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Lent 1
26/2/2023

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
Psalm 32
Matthew 4:1-11

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In a sentence:
The one temptation in life is to fear death in all its guises; in Jesus we see the freedom of denying death this power over us

Our readings this morning are part of a tale with two beginnings.

Adam and Eve and their apple, and the temptation of Jesus, are arguably the first things which ‘happen’ in each of the Old and New Testaments. And there is a clear correspondence between them – Eve in the Garden, conversing with the serpent and Jesus in the wilderness being challenged by the devil. The stories are strongly mythical but no less engaging for that, and part of that engagement is the similarities and differences between them. Perhaps the most apparent difference is that if the First Couple and Jesus undergo the same testing, Jesus comes out looking somewhat better than the other two!

What are we to make of that difference? A moral reading sees something heroic in Jesus’ achievement. He reveals himself to be strong enough to resist temptation where Eve and Adam were not. For their failure, they are excluded from the Garden and die. And yet this is pretty much what happens to the good Jesus, despite his success. This means that if we read these temptations as moral testing, Jesus’ experience contradicts any notion that moral success makes us safe: goodness doesn’t preserve us.

Experience might already have taught us this, but the success of Jesus in resisting the temptations presents a problem with morality, in view of how he dies. This is the problem of theodicy. Theodicy asks about the justice of God: how can God be just if good people like Jesus suffer and die as he did? In the particular case of Jesus, tradition has found an answer which is deep in the Christian psyche: Jesus came in order to die. With this twist, the death of Jesus is no longer an affront to the justice of God but is, instead, God’s own act: God ‘sends’ the Son, a ‘ransom’ for many. This is usually understood in terms of a sacrificial economy: Jesus is a sacrifice which does more than other sacrifices have done. How sacrifice was thought to work in Hebrew tradition is far from clear in the Scriptures, but that tradition is nevertheless used to interpret the death of Jesus, with the typical understanding being that God sacrifices Jesus. On this understanding, Jesus’ triumph over the devil in the temptations proves that he is like an unblemished offering presented at the Temple: perfect, and so a worthy sacrifice to offer against so great a need.

Nonetheless, this kind of sacrificial understanding doesn’t really work for us. Our occasional modern talk of sacrifice – the mother who sacrifices herself to save a child, or the sacrifices of soldiers in war – don’t touch upon the same thing. For sacrifice adequately to explain for us how the death of one good person saves many un-good ones, we would have to come to faith in the old sacrificial system before we could believe in Jesus. For us today, this would be like taking sides against Paul in the circumcision debates (Galatians 2) – become a circumcised Jew first, and then Christ will be a benefit to you. Apart from that, we might also wonder why, if God is truly all-powerful, he cannot simply forgive, without killing Jesus. Theories about God’s utter holiness and the magical saving effect of blood to break through holiness into forgiveness can’t make this question go away.

Jesus’ achievement in the face of these temptations is undeniably a sign of his being and character. But we must also see that, in view of the cross, if he is a new beginning, even this demonstrated righteousness does not avert the cursed life and death to which Adam and Eve are consigned. This new beginning to the tale of God and the world does not quite undo the old beginning. So far as we can see, the deathly effects of the First Couple’s apple-munching continue, even in the person of Jesus, said to be the “Son of God” (‘If  you are the Son of God…” the devil mocks). Our heartfelt ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ misunderstands the human condition: goodness is not salvation from this life. Goodness and innocence do not insure against suffering. This dismal conclusion is what sacrificial theories of Jesus’ death try to avoid but, for the reasons we’ve already considered, these theories don’t get us over the line these days, if they ever did.

We need another way of thinking about the ministry of Jesus from the temptations to the cross. So let’s try this: the ‘fact’ that even this righteous one dies is a call to us to be reconciled to death. This brings both the first and second beginnings of this tale into the very centre of who we are, what we do, and what we expect to come – here and now. Given how the story is told, we cannot but conclude that Jesus – at least – was reconciled to death. This doesn’t mean he was happy about it; ‘take this cup away from me…’, he prays in Gethsemane. But it does mean that death did not get in the way of him living the life-in-all-its-fullness of a child of God. Death did not force Jesus’ hand. In the first beginning of this complex tale, Adam and Eve desire to ‘be like God’. The distinction between them and God is, in the story, cast as the difference between a God who knows Good and Evil and the human beings who do not but desire to. But this is also the difference between a God who doesn’t die and human beings who do. To be ‘like God’ is not to die, not to be a creature. Unlike Jesus, these two ‘grasped’ at being ‘like God’ (Philippians 2), and yet they die nonetheless.

Yet their death – and ours in the same way – is a corruption of death. No longer is death merely part of what they are as not-God creatures. Death is now something to be feared – a power to be avoided or wielded. In the scene which follows what we’ve heard today, they hide from God for fear of judgement (for they are naked and judge this in themselves). This kind of fear of God, and the pain death will now become, are two sides of the same coin.

It’s within this reality that the second beginning of the story takes place: death has become a power to which people are subject, an horizon we know is there and work constantly act to keep away from. Fear of death and its many friends overshadows life, dividing and separating what God had joined together. Fear of death motivates invading armies and counter-offensives, causes us to lash out at each other after a hard day, and makes us greedy. Fear of death causes righteous people to crucify a righteous man.

In contrast, Jesus’ responses to the devil show that he doesn’t fear dying of hunger or the ‘death’ of failing in his ministry. Rather, he continues to live the life of a child of God. His path to the cross is no suicidal relishing of death, but simply the refusal to seek immunity to death. Jesus refuses to allow death to be a motivation. The life of a child of God is freedom not to be God, and a reconciliation to this as freedom:  creatureliness means that we are not immune to death.

Someone once said that the Jesus who calls us bids us ‘come and die’. This death is not suicide; it is a kind of ‘death to death’. In its own strange way, of course, death frees us from from all ties; this is what we mean when we say, ‘Rest in Peace’. But before this, in the life we are still living, to die ‘to’ death is to be set free from the tie of death, from the fear of it, from the willinginess to inflict it on others.

On this reading, the crucifixion is not the failure of goodness to bring us the reward of life. The crucifixion is Jesus’ refusal to fear death, and so is his refusal to be motivated by it. On this reading, the crucifixion is not Jesus passively sacrificed like a coin spent in some economy of salvation. The crucifixion is the triumph of a human being living in the shadow of everyone else’s fear of death. He dies because he does not fear death. The cross is Jesus’ own death-to-death throughout the whole of his life, demonstrated in a ‘real’ death.

In the same way, Jesus’ response to the temptations is a choice for life in the midst of invitations to fear death. This new beginning contradicts the first beginning, in which avoiding death by becoming like God seemed such a good idea.

To hear this tale with two beginnings opens up the possibility of a third beginning – indeed as many third beginnings as there are people who fear death in all its guises, whether the death which is the cessation of our breathing or the death which is some other constraint on life.

The ‘No’ of Jesus in the temptations is a reconciliation to the reality of death but a choice nevertheless to say ‘Yes’ to a life of free and open humanity. It is No to the shadow of death and a Yes to the light of life. It is a No to isolation and a Yes to mutuality. It is a No to hard justice and a Yes healing grace. It is a No to the gaslighting ‘if you are a Child of God’ and simple, source-of-all-life reception of God’s Child-making embrace in all hardship and all joy.

Jesus’ No to the devil’s life-sapping temptations is a No to fear and a Yes to the life God has given us to live.

We are Adam and Eve in the Garden, and Jesus in the wilderness, tempted to say Yes to fear.

But, faced with the choice, let us – in Jesus – say Yes to God, Yes to life.

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Transfiguration
19/2/2023

2 Peter 1:16-21
Psalm 99
Matthew 17:1-9

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In a sentence:
The Transfiguration of Jesus invites a transforming of our sense for – and living of – the lives we have been given to live

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.

(Nicene Creed)

This is rather a mouthful, and a contested one. We don’t recite the Creed each week but we do often enough; and when we don’t say it, it is nevertheless implied in the alternative affirmations of faith, and in other parts of the liturgy.

Where a protest is raised – in the world and often enough in the church – the objection is usually that the confession makes the world too big and God too small. Is God so small as to be identified with Jesus in this way? The objection is not new, which is why the middle bit of this ancient confession of faith is the longest: it’s here that God and the world collide. We have the Creed because of this apparent smallness of God in Christian confession.

Something of this tension between God and the world is reflected in the account of the Transfiguration we’ve heard this morning. By itself, the Transfiguration is not easily accessible. What happens here, why Elijah and Moses are there, why it occurs at this point, its fleeting strangeness – all of this compounds the sense of our distance from the reported experience. Are we simply to ‘believe’ the text and assert that Jesus did glow-up like this for a moment, with heavenly sound effects to complement the light show? What does it all add to our understanding of God? The disciples themselves had no idea what to make of what happened. A hint is given that Easter will make sense of it all, but this doesn’t help if we continue to wrestle to make sense of Easter itself.

Most of you have heard dozens of sermons on the Transfiguration, the last 19 of which here at MtE you can find on our website. I’ll try not to repeat all that this morning! Today we’ll come at it this way: taking as given some mystical experience, let’s consider the divine voice which offers commentary. The voice declares that Jesus is the Son – God’s special one – and that we should take notice of him. What would it mean to say that small and ordinary Jesus is such a presence of the fullness of God?

The first thing we would have to say is that, if Jesus were this presence, we wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at him at any other time. Peter, James and John get a glimpse of something new, but once they get talking they might wonder whether it wasn’t just a dream interrupted by lightning and thunder. Most of the rest of the time, Jesus is just a chap amid a group of men and women, milling about the place, as probably happened from time to time in those days. Perhaps Jesus is wise, and charismatic, and courageous, and committed to his cause, but that describes anyone with their wits about them. Jesus doesn’t look special.

We are told that the disciples’ response at the time was ‘fear’ or, as the Greek word could also be translated, ‘amazement’. This makes sense in terms of the shock at what happens, as a sudden flash of light makes us blink, or a loud noise makes us jump. Yet we are told the story not to know their response but to share it. What if this were true? If Jesus intersects with God in this way, what then for us?

To grasp the extent of this question – the moral extent, we might say, but also what it might mean for our sense of everything – we must keep in mind that it is not merely ‘a’ connection of Jesus to God which flashes forth for a moment. It is the connection of the crucified Jesus to God. The crucifixion (as an event) is still just a possible future at this point of the story, but for the Gospel writer and we who think about Transfiguration on this side of Easter, Jesus is the crucified, discarded one. Listen, the voice from heaven now commands, to the one you abandoned and crucified. This one is my Son, my beloved and my delight. And not so much listen to his ‘words’ – to this or that saying. Listen rather to the Word he is as the collision of the depths of human experience with the whole of God. The Transfiguration is light shining through the cross; (it does not ‘look’ like the resurrection of Jesus but is the meaning of the resurrection itself).

This, then, is not a warm-and-fuzzy, nearer-my-God-to-thee mountaintop experience. Not merely Jesus is transfigured. If it is the crucified Jesus – the sign of the most distant from God parts of the world – if it is this one who is transfigured – then even those things in the world which seem far from God are now pulsing with the possibility of bearing God. The world is now not as we have known it. And not only the world but God also is transfigured. God is shown to be willing to ‘own’, to live into, to die with and to pass through the darkest of human experiences, in the cross.

The Transfiguration, if it happened, says what doctrines of incarnation and atonement and resurrection and consummation would say if they were true: God is the mystery of the world, the hidden beginning, means and end of all that we are. We forget this in the midst of doctor’s appointments and overseas trips, between the birth of grandchildren and reports of wars in faraway places. We forget it when we’re angry that some justice has not been done, and when we’re glad to have received a windfall. We forget, when someone is trying to scam us on the telephone, and when we catch a hint of jasmine on the breeze. To forget God is not to be irreligious but to mistake some part of the world for less than it is – as just a thing which happens. For what it truly is is the possibility of the free and freeing presence of God, making possible the enjoyment – and the suffering – of all that we are and have and can be, without turning those things into God. To say that the big God is met in the small Jesus is to say not merely that this God can be found, but that God wills to be found, in all the small (and big) better-and-worse things of our life.

Jesus is God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made… in order that we might be, too – here and now in our little part of everything.

If we wanted to say why Christians gather like this today, we might say that we gather to be reminded that we have forgotten. We have forgotten that God is the God of small things, even the God of crucified things. We have forgotten, and so we have feared, and we have lashed out, and we have pushed away because we have thought we can’t afford to love or forgive or hope. We have forgotten what life and the world can be. The Transfiguration is not a thing which just ‘happened’. It is a thing which can happen – the discovery of God which transforms the world around us: Here. Now. You. Me. In God.

‘…a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved and my delight. Listen. Comprehend. Believe. Live.”’

‘When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by amazement.’

What else could they do with such news ringing in their ears? Now everything would have to change…

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Epiphany 6
12/2/2023

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 119:1-8
Matthew 5:21-26

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In a sentence:
What the contemptuous world needs (now, and always), is deadlock-breaking love.

Some of us have been meeting over the last year to consider The Quarterly Essay, as each issue comes out. Last September’s issue was an analysis by Scott Stevens and Waleed Aly of the rise of ‘contempt’ in modern politics. The authors note the intensifying shrillness of ‘cancel culture’ on the left and corresponding antagonism on the right, and the apparent inability to communicate across those lines other than by verbal grenades lobbed out of ideological trenches. The November issue contained substantial correspondence in reply to Stevens and Aly’s arguments, filling out the spectrum of thought about contempt, justice and power in society today.

What has the gospel to say into a culture of contempt?

“You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times,’ [Jesus remarks], ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment’. But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.

This is, by the way, not quite the gospel – it is the law – but it would seem to have something to do with our present experience of deep antagonism in society and politics. Jesus’ saying comes from the Sermon on the Mount, which both intensifies the received legal tradition of Israel and re-casts it. Here, and in the verses which follow, Jesus presses past a mere external observance of the letter of the law (that internet trolls usually don’t actually kill people they hate) to a problem with the spirit (that internet trolls would be happy if someone else killed the people they hate). And this applies, of course, also to those of us who are not internet trolls but still have a capacity for the kind of anger, hatred and contempt for others Jesus indicates here.

Jesus’ solution to the problem of contempt would seem – at first blush – simply to be, ‘Stop it; don’t do that!’. This is fairly straightforward advice, if not easy to implement. The very fact that Jesus says thinking murderous thoughts is the ‘same’ as murder suggests the likely impossibility of finally obeying this commandment: contempt cannot be expunged.

In Aly and Stevens’ analysis of contempt, and in the various responses to their proposal in the next issue, the assumption is quite the opposite. The question asked is, If this is how our society and politics are working, how do we fix them? (And we must ask this question, of  course!) The question leads into analysis of the nature of democracy and its inherent tensions, and the challenges of balancing rights and responsibilities in human relationships. Not surprisingly, the dualism of the right-responsibility debate means there’s no open-shut case which doesn’t look like an indefensible prioritising of one over the other, and this is all the more obvious from the responses to the Essay. As we might expect, those responses are variously at odds and in agreement with each other and with Stevens and Aly, sometimes quite vigorously and, here and there, with a least a little contempt creeping into the debate about how to moderate contempt in public debate. It’s all pretty cacophonous!

The problem here is that everyone is at least a little bit right, which is to say positively what Jesus has said negatively in our short reading this morning – which is that everyone is at least a little bit wrong. What do we do with that intractability, that inability to pull together in the same direction? The usual approach, and that taken by most of the contributors to The Essay’s discussion, is analysis. A kind of moral calculus is developed from given principles. In this case, background principles include ‘democracy’ and corresponding notions like ‘civility’, with concerns about justice and peace being motivating principles: how can we tweak the system to address injustice and unpeace?

One solution – entertained at the edges in this conversation – is revolution. This isnot a tweaking but an overthrow of the system, expecting the revolutionary violence to be outweighed by the anticipated justice which follows. History has known this experiment. Another solution, often just as violent, is the strong monarchic political hand which doesn’t have to honour democracy but can simply crush the unjust, although it often mistakes the just for the unjust. Because neither of these is an option for contemporary Western societies, attention turns to tweaking: let us better understand ourselves as denizens of democracy, and moderate our behaviour according to a deeper sense of democratic being and, in this way, move towards broader justice and more profound peace.

This is a laudable intention, and we cannot but commit ourselves to such work. Civil and divine law requires this of us. And yet, it will not work. As pessimistic as that is, its justification is pretty much all of history up until a few moments ago. Between the sayings of Jesus and today, there are almost 2000 years. Yet, between what he says and what we say today, there is but the time we require to take an intervening breath. When everyone is a little bit right, and so a little bit wrong, no social or moral calculus will lead us out of the messiness of life together. This is because the condition of being human is not a problem to be solved; it is a mystery to be negotiated. Mysteries are things which are there and can be seen and touched and experienced but can’t be comprehended or managed or directed. If we know that we ought not to hold in contempt, or to lust, or to covet, or to be jealous, we still can’t help but be like this sometimes. We might be able to keep it to ourselves, which helps a little, but this doesn’t make the possibility of murder or adultery or theft go away.

So, what will help here?

Only a miracle.

This is a problem, of course, because we don’t believe in miracles these days – we don’t really believe in them, as much as we long for such rupturings of what we expect to happen next. Part of the problem is that our sense of what a miracle might be is runs along the lines of turning sticks into snakes, walking on water or fast-tracking sick people back to health. These kinds of things, of course, are part of the biblical story, but they distract us.

The miracle which matters, and the miracle which our society and politics desperately needs, is the appearance of the saint. We can scarcely hear even this suggestion without scoffing, not least in the churches if even more loudly in the wider world. But this makes the proposal no less correct. Saints are peace-oriented, justice-creating rule-breakers. They are not ‘holy’ in the sense that they never think contemptuous, salacious or envious thoughts. But neither is the possibility of acting for a peacing justice limited by those failings. Saints are those who simply choose to ‘do justice and love mercy’ with all the humility and grace they can muster. And they do this despite the circumstances, despite what the system says might be the minimum required or the maximum allowed. Saints, then, are not necessarily civil or polite or democratic. They are truth-tellers and truth-doers.

If ‘saint’ is too hard a word to re-habilitate for modern politics, then perhaps ‘love’ might be admissible. Interestingly, it is the word with which Stevens and Aly conclude their response to their critiques.

‘Is it really too much to suggest’, they ask, ‘that the commitment to see one another as equals, and therefore as equals in a shared project which depends on cooperation, compromise, frankness, remorse, forgiveness, reciprocity and mutual education, requires a devotion for which the only word is love?’

‘Love’ has the advantage of being a more secular word than ‘saint’, although with the disadvantage that we often dilute it to almost vacuity. Aly and Stevens propose a strong, politically engaged sense of love, and imagine that we might have to be such lovers. Yet the political crisis they seek to address is that many (at every point of the political compass) seem deaf to the call. And so the call to love is either pointless – in that it doesn’t move us along – or it is incomplete: the imperative to love also requires the indicative of love, which is that such love will die for love’s sake. That is, we must see the cost of heeding this call to love. Saints – if we persist with this label for such lovers – have a tendency to die for their saintliness. If this death is not a crucifixion or a drive-by shooting, it is at least the ‘aspirational’ death-to-self which is personal sacrifice for the greater good. And because such love involves some kind of death, it is necessarily irrational: it resists balanced analysis and comprehension.

Contempt can only be overcome by lovers prepared to die at some level, and prepared to die not only for a ‘cause’ but, ultimately, for the ones who hold them in contempt – for they ‘know not what they do’. This is what a moral and political calculation cannot propose, although it’s the meaning of Jesus’ own death and the death to death to which all potential saints are called.

And who is called to die this life-enabling death to death? This question bedevils the conversation and the responses to the original Essay. The answer is, Everyone. Not everyone will heed the call, of course, which is the original problem: the resistance of contempt to the command to love. Yet the resistance of others is not our concern now. Our problem is whether we ourselves believe that the death of contempt can be overcome by a life of love.

Can saints make a difference? Can the ‘somethingness’ of love overcome the nothingness of death? This is what is at stake in the church’s talk about resurrection: whether or not life and love will not only overcome and transform death and contempt. Overcoming is easy – revolution and power politics can do this. Transforming is the challenge.

Those great lovers among us – our saints, ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ – are a test, a probing, a proving, of just such a possibility. These saints manifest a love unknown towards a future unknown, and we so desperately need them because the futures we think we know are nothing to look forward to.

Let us, then, pray for peacemakers like this.

And let us pray that more of them might arise.

And, while we wait for that prayer to be answered, let’s do our best to be a little more saintly ourselves.

Because what the world needs now – as ever – is love.

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Epiphany 5
5/2/2023

Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 112
1 Corinthians 2:1-5
Matthew 5:13-20

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.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” (Mat 5.11)

The call in the Gospel to be salt and light picks up from this final blessing of the beatitudes. Each of the blessings of the beatitudes are not simply present gifts, but function also as future promises:

The poor are blessed and shall receive the kingdom of heaven
Those who mourn shall receive comfort
The hungry shall be filled
To the pure God will be visible

Running through the blessings from the beatitudes is not simply gift, but a sense of fullness that is arriving with Jesus himself; Jesus who offers this new way of life to those who follow the Anointed One. There is an eschatological dimension to the blessings which lead into today’s reading: that is, a dimension that is about God’s definitive intervention in the world to gather up all of history into a new order of righteousness and love. (Perhaps it’s worth noting that the Greek here translated as “blessing”, ‘makarios,’ can mean something like happy, fulfilled, and joyous, not merely “blessing.”)

It is in the context of this hope in hope itself, the context of hope in the fulfillment of hope, that we hear today’s Gospel reading.

Whatever we might say about the meaning and usage of salt in the ancient world (one commentary lists no less than eleven possible meanings for the metaphor of salt!), we are called to be the salt of the earth. There can be no limitations set on the scope of God’s redemptive work: it is the world, the whole world which God seeks to embrace in the saving work which Jesus’ teaching and ministry announces. So too does the reference to a light for the world, and a city on a hill recall us to the great expansive reach of God’s saving plans in Christ.

And yet here we begin to see one of the challenges with proclaiming with such confidence that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is good news to and about the whole world. If this good news speaks to the world, then it speaks against that other Gospel: that Gospel of Rome, which spoke of military might and victory. Gospel was originally a term for military triumph; triumph which ultimately emanated from the city Cicero called, “a light to the world”: Rome.

Part of what ought to make the original audiences of this sermon nervous – whether those who heard Jesus’ teaching during his ministry, or those who first heard these words recorded in the text of Matthew’s Gospel – what ought to make them nervous is that the teaching of Jesus has direct political implications. It can be very difficult for us, in contemporary Australia, to understand what is at stake in what Jesus seems to be teaching.

If Jesus really is the Messiah, who brings fulfillment of the prophetic utterances of Jewish hope;
if Jesus really is proclaiming the definitive intervention of God, to gather up history and fundamentally change the world as it was known;
if Jesus really is suggesting that the whole world is the domain of Christian discipleship;
then Jesus is consigning his followers to direct confrontation with Roman authorities. Jesus is signing the warrant of oppression for the communities that will be formed in his name. He not only looks forward to his own death upon a cross, but the deaths of hundreds, thousands, of Christians under the Roman persecution – and the various persecutions throughout history, and which continue today.

It’s here that some assumptions about the dynamics of power and authority in Jesus’ historical context need some revision. It has become almost cliche to talk about the Pharisees and Sadducees as the religious authorities wielding power to ultimately send Jesus to his death. Across history Christians have perpetuated the idea that the legalistic Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes misunderstood God’s gracious love, and instead contorted the law to maintain their place of power in ancient Judea.

Now, while it was true that Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes held positions of relative power within the Jewish communities of the ancient Roman empire, it should always be remembered that they were leaders within an otherwise oppressed community, within an occupied territory. In other words, while the religious leaders of Jesus’ day did indeed have power and influence, much of this power and influence existed within a broader context of disempowerment for the Jewish people as a whole.

This broader understanding of the power dynamics of the ancient Jewish community ought to give us pause when we move too quickly to condemn the religious leaders of Jesus’ day for their lack of understanding or faithfulness. In our Gospel reading today the righteousness of these religious leaders even becomes the standard for measuring the righteousness of Jesus’ own followers. Perhaps the point Jesus is making is that for all the disagreements Jesus has with the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes, they are the ones who are the visible manifestation of the Jewish community. They are the ones who must negotiate the complex relationship with capricious Roman officials; they are the ones who have sought to keep a dispirited, dispossessed people faithful to God’s law.

Now this, of course, does not mean that the religious leaders are free from culpability: the Sadducees had a reputation for cooperation with the Romans, not all of which was for the benefit of the Jewish people as a whole; and all of the Gospels record quite heated disputes between Jesus and Pharisees.

Nonetheless, what Jesus seems to be aware of in his teaching is not only a new kind of religious ethos for a self-contained community. Jesus seems to be aware that his teaching implies a direct confrontation with the ways of the world. Not simply because his religious ethic is unpopular, but because he is the Messiah who fulfills the expectations of Jewish hope and brings the arrival of God’s Kingdom. While understood in different ways, this was the same hope held by the religious leaders, who sought to see this fulfillment of hope through engaging the messy, complex world of leading an occupied people.

For this reason it needs to be made abundantly clear, then, that what Jesus offers us in his own proclamation is not a repudiation of the law, not an impudent rejection of the religious leaders and their complex negotiations with Roman power. Rather, Jesus offers us in his proclamation the gathering up of Jewish hope, and a new way forward.

Jesus is saying:
Nothing will pass from the law, indeed that same God who the law draws us to is now calling us through and beyond this law. That same God is calling us to see that law fulfilled. That same God is offering us both gift and fulfillment. That same God is meeting us in the complex, risky world in which we stake our lives on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven.

For us today, 2000 years removed from unjust occupation in Judea, this can seem somewhat alien (though, of course, perhaps it shouldn’t, with the ongoing plight and violence in modern Palestine). We, in this room, are unlikely to be called upon to stake our lives on the way to the Kingdom of Heaven. And yet, we are still recipients of this same call; still part of this same secret thread which weaves its way through the whole world and all of human history.

Our call is no less cosmic in scale: we are called to gather up the history of hope for the world and carry it forward. We may no longer do this in ways which seem as visible as the past, and yet we should not therefore diminish the scope of God’s redemptive work. The world is the domain of God’s salvation.

What we continue to learn as we move out into the world is that this redemptive work is not always something we carry with us. We often find the Spirit out there ahead of us. We are often called into the messy, complex work of negotiating the different forces which shape the Church and its relation to the world – sometimes needing to take a backseat to how others teach us about the Kingdom of Heaven. In this too we are to be lights that shine on the secret ways God’s will is working out in the world.

The call today is to be salt and light. This is a call which gathers up the hope of the oppressed, which carries the cry for justice into the whole world. The call to be salt and light is the call to highlight where the world needs promise, and where the world experiences fulfillment – even in small and secret ways.

And in all things we proclaim with confidence that the world needs the God who has been faithful since the beginning, and is faithful still.

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Epiphany 4
29/1/2023

1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Psalm 15
Matthew 5:1-12

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In a sentence:
God’s ways in the world call our ways and confidence into question, seeking from us humble action towards justice.

With his claims for a foolishness which is wisdom and weakness which is strength, Paul seems to be going all paradoxical and mystical, rendering these notions self-contradictory nonsense, with little offered to replace them.

At stake here, however, is not mystification but the question of the freedom of God. The Corinthian church was divided and confused, as most communities are! Paul’s concern is that God is taken to justify that confusion. The division arises from the exercise of a particular sense for wisdom and power – that which traces its source and legitimacy back to God. The way of the world – the order of the Corinthian Christian community – is justified by direct lines to God. Turned around the other way, the argument becomes not merely that our ordering of the world is like God but that God is like our ordering of the world.

Paul’s inversion of wisdom and power, then, is not about mystifying these notions but about God’s freedom: you can’t read God off the order of the world. God is not constrained by the way that we do things.

…God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

The ‘boasting’ here is not about how handsome, smart or otherwise godly I might be, but a celebration of the gift of God. Boasting about myself is precisely a claim to godlikeness, and it is this which is the source of human division – the appeal to a righteousness outside of the present relationships in which I find myself, which sets me free from responsibility for you. It is this lack of responsibility for the other which divides the Corinthians, and us today.

Paul’s ‘boasting in the Lord’ sounds to modern ears like an unnecessary otherworldliness, but it stands as a challenge to all the concrete worldliness-es – the wisdoms and powers – we usually exercise. In particular, it stands against all claims that there is a system which will work things out for us, a set of necessary steps we need to take to set human being right. If there were such a system, we’d have to admit that we have yet to discover it after thousands of years of effort.

The current debates around the Parliamentary Voice are a case in point. Increasing recognition of our complicated and violent colonial history, continuing need in aboriginal communities and general goodwill on the part of the majority of Australians are not enough to show us a way forward. The reasonable desire for a clearer communication of what is intended, mixed with cynical political tactics from some opposition parties, mixed with division within the indigenous community, mixed with the possibility of compassion fatigue, risk aversion and self-interest in the voting populace, all amount to anything but clarity as to what is to be done to undo some of the injustice of the past and the present. The same could be said for the numerous other challenges in the social, political and economic spheres whirling around us. These spaces are filled with social and political slogans which are both right and wrong at the same time. They are right in that they name an injustice, and wrong in that they imagine that those injustices can properly be made just. The justification of this claim – that the injustice cannot be rectified – is the experience of history itself: we have not seen it happen in any final way. This recognition is not new. It is not for nothing that old Israel opted for apocalyptic thinking. This embodied the notion that if there is going to be any experience of final justice, it must come from outside the dynamics of normal history. Apocalyptic thinking is not an escape from life in the world but a recognition of the world’s unresolved problem: when will injustice be overcome?

The question then becomes, how are we to live under such circumstances? And this is a question of how to live together, because dropping out of circulation is easy, denying as it does that the other is part of me and I part of her.

Paul’s answer to the question of justice seems weak, given the scale of what confronts us in contemporary social and political division. This answer is crystallised later in his first letter to the Corinthians, in his famous ‘love chapter’ (chapter 13). The apparent weakness of this response springs not least from the context in which we normally hear Paul’s appeal to love: in weddings. There, Paul’s thoughts on love are heard as an account of what the marrying couple themselves already experience. In modern marriages (weddings), we commit because of our experience of love. This is the presence of a kind of justice, so that there is no call for what Paul is actually doing in that chapter – commanding an unloving couple to love each other. Such a command might make sense in an arranged marriage but not in our modern marriages, at least not to the beginning! Paul’s love chapter, then, is reduced to what we feel about people we already love, which has little to do with those from whom we are alienated, which was his own situation.

And so, love becomes a weak political proposal. What does love look like now, in relation to Australia’s colonial history? This is precisely the question. But if, with Paul, there is to be no boasting save in the Lord, then there can be no all-encompassing answer – no proposal that love only looks like the Parliamentary Voice, or a treaty, or one of the less novel approaches to the problems of indigenous experience in Australia. Any one of these is as full of possibility and risk as the other because, for all the good which might still be done, the injustices we want to address here can only ever be partially addressed. And they can only be partially addressed because, at heart, human beings are fanatics for this or that wisdom or power which ultimately excludes and denies. The tone of modern politics is nothing if not fanatical.

This is not intended to be pessimistic but realistic. To commit to some political action (such as the Voice or a treaty) is not to have solved the problem. There is no righteous deed which does not need constant re-negotiation. Justice is a continual balancing act or perhaps, in our direct experience, an inbalancing act.

Paul’s ‘boasting in the Lord’ is not, then, the confidence that with God everything is clear and in good order, much less that the present order is God-ordained. This was the claim of the happier Corinthians, who were confident they had settled into God’s way. To ‘boast in the Lord’ is to delay claims about the achievement of righteousness while at the same time acting towards justice. It is to hear a call to justice and to turn towards that voice within the messy now of human life together, where it will always be the case that we can do better. It is to debate and to work for justice, but also to be ‘above’ arguments about any final solution. It is to be broken and whole in the same moment, in a way which denies neither the need for our action nor the unearned gift of God.

Faith in the God of the crucified Jesus is recognition that we are not, in history, ever finished – not ever righteous. The closest we come to completion is in the person of Jesus, who is himself defined by the ambiguity of the cross – that confusion of human and divine judgement which, Paul declares, turns our sense for power and wisdom upside down, and should shake our confidence that we see clearly.

Paul’s attempt to dislocate our confidence – that we see and comprehend truly – is an invitation to humility. In society and politics, humility is much lauded but rare. What looks successful and gains attention is the exercise of wisdoms and powers which lift you above me. What distinguishes humility from this is that it is not deluded: it claims no extraordinary and unambiguous power or value but acts according to justice, and looks to see what the next just action might have to be.

This is the life of faith to which Paul calls the Corinthians, and us: to do justice, love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6.8). In the broadest of our politics and the most intimate of our relationships, let this be how we are there for each other: with a wisdom which is ever more open to deeper love, and a strength which comes from God’s own persistent faithfulness.

By the grace of God…

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Epiphany 3
22/1/2023

1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Psalm 27
Matthew 4:12-23

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In a sentence:
The power of the cross is that it “levels” us, given as our common situation before God

Paul’s account of the situation at Corinth is sadly familiar. With our Protestant and Catholic, liberal and conservative, high church and low church, traditional and contemporary, exclusive and open communities, the problem Paul names remains today, if now on a much larger scale.

Yet it’s noteworthy that we don’t hear in Paul’s response such simple encouragements as “Love one another” or “Do try to get along”. He sees that the issue runs much deeper than simple moral failure. What is at stake is not a social, moral, psychological or motivational deficiency but is specifically theological; it is a failure to identify correctly what is at the heart of Christian life and so of human life more generally. Christian division, then, is a crisis in doxology: a crisis in the correct praise of God.

Because of this, Paul casts these divisions in the light of the cross:

“I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one can say that you were baptized in my name. … For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power.” [NRSV]

The “power of the cross” to which Paul refers is its function as the great leveller of humankind. Power and wisdom are how we distinguish and rank ourselves in relation to one another: stronger, smarter, richer, older, prettier, or whatever. But such divisive power and wisdom dissolve away if the crucified Christ is the reference point for all the meaning, power and wisdom the world needs. If the thing which matters most – the “thing” we call “God and Father” – identifies itself with the rejected and outcast human being Jesus of Nazareth, then no rankings in human knowledge and ability will impress God. God is “happy” with the nothingness of the cross. The saving power of the cross, then, is not that it adds something to us to make us better, wiser or stronger. The power of the cross is that it takes something away.

What is taken away are the additions we are tempted to make to Christ himself, marked by one of the most potent and problematic of theological concepts. This concept is the little word “and”. The “and” appears as a supplement to the crucified Christ. Fellowship at Corinth revolved around Christ “and” – Christ “and” Paul, Christ “and” Peter. If you did not have the same “and” as your neighbour, it becomes less clear that you are truly one with each other. At the Corinthian communion table, it was Christ “and” having food to eat – having no food to bring to the meal meant no real participation in the fellowship of the Lord’s supper (1 Corinthians 11). In civil society, it was Christ “and” the law courts (1 Corinthians 6); common Christian conviction was not thought to cover how to deal with disputes between believers. Again at the table, it was Christ “and” maturity – the “mature” in faith feeling free to eat meat which had been offered to idols, the apparently “immature” being greatly troubled by this, perhaps even to the point of losing faith (1 Corinthians 8, 10). A similar confusion arose around speaking in tongues in that community (1 Corinthians 14).

So it went in that church, each issue a manifestation of the same problem: community built on the kind of power and wisdom which is “added” and so which some have and some do not. What more I have raises me above you: Christ “and”…

Paul’s correction is that each of the “ands” we append to Christ has to be subject to the levelling effect of the cross. The cross unites by levelling. It marks the lowest common denominator among us – godlessness – and, from there, opens up the power of grace which builds upon nothing. Our calling is not to be clever, not to be wise or powerful. It is not, that is, to accumulate as many “ands” as possible. Our calling is to be faithful and to trust the one who has determined that the cross, and no other “helpful” addition we can imagine, will be the way by which God is effective in us and in the world.

What does this mean for us? It means that we are free before God. If the word of God in the Crucified is an assault on all things by which we would supplement ourselves or Christ, so also is it a liberation from the need to supplement ourselves before God. If I don’t have to be right in order to have the fullness of God in Christ, I need not be anxious about whether or not I’m always doing the smartest thing. And if anxiety is stripped out of our work, then our work approaches something more like play – be it our work as individual persons or our work as a Christian community. We can try this or that – not because it’s the cleverest thing, but because we are free to do so in Christ, the wisdom and power of God.

In our personal lives, we are free to do it differently – start a business, retire early, get a divorce, give away a lot of money, buy a puppy, or whatever. In our common life as a congregation, we are free to experiment – playing with worship styles, or times, or locations, or mission investments, or whatever. In the next couple of weeks, this is just what we’ll be doing as we begin conversations with the theological college about what relocating into a partnership with them might look like. In all that, we need to keep in mind that the college is a mere “and” to us, and is not the gospel promise itself – is not any kind of salvation for us. And we have to ensure that the college sees us in just the same way. If it doesn’t work, whatever we might lose we don’t lose that which is most basic. We don’t lose what binds us to God and is the possibility of our being truly bound to each other: the Christ who died by our wise and powerful hand and yet who graciously returns to us to speak of a different wisdom and a different power.

The crisis with which Paul begins at Corinth is human division, but the response is the grace-full heart of the gospel. The church is called to unity not because unity and love are “good things”. We are called to unity because what we have in common in Christ exceeds all things that distinguish us from each other. Our human wellbeing is not secured by our own efforts and allegiances, but by the God who names us as his own, giving us himself and a common humanity by seeing us in the Christ we rejected. God sees us through Jesus. If we are in the Christ who is rejected, we are in the Christ whom God raised to life. This is grace.

There is, then, no place in the reign of God for division through merely worldly and selfish preferences and concerns. We are called out of ourselves to discover our lives hidden together with Christ in God.

Let us, then, open ourselves to this grace and, little by little, ever become something of this grace to those around us.

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Epiphany 2
15/1/2023

Isaiah 53:1-7
Psalm 40
John 1:19-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.  Isa. 53:7. NRSV

The next day, [John the baptizer] saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’             Jn 1:29 NRSV

Our two readings this morning are linked by a single vivid image, a lamb waiting at an abattoir. It is John the Baptist who makes the link and today’s Gospel follows on from last week’s.^[1]

You may remember Matt Julius’ arresting title, ‘The wrong baptism’ where he rightly drew our attention away from Jesus’ baptism (which St John does not actually describe) to the baptism of Jesus on the cross. [Since we will talk about two Johns this morning, the gospel writer will be ‘St’ and the other, mostly ‘the Baptist’]

John the Baptist, named for his profession not the denomination, is such a strange figure. He has already opted out of normal society, an ascetic, perhaps connected with some of the communities we know lived in the desert beyond Jerusalem. He also stands between the biblical Testaments, the last prophet – and, as St John makes him – the harbinger of a new chapter in God’s dealing with humankind, the Forerunner (as Orthodox Christians call him).  He reached back into the Jewish tradition to quote the prophet Isaiah and his moving four poems or songs about another strange figure called ‘the suffering servant’. He too was cast out, and as the fourth song (today’s reading) says,

‘cut off from the world of the living, stricken to death for my people’s transgression’ (Is. 53:8)

You can see why the first Christians, all raised in Judaism, saw a close portrait of their crucified Lord. The figure of the ‘Lamb of God’ is its focus.

St John began his Gospel with the image of the ‘Word’, the ‘Logos’, but he now takes up the Baptist’s ikon and repeats it no fewer than three times – but what does it represent?

If you read all of chapters 42 to 53, you will find no single answer. The Servant of God, of which the Lamb is one image, is seen as a representative man, a leader perhaps, a messiah, perhaps, or a remnant of the faithful Israel, guided by God’s promises, or a kind of ambassador to other nations on God’s behalf (which, by the way, is a common task of a biblical servant, as it is of a deacon). Modern Judaism, I learned from reading commentaries by modern rabbis, choose the communal image, God’s chosen people, Israel. In Isaiah’s time, they were an exiled nation with its temple in ruins and its culture cut off from its sources. The Servant is not one man, he is Israel.

We heard from St John this morning about the interrogation by some pharisees from Jerusalem, to whom the Baptist denied that he was the Messiah, nor Jeremiah who would return to announce the messiah, nor a prophet – like Isaiah. The John verses are the Baptist’s attempt to distinguish himself and his ministry from that of Jesus.

There is a subplot here which need not detain us. Both Johns are addressing two communities – the followers of the Baptist and the disciples of Jesus. The Christians were wary that the baptism story looks as if their Lord Jesus submitted to John and was thus somehow less than him. But John was executed and in time his disciples chose to follow Jesus or withered away.

And there were two baptisms, John’s in water, Jesus’ with fire and the Holy Spirit.  St John is careful to add the Baptist’s testimony that he saw the Holy Spirit ‘remain’ over Jesus at his baptism (1:32).

The next day he sees Jesus in the street and proclaims to the crowd, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’ quoting Isaiah – and we will sing it again before this service is over.

Now, Christians believe that it was the mission of Jesus to ‘take away the sins of the world’. But Isaiah’s servant was to take away the sins of Israel. The revolution announced in the Second (or New) Testament is that God’s promises are open to all humankind, to the ‘Gentiles’ as well as to God’s beloved first people.

But what happens when we name Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’?

St John believed that Jesus’ death on the cross took place on the day when the lambs were being killed for Passover. No other gospel makes that connection. St Paul calls Jesus ‘our Passover Lamb’ (1 Cor 5:7). I asked myself what the Jewish tradition thinks of the lamb of isa. 53. They insist that the Passover Lamb was not a sacrifice. It is the story of origins for Jews. On the eve of Exodus, the whole nation prepared itself for a hard and dangerous journey from slavery to freedom. The lambs were for a meal to sustain them, to be eaten in a hurry.  Blood was sprinkled on their doorposts as a sign to protect them. None of this is ‘sacrifice’ in its normal meaning.

The other major penitential event in the Jewish Year is the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. In its background story (Levit. 16:7-22), two goats were selected; one was sacrificed, and its blood poured on the altar; the other, over which the priests listed the sins of Israel, was driven out without further ceremony into the desert where it died, hence our ‘scapegoat’.  But the goat associated with Israel’s sin was not the goat which was sacrificed.

Sacrifice is a word in the Christian vocabulary, but it needs to be very carefully used. Jewish sacrifice, for ordinary people like Joseph and Mary, was concerned with such things as doves and pigeons; the more serious, national rituals took place in the Temple, and with its destruction in AD 70, all animal sacrifice ceased, and since then Jewish understanding of sacrifice has been spiritual and ethical. They are horrified at the thought that the death of a human being could achieve these purposes.

From the earliest centuries, philosophers have offered ’theories of Atonement’ – to make sense of death of the innocent Jesus. The most popular for Protestants – though there are Catholic equivalents – is called ‘the Penal Substitutionary’ theory, which holds that the primary purpose of Jesus’ death was to satisfy God’s justice. It was a brutal payment to God for others’ wrongdoing. Many modern Christians reject this theory because it is morally offensive. And something of it remains in other theories and is kept alive in conservative Christianity. (This was the doctrinal dividing point between the Student Christian Movement and the evangelical Union in the 1960s.)

I should now solve all these mysteries for you, but I cannot. This sermon is an unfinished symphony.

Certainly, our present era has a major challenge in articulating our faith in categories both true to the biblical tradition, and meaningful in our contemporary contexts. We cannot follow our mediaeval ancestors in wholesale but uncritical borrowings from either Testament. It is a task we preachers attempt every time we speak, and in the end, we stand dumb before the ‘Mystery of faith’.

Let me add some comments which need to be explored if I were to complete my sermon (some of these have been added post-preaching!).

The image of the lamb of God appears elsewhere in the scriptures. Some (e.g. Calvin) have seen Jesus’ silence before Pilate and Herod as a parallel to the Lamb/servant‘s innocence. In Revelation, the lamb is also a lion overcoming God’s enemies; the martyrs are dressed in white garments ‘washed in the blood (!) of the lamb’ (7:14). In eucharistic and liturgical history, the bread is called ‘the lamb’, and the Agnus Dei is sung while the bread is broken after the Great Prayer and before Communion.

Are any of these uses tied to a sacrificial understanding of Jesus? Well, yes, but not in a penal substitutionally way! Christ died for us, yes, but is its meaning to be found in the blood of his execution, or from the whole of his incarnation, teaching, healing and in his constant communion with and obedience to the Father? The hours in Gethsemane seem to be a critical point here. The Lamb of God image has anchored our attention on the death of Jesus. In Isa. 53:7, after the lamb is mentioned, the parallel analogy is of a sheep before its shearer, i.e. not faced with death. I do not wish to remove death and suffering from Jesus or his work of salvation, but I want to release it from a narrow interpretation.

The graphic on today’s order of Service is of a mosaic of the 6^th C AD in the church of San Vitale in Ravenna. It is situated at the top of the vault in the dome, supported by four angels and the background is of stars and flowers of paradise – but there are no wounds or blood.  That is the main way Christian artists have portrayed it. There is another strand where the lamb is pierced in the breast and blood spurts out in an arc, sometimes into a chalice; obviously that comes of a catholic piety and goes beyond the meanings I believe are justified.

We believe that Jesus/the Lamb rescued us from the debt we owe God. I want to take ‘on the cross’ as a summary of his whole ministry. His ‘work’ is done, but ours is not, and we live and work through the hope based in Jesus’ unique victory: as a human being in communion with his Father, he broke through the barriers which prevent us from being who God wants us to be. That was the otherwise impossible task the Lamb was prepared to take on.

We need to live within the paradox set for us by John the Baptist, who baptised Jesus but knew there was another baptism.  That baptism, which we share, makes us members of the body of Christ and heirs of his promises, ‘through the water of rebirth and the renewal by the holy Spirit’ to life eternal in Christ.

[1] I also chose the Fourth Song from Isa. 53, which is where the image appears.

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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!