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Epiphany: The Baptism of Jesus
8/1/2023

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Matthew 3:13-17

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.

My Dad had a cousin named Dawn Mount — she has now passed away. Dawn was so named because she was found abandoned at dawn at the base of a mountain. In lieu of family, or birth certificate, she was named by a police officer: Dawn Mount.

Dawn entered our family through my Great Aunt Biddy, one of the living saints of this world. Aunt Biddy has fostered dozens of young people — their photos cover the walls in the living room. Often her home provided respite for young people facing quite significant challenges. Young people the social service system in Aotearoa, New Zealand, has not always known how to cope with.

Dawn entered the house, I imagine, as everyone does: through the front gate, down the path to the door, to be greeted by Biddy’s unending kindness.

On occasion young people were accompanied inside by a social worker, who conveyed to Biddy the backstory, conducting the handover. On these occasions as soon as the social worker left it was back to the front gate, bags under arm, to come in again: through the gate, down the path, to be greeted, properly by Aunt Biddy and her unending kindness.

Biddy met no “cases” at the door, she took on no “problem children,” Biddy met children, young people: those who they were.

And they were all embraced as her own: expected to attend Church on Sundays, sent off to the same school adjacent the Church, and welcomed into a chaotic, and wonderful, and complicated, and generous home.

Dawn entered this home as a teenager. Years later she asked my Aunt, “how many people do you know who were born as teenagers?”
“None,” Biddy replied.
“Yes, you do … Me.”

What my Great Aunt Biddy knows in her bones, shaped by her Christian faith I’m sure, are the lessons of baptism.

Not baptism merely as a ritual avowal of our beliefs. Nor baptism as a routine rite of passage into one among many of the cultural and religious communities of the world. Nor baptism as the commitment of parents to induct and instruct their children in the ways of the tradition.

Aunt Biddy knows that new life must always begin at the beginning. Aunt Biddy knows that baptism is always the welcome home. Always meeting people as themselves, as those who they are.

It is the beginning of new life.
It is the welcome home.
Baptism is for the sake of the quiet, secret work in which love restores the world.

One of the things that’s interesting in the emphasis on baptism on this day of the Christian calendar, is that the text from the Gospel is actually the wrong baptism. Christians take our understanding of baptism not from Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan, but from the baptism Jesus undergoes in his crucifixion.

So it is that The Basis of Union — the founding theological statement of this church — talks of, “[Christ’s] baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial…” (Basis, §7)

Of all the Gospels Matthew seems to recognise this awkwardness in the way Jesus comes to John at the Jordan to be baptised. Matthew — unlike Mark and Luke (the two other Gospels that seem to tell the story in similar ways) — makes a point of including the awkward conversation between Jesus and John. John refuses to baptise Jesus until Jesus argues him into it.

As a historic point, the commissioning at the end of Matthew’s Gospel — for the disciples to go and make disciples, baptising them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit — likely reflects, and in turn reinforce some of the earliest baptismal liturgy and practice of the Church. For this reason one can understand why Matthew makes a point of telling the story of Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan slightly awkward. To make clear that this baptism is not the primary source from which later baptismal liturgy and practice should take its lead.

Nevertheless, although today we have heard the story of the wrong baptism, Jesus’ baptism by John does teach us fundamental lessons about what baptism continues to mean for us.

John, perhaps taking the lead of my Aunt Biddy (although she’d probably resent the suggestion that she was quite that old), understood that baptism is for the healing of the world: turning from captivity to sin, and towards the restoration and freedom offered by God. If this is what baptism means, then what need does the Messiah have for baptism?

Jesus’ decision to be baptised reinforces that he too was on the journey towards the restoration and freedom offered by God. The journey begun at baptism is always a journey with others: the restoration of ourselves is always a restoration in relation with others. It is not first and foremost about what we do, but about the unending kindness we receive ultimately from God.

So it is that The Basis of Union speaks of baptism as being, “united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy.” (Basis §7)

And above all, what Jesus’ baptism signifies is the declaration that Jesus is the beloved child of God. And this is the meaning that baptism must carry with it.

That each of us have become children of God. Not by virtue of the water, but by virtue of the work of love which is renewing the world. By virtue of the Spirit of love which emanates from the true site of baptism: the place where Jesus’ journey with others ends, and where only Christ can go. We have become children of God because of the true baptism of the cross.

In the river we see the glimpse, and at the cross we see in fullness, that God meets us at the front gate on our worst day, and walks us down the path to the doorway home. There we are met with unending kindness.

Baptism is the beginning of new life.
It is the welcome home.

Baptism is not our entryway into an exclusive club, but our witness to the whole world that each of us are embraced as divine children. For all the wrong baptisms, false starts, and fractured beginnings of our lives. Baptism is the renewal, the beginning again, always from the beginning. Baptism is the invitation to be the person who we are: who we truly are, in the love and restoration and freedom of God.

Baptism is good news.
This is good news:

You are a beloved child of the divine
You have a place in the chaotic, and wonderful, and complicated, and generous home of God

No matter the abandonment of your dawn, you are born again on this day
No matter how partial, fragile, or fleeting the love which formed you, you are met with the unending kindness of God

And friends, hear this the Good News:

Christ journeys with us, and before us, going to the cross.
God meets us at the front gate, walks us down the path, and welcomes us with unending kindness again, and again, and again, and again.

Through those we have met in this room, in our lives, as if by chance — and through the baptismal wisdom of the living saints of this world.

May the Spirit who hovered over the waters:
At creation, at your birth, at your baptism
Grant you the gift of the freedom of Christ:
in the name of God,
who created you,
who formed you,
who loves you.
Amen.

 

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Christmas 1
1/1/2023

Numbers 6:22-27
Psalm 8
Philippians 2:5-12
Luke 2:15-21

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 does it mean for God to enter history?

What does it mean for God? And what does it mean for history?

We are perhaps comfortable with the two touch points of God in history set out in two of our readings for today. Perhaps in part because they speak of something that is not quite history: something long ago, to be sure, but not the history of documentaries, newspapers, and academic texts.

God enters history in the act of creation. Ordering the world, and human beings within it, in a grand act of grace and freedom. Many can sit easy with a God who enters history through the whisper of the wind, the ancient forming of galaxies, the mysterious something which makes the world tick.

And we can well enough get our heads around the touch point of God’s presence in the holy of holies. In the tabernacle, and temples dedicated to the Lord. In God’s bearing with the Jewish people, through their long history. Perhaps there is a sense of God’s people as an ancient, almost mythic past, that no longer impinges on the present. … Of course, that cannot be true, when the people of the unspeakable divine name were subject to unspeakable evil.

Nevertheless, God entering history in quite abstract ways can be enough. Through the long ago creative act — the wind breathed into those first embers of creation. The long ago sacred site, where God was present as if only as a rumour.

But when God enters history in flesh and blood, as a person. When the haziness of more ancient texts gives way to a frightfully recent picture of a person. Albeit not a direct, unvarnished window, but something more … tactile.

When God enters history not simply as an unspeakable name, an ancient whispered wind, a sacred presence … When the holy unspeakable name takes on a face, and flesh, and a familiarity: Yeshua, Iesus, Jesus. This anointed One. The holy name now wholly speakable.

What does it mean for God to enter history in this way?

What does it mean for God? And what does it mean for history?

There is in our two New Testament readings two accounts of this history. The rather mundane story of a Jewish child undergoing their rites of passage. And the grand history, as if from God’s own view, in one of the earliest confessions of faith for which we have a record.

In the grand theological history of Philippians there God is emptied out, God empties God’s own self out. As one theologian puts it, it is the story of God’s journey to the far country, and then the journey home. As if, could it be, God ceases for a moment to be God. Letting go of eternal equality with God the Second Person of the Trinity becomes human, takes on the form of a slave.

The theological question, with which early Christians wrestled is:

Whether God must cease to be God in order to enter history? In order to take on human flesh, human face, and human name?

The early Christian wrestling with this question responds with a resounding, “No!”

At one of the early councils of the church at Chalcedon the formulation was offered:

One divine person, with two natures: human and divine, neither confused nor separated.

Jesus never ceasing to be divine, never ceasing to be human.

But perhaps we can go further than this. It is not simply that the divine person takes on a human nature, as if there were a question of whether there ever would be an incarnation. Rather, God so entwines God’s being with our human life, through the human life of Jesus, that we cannot think of God apart from this one.

Hear these words of Scripture: “God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God, in love.” (Ephesians 1:4)

In just the same way we cannot think of God as other than the one whose being flows through creation. That ancient wind which flared the embers of creation to a guiding and abiding flame.

In just the same way we cannot think of God as other than the one who brought liberation to a people born of grace and freedom — God who speaks through Psalms and prophets.

In just this same way: we cannot think of God as any other than this one who is emptied, this one who takes the journey into the far country, our home. We cannot think of God apart from the entry into human history. In freedom and grace God chooses that divine destiny would be bound up with our human being: our history, your history, my history. In Jesus we see coming to fruition the God of all creation who seeks to make a home in the far country, to make a home in our home.

There is only God in this fragile child among humanity. Heralded by shepherds and strange sights in night skies — as if entering the layers of sacred stories which hold the precious memory of his own people’s history. There are no accidents here.

When Jesus comes to be circumcised we are led to see this as a new child taking their place among God’s people. Tying the child’s fate and future to God.

And yet, it is not a child who is taking their place within the people of God. Rather, here is God taking his place among the people. God freely and willingly binds divine destiny in this moment to human care. So fully does God give of herself in this Child that God becomes vulnerable to these figures of history, subject to their care.

Here the history of God’s people is inverted. It is no longer that God’s people can not exist apart from God’s sustaining power; here God can not exist apart from the people. Into their hands, into our hands, God offers God’s very self and child.

This is the ultimate demonstration of God’s self-giving love. Not simply that God would love us, but that God in an act of freedom and grace, chooses to be no other God than the one who embraces our humanity. God in freedom and grace chooses to be no other God than the one who is present with us, even in our frailty and vulnerability. God is no other God than the one who makes the journey to the far country, our home.

Ecce Deus. Behold God!

Let us then go all the way with our proclamation today of the Good News. The unspeakable holy one of old has now placed the name of Jesus on our lips.

So let us go all the way with our proclamation of the journey home. The God who binds divine destiny to our humanity gives Godself to us, but does not give herself away.

Gathered around this child in history is the tender love of parents. And this tender love responds to the self-giving love of God heralded by shepherds. And this tender love has echoed throughout history, it has touched the lives of each of us.

We, then, are the sign of renewal. However partial, fleeting, or fragile we have received this same divine love which has reverberated through the millennia. We have been grafted into the history which begins with this child and has been carried to today. We are gathered in this place to proclaim God’s presence with us.

So friends here is the Good News:

God has arrived and placed a name on our lips: Jesus, the Messiah — anointed One that we may all be anointed.

And we are anointed with the love that kindled the stars
The love that led the march of liberation, that sounds the call for justice

And we are anointed with the mercy that binds the broken
The peace that lies ready to be discovered in the heart of the world
The joy that breaks free everyday

This is the Good News:

God is with us, the divine destiny bound to our human history.
That every one of us may bow in wonder, and every tongue confess that love reverberates through the world.

And even at the end of our own fragile, fleeting moment.
God is with us in the sunset and the dawn of the new life.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2022

Genesis 1:26-28
Isaiah 9:2-7
Luke 2:1-7

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In a sentence:
The birth of Jesus is the meaning and purpose of all births

Somewhere in the middle of 2022, the eight-billionth living person drew breath for the first time. From a rough guess about when modern humans emerged, demographers calculate that this puts the number of human beings born in all of history at around 117 billion. “Be fruitful and multiply”, God commands the book of Genesis – perhaps the most closely observed divine command of all!

What do all those babies mean in view of the prophet Isaiah’s declaration: “a child has been born for us”? What is the meaning of the one child in relation to the 116,999,999,999 others?[1]

To answer this, we need to back up a little and consider first what the old Genesis commandment might tell us about the meaning of any child. “Be fruitful and multiply” is an odd commandment, seemingly given as if not multiplying might have been an option. But at the end of the account of the creation of Adam and Eve in the next chapter, we are told, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Genesis 2.24, KJV). The thing about “cleaving” is that it’s quite good fun. And so, having cleaved once, the man and the woman are likely to want to cleave again (and again and again), with the typical result being considerable multiplication. This happens naturally so that, of all the cleaving required to produce 117 billion babies, very little has been in direct response to the command to multiply. What, then, is the point of the command to be fruitful, given that the widespread enjoyment of clefts and cleavers results in fruitfulness anyway?

hen what happens naturally is endorsed with a commandment, we’re in the realm of giving “meaning” to the ordinary. The command to be fruitful is a kind of overlay on what would happen anyway, by which God hijacks natural human procreation for some purpose. By claiming an interest in human fruitfulness, God gives a particular meaning to a child. Children are to be born now not merely “of blood or of the will of the flesh or of [human will], but by the will of God” (cf. John 1.13). Children are now born “for God’s sake”. That is, regardless of the motivations of their parents, children are now God-purposed.

And the point here is not simply about children. We were each born, so we are thinking here about the meaning of any human being. And the issue is not whether we are or aren’t fruitful (for whatever reason) but that we are fruit. What does that mean? What were each of us born “for”? We need an answer to this to be able to say something sensible about why we have gathered today to hear St Luke tell us that Mary “gave birth to her firstborn son”.

The faith of the church makes a connection between the one birth of Jesus and all other births, and so proposes a meaning of the one and the many births. And this connection and meaning are as unbelievable as all miracles are. The meaning of the Genesis commandment to be fruitful and multiply is that God claims all subsequent human history as a preparation for the arrival of Jesus: Have babies, God commands, so that Jesus might finally appear. Or, to put it the other way around, the birth of Jesus is the meaning and purpose of all other births. By making babies we make history, so that history might be made in Jesus.

Imagine if that were true…

Yet, as I’ve just said, it is quite unbelievable. It’s unbelievable, first, because it’s an impossible thought that one could be the meaning of all, especially when that one is not the first or the last but arrives in the messy middle.

And it is unbelievable, second, because who actually thinks anything like this when it comes to baby-making? The drives of the flesh and the heart are, most of the time, far from any thought about the will of God.

Yet, unbelievable as it is, this connection of our births with Jesus’ birth is the only thought which makes sense of the celebration of Christmas. We don’t have to believe the connection, but without it Christmas would be merely sentimental wonder at childhood, or a desperately wishful hope which distracts us for a moment from the harsh realities of life.

Do this, God commands in Genesis. Be fruitful and multiply not merely because you are driven to cleaving but so that the humanity of Jesus might appear. All human being is oriented towards this. And so, though Genesis speaks of all of us as created in the image of God, the New Testament speaks of the one Jesus as that image. His way of being human is our destiny. Do this – be fruitful – so there may be a history within which Jesus can arrive. This is the meaning of a child – our meaning, our purpose.

And now there appears a third and final unbelievability concerning what I’ve proposed. Meaning and purpose have a future orientation, but the baby Jesus is now very much in our past. How can our birth after the appearance of Jesus be a preparation for his appearance? How can the goal of all human history be in the past?

After hijacking the absolute human necessity of being born, God does the same with another absolute necessity: staying alive by eating and drinking. Do this, Jesus says – eat this bread and drink this cup – that my humanity might be present among you again. Do this, for the appearance of me: eat and drink and become the many members of the body of Christ.[2] This – the body of Christ – is no mere or weak social metaphor. Become the body of Christ: become the appearance of the humanity of Jesus in a community of love, even if only for a moment. In the act of creation comes the command, Do this: Be fruitful. In the act of re-creation comes the command, Do this: Take, eat, drink, together. All of this is towards the appearance of the kind of being human we see in Jesus in the manger, on the roads of Palestine, and on the cross.

Do this: be fruitful. Do this: eat and drink. Seeing these together is to see that, at least so far as God is concerned, the Eucharist is as good as sex. For our part, we might wonder about that! But we can at least see that they have in common that they make possible the appearance of the rich and open humanity of Jesus, the presence of the kingdom of heaven on earth. We are, so that a humanity like Jesus’ own might appear. And Jesus appears, that we might see what life can be, and will be. We are for him, and he is for us.

The difference between us and Jesus is only that, between the promise of the cradle and its rejection in the cross, he succeeds in being fully and freely human, and we usually don’t. This is lamentable, but not the end of the story: “a child is born for us”. While we are the reason this one child can be born, he is born for us. Our failings, whatever they may be, are simply that the humanity of Jesus is not yet our humanity. When we talk about “sin” we mean just that we don’t often live freely in love as he did. But this is secondary to his being for us and not over against us.

For the humanity of Jesus is not only the “model” for our own but is also a promise: we will be as he was, knowing God as he did. We will be the presence of God’s kingdom of love and freedom. This “for us” is so central to the story, that we can might dare even to say, Mary wrapped us in cloths and laid us in the manger of the world, and God looks to make us come alive and grow in God’s own Spirit.

For the final time, none of this could possibly be true. It contradicts everything we think we know, which is that the many give meaning to the one, and not the other way around.

Yet here we are, a remant gathered 2000 years after the event of one birth. We might be here because of tradition or obligation or curiosity or misapprehension. Or we might be here in order to be reminded of something we think we’ve forgotten, and so to understand once more.

In any case, let us understand what it would mean if it were singularly important to hear that “a child is born for us”. What would it mean that there, in that one place in the messy middle of our history, is the beginning from which all things have sprung, and the end towards which all things are headed? What would it mean that there is found a humanity which, to date, we have only seen as in a glass, darkly, but through which God sees us as if face-to-face?

To believe that this one child is indeed born for us would be to believe that each gurgling bundle of joy, each callow youth, each jilted lover, each soldier lining up the sights of his rifle, each bearer of terminal cancer, each tearful refugee, each self-satisfied magnate of industry, each frail old soul moving slowly from her bed to her window seat… Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once is purposed for the appearance of God in a humanity like Jesus’ own. To believe this would be to see in another person not only what we think they are or even what they think they are – which is too often to see only the straw in the manger. To believe that Jesus was born for us would be to see in another person the child who is purposed for the appearance of God. And it would be to begin to live differently, as if our lives and the lives of others mattered far beyond anything we could have imagined, because it is God we are to become.

Of course, this is all quite unbelievable, Wonderful as it might be were it true.

But in view of everything we see going on in and around us, this might be the one thing we need to believe, and to begin to live, for God’s sake, and for our own sake, and for each other’s sake:

we are born,

that Jesus might be born,

that we might become like him.

Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. And his name is called, Wonderful…

[1] While Isaiah wasn’t thinking of Jesus here, his words have been borrowed by Christians to say something about Jesus.

[2] The other absolute human necessity is dying, which is “covered” with St Paul’s reading of baptism – dying with Christ – a thought for another time!

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Advent 3
11/12/2022

Isaiah 35:1-10
James 5:7-10
Luke 1:46b-55
Matthew 11:2-11

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In a sentence:
The promise of God is not for our well-being alone but for peace in our midst, reconciliation across divided communities

Ringing through all this morning’s readings is the news of God’s approach to set right all that has gone awry in the world.

Jesus summarises this in his response to the Baptist’s question about who Jesus is:

‘Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them’ (Matthew 11).

Such promises, and the declaration of their imminent fulfilment, are words gladly heard even by people like us, for whom life is a relatively ‘relaxed and comfortable’ reality. Yet, regardless of whether we imagine that the kingdom has largely come for us, or whether we still long for some missing healing or security or restoration in our lives, we can easily miss the point here. One mistake is to hear what is said about what God will do as a charge as to what we should be doing. Another error – and the one we’ll focus on today – is to imagine that the mere restoration of sight or hearing or social and economic rights will, in themselves, amount to a return to a full humanity.

The promises made through the prophets, and said to have been consummated in God’s work in Christ, can read as if they concern merely this or that thing which God might rectify. The blind will see, and the deaf will hear, which is surely good news. The poor will be lifted up, and the hungry will be fed – again, surely good news. Yet the point of these texts is not simply the removal of obstacles to fullness of life. Good health, by itself, is not the promise of the gospel. Well-being and economic fairness, by themselves, are not the promise of the gospel. Such healing and restoration are important, of course. Yet, we tend to think about them in quite closed and individualised terms. The point about the types of restoration the gospel points to is not only that bad things are fixed up, but that broken relationships are restored. This is a subtle qualification but an important one.

The restoration of relationships will require the opening of eyes and ears and the loosing of tongues, and so on. Yet, these miracles themselves are necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for the healing of relationships; more is needed. Peace is not everyone having a job, or universal healthcare, although these must be part of it. By themselves, these are not enough because, if I can now see when once I could not, I may still choose not to look at you. If I can now hear, I may yet choose not to listen to you. If I am no longer imprisoned or enslaved or downtrodden, I may yet become your gaoler, enslaver, or oppressor. The justice of God is not simply a matter of cutting the ties which bind, a loosing of tangled wings and a healing of broken bodies and hearts. God does not simply heal and liberate but reconciles. Indeed, this reconciliation is between ourselves and God, but it is inseparable from social reconciliations between ourselves. We can’t state this too strongly. And, in connection to our readings, it also can’t be too strongly said that our natural tendency is to focus on what God promises to do in the ‘vertical’ between us and God, and to miss what is said about the ‘horizontal’ you-and-me dimension of reconciliation.

Each Sunday, we gather for what looks like a vertical engagement but is deeply horizontal. We meet around prayers and hymns of invocation, we listen for the word in scripture and preaching, we pray a prayer of confession, hear a declaration of forgiveness, sing a doxology or hymn, say a creed, gather around the table, pray prayers of intercession, and then are dismissed under a blessing. So far as reconciliation goes, the interesting part is that which follows the preaching in our usual order – the prayer of confession and the word of forgiveness. This is the moment at which, we might say, reconciliation is declared and enacted. Who is being declared to be reconciled to whom at this point? The easy answer is that we are, whether as individuals or as a whole, speaking here of reconciliation between ourselves and God. Perhaps you can verify for yourselves whether that is what you hear and experience at that point in our worship when it comes in a few minutes!

But there’s complicating thing which happens in the Eucharist. Holy Communion enacts a reconciliation or communing not only with God but with each other. In preparation for the Eucharistic liturgy, we ‘pass the peace’, which is not an act of greeting but a declaration to those around us that we constitute no threat to them; we are ourselves claiming to be reconciled and reconciling agents of peace. We move then to pray that, in taking the sacramental signs of Christ’s body and blood, we might ourselves together become the body of Christ.

An individualised God-and-me understanding of reconciliation obscures the bigger picture – that the salvation God brings is not just for us in our notions about where we need healing, but for others. And the ‘for others’ raises the possibility that salvation may actually cost us something. God comes not to heal ‘me’ as I am in this or that particular distress, but to heal us. The gospel promises not only the lifting up of the lowly, but the humbling of the mighty – maybe us. Not only are the captives set free, but presumably those who locked them up unjustly are chastised or corrected – maybe us. What takes place is a ‘setting right’ of disorder. Such a setting right requires the work of God not only because we can’t heal and set right all things ourselves, but because we have too much vested interest in things remaining much the way they are, or in others suffering for our gains. If we doubt this, consider only the rhetoric of election time with its shrill clash of conflicting desires and proposed futures.

We will hesitate at such a vision of the kingdom and its healing work because it will cost us too much. A healing and restoration to wholeness which is just our own is easier and costs us less than one which heals others at the same time. We often have an interest in others being a little less healed and restored than they might like. A bit of blindness and lameness and poverty about the place is convenient and comfortable for many. Being reconciled to God but not necessarily to each other is easier and allows us to keep the things of God merely ‘spiritual’ and disconnected from the ‘real’ world around us. The criticism of religion that it promises an other-worldly escape from each other is, then, shown to be wrong. Indeed the critique rebounds: there is nothing religious in the observation that our world trades on difference and oppression, so that any vision of reconciliation will be uncomfortable for us all. Of this the conversation around the indigenous Parliamentary Voice is just one proof. The vision of justice in the gospel exposes the religious and the unreligious with a harsh light.

In Advent, we focus on the desire for God’s justice and hear a whisper not of new religious possibilities for our relationship with God but of the possibility of a wholly different world. This new world comprises a setting-right which is a lifting up and a casting down, a gathering in and a sending away, and yet is also salvation for all – for those elevated and those humbled, for those made rich and those made poorer by the action of God.

The fulfilment of such a promise as this would be worth waiting for, and worth living towards, as painful as its realisation might be for many.

May God’s people take comfort not merely in God’s love for them but in that God’s love is for all, and carries a promised future in which all have a place, and a right relation both to God and to each other.

And may God’s people live ever more deeply in ways which model this promised future, here and now.

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Advent 2
4/12/2022

Isaiah 11:1-10
Romans 15:4-13
Psalm 72
Matthew 3:1-12

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In a sentence:
Jesus is where the reign of God happens, and we live within this reign as we are conformed to his humanity

“Repent”, John advises (demands!), “for the kingdom of heaven is come near”.

Repent is a loaded word. Mostly it means for us “stop doing something.” See where you’ve done wrong, be sorry, and do rightly. More fundamentally, however, it has to do with thinking again, seeing anew, turning to move in a different direction. And, while the force of John’s preaching comes from his conviction about a coming day of judgement, repentance is not just a religious notion. Within a day of last week’s state elections, the clamour for change was heard within the state Liberal party: the party needs to turn around, become something different, think and see differently. In other words, the party must “repent”.

This repentance, of course, is not in response to the approach of God but because there’ll be another election in four years, and we (the Liberal party) can’t endure another such loss. But the principle of repentance is the same: we were not ready this time, and we fear we might not be again when the election comes around once more. This is repentance motivated by fear – understandably so, but fearful nonetheless. The news of the approach of the next election is bad news because we’re clearly not ready for it.

Yet the proposal for change here is odd. The election seemed to declare that Liberal party policy was not welcomed by the majority. Repentance in this circumstance is a commitment of the Liberal party to stop being itself. The focus is not on what is right but on what will see us through the next electoral moment.

John’s preaching seems to resemble this. “Repent” is spoken in the context of a presumed crisis – that God is coming. On this surface reading, the approach of God is bad news because – as with the Liberal party in its present condition – we might not be ready. There is not a little fear at play in this hearing of John.

Yet the problem with repentance arising from fear is that it can only be superficial. Such repentance is not about what we believe to be true but what we need to do to survive the coming crisis. It’s like the Liberal party thinking it should ask what the people in Melbourne’s West want and then shaping policies to those desires, rather than imagining – as political parties tend to – that there are certain things which need to be done despite the will of the people. If – as one Liberal supporter probably now regrets having said last week – Victoria is populated by idiots who simply couldn’t see the merit of the Liberal policy platform, must the Liberal party itself become a party of idiots to win back ground next time around?

I’m not interested in all this to analyse the election nor to criticise the Liberal party; any party in the same position would likely think this way. The point is to see the temptation to superficiality which comes with fear: the temptation to sell out. Or, if the plan is not to sell out but to “trick” the approaching menace, then we are planning to manipulate by deception. In either case, our true selves are obscured as we re-colour to hide in the shadow of the approaching doom.

The preaching of John – if we take it seriously – can be heard in just this way: stop doing what you clearly think you should be able to do, and do something else. This is an invitation to the superficial – in John, a moral superficiality. You can’t deny the power of God or the poll booth, so deny yourself. The superficial is what sits on the surface, so that we look like one thing but are really something else. Superficiality is a mask behind which is the true me. In the end, John sounds like he’s saying, “Stop being yourselves”.

It is, of course, impossible to stop being ourselves if we honestly value what we are. We can’t healthily desire one thing and be another. The commandment we don’t want to hear instils in us this tortured dynamic. Certainly, what we do – our moral action – is important. But the call to goodness and the motivation of fear are in deathly conflict because the fearful can’t know when they’ve done enough. John’s preaching, then, must be heard as a kind of pre-repentance call: a call which cannot bring about what it demands. Hearing the call, we begin to wonder, how can we repent? How can we be both ourselves and different? And how much change is enough?

The answer is hinted at in John’s preaching and developed in the wider context of the gospel. The kingdom of heaven is not distant and on its way. Rather, the kingdom has drawn near; the kingdom is come with the arrival of Jesus. The call for repentance – the call for reign-of-God-like human being – is answered in the person of Jesus. Jesus is our repentance, our re-thinking, our seeing again.

If Jesus is the kingdom, John’s call changes radically. The kingdom is now not first something demanded of us but given to us: The kingdom is come. So far as repentance goes, Jesus is enough.

And the “enough” is crucial. If we intentionally do something wrong – which is John’s moral observation – it is because of fear about “enough”. We fear that there will not be enough – not enough of me, not enough for me – and we act against the rules to secure enough or we calculate to prove that we are enough (which is what we call self-righteousness). When it comes to repentance, the question will be, have I repented enough? How moral do I have to be? How much does God – or the electorate – need to let us through? These are the moral uncertainties we face if it ever occurs to us to think about them.

With Jesus, it is different. The question is not our “Am I good enough?” or “Have I got enough?” Jesus answers God’s own question: What is required when the question is always “How much?” What is required is assurance of enough. And this is what comes in the arrival of Jesus. Jesus does not ask the superficial How Much? As the presence of the kingdom of heaven, Jesus is simply Enough. The miracle is that he is enough as one of us. Limited in time and space and culture, limited in how much good he can do, still susceptible to the charge from those around him that he has not done enough, our faith is that this one is enough – that Jesus was enough human being, enough God: the definition of the kingdom of heaven.

God’s answer to the question about enough is Jesus: this is enough for God. And God gives him as also enough for us. Not a mere model of how to be, Jesus is made the fullness of God’s kingdom for God and for us. With this, repentance is no longer becoming enough by doing better here or there but receiving this fullness, pointing to the coinciding of our desire and God’s desire in Jesus. Christian repentance stops trying to be enough and lets God’s gift be enough.

Of course, the moral imperative to do better doesn’t go away. There is no question that we could not do better and, most of the time, we probably know what and where this is the case. Just do it. But do it not because there approaches some crisis to avoid. Do it because the only crisis – the only judgement – which matters has already come: enough of God has come in Jesus to liberate us from fear we can’t do and be it all, and to liberate us for works of love and mercy for their own sake.

Repentance is not a wondering about how to win God’s favour but the conviction that we already have it.

And so the moral life is not about storing up reserves against the judgemental onslaught of God or the world but about expressing that favour for those who do not yet know it.

We are not called to avoid the approach of a menacing God but to become the approach of God’s grace, mercy and peace.

Repent, therefore, and believe the good news, so that the kingdom which has come may come again.

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Advent 1
27/11/2022

Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Psalm 122
Matthew 24:36-44

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In a sentence:
Time is what passes between persons; love is time.

On the first Sunday of Advent each year, our readings touch on time and the coming judgement of God. Yet these themes are set in an apocalyptic key far from modern thinking about the nature of time. While these old texts answer a question about the kind of time we live in, we would need to share the apocalyptic sense of the times for the answer to make sense to us.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is impossible. We can’t unthink what modern culture has taught us about the nature of time, and become first-century apocalypticists. What we can do, is get a clearer sense of how time and life are connected for us today, and ask what someone like St Paul might say into that.

For us today, time is a “forever” thing: it rolls on and on. We might calculate that one day the universe will end with the heat-death of all things (everything ending up at the same cool temperature) but this is not a limit on our experience of time. Time is close enough to infinite that we can think it to be stable and ourselves to be placed in it to fill it up. This time is like a jar into which we pour what we do. The “bucket list” method of living our lives is perhaps the quintessential symbol of this for our time. The bucket list names those “experiences” with which we hope to fill our few moments in infinite time. The great time-bucket, of course, is indifferent as to whether there’s anything in it or not. It remains a bucket if we never get around to doing anything. But even a life rich in experiences is but a drop in the enormity of the infinite time-bucket. And so, when our actions in time’s ever-flowing stream are merely “in” time, they finally amount to nothing. It matters not what we do; time rolls on and sweeps everything away. Infinite time is finally empty time. (Consider a thought from a few weeks ago, that eternal life might be boring). The old Greeks had it right when they imagined that the god Chronos consumes all his children.

If we hear St Paul this morning through this notion of time and our place in it, he can make little sense. For him, time is not infinite but has an end, and soon. But the “end”-thing is distracting. If we don’t expect time ever to end, why not simply dismiss what Paul says about life in time? If you’re never going to get to the end which is the judgement, why bother how to get there? How could our unending time finally come to something, come to some meaning, to some sensible summing-up? And so Paul’s exhortation that we live a certain kind of life makes little sense to many today not because his morals are out of step with ours but because his idea of time looks wrong. What we do cannot matter for the reasons Paul seems to propose.

And yet, for all this, it is not an end to time which concerns Paul; he anticipates less that time will end than that a judgement will be made. This judgement reveals the nature of time: what time is for. Paul’s call to the sleepers to awaken looks at first to be about keeping ourselves safe in the coming judgement. Yet his concern is not the threat of judgement but the nature of our time here and now. What is the purpose of our being, and how does what we do embody that purpose (or not). “Live this way”, Paul says, not because the final judgement is coming but because this is what time properly requires.

This, then, is the difference between our sense of time and Paul’s sense: our unbounded time finally swallows us up and sweeps us away, while Paul’s time is waiting for us. The time in which we live is for him not empty and indifferent about whether or not we pour anything into it. God’s time waits for us. God’s time expects something, looks for something, demands something. And it is not yet God’s time until this demand is met.

And this brings us to the surprise in the gospel’s proposal about time. To wake from sleep (as Paul commands), to lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, to live into the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control Galatians 5.22f) – all this is to make time. This “making” of time is not what we usually mean – finding time for some good work, making time “for” something. It is the making of time into God’s own time: the creation of a true timeliness in our lives. What Paul criticises – drunkenness, debauchery, jealousy, the “fruits of the flesh” – these are empty time, time within which meaning is eroded as mutually responsible relationships are broken down. Election season in a democracy like ours is empty time in this way.  Time is what passes between persons, and properly to “make time” is live toward an interpersonal human being made from love and gentleness and patience.

Do this, Paul says, and time – the substance of your lives – comes into being.

But also, “Do this”, Jesus says, for the remembrance of me – also a creating of a certain kind of timeliness. Do this, take and taste bad time – broken body and spilt blood – and hear the promise: This is my body given for you, that you might have bodies, my blood that you might have blood. Or, this is my time, given for you, that you might have time. If we’re paying attention, we might marvel that God can make time for us from the nothingness of broken time: from our choices for sin and death.

This is no mere wish or other-worldly thing. The word the sacrament acts is that, gathering as we do around the one table, all the time we need is standing next to us, the (only) time which matters.

Making time is now not about “finding” time but creating it through lives of love and care. The time of our lives has a face which turns towards ours and asks, Do you love me?

Sleepers, awake. Paul says. Open your eyes and see. Live love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

And you will have time enough.

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Reign of Christ
20/11/2022

Colossians 1:11-20
Psalm 46
Luke 23:33-43

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In a sentence:
Patience is finding life in the midst of life

Conventional wisdom has it that “patience is a virtue”. As often as not, this is declared by the person on whom we are waiting, and so the saying generally serves as a way of trying to keep us at a distance until our time, or turn, comes.

In our reading from Colossians this morning, Paul prays for two things for the Colossian believers: that they might be made strong with the strength that comes from God’s own power, and that they might be “prepared to endure everything in patience”. These are really not two things but one, and we’ll look at them together by focussing on patience.

Patience is a certain kind of waiting, the bearing of suffering or some other deprivation or difficulty. We don’t have to be patient. Despair is a way of enduring which knows no hope – no end to whatever afflicts us. Despair anticipates no resolution and the ethic of despair is sheer endurance. But few people can live this way; we’re more likely to opt for the less debilitating resignation, which is marginally happier. Resignation tolerates suffering and deprivation as a strategy of least resistance. At best, it will be a brave acceptance of what cannot be changed, a stoic keeping-at-a-distance of loss or suffering. A third response to suffering or deprivation is impatience – a refusal to accept suffering by exercising power to bring about a change. Impatience powers-through, if it has the resources, either in a DIY way or by haranguing others.

Why, of the various responses to difficulty, does Paul propose patience?

The key here is in recognising that patience is not simply endurance, and so not really like despair or resignation at all. Patience is a reconciliation with the timeliness (the temporality) of our lives. This is more than accepting that we need to wait out whatever is wrong. The timeliness of our lives is not in counting the ticking of clocks but rather in the fact that our lives are not “immediate”.

In our common talk, when something is immediate, it happens now: I want it done, and done immediately! The modern world is increasingly immediate in the sense that things happen faster: faster calculations, faster travel, faster service delivery, and so on. There is the more trivial sense of immediacy – quickness, without intervening time.

Broken down to its roots, however, the word “immediate” means, “without mediation”. Something is immediate in this sense when neither time nor anything else stands between us and what we desire. The “middle” drops out. We no longer order a book from a local store, which store then orders it from overseas; we can go direct to the supplier ourselves. We can – if we’re lucky! – find a life companion directly online without the hard work of lurking in this or that place, joining a social group, discovering who might be nearby and interested and available. We can find a spare part or the next piece in our collection without driving across the city or the country looking for it. Impatiently desiring Faster and Easier is not only about the immediate as instantaneous. It is also about the immediate as “without a middle”, without someone or something between us and our goal, perhaps even standing in the way.

By contrast, patience has discovered something which matters in the “not-immediate” (to put it clumsily) or, more positively, in what is mediated. After Paul speaks of patience in our passage this morning, he moves straight on to an account of God’s work in Christ: “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” Most importantly, this healing work does not take place “immediately” – instantly or without something between the origin and the goal. This is a mediating kingdom, a mediated relationship to God, and to everything. Christ stands in the middle between God and us. There is no immediate, direct link between us and God; time, space, and spaced-timed bodies are part of what it means to connect to this God.

Impatience is about immediacy; patience has come to terms with the mediated nature of our existence as creatures of this particular God. There is an unavoidable middle between us and what we truly need. But being unavoidable, it is necessary. And so patience experiences time and all that is in it as itself the stuff of life. “What we truly need”, then, is not just where patience might lead us but also the messy middle between here and there. Time and the persons and things which seem to be in the way between us and our desires are just what God uses to make us, to redefine and fulfil those desires. What God finally makes is the Body of Christ – a community of people learning to be patient with each other.

Patience is a virtue not because it is convenient for the person we are waiting on but because we too easily experience time as quite other than filled with divine possibilities between us and where we think we are going. In fact, having to wait seems increasingly to be creating a hatred of time and those who fill it, whether it be sitting in traffic, waiting 10 extra seconds for a slow internet download, standing in a supermarket queue or “having” to pause to eat in the midst of a busy day. We struggle with the passage of time and what fills it because it seems to be empty time: wasted time simply to be endured, time for resenting others because they are holding us up and, of course, time for being resented by them in return. Patience is not waiting; it is allowing that God takes time. God takes time, and makes of it life for the time‑d.

Patience is not a dry agonising endurance of time or of each other. True patience reflects God’s patience with the world – God’s making use of our time. Patience does not simply endure but takes what fills our time to be a rich field sown with the stuff of life.

Patience is then not an emergency plan for a situation in which something has gone awry. It is about the simple, God-blessed fact that we are situated – “sited” – in time, in relation to others.

Patience is being reconciled to being the kind of embodied, time-set creatures we actually are. We are not to be patient because the circumstances might require it; patience is all there is. To be reconciled to God and to each other is to be patient.

Paul prays for patience so that we might discover that even time which looks empty is God’s own time. God has been patient, has “endured” time, has become broken flesh in Christ, and so made time God’s own, the place God is content to be. If God is content to be here, to be patient is to claim this time as be truly our own, the place where we are content to be.

To be patient is, then, to be conformed to God’s own way of being and doing. To be patient is to be our true selves: the “image” of God.

By the grace of God, then, may the virtue of patience, with the strength it gives to redeem our time, be ever more fully ours, to our fuller humanity and (what is the same thing) to God’s greater glory. Amen.

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Pentecost 23
13/11/2022

Isaiah 65:17-25
Psalm 126
Luke 21:5-9

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In a sentence:
The heaven we need and live towards is our here and now

When the question is heard in our house, “Can you tell me a story?”, the following little tale is sometimes told:

Once upon a time, there was a spider who wanted to spin a web.
But she couldn’t. So she died frustrated.

(End of story).

These days that story is re-told either to be annoying or in mockery of my story-composing skills. But it wasn’t until I read closely our text this morning from Isaiah that I realised the theological significance of that frustrated spider.

Isaiah 65 tells of the coming creation of new heavens and a new earth. It’s difficult to hear this without hearing its much later echo in the book of Revelation 21, but we must try to filter that out for at least a moment. Revelation is a thoroughgoing apocalyptic text, but even late Isaiah is too early for apocalyptic ideas. In particular, unlike in Revelation, Isaiah’s vision has no promise of resurrection.

Isaiah’s vision of heaven, then, has no “eternal life”:

No more shall there be … an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. (65.20)

What is promised is not eternal life but enough life. This is because, for the Hebrew mind, the problem is not death but dying frustrated. In the restored creation,

[t]hey shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labour in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD – and their descendants as well. (65.21-23)

The new heavens and earth signify, “They shall not labour in vain”. The problem to which Isaiah’s vision is an answer is vanity of purpose, thwarted intentions, not enjoying the fruits of our labour. Heaven is the opposite of this, Isaiah says: no more “dying frustrated”. The death which remains in this vision of restoration is now a “good” death after a life that proved to be worthwhile. Un‑fulfilment is the problem; fulfilment is the correction. Isaiah’s heaven needs no eternal life because one fulfilled life is life enough.

A heaven without eternity is a confronting thought for those of us accustomed to speaking of never-ending life. In truth, we don’t think much about eternity. But what do we imagine we would do in a “forever” heaven? “Forever” is what we usually associate with boredom; to say that the sermon went on “forever” is to say that it was not, in even the remotest sense, an experience of heaven! Heaven-as-forever might be somewhat less than we hope for.

But it gets worse. In Isaiah’s vision, not everyone gets to heaven, even the worthy! “I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy”, declares God, meaning that it’s not here yet. It will be the case that some listening will not see it, perhaps even all of them, because Isaiah has no resurrection to carry them there.

And so a surprising thing emerges: Isaiah’s first hearers both rejoice that this restoration of the heavens and the earth is coming, and know that they will not see it. They look forward to the coming of what they will not see. For Isaiah and those who first hear him, it is heaven enough to know that Jerusalem will be restored, without having to be part of that restoration. Faith here is not that I will experience the good thing but that someone will. For Isaiah, not I but the Jerusalem-to-come will know the new heavens and new earth – a new Jerusalem in which I may not get to live.

This is about as un-individualistic an idea of faith and salvation as we could imagine – that the promise of heaven could be for me a life-giving promise even when I don’t expect to experience it. I rejoice and take heart that God’s salvation will be experienced by someone else.

If we are surprised by this, we will also be surprised to hear that precisely this understanding of the promise of heaven is at the heart of Christian confession and life. Christian faith begins not with the idea that I might get to heaven – something often mocked by non-believers. Christian faith begins with the idea that Jesus “gets to” heaven. Christian confession simply displaces Isaiah’s Jerusalem with the crucified Jesus. It is Jesus’ life which is frustrated by being cut short. He doesn’t see the fruit of his work but dies too early, and all he built is thrown to the wind. Good Friday is what Isaiah describes: houses built, vineyards planted, children born – but all in vain. In the death of Jesus is caught up all frustration of human work and intention. The cross is exactly non-heaven, exactly the frustrated, disordered world. But to speak of the resurrection of Jesus is to say of him what Isaiah said of Jerusalem. It doesn’t overturn pointlessness and thwarted goodness in happy consolation for Jesus but rather says that his thwarted life was enough, that the frustrated life he lived from his vision of heaven was enough.

This is more than a clever theological trick, tying Isaiah’s earthy salvation to what we’ve learned to be the “more” heavenly Christian salvation with its overtones of resurrection and eternity. But the point is that faith doesn’t leave the earthiness behind with a dose of resurrection and comforting notions of eternal life for everyone. If Jesus is Lord now – is now the sign of God’s kingdom – he was also the presence of God’s kingdom before the crucifixion, in his seemingly frustrated life and work.

Consider what it is like for us to believe here and now. We live not in the glorious heights of heaven but on the plain of frustration. Perhaps we “believe” in heaven, but all this can really mean is that we believe that Jesus is restored, that he is in heaven. This is the only angle on heaven we have, apart from sentimental and wishful thinking which proposes a heaven as some kind of retirement payout. We might hope that we join Jesus in heaven but this is precisely the point: we hope. And what do we hope? We hope first and foremost not that we might get to heaven, but that Jesus is there. Because if he is not there – if someone is not saved – then no one is, and we have no idea what we hope for. Our hope is that Jesus’ thwarted life was enough, because then our thwarted lives might be enough, too.

This is to say that an overgrown hope in heaven to come threatens to deny the real possibility of life here and now. There are some who expect heaven to come as a consolation for a frustrated life. And there are some who find solace in that, though they might not see heaven, it is nonetheless real and they will live here and now in view of that reality. There is a world of difference – even a heaven of difference! – between these two mindsets. Heaven as reward or consolation makes what I do and experience here and now less important than the coming life of heaven itself. I live now for the coming heaven in which I’ll really live, rather than living to live here and now. This is because the heaven I look forward to makes me think that this present world is not the real thing. I’ll be good for heaven’s sake rather than for goodness’ own sake. I’ll “wait” for heaven, and get on with things when it comes. This is not just a frustrated life but a procrastinated one.

But, against this, the real heaven I might not see requires me to start living here and now, because there is no other life to which I can put things off. I must live as if there were no heaven to come, as if the promise of heaven were as close as I’ll ever get to experiencing it, apart from getting on with a heaven-shaped life here and now.

This is to say that we might need to set aside our infatuation with a heaven to come – for our own sake, for our neighbour’s sake and for God’s sake. We pray, of course, for the coming of God’s kingdom, “on earth, as in heaven”. But we do this knowing that the coming of God’s kingdom is the gift in the Incarnation, and the gift in the Eucharist, and the gift in the promised presence to us of Christ in our neighbour. It is into our Now that the kingdom comes, and heaven is possible.

Lift up your hearts, Isaiah says to his people. God will come.

Lift up your hearts, we hear each week: God has come, and made dwelling among us, and comes and comes and comes again in glimpses of heaven in the lives of the saints and those who don’t yet know they are saints.

We gather as those learning what the kingdom looks like, learning that we might be saints, and so learning how to become God’s kingdom here and now.

So, Sleepers, awake.

Lift up your hearts.

Live.

Become the coming of God.

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All Saints
6/11/2022

Ephesians 1:11-19
Psalm 149
Luke 6:20-31

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In a sentence:
The one crisis (judgement) in faith is the cross of Christ, by which God judges all human judgement to make straight our way to him

To speak of “All Saints” is to speak of an identity – of knowing who we are or, at least, who the saints are! But this is more than a label. Who we are has to do with where we are, who we are with, and what we do. Identity has to do with a situation, a condition. What, then, is the human situation and the condition of the saints?

In the last week, the little owner of the sweetest singing voice in our house was heard to chime the following chorus,

“you’ve got to get yourself together,
you’ve got stuck in a moment,
and now you can’t get out it” (U2, “Stuck in a moment”).

(Mine is not the sweetest singing voice in the house!).

“Stuck in a moment”. This week the lexicologists at the Collins Dictionary announced their word of the year: permacrisis. I hadn’t heard that word until I read the announcement. Yet I knew straightaway what it meant – “an extended period of instability and insecurity – and I felt how appropriate a choice it was. The crises to which permacrisis points are, of course, very close to us all. Any one of the pandemic, Ukraine, #MeToo, inflation, floods, and heat waves would be crisis enough on top of the usual crises of family, work, and health. But laid one over the other, things are feeling fever-pitched. We might hope it’s a passing phase, except that I was struck by a comment in something else I read during the week, which remarked upon “the complex of modernity in which life knows itself to be at the mercy of a continuum of crisis” (Peter Sloterdijk). While that also seems to characterise today’s experience well, it was written 40 years ago. If the commentator is correct, the problem is not the world in the early 2020s but a deeply rooted cultural experience: being stuck in a milieu that we “can’t get out of”.

In all of this, the crisis of permacrisis is an instability to which we must constantly respond – “perma” wars and rumours of wars. The world is continually upset as things refuse to stay where we put them, and we want desperately to put them back again if we can.

What does faith say here? The Bible knows crisis, yet it differs from the crises we know. Our word “crisis” comes, letter-for-letter, from a Greek word which, in the New Testament, is typically translated as “judgement”:

And this is the judgment [crisis], that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil (John 3.19)

The Father judges [crisis-es] no one but has given all judgment [crisis] to the Son (John 5.22)

The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment [crisis]with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here! (Luke 11.32)

This is evidence of the righteous judgment [crisis] of God, and is intended to make you worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are also suffering (2 Thessalonians 1.5)

That is, a biblical “crisis” is not accidental but something intended, something God brings. The crises taking place around us are occasional – natural disasters or things we have done to each other that cause the world to go to smash. Biblical crises are deliberate interpretations of natural and historical conditions and crises; it is God who is smashing stuff. By themselves, natural and historical crises are things to be “coped with” and managed – occasions for getting ourselves together. Biblical crises reveal: “this is the crisis, this is the judgement, this is the setting right”. We don’t “cope with” crises like this; we live with them as a given condition.

Such a crisis is folded into our Gospel reading today – Luke 6.20-31. Blessed are the poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those reviled for Jesus’ sake. Woe to the rich, the full, the comfortable, and the well-reputed. This crisis-inducing judgement upsets the world, for now, we might wonder anxiously, Am we among the blessed or the cursed? The crisis is not, “How can we hold it all together?” but “When it all finally falls apart, where will we be found?” Luke, of course, is too simplistic here, in the way of the old prophets. God doesn’t do nuance, and so we can’t let ourselves off the hook too easily. To come to church and hear such a text is to have yet another extra crisis to “cope with” if we are to make ourselves safe, now from God.

This reveals the depth of the human situation, what we are really stuck in – not just our engrossing crises but the requirement for constant decision and assertion of ourselves in the face of the world, of other people and of God. This is our permacrisis: we are required to be the sufferers, the judges and the setters-right of ourselves in the world.

In our reading from Ephesians this morning, we heard of another crisis, much less explicit but real nonetheless. Here the crisis (the judgement) is, “I, God, know who you are…You are mine.” You – the saints of God – are “destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will” (1.11). This, in a wholly (and holy) new way, is the permacrisis of the gospel, the permanent judgement of the gospel. There is only one judgement, one moment of decision – that moment in which all judgements are collapsed into Jesus, and we are collapsed into him with them. This judgement is given that we might “hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory” (1.12). The “praise of this glory” is not an orientation out of this crisis-plagued world, for the glory of Jesus is the cross, which God makes the crisis of crises, the judgement of judgement. In the cross, the rich one is made poor so that the poor might be made rich through judged judgement. Luke, with his inversion of the status of the rich and the poor, says to us that we don’t know ourselves: we judge each other wrongly, anxiously, exclusively and violently: crisis leading to crisis, judgement to judgement.

Against this, the gospel is that there is one judgement which matters – the judgement of all judgement which makes human life once more a gift and no longer an anxious work of self-justification. While we are so accustomed to self-knowledge and self-determination through self-judgement, we have in God a new witness to who we are. If, distracted by the crises, we forget God, God does not forget us. In the crisis of crises is found the life of the people of God. This is the moment we want to get stuck in: the permacrisis which is the gift of life, and which sets all other crises in perspective.

This is the crisis which would make saints of us and not just of us, but of the whole world.

To be such saints as this is to live as though all deathly judgement is behind us, and before us is only life.

Let us, then, live as saints: bearers of crisis-dissolving grace from God to each other and the world. And then we might see that the moment we are stuck in is nothing less than the coming of God’s kingdom.

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Pentecost 21
30/10/2022

Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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This story must be one of the most vivid, and memorable stories in the Gospels.  Children love it and remember it, Sunday School plays used to be made of it and we could all happily believe it is just a tale, a diversion from the serious stuff in the Gospel. The reality is that it is a meticulously formed story in Luke’s carefully constructed two-volume proclamation of God’s plan for humankind in Jesus.

So I thought we’d examine the text in a bible study this morning and perhaps discover more than we did when we were young. The verses are all set out in your service sheet.

The trouble with lectionaries is that they chop a biblical book into small chunks, and place them alongside three others which may well also have the gospel we need to hear for the day. We regularly lose our place in the stories. So let’s begin by stepping back and seeing where today’s chunk fits.

Today’s story has its beginning back as far as chapter 9, when, after the transfiguration, Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem. Jericho is the last stop on that line, 20 km to go. But Luke has been theologically leading his readers on this journey too. At the end of the last chapter (18), he gives us (v.31-) the third prediction of Jesus’s passion, three sounding gongs in his narrative about what will happen in Jerusalem, and how it will be the fulfilment of prophecy regarding Jesus.

Jesus is not just walking by himself; he is part of a great crowd ‘going up’ to the Holy City for the Passover festival.  As they approached Jericho, he meets a blind beggar who calls out to ‘Jesus, Son of David’ and when asked what he wants he says, ‘I want my sight back’ and he receives it, instantly. And all present praise God for it.

So, let’s now follow the text in my favourite translation, from the Revised English Bible, which replaced the NEB in 1989.

1 Entering Jericho Jesus made his way through the city.

2 There was a man there named Zacchaeus; he was superintendent of taxes and very rich.

All we need to know about Zacchaeus in one line! Older translations say he was a ‘Chief Tax Collector’, the only such one mentioned in the NT. He is in charge of other tax collectors (‘superintendent’) and will have added to his income from them. In short, he belonged to the most despised section of Jewish society.

3 He was eager to see what Jesus looked like; but, being a little man, he could not see him for the crowd.

‘See’ in the sense of wanting to observe this man, not to consult him.  But there is one more fact: Zacchaeus was ‘of small stature’ [helikia mikros] and couldn’t see for all the regular-sized folk in front.

4 So he ran on ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see him, for he was to pass that way.

Sycamore trees are good for climbing: they have a sturdy trunk and spreading branches, but they also have abundant foliage. Peter’s graphic looks right!

5 When Jesus came to the place, he looked up and said, ‘Zacchaeus, be quick and come down, for I must stay at your house today.’

Leafy or not, Jesus spied him, almost as if he expected to see him. Jesus already knew his name. Notice that Jesus says he ‘must’ stay with him – not just for a meal, but for a B&B on the journey to Jerusalem too. There is a sense that the Abba God compels him to stay.

The crowd would have spotted him. He will have been conspicuously well-dressed, and the sight of him shimmying up a tree invited sniggers. He may have hoped to ‘see’ Jesus, slither down and vanish unseen. Not likely.

6 He climbed down as quickly as he could and welcomed him gladly.

Both verses 5 and 6 speak of ‘hurry’, ’quickly’, which is intended to highlight the urgency of Jesus’ summons and of Zacchaeus’s obedience. (We might remember the haste of another rich man in robes, running to greet his prodigal son. That too was undignified and unexpected.) Zacchaeus’ welcome of Jesus hardly suggests reluctance.

7 At this there was a general murmur of disapproval. ‘He has gone in to be a guest of a sinner,’ they said.

Suddenly the mood changes and the fickle crowd turns on Jesus and this is not the only time we hear this criticism. Jesus (in Luke) is often in the company of ‘tax collectors and sinners.’  It is part of Jesus’ divine mandate to sit with sinners.  Such actions belong in the kingdom which is breaking in.

8 But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Here and now, sir, I give half my possessions to charity; and if I have defrauded anyone, I will repay him four times over.’

However successfully he descended from the tree, Zacchaeus doesn’t care. He ‘stood there’, calm and composed before his critics. And his first words are what the NT calls ‘fruits worthy of repentance’ – though there is no other sign of his penitence. He is, from that moment, giving half of all his goods to the poor and a four-fold restoration to those he has defrauded. Now, the degrees of compensation are laid down in Jewish law (it’s all there in Leviticus 6: 1-5): Zacchaeus’ offer exceeds the legal requirement. He chooses to relinquish his very profession and embraces a considerable drop in economic status. By contrast, in the previous chapter (Lk 18: 22-24), we have just heard of a rich young ruler who sadly turned away from the kingdom because of his great wealth.

9 Jesus said to him, ‘Today salvation has come to this house – for this man too is a son of Abraham.

It would be possible to describe Luke’s Gospel as dedicated to showing the restoration of all the children of Abraham to their rightful relationships. Abraham’s children have been scattered, exiled, lost in biblical history; in Luke they are being gathered in once again, not least women and children – and even Gentiles. Compassion marks Luke’s Gospel.

Included are include the blind beggar (19:35f), the tax collector (!) praying alongside the Pharisee (18:8f) and earlier, the crippled woman in the synagogue who is healed on the sabbath day, who is called ‘a daughter of Abraham’ (13:10f). Zacchaeus has demonstrated that he has come home.

Two notes to end on.

Jesus says ‘salvation has come to this house’ and it’s worth remembering that Zacchaeus’ ‘house’ now includes all those who have suffered by him, but also his family and his slaves. Zacchaeus continues to be their guardian and benefactor, in a very different spirit – as kin under the God of Abraham, through Jesus.

And ‘salvation’ may begin here with one man’s conversion, but it has personal, domestic, social and economic dimensions. The biblical word can be translated as ‘made well’ or ‘healed’. The whole of life is embraced by Jesus’ ministry, and all who follow him have a foretaste of the coming reign of God.

The meeting of this little man with the very Word of God incarnate is not a diverting tale in a larger story: it is the larger story.

10 The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what is lost.’