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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.

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Transfiguration
27/2/2022

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Psalm 91
Luke 9:28-36

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In a sentence:
We don’t know what we see in Jesus, but we know that it is good

Many approaches have been taken to the story of the Transfiguration. Some imagine that we have here a dream sequence or a vision – something which only happens inside the disciples’ heads and but not “really” occurring in time and space. The story is so rich in symbolism that the symbols themselves cry out for recognition, to the extent that questions of “what really happened” become quite secondary. Others have thought that this is a resurrection narrative that has been dislodged – deliberately or accidentally – from the end of the gospels to become something of a hinge point in the middle of the narrative. Others, of course, have taken it to be a reliable account of a historically “objective” event.

Our approach today won’t be to untangle these tightly knotted and confused approaches but simply to take the story at face value, and dive in at one particular point. In response to the strange change in Jesus, Peter apparently gathers his senses and speaks on behalf of the disciples: “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”. Our focus text today will be the remark which follows: Peter has spoken, “not knowing what he said”.

We’ve long heard that this comment characterises Peter’s state of mind at this point. Like the callow teenager who has long loved from a distance a pretty girl in his class, only to respond with something utterly stupid when one day she speaks to him, so Peter is generally cast as blurting out the first thing which comes into his head, “not knowing what he said”. On this reading, he might as well have said, “…the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”.

But biblical texts are economical. We already know that Peter and co. are out of their minds with fear. His building proposition, and naming this as incoherent, scarcely seems necessary.

We might, then, come at this another way. The Greek word behind “dwelling” is translated in other places as “tabernacle”. The Tabernacle was a tent-like structure in which God dwelt before the construction of the Temple. This is, then, a heavily loaded word – not merely a “place to stay” but having connotations of a holy presence. In the prologue to his Gospel, the evangelist John writes, “…The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1.14). John uses the same word here: the Word “tabernacled” among us.

In this light, Peter’s proposal of tabernacles becomes less silly than naïve. That is, tabernacles might be entirely appropriate but does Peter understand what that would mean? Has he grasped what it means that Jesus is in the same room as Moses and Elijah?

The Transfiguration story follows an episode in which Jesus puts a question to his disciples, Who do you say I am? To this, Peter responds, You are the Christ. Jesus then goes on to explain what will happen to him. In Mark and Matthew’s version of the story, this greatly offends Peter, who demands that such things must not be allowed to happen. Jesus then hammers Peter in return, naming him “Satan” and announcing that Peter, in effect, has not understood what he himself has said – what “Christ” means.

Luke doesn’t have that part of the story. Still, perhaps Peter’s announcement about the tabernacles is the same: “not knowing what he said” is about saying the right thing while not understanding what it means, or saying the wrong thing but, at a deeper ironical level we don’t yet recognise, being precisely right.

This naïve irony is not an unusual experience – certainly not merely a “religious” experience:

“Will you take this man, to have and to hold in the covenant of marriage, loving, comforting, protecting and faithful

as long as you both shall live?” “I will”, she said, not knowing what she was saying.

“Let’s start a family,” he said, not knowing what he was saying.

“We would like to offer you the job”, they said, not knowing what they were saying.

“You are the Christ”, Peter confessed, not knowing what he was saying.

“Let us build a tabernacle”, Peter said, not knowing what he was saying…

Or consider our own current deliberations:

“Let’s amalgamate with another congregation”, said the one, not knowing what he was saying.

“Let’s find another place to call our own”, said another, not knowing what she was saying.

As a community, we have before us a range of options, about which it can be easy to speak and yet not know what we are saying. If we are ignorant of the facts or simply ignoring them, we have a responsibility to expose those deficiencies. This will be part of the work of the Church Council towards a final tabernacling proposal.

But there is another “not knowing what we say” which has to do with the very nature of the church as the people of this mysterious transfiguring God.

We have spoken about the fact that change is inevitable. When things are more or less comfortable, more or less easy, change becomes something we endure rather than embrace. To endure what happens next is to doubt that God could look anything different from what God appears to be here and now. To embrace what happens next is to expect God to be transfigured for us but still be the same God. This transfiguration won’t be a mystical mountaintop vision but perhaps a re-discovering of God in a house of sticks or straw after having we have known him in a house of bricks. To embrace what happens next is not to know that it is right, but to commit to it being right and then discovering how – in God – it can be. And if it is truly a choice for this God, what we have chosen will be both wrong and right: we didn’t expect that, but we needed it.

In a couple of month’s time we will hear a proposal from the Church Council which will be put for all sorts of good reasons, and in Peter’s sense we won’t know what we are saying, or choosing. If we are to continue to represent what we think MtE has stood for up to this point, what is required from every one of us is the expectation that God will meet us in some unexpected transfiguration, whether our next thing is a house of bricks or that we become members of someone else’s household.

The deep ironic truth in Peter’s “let’s build a tabernacle” is that a tabernacle is built for Jesus in the gospel. It is just that his tabernacle is made of only two pieces of wood joined in the shape of a cross. And, to recast his call to discipleship, this Jesus says to us: whoever would be my disciple must take up his tabernacle and follow me. This is not a call to mere self-sacrifice on a cross. It is a call to believe in the God who raises the dead.

This we say, not really knowing what it means, but that it matters. For we do know that tabernacling God, the giving of flesh to our faith, becoming the Body of Christ: this is the end of all things, the goal towards which all creation is oriented, and what God most earnestly seeks. To hope that we will faithfully be the church in all that we choose is to hope…we’re not quite sure what, but we know that it matters.

To say it again, what is required of us now is the expectation that, whether it is on a mountaintop or in the last place we might have imagined MtE to end up, Jesus will meet us there and, in his own strange way, will remake us and renew us.

The dwelling we seek to build is not about mere space. It is about place: life in all its fullness. The tabernacle of Jesus doesn’t finally house him but us; he is a place for us in God, wherever we find ourselves in the world. And we will discover ourselves – not knowing how – finally at home.

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Epiphany 7
20/2/2022

Psalm 37
Luke 6:27-38

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In a sentence:
The command to love knows no bounds, and is to be part of everything that we do

Take a few moments to reflect upon who your enemies are.

Perhaps this is a confronting task. We are strongly conditioned today towards keeping the peace through broad tolerance. Having enemies is perceived to be wrong – so wrong, perhaps, that we are inclined towards thinking we don’t have enemies, only people we can learn to tolerate under certain circumstances.

Yet let us consider: are there places you cannot go because of who is there, or who might be? Perhaps a part of town, or a country, where we would expect to be unwelcome, or perhaps certain streets after dark, or the gatherings you can scarcely abide but must attend and yet cannot speak your mind.

“Enemy” might seem too strong a word for characterising at least some of those we might encounter in those spaces. But it’s worth keeping in mind the etymology – the word sources – behind our word “enemy”. The English word is comprised of two constituent Latin words. The second is the most interesting: the ‘-emy’ at the end of the word comes from “amicus” – friend (amicable, amiable, amigo, French “ami” – friend/ly, etc.). The first part of our English word – the “en-“  – is just a negation. An enemy is, literally, an “unfriend” (the Greek word in our gospel reading today – echthros – similarly goes back to meanings of “stranger” and externality). This broadens greatly our sense of what “enemy” might mean: not merely those who passionately oppose us but those we don’t want much to do with.

It is not such a long bow to draw, when we equate enemies and unfriends. The social media platform Facebook calls adding people to your network an adding of “friends”; to remove someone from your network is to “unfriend” them. This is very often taken with great offence by the one excluded in this way. To unfriend can often be to make an enemy.

But the presence of enemies in our world is reflected more deeply than in word origins and social media spats. Our perception of the omnipresence of enemies is reflected in our story-telling, something very close to the heart of our being as social creatures. The stories we tell are almost universally structured by “agonism” – by conflict. The protagonist – typically the hero or heroine – is opposed by the antagonist: Churchill vs. Hitler; Dr Who vs. the Daleks; Harry vs. Voldemort; Little Red Riding Hood vs. the Wolf; Jesus vs. – well, how we complete this last one would reveal a lot about where we think enmity finally resides in the world – for another time, perhaps!

Some have wondered whether this experience of the world and our telling stories to inform that experience needs to be changed. This is because the fact of unfriends easily morphs into the need for unfriends. We can begin to define ourselves over against our unfriends. And our world shrinks a bit with every unfriend. With each unfriend we identify there is another place we cannot safely go, another thing we cannot learn, more love we cannot receive. However, the losses we incur in “enem‑ising” others often seem to be offset by gains. Enemies can be convenient. We can cast enemies as the source of all that is wrong in our experience. In this, we can transfer what might be wrong in us to another. It is easier that she might be “a piece of work” than that I might be.

This is all very general, of course, and in any particular instance there might be at play things over which we have little control. But recognising the general dynamics of life with unfriends might help us a little towards acting on the confronting imperative of Jesus: love your enemies, do good to those, who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

Let’s see whether we can bring this closer to home by considering what it might mean for our life together as a congregation and the decisions we have to make about our future. Most of us met last week to look at some basic scenarios for that future, including obtaining a new place of our own (even if only on long-term lease), co-habiting with someone else and amalgamating. Very roughly, only a few of those 25 or so people present preferred amalgamation over the two remain-as-MtE options, and only about a third could “live with” amalgamation as a prospect. The two stay-as-MtE options each gathered about half the group as a first-preference and about 80 per cent of us as a “could live with” continuing as MtE in our own or a shared space.

At first blush, I took from this that our thinking prioritised retaining our identity as a congregation. It looks like an affirmation of what MtE is and stands for in itself. By extension, however, amalgamation looks like the loss of what is signified and made possible by a continuing of MtE.

There are various reasons why we might say not to amalgamation – some better than others – but let us consider some which have been articulated.

We wonder whether the congregations we might join value what we value. Will we still be able to have a weekly Eucharist? A liturgy like the one we still have? Where there are differences, we wonder whether other congregations can become more like us so that we need not become too much like them.

Implicitly, perhaps, we take the answer to these questions to be, No. We have not yet tested this, of course. But as the Church Council considers what it has heard from everyone, and the resources we have, and our freedoms and responsibilities, it must also consider the motivations behind our expressed preferences. In this case, is amalgamation per se the problem, or who we might amalgamate with? We need to be sure we know why not if we choose not to go this way.

In making these observations I’m not proposing that amalgamation is our best option. It’s just that, while we did a good job last week of hearing Where people are “at”, we didn’t do so well at testing and teasing-out and understanding more deeply the Why. In this case, why do so few of us find amalgamation unattractive, given the many clear benefits it could have? Regarding the perceived differences between ourselves and others we might say – humbly – that we are too difficult for others to get along with, so it’s not going to be worth trying. Less humbly, we might mean that, given they are impervious to the truth, we don’t want to have to give up what matters to find a way to get along with them.

Or is it that amalgamating would be admission of defeat? Or do the anticipated conversations seem too difficult? Do we fear getting lost in such a change? Of course, more positively, we might think that there really needs to be a Uniting Church in North Melbourne(-ish). But we haven’t quite said that.

Again, I’m not proposing (yet!) that we amalgamate. I am simply wondering what the relationship is between our future as a congregation and Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies. We might not consider other congregations enemies, but perhaps they are not quite friends either and, in some sense, are unfriends. When Jesus says love your enemies, it’s almost easy to agree with him that it is a good idea – easy because our enemies are often a long way away. Or, to take him literally, no one really hates us, curses or abuses us. But “love your unfriends” – this is hard, because unfriends are everywhere, even very close, and are not quite nasty enough that Jesus might have meant that we should love them.

What then, shall we do? There is no final answer yet, but we might still need to put some questions to the answers – the assumptions – we think we already have.

In view of what Jesus says today and our place in the Uniting Church, we might at the very least say that the imperative to love our enemies ought to part of the rationale for all that we do, not least what we plan to become as a congregation.

“Love your enemies”, Jesus says, “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you…Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful…Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven…give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

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Epiphany 6
13/2/2022

Genesis 3:1-10
Psalm 130
Luke 2:22-40

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In a sentence:
God clothes us with Christ and, so attired, we are dressed for anything.

What is the question to which the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist seeks an answer, the problem we need to resolve?

Obviously, it is how we will continue as a congregation once we leave this place. Less obvious is what “how” means – “how we will continue”. Central to our thinking today and in the weeks to come will be the question of “where?”: Where will the congregation be? This understanding of what matters predominates for us because “where” has been central to our efforts over the last too-many years.

Yet the challenge we face is not simply that of location. If we were the congregation that built Union Memorial Church, we would also be able to fix it – this is what congregations of many hundreds of people can do. But we are not that congregation. The church-world relationship we considered last week has shifted monumentally since those foundations of UMC were dug – not quite deep enough. Buildings aside, the crisis moment of our congregation includes the declining fortunes of the broader church in western societies.

And so what we need is not only a new location but also a clear sense of the time. What does this particular moment require? As we reflected a couple of weeks ago, nothing about tomorrow is clear except that it need be nothing like yesterday. This is to say that nothing about tomorrow is necessary. Nothing is predetermined for us by what has gone before.

But we as begin to think more intensely about this, we strike a problem, and it is Adam’s problem in today’s reading from Genesis: we know that we are “naked”. The man and the woman have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, and suddenly they are troubled by what did not bother them before: they have no clothes.

Yet, nakedness itself is not the problem. Adam (and Eve’s) knowledge of good and bad after the apple affair does not include the knowledge that nakedness is shameful. The knowledge of good and bad is not knowledge of what is good and bad, only knowledge that there is good and bad. The man and the woman now know that there is an alternative to being naked, which has not occurred to them beforehand: “the man and his wife were naked, and were not ashamed” (2.25).

Knowing there to be a clothing alternative means that they are now free to – in fact, required to – decide whether to be clothed or remain naked. They are required, that is, to judge themselves and each other: am I adequate? Their judgement is that naked is not good, and they stitch together a few leaves and hide.

The distorted condition of Adam and Eve is not that they are naked but that they know too much: I was naked, Adam says; I see that I could be embarrassed about this, and so I am.

This shift in the story marks the presence of a radical uncertainty in human experience. Awareness of their nakedness is not about their bare skin but is a kind of self-exposure to themselves as responsible before God. With the appearance of choice in the awareness of a distinction between good and bad, morality appears – the possibility of being wrong, and being judged for that failure.

This is what we know as we consider our next steps as a congregation: that God will not tell us what to do, so we must work it out, not knowing what “the right” thing to do is. The apple-eating and its consequences account for our sense of being responsible for what happens next. To protect ourselves, we calculate and plan and rationalise, to act according to whatever seems to be the best principles. In this, we demonstrate to ourselves – and we think we demonstrate also to God – what the future has to look like. We make the future the next necessary thing.

Nothing could be more sensible than working it all out “properly”. Yet this is also fundamentally an exercise in self-justification. To calculate and balance and debate is to demonstrate – to each other as much as to God – that we have done the only thing we could, the necessary thing. Necessary things are safe, but God has no interest in what is necessary; what is necessary is always outside of God. Grace – which is fundamental to the character and activity of God – is radically unnecessary, unlegal, unjust, and is precisely what God does when re-creating us out of nothing in forgiveness or in the gift of a tomorrow we did not imagine but desperately needed.

The gospel is that God has seen us naked and – unlike we ourselves – has neither laughed nor been shocked. But we don’t believe this, so we reach for fig leaves – for visions, for mission strategies and for budgets – and we cover ourselves with these, just in case it be found we don’t have enough on. Yet, to rest our future only on the conviction that we have “done our best” is to declare nakedness before God shocking.

We must surely do our best, but this is not the end of the story because the story of the first couple’s judgement of their nakedness does not end with them hiding in the bushes. At the end of Genesis 3, after hearing all the bad news which now flows from knowing too much, the text reports, “And the Lord God made garments of skins…and clothed them” (3.20).

This gift is not about the durability of leather over withering leaves. It is not about the difference between our Elm Street hall as a temporary fig leaf and what we do next as “better”, as more secure and amenable. The difference between the leaves and the garments of skin is, rather, the difference between what Adam and Eve can provide for themselves and what God provides for them.

What we can do for ourselves is always of the order of fig leaves. We can make these work for a while, as we have made this hall on Elm Street work. Thinking this way, of course, suddenly casts Union Memorial Church itself as something of a fig leaf. As it finally withers and falls away, we naturally reach for something else to cover us. But we must keep in mind that self-provision is always a fig leaf, always an estimation of what we’ll need to cover whatever seems too exposed.

God does not provide us with what we could provide for ourselves – does not provide even a better version of what we might have managed for ourselves. The difference between what we can do for ourselves and what God does for us is the difference between living by our own goodness or cunning and living by God’s grace. What God does for us is grant us the freedom to be wrong. The man and the woman are wrong in their assessment of their nakedness. Yet they are accepted by God, and the garments of leather are the sign of that acceptance. This acceptance does not wear out. The leather lasts forever. To press it to its final truth, Christ himself is these garments of skin.

In clothing us, God says, for all your misjudgement and confusion, you are still mine. There is nowhere to hide. I see you. And my seeing clothes you.

The risk in our conversations over the next little while is that we proceed by telling one another, “If we put that on, we will still be naked.”

God has seen us naked and has not laughed or been shocked. It is neither here nor there. Our conversation today is not about getting dressed because we have to. It is a fashion parade: an occasion to wonder that such garments could be clothing and what it would be like to wear them.

We are free to play dress-ups in this way because God is not overly concerned about what else we wear, apart from Jesus.

We no longer hide from God; we hide in God.

And when we put on Christ,           we are dressed for anything.