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Easter Day
17/4/2022

1 Corinthians 15:19-26
Luke 24:1-12

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In a sentence:
Resurrection life is a life of eyes-opened love for each other

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote to Jean-Baptiste Le Roy concerning progress on the new Constitution for the United States:

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

(In fact, Franklin’s observation was probably drawn from an earlier source). That last part has entered into conventional wisdom: nothing in life is certain but death and taxes.

Christian confession adds to this sardonic observation the following: while we might think death and taxes to be two things, we live as if they were one. For this to be clear, we must see that taxes have to do with our responsibilities to each other, the claims we make on each other, and it is these which place death-like limitations on what we can be or do. In her full moral claim on us, the other person is our limit, our end, and so our death. Death and taxes – our end and our moral accountability – coincide.

This might seem a strange place to begin our reflections on Easter Day, when we might expect to hear a clear word about resurrection. Yet, surely, a clear word about resurrection requires a clear word about death. If resurrection is somehow an “answer” to death, we have to get death right for that answer to be worth hearing.

Today’s reading from Paul comes from his great “resurrection chapter”, perhaps a strange place to look for ideas about death. On a surface reading, Paul seems to be arguing the case for the resurrection of Jesus, and our resurrection with it. I suspect, however, that what is really at stake is the timing and meaning of death. The pointer to this “hidden agenda” is that the Corinthians seem to have believed in resurrection already. Theirs was a richly blessed church:

^1.5 …for in every way you have been enriched in [Christ Jesus], in speech and knowledge of every kind…⁷so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Corinthians had a strong sense that the kingdom had come, that they had been set free from the bondage of death. And yet, they jostled each other for priority in the community, took each other to court, were confused about obligations in marriage, argued about rights against responsibilities, and overlooked the needs of the materially and spiritually poor in their midst. It’s worth remarking that this letter contains two of Paul’s best-known passages: his teaching on the mutuality of church members with its notion of the church as Christ’s unified Body, and his “love” chapter, most favoured at weddings and funerals. As communal and love-oriented as these chapters are, we have them precisely because of the absence of the loving mutual responsibility they describe.

To recall where we began, we could characterise the Corinthians as having given up on “taxes”. Resurrection life is, for them, the overcoming of that death which is the limitation of self in responsibility for each other. Death is here social obligation: the constraints the bodies and needs of others place on us. The poor person makes a claim against our use of resources, the indigenous person against our colonising intent. The Israeli makes a claim on the Palestinian and vice-versa. The refugee makes a claim on an economic system they’ve not (yet) contributed to. Being present to us in this way, the other threatens to be the death of us.

The Corinthian church saw this sense of death overcome in what was effectively a decision not to see the presence and needs of others. Resurrection – life in freedom – is here a closing of our eyes. Their exclusion of the poor from the Lord’s table was a closing of their eyes; rejecting the spiritual objections of the weaker believers among them was a closing of their eyes. Closer to home, “terra nullius” was a closing of eyes. “Haven’t got time” is a closing of eyes. “Just a woman” is a closing of eyes. They and we overcome death’s claim on us and so are resurrected in this way: sweeping aside what feels like deathly obligation by closing our eyes.

If this is what has been happening in Corinth, then Paul’s “resurrection chapter” is strangely out of place if all he wants to do is to assert and defend the resurrection of Jesus (and our own). But, given what the Corinthians understood resurrection language to imply for their “common” life, Paul’s recurring phrase – “raised from the dead – should likely be read with the emphasis not on “raised” but on “dead”. His concern here is not, first, resurrection, for this is accepted if misunderstood. His concern is instead with the when and the meaning of death, and his message to the Corinthians is, you still have some serious dying to do.

For the Corinthians, to be dead is to see and feel the claims of others, and to be risen is no longer to need to see the other, no longer to have to “pay taxes” (so to speak), no longer to have real responsibilities towards each other. Their life together reflects this – for they do not see each other properly – and they think this to be resurrection. Here it becomes clear that an interest in death and resurrection is no mere “religious” infatuation but has deep moral consequences.

And so Paul insists on an entirely different sense for death and resurrection: to be dead is not to see but no longer to be seen. Death is “the last enemy” which “hides” us from each other and, in a way, from God. The death of Jesus is not that, like the Corinthians, he closed his eyes to us but that we closed our eyes to him. He is cast out, relegated to the worthless, a stone the builders rejected.

And so, for Paul, to be resurrected is to be seen again. When the church confesses that Jesus is risen from the dead, it says that God refuses to let us keep our eyes closed to Jesus. Perhaps it is not for nothing that Paul favours the word “appeared” rather than “raised”, in his apparently traditional account of Easter:

…Christ died … ⁴and … was buried, and … was raised on the third day …, ⁵ … [and] he appeared to [Peter], then to the twelve. ⁶Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. ⁸Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me…

To be raised from the dead is to be seen again.

Death is not seeing and feeling the imperative to act morally, as the Corinthians seemed to think and rejected. Death is closing our eyes and ears. Death is declaring Sovereign Borders so as not to see, and keeping detention centres out of public view. Death is covering our ears to the painful claims of indigenous peoples on the beneficiaries of colonisation.

In such decisions, Paul asserts, we mistake the means of death as the means of life. And so, again, we see how theories of death and resurrection are no mere religious additions to otherwise secular life. Affirmations of death and resurrection are active all around us. With the commencement of election season, we have entered into 5 or 6 weeks of sound-bite sermons about what should or should not be seen, what will or will not be raised to life.

Christian talk about resurrection has to do with the opening of our eyes to see each other, and the extent to which we are ourselves seen.

We are not good at this. We don’t see well, and so we are poor lovers. We need constant reminding that we are mutually-sustaining members of a common body, that only love finally endures. For now, we see only as if through a glass darkly, and so our testimony to the resurrection is itself dark and blurry. The last enemy – the death which darkens our vision – is not fully overcome for us. But when it is, we will see as God sees us: clearly, face-to-face. Heaven is being seen in all that we are and need and can be, and resurrection life is seeing ourselves seen.

To confess that Christ has been glimpsed in resurrection is to expect that we also will rise, scales fallen from our eyes. In the meantime, faith is learning to open our eyes – learning to see and love – and heaven begins to take shape among us.

To misquote Charles Wesley, for an interpretation of the verse of the last hymn we will sing today:

Soar we now where Christ has led,
following our exalted Head;
made like him, with open eyes:
ours the cross, the grave, the skies.

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Related sermons

5 April 2022 – Open your eyes

3 April 2022 – Jesus is the life, and the death

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Good Friday
15/4/2022

Numbers 5:1-10
Matthew 27:24-26,32-54

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.

We have learnt over the past two years that the world is filled with fragile bodies.

The pandemic and war; fires and floods; famine and drought.

Set against this is the chronic call of justice for marginalised people, whose bodies continue to be bound, imprisoned, and disposed of.

And the call too on behalf of the Earth’s own fragile body: the natural order stands on the precipice of catastrophe; all the world’s experts unable to tame the insatiable drive of death pushing us over the edge of a cliff.

We have learnt that our bodies do not end at the boundary of our skin.
My body extends out to what I aspirate, and to what I discharge.
Bodies have become news items, with regular reports of case numbers, death rates, and sewage detections of viral particles.

Our common humanity has been revealed as a common fragility in the face of an ambivalent natural order, and forces of death which hold our common life in their grip: ambivalence, greed, hatred, prejudice, self-entitlement, trauma.

Fragile bodies captive to the forces of death become corpses.

Into this contemporary experience we are in this place to hear again the story of the corpse of God. We hear this story in a year where we have had to navigate the risk of disease; where we have lost loved ones – some without the grace of a final touch. Even today we may be in aching bodies; aware that as we gather for worship to hear the sounds of scripture and song, around the world others hear the sounds of gunshots and bombs.

Fragile bodies captive to the forces of death become corpses.
And corpses defile.

Hear these words from the law:

“… put out of the camp everyone who is leprous, or has a discharge, and everyone who is unclean through contact with a corpse; … put out both male and female, putting them outside the camp; they must not defile their camp, where [the Lord] dwells among them…” (Num. 5:2-3)

In the framework of the ancient Jewish law, the Torah, the holiness of God must be set apart from the defiling forces of uncleanness. These sites of uncleanness remind us of the constant spectre of death which looms over humanity. Leprous skin that evokes the paleness of corpses, discharges which mark our life force leaving our bodies, and above all corpses themselves. The power and holiness of the living God cannot stand the presence of these spectres of death. The source of life can have only umbrage with death.

So it is that the Rabbi Jesus, who is called the Holy One of God, is led out of the camp, towards the cross … to the place they call the skull … to become a corpse.

“This is Jesus, the King of the Jews.”

This is the defiled one, whose corpse will surely become a defiling presence —
unable to stand in the presence of the living and holy God.

As he is becoming a corpse Jesus calls out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Set outside the camp alone, Jesus gives up his Spirit – breathes his last: his life force discharged from his body.

The Holiness of God must be set apart from the defiling forces of uncleanness: the spectres of death. The source of life can have only umbrage with death, seemingly even with the corpse of God’s own beloved child.

Holiness stands against death.

And yet … At that very moment … At the point of death itself … As the Holy one of God has his very life snuffed out, his fragile body crushed and beaten, pierced and bloody …

Time collapses in on itself.

Is this not the Holy One who healed those with leprous skin?
Is this not the Holy One who cast out the presence of evil spirits?
Is this not the Holy One who healed the woman with the discharge of blood, the One who raised even the dead?

At the point of death the holiness of God explodes out from the cross itself
The curtain in the temple that kept uncleanness out tears, no longer able to keep the holiness in
The world captive to the forces of death has its foundations shaken
The corpses of saints in their tombs are imbued with new life

The world is cracked open by the wooden stake of the cross driven into its heart
The sources of defilement are met face to face on the cross and there defeated
Holiness turns and goes on the attack, and uncleanness and its death-like pall must go on the retreat

All are released from the bondage of sin

Fear not the captive forces who keep us bound in death
Fear not the un-making powers which erode the earth
Fear not the fragility of bodies caught in the bonds of oppression
Fear not the spectre of death

For everything is being made holy
Death cannot hold the holy in its grip, but holiness and life and love and the divine breath of God are exploding out into the world

Everything is being made holy,
everything is being made holy,
everything is being made holy.

God will never, ever leave us.
God can never, ever leave us.
There is a new creation: and the Holy One of God in the midst of death is re-making this world as holy

And those in Ukraine whose corpses litter streets are holy
And the queer ones who pray to be different or be dead, they are holy
And the trans kids whose bodies have become objects of political rancour are holy
And black lives bound and imprisoned unjustly are holy
And refugees are holy as the years of their life eek out in indefinite detention
And the disabled bodies who are disregarded as invalid are holy

Until we see the corpses rise to life we must see the presence of the Holy working in those who beckon us to a more just world.
Holiness draws all things into the loving life of God: everything is set apart for God’s purposes of love and mercy, peace and joy, justice and truth.

Hear these words from Anglican Trans* Poet Jay Hulme:

Holy! Holy! Holy!

If God is everywhere, then everywhere is holy,
everything is holy, everyone is holy.
The blaspheming tongue – holy.
The maze of streets – holy.
The broken street light that flickers at 2am
to welcome home the dying – it too, is holy.

The homeless are prophets and saints
as much as these bones and fragments.
Treat them with reverence and love them
for they are as holy as any other.
I am holy. You are holy.
The spit that flecks your lips as you curse out a stranger
is disgusting, but holy.

We are disgusting, but holy.

When we leave strangers to die
we are leaving the holy.
When we abandon the lost
we abandon the holy.

Take your neighbour in hand,
lead them to a crowded [ED],
see the doctors pull on their gloves;
the gloves are holy.
The hospital is holy.
The cracked linoleum and buzzing vending machine;
Holy! Holy! Holy!

To save a life, is holy.
All life is holy.

Lord, even death can be holy,
when a person is ready to go.

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… today we tell the story of the corpse of God, which does not defile, but is re-making the world to be holy, holy, holy. We tell the story of the fragile body of God whose holiness emanates out for the sake of the world, and against the forces of death.

Truly this is God’s son
Truly this is God’s law
Truly this is God’s life for the world.

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Funeral of Suzanne Yanko
5/4/2022

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
1 Corinthians 13:8-13

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When we gather like this at a time like this, it is to tell not one story but two. The one is the story of our experience of each other, of which we have just heard a little today (and it is always too little). This is our experience of Suzanne. The other story is the story of God’s experience of us, to which we now turn.

These two stories are intertwined in a relationship which can be treated in all manner of ways. Today, taking the lead from what we have heard from the psalmist and St Paul, we’ll consider this intertwining through what it is to know and to be known, to see and to be seen, to love and to be loved.

Psalm 139 is one of the most intimate passages of the Jewish Scriptures, in which the poet marvels at his very self and at God’s knowledge of that self.

¹ O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

¹³ …For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Alongside the poet, we heard from St Paul, who is not often accused of poetry! Yet if not aesthetically, he poetises to present a particular grammar of our being, the way in which things should be made relative to each other:

I know, but only in part; yet I shall know even as I am now fully known.

This is part of Paul’s famous “love” chapter, more often heard at weddings than funerals – which is to say that it is easily sentimentalised. But Paul is never sentimental. He writes to a community with a poor track record in the love stakes, and he is wrestling with the difficulty of day-to-day love in the light of the perfected love he believes God has shown: Now I know, I see, I love, only in part; then (in what we might vaguely call “the life to come”) I will know fully, in the way that I am fully loved and known by God even now in my imperfect knowing.

To leave it there would be merely to have presented some mystical subtlety, and perhaps a mystifying one, at that. But, with some work, we can bring all this home as the very heart of what makes us tick, and what has brought us together here today.

In a gathering like this it seems obvious that we focus on our knowing and seeing. We knew Suzanne and we tell the story of what we saw in her.

What is less obvious and less likely to be reflected upon is that Suzanne knew us and that, with her death, that knowledge is ended, and we are diminished. We say sometimes of those who die that they were “a part” of us. But this can be sharpened. They have sustained us in their knowledge of us and love for us.

These days, we are taught that we are free agents, active subjects, doing what we wanna do, being what we wanna be! But in reality, we are truly ourselves, not to the extent that we know and love as we would like, but to the extent that we are known and loved as we need. To put it too strongly, but also surely correctly: others’ knowledge and love of us creates us and sustains us. If you doubt this, consider a conversation with someone who has survived all his family and friends and now knows the living death of not being known, not being seen. Or perhaps ask an asylum seeker in a country which tries very hard not to see them.

If it were indeed the case that being known and loved matters as much as knowing and loving, it might turn our lives around. For it would come to be that the well-being of others rests on our knowledge of them, our love of them. Every breath we take would be less to prolong our own life than to make it possible for us to continue to enrich the lives of others. The life which is remembered at our own funeral would then be less the experiences we collected, and more our having been experienced as a source of life and love, a kind of co-creator of those who gather after our death to remember us.

We are here today because Suzanne has been such a co-creator of each of us in her knowledge and love of us, in her seeing us.

Yet we are imperfect lovers – imperfect creators – partly because love is not always easy and we would rather not, and partly because we are mortal and our capacity to love simply runs out.

St Paul wrote precisely because of this. Yet he looks forward to when we will see and love each other as God sees and loves us – comprehensively, perfectly.

To be seen in this way might feel a little creepy to us who live in an age tending towards almost ubiquitous surveillance. But to say that God sees us is not to say that God is “watching” us. God’s gaze does not monitor but sustains.

That God sees us is good news if being seen, and known, and loved, is the source of all life.

This is all the church means when it speaks of a “life to come”. With us, love and knowledge come to an end. But with God, they do not. And so, in God’s unfailing and life-giving knowledge of us, we do not end, either.

If we die, it is but the blinking of God’s eye,
and then we will be seen,
and known,
and loved
again.

Until such time, open your eyes, and see, and love.

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Lent 5
3/4/2022

Psalm 126
John 12:1-8

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In a sentence:
Jesus is given as our “whole” – our life and death, lived within God. And so we are free.

Today’s story of the anointing of Jesus by Mary is one of the most disorienting passages in the New Testament. The story confuses us because we easily identify with what Judas says, however sincere he may have been. And, in this, we stand against Jesus. Yet, we stand against Jesus because of the very things we’ve heard from him about love, self-sacrifice and “being there” for the needy. And so we find ourselves at a point of crisis: what do we owe to the poor, and what to Jesus?

One way of addressing the undecidable “Jesus or the poor?” question is to turn what we do for the poor into what we do for Jesus: “Inasmuch as you do it to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do it to me” (Matthew 25). This is an important part of Christian theology and ethics, but it doesn’t seem to be what is said to us through the story we’ve heard this morning. Jesus delineates starkly between himself and the poor as beneficiaries: you always have them; you do not always have me. There is here an impossible “either/or”.

The fact that this feels like a moral conflict should signal a warning. Morality anxiety is about justification, and moral resolutions present us with the attractive possibility of self-justification. If we can resolve how Jesus can justify Mary’s extravagance, we have guidance for determining the limits of our own acts of devotion and mercy. Our questions here seek to understand whether we can or must do the same as Mary did. We are anxious for the secret of making the right decision and knowing it to be right.

But we will not find such a secret in Mary’s anointing of Jesus, for there is no anxiety here (or perhaps only Judas or, in another version of the story [Luke 10.38-42], Martha, is anxious). Indeed, we know very little of Mary’s motivations, although we imagine that she is the one with whom we are to identify in the story. Yet, whatever is going on for her, it is only as Jesus himself interprets the anointing that what she does finds unexpected justification: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

With this comes a shift from our moral dilemma with its contrast of what the poor need and what Jesus needs, to a comparison of what the poor do not have and what the disciples will soon not have. And now we come to the scandal of the text itself, which is not the one that usually bothers us: “You do not always have me” – the disciples’ impending loss of Jesus – is more important than the other “not haves” in the world. Or, more specifically: the death of Jesus is more important than all other deaths.

This will bring us to something John’s gospel does not say but might have said. The Jesus of John’s gospel is full of “life”. The gospel begins with, “In him was life…” (1.4). Just prior to this morning’s episode, Jesus declares, “I am the resurrection and the life” (11.25). Before that, “I have come that they might have life, in all its fullness” (10.10). Later in the gospel, we hear, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (14.6). Life is presented in this gospel as being at the heart of what Jesus is or brings.

And yet, in the anointing at Bethany we have something else assigned to Jesus: death itself. The gospel declares, “You imagine you know life”, but then invites, “Look at Jesus”. In the same way, today’s story says: “You imagine you know death, but look at Jesus”. The true scandal of this text is not the wilful extravagance that sees a year’s wages spent in a matter of moments, which we are not sure we could justify. The scandal is instead that the death (“burial”) of Jesus warrants such extravagance. What justifies Mary’s prodigal act is that it points to Jesus’ death. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it is that this testimony takes precedence over our actions and concerns for the world. Pointing to the death of Jesus matters more than pointing to all other deaths we experience and might respond to.

This is, undoubtedly, one of the most shocking things in the New Testament – perhaps the most shocking. Imagine, for example, how our expectations of a funeral might change if not the death of the deceased, but the death of Jesus, were the most important thing to consider there. Imagine, indeed, what our lives might then look like.

To say that Jesus’ death is the most important of all deaths is to say that his death is not representative of some “class” of death we experience. It is not the death of the innocent, or the death of the zealot or agitator. It is not death by accident or misunderstanding, or the death of the infirm or elderly. It is not the death of a scapegoat or a sacrifice. His is not a death like ours.

Jesus’ death is not “a” death but death itself.

A lot of people – including in the church – have a problem with the language of the resurrection, and this is understandable. To understand the first proclamation of the resurrection you really need to be a reforming first century Jewish apocalpyticist, which most of us are not. And so resurrection language quickly muddies the waters hereabouts.

But the gospel point can also be proclaimed with reference to Jesus’ death, which we think we can better understand. We can demote resurrection language somewhat by focussing on Jesus’ death as the defining death of us all. He defines death, not because his death was particularly ghastly, but because of what death on a cross represents. Crucifixion was an intentional casting-out of the victim by his executioners, and an invitation to God also to cast the crucified one out. Crucifixion has the social, religious and political intention of being the mother of all deaths.

And this is precisely what Jesus says his death is when he contrasts his death with the living deaths of others: those deaths are always with you, but I am not. My death is different.

To take up the resurrection from this perspective, we can now say that to believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe in his death. We don’t believe in his death by forcing ourselves to accept some sacrificial economy by which Jesus is “payment” securing our relationship to God. To believe in the death of Jesus is to identify with it – to see it as my own death. There, I am crucified, I who fret over what is mine versus what is yours, over what God wants versus what I want; I who fret over worship versus mission, over when I’ve done enough and when I am justified in stopping. Or, we might say, I who am lost in the struggle between life and death. The effect of this struggle is that of being lost, of having no firm foundation, no sure reference point.

Jesus’ death is not so much the cessation of his heart’s beating. It is more the death of the lost: the death which is rejection, separation, loneliness, desolation and invisibility – and all this finally, even before God. This is the death that springs from Judas-like arrogance and hubris, fear and loathing, self-delusion and ignorance. Jesus’ death, then, is what we all experience in ourselves and cause in others. Densely put, Jesus’ death comprehends us.

This means that what we do – our life and death – is now caught up in what God does – the life and death of Jesus. We are not one story but two: our own and, with that, the story of Jesus. Growing in grace is the process of the life and death and life of Christ coming to take shape in our lives and deaths.

To make this a little more tangible, we can say that growing in grace is learning to let go of our breath. In anxiety, we hold our breath – literally and metaphorically – waiting to see what will happen next. Judas gasps at what Mary does, her pouring out her life’s work for no apparent benefit. To grow in grace is to release our breath, to release our spirit. This is, literally, to ex‑spire to “out spirit” (Latin: ex‑spiritus, “out-spirit”). We can only breathe out, or ex‑pire, with confidence if we expect then to breathe in again – literally if we expect to to in‑spire, “in‑spirit” again (Latin: in-spiritus, “in-spirit”).

What else could resurrection be but this? Now, in our daily ex‑pirings and in‑spirings, and in the last day, when all creaturely ex‑piry is met with God’s in‑spiry? When we see no longer through a glass, darkly, but face to face: the life and death of Jesus made ours, con‑spiriters with him?

None of this solves our dilemma about “what to do”, when that question presents itself to us. But if what we have considered together this morning is true, then what we do matters less than we imagine.

Leave her alone, Jesus says to the torn, anxious, gasping Judas in us all, for she has seen my death and my life, and she can breathe out so because she sees that, whatever happens next, all will be well – all manner of things will be well.

A much-improved version of a sermon
preached at MtE, March 13, 2016!

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Lent 4
27/3/2022

Psalm 32
Luke 15:11b-32

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In a sentence:
As, properly, a child cannot earn but already has her parents’ unconditional love, so we already have the love of God.

Today’s gospel text is so well known to nearly everyone here that we might wonder why we need to hear again what is so thoroughly familiar to us.

Just as familiar as the story itself is the standard – and undoubtedly correct – reading: that the prodigal child is unworthy of reception back into his father’s house, yet is received. And that the older brother lacks the grace of their father. From this is drawn the standard lesson – don’t be the prodigal child but, if you have been, it does not matter how far you have strayed; God awaits your return. And once you have returned, don’t become the grumpy and self-righteous older brother.

Those among us today who are prodigals and old grumpies, listen if you have ears. And God have mercy on your souls – which, this very parable suggests, God surely will. Here endeth the standard – and important lesson.

Knowing all that, let’s dig around a bit by changing the parable, introducing a daughter into the family. And let it be that, having received her portion from her father, the conscientious daughter heads out into the world to do the best she can with what she has inherited. She convenes planning meetings, develops a mission statement and a set of guiding values, constructs forward-estimate budgets across innumerable spreadsheets, checks with all the right consultants, and makes sure the communication about what she is doing is regular and clear. She tests preliminary proposals, takes further advice, keeps in touch with her Presbytery and Synod, and after all that, everything just falls apart. It doesn’t work. There’s nothing to be done but to liquidate the remaining assets and see what is left.

Knowing how her prodigal and grumpy brothers relate to their father, what now is her relationship to him? What will her judge-and-jury older brother have to say about her failure to launch? “Well, yes, Dad, she can come home. But no party. Let’s not draw attention to it all, but just quietly put her back to work. Of course, it doesn’t really matter what he thinks because we already know, from his take on his young brother, that he’s probably going to be wrong here, too.

But what do we think? Should she consider herself to have a better standing before her father than her prodigal brother thought he had? Should she expect to return home as child, whereas he could only imagine returning as servant? Is doing your best and failing better than just not caring and failing?

Well, yes. And no. It depends on what we’re asking after. Morally – and morals matter – trying for the best is better than simply not caring. Yet, in the end, the tried-hard-and-did-well older brother is reminded that this was not the basis of his inheritance – this was not his true “success”. All the father had to give was already his son’s, and so also for the young prodigal. Reading the parable allegorically now, trying hard does not earn us the love of God. God does not reward us for being “sincere”.

To bring this home now to the work of this congregation: what we are doing in our hard work towards a new future is not about earning divine favour. Perhaps this is obvious, but “earn” is not just about reward. What we are seeking is not “more” God, not a rosier outlook than we might have had here. Neither are we seeking to carry God with us into some new future – the God we have known here, in the way we have known God here. We are not “doing our best” at this point for fear that – if we don’t do our best – we will lose God.

Mark the Evangelist – the conscientious daughter – already has her father, who loves her as much as he does her younger lazy-prodigal and older grumpy-self-righteous brothers.

As she leaves behind what did not work, she looks ahead to what might yet work. But she keeps in mind that a fresh start is no guarantee of success. And she keeps in mind that she will not be lost if it doesn’t succeed. This is because the “work” which really matters has already been done: the loving father has claimed his children. Because “success” begins and ends with God’s claim on us, we have already succeeded if we believe this.

Soon a future will be proposed, although it’s still not clear what it will be. This future will seem to some of us to be prodigally novel – a squandering of our inheritance. It will seem to others to be grumpily conservative – a failure to rise to the moment and make the most of our generous inheritance. It will seem to yet others to be conscientiously boring – the worst of both worlds.

But whichever it actually is will not matter if, whatever our hopes and fears, we can hear what the love of this father calls for from us: joy.

Rejoice, says the love at the heart of this story, for what finds itself lost will be found, and what is dead will be made alive. And this applies not only now out of what we did yesterday, but also the day after our uncertain tomorrow. This is the mystery at the heart of Jesus’ parable: that, whoever, whatever, we are, this God spans our success and our failure, our strengths and weaknesses, our richness and our poverty.

And so, as we do our best or less-than-best – whether as uncertain individual souls from day to day or as an uncertain church from age to age – it is with a growing confidence.

We grow more confident that not our efforts to find the source of life, but God’s efforts to pull us to that source, will be revealed to be the mystery of who we are, the mystery of what we do, the mystery of where we are going.

With this God, what happens for us next is mystery, not problem.

And in this, we have freedom and peace.

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Lent 3
20/3/2022

Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63
Matthew 6:7-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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I don’t need to convince such a congregation of the importance of the Lord’s Prayer. It is the only prayer Jesus gave us – whether he meant it as a text (which it became) or as a general guide, does not matter much, for the embrace of its concerns is wide.^[1] We could pray it more deliberately in church, but that applies to hymns too – we may pass by some familiar words, but suddenly one word will claim our attention afresh. So, the best thing is to take the prayer down from time to time and look at it, as today.

Most of us have also passed through a period when the wording has changed.  I was a member of the international panel which worked on those ecumenical texts^[2] and took part in a discussion of the Lord’s Prayer.

Our Father in heaven

The Greek opening simply says, ‘Our Father, the One in the heavens’, so not any earthly father, nor modelled on one.  This has been one of the great debates of our time. But it is not our experience of a father (or mother) that defines God; it is the other way around. A God who loves us, but – as we shall see – also tests us, covenants with us, recalls us to our path.

It sits alongside St Paul’s great affirmation, ‘I know … nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 8:38f). Because of that mutual love, we have the nerve to address God. Martin Luther used to challenge God: ‘You taught us to pray, to ask for what we truly need. So: listen up! I’m praying!’ Not arrogantly, not insolently, but with the boldness of an intelligent child. To pray ‘Our Father’ and to hallow his name, is to be given a share in Jesus’ relationship with God.

Your kingdom come/ your will be done on earth as in heaven.

It ought to be no surprise that a prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom and the fulfilment of God’s will was part of Jesus’ prayer as it was of his ministry from its first word (Mk 1:15). It is to ask ‘let the world be transparent to God, let God’s will and purpose for us all, and God’s own nature show through in every state of affairs.’

I cannot think of a more important prayer for our times. We who have heard Jesus of Nazareth speak about, and embody in himself, a world which exhibits the character of the love of God will want to work for, to live in that spirit, by that ethic. And we can see signs of it, but the hard fact is that, it is also yet to come. This prayer is aligned to the future. These days, I find myself praying these two lines with passion, urgency and hope.

The prayer of Jesus now suggests some petitions to follow.

Give us today our daily bread

But what kind of bread? The version used by the Narinyeri people of the mouth of the Murray River translates back into English as ‘Give us tucker till this sun goes down’, and I think that’s very clever. When will this sun go down? Well, none of can be in any doubt about the importance – to God – that the human race have what they need to sustain life. Think of the thousands whose meals are in doubt or not there in Ukraine, in Afghanistan, in Yemen – and in the flooded or burned north-eastern states of our own land. Daily bread is essential. But there is a tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, beyond today’s sunset. Perhaps, in our times, it means ‘give to us the ability to continue to feed the world’, or even, open up our markets in such a way that the marginalised are fed. Climate change factored in. And of course, it carries the meaning of ‘the bread for God’s tomorrow’, for the great feast when people come from every corner of the earth to sit at a banquet in that kingdom.

Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

My Scottish mother never quite understood why in her new country they did not pray ‘Forgive us our debts’ – but she did not know the Greek word was the same in both Mathew’s and Luke’s version.^[3] Certainly ‘trespasses’ will no longer do.

But some have thought that the straightforward naming of sin is a problem. It has become a favourite put-down of the churches that ‘they are always on about sin’. And the churches have made their own sin plain to see, to our shame. We have said ‘Sorry’ in a world which finds that hard to believe.

But the prayer’s accent is not on the ‘sins’ or the many debts we owe – but on the ‘forgive’. That is what e boldly ask. Someone has offered, ‘You, God, have forgiven me, and my thankfulness makes it possible to forgive someone else who has hurt me!’ I believe that is how it works, and why the petition is mutual: God is always ready to forgive, but we have, as mature people in Christ, a responsibility for what we ask.

Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.

What to do about ‘temptation?’! We had an argument in the panel. The English suggested ‘Bring us not to the test’, which the Americans thought sounded like cricket – or exams. The Americans proposed ‘trial’ and the English said that sounded like a courtroom.  The American ace was that that the courtroom is a common metaphor in which the New Testament speaks of our salvation.^[4] There was argument about ‘do not bring’ and ‘save us in’, and so we finished agreeing on ‘Save us from the time of trial’.^[5]

The trial of faith for early Christians was quite graphic: they could die for it. They could deny Christ and save their skin^[6]. That’s not our trial. Given the changed standing of religion in western culture, the acceptability of atheism whether you know what it means or not, the journalistic glee for the faults of the institutional church (which we have acknowledged) have made it much more difficult to claim Christian faith publicly. And given the direct attack by Covid restrictions on how Christians celebrate our faith – in communal worship – there are many who will be tempted to give it all up.  We need to pray it will not be so, and that we will be delivered from darker, evil times.

The late great Russian Orthodox archbishop in London, Anthony Bloom, wrote much on prayer, and in his exposition to the Lord’s Prayer, for he said that we need to remind ourselves of to Whom all this prayer is offered: God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and for the coming of that kingdom.  But even the first compilers of prayer books felt it needed a note of affirmation to end on, so added the doxology, ‘For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever’. Amen!

[1] It was rightly pointed out to me that in John 17 there is Jesus’ ‘High Priestly Prayer’; but this is clearly a theological composition by the evangelist. The Lord’s Prayer is full of Jewish references.

[2] The English Language Liturgical Consultation consisted of representatives of national ecumenical bodies, in my case the Australian Consultation on Liturgy. The texts and commentary are in Praying Together, Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1988.

[3] The churches of Scotland pray, ‘Forgive us our debts’ following the Luke translation.

[4] e.g., the word ‘redemption’ is a juridical term.

[5] I spoke to my notes rather than read them, and I left this paragraph out. But it’s a good story.

[6] I mentioned other examples of persecution of Christians to our own day.

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Lent 2
13/3/2022

Philippians 3:14-4:1
Psalm 27
Luke 13:31-35

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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The gospel lessons through Lent traditionally and understandably relate to Jesus’ travelling towards Jerusalem. That is where the crucial drama will happen. But on the way there is plenty going on. On his way to Jerusalem Luke’s Jesus has been saying some interesting and provocative things.

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! (Luke 12:51) 

 A gardener is told, ‘If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ (Luke 13:9)

To some Pharisees he said, ‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?’ (Luke 13:15)

‘Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.’ (Luke 13:24)

Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’  27 But he will say, ‘I do not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!’  28 There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth… (Luke 13:26-28)

If Jesus had been running for an elected position he was certainly getting right up the nose of his opposition. Even some who were not on his side were warning that going to Jerusalem was not a good political decision.

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” (Luke 13:31)

Did Jesus take their advice? Hardly. ‘Go and tell that fox… (Luke 13:32) he replied – I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’ Then follows the deep sigh. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’ (Luke 13:34)

It looks like there are to be consequences for not being willing to be gathered by Jesus. The reader may well ask whether they are included among the unwilling, among the not gathered. Surely not. Me, the reader couldn’t be a part of Jesus’ deep sigh. Anyway, I am not from Jerusalem. I am Australian, and if you want to push my ancestry, I am Celtic – a long way from Jerusalem. I visited there once but surely that doesn’t count. My belonging and heritage don’t number with the prophet killers. My lot didn’t lob stones at the ones sent by God – did they?

You can see what I am doing here. I am looking to point the finger onto someone else, at least anxious to point away from me. It might have been easier to do this if I hadn’t read all the other bits of Luke to discover that no one seems to escape Jesus’ deep sigh. The religious leaders are hypocrites, Judas betrays him, Peter denies him, the other disciples run away. The occupying Romans get a red card – Pilate washes his hands of him and the rest of them didn’t know what they were doing so he forgave them. In Luke’s world all humanity seems to fit into the company of the unwilling.

What about our world? The image on the front of our order of service this morning was painted by an artist in St Petersburg. The artist posted the image on social media two weeks ago. Above it he wrote: ‘My country invaded Ukraine. I am really sorry. I wish it never happened. Please, forgive me if there was something I could have done and didn’t do.’ Philip had been praying for peace for weeks. He and his wife have been on the streets protesting. They have signed petitions denouncing the war. Their son is of inscription age. Her mother lives with them and agrees with every decision the President makes. Luke’s Jesus said there would be families divided. Philip has played no part in the violence against Ukraine, but he wears the shame of what is happening as if he did. As willing as he is to be a follower of Jesus, to defend the prophets, he knows himself to be part of the community of the unwilling, the ones who refuse to be gathered.

I was talking of these things with Kateryna, a Ukrainian friend, another icon painter. She told me that the stories she is hearing of the attacks and resulting privation remind her of the stories her parents told her of the time they had to leave Kiev in the Second World War.

Then she said something that came like a slap in the face. She said, ‘I wonder if these stories remind our indigenous people of the times their land has been attacked and stolen by us.’ Pointing the finger at what is happening half a world away was a whole not more comfortable than remembering Australian history of the past 200 years.

Jesus’ deep sigh over Jerusalem applied to all its inhabitants, all its visitors, all who looked to Mt Zion for strength and inspiration and faith. Jesus’ deep sigh over Jerusalem envelopes that city and all cities that have ever looked to Jerusalem as a focus of the saving actions of God – all the cities with links to the Abrahamic faiths. The sigh ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills … and stones…’ can always be applied to cities everywhere. Moscow, Moscow, the city that… Canberra, Canberra, the city that… then fill in memories of first peoples’ dispossession and refugee incarceration. ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’

The good news is that Jesus’ desire to gather the children of the cities of the world never fades. St Anthony of Egypt said, ‘To say that God turns away from the sinful is like saying that the sun hides from the blind.’ Jesus’ invitation to be gathered continued as he made his way into Jerusalem, as he confronted hypocritical displays of virtue, as he was tried and executed, as he rose to new life, as he ascended to reign at the right hand of the Father.

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Lent 1
6/3/2022

Psalm 91
Luke 4:1-13

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In a sentence:
All temptation questions our relationship to God; all resistance to temptation claims that we are God’s children

In our gospel reading today, we see playing out something of what has just been put to us by Stanley Hauerwas in his reflections on the mission of the church. Jesus, that is, engages “wittily” with the Devil.

The wit is ironic – the assertion below the surface of Jesus’ responses that there is more going on than first meets the eye. The joke Jesus hears in these temptations is the suggestion that he look for something which has not been lost – his identity. “If you are the Son of God…”, then do this. That is, prove – or test – that you are who you say by making bread from stone or being miraculously caught in free-fall from the pinnacle of the Temple.

For Jesus to have his “wits” about him here is simply for him to know who he is. In his exchange with the Tempter, he is forced to express his identity negatively by saying No to the Tempter’s proposals, but the No is not the point. The point is the “Yes” Jesus implies. For he is confident that he does not, to draw again from Hauerwas, have to prove himself to himself, to others or to God; Jesus doesn’t have to “make the world work”.

If the testing of Jesus here is the same as the testing – the temptations – we experience, then our temptations are about the same thing as his, and about one thing: who do you think you are?

We might do many right things at any moment of decision, but there is only one properly wrong thing. It looks like there are many wrong things as well, but only one of them will present itself as the thing that “tempts” us, or “tests” us, and so which we work hard to justify. We could be irresponsible with our money in a hundred ways, but it is only the one way we choose that we argue most strongly for, for it is the point at which we have to prove we are acting like the children of God. We could tell lies about a hundred different things, but only the one lie we want to tell matters. We could choose from a dozen future options for the congregation, but only one of them is really going to tempt us, is really going to require the necessary rationalisation which will prove to everyone that it is where we are most faithful. At this point – as with our money, or our flexibility with the truth, or our infidelities, or our forward mission planning – we will be “making the world work”, particularly for ourselves, and making God work for us too. We will, in this, be proving ourselves to ourselves, to others and to God.

But to know ourself as a son or daughter of God – this is not to make anything “work”, not to prove anything. If we are a child of God, the work has already been done. We need then only be as children are at their best: without guile. We are only ever tempted at one point: does this which I want to have or to do or to say express that I am a child of God, here and now? A “Yes” to this question cannot be argued, cannot be proof-texted. Children just are and do; there is no “if”.

Our childness, of course, is often compromised. Parents muck it up. Siblings drive us crazy. We are ourselves simply rebellious. In all of this, the “if” is making itself felt. We wonder, am I the child? This is the source of anxiety, fear and self-justification.

To learn to live by our wits as Jesus does – and it is a thing learned – is to learn to see when our being in God is challenged, and to laugh it off.

For we have nothing to prove. In Jesus is proof enough that nothing can separate us from the love of God. All that we do should be proof that we believe this.

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Ash Wednesday
2/3/2022

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-20

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In a sentence:
Lent is a time to give up anything which reduces us or others

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

We hear this every Ash Wednesday and, with the text ringing in our ears, we have learned that Lent is a time of “giving up”. We “give up” wine, or meat or coffee or chocolate or some other thing which might count as a “treasure”. This is, in part, an act of sacrifice which honours Jesus’ own “giving up” of his life in faithfulness to his calling.

Of course, the implication o “giving up” for a season is that we will then, with a sigh of relief, “take up” whatever we have sacrificed once Easter arrives. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, especially if the disciple of such time-limited sacrifice causes us to think about the ministry of Jesus and the meaning of the cross.

But let’s consider that not all treasures are alike. In particular, not all treasures glitter but they still seem important to us. At least, we invest a lot of time and energy in them.

So, for example, what would it mean to give up gossip for Lent? Or slander? Or snobbishness? What we treasure in these things is judgement. Let us give up being judgemental for the 40 days of Lent; there’s plenty of time to judge others over the rest of the year.

Of course, the real sting in judgement is that, if we are really good at it, we will also judge ourselves, for better or for worse. The “worse” is the more interesting here. What if we gave up our shame? Or our guilt? Or our fear? Again, the venerated tradition of giving things up for Lent means that we can start feeling ashamed and guilty and afraid again once Easter comes. Lent is only 40 days, and surely we can cope with not judging ourselves for that long.

Where your treasure is, there is your heart. Where your heart is, there is your treasure. This tells us what we value, but not what is valuable in itself. What is valuable, Jesus says, is what cannot rust or be snatched away. Whatever good Lenten disciplines might indeed do for us, penitence is not a season because forgiveness is not a season. Forgiveness doesn’t corrode and can’t be stolen away because it is a re-valuing of all value – God’s own re-valuing

To judge another is to place a value on her, and so we feel justified in denying her our treasures. To judge ourselves is to have treasured the wrong thing. We reduce ourselves to our knowledge of who we are rather than God’s knowledge of us.

Lenten disciplines are targeted at those things which make us less than free and loving human beings. We give up only what does not accord with that, and we do not take those things up again. This might or might not include wine or chocolate; it almost certainly includes slander and guilt.

Let us then, at least for the season of Lent, stop being sad and fearful at our own expense, greedy and safe at the expense of others.

And let us see what God will do with that.