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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.’

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Pentecost 20
23/10/2022

Joel 2:23-27
Psalm 65
Luke 18:9-14

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In a sentence:
Humility overcomes hard righteousness to bring
reconciliation for all

The obvious lesson from our Gospel reading this morning is, Don’t be the Pharisee: “for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” This presumes, of course, that we all want to be exalted, at least a little bit!

This reading works even for those not really sold on the whole God thing. We value humility and have little time for self-righteous posturing. Not taking ourselves too seriously is appreciated by others, and so is a helpful rule of engagement as we move through daily life. Here endeth the lesson, then – at least the obvious, moral lesson – and a good one to learn.

But let us look to see what might be less obvious here. While the two figures in Jesus’ little story are poles apart in terms of moral judgement, they have in common that each stands at his pole alone. I don’t know whether this is intentional in the original telling of the story, but I’m going to make quite a bit of it in what follows! The Pharisee is a self-made man. It is “standing by himself” that he declares his judgement on himself and the other. He needs no other, because this is the meaning of self-righteousness: righteousness by virtue of what I am or have done, perhaps against great odds, with reference only to the truth I perceive and not to others and their truths. The unexpected and usually unobserved effect of self-righteousness is that such a person ultimately stands alone in the world they have created, which does not require and so finally does not admit others. The heaven of the self-righteous has a population of just one. My presumption to be able to perceive the unrighteousness of all others excludes them. Judging and rejecting others has no end and, finally, I am alone.

The experience of the tax collector is the aloneness of being rejected. We don’t know why he considers himself unworthy before God but we can take him at his word that he is, for whatever reason, morally (or otherwise) unworthy. If the Pharisee is a self-made man, this tax collector is a self-unmade one. This is the moral reading of their different experiences.

But the important point is not the difference of their moral achievements but the similarity of the effect of those achievements: both men stand alone. Both have isolated themselves. This sameness makes possible a new perception of their difference. No longer is this difference in taheir moral performance; it is in their perception of their being alone. For the Pharisee, aloneness is a virtue to be celebrated, for which he even thanks God. Or, more precisely, the Pharisee doesn’t see the aloneness but only his isolating righteousness. The Pharisee doesn’t know his condition. And so he also mistakes the condition of the tax collector. The Pharisee sees the other’s sin but not the other’s aloneness. The Pharisee, then, doesn’t see how he and the tax collector are the same.

While the Pharisee celebrates his righteousness and the alone‑ing it brings, for the tax collector, aloneness is a devastating affliction he desperately wants to escape. Recognising his problem, he seeks relief by the only means available – the appeal for mercy. And so the one whom the Pharisee’s moral, alienating righteousness holds in contempt now finds true, reconciling righteousness.

Hoping that this much has made sense, now for something less sensible. All this makes possible what is, on most grounds, an untenable assertion but one we must nonetheless make. If the tax collector is alienated by hard righteousness and is restored to life by God before the one who rejected him, then the tax collector is Jesus himself. It was the righteousness of the Pharisees, priests and scribes which cast Jesus out – which “alone‑d him” – in crucifixion. Easter Saturday becomes the prayer for mercy – a strangely unvoiced prayer of the dead – and the resurrection becomes God’s healing insistence on life not only for himself but for those who rejected him in Jesus. The tax collector’s prayer is not for himself only.

Notice how far we are here from the mere morality of arrogance and humility as personal attributes we might or might not possess and which we eulogise or lament in others. Humility is now nothing like a meek mildness but the opposite of the hard righteousness which divides and alienates us from each other and even from ourselves. Humility becomes the possibility of connection, reconciliation, and so of the creation of something which wasn’t there before. The truly humble do not slip quietly into the background. The truly humble are the means by which the world is made whole again. The tax collector’s prayer is not for himself only.

This is, perhaps, an appealing exaltation of the humble. But there is some bad news here. Such justification as the tax collector received that day in the Temple didn’t change much. Things will be the same tomorrow as they are today. The Pharisee isn’t likely to have changed, nor most of the rest of us who are like him to varying degrees. Ours is a world of harsh alienating righteousness, increasingly pressing towards cynical contempt and contemptuous cynicism. This is not the rejection of righteousness but a relentless demand for it – a demand in and all around us.

In the face of this, prayer for reconciliation, and work toward it, are a struggle, something of which we see in the demeanour of the tax collector and in the crucifixion. There is nothing easy about a sinner’s prayer for mercy. Humility which is merely a mood or way of negotiating difficult circumstances cannot survive the “cost” of mercy. The humility which creates is difficult work. Without the conviction that things can be made out of nothing – the conviction that God will raise the dead – humility is something better seen in other people, a convenient pathology which makes our lives easier (if not theirs).

The humility of the tax collector, however – the humility of Jesus himself – recognises poverty and trusts that God can do something about it. Death and nothingness – the ultimate humiliations – are not barriers to life. And the humility which seeks mercy from God also seeks mercy in the world. To be humble in this way is not to be weak but to desire the smashing of the cold fetters of hard righteousness. This is not easy in a world like this one, in which the alienating righteousness of the Pharisee in Jesus’ story is part of what drives our society and its politics.

Cynicism and contempt are the fruit of an excluding righteousness, the application of some moral or political code against which the enemy measures up only very poorly. This contempt, however, is not a moral flaw in those who look about with contempt but a misreading of justice and righteousness, usually on all sides. Against this, Jesus summons us to what he calls elsewhere the righteousness which exceeds that of the Pharisee (Matthew 5.20). The righteousness of the Pharisee leads to a myriad of heavens with population one, from which we can hurl contemptuous abuse at others in their lonely heavens. But the righteousness of God is towards a single heaven bursting at the seams with Pharisees and tax collectors, Russian presidents (and American ones), rapacious colonists and displaced indigenes, billionaire entrepreneurs and gullible consumers, cynical politicians, sarcastic shock jocks, smug baby boomers, sanctimonious gossips and even Uniting Church ministers.  There they – we – all shall be, in a heaven pressed down and flowing over for the wantonness of unrighteous grace, of unrighteous mercy, of unrighteous forgiveness and of unrighteous reconciliation. With graced abandon, the unjust justice of God exceeds that weaponised righteousness with which we cut and divide so deeply.

Let us, then, not cheapen humility by mistaking it for niceness, and the call to humility as a nudge in the direction of not taking ourselves too seriously. Humility, at least that of Jesus the tax collector, testifies to God’s refusal of any final alienation and so to the power of God to reconcile.

Blessed are the humble – blessed are the peace-makers. They will be called the children of God because, like God’s first Son, their way of mercy and reconciliation grants a glimpse of what heaven looks like.

Humble yourselves, then, that God might exalt the whole world.

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Pentecost 19
16/10/2022

Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 121
Luke 18:1-8

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In a sentence:
Prayer requires a vision for peace for the whole

Conventional wisdom has it that when the going gets tough…there’s always Netflix. Of course, that’s not quite how the saying goes, but could it speak a truth about our infatuation with binge-watching inexhaustible streaming services? While storytelling and story consumption are deeply embedded within us, this is not enough to account for the explosion of streaming subscriptions and our consumption rate of films and TV series. No small part of this must be the escape the screen offers. There is much from which we want to escape, of which the headlines and TV news reports are sufficient evidence, whatever else might be happening in our personal lives. But video streaming is scarcely the only means of escape. Grey nomads across the county are getting away from it all in droves, extending indefinitely the escape the rest of us hang out for in this land of the long weekend. Gamers disappear into parallel universes for hours or days on end. We can escape into exercise and the body beautiful, or self-consoling overeating, or radical political and religious causes which provide meaning and refuge within the chaos. Or we can simply avoid the daily news for the stress it induces and not venture out too much.

The point here is not to criticise the much-needed holiday, the relaxing weekend immersed in a favourite TV series or setting different priorities from those of our parents’ generation – whichever generation that was! The point is to express the suspicion that, perhaps for most in the modern world, life is lived in the mode of distraction from life. If this is true, it is because of a perceived inadequacy of the story we are presently living, or even the unliveability of that story. A few brave souls – or perhaps deluded ones – don’t experience themselves in this contradicted way. But many of us have become more adept at losing ourselves in stories rather than featuring in them.

My interest this morning is not Netflix or purveyors of other streaming services and means of comforting distraction. Rather, I’m interested in prayer as it features in today’s Gospel reading. What we think prayer might be is controlled by our response to the story we think we are living, because prayer has to do with changing our stories. If video streaming or early retirement or upgrading a spouse or drinking ourselves into oblivion is about leaving behind our present uncomfortable story, then this will affect our sense for prayer. In particular, if escape is our mode of coping, we’ve already decided that prayer cannot help us with our uncomfortable existence. Those escape artists who still pray do so as escapees. The escape is a disconnection from the whole, so that the escapee’s prayer is now not about the whole but about the individual. My inner, personal spirituality and communion with God become my escape. I’m spiritual-but-not-religious because religion is worldly, and the world is what I’m leaving behind. Prayer turns inward because that is the only place I find myself to be safe. Prayer beyond this is pointless for those who have lost hope that there is a story of the world other than that of grim newsfeeds with their wars and rumours of wars, and in which “everyone is angry about everything all the time”. At best, prayer might help my inner story by re-storying me apart from the wider world. Such prayer is now not for the world with its roar of cascading, contradictory stories but against that world.

At the end of today’s reading, Jesus asks, “…when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”. That is, at the final setting right of all things, will there be anyone left who is praying for that setting right? Clearly, there may still be prayer, in the sense of those inward-looking prayers in the hearts of the escapees. But the faith and its praying sought by Jesus is not this. It is the faith suggested by the widow’s persistence in his parable. If her constant harassing of the lazy judge is what prayer is to be like, such prayer bears no marks of escapism. She lives her uncomfortable story as she seeks to see it changed. Her effort is not towards escape but transformation. As one of the tough, she gets going in action which models the kind of prayer which wants to change the world’s story. This kind of prayer – and action – denies the world’s brokenness from within that world. It is, then, prayer not against the world, justifying my flight, but prayer for it, necessitating my staying. This prayer does not abandon ship but can only be prayed from onboard.

This is the very ministry of Jesus. He is pushed out of the world onto the cross by us in a kind of reverse escapism; the world-as-a-whole can’t flee but it can fling just the one Jesus away. Yet, true to his deeply world-centred existence, Jesus will not be suppressed or escaped. And so he prays even from that cross – literally from on‑board, both within the world and cast out of it: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what to do”; they don’t know how to pray. Such prayer seeks community even out of alienating rejection. Prayer like this expresses a vision of the reconciliation of the whole world. This world so deeply divided by cynicism, contempt and fear needs a faith which will do this work of prayer – a work that can only be done from within the brokenness and not from outside.

And so this is the kind of prayer, work and life to which we are called. This is the taking up of our own cross after Jesus, with prayer that leans into the world and not away from it. It prays for the coming of God’s peaceable kingdom; that earth become heaven; for bread, grace and safety. Outside the world which is not yet its true self, but within it and sharing in its brokenness, we pray and work for the forgiveness, reconciliation and wholeness which will make all things – even us – new.

In such prayer and the active struggle for life it expressed, let us be unceasing.

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Pentecost 18
9/10/2022

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Psalm 66
Luke 17:11-19

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In a sentence:
Life begins with thanksgiving

“Say ‘ta’ ” is one of the first things we teach our children: it’s nice to say thank you. And it is! As a polite social noise, saying thank you paves the way for easy exchange, even when the gratitude might not be particularly deep.

Saying thanks is central to our Gospel text this morning. But what does the thanksgiving “do”? The structure of the story might be read to suggest that the thanksgiving is the basis of the healing: “you are made well because you have given thanks”. This is not unlike what our children learn: saying “ta” increases the likelihood of getting more stuff! Yet this doesn’t match the story. Had the grateful Samaritan not returned to Jesus, Jesus might have said of all ten who cried out for healing, “Your faith made you well”, for all were healed simply at the asking. So gratitude doesn’t get us stuff, at least so far as God is concerned. But what, then, is the purpose of thanksgiving? To get deeper into this, we need to look a little into the problem of gift-giving.

Over the last few months, a number of us have been reading and discussing a book by Miroslav Volf on giving and forgiving (Free of Charge). We have seen how difficult it is to give a gift. It is easy, of course, to present someone with something, but this is rarely true gift-giving. Perhaps we give because it’s expected of us (it’s her birthday, and that’s what you do), or because someone has given us something and we feel obligated to return the favour (thereby fulfilling local righteousness). Perhaps we give to ingratiate ourselves and to receive some favour in return now or later, or perhaps we’re just clearing out our cupboards, and “giving” away our junk is a useful twofer. Real or perceived, these mixed motivations make it hard to know that our gift is truly free of compulsion and self-interest – in totality about the recipient and not about the giver herself. Our gifts tend to have value to us, the givers, and we look to see this value realised. Strangely, but probably correctly, Volf goes so far as to speculate that the only way a giver could be confident that her gift is truly free of ulterior motives is if she intends to forget having given it, and so to have no further expectation from it precisely because it is forgotten. The true gift is forgotten by the giver.

This invites a strange thought: if the gracious God gives perfectly – freely and without self-interest – we could say that God “forgets” having given. The word “forget” means – literally and concretely – to “un-grasp” something, to let it go. Forgetting releases the thing said or done. This means that, having healed the ten in the story, the gift cannot be manipulated against the recipients because God has no further interest here, which is the meaning of “forgetting”. This forgetting is not a divine “senior moment”. To say that God forgets is to say a positive thing negatively: unlike like our own gift-giving, what God gives is a true gift. We might note here that the Bible has long maintained that, in forgiving, God forgets our sin [e.g. Isaiah 43.25, Jeremiah 31.34 and Hebrews 8.12]. If we believe that God forgets the sin, we must believe that God forgets the forgiving.

This is more than just a little odd, in at least two ways. First, what could it mean that God forgets and, second, what now is thanksgiving?

First, then, how can the all-knowing God forget? In fact, the notion of an all-knowing God is itself a negative idea and no better than the notion of a forgetful God. To say that God knows all things is simply to say that God’s knowing is not like ours; if our knowledge is limited, we then say that God’s knows everything. God’s ways are not our ways. And so, if it’s the case that we prefer not to forget having given gifts because the giving might still benefit us, we are free to say that God’s giving is so different from ours that God does forget. Of course, this is a rhetorical trick, but all speech about the gods is rhetorical trickery. We are just more familiar with some Godtalk and so imagine it to be more sensible than novel trickery like a God who must forget if we are to be both healed and free. God appears as much between the words as in them. If we speak a truth about God, any strangeness in what we say has to do with what we are also denying. “God forgets” means that God’s giving is unlike our giving. And so we affirm that God forgets the gift.

What then of the second question, about thanksgiving? What could thanksgiving be if God forgets having given, and so seems to release us from the responsibility of saying “ta”? The answer is as strange as the suggestion that God might have forgotten in the first place. We give thanks in order to remind God that he has given. To give thanks is to name God as Giver, and in this naming we bring God as giver to God’s own mind, and to our own. This thanksgiving is not polite noise; it goes to the heart of our relationship to God as a relationship of giving and receiving. God forgets the gift but we must not, because it is our re‑minding God and ourselves that the creature-creator relationship is renewed.

When Jesus commends the Samaritan’s faith, then, he speaks not of the wish which cries out just in case Jesus might be able to do something to help. And faith is certainly not our ability to distort our minds to accommodate creeds which don’t yet make sense to us. Our passage suggests, rather, that our minds are already distorted – or, at least, nine minds out of ten are. “Your faith has made you well” is not about the total remission of the illness but the entry into remembrancing the gift of life as a gift. Faith sees the gift.

This is worth saying because of how rare it is. In today’s reading, the frequency is one in ten. Last week’s Gospel reading (from Sunday 26C) was even more pessimistic. After discussing how we know the truth about ourselves and God, the text concluded, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead” (Luke 16.19-31). This is a radical scepticism about the power of a miracle to change human hearts: despite the miracle, we will still get the gift wrong. Transferring this to today’s text, the scepticism becomes, “neither will they be convinced if I cure ten sufferers of their debilitating illness.” Convinced of what? Convinced not of God’s power to heal but that this God is the one and only source of all life. Life is knowing where life is to be found. The shock of the story is that while ten survive, only one lives.

The urging in our reading today is not towards believing in healing miracles but towards believing that we could live a “eucharistic” existence, to borrow from the Greek for thankfulness. This is to experience life as grace‑d givenness. It is to become that miracle which is the creature who finds life again at its source in God, even in the midst of the chaos around us. For if, indeed, we live in a world in which nine out of ten forget to say thanks for the gift of life, it is surely a chaotic world.

Let us, then, give thanks with no mere “saying ta” but in such a way as to re‑mind ourselves by re‑minding God, for our old minds will not get us to where we need to go.