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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.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2021

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Luke 2:1-7

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In a sentence:
God lays us in the manger of the world with a promise to bring us through all things, back to himself.

Every generation throws up its own questions about God. Over the last couple of months, I have found myself pondering one of the pressing theological questions of this age. Most simply, that question is, Does God have Netflix?

Of course, this question concerns not only Netflix but extends to the providers of any video streaming service. And we note that there are those who would insist that heaven is illuminated by the glory of God and not by the ghostly glow of LED flat screens and that, besides, surely God reads books rather than watches TV. But such objections need not be seriously entertained.

Now, while the question of a divine streaming subscription has continued to nag at me, part of the difficulty in answering it was that it wasn’t clear to me why the question mattered at all. However, I have begun to suspect that the problem to which this question points is that of divine omniscience: the theory that God knows all things. We have all had the experience of sitting down to a movie or a book, only to realise 30 minutes or a few chapters into the story that we have seen or read it before. This must surely be the experience of the all-knowing God – Every. Single. Time: “Oh, I think I’ve already seen this! ” So far as an omniscient God goes, what would be the point of watching or listening to a story if you know how it’s going to end?

Putting that question on hold for a moment, we can contrast this divine experience with our own. We would love to know the end of our own stories. To know our own end would not be simply to have information; it would be to know how to live here, in the middle of our story, anticipating that end. Our sense for the end colours our experience of the middle – our experience of life here and now.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that we generally anticipate our lives will turn out to be tragedies. – that, finally, things will not turn out well. Suspecting this, we gravitate towards comedy. The sense of comedy we mean here is not “funny” or “amusingly entertaining” but the narrative sense of comedy. A comedy is a story that starts high, moves through a deep low and then rises to finish at least as high again. (We spoke earlier in the year of “the comedy” of Job in this sense). In contrast, a tragedy starts high and ends low.

The prospect of tragedy is everywhere. Global warming is one such threat – lush forests reduced to dry dust; in a different way, the possibility of a very long tail to the COVID-19 pandemic is another looming tragedy – freedom and predictability gone. And, of course, no one gets out of this life alive.

The prospect of living a tragedy is scarcely bearable, so we seek comedic distractions and diversions from the dismal here and now. We turn away from the present, from our own story. In its worst manifestations, we descend into living through other people’s more uplifted lives. So-called “reality TV” is about someone else’s reality. If the glow of LED screens doesn’t illuminate heaven, it can serve as something of a secular “opiate of the masses” – a diversion from the dreary prospect that, for us at least, things might not get much better. There are, of course, more positive reasons for watching TV or reading books. But when the CEO of Netflix observes that the service’s principal competitor is the human need for sleep, we might suspect that escaping the world – to the point of denying our own biological needs – might have more than a little to do with the booming success of the streaming services.

The choice of a life lived in distraction reflects the experience or suspicion that our own story is finally tragic, without meaning. Our stories are not interesting enough that anyone would want to watch them. We seek, then, to be entertained – entertained, in the sense of amused rather than in the sense of being considered – as we might “entertain” a thought.

Now, while media consumption can be mere distraction, distraction is the purpose of reading Scripture. The Scriptures are there also to distract us from tragedy by telling us a comedic story – that of Israel and Jesus. There is, though, no LED opiate here to null the pain of the life. We are not to “borrow” the lives of those in the biblical story but to live them: to see our own lives as hidden in God, with Jesus. Live this life – the kind of life Jesus lived. Why? Because the life of Jesus is the defining comedy. It begins with all the promise of a babe-in-arms, descends to the crucifixion and ends with the resurrection. This last – the resurrection – is not a “reversal” of the crucifixion in the middle but signals that God’s love is the context of the whole of Jesus’ life: even the cross is not outside of this.

Faith in this God, then, is a conviction as to how our story ends. However, we hold this conviction only in the middle of the story, where we are buffeted from the comic to the tragic and back again, more than a little given to wonder how things will, in fact, end. Sometimes the best we hope for is a little comic relief. Christmas seems to have been cast as something like this in our culture: a gasp of air before we descend under the waters again.

But the central question of our lives is this: are we living a tragedy or a comedy? This question doesn’t ask about what it feels like here and now. It is a long-game question – not of experience but of conviction. And it matters because our conviction about the end of the story changes our experience of the story here and now. If our life is finally a comedy, then “Lift up your heads”. If our life is finally tragedy, then it is perfectly sensible to make the ride as easy as possible with whatever works: drugs, travel, sex, chocolate or distraction-by-media.

Our gospel reading today – as always on Christmas Day – has Jesus laid in a manger. Our focus here is often on the “outcast” Jesus, born at the margin, a manger in a stable being a sign that he had no real place among us.

But we are all born into a manger: the world in which we are placed. And to the extent that we think our lives are finally tragic, we are all cast to the margin, from which we watch someone else’s more comedic passage through life.

It is given – it is the “law”, we might say – that God has laid us in a manger. And we open our eyes and wonder what is going to happen, and our first breath becomes a crying out for fear of it all. But it is the gospel that this God has laid us in a manger. This is gospel because, with this God, all lives are finally comedies. They are comedies because God is watching. It is when God watches that we have life. For God is no mere voyeur seeking distraction, and neither does God watch to oppress, accuse or condemn – all tragic outcomes. Instead, God watches with an attentiveness that brings life and does not give it up.

And so God doesn’t need Netflix. God has us – a divine comedy in the making – and God watches with intense interest. For ours is a story the end of which God both knows and does not know. God doesn’t know the end because it is truly our story – yours, mine, ours. And it is not yet finished.

But God does know the end because God watches not for distraction but for traction: to pull us towards life. Or, to put it differently, God watches not merely to be entertained by us but to entertain us: to consider us. God watches as much for our sake as for God’s own.

Jesus laid in the manger is God entertaining us – not for our distraction but considering us. And God looks to us now to entertain Jesus: to contemplate him. Because in his story we see God entertaining us, considering us, and the gospel makes this attention the ground of our being: that God sees us. Faith is seeing that God sees us, and resting in that. Faith sees in Jesus God and us, together on the great rising arc of a divine comedy which begins wherever we do and takes us wherever we go but always ends in peace.

When God is watching, whatever is laid in a manger ends up in heaven – even us.

From the manger, then, lift up your eyes to meet the gaze of God, and choose a life the ending of which not even God knows except that it ends with life.

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Advent 3
12/12/2021

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Psalm 23
Luke 1:7-18

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In a sentence:
The Holy Spirit is given to renew us in the midst of a world which seems to be without God.

With today’s reading from Luke’s Gospel, we find ourselves once again in the strange world of apocalyptic thought.

Foreign though it is, we don’t have to try hard to find points of correspondence between that strange world and the estrangement in our own. The threat of climate change presses ever more closely upon us, as does the ongoing impact of COVID-19. In response to our chequered past, questions of restorative justice continue to threaten the future we presumed to be ours. Gender wars fill the papers, as do diplomatic tussles reflecting troubling shifts in international balances of power.

Just as the apocalyptic prophets of biblical times tell their hearers to look to the signs of the times, so also do we read the signs – the patterns in the weather, the number of cases each day, the latest mutation – all to understand where we are and what is coming next.

John’s apocalyptic language, then, is perhaps less strange to us than might first seem. At least in the frightening aspects of the apocalyptic outlook, we see something of ourselves and our experience of our own times. Yet, what troubles we see on the horizon today are “merely” troubles. There is nothing in what is going on around us which could make sense of the conclusion of our passage today: “So, with many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people.” Whatever our trials and tribulations, there is good news in the preaching of the apocalyptic prophet.

As we’ve noted before, the apocalypse is properly not the dramatic, attention-grabbing shaking of all things but the revelation of God which comes with it: the revelation of God’s glory and the setting right of history. This is not a threat but rather something for which the people are longing. This is the “good news” – the gospel – in what John announces.

In the midst of all this, we hear in John’s preaching something which almost passes without notice but which we will consider today: “I baptise you with water … but one is coming who baptises with the Holy Spirit and fire”. The difference between what John is doing as a prophet of the old era and what Jesus will do as a prophet of the new is that Jesus brings the Holy Spirit.

The coming of the Holy Spirit, then, is part of the apocalypse or revelation of God. And when it comes, what happens? Jesus “happens”. The Spirit with which Jesus will baptise is the Spirit which comes upon him in his own baptism by John. Of course, Jesus has already “happened” at this point – he has been born and lived perhaps 30 years. Yet the connection between Jesus and the Spirit made explicit here (and in his birth – consider the descent of the Spirit on Mary in Luke’s narrative account) is crucial for what he is: the presence of God in the form of a piece of the world. In Jesus, God looks surprisingly like one of us.

This means that he has himself become the bearer of the apocalypse – the revelation of God – even as he is. What we see here is less a new age than a renewal of the age – a renewal of human possibility. This holds up even to the point of the crucifixion. What then happens by, around and to Jesus happens for him as the one on whom the Spirit rests.

Why does all this matter?

It matters because, for the things which trouble us today, resolution is only available to us tomorrow – that kind of tomorrow that never comes. Stark apocalyptic thought was also like this – now is the time of tribulation only; peace is coming tomorrow. God is presently – truly – absent, and we are on our own. God is coming, the enthusiast affirms, but right now we are truly alone.

But the New Testament baptises apocalyptic thought, soaking it in Jesus. To say that the Spirit-soaked Jesus baptises with that same Spirit is to say that God’s coming is here and now. The Holy Spirit is the means and the extension of the apocalypse, of the revelation of God. By itself, the world is not a sign of God, and neither are the signs of the times. We might well try to read the signs of the time, but we do just as well to dismiss them. God is not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, not in the graphs or the predictions, not in warmer weather or diplomatic boycotts. Rather, God is in and among us by the Spirit who renews the face of the earth (Psalm 104).

This is why our liturgy for these few weeks of Advent has been laid out in the pattern of the church’s liturgical year, making each successive season approximate to each element of the worship service. The service moves from the perceived absence of God lurking under Advent through to the proclaimed presence of God in the world in Pentecost, in the community of believers. At that Pentecostal point of the service – the Eucharist – we pray: send that Spirit which makes Jesus the Christ also upon us and what we will eat and drink, that we might be the presence of God, the Body of Christ. Let your will be done once more on earth as it was in Jesus. As that Body, we then pray for the world and are sent into the world.

And sent to do what? To bear fruit, as John cries out. As a tree takes mere elements and makes of them nourishing fruit, the renewed heart allows God to take what are mere elements – us – and make of them something life-giving. Jesus’ own life is the taking of elements – the stuff of us – and making of them God’s creative presence.

What does God’s creative presence look like? It looks like a table spread in the darkest valley and all its signs of the end, our cup overflowing. We are called to take our seat at that table and to bring others to it – here and now, all the days of our lives given us to live. God comes not to wipe all things away as beyond redemption but to renew them. God comes not “spiritually” – spookily, in hidden places, hearts and minds.  God comes not tomorrow or the day after but today.

The gospel proposes, first, that – by the Spirit Jesus receives – God looks surprisingly like Jesus – that heaven is made of earth.

The gospel proposes, second, that if we open ourselves up to the same Spirit Jesus gives, God will then look surprisingly like us: the Body of Christ, here and now.

The gospel proposes, third, that this is enough, whatever the signs of the times might be.

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Advent 2
5/12/2021

Malachi 3:1-4
Philippians 1:3-11
Luke 1:68-79

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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The season of advent begins again the telling of the story of the life of Jesus. Everything in the Christian tradition orbits this story, everything is drawn into its gravity. All of the texts which we have received from the Jewish tradition; all of the experiences of the earliest Christian communities; all of our own lives, find their centre in the story of this one life. The singular person Jesus of Nazareth: who was born, who lived and taught, was crucified, and was raised. We retell this story over and over and over again, until it shapes who we are, until it seeps into our souls, until we feel it in our bones.

This is one of the mysteries of the Christian tradition, that this singular story rooted in the first century, in a particular geography, somehow resonates across history and in quite different places. As we begin to anticipate again the coming of God in the person of Jesus, then, we are invited not only to remember an event fixed in the past. Rather, we are invited to pay attention to how the story of the coming of Jesus in Bethlehem is a story which reaches out and has something to say about the coming of God in our own times and places.

We might view the task of Advent as no less a time of self-reflection and preparation as the time of Lent before Easter. A time to not only swell with the joy of the assured arrival of God’s beloved child into the world 2,000 years ago. But also a time to reflect on whether we are ready to receive this child, to receive this God in the world and lives in which we actually live.

It is striking to me the sharp contrast between the texts scheduled for reading during advent, and the general vibe of the season. While many of us face busy work and social lives at this time of year, we also look forward to end of year parties, gatherings with family, and the celebration of Christmas itself. The anticipation is one of effervescent joy.

And yet in the midst of this season we hear from the scriptures foreboding warnings about the coming Son of Man; the Gospel reading next week will have John the Baptist castigating a brood of vipers. This week we hear from the Hebrew Scriptures a warning from Malachi — whose name is literally rendered “the messenger” — about the refining judgement of God; and from the New Testament, a call from the imprisoned Paul inviting the Church in Philippi to share in his ministry of suffering.

If there is any antidote to the story of Christmas falling into sanitised nostalgia, robbed of its world-shaking power, perhaps it is simply taking the time to truly listen to the Scriptures.

The question which the Scriptures seem to press upon us — at least the question which has been pressed upon me is: are you ready to receive Jesus into the world? Have you become worthy of the coming of God?

Of course we cannot make ourselves worthy, God alone can and indeed will do that. But Malachi offers us a warning: the road to becoming worthy to receive God is fraught, it can be painful.

“Who can endure the day of [the Messenger’s] coming?” says the prophet.

On the road towards Christmas it is common to read Malachi as a primarily Christian prophecy. Particularly as a prophetic prediction about the second coming of Elijah in John the Baptist, with his proclamation of divine judgement. It’s worth recognising that perhaps Malachi saw himself as this messenger from the Lord — indeed Malachi literally means “messenger.” The point is that the message of God’s judgement is not found once in John by the Jordan, but found throughout God’s faithful journey with God’s people. It is found today.

It is found when, like in Malachi’s day, our worship becomes self-serving, when our devotion to God becomes confused with projections of ourselves, holding onto our own nostalgia, or pursuing our own aesthetic desires. This must be burned away, so that we see again the pure riches of our worship and devotion before the God who comes.

So too in the words of the Apostle Paul. It is easy to hear a consoling word of friendship: “I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you…” says the Apostle. And yet, this joy arises for the imprisoned Paul precisely because the Philippians, “share in God’s grace … both in … imprisonment and in the defence and confirmation of the gospel.” Indeed we might even hear in the joyous memory of Paul in prison an attempt at taking his mind off his immediate plight. Something like thinking of better days in the midst of a storm. Rather than consoling, Paul is drawing the Church in Philippi more deeply into an appreciation of his own sufferings. The prayer of Paul that the Philippians would abound in knowledge, to become pure and blameless for the day of Jesus Christ, is not a prayer that should be taken lightly. It is the prayer of a prisoner reminding his fellow co-workers that focusing on “what is best,” or better: focusing on what truly matters, means being willing to lose everything, even freedom, for the sake of the Gospel.

The call of the Gospel is not a simple task. The coming of God into the world — into this world, here and now, the world we live in today — is disruptive, and world-shaking.

God comes to us in the beloved child Jesus Christ. God meets us in our fumbling praise, in the compromised ways we live out our faith. And this is both a joy and a challenge. We must be ready to hear the message of God which challenges God’s people across time and place. We must be ready to set aside what does not matter, to attend to what truly does.

Hear then the Good News:

In Jesus Christ God fully enters the world, takes on our humanity, bears with our burdens, stands with us in our imprisonment by the forces of sin and death — those forces which stand opposed to the reach and reign of God’s love: mercy and justice, peace and joy. And on the cross Jesus encounters death face-to-face and there defeats it. Releasing us and all creation from the grip of hate and violence, oppression and cruelty.

And this then is the challenge of this Good News: now refined by the salvific work of Jesus, we must begin again to examine what is still being refined away; and how we will become co-workers with all those who share our imprisoned state.

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Advent 1
28/11/2021

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25
Luke 21:25-36

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In a sentence:
God arrives before death, that we might not die too soon

Not many people wake up in the morning knowing that today is the day they are going to die. Perhaps people condemned to execution know this, or suicides. But even then, there are stays of execution and changes of heart. Inevitable as it is, death nevertheless catches almost all of us by surprise.

Much of our lives are spent keeping death at bay, something at which we have become increasingly successful. Most of us, most of the time, can live without worrying too much “just now” about dying, even if the odds of our greeting death increase with each day we haven’t died.

Perhaps surprisingly in all of this, death is not unlike God: a limit to our being, present mostly as a horizon, arriving in its own time. No one wakes up thinking that today is the day God will finally arrive. Sometimes people gamble on this, usually under the spell of a charismatic cult leader, but disappointment here has been universal. Faith holds that God is, like death, inevitable – ultimately unavoidable – and also that, like death, God is unpredictable. You will meet your maker, like the unexpected thief in the night.

In today’s text and many like it, this scenario is described in terms of first century apocalyptic thought. This thinking included the conviction that God’s arrival was imminent: “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place,” Jesus says (Luke 21.32).

We can’t believe this now, at least not in the sense we suspect Jesus and his first hearers believed it. It is entirely possible they believed this in the same way that a suicide bomber believes, or with the true-believer conviction of the staunch defender of “freedom” and “democracy”. This way of thinking was in their blood: this generation will not pass away until all this has taken place.

We can’t believe these texts in that way, not least because that generation has well and truly “passed away”. But we are clever and find a way. Noting the similarities of God and death, we collapse the inevitability of God into the inevitability of death: God arrives when death arrives. Or, as we’re more likely to put it: when we die we go to heaven (or the other place). This mostly works, although now it is not heaven coming to earth (for which we pray each week) but us going to heaven (or not). Or, more profoundly, instead of God coming with the threat of death – which is surely implied in these terrifying texts: now death brings God

Yet, death which brings God is precisely our problem. We kill or are killed, discriminate, alienate and stigmatise because it makes someone feel safer, which we imagine is what God wants for us. We deny others what they need because we feel closer to God when we hold on to our stuff. We are unfaithful or unreliable because the relationships and commitments we already have seem not to bring God with them, se we prefer others.

If God arrives when death comes, then a culture of death already enjoys the presence of God, already is God’s kingdom – surely, the kingdom of a horrific God.

But perhaps we reject the seemingly obsolete “this generation” of our text too quickly. Maybe the point here is that God is “more” inevitable than your death – if one thing cannot properly be more inevitable than another. It’s not death you have to worry about, but God. At least, this is what we ought to want – the coming of God and not death; it is, again, the meaning of “thy kingdom come”.

We pray “your kingdom come” because we are already in the presence of death. Our deathly ways do not bring God, at least, not this God. With this God, death is real but is not a means to good things. Death is not a method for God.

The world is such that death always comes too soon. This is not that we stop breathing prematurely but that death presses in on us in the form of fear, worry, hatred, law, oppression, possessions; or death presses in when we employ it to cause these things in others.

We sometimes speak of “realised eschatology” – the notion that the promised gifts of God begin to be available before the end of all things. But there is also a “realised thanatology” – a realised social, personal, political “death” – which arrives before our biological death. Faith seeks God’s early arrival because death has come among us too soon.

We read these strange and seemingly out-of-date texts today because they pose a question: Does the arrival of God coincide with the end of life, or its beginning? And then, when does God arrive? What we think the answers to be here can be seen in how we live. We do well to ask ourselves, Is the world more alive now because of the way I have lived today?

If God’s coming is the beginning of life then, in a deathly world like ours, God’s arrival marks the beginning of death’s of own death. Something new is in our midst.

Rejoice, Jesus says, not because you have dealt enough death to usher in your own little interpretation of God’s kingdom but because the world is less deathly now that something of God’s kingdom of life has begun to take shape in your lives.

And suffer, Jesus says, not because death oppressed you but because you refuse to let it deny the life which God’s kingdom promises.

The apocalyptic mind declares that God comes before death, and that this is good news for all who say No to struggling under death before its time.

It is in an outlook like this, and life-affirming actions which resonate with it, that our redemption draws near. Stand up, Jesus says, and raise your heads: God is coming, your redemption is drawing near.

So, live and bring life.

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Reign of Christ
21/11/2021

Revelation 1:4b-8
Psalm 93
John 18:33-19:5

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In a sentence:
The true human life is lived not in seeking to escape the limitations of life but to find life – and God – within them

“Here is the man”, Pilate proclaims to the masses who cry out for Jesus’ blood.

Whatever Pilate means, for the gospel writer these words mean more than “Look at this fellow!”  John wants to say – “Look, here is the human being. Gaze upon this one, and see what it means truly to be human.” But how is this beaten wreck of a man really what the true human being looks like? What is true humanity?

Perhaps some of you have seen the movie The Truman Show (1998). On the surface, the film is an entertaining comedy with the usual happy beginning, sudden descent and final rise again to life. Symbolically, however, the film is a clever anti-religious statement about true humanity or, at least, about what constrains us as human beings and what we need to do to be free. The name of the central protagonist is essential: Truman, or “True Man” or “True Human Being.” (Truman’s surname – Burbank – is the name of the district in which such film studios as Disney and Warner Bros. are found).

In the story, the young Truman gradually becomes aware that he’s living in a contrived world. We, the viewers, know that everyone else in Truman’s life is an actor, and that his whole life is being viewed on television by the outside world. When Truman finally realises that something is horribly wrong, he makes a run for it – not knowing where he is running to – only to bump into the edge of the enormous dome which encapsulates his world. There he is addressed from on high by the director of “The Truman Show”. The director’s name “just happens to be” Christo, and his voice booms god-like from the sky via the weather sound system. Christo invites Truman to stay and live out the lie for the pleasure of the millions of viewers who’ve watched his progress since he was born.

But Truman – the True Human Being – decides instead to see what life is like without Christo – without God, we are to understand. And in the story, of course, he can; there’s another, bigger world out there. Truman exits the false world and leaves behind the Christo who has been his limitation, stepping forward into what might be a brave, new world.

The film is a parable of how our society has thought that it has found the measure of God, and that it ought to cut itself loose from God. Truman sees and leaves the untrue people and the false director-God behind. But more importantly, we are invited to do the same. We cheer for Truman as he throws off the tyrannical meddling in his life. We see that it is the right thing to do, for he has been subject to a lie, and he will only find his full humanity by shrugging off what has been holding him back.

But there is a storyteller’s trick at play here. While Christo is God in the story, it is we who have the God’s-eye view of everything in Truman’s life. We stand above Truman and Christo. We see everything and judge that Truman only becomes True-Man – genuinely human – when he turns his back on the god-figure who has been in control of his life. We cannot but judge in this way because we are made to think we see everything. Truman – the true human being – must break free from Christo, the god who keeps his world small.

All this, however, is rather a cheap shot. In the film, Christo is God and Truman is us. As Truman breaks free, so do we. In the gospel, however, Christo is Pilate and the religious authorities and us, and Truman is Jesus. The power is not with a god but with the authorities, and Jesus is constrained by them. The difference is now that there is nowhere Jesus can go. There is no other world in which there are no constraining powers. The film would have us believe that after Truman steps out of his little world, it is into the real world – a place free from Christo-like constraints and powers and crucifixions.

The true human being – Jesus or any of us – can’t escape the world as Truman does. The lie in the film is that Truman escapes not from the limiting god in the sky but from the realities of historical living. Problems on the ground are blamed on the heavens: “Imagine there’s no heaven…above us only sky,” a gentle, wistful song invites us. The implication is that if heaven were imagined away, the earth would be healed.

Of course, heaven has today largely been imagined away, at least as a public thought; there remain only the little heavens in the minds of individuals.

And nothing has changed. With a heaven “out there” no longer capturing the public imagination, heaven has been bought crashing down to earth. It is no longer above us in a religious space but ahead of us in political time. And so the crucifixions continue because heaven and its gods were never really the problem. It is not the gods who place Jesus in the power of Pilate and ultimately on the cross. Jesus simply doesn’t fit and so is squeezed out, pressed towards oblivion.

Yet Pilate’s “here is the man” is made by the gospel writer to be the ironic opposite of what Pilate seems to intend. Perhaps Pilate mocks Jesus, but the evangelist mocks Pilate’s inability to see what is in front of him – that Jesus is more human than we are.

Jesus’ humanity is in his reconciliation to having no heaven to escape to Truman-style, as we wish to escape. It is in his refusal to deny what he holds true for the convenience of an easier ride – Christo-style – as we do. Jesus’ humanity is in that, whether his life is joy or suffering, it is as one who knows himself the child of God: I am God’s, and God is mine.

On this day each year, we take Pilate’s mocking in this morning’s reading and contradict him to declare in faith that Jesus is “king”. But, in this, we don’t make him a Christo in the sky, pulling the strings in our lives, doling out pain and suffering on us like on rats in a laboratory, watching to see what we will do next.

To say that Jesus is king is to say that he lives the life of the true human being – the woman, the man who has but one life, in this world and no other: a life lived for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health; in youth or advanced old age; gay or straight; under democracy or dictatorship; as citizen or alien.

Jesus is Lord and King when our lives are lived as his was: looking not for a heaven to escape to, but living the prayer that God’s kingdom come, here and now, in the midst of what we have to deal with. It is only here and now that we can become children of God.

Let us, then, seek the coming of this kingdom in all things so that, in all things, we might with Jesus become God’s kingdom.

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Pentecost 25
14/11/2021

Daniel 12:1-3
Psalm 16
Mark 13:1-14

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In a sentence:
God is revealed in the person of Jesus and continues to be revealed in the lives of God’s people

“Not one stone left upon another…”

I confess that last month’s earthquake made me wonder whether our calculations might have been simplified a bit here at Curzon Street: not one brick left upon another! But still it stands!

Yet, had it tumbled down, similarities between that destruction and the prediction in today’s reading would only be superficial. For us, a collapse might mean sadness and but perhaps also relief. For Jesus’ disciples, it was a matter of horror: how could such a thing come about?

The terms in which Jesus speaks here are classicly apocalyptic. Apocalyptic thinking anticipated an in-breaking of God’s righteousness in answer to the unrighteousness of the world. The apocalypse of God – literally, the revealing of God – was the manifestation of God’s glory, a manifestation which would lead to a judgement and a setting right of wrongs. Very often, this final consummation of all things was to be preceded by a breaking down of social and political order, of which the predicted destruction of the Temple in today’s reading would be a dramatic sign.

Of course, we don’t need apocalyptic thought to recognise that all things come to an end. We have enough historical and personal awareness to know that everything ends. But our text is not about the way of all the earth, by which we reasonably expect there will come a day without Google or Netflix, the United States or China. Jesus makes a prediction which disrupts even this expectation. He points not to earthquakes or entropy or the dialectical mechanisms of history but to the rattling of the world with the approach of God.

It’s not entirely clear, then, whether the approach of God is a good thing or bad. “When will these things be?” the disciples ask. Such a question asks about “managing” God’s approach, about being placed as well as possible when God gets here, about becoming a small a target. Jesus speaks elsewhere of the approach of God as being like the coming of a thief in the night, with an implied warning: be ready at all times. We usually focus here on the suddenness – the unpredictability – of God’s otherwise welcome return, but perhaps the activity of the thief should not be dismissed too quickly. For the approach of God is not without threat: the thief comes to take what we value. God is also a challenge to what we value.

And how does God approach? What does God look like when God comes? As the rest of Chapter 13 unfolds, Jesus speaks of the persecution of believers before God finally arrives. The world does not like what it sees in these ones – in the disciples of Jesus. This is because they are not how they should be: they are not as we are, for that is our ultimate measure of others. I persecute one in whom I do not like what I see, in whom I do not see myself.

I can relate to this. There is an old man who hides in the mirrors at our place and who jumps out to frighten me whenever I pass by. Perhaps something similar happens at your place? And perhaps one grows used to this? Whatever the case, such mirrors are the engines of persecution. When we look at each other, we expect to see something of ourselves. You, if you are in radical difference from me, should not be here – you black person, you asylum seeker, you infidel.

The tribulation Jesus describes is, then, what happens when God comes close in the person of believers. It is not suffering in general but the suffering which God brings when God affects people. This suffering is what happens when the world cannot bear what it sees when it looks in a mirror: we do not recognise ourselves, believer, when we look at you. You look like Jesus, but Jesus didn’t look enough like us.

It is the presence of God in the persons of believers, then, which are the cause of the tribulations, the wars and rumours of wars. The apocalypse, then – the revelation of God – is not God’s response to the evil in the world; it is the cause of the strife.

The revelation of God disrupts the settled world. This is obvious in the more dramatic apocalyptic texts. Yet, the crucial revelation in the Bible is not the end-time apocalyptic overturning of all things but the life and ministry of Jesus. For the New Testament, Jesus is the apocalypse of God. Jesus is what the glory of God looks like in the world.

Perhaps this is acceptable to our moral sensibilities, at least through those parts of the gospel when Jesus is doing and saying Godly things. But Jesus is also crucified, which looks like a negation of God’s glory but is in fact its intensification: the glory of God is the crucified Jesus. Or, in terms of apocalyptic thinking, the crucified Jesus is God’s apocalypse, God’s self-revelation. Nothing else in all the horror and splendour of New Testament apocalyptic matters more than this: the crucified Jesus is the revelation of the glory of God.

The cross, of course, is a kind of “negative” glory, in the way that old film-based photography produced an image of “reversed” colour. We can discern in a photographic negative what the image is but it is both exact and shockingly distorted. It is both us and not us – our ghost. The cross is God’s glory in negative – God’s glory as God sees it, God’s glory in the form of the world. We cannot yet see the glory in it. But in the light of the resurrection – the light of the Father’s love – the cross becomes the apocalypse: we see God in Jesus, even crucified.

This is not a new thought. The glory of God, wrote the 2^nd Century bishop Irenaeus, is a human being fully alive. What God reveals – God’s apocalypse – is just this: a human being fully alive in whatever circumstances – suckling at the breast, learning in the synagogue, teaching in town squares,  dying on a cross. Or crossing a dangerous sea to safety, struggling to hold a marriage together, grieving the loss of a life’s love, wondering about that old face in the mirror. We, too, are material for the apocalypse of God.

The ancient controversies about the humanity and divinity of Jesus, which lead to the cascading of affirmations about him in the creeds – God from God, light from light, of one being with the Father, begotten not made… – these are not about theological minutiae. They are about whether the world in which we live – the world which we are – can be a revealing of God’s glory. Can God be here, Now, in a crucifying world, or a warring one, or a burning one?

It may be that what we see or are living looks little like God’s glory. We may have lost the Temple, the standing, the resources, the energy, the youth, the time, the companions. Or, perhaps in other ways we have these and imagine that these are signs of God’s proximity.

Yet, do not be led astray: these things are not the end. Only God is the end. And so God is our beginning, now. The glory of God – human beings fully alive – is possible in all things.

Let us then, in Jesus, live towards that possibility:

becoming the apocalypse of God.