View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 5
2/7/2023

Romans 6:12-14, 20-24
Psalm 89
Matthew 10:40-42

---

In a sentence:
God renews our times with the gift of a new tomorrow

Time and character
In his book Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell unpacks the conditions which cause epidemics of the social and economic kind – epidemics of behaviour. What causes a long-available brand of shoes suddenly to sell wildly all over the place, or an online video to go viral?

Among the many factors Gladwell considers is the impact of context on behaviour. Our assessment of our own character – and so of our behaviour in different circumstances – will usually be a judgement we make independently of those different contexts. Gladwell shows how insecure that assessment might be, precisely because it does not attend to the impact of context.

Among several examples, Gladwell cites a study based on what we know as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. This was a study of the difference context made to the actions of a group of seminarians (students for Christian ministry). The students were sent across campus to what they were told was an important appointment. Planted along their path was a person in some serious need. The study asked was whether priming these seminarians in particular ways would change their response to the needy person. If the importance of the appointment were exaggerated, and the students were told they were running late, would this affect how many would play the Samaritan and stop to help the needy person? The answer was, Yes. Significantly fewer students helped the needy person when their context – in this case, whether or not they were running late – put more “pressure” on them. Change the context, and you change the behaviour, the expressed character of the person.

Drawing on wider research, Gladwell concludes that context shapes our expressed character (our actions) much more than we realise. This is not a fatalistic conclusion – that we are trapped in this way – but simply a realistic observation: the temptation not to do the “right” thing is strongly influenced by where we find ourselves at the time. In certain contexts, we are tempted to argue that the ‘time’ is not right for this or that good thing we know could otherwise have been done.

If we are what we do then (which is difficult to deny), it also seems true that the times in which we live make us what we are: we are our context.

This must be true in a general sense: to be born in a particular place and a particular time makes us different from those of other places and times. But the issue here is not this general truism. The question is whether we are also – or could be – more than the time we live in.

The sense of time I’m using here is obviously not merely the ticking of a clock. It is the social and political times in which we live. And my interest is not merely that we are in this kind of time, but how we are here: does our time make us, or do we make time? Gladwell’s boot is oriented towards how circumstances change us and can be manipulated to change us. How can we sell more phones or get more people to volunteer their time for some worthy cause? This is the times making us.

The possibility the gospel poses is the opposite: we are called to make time. This is not a matter of “finding” time in the crush of things we usually have to do. The time-making of the gospel is the re-making of the times in which we live, and so the remaking of ourselves. It is a new perception of life.

Paul: Christ as the time of our lives
This is the possibility Paul addresses our few verses from Romans today, even if he doesn’t do it in these terms. Extending what he had to say in the previous chapter (Romans 5), Paul contrasts slavery and freedom, wages and gift, death and life, and so on. This language gives his treatment of the question an almost irredemiably “religious” feel, and so makes it quite alien from the lives we think we normally live. Who thinks these things at breakfast, at the hairdressers or when binge-watching a new TV series?

But Paul is not “religious”. His concern is “the human”. Is the human bound or free? What are her necessities, and her freedoms? Where is she overwhelmed by death, and where by life? Or, in the terms we have just been considering, what kind of time does she inhabit? In contrast to the time of sin and death represented by Adam, Paul simply posits a time of God and life represented by Christ. If there is any sense in which we are “in Christ” as believers, it is then not a merely mystical thing. We are “in Christ” in the real lives we live. Paul says, “Let your experience of the time given you be different. Let Christ – and not Adam – be the time of your life”.

What does this mean?

Making time
To be in Christ doesn’t mean, ‘Be religious”. It means to be in the times everyone else is in, but to do so in the likeness of the humanity of Jesus. This likeness contradicts the times. It is a strange new order in the midst of disorder. It sees the world everyone sees, but now seen in a different light. Jesus and his opponents did not differ about the world in which they lived, but only in how to live in it: do we receive our times, or do we make time? Do our context, our history, and our relationsihps make us, or are we making something of them?

There is a sense in which the time in which we live is always Yesterday; we always live in received time. How we live in that time is the possibility of a re-made Tomorrow which is not simply Yesterday done over again but is something new. This is what it means to “make time”. Jesus was lively, new-creation time in the midst of stale, old time. So confronting was this contrast that he was crucified for it. To speak of Jesus as risen is to speak of the possibility of such new time now, even among us.

As a congregation, of course, we are shifting to a new space. In the sense of “era”, this represents a new time. But it will be easy to mistake the mere shift as a newness which matters. It matters much less than whether the quality of our time changes. In Paul’s terms, Adam’s time – the time of Yesterday – is an ever-present possibility, wherever we are. But Christ’s time opens up new tomorrows. Those new tomorrows are the time-making to which the gospel calls us. To make time is to reconstruct our time, to reconceive it. It is to bring order out of deep chaos, and so the gift of God is to become God-like, Creator-like. It is not our context which makes us; we are made to become makers.

And what does this feel like? To borrow from the Gospel reading today, it feels not like peace but like a sword. It might be hard – for us and for others. Making time does not avert difficulty or death. Again, Jesus died because of this. To make time is to change our future. This is not that we won’t die, but that our death itself will be changed.

We move to the next thing, not in timid acquiescence to the times but in the effort to become new, to make the times new, and in calling others to join us in this.

This is the life of the gospel, as individuals and as a community. Let us then, grasp the gift of the gospel, and make time, anew.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 4
25/6/2023

Genesis 21:8-21
Psalm 86
Romans 6:1b-11
Matthew 10:24-39

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

---

One of the reasons we like to read and reflect on passages of Scripture is because readings from the bible comfort the afflicted. The trouble is that far from comforting the afflicted, much of Scripture afflicts the comfortable. One of the complaints we might want to make about those who chose the readings that are included in the three-year lectionary cycle is that they have not only included the bits that comfort. They have also included bits that afflict. The readings for this Sunday fall into that category. In his letter to the Romans, Paul wrote, ‘Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?’ Matthew writes words of Jesus, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ The story of Hagar and Ishmael is touching but it relates why future enemies of the chosen race were permitted to survive and flourish.

It prompts the questions, ‘Why were these accounts recorded in Scripture?’ ‘What might have been happening at the time of writing these passages?’ The same kind of questions may be asked of any story. Why tell it? How does the story connect with what is going on in our lives now?

The story in Genesis about Hagar and Ishmael was told to the tribes of Israel over many centuries but the first five books of the bible were probably written down in the form we have them in our bible today at a time of crisis, at the time when Israel and Judah were in exile in Babylon. Matthew’s gospel was probably written after 70 CE when Jerusalem fell, and the temple was destroyed. Paul wrote to Rome at a time of lively philosophical and religious debate. Writings we know as Scripture today were written at times of crisis and upheaval. It might be argued they were written because of the times of crisis and upheaval of those who read and heard Scripture.

It needs to be noted that these writings did not just relate to a series of events without some interpretive comment. We can detect deliberate messages. Each writer writes about certain events but they are adding comment as to how their readers can understand what the events mean for them. Sometimes their comment flies in the face of what readers might expect.

An obvious example of that comes when Matthew has Jesus say, ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword…’. He goes on to spell that out in graphic and brutal terms – specific family members who normally would be expected to get on and have each other’s backs are the very ones who will be set against each other – stabbing each other’s backs. Did Jesus really say this or did Matthew invent this to make a point? There are some tests that bible scholars use to determine the likelihood of a genuine quote. One test is if an act or saying feels out of character or awkward, then it is more likely to be a true quote. Matthew tells us that Jesus, the prince of peace said, ‘I come to bring a sword.’ – very awkward. Another test for authenticity is if Jesus is turning an idea on its head like in the verse that concludes his saying about peace and swords and family members hating each other – Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.

Paul has a reputation for saying weird things that get people thinking differently about life and death. He has said that God’s grace is more than a match for the world’s evil. If there is more evil, then there is more grace. Well that’s good. God’s grace is very good. The best way to get more grace in the world, according to Paul, is to sin more, be more evil.

Paul comes right out and says it, ‘Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?’ Having asked the question, the competent debater sets out to answer. The response is extraordinary and unexpected. I would have said something like – if you have been in debt and someone pays it off for you and gives a bit extra for good measure how can you expect help if you go into debt again. Surely nothing wrong with that answer, after all, Jesus said much the same in one of his parables. The problem with that answer is that Paul has just said that God’s grace knows no bounds so the debt would be covered again, wouldn’t it?

Paul comes up with a gob stopper. Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? Certainly not. Why not? Because we are dead.

‘Well, what sort of answer is that?’ I hear you cry. How is being dead going to help? Well, if you are dead no one can harm you anymore. The worst that can happen has happened. What people think of you doesn’t matter anymore. You cannot be frightened.

In the world of Paul, Christians had to live fearlessly to stay faithful. No problem, says Paul. You are dead, the fear of being debilitated by sin and death has passed. How can this be? Well, you are baptized. So? Well in baptism we have entered into Christ’s death. The baptized die with Christ. That is what the symbolism of water is in baptism. That stuff can kill you. This link between death and water is more obvious in those places where total immersion is practiced. In the Uniting Church we have tried to make the water more visible by pouring it in generous proportions into the font. I can remember as a student participating in a baptism where the container for the water was like a little crystal butter dish. There was so little water that at one baptism the session clerk thought there was no water at all and went to get some. If he couldn’t see the water from one metre away, how visible could it have been for the congregation. It is very difficult to feel threatened with death when you are being sprinkled with water from a butter dish. But Paul says this is actually what it is about.

‘Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.’

Often baptistries are in the shape of a cross. I have pictures of baptistries and fonts designed to remind the church of graves and coffins.

Morbid? It would be if the symbolism stopped there. It would not symbolise the truth of the matter if candidates for baptism only went down into the water. But that is not the end of it. The baptised come up out of the water, dripping wet like one newly born. The newly baptised child is taken away from the font and presented to its new family, the church. That family promises to be a life-giving community. Within the family of the church the Christian is not immune from evil and death. There is no magic umbrella to protect us from the real world. But it is the company of the church that acknowledges the reality of evil and death but does not concede that it has the last word. More powerful and significant is the life-giving grace of God. If that is the focus of the Christian we don’t need to fear all the other stuff.

Remember you are baptised and be thankful. In baptism you have died. Now you can live.

God breaks out of every scheme of logic with all the loose ends neatly tucked away. So we tell stories, stories ancient and new, stories of God and faithful people who, despite the complexities of life, trust the Lord of life to be faithful to his promises of life.

It is not a matter of God changing to our concepts, but of us changing to God’s concepts. Of losing in order to find, of being bound in order to be free, of dying in order to live. That calls for trust in God. Jesus said, “Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 10: 39)

Bronwyn Pike is the Executive Director of Uniting, the church’s social care agency. In the Religion Program on ABC radio in 2002, when she was Victoria’s Minister for Housing and Aged Care, Bronwyn said:

I believe absolutely firmly that people’s lives can be transformed in a relationship with Jesus Christ, and I think that we’ve tended to think that maybe people’s salvation is only found in psychology or counselling and all of these things help, but true transformation is still there and available when people come to understand that by giving their lives away, they find it.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 3
18/6/2023

Romans 5:12-21
Psalm 116
Matthew 9:35-10:8

---

In a sentence:
In a world of death-dealing dominions, the gospel offers the life-giving lordship of Jesus

How Much More
There’s a lot going on in our reading from Romans this morning! I’ve tried to give some indication of the dynamics of Paul’s argument with the colourful version of the text on the pew sheets, to make more evident a few of the directions taken in the text.

Of those various connections and emphases, I’d like us to consider together this morning is the Much and the More and the Surely, which pop up several times throughout the text. If something has gone wrong in us, Paul says, Much More Surely has God brought about something good and remedying in Christ. How Much More the gospel gift is, over the fruit of human brokenness. Christians, in Paul’s view, are How Much More people – are a people of God’s excess.

But what does that mean for the contemporary experience of the church in this society, today? In particular, what does it mean for us as a congregation about to move to a new place. Are we moving into a space and a being which is More, or Less?

More, or Less?
The Less-ness is obvious. This congregation is what remains of a community which built a 900 seater church (UMC), and of another community on the other side of North Melbourne, and of another community which worshipped in Parkville, and of numerous other church communities which have long since closed. The Less in all this is unambiguous. And we move now to another site, Less the history and the grandeur of the ecclesial spaces which have been enjoyed in this place for over 150 years.

At the same time, after 12 or 13 years of being squashed into this hall, there is a sense in which we are moving to a More, given the space, the aesthetics, and the clean and accessible toilet facilities we expect to enjoy the CTM!

Yet we also know the risk. What is More at the CTM might just be the burning brighter of a lamp just before it goes out. This would not be a real More but the particular way in which the Less finally arrives.

If Christians are a How Much More people, in what way is this so under these circumstances and given the admittedly very possible Less outcome? For all our careful planning and attention to refining the memorandum of understanding, the hiring agreement, and property sale proceeds, we cannot turn our face from the possibility of death. And there are no communities around which are obviously How Much More than our own: it is change and decay in all around, we see. The Less of death’s dominion seems to be spreading to swallow up the How Much More people.

Adam and Christ
Yet St Paul is across this. His argument in our passage today looks, at first glance, to be somewhat abstract and highfalutin in its theological twists and turns. But what he is basically doing here is speaking about our existence through two related but contrasting conceptualities, marked by Adam and Christ.

These two ways of speaking about being human are like the “overwhelmings” our study groups have been considering over the last few weeks, as we have read our way through David Ford’s The shape of living. Paul might well have written in terms of “overwhelmings”, but his expression is “dominion”. To be in Adam or in Christ is to be subject to a comprehensive power,  to one kind of lordship or another. But these dominions are not symmetrical; what they offer is not equal and opposite.

Adam stands for death and decay, and we certainly see a lot of Adam around us. Paul saw this too; the motivation for his letters to his little congregations around Asia Minor was precisely the experience of change and decay. But Paul’s gospel is of a God who raises the dead and calls into being what does not yet exist. This is the Much More in what we have heard from him this morning. Yet the Much More is not something added on top of what we already have. It’s not the promise of compensation or reward after an experience of So Much Less than we hoped for. For this reason, the resurrection of Jesus has to be understood not as a mere reversal or undoing of all the Much Less which went before, particularly the crucifixion. Instead, the resurrection shines a light on the quality of the life of Jesus despite appearances in the opposition he met and the apparent judgement of the cross.

The Much More, then, is not a life to come; it takes place in this life. It was the life of Jesus before the crucifixion and even in the crucifixion. Jesus is never the Less but is always the How Much More. His life and the death is a denial of death’s dominion: the denial that life must ultimately be subject to the darkness of death’s shadow.

Living well, dying well
The Much More, then, is not a quantity. It is not something extra added at the end to balance the scales. The Much More is a quality. The question is not how long our lives are and, therefore, whether there is a More to come for anyone one of us or for the congregation in our new location. The question is whether, in whatever time that we have, we are slaves or free. This is the difference between Adam and Christ. It is the art of dying well because I have lived well. In this sense, there is for each of us the possibility of a How Much More.

Such a life is lived with death already behind it, rather than death before it. This is a strange way to put it because we are yet to die biological death, but the language here must be odd because the thought the gospel invites us to think cannot quite be grasped.

Of course, we will still die, and we will grieve our dead. But scandalously – and it is scandalous, in view of the pain death brings – it is almost as if for Paul death were a state of mind, and that the gospel calls for a change of mind – the meaning of the word ‘repent’. This repentance is not the denial of death but the refusal to live under death’s shadow. This a question of dominion: who is Dominus, who is Lord? Not death. Christ.

In the biblical story, there stands between Adam and Christ, between slavery and freedom, Abraham, about whom we had a bit to say last week. We are Abraham invited to turn from Adam’s death to Christ’s life. Go to the land that I will show you, says God – even Christ himself.

This is easier than it seems. We saw last week that all Abraham and Sarah had to do was live in a strange land, have a child, and tell him a story. And the effect of their doing that is that we’re here today thinking about Adam, Abraham, and Christ, about life between slavery and freedom.

And now we are going to a strange land, and there goes with us a God of How Much More. All we need to do is have a child and tell her the story.

If this How Much More God is faithful, which is the true heart of our question about God, our work will have been done if we do go,

and bear,

and tell.

From there, the How Much More of God will take care of itself.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 2
11/6/2023

Genesis 12:1-9
Psalm 33
Romans 4:1-12
Matthew 9:9-13

---

In a sentence:
God is free so that we might be; God’s call to us is a call to be free to be ourselves and that others might also be freed

Of spiders, fear and freedom
On Tuesday night, I hopped into the car in preparation to pick up our boy and some his friends from volleyball training, when there ran across the outside of the windscreen a medium-sized ‘huntsman’ spider, silhouetted against the twilight sky. Most of us can be reasonably sensible about spiders; this is less true with the huntsman. Essentially harmless to humans, their size makes them fearsome-looking and fast. It isn’t going to hurt you, but it could end up anywhere in no time – in particular, up the leg of your trousers or sleeve of your shirt – and no one wants that!

I was inside the car, and the doors and windows were all closed, so I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried, yet. But I know from previous experience that these critters can hold on pretty tight, so after picking up the kids from training, I didn’t, as usual, open the windows or sunroof – which is usually necessary when you have several teenagers in a car after 90 minutes of vigorous exercise. The last thing I needed at 100km/hr on the freeway coming home was arachnophobia erupting in the back seat, or the front!

God’s terrifying freedom
You probably didn’t notice the spider in our readings this morning, but there was a big, fast, hairy one there, which we usually call “God”. ‘Go’, God says, ‘…[and] So Abram went’. Perhaps we are so familiar with the story that we miss its terror. But consider: Abram and Sarai are just getting on with their lives and minding their own business when, out of the blue, God commands: Go.

The problem here is surely God’s capriciousness. The command is unexpected, unfathomable, unreasonable and untameable. The last thing any of us needs in our relatively stable and comfortable lives is a big, hairy spider-like God dropping into our lap and running up the front of our T-shirt.

The only possible justification for an approach like this from God is that it matches – accords with – true human being. That is, it only makes sense for God to act this way, and for us to be interested in such an approach from God, if this is the kind of expectation from life necessary for our fullest, most authentic human existence.

Our reading of God has to do with our reading of ourselves. Do we have to be like Abram (and Sarai) – free in the way that God is free – in order to be happy? The invitation in the story of the call to Abram and Sarai is to ask ourselves: Are we better when we are as free as God? In the story, God’s freedom to command ‘Go’ is met by Abram’s freedom to respond in the way that he did: ‘So Abram went…’ Is this what we need to be?

Faith as openness to freedom
Notice how our understanding of faith would have to change if this were so. Faith would not be ‘believing in God’ but the suspicion that the freedom of God seeks our freedom. God is free, and we can be too. God is big and hairy and fast, and we should be too.

The freedom at stake here, however, is not an abstract anything-you-want liberation from all constraints. A promise is attached to God’s call to Abram and Sarai: “Through you, the nations will bless themselves” (or “Through you, the nations will be blessed”). That is, Abram’s freedom will bear forth the world’s freedom.

Abram and Sarai’s story, then, poses a two-pronged question: Is there a God who is spider-free, and does that God’s freedom set us free?

But how do even we answer a question like this? How do we “prove” there is such a God and that we should be such people? We can’t do it “theoretically”. That is, we can’t argue ourselves or others into radical freedom.

We prove, rather, it in the old sense of the word, which is to test it or, to probe it (“probe” and “prove” are closely-related words)

And Abram and Sarai do probe God, and God continues to probe them. And Abram doubts, going so far as effectively to prostitute his wife to save his own skin. And Sarai also doubts, which is enshrined in the changing of her name to Sarah. But God prevails – proves to be up to the probing.

But let’s now skip across to what St Paul says about Abraham in today’s reading from Romans. Paul’s argument hinges on the conviction that what is the case for Abraham is also the case for us. The presenting problem is circumcision, but this is a passing surface question. For Paul, it is crucial that Abraham’s response to God is a heart-thing and not a law-thing. That is, Abraham doesn’t earn God’s favour by jumping through some moral hoop. Instead, Abraham ‘believes’. For Paul, this means Abraham trusts. And God counts that trust as enough.

For Abraham to have done the right thing and earned God’s favour would be for Abraham to have bound God: Here’s my ticket, you owe me now, let me in. But instead, Abraham sees, accepts and acts as if there is a future in God’s command to “Go”, and this is the basis of his relationship to God. Paul’s concern is the kind of relationship we have with God – whether it is a bound relationship or a free one. Are we good with God because we are bound by what God commands, or are we good with God because God simply loves us, and we act within that love? Put differently, are we slaves to God and the gods, bound to do what is required, or are we as children who act not out of requirement but from the love of God?

Our freedom in God’s freedom
Our being free or bound is something each of us needs to prove – to probe – at a personal level. When and where do we feel ourselves bound, and by what, and what are the possibilities of freedom? Where are we acting for the wrong reason when acting for the right reason would set us free?

I’d like us to think together for a moment, however, about our shared life as a congregation and where we find ourselves now. There is a strong sense in which the move we’re about to make to the CTM is not free. Were it not for our building woes, we almost certainly would not be considering moving, although that might still have been a good idea. Nonetheless, we are moving because we must; we are bound to move. This is not freedom, and it’s less than God’s intention for us.

What, then, does freedom mean for our move? One thing it means, as I’ve said before, is that freedom is a stance towards what is unavoidable. In our case, that stance will look like a “leaning in” to our future at the CTM rather than a leaning back. This is not to say that we can’t regret or be sad about the need to move; this also matters. But it is to say something about how we must face the future, as individuals and as a congregation.

For this reason, our Church Council has decided that we will move in six weeks’ time, perhaps before we actually have to, simply in order to demonstrate to ourselves that we are moving to a place where we expect to live, and not a place to die. There is, then, no reason to lean back in fear of what’s in front of us. You lean back from death but forward into life. Everything dies, but it only dies properly after it has lived, and we still have plenty of life in us.

Precisely what our new life together will look like is difficult to see and, so far, we’ve really only guessed and speculated and fantasised. As with the story of Abram and Sarai, there are many things – for better and for worse – yet to unfold.

But let’s consider the promise to Abram and why it matters that we choose to live freely: In you [God says], all the families of the earth will be blessed. That is, Your freedom will lead set others free. Paul’s point is that this promise is also made to us: be free, that others might also be free.

We don’t know how this can or will be so. Abraham and Sarah died in the “promised land” without the promise yet being fulfilled. But we are here today because God’s freedom elicited from them enough imperfect freedom that we still tell and reflect and act upon their story 3500 years later.

We might, then, dare to pray that, 3500 years from now, people might be found who are reflecting on our story. The gospel is that this is as likely for us now as it was for Abram and Sarai back then.

And we should not merely pray this way, but we must act as if it will be so: choosing tomorrow freely, without fear, sons and daughters of Abraham and Sarah, testifying to the freedom of God, for the blessing of the freedom of all the world.

God. Can. Do. This.

View or print as a PDF

Trinity Sunday
4/6/2023

Genesis 1:26-2.4a
Psalm 8
Matthew 28:16-20

---

In a sentence:
Trinitarian faith is the conviction that God is indelibly marked by, and so can heal, human experience

What catches our attention
When I checked the list of the ten “Most Viewed” news items on The Guardian’s website on Thursday, their themes were as follows:

• War crimes allegations
• Queensland vs NSW State of Origin
• The Ben Roberts-Smith defamation case
• Australia’s housing crisis
• Ben Roberts-Smith (again)
• Drone attacks in Moscow
• The rental crisis
• People pursued by debt collectors
• Different drone attacks in Russia
• State of Origin (again)

There is, of course, more than this in the daily papers, but this is the kind of thing that attracts our attention. On any given day, it’s pretty much the same: a predominance of bad things unfolding around us (drone attacks or straining economies), relieved by a few diversions or titillations (State of Origin or some celebrity’s latest peccadillo).

Most of it, of course, is a “long way” from us – someone else’s crisis. Yet, unless we simply stop engaging with the news, we feel around us the low, distant thrum of things falling down, the threat of things which might become our problem as well. It doesn’t go too far to say that we are ‘baptised’ – immersed, soaked – in this shared experience. Of course, there is love-light which shines through and is even to be found in the newspapers; it’s just that the love stories don’t feature in the “Most Viewed” item lists.

David Ford (the author of our current study group book) might characterise this troubled experience as one of the ‘overwhelmings’ which constitute the human being – one of our many immersions and baptisms. Christian faith denies none of these realities; it ‘simply’ locates these experiences within a broader horizon than tomorrow’s coming repetition of today’s news. And this brings us to the church’s trinitarian dogma. Perhaps this is unexpected, for what could such high falutin theology have to do with the deep anthropology of felt experience in the world, to which the daily news testifies?

The human heart of God
An answer can be found in the classic credal summation of this teaching, as we recite about every other week. Here we see the human being right in the heart of God. Indeed, we can see how human experience is the crisis which precipitated the Creed in the form we have it.

The Creed appears in three bits (‘articles’). All we have to notice about this today is given on the front page of the pew sheet this morning – the size of each of these bits. By far, the largest is the middle bit, and the second largest is the last. The middle bit is the largest because it’s the bad news about human existence. This is what appears in the ‘Most Viewed’ list, the thing which catches our attention, the thing which most threatens us. This is Jesus dead on the cross. It is Russia in Ukraine, the US in the Pacific and Israel in Palestine. It is war crimes and train crashes and murder-suicides. The third article of the Creed is more like the Most Viewed diversionary stories; it is the good news, the relief. Yet, it is not mere titillating distraction but a vision of the peaceful resolution of tangled and strangled life.

And notice how small the ‘main’ God bit is at the top – the creator-God article we might think makes the broadest religious sense. By contrast, and challenging a general notion or interest in ‘God’, the Creed places human experience and human longing at the very heart of God and gives these the most space. And this was seriously controversial. At the time of the laying out of the Creeds, the ‘Most Viewed’ items in ancient newsfeeds would have been ‘Church contaminates God with crucified prophet’ or ‘God died, proclaims Christian bishop’ and then, among the diversionary and titillating most-viewed items, ‘Bishop thrown to the lions’.

But the church persisted with its odd theology. The middle article of the Creed is the longest because it places our Most Viewed items at the heart of God, as if these mattered to God, even to the extent that they are part of God. And out of that dull background thrum, slowly, are heard strains of music: resurrection, community, unity, holiness and fullness of life. Discord resolves into harmony, the pavement-pounding of marching armies gives way to the delight of dancing feet, steel melts to flesh and hands which held at a distance now meet in reconciling embrace behind an enemy’s back.

Our story, in God
This is what the church’s trinitarian faith means. If we are baptised into a world of dark Most Viewed stories, Jesus’ command to his disciples that they go and baptise is a command to confer a new story: find yourself here, in the Creed. It is a dark place where we afflict each other, and also suffer with one another. But there is also a promise there. Be baptised into the promise, and start to read more of this story. And not only read the story but become it.

Christian faith is about finding ourselves unexpectedly hidden in the life of God, as the geometry of the Creed shows. To borrow again from David Ford, we might say that we are ‘secreted’ within God – hidden and enveloped within different story – Christ’s story as our own. Our lives are God’s secret, God’s, hidden precious thing.

The trinitarian confession of the church is a story of God-and-the-world. God’s own Most Viewed items are the lives of each one of us. Our lives are not given to be the next tragedy or diversion in the news. To confess God as three-and-one is to know the story of our lives read by God, whose reading of us is always towards wholeness, peace, and joy.

To confess God is in this way is to tell our stories to their glorious end: the life of the world to come, in God.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost
28/5/2023

Numbers 11:24-30
Acts 2:1-21
John 7:37-39

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

---

If we were to consider what we cannot live without, I imagine we’d identify a variety of relational and experiential possibilities:  people to love, nurture and care for us, accepting us without question, and sharing with us our mortal journey;  careers, hobbies, passions and lifestyles that offer purpose and meaning;  communities, places and practices in which we are safe, and in which we find encouragement and belonging;  something or someone in which to invest trust, giving us hope in the midst of the pain of illness or injury, disappointment or grief;  experiences that delight our senses or emotions – that first coffee in the morning or that bit of chocolate after dinner, the physical exercise that releases endorphins to provide a natural high, a piece of music that makes us smile or weep for reasons we can’t explain, the grandeur of outback wilderness, mountaintop panorama, or ocean vista.  And there are more fundamental human needs – food, water and the air we breathe.  Apparently, these needs can be quantified using a fairly simple formula – we can live for about 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water, and 3 minutes without air.

The primary narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures places these basic human needs within the context of faith in the God who calls people into the life of covenant relationship.  Led by Moses out of slavery into freedom, the Israelites begin to regret leaving Egypt, lamenting that they’ve journeyed into the wilderness only to die of starvation.  In response to this, the Lord provides quail for dinner and manna for breakfast.  Then they complain that they’re dying of thirst.  In response to this, Moses is instructed by the Lord to strike the rock at Horeb, and water flows for them to drink.  Moses names that place Massah and Meribah, because of the quarrelling and testing of his people when they ask – ‘Is the Lord among us, or not?’

Centuries later, the apostle Paul recalls these events in a remarkable way.  Writing to the church at Corinth, he interprets the Exodus narrative through the gospel of Jesus, when he says: ‘I do not want you to be unaware that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink.  For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ.’  Paul recognises that the Corinthians and the Israelites share the same struggle.  This is the struggle to recognise that the Lord is indeed among them as the giver of life, not merely in the provision of food and water, but in every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord, calling people into the life of devotion, justice and peace, as creatures of God.

The writer of Psalm 104 reflects on what it means to be creatures of God: ‘All things look to you Lord to give them their food in due season; when you give to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.  When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.  When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.’  In this psalm, as in the creation story in Genesis chapter 1, the Hebrew word for spirit is ruach – the life-giving breath or wind of God.

In the Pentecost story in Acts chapter 2, the Greek word for spirit is pneumatos – the breath or wind of God that manifests as tongues of fire resting on each of the disciples.  This is the hope of Moses and the promise of Jesus fulfilled – the Spirit of God breathed into God’s people that they may dwell in praise.  When the mighty acts of God are proclaimed in every language in Jerusalem, those listening are amazed, thinking that the disciples must be drunk.  But the apostle Peter declares that the gospel of Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy – that God’s Spirit will one day be poured out on all flesh.

It’s interesting to consider Pentecost in relation to the Creedal affirmation that Jesus was ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary.’  This phrase seems to cause such controversy, with some wondering how virgins can be mothers.  Often overlooked are the theological implications of the phrase, perhaps especially the reference to the Holy Spirit’s role in conception.  We can learn from medieval artists who recognise that Mary conceives by receiving the Word, not just through the angel’s message but through the voice of the Spirit.  And just as Jesus is ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit’, so too is his church.  Note the irony in Moses’ words to his agitated apprentice, Joshua:  ‘Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them.’  This is the meaning and purpose of Pentecost – the Lord has put his Spirit on us to make us prophets of Jesus Christ.

Consider the brokenness that afflicts this planet and its peoples:  the loss of purpose, meaning and identity that leads to despair, the struggles for power that promote the manufacture of terrible weapons, the disappearance of fertile land for subsistence farming, the deepening threat of global warming, the insatiable appetite for unsustainable consumption, the false hope in unbridled economic growth, the widening and self-justifying gap between rich and poor, the various self-serving media that sacrifice truth on the altar of greed, the hopelessness of addictions of increasing variety and misery.

Into this brokenness, the Holy Spirit breathes and speaks God’s Word of hope.  This is the Spirit:  who hovers over the waters of creation, bringing forth life out of darkness, who speaks through law and prophets to create a holy people, who settles on Jesus at his baptism to confirm God’s love and call, who empowers the ministry of God’s anointed in acts of healing, justice and peace, who is promised by Jesus to those who love him and obey his commandments, who is crushed by the death of the Son and the grief of the Father, who is sent upon all chaos to breathe once again life into darkness, who rejoices in the re-union of Father and Son, and invites the whole creation into God’s renewing embrace.

This is good news for a hurting world; indeed, good news that God’s creation cannot live without.  This is good news for the congregation of Mark the Evangelist, as it discerns its life and witness, and journeys into a future grounded only in God’s call.

May God breathe the Spirit of Christ crucified into you, that you may be rivers of living water – as creatures of his life, as stewards of his peace, and as prophets of his glory.

Praise to the Father, Christ his Word, and to the Spirit:  God the Lord.  Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Easter 7
21/5/2023

1 Peter 4:12-14, 5.6-11
Psalm 111
John 17:1-11

---

In a sentence:
Fear is always finally that God will not be there ‘tomorrow’, but this we do not need to fear

Being human
Most of us have had the experience of not being able to keep watching the news or reading the newspapers, simply because it has become overwhelming: too much controversy, too much complicated debate, too many shot dead, burned in a hotel fire, dragged out of mangled cars or drowned when overloaded boats succumb to the waves.

The news is distressingly un-new; it simply replays over and over with different actors and, not surprisingly, can be overwhelming. We feel threatened by the dangers which leap out of the television screen, knowing that each person caught in the lens might well have been us, or perhaps we are overwhelmed because we feel we should be able to do something about it but can’t, or don’t know what. When we switch off the screen or radio, or close the paper, we prove the somewhat cynical wisdom: ignorance is bliss.

Over the last couple of weeks, our discussion groups have begun a new book in which theologian David Ford proposes that experiences like being overwhelmed are defining for human beings. We are overwhelmed from birth by family, language and culture. We are overwhelmed by love or grief or by the kinds of things which confront us in the news. Positively or negatively, the human being is inherently susceptible to being overwhelmed, or perhaps even needs to be overwhelmed.

In the same way, Ford then goes on to consider desire. Like the various overwhelmings which define us, these desires can also be positive or negative and can be quite comprehensive. Desire, then, can also be used to describe the human being: the human is a being which desires, and perhaps which desires most deeply to be desired.

Ford’s method in the book seems to be to identify certain aspects of human existence which might be said to be universal, and then to ask how such things are means by which God connects to us. That is, his point is not least that good theology requires good anthropology, and good anthropology points to what good theology needs to address.

The fear of God
I suspect that our experience of fear might be another of those universal human experiences which can be a basis for thinking about God. ‘Cast all your anxiety on God’, writes St Peter in our reading this morning. Anxiety, or fear, pops up several times in this letter. Peter’s community is under persecution, apparently having been marked out as sufficiently different from the mainstream to present some threat to the wider community. But at this point, Peter doesn’t suggest that fear is inherently bad. He allows for it but tweaks it: ‘Fear God’ (2.17), he writes, ‘Do not fear what they fear’ (3.14).

The idea of fearing God seems strange to us these days. We’re more likely to want to speak about ‘loving’ God, drawing a polemical contrast between love and fear: love (good) versus fear (bad). But the Scriptures know us a little better than this. Not fearing would be like not being overwhelmed or not desiring. That is, we can’t do it. The question is not ‘to fear or not to fear’ but what we fear, on the assumption that we will fear something. Peter’s ‘do not fear what they fear’ invites a discrimination between fears, just as we might discriminate between types of love – that ‘love’ which destroys us or others, versus those that build up.

For Peter, it is only Godly fear which properly makes a claim on us; all other fears diminish us. And in this contrast, we see how fear begins to change meaning when borrowed and applied to our relationship with God. The fears which Peter’s community has, and those which most of us have, are social, economic and political. We fear that there will not be enough – not enough money, not enough time, not enough ‘me’. And so we act, out of fear, to assure ourselves of ‘enough’. We can read wars in this light – not least the current war in Ukraine. Political struggles are about ‘enough’: consider the debate around the proposed Parliamentary Voice in these terms. We fear that nothing will change, so that we will still not have enough, or that too much will change and we will lose what enough we have. We fear that we will still not be, or will no longer be, free. Even as we oppose each other, we fear the same thing – that we will be lost, or remain lost. To tweak Peter’s language here and borrow what he says about the devil, this is the fear which devours, the fear that consumes until nothing is left.

‘Do not fear what they fear’, Peter writes. Do not fear in the way they fear – do not fear that there will not be enough. For the fear of God is not a fear that God is a powerful judge, such that we have to do the right thing in case we won’t be enough – in order not to be punished for not being enough. This would be merely to replace a clear and present danger of everyday fears with one which is less clear and in the future. We do not fear God because God is scarier than the other things we fear.

The one thing fearful
Rather, to speak of fearing God is to let go of fear about all other things, although this is a negative way of putting it. To put it positively, to fear God is to be free of the fears which press in on us. Do not fear those things which might diminish you; ‘fear’ rather the God in whose eyes you cannot be diminished.

The psalmist’s ‘beginning of wisdom’ (Psalm 111.10) is, then, also the beginning of freedom. This wisdom is that the fear of the Lord is not fear at all. It is more like a kind of mindfulness – although not quite in the modern therapeutic sense. It is to be mindful – to be mind-filled – not of the unavoidable difficulties and challenges and oppositions which fill our lives, but to be mindful that God accepts you. In all things, we are God’s precious children. We must respond to the challenges and threats, but God’s acceptance of us is not dependent on that response. And so mindfulness of God’s acceptance of us is liberating. If God already embraces us before we do anything, then our actions from within that embrace cannot break it – we cannot fall out of God’s love because that embrace is never not enough.

In the life we each go home to after worship today, in the life the congregation must negotiate in the months and years to come, in the lives we are given to live with each other, we are have enough to do the next thing which will point away from fear to freedom. We have enough to point away from the possibility that we might be loved to the actuality that we are. We have enough to point away from death to life.

In the normal course of things, the ever-present danger is that fear itself might overwhelm us, so that our fear-filled desire for life might in fact lead us to a living death.

But the ‘fear’ of this God is the gift of freedom from fear because, whatever the future holds, in God we have enough. When a God like this is the one thing fearful, there is none to accuse or fear, only the freedom to do the next good thing which must be done, leaving the rest to God.

Let us, then, not be anxious or fearful about the next thing which comes, because this would be to fear that God will not be there, in that next step. And this we do not fear, for God is faithful, and so not only must we step out into tomorrow, but we can.

View or print as a PDF

Easter 6
14/5/2023

1 Peter 3:13-16
John 14:15-21

---

In a sentence:
God gifts us with memory, that we might know we can be different

Faith and politics, yesterday and today
It is a widely-held ‘truism’ within Australian society that ‘religion has no place in politics’.

This assertion seeks to exclude those faith convictions – notably Christian and Muslim – which might make some claim on society as a whole. (More private and internally ‘spiritual’ religion has already absorbed the ‘no faith in public’ requirement of modern liberal societies. This kind of spirituality is already committed to residing just in heads and hearts and not in the broader political sphere).

The rejection of faith convictions in the public sphere looks like the assertion of the public-private distinction which colours our thinking around religion. Our shared idea that politics is public and religion is private is part of the prohibition. But alongside this distinction between public and private realms is our sense of the distance between the present and the past. Faiths like Judaism, Christianity and Islam have deep historical roots. Indeed, they are rooted so far in the past that the question of their continuing relevance is greatly heightened. Are we today not ‘modern’? Are we not people of the present rather than stuck in the past? And so there is no small sense in which the purported irrelevance of faith for modern politics is linked to the distance of faith’s founding events from the present. The further back in time those foundational events are, the less relevant they seem to be for those today who have forgotten them. The historical distance of the crucifixion and resurrection seems to signify Jesus’ modern irrelevance. The past is a private – privy, hidden – thing, and not for present, public exposure.

Put differently, the ejection of faith from politics presumes a politics which does not remember.

Forgetting and remembering
Our gospel text today addresses the question of the impending departure of Jesus and this as a crisis for the disciples. It’s not immediately clear from the text how the crisis is experienced. Clearly, the disciples’ lives have been tightly bound up with Jesus, and his looming departure would create the typical experience of loss and grief at an emotional level.

Yet Jesus speaks not of coping with grief but of ‘reminding’: ‘Though I go’, Jesus says, ‘the Spirit, which the Father will send, will remind you of me’. This answer to the disciples’ worry indicates that what’s at stake here is not the grief around Jesus’ departure but the possibility that everything will be forgotten – first Jesus and then the disciples themselves. I’ve said before, and it needs constantly to be recalled, that when Jesus identifies himself as ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’, the word for truth has the curiously negative sense of ‘not-forgotten’: Jesus is ‘the Way, the Not-Forgotten, the Life’.

The promised gift of the Spirit, then, is no mere ‘There, there, it’ll all be OK’. The Spirit is given because forgetting is bad; remembering matters for true human being – for the continued presence of the humanity of Jesus. It is this remembering which creates the church.

And yet, the point here is not that only the church is a remembering community. This would be to leave us with the modern problem that the church seems – even to itself – to be a people trapped in thoughts about yesterday, and so politically irrelevant. The gift of the Spirit at the departure of Jesus marks the claim that human communities in general (and not merely religious communities) must remember in order to become their true selves. This centrality of memory to identity is the engine of countless ‘amnesia’ plots in films and TV series, with their driving ‘Who am I?’ question resounding in the head of the protagonist. Remembering creates our identity by telling us what we have done and what has been done to us.

Perhaps this is not overly controversial. Yet, even when we remember, we are prone to want to remember only the best and none of the worst. In contrast to this, remembering Jesus involves recalling not only the good stuff but the bad, not only the resurrection but the cross, not only what Jesus said that we liked but also when we suddenly found ourselves the target of his polemic. It is not for nothing that tokens of a broken body and spilt blood are at the centre of what we do at Jesus’ behest, ‘for the remembrance of me’. These gory elements are there lest we forget that the light casts shadows.

So, too, with remembering in any community: the memory is usually pretty selective because it is painful to be reminded of things we have managed to forget.

A nation called to remember
Australian society is presently in the grip of a call to memory: Remember that the Australia we now know was founded as a colony. Remember that colonisation was very often a violent process and, even where it wasn’t, recognise that it was and continues to be radically disruptive of whole peoples. Remember, Australia, and know how we have come to be what we think we are.

The ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and the corresponding proposal of a First Nations Voice to Parliament are two forms the call to memory has taken among us. Without recognition of the importance of memory for identity, these can make no convincing social or political sense. And so, we must understand the place of memory, and the importance of institutions like the Voice which have precisely the purpose of reminding and bringing a fuller identity.

Remembering can be painful. If the promised Spirit reminds those first disciples and even us today of ‘Jesus’, it reminds not only of the words of peace on the lips of the risen one but also of the desolation of the cross. If the resurrection reveals something about the powers at play in the heart of God, the cross reveals something about the powers in the heart of humanity. Heaven is not the memory only of the good things. The church remembers the crucifixion and the synagogue remembers the exile, and both remember the divine judgement read into these experiences. But to forget such things would not simply be to cease being Christian or Jewish; it would be to cease to be human.

The remembering which could be enabled by the Uluru Statement’s proposal of the Parliamentary Voice, with other history-telling processes, will similarly not be easy or comfortable. It will not be easy because we don’t know what has been forgotten and so what might be recovered. It won’t be comfortable because we cannot see the cost of remembering before we begin. It won’t be simple because, sometimes, we will get the memory or the consequences we draw from it wrong. Memory can be wrong or deceived, but this makes it no less important. Errors should be named, but still we must seek to remember rightly, to know ourselves: to know our inherited way of being human. We are what we have done and what has been done to us. These experiences are voices which speak to us and by which we speak, even if we don’t remember them. To remember is to know why we are like we are, and so to see that we could have been different. To see that we might have been different is to realise that we could still be different. Memory like this makes change possible. And we could do with a few changes.

Jesus’ promised gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples is a promised gift of memory. What is remembered through this Spirit is the human experience of Jesus as a revelation of the rich possibilities of human life. To remember this is to see such richness as a possibility, even for us forgetful people of today.

The call to memory in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ is no less a gift: reconciliation requires truth, and truth is Not-Forgetting. And so we must heed the call in the Statement and commit to the Voice and to similar institutions for remembering.

This is how we are to become what God creates us to be. It is the one Christ toward whom the Father draws all peoples. And so the humble spirit which calls through the Statement is the Holy, Creating Spirit of God, drawing us down one path which will bring the whole groaning world a little closer to God’s coming reconciliation of all things.

View or print as a PDF

Easter 4
23/4/2023

1 Peter 2:17-25
Psalm 23
John 10:1-10

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

---

God may my words be loving and true. And May those who are listening discern what is unloving and untrue in my words, that you may be glorifying. Amen

St. Francis is credited with saying, “preach the gospel, and if necessary use words.” As good Protestants we know it is necessary to use words and gestures and symbols and rituals and candles and textiles and visual images and song and acts of kindness and mercy. It is necessary to use all things in the world to tell the story of God in Christ.

The task of preaching, the task of living a life of witness is to give some shape, some articulation to the story of God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ: to turn parts of creation to tell that story, to build a sort of symbolic world of new creation that we can inhabit. To this end, we weave together stories, images, practices. We take bits of creation, and we twist them.

The Christian tradition is famed for its use of irony. The core word we use for our central story of Jesus Christ killed by the Roman Empire is this word “Gospel”: good news; which originally meant the triumph of military power. And it becomes for us the story of military death. We name Jesus Christ as “Lord,” to spit in the face of all other lords of this world.

But there is a risk in doing this work of building a symbolic world that tries to give shape to our vision of new creation — that world just behind the veil of this world, the world which Christ, the risen crucified One has established. The risk, of course, of trying to articulate this world beyond us — that has yet arrived — To articulate this world, in language, in metaphor and symbol, in practices and ritual, runs the risk that what we build is not, in fact, this new creation, which is in the hands of God. But instead, we build our own creation. We create a symbolic world that we control, where we set the limit, set the limits of what is true, and what is real.

At the same time, by building these symbolic worlds of faith and religion, we can trick ourselves and delude ourselves and turn our gaze away from a sober reckoning with the reality that is still before us. And so we construct schedules of readings for each week in the Christian calendar, and we omit the difficult parts of the text. In our reading from First Peter the lectionary does not include the lines, “honour the Emperor.” It does not include the verse that begins and says, “slaves obey your masters.” And it has been my experience that not many people preach from First Peter at all.

So when we come to a text like First Peter with all of its challenging words, that seems to shipwreck the symbols we have associated with our tradition, Jesus who is Lord against Caesar, who is Lord. And yet here, we hear the call of Scripture itself to honour the Emperor. The apostle Paul says, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” Paul says, “there is no longer slave nor free.” And here scripture says, “slaves obey your masters, even when they hurt you unjustly for your suffering is a sign of Christ.”

One of the great gifts of scripture is of course, that it shipwrecks our assumptions and claims about God; it forces us to dig deeper to understand where God is acting now.

What first Peter teaches us, I think, is that in our attempts to be faithful to God, we cannot do this by looking away from the real concrete reality that stands before us. I don’t think — I don’t want to think that the writer of First Peter tells slaves to obey their masters because the author thinks that slavery is in itself, an inherently good thing and suffering at the hands of cruel masters is an inherently good thing. And yet, in an early religious renewal movement, a small community spread across Asia Minor, a group with no political power, with no credibility, struck by prejudice, it is difficult to find a way forward that negotiates the experience of suffering and persecution.

What First Peter offers then, is not a guide that says for all time, we must accept inequalities, discrimination, domination, violence and abuse and suffering as if all these things are what God wills for the world. Rather, I think first, Peter points us to this idea that whatever we want to say about new creation, it must be something that we are saying about this creation. New Creation is something that emerges in this creation. It is not the resurrected Christ who was never put on the cross, but always the Resurrected Crucified One. The One who brings new life to a broken world, the one who brings healing to a sick world, the one who brings freedom to a bound world. And so, to be faithful to that message, to be faithful to the declaration of liberation for someone who is literally not metaphorically enslaved means to do the hard work of negotiating with sober and tragic honesty how to be Christian in a world where we suffer.

And for those of us who enjoy the privileges of 2000 years of water under the bridge, of a world that has been radically changed, of a world where we are the beneficiaries of forms of freedom, dispossession of others, and wealth creation. Our faithfulness to these early teachings is not simply to replicate them but to look again, with honesty and sobriety, at our situation in the world. Because there are some churches in the privileged, rich white West, who are talking about how the church is now on the margins as if we don’t hold billions of dollars of property. There are those who say that the criticism that is levied against the church that has hurt and abused people, and continues to, is an act of persecution rather than a prophetic voice of justice calling us back to the good ways of God.

And so we should allow First Peter to disrupt the assumptions we make about what Christianity has to say about following the shepherd who is God in our world today. We should not allow ourselves to say well, we know what Christianity is about.

“Christianity is obviously about caring for those on the margins as we were on the margins.”

“Christianity is obviously about speaking truth to power as if we are not connected to the axes of power.”

The Call of the gospel today is to face up with the complexity of our place in life. To face up to what it means to have a legacy of Christendom that the church still holds on to, but must renegotiate in a new way. The point here is to say that there are no easy answers in scripture or in life or in preaching or in the life of faith.

There is only the hard work of discernment, of placing our stories about ourselves and the world and our place within it. Placing those stories into conversation with our own tradition and history, with the lives of those who are suffering and calling for justice, and acknowledging where we stand in relationship to the guilt and shame of the world.

The point might be to say that we actually do need to construct the symbolic world we inhabit. We need to gather as communities of faith, that worship, that tell the big story of God’s reconciliation. We need to come to the table and be fed. But we should always do this not because we seek to encounter something that comforts us, something that we understand, a story that we are telling. We do this to listen to stories of others, stories in which we are engrafted, stories that shape us and that are not shaped by us.

The story of God’s transformation is always the story of God’s transforming work. We must tell the story over and over and over again. And in doing so, we must discern that God is calling us. We must be willing to confess.

View or print as a PDF

Easter 2
16/4/2023

Acts 2:14a, 22-23
Psalm 16
John 20:19-31

---

In a sentence:
Whatever resurrection life looks like, it does not leave our history – us – behind

Identifying the dead
The fan of the TV murder mystery knows that an essential part of many of those stories is identifying the dead body. By this we confirm that the deceased is the person we think she is.

When we identify a living person, it is by recognising her face or voice. If we know her very well, we might even recognise her by smell or the feel of her skin. That is, we identify the living by sensory means, by what we naturally are, as perceived by sight, sound and touch.

When we identify a person who has just died, sight is the only sensory means left. The detective pulls back the pall, and the face is recognised. Often in the murder mystery, however, the story is more complicated than this. The trauma to the body or years in a shallow grave means that seeing doesn’t tell us much. Our senses fail us here or, perhaps better, the natural, sensory being of the person who died fails us because what remains can’t tell us who this is.

And so, where the person’s natural appearance is no use, the investigator turns to ‘history’ – to what the person did or was done to him. Now it’s about tattoos and scars, dental records and prostheses, or the remnant of a train ticket found nearby. These are historical ‘additions’ to the natural person, the unique marks our particular experience of life adds to our natural embodiment.

Thomas and the marks of crucifixion
Each year on this Sunday we hear John’s account of the appearance of Jesus to the disciples, in the absence of Thomas. Thomas, who begins in doubt, soon makes one of the strongest declarations about Jesus in the Bible: ‘My Lord and my God.’

We have all wondered with Thomas and then wondered at Thomas and his credulity. Our problem is that he apparently has Jesus standing in front of him, but we have the story of Jesus standing in front of him – natural Jesus, perceived by the senses of sight and hearing and touch. And the story doesn’t seem to be enough for us. Thomas and the other disciples seem to have it easier than we do.

But let’s look at the details of the account and, in particular, at how Thomas comes to his extraordinary confession. We all know that Thomas insists on seeing Jesus’ wounded hands, feet and side. This seems to be a gross materialism – ‘Let me hold him, and I’ll believe he’s here’.

Yet, we don’t usually note that this is also how the other disciples identified Jesus:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. (20.19f)

When Thomas says, ‘Show me the marks’, he asks for nothing more than what the other disciples have already had. Thomas doesn’t want to see ‘Jesus’ in some ‘There you are, old chap’ kind of way; he wants to see the marks of crucifixion. It could only be the risen Jesus if those marks were there.

This is very odd. Thomas and the others knew what Jesus looked like and sounded like and so could identify him by his natural features in the normal, sensory way. Yet it is by the marks of crucifixion that they identify him. This is to say that what Jesus ‘looks like’ – his natural person – doesn’t matter here. What matters is nothing natural – nothing sensory – but only the traces of Jesus’ story – his hi-story – summed up in the wounds in his hands, feet and side. Jesus is what he did and what was done to him. It is the (hi-)story which matters, the human and social dynamics which Jesus embodies and is.

Resurrection as the recovery of the cross
If this is true, something very strange happens to resurrection-talk. If Jesus is what was done to him, the rising of Jesus is the rising of just that – the rising of what Jesus did and of what was done to him. The rising of Jesus, then, is not merely the breathing-again of a dead man but the rising of the cross: the recovery of the cross as the heart of the matter. The resurrection is not ‘once-dead friend Jesus’ who comes back to life as some proof of life after death; the resurrection is the return of the crucified – the return of the cross. We are not, then, to believe in the resurrection but in the cross. It is the cross which is the scope and completion of Jesus’ work (‘it is finished’, John 19.30); the cross is the ‘load-bearer’ here, as we said last week.

This is not just neat theology; it makes a difference in real and specific human experiences and contemporary challenges. Some of you have read the op-ed piece I wrote last week, linking this interpretation of Thomas’ experience with the proposed indigenous Voice to Parliament. I won’t say anything more about that this morning.

But we can also connect Thomas with the fact that we (as a congregation) are here today in this particular place because we are about to move away from 170 years of one way of being, into something very different.

The raising of the wounded church
It might be (just a little) overdramatic to speak of our congregation’s present and immediate future as being a matter of death and resurrection. (It’s probably more like an amputation, which is bad enough!). But we do symbolise something of the wounds of the whole church in its current condition in broader society. It is not only the state of the property at Curzon Street which sees us having to move; if we were still the community which built those buildings, we would also be able to take care of them. But we’re not that community anymore, and maintenance and insurance and other overheads have pushed us into deficit budgets. The crisis of UMC aside, we were (are) in serious trouble. We should use it carefully, but dying is a useful metaphor for understanding many – perhaps even most – Christian communities in Australia today. The possible exception here might be recent, more successful migrant-based churches and a few Pentecostal megachurches. However, even many of these might yet be found just to be running late for their own funerals.

Whatever we think has caused this, the wounds in the Body of Christ are deep. And the question is, what would a resurrection look like? All we can say about this is that a resurrected Body of Christ – tomorrow’s church – will bear the marks of its suffering and rejection, and yet, those marks and wounds will not debilitate. The risen body of Jesus – marked as it is – is no longer on the cross and no longer wrapped in tight linen bindings. So also it will be for the Body of Christ which is the church, and this is the hope with which we contemplate our future.

We are everything which has brought us to this point. And our future can only be one that catches us up and carries us forward, history and all. The promise of this place, then, is not a sudden burst of new people coming in, filling this space in no time and out-shining all that has gone before. The church does not believe in flash-in-the-pan, won-the-lottery, dropped-out-of nowhere miracles. This is what we think Thomas and his friends got – a sight and sound spectacular. And yet, such a spectacle would prove nothing. So what if one dead person once rose from the dead? Quite seriously – so what? ‘Do you believe because you have seen?, asks Jesus, as if to imply, ‘What kind of belief is that?’

The church does not believe in miracles like this. It believes, rather, in the story of a history of a transformation of death: a scarred but living and strong body of Jesus, which then become the scarred but living and strong Body of Christ – even the church.

If we were to come here – and this has not yet been decided – it would be so that we might be both the congregation we have known and the congregation God might raise us into. Any future of the church is not simply a cutting itself free of its history of success and failure. The church’s future is a carrying-forth and transformation of all that. If we come here, and if this is in the hope of anything in any sense like resurrection, then we must both remember everything and also look to see it all transformed.

‘Do you believe because you see?’, Jesus asks us. No, we believe because we hear that history’s tragedies are just the nothingness out of which God creates a future with the world, a future with us.

The risen Jesus bears the marks of sin and death, and yet lives. His risen life, and ours, is one of memory and hope.

Our life is memory and hope.