rising in glory from the cross. They are, as he says, ‘signs… that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’. (20:31)

One of the signs is Jesus’s testimony, ‘I am the Good Shepherd’.

You may like to have Norma’s ikon on the front of the service booklet where you can see it.

Between the 2^nd and 4^th centuries, it was the main image of God in human form, then it largely disappeared but is now universal. I suppose it was a familiar sight in ancient Palestine; indeed, there are statues from pagan times of a beardless youth with a lamb slung around his neck which might have provided a model. (Sheep in their time were smaller than ours!) I’m not good at dating sheep, but Norma’s one is, I think, still young, and Jesus – the mature Jesus with a beard – is holding it firmly.

The halo forms the shape of a cross around the head, and you can see the marks of the nails in his hands. ‘The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’.

And since you’re looking, you can see the letters O and N, by which the icon-writers identified the principal figures. The O at the top is for ‘the’, and another O (Ω) hidden under the lamb on the left side, and N on the right, form the Greek word for ‘Being’, Existence Itself, and translates the Hebrew I AM – so there you have our text.

Jesus, after all, was not a shepherd, even when young, and on the whole in the Bible, shepherds get a pretty bad press. They may be wolves who attack the flock.  Ezekiel in particular goes to town, calling them thieves and robbers ‘who do not care for the sheep’.

But the addition of the adjective ‘Good’ to ‘Shepherd’ takes the matter right out of an agricultural context. The Roman and English traditions which paint Jesus cuddling a lamb with little children at his feet in a flowery field have missed the point. It is not meant to convey a family-friendly, sentimental image to make us feel warm inside.

At the centre of this passage is the One ‘who lays his life down for the sheep’. In all the references to shepherds throughout Scripture, none goes this far. This shepherd goes even beyond the mere ‘good’. And it is saying something else: this goodness is not human virtue; it is divine, it is of the essence of God. The combination of ‘shepherd’ and ‘good’ should have been a shock to its first hearers.

The evangelist is saying something important about Jesus. The human divisions and conflicts in the earlier verses are set aside. This shepherd knows his flock, and the word ‘know’ means to know intimately, knows every one of the flock and knows them thoroughly (or in the old use of the word, ‘throughly’, through and through). And the flock knows their shepherd, just as thoughly.

This is exactly how St John speaks of Jesus’s relationship to his Abba, Father. And he goes on to offer the same intimacy to us: ‘I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’

And amidst of the babble and noise that surrounds us – more than a shepherd ever knew – we know him by his voice.

^2’7My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.’

I looked at dozens of Good Shepherd ikons in my preparation. They come in all shapes and sizes, all comfortably settled, half-awake, gazing nowhere.

This is where Norma’s ikon has a surprise.

This is a lamb that knows, knows her keeper (Ps 121) and knows she is held. Her eye is unwaveringly intent on the Good Shepherd. I think that is a detail unique to Norma’s ikon.

For he has heard her voice too and has come, picked her up and carried her, he, the holy One, the I AM.

‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.’ (John 10: 28)

‘So [as St Paul wrote] we do not lose heart.’ (2 Cor. 4:16).

Into that loving, life-keeping embrace, we entrust our beloved Norma.

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Pentecost 12
20/8/2023

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Psalm 67
Matthew 15:10-28

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In a sentence:
The love of God finds us all in the end, whoever we think we are

Dogs
Today, continuing on from the readings of the last couple of weeks, we hear another miracle story. Yet this one is different because the problem it presents is not the problem of miracles but the shock to modern sensibilities of what Jesus says (recall the scandal of the parables). The modern response here is less, “Jesus could not possibly have healed the girl,” than it is, “Jesus ought not to have said that.” “Dogs” is not a very nice way to speak about people who are different from us. Such a sentiment, then, on the lips of Jesus, is more than a little “uncomfortable”. If Jesus doesn’t jump in quickly with the mandatory celebrity apology, he risks being cancelled.

He doesn’t apologise, and if the church also can’t quite cancel Jesus, it’s common these days to imagine that here even Jesus reveals himself to be “human” – even he has things to learn. And thanks is then given to God for this courageous woman who, through her persistence, teaches Jesus an important lesson. And yet… Why is it that, in every other instance in the Gospels, Jesus is apparently always the one who understands, leads, directs, challenges and rebukes appropriately, but that just here – at an otherwise unremarkable point in the story – he drops the ball? More likely, he does not, and our gut response springs from simply seeing and hearing the wrong thing here.

What, then, is being seen and not perceived, heard and not understood, as we hear today’s story? If we attend to what in fact happens in the exchange between the woman and Jesus, we see that her faith is affirmed not because she shames Jesus but because she agrees with him: “Yes, Lord”; “Yes, Lord, a dog, and yet even the dogs gather up the crumbs from under the children’s table”.

Faith
The woman’s “Yes, Lord, and yet…” is met with Jesus’ response, “Great is your faith!” But what is this faith? It is not that Jesus could heal her daughter, otherwise her first request would already have proven her faith, and led to the healing. Her “faith” is that Yes, it is the children’s bread, and yet it is for me, too. Her faith is that she recites the promise of God that all the nations will be blessed with, or through, God’s “children”, Israel. Her faith is in the one who made this promise, and she speaks God’s promise to Jesus – with you, Jesus, crumbs are enough – and Jesus replies, Amen.

But can crumbs be enough? Not with “real” bread, which is why Hotham Mission has put much time and money into food programs and food security research. But this is not a story about bread; it is about relationship, participation and blessing. Bread is here a metaphor for these things, which is to say that these things are as essential for life as bread.

The woman’s quip about crumbs stretches the metaphor beautifully, by which she declares not “I also deserve to be fed” but rather, “So abundant is God’s provision of bread to his children that there are leftovers” – “crumbs”. (It is worth noting in passing that we’ve only just heard of a miraculous feeding, after which twelve baskets of “crumbs” were collected, and another follows today’s story, after which seven baskets are collected.)

Whereas our concern tends to be about the woman’s feelings at being called a dog, she appears in the story not as one offended by Jesus but as one confident in the quality of the bread he brings to the “children”. We are, then, not to defend her but to believe as she believes.

She believes that it is through God’s few that the many are blessed. And what does this mean, practically? How is this also our truth – for that is the only reason we might bother with it? We can perhaps drive the point home most clearly with a little “embodied” demonstration. Turn and look at the person next to you, and now say to them, “Woof!” Are we not all here “Gentile dogs”? The church – which almost completely Gentile – has its very being from the crumbs of God’s love for Israel. We forget this, of course, and in the forgetting we harden grace into law. We make ourselves the source of a blessing we can give or withhold, according to whether we think we’re dealing with children or dogs.

We here are one small part of the emergence from a blessing which took place in a particular time and place which is not our time and place. We are a part of the people of God not because God is one and loves everyone the same way. God loved someone else first, and we have been picked up along the way. Of course, in the end, it does not matter who is first and who is second, who is fed at the table and who is not, for all will be fed.

But we forget the ordering at our peril – the peril of self-righteousness – and at the peril of all to whom we might be a blessing. This is because we obscure the way God works in the world at the risk of what God actually offers. We speak so easily in the church of forgiveness but what is forgiveness if not a gift of life from outside of us, a blessing with its origin outside of us?

For‑given
And this leads us to a connection which is little short of horrifying for good-minded people such as we think we are: we can now see in our story this morning that the Canaanite woman is “for‑given” for not being a Jew.

This, of course, makes no moral sense, because morals are all about responsibility for fault, and this woman is no more responsible for her heritage than anyone could possibly be. This is why we take offence here, moralists that we tend to be. It makes no moral sense but it makes good theological sense to speak of her being “for‑given” in this way, because forgiveness is properly defined not by the fault but by the gift. And the gift is always the same: Sinner? You are mine, says God. Canaanite? Mine. Dead? Mine.

The basis upon which that extraordinary woman made her appeal to Jesus is the same basis upon which the Christian becomes a Christian in conversion, on which he confesses sin and expects to hear the absolution, on which he takes as his own the death and life of another in sharing bread and wine around a table as a source of new life.

The gift is always the same – that we are claimed by God – and it always comes from beyond us. This is why Christians are called to be lovers and givers in evangelism and the service of others. Love is not mere attraction but is, more completely, gift.

He probably didn’t, but Jesus might have said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of heaven, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a dog who licks up the crumbs under the children’s table.”

The ministry of Jesus was to feed the children, and to let the dogs in. Such love and such a flow of blessing are to be the shape of our own lives.

Let us, then, love and give, puppy to puppy, to God’s greater glory and to the richer humanity of all who still hunger for the children’s bread.

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Pentecost 11
13/8/2023

Psalm 85
Matthew 14:22-33

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In a sentence:
Though it might feel like we are falling, Jesus is a very good catch

Sur‑prise
Last Monday morning, I went down to the Curzon Street church to take some photographs of the inside of the empty buildings before the sale was finalised the next day.

It was a poignant moment, although it was no surprise that the moment would come. Standing in the empty, dusty Union Memorial Church led me to reflect that those who built the place would have been surprised at what it had come to. Reflecting further, the more I pondered the word “surprise”, the stranger it became.

For us today, “surprise” describes something which breaks in as a momentary disordering of our world, whether for good or bad. But the word comes to us from Latin through French, and has a root meaning of “over-taken”. A sur‑prise is a grasping or a seizing. To be surprised is to be captured. Perhaps it’s not surprising(!), then, to learn that the words predator, prey and reprieve are related to surprise.

Now, the problem with getting into the background of words is that we – or the preacher, at least – might be tempted to make modern words mean now what they clearly don’t. And yet, this is precisely what preaching is supposed to do. Our language, like our bread, grows stale with time. Familiarity here breeds not so much contempt as simple indifference or even ignorance – that we don’t know what we are saying. We know, of course, that our times are constantly changing. But as the times change, our language no longer works as it once did. This is particularly the case with social, political and theological language – language which gives contour to the heart of our being. We could, perhaps, invent new language, and this happens as well. But we also need to strange our language to make it not only new but vital – life-giving.

Consider hearing “surprised” as “captured”. It now becomes the case that we are always surprised because we are always captive to something. We are captive to our bodies – which kind we got and what our lifestyle and age have done to it. We are captive to fear of whatever kind presently presses in on us. We are made captives when we fall in love, to the economy we live, and to our mortality. In various ways and to various things, we are captive, we are seized, we are “sur‑prised”. This is inescapable, whether in our personal lives or in our lives together as a society or a church.

As a community, we were surprised by the problems with Union Memorial Church. We were surprised, in the ordinary sense, by the unexpected movement of the foundations. But, more profoundly, we were seized by the need to do something about it. For about 15 years, we were over‑taken – “sur‑prised” – by the problem. We could more dramatically extend this characterisation of that experience by bringing in the related predator-prey language. Were we not prey to our desires to remain in that place, and to our sense of responsibility for it, but also to the dilapidated condition of faith in contemporary society, and to the financial decisions of the wider church, and to the foibles we each brought to the process? This is not necessarily to criticise anything which happened, but only to make strange our way of talking about it. Were we not grasped – predated as prey – by things much bigger than any of us? Was this not a “sur‑prising”, a seizing, a capture?

I think that this way of talking about what we’ve been through. But it also tells us something about our present experience here, now that we have moved. For though we are now here at the CTM, it has not yet sur‑prised us, it has not yet grasped us, it does not yet hold us.

Falling
And this brings me to the problem of the moment: not yet to be held is to be falling, one of the most disorienting experiences we can have. In its own frightening way, a fall surprises us – it takes us over. We know it is happening but we can’t do anything about it. We have to ride a fall – we have to ride nothingness – to the ground, until the ground captures us again, and not usually very gently.

At last, then let us look to our reading from Matthew this morning. Out on the water, the disciples are seized, surprised, overtaken by the wind and the waves, and there appears in the midst an impossible thing which seizes them more tightly in their fears. It beckons to them but they don’t believe, and so Peter proposes a test: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus replies, “Come.” So Peter gets out of the boat and starts walking on the water toward Jesus. But he notices the strong wind, becomes frightened, begins to sink, and cries out, “Lord, save me!”

We here have stepped out of a boat on the high seas, imagining that it is better to respond to Jesus’ command than to let the ship suck us down. Perhaps some of us have also done this in some way in our own lives. But, having disembarked,  there is a lot of water to cross before we get to him, before we are held again. And in that space, it is as if we are abandoned: Lord, is that you? Is this you? Or have you forsaken us? (We might note here, in passing, that Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross is just such a “crossing of the water”).

“Lord, save me!” Peter cries, and Jesus reaches out and seizes him and says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” But doubt what? Doubt that water can hold us up? No. Christian faith doesn’t believe that, with enough faith, we could walk on water. We believe rather that, though we are falling, Jesus is a good catch.

Caught
No small part of the life of faith – in fact, of any life – is waiting to be caught in God’s secure hands as we take a step away from what can no longer sustain us into some new sur‑prising. Faith is living in the expectation that we will be caught, that we will be surprised by the embrace of God. Of course, we work hard most of the time to ensure we don’t fall; this is what strategies, planning and training are all about.

But falling is inevitable, and once it happens, we can only let it happen. If we are falling then, the only question is whether we think we will be caught, or come crashing to the ground.

In terms of the gospel story, we ride the fall waiting for the hand of Jesus to grasp us by the wrist and drag us waist-deep through the fearful nothingness to himself, to God.

If this is what we believe, our present and unavoidable finding-again of ourselves in a new place is not the end of the story but a necessary thing if we are to discover God again and anew.

We once had to “lean into” the decision to move here; with Peter, we started walking on the water.

Now that we are here on the water let us again lean into what this surprising God will do to make this time and place ours, and to remake us for this place and time.

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Pentecost 10
6/8/2023

Isaiah 55:1-5
Psalm 145
Matthew 14:13-21

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In a sentence:
In the hands of this God, the one pearl, invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish is enough

Parables versus miracles
Over the last couple of weeks, we have heard – although not looked very closely at – some of the parables of Jesus. Today, by contrast, we hear a miracle story.

We respond differently to the various reports of what Jesus said and did. Mostly, we are happy with the parables, if sometimes a little mystified. Many of us, however, suffer from a nervous twitch when it comes to the miracle stories. We feel an urgent need to get around the miracle, an urgency we don’t feel when it comes to the parables.

The parables and miracles might be contrasted as thoughtful, scratch-your-head texts (“Hmmmm…”) and spectacle texts (“WOW!!) – even if we might be sceptical about the miracle report. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven added to the dough” – “Hmmm… That’s something to think about”; “Jesus broke bread and fed over 5000 people – “Wow! Did you see that?”

Of course, we might wonder about the miracle, but that’s not the real problem. The problem is that we don’t say “Wow!” when we hear that the kingdom is like leaven added to the dough, and we don’t really scratch our heads wondering what it could mean that a hungry mass is satisfied with one bag of groceries.

We touch here upon what someone raised last week in our brief conversation about the readings: why does Jesus justify his use of ambiguous parables with a troubling quote from Isaiah, along these lines?

‘To you [disciples] it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to [the crowd] it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13.11ff)

Jesus means here that these parables are not easy. What they relate to is about as easy as it is to perform a miracle. The Kingdom of Heaven in the parables is a very strange thing.  A little later in last week’s collection of parables, Jesus asks the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” (13.51) They answer, “Yes”. For Matthew, it is important that this is a “YES!!” but it was more likely an uncertain “Ummmm…yeahhhhh…could you say all that again?”

On the one hand, the shock to the senses of the miracles illustrates what the parables are about: they have to do with the miraculous. On the other hand, the miracles are mute and meaningless without the parables. A curious thing about today’s account of the feeding of the 5000 is that it doesn’t actually tell us what we are to do with it, which is also the case with just about every other miracle story in the Scriptures. There is no “Believe this” – that I did it. There is no “Do this” – as I have done. There is no “watch for this again” – so you’ll know when I’m around. There is just the story, and the narrative moves on, kind of like how the parables are told, leaving us to scratch our heads.

Here you are, Jesus
With all this in mind, let’s consider today’s particular story. In the middle of the account is an exchange between Jesus and his disciples about who will feed the masses. “You give them something to eat”, Jesus tells them.

The standard reading is that here the disciples are being tested, and fail. And they do fail. But what is the test? Again, the common reading is that they didn’t have “enough faith” – they couldn’t summon the magic – to do what Jesus then had to do in their stead.

But if the feeding has something to do with the Kingdom of Heaven, “not enough faith” doesn’t ring true with the Scriptural understanding of who does what in that Godly kingdom. For a contrast with these disciples here, we might jump gospels and watch what happens in Cana when the wine runs out (John 2.1-12). There Jesus’ mother Mary, the quintessential disciple, nudges Jesus and whispers, “They’re out of wine,” and then tells the servants, “Do whatever he says”. Problem solved.

This suggests that if the disciples fail a test before the hungry masses, it is not that they didn’t have enough “faith” to feed them. The failure is that they didn’t see that the test was whether they would defer to him and respond immediately, “Here you are, Jesus: we can toss in a few loaves and a couple of fish.”

The work of the miracle is to communicate that the world the parables describe can only be realised by God. The Kingdom is God’s work. Put differently, the parables tell of the miraculous nature of God’s reign.

What does this mean for anything?

It means that all of our great efforts at working miracles – our planning, our negotiations, our careful liturgy and our new organ, our food programs, education programs and asylum work – these things are but a few loaves and a couple of fish to be presented with the words, “Here you are, Jesus”.

The miracle – the unbelievable thing – is that this is enough. In the hands of this God, the one pearl, the invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish… is enough. And faith, when it comes – the faith that so little is yet enough – this faith is what it looks like for God’s kingdom to come, on earth as in heaven.

“The” parable, and miracle
So little is enough with God because at the heart of our confession is a single, baffling parable: “A person of faith freely walked a path to condemnation on a cross”. “Hmmm…”, we might say, “Not sure I get that”. That one parable is met with a single, spectacular miracle – “The crucified man was raised to life”. “Wow!!”, we might respond, “Although not sure I can believe that”.

But it also applies the other way around: the raising of the condemned man is the parable, and the steady path to the cross is the miracle. We don’t get the parables without the miracles. The easy-to-comprehend cross is only ours with the impossible resurrection. The glorious resurrection is meaningless without the gritty reality of Jesus’ life and death. What we find easy in the parables and hard in the miracles lean in toward each other, fill each other up, and there the Kingdom of Heaven is revealed.

When the kingdom of this God draws near, everything becomes a parable, and everything a miracle – even us with our hesitations, our lack of faith or vision, our fears and our graspings after empty hopes. And the same for our more “positive” experiences – our dreams and visions and joys; the Kingdom of Heaven “makes strange” everything, for the good.

Our life together as Mark the Evangelist in this place, and the quiet hopes and anxieties of our hearts, are the stuff of parable and miracle, where God’s will is done, on earth as in heaven. We will be God’s parable and miracle.

Let this be the light in which we do our next thing.