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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.

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Epiphany 5
6/2/2022

Genesis 2:18-25
Psalm 138
Luke 2:22-40

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In a sentence:
The church is more – and less – important than it can imagine.

Storytellers tell lies.

A storyteller requires her audience to accept some basic premise that is not true, in order that the story might begin to unfold. The premise might be simply the proposal that the story begins where the teller begins, for every story begins somewhere before its beginning. More fancifully, the premise might be that there is, in our midst, a hidden world of wizards and witches, within which is unfolding a drama that threatens the whole world, and everything hinges on the personal character of an 11-year-old boy. If it is not a world of witches and wizards, the premise might be that time travel to the past is possible, or an unbelievably grotesque murder, or that a little drummer boy happened to be passing by just as a baby was being laid in a manger. Once we allow the premise, the story has traction and takes us where the storyteller wants.

Stories, then, are lies. And the storyteller needs our complicity in the lie if the story is to gain lift. We become willing conspirators with the storyteller in this way because, however untruthful the story’s premise is, the story is ultimately not about the lie but about people like us in that kind of context. Stories can brutalise reality because they are not about space travel or magic or prehistoric times but about how the various actors placed on those stages interact in those contexts. The basic premise is a lie, but the action might not be. The truth in the story is the human drama in that imagined context.

Stories, then, are true lies – creations out of nothing. “Once upon a time, there was…” – this always means “There 1was never, ever…” a princess, a frog, a drummer boy or even a manger. Or, at the very least, it would not matter if there were not. And yet does matter what happened after the never-happened.

It is the same in church. We gather here week after week to tell a story, and that story is also a lie told to hear the truth. We’ve heard today from Genesis 2. Genesis 1 relates the creation in 6 days. Genesis 2 seems to forget where Genesis 1 ended and places Adam alone in the Garden without animals or Eve, which are added as the chapter unfolds. After the creation of Eve – which ends this second creation narrative – the story continues in Chapter 3 with the apple affair and the expulsion from the Garden, to which we’ll come next week.

The creation of Adam and Eve is a foundation story that places human beings in creation but also casts them as distinct from the rest of creation. In addition to this shared distinction, the man and the woman are, just as importantly, there for each other.

What the story might mean for human beings in sexual differentiation won’t be our interest today. Neither will the social and sexual dynamics that some have read into Eve’s arrival after Adam as “helper and companion”. Rather, we will first note that this story – in common with all stories – is a true lie. This is what we mean when we call it a myth: not that it is untrue – a very narrow meaning of myth – but that it is a lie told to speak the truth. The truth is that “it is not good to be alone” and God does something about this, which is to say that if there were to be an Adam, there would have to be an Eve.

But we’re going to go another step today and tell a bigger lie, even less believable than the Genesis narrative itself: for a proper understanding of this story, we must see that Adam is the world and Eve is … the church. “It is not good for the world to be alone”, God says. And so Adam is lulled into a deep sleep, and the church is called out of him and presented back to him as “a helper and companion”. And Adam declares with delight, “Here at last is my truth”, and the world leaves what was its own and joins itself to the church. And the creation is now complete.

Now, Genesis 2 is clearly not about this. Of course, it’s not clear what Genesis 2 actually is about. This is not least because the story is three or four thousand years old, and the opinion about its meaning is divided into about one opinion for each of those years. There’s a sense, then, that each time we tell it, we lie above and beyond the original storyteller’s lie – and perhaps we lie all the more, the more seriously we tell it.

Our deceit this morning is not so much the untruth of myth but of typology. Typology is what allows the gospel writer Matthew to say that Jesus is the true Israel, what allows St Paul to say that Jesus is the true Adam, what allows Rowling to say that Voldemort and his Death Eaters are really Hitler and the SS, and what allowed us to say what we did last week: that the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist is the deep and the void God acted upon in Genesis 1. In typological thinking, we take a couple of things which look to be little bit the same and ask, what would we see if they were the same? (In fact, Paul does something a little like what we’re proposing today when he considers human marriage to reflect the marriage of Christ and the church [Ephesians 5.22-32]).

Eve-with-Adam looks a bit like church-with-world. Whatever else we might read into it – and there are some pretty unpalatable readings possible – the Genesis story ties Adam and Eve closely together. This matters if Eve is the church and Adam the world. If Adam and Eve are somehow “for” each other then Eve-as-the-church is for Adam-as-the-world.

In the creation of Eve, we see at least the establishment of human relationships and the possibility of a continuing history. But there is more than this. As we have already noted, creation is completed in Eve. God, then, is finally revealed as the creator in Eve’s appearance: God “becomes” the God we know when Eve arrives. Eve’s arrival, then, becomes a sacrament of the being of God as creator, and so of Adam’s own being as creature. In Eve, Adam receives himself – no longer being alone – and so receives God. There is no Adam, and so no God-as-creator, without Eve.

Such a reading of the Genesis story is risky. But it’s essential to see that it’s risky because we’re telling a lie, and really good liars eventually have trouble distinguishing between the lie and the truth. This is why reading the Bible is so dangerous.

Our particular true lie today is that the church is to the world as Eve is to Adam. We know, of course, that we – as the church – have a mission. But the Eve-Adam dynamic has a surprise in it, which might open up our thinking about how God works with the church. Our experience of mission is that it is hard work and that we’re not very good at it. In the creation story, however, something strange to our expectations takes place: Adam recognises himself in Eve: flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. More than this – surprising in what we assume to have been a patriarchal culture – Adam leaves his family and goes to Eve. Nothing could be easier, so far as Eve – the church – is concerned.

If our borrowing of Eve and Adam for thinking about the church in relation to the world has any truth, it might cause us to wonder: what would it mean for the world to recognise itself in the gift of the church? What “attracts” Adam-world to Eve-church? And what would this mean for the church’s own understanding of itself and its vocation?

As a bare story of the creation of bare human beings we might guess at part of what Adam found attractive in Eve: they were naked and not ashamed! But even the original hints at much more than sex. Adam becomes a believer when he sees Eve, for there is truth in her appearing. In Eve, at last, it all comes together.

And there is truth in the appearing of the church. Here we can begin to build on what we considered last week: the utter freedom the church has, if it is the church of the free God. But the essential thing is that this cannot be sheer freedom from all things, if the church is Eve-like. The freedom of the church will be a bound freedom, a freedom to be itself in relation to the Adam-like world. The radical freedom of the church is a freedom not from but for the world.

This is to say that the freedom of the church is to be oriented towards those as different from itself as Eve is from Adam. Adam is bereft because everything in the world apart from Eve is less than he needs. Adam – and so the world, and so God – are not complete without the sending of Eve.

Can we grant this lie, in order to become the truth of this story? Can the church really be all this? Can Mark the Evangelist be this as we take our next step? Would it be truly a lie to hold this, or would it be to lie truly?

It is only if the latter is that case that it is worth our while even bothering with taking the next step.

It is only in the space between the lie and the truth that God – and we – happen.

Let us, then, become a true lie. Let us strive to be a story about God and the world which could scarcely be true, but must be if God is anything like the story says, and we are to have any hope.

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Epiphany 4
30/1/2022

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71
Genesis 1:1-5
Luke 4:21-30

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In a sentence

We are, as a congregation, at a moment of creation which – if it truly reflects the creative activity of God – is a moment of radical freedom.

The first few verses of Genesis describe what Christian doctrine has come to call God’s creation “out of nothing”. The problem with this is that there is, in fact, not “nothing” in the text but a “formless void” and a “deep.”

“Nothing” is, in fact, impossible to conceive. Try for a moment to think of nothing. It’s like trying to imagine ourselves dead. We imagine ourselves being dead and experiencing that we’re dead, which we wouldn’t be doing because we would be dead, and the dead don’t experience anything. Thinking nothing is like this: nothing always looks like the somethings of the world.

The Genesis text, then, mythologises here not because it is primitive but because the radically creative act it wants to describe requires this kind of trick. We do the same today even in modern physics, when we talk about black hole singularities or invoke the mathematical idea of zero. Like biblical myth, these are kinds of “placeholders” for impossible thoughts that seem necessary – or at least useful – to think.

Because Genesis has to talk about nothingness in thing-ness terms, it speaks not in terms of quantity – whether there is something or nothing – but in terms of quality: form or formlessness. “…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep…” In this, the earth is a “nothing-something”. It’s “there”, but not in any useful or meaningful sense. Creation out of nothing happens when clay takes form as a pot, noise resolves into a melody, or a dead thing stops being dead: when sense drops out of nonsense.

This understanding of nothingness matters for us right now in this place because there is just such a “nothingness” standing on this property, from which we are about to turn in search of a “something”. Perhaps this seems too harsh a characterisation of Union Memorial Church. Yet the point here is not to offend, or to denigrate what it has been for the last 140-odd years. The point is to understand where we are in our need to make decisions and the theological – “faith” – nature of those decisions.

What Genesis says about the “nothing-something” of the earth “prior” to the moment of creation can be said about UMC. It’s “there” but it is not there in any useful or meaningful sense. Again, this doesn’t mean that UMC has not been important but only that its future is now closed to us. While it still has a diminished form, Union Memorial has proven to be a “deep” from which we’ve been unable to extract what we need.

This is a painful reality. But if it is true, the Genesis way of speaking of the beginning of all things enables us to re-cast where we are now, such that we are not at a point of radical loss but at a creation moment.

This way of seeing things matters for what could happen next because an essential dimension of creation out of nothing is that it is not necessary. It is not necessary, in the sense that it is an effect without a cause. The world did not have to be, and it did not have to be like this. The primal nothingness does not have the seed of the world resting within it, about to burst out. It is not an equation that unfolds into the laws of physics from which everything eventually comes to be.

To put it more concretely, creation out of a deep void is an act of utter freedom – the freedom of God to create or not to create, to create us as we have been made, or differently. Or, we might say, it is good and proper that there is no necessary link between our formlessness today and our form tomorrow. We are, as a congregation, at a moment of creation which – if it truly reflects the creative activity of God – is a moment of radical freedom. And so anything is possible

And yet, freedom is corrupted for us: we cannot be radically free if this means everything which has gone before us be counted as nothing. We can’t really cast Union Memorial Church as a formless void because history is continuous. There are no true beginnings in history – everything has something before it. That is, we remember. And, on the conviction that what we have been has been good and godly, we want the next thing to be kind of the same. Yesterday – how we were – this is our nothing-something: it is nothing in that it is gone; it is something in that we don’t simply forget it. The problem becomes that we are a UMC-shaped congregation trying to fit into what has to be a non-UMC-shaped hole.

We are not, then, radically free. And we will experience this unfreedom in two closely-linked places. First, a tension before God: will we make “the right” decision? Freedom demands responsibility, which requires decision, and we always think about decisions in terms of risk: what if we make the wrong choice? This opens up fear and anxiety before God.

Second, the compromise we’ve all agreed upon just by turning up here each week until now has to be renegotiated. And so we will experience unfreedom in tensions between each other: we value the past differently and so would create different futures if we were God.

These two points of tension are inseparable because, of course, what I finally think God wants I hold to be good not only for God and me but also for you. What does faithfulness look like when our freedom is compromised like this?

We heard another creation-out-of-nothing story this morning, although it didn’t sound like one: God’s call to Jeremiah. Hearing God’s call, Jeremiah responds, “I am only a boy”, which we might paraphrase as, “I am a formless void”. Yet God has already answered this objection before Jeremiah makes it: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you…”. That is, it is not you yourself, Jeremiah, but my knowledge of you that will make these things possible. It is not what you know or how good you are, but my call that will matter, for your ministry will be a creation out of nothing.

This holds for us all and is why we baptise infants. A child might be baptised before she has manifested anything other than a capacity to breathe because in baptism the most fundamental thing we declare is that, without God, we are formless and void, and we come into being at the call of God. The baptismal waters are a wet “Let there be…and there was…”

And it is the same with adults. Of course, like an infant, an adult presenting for baptism is not nothing. Yet in that baptism, he looks forward to what God will make of him, not to what he will make of himself.

As for individual children and adults, so also for congregations: we are together now at a baptismal moment. We are not nothing but tomorrow will be a new giving of form to all that we have been, a re-creation of what we are. What happens next has not been pre-determined by what we have already been, if it is this God who is making us.

None of this tells us what to do, but only indicates the spirit in which we will act if God truly creates in freedom and we are children of this God, being the expression of that freedom. The obvious needs in what confronts us have to do with accommodation, continuity and identity, and self-determination. Such things are about what we have already known. Any community needs these things, and so they are not problems in themselves.

Just as important yet much less obvious is that, as we step forward, it is into a deeper Christian identity in Godly freedom. This will be freedom from things we’ve turned into the stuff of God but which really are not and so can be allowed to lapse into nothingness. Christian freedom is freedom to be wrong, and so it is freedom from fear of judgement and the temptation to judge.

We need such freedom, of course, not only in relation to the future of MtE but also in our own personal lives. Mr Palmer and his United Australia Party are right that we are in desperate need of freedom, even if they seem to have no idea what that means.

To be free after the freedom of the truly creative God is to be free to create what is not necessary to carry but will nonetheless be good, and even very good.

Let us, then, in our life together and in the lives which are just our own, imagine not only what seems to be necessary our past into the future but also what is not necessary – a creation out of nothing which comes as light in darkness, life to the dead.

This is God’s new thing among us, which we and the world desperately need.

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Epiphany 3
23/1/2022

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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E tō mātou Matua i te rangi
Kia tapu tōu Ingoa.
Kia tae mai tōu ranga tiratanga.
Kia meatia tāu e pai ai ki runga ki te whenua,
kia rite anō ki tō te rangi.
Hōmai ki a mātou āianei
he taro mā mātou mō tēnei rā.
Murua ō mātou hara,
Me mātou hoki e muru nei
i ō te hunga e hara ana ki a mātou.
Āua hoki mātou e kawea kia whakawaia;
Engari whakaorangia mātou i te kino:
Nōu hoki te ranga tiratanga, te kaha,
me te korōria,
Āke ake ake.     Āmine.^[1]

Hear these words from the law:

“If resident aliens among you prosper, and if any of your kin fall into difficulty with one of them and sell themselves to an alien, or to a branch of the alien’s family, after they have sold themselves they shall have the right of redemption; one of their brothers may redeem them, or their uncle or their uncle’s son may redeem them, or anyone of their family who is of their own flesh may redeem them; of if they prosper they may redeem themselves.” (Lev. 25.47-49)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer. (Ps 19.15b)

“Some of the [religious leaders] in the crowd said to [Jesus,] “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” [Jesus] answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the rocks would shout out.” (Luke 19.39-40)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

We live on a land of droughts and flooding rains
And the droughts are getting longer
And the floods are getting deeper
And the fires are burning longer
And the crisis is getting deeper
And the wait for justice is getting longer
And the cries are getting deeper

“Without a word, without a sound,
without a voice being heard” (Ps 19.4)

And those who were killed by the colonisers when they came have no voice
And those whose land was taken have had no voice
And those who were enslaved have no voice
And those whose culture has been erased have no voice
And those in youth detention in spit hoods have no voice
And those left in remote communities, when the services are switched off have no voice
And there is no treaty, so there is no voice

“Yet their message fills the world,
their news reaches its rim.” (Ps 19.5)

Āke ake ake

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Hear these words from the law:

“The uniting churches were largely silent as the dominant culture of Australia constructed and propagated a distorted version of history that denied this land was occupied, utilised, cultivated and harvested by First Peoples who also had complex systems of trade and inter-relationships. As a result of this denial, relationships were broken and the very integrity of the Gospel proclaimed by the churches was diminished.”^[2]

The uniting churches were largely silent

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

“Some of the [religious leaders] in the crowd said to [Jesus,] “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” [Jesus] answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the rocks would shout out.” (Luke 19.39-40)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Leaders met at the meeting place
Coming from all points of the southern sky
At Uluru — and spoke about sovereignty from the big rock

“Sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature,’ and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with [their] ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.”^[3]

Hear the voice of Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven:

women are still not being heard
our bodies ignored
crimes against us approved
sister spoke up
it took her life
in custody, without custodianship
children taken, and land
weeping and lonely
no more women unheard behind the wall
no more women dead over unpaid fines
no more women dead by men
it must end.^[4]

…

The Psalmist ties together a reflection on creation with praise of the law. The created order of things is not simply an inert object, not simply a bundle of random stuff. Rather, the created world is the wide horizon of our encounter with God.

God is big.

The story of God can only be told on the cosmic scale of the universe. The rhythms of life, the fact that we human beings are products of nature’s processes, the changing of night to day and day to night … All of this must be included in our account of a God who speaks to the world.

The voice of God comes to us through creation itself. It comes to us through the voices of those who have tended to creation, those who have cared for these lands and waters and living things since the time when the sacred stories were first told.

Too often we have not heard these voice. We have let them go silent.

And yet, says the Psalmist, even though no voice is heard, no words are uttered, even without a discernible sound, God’s message permeates the world.

God’s message speaks of a law that is perfect, demands which are just, decrees which are faultless, of more worth than gold.

What the Psalmist offers us in this rich poem is a vision of a world in which the movement between the world itself and our human community is a seamless whole. We should not seek here a sense of a discussion of creation simply stitched together to a discussion of the law. The law which restores our souls in the law which forms a human community which reaches beyond itself and embraces all people, all things, in a new order of righteousness and love.

For this we must allow the message of God which permeates the world to permeate our souls. We must be open to acknowledging faults … We must be open to letting go of being the ones in control of measuring our own correctness:

“… faults hide within us
forgive me mine …” (Ps 19.13)

says the Psalmist.

We must “keep [our] pride in check, / break its grip; / … be free of blame / for deadly sin.” (Ps 19.14)

We must allow this Psalm to sear into our souls.

There is blood in this land, and not enough justice yet to clean it.

So let us listen to God’s voice in those who speak for justice
Let us hear the call for Voice. for Treaty. for Truth.

Āke ake ake.     Āmine.

^[1] The Lord’s Prayer in Te Reo Māori.

^[2] The Uniting Church in Australia Revised Preamble to the Constitution.

^[3] Uluru Statement from the Heart.

^[4] Ellen van Neerven, ‘Women are still not being heard,’ Throat, p. 47.

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Epiphany 2
16/1/2022

Isaiah 62:1-5
John 2:1-11

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.

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

This is the kind of question which entertains undergraduate philosophy majors for hours and days on end. (Philosophy undergraduates like I was almost a decade ago.)

There’s actually quite a clever answer to this age-old question if you read a few complicated philosophy books: yes. As it turns out, yes a tree does make a sound when it falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it. Case closed.

One of the philosophical reasons for saying yes to this question is actually kind of interesting. In some schools of thought within philosophy they talk about the idea of “adumbration.” In a technical philosophical sense, this big, strange word “adumbration” refers to the fact that human beings only ever perceive the world in part, and yet experience the world as a rich and seamless whole.

I may only be able to see your masked up faces from one perspective, and yet I have no doubt that if I were to walk around the room I would find that you are, nevertheless, three dimensional people. And not just cardboard cut-outs set up for my amusement.

So too, when I speak to someone, I may only grasp a tiny piece of who they are in conversation, but I experience them as a full human being: with interests and passions; family, friends and acquaintances; regrets and hopes.

At its best – indeed at our best – the world and its people are experienced as full, as something to be discovered, as an inexhaustible opening to adventure. Even though our small experience of the world is only ever partial, fragile, and fleeting.

And so it is that the philosopher says the tree which falls with no one around, acts in the same way as the one which falls in front of me. There are no gaps in reality, only bits we haven’t yet seen.

Our reading from John’s Gospel invites us into something like this experience of “adumbration,” this experiencing of the world as a seamless whole, even though we only ever see it in part.

The basic story is fairly straightforward: Jesus is invited, along with his mum, to a wedding. The hosts run out of wine. So Jesus does what any self-respecting incarnate Word of God would do in the same situation … and turns the water from six large stone jars into wine. This wine, as it turns out, is a marvelous hit with the wedding host and the whole party rejoices.

The point of this miraculous act, we are told, was so that Jesus could reveal his glory.

Here, however, we only glimpse the glory of Jesus in a partial and fragmentary way. If the point of this miracle story is that it reveals Christ’s glory, why is it that we are also told that only the servants and disciples saw the miracle, but not the chief steward and the bridegroom — and presumably the other guests?

We might ask: If a miracle is performed, and no one important is there to see it, does it reveal Christ’s glory?

Here we are only supposed to glimpse the glory of Jesus in a partial and fragmentary way. We are, as it were, thrown off the scent of what we might initially think glory is all about. Glory is not about flashy shows of power, about clear signs that God in Jesus Christ can command the world of creation at will, bending it to his every will. Rather, glory is about servants seeing the new wine being poured into old wine skins – or perhaps old water jars. Glimpsing glory is about the first fruits of reconciliation. Glory is about the wonder and anticipation of meeting Jesus, this remarkable person, and believing in this One: glimpsing glory leads the first disciples – and us as disciples – to the beginnings of belief, the beginnings of the journey of following Jesus.

In other words, what is seen only by some, only partially, only in ways which are confusing and strange: what is seen in part, becomes an invitation into the whole. This is the importance of today’s reading from John 2 within the broader arc of Gospel narrative: it is the entry point into the journey which will unfold as the Gospel narrative carries on. And so this strange story is an invitation to us, to step into this journey as well. Not simply to keep reading John’s Gospel, but to be enticed into following the strange way of this Jesus, the incarnate Word of God.

Here Jesus’ performs a miracle not to demonstrate his power, but to lay out bread crumbs, to release a sweet perfume, to open our ears and eyes to wonder.

Look at this one who performs miracles that spark joy in the world!

Look at this one who invites servants and fishermen into the secret of his renewal!

Look at this one whose glory is seen only partially, so that we might be invited on the journey to see the whole world as filled with glory!

The disciples see a sign of the beginning of renewal — but only the beginning — so that they may appreciate that they too will be caught up in Christ’s renewing work. They see this miraculous sign of Jesus exerting power over natural things, so that they know all of creation will be renewed by Jesus’ merciful might. They see at a wedding in Cana only a tiny piece of Jesus’ strange way: and this invites them into discovery, into an inexhaustible adventure. This is the point of today’s reading: it piques our curiosity and wonder, so that we lean into the world transforming glory which Jesus will ultimately bring at the appointed hour.

In today’s reading Jesus tells his mother that his hour has not yet come. Jesus’ mother will not re-appear in John’s Gospel until this hour does come.

The hour in which the celebration of the party guests is turned to the mocking of the crowd.

The hour in which the sweet wine of miraculous joy is turned into the sour wine of persecution.

The hour when the water of purification flows from the vessel of Christ’s body, through his pierced side.

This too is what we are invited into; this too is glory.

The task which is set before us by today’s reading, and by the Scriptures which we read together week after week, is to adopt a posture of seeking out God’s glory at work in the world. At times this is strange, wondrous, and joyous. At times this is a bitter fruit, and suffering — which we know all too well in the current crisis. And yet the task is to look beyond the immediate experiences which stand right before us, and recall that while we see only in part the world is a seamless whole, history is a seamless whole, creation is a seamless whole. And it is God who holds all things together, it is Christ the Word through whom all things are made, it is the Spirit of God which nourishes us and beckons to us: what we see in partial ways will be used for God’s glory; what we feel as fragile will be caught up and transformed into new life; what we grasp at and which seems only fleeting will be held in the very heart of God.

For glory is all around us, but it is not first and foremost the miracle, but glory is found through faith in the one who leads us, who bids us to begin the daily journey towards glory and light and love.

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Baptism of Jesus
9/1/2022

Acts 8:14-17
Psalm 29
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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A favourite image on Christmas cards is the three magi with their unsuitable baby-presents gathered at a safe distance around the manger. It is a kind of tableau, a vivid image placed before our eyes, and has been a favourite with artists. And we are right to gaze in adoration on the epiphany in the mother and child, remembering Whose Child he is. But since the magi were late, the western churches remember them after twelve nights if we observe them at all.

It’s very different for Eastern Orthodox Christians, for whom cribs and magi are mere preliminaries and the focus is on the baptism of Christ, today’s theme. You often see a photo in the media of the ceremony on the Bay where the bishop hurls a cross into the water and some swift swimmer rescues it. Anglo-Saxons look on this ethnic display with astonishment.

The word ‘epiphany’ in Greek means a manifestation of God, and the Orthodox more precisely call it Theo-phany. In these moments, God is revealing something of Godself – in the birth of the Christ Child, in the young Jesus stepping down into the waters of the river Jordan.

Today we read Luke’s description of the baptism. The same notably brief account appears in all four gospels. We meet the strange figure of John, later given the title ‘the Baptizer’ because that is what he believed God had called him to do – that, and scare the living daylights out of an already fearful and subject people. Our lectionary leaves out most of Luke’s darker summary of the message (but so do the other gospels).

To be fair, John did preach about judgement – about the winnowing-fork and threshing floor, the separation of the grain and the burning of the chaff – but, unlike some modern preachers, he does not leave them without hope. The gospels use the same phrase for the first message of both John and Jesus: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!’ The first step for that crowd was to wash themselves in the Jordan.

But that’s not the epiphany. That follows Jesus’ baptism. There, a very striking tableau is revealed. Listen again:

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized/ and was praying, the heaven was opened, ²²and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Only Matthew records John’s objection to Jesus asking for his baptism. Of course, the human being who uniquely shared the holiness of God had no need to repent – and Paul captures the reason, when he writes to the Philippians, ‘Christ Jesus… though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.’ Of course, he stepped into the water with the slaves who were certainly in that crowd.

But look at the actual epiphany: Jesus, standing in the water, praying to the One he called ‘Abba, Father’, as the Holy Spirit visibly descended on him, and God’s voice was heard addressing Jesus: ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’. An ikon indeed, God revealed.

We tend to think of the link of baptism with the Trinity being in Matthew’s formula: Go, teach, ‘baptize in the Name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’, but the three-actor image in the other three Gospels makes this ancient doctrine just as clear. This was an event in the life of the fullness of God, the triune God of love. This is the key to the birth of all Christians, of the way the Church reproduces itself.

Our reading from Acts this morning shows that there was a period when the earliest Church was sorting the liturgical details out. Some simply baptised ‘in the name of Jesus’ (v.16). Some indeed ’had not even heard there was a Holy Spirit’ (Acts 19:2). Luke-Acts is doing some necessary tidying up.

Now let me ask a modern question, a liturgical one in fact.

A moment ago, I added another facet to my words about water. Water cleanses, purifies, and gives health; it also slakes thirst and refreshes. But now add birth. We are conceived and grow in the waters of our mother’s womb, and we are gently bathed. But then water is as dangerous as it is life-giving, as recent news about summer drownings attest.^[1] All symbols have multiple layers of meanings; they catch the attention and open the eyes in fascinating ways and lead us into deeper understandings. An early writer called the font both ‘womb and tomb’. Jesus left us the Gospel and two sign-acts which use physical elements, water, bread and wine. Sacraments.

Now, my question, perhaps an uncomfortable one.

What kind of epiphany accompanies our contemporary celebrations of baptism? In what ways does modern baptism proclaim the richness of its meanings? We usually achieve one: washing, but if our children came back from the bathroom after using three droplets of water, we’d send them back. It’s hardly bathing and it’s no threat to life. The dimension of cross is invisible. We are a long way from Jordan and the practice of the church for the first thousand years, evidenced in their generous fonts.

The change began as soon as the majority of Christians were adults. They naturally wanted their children to stand under the same gospel sign. And where there is a hope that children will be brought up in close connection with the faith, lived by their parents, I still think that is appropriate. Our present secular culture certainly does not assist that growing in faith as it once did; quite the opposite.

Our received church culture also became rather sentimental about babies, and baptism even became a social occasion, to be followed by a sherry party. But given that baptism of infants has almost totally disappeared from our society and churches, I want to suggest that rescuing baptism from all that polite custom, is necessary for evangelization and mission today.  If we are a church planning for the future, we will be baptizing adult converts. I see few signs of that in the Uniting or other churches, except for Roman Catholics.^[2] Our worship book, Uniting in Worship-2 (2005) has adapted their program for our use, but it is largely ignored.

My point is not to dig up ancient rituals, but to recover the living symbols which served the church well until now; it has nothing to do with the amount of water used; the Holy Spirit is quite capable of working with three droplets or none!

The old ikons show little fishes swimming around Jesus, deep in the water. They are there because they have seen and felt and known the Christ of the epiphany and are reborn. They are us.

In the crowds around us here and now are grown-up, educated and self-aware human beings, seeking salvation, wholeness of life, for an alternative to the destructive philosophies of our time. There are also those who are none of those things, the marginalised, the neglected and the poor.  For all these, the God of love gives the church the means to be ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds’ (Rom. 12:2) in and through the experience of our faithful worship, by words, yes, but also in sacred signs, in the overflowing font and in the breaking of the bread.

[1] John promises that Jesus will baptize with fire (the Holy Spirit), and fire has this double meaning too: both the revivification of the bush and its modern devastation.

[2] The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (1976) is a process which arose from the research and teaching of the Second Vatican Council. It is sometimes called the ‘Catechumenate’.

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Christmas 2
2/1/2022

Ephesians 1:3-14
Psalm 147
John 1:10-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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Happy new year, he said with as much optimism as he could muster. Optimism may be difficult, but fervour for a better year goes without saying. How else could it be as we stagger through a world pandemic as it climbs its way through the Greek alphabet. Even hearing me instead of Matt preaching is a symptom of the uncertainty that dictates our plans and expectations. We do have a reminder in our Sunday worship each week that the world has been here before. We hear, almost daily, of ways to tackle and live surrounded by this virus. Little individual wine glasses at the communion table were one of the answers our forebears came up with for living with the Spanish flu in church. Most protestant churches never let them go. I hope masks don’t hang around like the little glasses. We prayed about this a few weeks ago as we sang ‘Immortal, invisible’. I am sure I wasn’t the only one who smiled as we sang the line, ‘take the veil from our faces…’. I couldn’t tell if anyone else was smiling – you were all wearing masks.

Of course, the prolonged disaster attacking the world population is just an extra added to the regular fires and floods and wars and geotectonic eruptions and other disasters that beset humankind. It is as if our race is continually battling universal eco-systems and malignant social systems. It often feels they are not on our side. The rottenness of all this seems more devastating, more unfair, at times of festivity – Christmas, New Year, summer holidays.

Remember nearly 50 years ago when Cyclone Tracy struck. At 2 am on Christmas morning winds of around 180 kph hit Darwin and devastated the city until 5.30 – 3½ hours of horror. People huddled in their houses as their homes disintegrated around them. Sixty-six people died. The hospital and churches were extensively damaged. The naval patrol boat HMAS Arrow capsized and sank and all communications with the rest of the world was broken.

So it was on Christmas morning 1974 as Australia and the world waited to hear what had become of Darwin a Christmas service was broadcast from the John Flynn Memorial Church in Alice Springs. The minister was a lover of Dr Zeuse books and that morning he told one of the stories to the children in church. While waiting for news from Darwin the outback of Australia heard the story of the Grinch who stole Christmas, a strange green monster who hated all happiness, especially the happiness that Christmas brings. He felt sure that if he could steal all the Christmas gifts and take them high up into his mountain hideaway there could be no Christmas because there would be no happiness.

As the story was being told on radios across the outback the people of Darwin were sifting through the tangled wreckage where Christmas gifts and decorations and dinner plans were all mixed up together with their clothes and furniture and hopes and dreams – all blown away. Surely the Grinch had done his worst.

Children’s stories must have happy endings. In Dr Zeuse’s tale the Grinch’s plans were foiled because to his dismay the sound of laugher could still be heard down in the valley on Christmas morning even though there was not a gift to be found. The Flynn Memorial Congregation and the outback folk who listened in were reminded that Christmas joy does not come by way of our festival traditions.

In Darwin as that story was being told its truth was being tested in churches whose roofs and walls had blown away. Every church expects to have more people at worship on Christmas morning than at any other time. Christmas Day 1974 in ruined Darwin churches congregations turned out in full. All the trappings of celebration had been stolen but people gathered anyway, to give thanks to God that he had come to them in Bethlehem.

Neither the Grinch nor Tracy could steal away the essential heart of what makes Christmas joyous. Singing carols in Darwin did not restore one house or put the lights back on one tree. Typhoid broke out 2 days later. The Uniting Church minister who conducted Christmas worship in his ruined church conducted funerals for many who had died. He led worship in the only clothes he had, his shorts and shirt. Christmas brought no magic to that disaster. But within that disaster even the mystery that God is on our side could be celebrated. God is on our side.

We long for a return to a covid free life. We pray for deliverance from pestilence. We follow our call as disciples of Jesus to aid healing and recovery. But nowhere are we promised that this world will experience freedom from systems that gang up against us. Not even all our prayers will evoke such a promise. The promise is that that God in Christ is on our side. God is with us. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Another disaster story. I was chaplain in the casualty ward of Warrnambool hospital on the night of the Ash Wednesday fires. The waiting room was filled with people smeared with grey ash. A nurse emerged from a cubicle. Her forehead was smeared with grey ash – in the shape of a cross. Before her evening shift at the hospital, she had gone to church where her priest had traced a cross in oil and ash on her face. For all to see, amidst trauma and death, she wore the message that the suffering Christ is with us.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Will this new year be happy? Who knows? Will it be accompanied by the suffering, dying, resurrected Christ? Yes, he said with all the assurance of faith.

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Christmas 1
26/12/2021

Genesis 3:1-24
Psalm 130
John 1:1-14

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In a sentence:
The incarnation is not about God ‘invading’ our space but making our space truly a place for us

In 1978 there probably appeared in a milkbar very near to you a “Space Invaders” game machine. Very cool!

It had a left-right movement lever, a single large plastic firing button, monotone 8-bit graphics and a gripping soundtrack. Space Invaders was a whole new world to the average 13-year-old of the day – not that this 13-year-old could afford to play it very much, but that was beside the point. It was, again, very cool.

Space Invaders was a shoot-em-before-they-get-ya game. The enemy was a space invader in a double sense: first and most obviously, it was an invader from outer space. Such invaders are nearly always bad. Second, and a little less obviously, it was a coloniser: the space enemy sought to occupy our space. These invaders are always bad.

But with this second sense, “space” itself needs to be stretched in meaning. When our space is invaded we are not dis-spaced but dis-placed. Space is too arid a concept to capture the loss of being dislodged. The coloniser sees space and takes it, but those already there lose not only their space but their place. Place is lived space – a home as distinct from a house. The violence of the coloniser includes the dissolution of place. The invaders might justify the invasion in terms of their need for “Lebensraum” (the Nazis) – living space – or that they are reclaiming lost space (Israel and the Chinese, among others). Yet space-invasion is violent nonetheless. In modern geopolitics, this kind of invasion is now relatively rare, but the experience of a challenge to place continues through the rise of the modern refuge; the refugee is an invader with moral rather than military claims on our space and place.

Space is not quite place. This difference is not merely [spatial] but is also social and psychological. Have we not felt displaced under the shadow of the virus these last couple of years? The COVID context aside, what we considered yesterday also relates to the distinction between space and place: wanting our lives to be comedic, but suspecting that they might be tragic. These are alienations in our own space – displacements even as our space stays the same.

But our sense of displacement is scarcely new. In the creation myth in Genesis 2, Adam is “placed” in the Garden and – by the end of chapter 3 – is again dis-placed with Eve as they are driven out of Eden. This displacement is marked with a number of curses: the joy of having children becoming a source of great pain, the distortion of the mutuality of human relationships and the struggle between us and the earth. These woes are not because of a “historial” expulsion from Eden but mark our experience that things are not right, the experience of having space but not quite place. This is our world, but it is against us; these relationships constitute us, but they are always troubled.

What Genesis 2 and 3 describe is the reverse of where the creation narrative of Genesis 1 began: in the beginning is not nothing but a chaotic, deep void. This is “mere” space into which God speaks to create place. With the Fall, however, space without place “returns”. Adam and Eve only know place before the Fall; the tension between space and place first appears in Genesis 3. From the point of Genesis 4 – from our point of view as the children of Adam and Eve – displacement is all we have known, and it is uncomfortable. From there, the human being fanned out into the world to fill it with cities, to invade each other’s spaces, and to invade the heavens. The Genesis pre-history portrays space as distorted place into which God doesn’t quite fit, or us. What we come to call “the human condition” is just this displacement. In a world like this, God is alien, and we are too. Most of the time, God is not present and, when present, it is only to “intervene” – to “come among” – before departing from our space again. Such an interventionist God is the space invader par excellence. The soundtrack to the old video game is suddenly the tune for a Christmas carol.

It is within a world like this that we hear from John’s gospel: “And the Word became flesh…” After Genesis 3, this can only mean: the Word invaded the world, for the world is now not a natural place for God. “He came to what was his own”, John writes, “but his own rejected him. ” Compromised space does not easily recognise the place which God makes. The crucifixion is a radical displacement of Jesus from his place among the people, casting him out of even that compromised place into a mere space outside the city. In the crucifixion, we read God’s approach as an invasion, and we reject it.

What happens when the place-making God is thrust into outer space – the cross, outside the city, formless and void? Is the cross a Godless space or a God-filled place? We are at the crux (cross! ) of Christian faith. The question is not, Did God enter the world at Christmas. Or rather, this is the question, but it is the same as the Easter question: Is the place-making God attached to the space of the cross?

Our answer to this is everything, which is why the Creed hammers the Christology: God from God, light from light, through him all things were made. This is not about getting mere theology right for its own sake, whatever that could mean. All of the extraordinary things said about Jesus in the Creeds are said about the one who is crucified – whose story looks finally to be tragedy, to recall what we considered yesterday. The question answered here is whether the harsh space of the cross – or the radical humility of a manger – can be the creative place of God.

Pastorally – in connection to us – the question asked is whether our experience of displacement is within God’s healing reach.

And the answer is, Yes.

God is not absent, occasionally invading our space. Rather, God makes place. God creates a “rest in peace” which is not death and the loss of all space and time but peace in time and space. As in Genesis 1, so also here: the deep empty of our displacement – in this God’s hands – can be made to be place and life.

John might have written: “He came to what was his own, but his own space‑d him. But to all who did receive him, he gave place as children in the family of God” (cf. John 1. 12f).

Is there a home in the world, or are we just invaders of space who must yet fear now being invaded by God or some other threat?

God has “made his dwelling among us” John writes. God comes home in the place­­‑d incarnation. As Adam was placed in the Garden, Jesus is placed among us, naming us as God’s own place, making flesh – our flesh – into Word.

Let us, then, make place for God, and for each other.