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Pentecost 17
19/9/2021

Ephesians 6:10-20
Psalm 1
Mark 9:30-37

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In a sentence
God meets us in the midst of life and in the midst of life God takes shape

It’s not news to many of us that life is something of a struggle. The present pandemic context would be proof enough of that, on top of the ins and outs of daily life: working and learning and loving and dying.

Such things are the form of our struggles, but what makes them struggles?

In our reading from Ephesians this morning, Paul offers an explanation verging on incomprehensible to us today. We struggle, not against enemies of blood and flesh – not against what we can see and touch – but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the forces of evil in the heavenly places. Even if it is still alive in modern fantasy books and films, this is strange language in our modern world. The ‘cosmic powers of this present darkness’ and the ‘spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places’ have little traction in what we consider to be our ‘real’ world lives. We have put these things to one side – even in the churches – except for when we want to play.

Yet, this is more problematic than it first seems. What embarrassment we might feel about Paul’s language of evil cosmic forces is in strange tension with what doesn’t embarrass us – the belief in God. For surely God is a spiritual power – albeit a much ‘bigger’ one, and a good one. We find ourselves, then, in a strange situation. We believe in what we might call a spiritual goodie – God – but not in spiritual baddies – the Devil and [his] cohort. And so it is commonly held in the churches these days that God is a personal spiritual reality but the Devil is not.

This has the effect that God is left ‘hanging there’ in the spiritual realm. And so is revealed something of the modern pathos of faith: we have largely dismissed the spiritual realm but still cling to a ‘spiritual’ God. The God of the Old and New Testaments inhabited a heaven filled with the forces of good and evil; the God of the modern mind is alone in heaven, with little to do. This emptying of the heavens has facilitated the recent resurgence of popular atheism: there is now only one spirit left to deal with, and now we outnumber it. Evangelism can feel like the call to leave the world to keep God company.

Maybe all of this sounds quite sceptical about the things of faith, but scepticism is not the point. The point is clarity about what our language means – to ourselves and to others, for our language is not innocent. Our words cast a world, cast God, cast our very selves. And we are able to hide in those words, or between them. Our language can hide from us who we are, who God is, or what the world is. The question is then whether our words capture us as we truly are.

If it is the case that our words about the heavens (and ourselves) have so shifted that God is now alone in heaven and distant from us in the world, then those words won’t do any more to speak of the struggle of life. To persist in talking that way is to become increasingly infantile in our speech. We place words next to each other in the way of a pidgin language which lacks an organising grammar: us here, God there. To what struggles we already have is added the struggle to link what we believe about a spiritual realm to what we live from day to day.

Yet one way of characterising what the Bible does is to see it as unravelling the world our words have made in favour of the world God’s word makes. God’s word does not separate but binds together.

At the heart of our confession is the presence of God in the person of the very real and worldly Jesus: the Incarnation. What happens in the very worldly struggles of Jesus, culminating in the cross, is the cosmic spiritual struggle. This much Paul has already declared in the first part of Ephesians.

The thing about the Incarnation, however, is that we tend to see it as a ‘one-off’ which comes to an end: Jesus is born, lives, dies, and returns to heaven. To be fair about this confusion, Luke does give us a graphic Ascension – which is pretty unhelpful – and the Creeds use this to amplify the suggestion. And so it seems that the powers are dealt with, and God is again alone in heaven, although now we see a Trinity rather than a monotheos – a kind of divine isolation ‘bubble’ of ‘intimate partners’ and perhaps a little less lonely. Most importantly, the Incarnation looks to have ended, and the world and God are again separated as they were before – into historical and spiritual realms.

But, the point of the Incarnation is that if God comes to the world, it is to stay.

And so, the world becomes the means of God’s work with us. If, as our modern society has come to understand, evil is not in some spiritual realm but can only be believed to exist in the ins and outs of history, then this is also the place where we meet God. And real-world actions are the form of so-called spiritual struggles.

This is to say that when Paul calls us to arm ourselves with the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness and the shield of faith, these are not ‘spiritual’ things. These are disciplines – practices – which will necessarily be part of the life of every believer who is seriously engaged in the struggle for an authentic human life. The shield of faith, the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation are things we do. The sword of the Spirit is so specific a way of acting that it could cut off the hands of a fool who tries to wield it without sufficient training and familiarity.

God’s place is not a lonely throne in heaven but is properly in the world. We find a firm footing in life by attention to God’s calling, through practice and discipline, through study, prayer, fellowship and service in accordance with patterns which bring live and love, meaning and order into the loveless and disordered worlds our words so quickly create.

One Christian commentator has remarked that one reason our Christian faith often doesn’t make sense to us is that we don’t have practices which reflect it and make it real. If God is only a head and heart thing – and in this sense a ‘spiritual’ thing – then the things of God will make little sense in a world less about heart and head and spirit than it is about what we actually do, touch and manipulate. Christian life is habit and action which will strengthen us in lives of love and righteousness.

It is a struggle to be a Christian. There is much to unlearn. We are already armed, if often against the wrong thing – even God.

Yet God is faithful. God meets us with grace even when we fail in our discipleship – even if we arm ourselves against God. How much more, then, will God meet and strengthen us if we seek earnestly to be shaped according to his will by preparing ourselves, putting on the armour of God, growing in knowledge of the Scriptures, growing more confident in prayer, more accomplished in service, and more at peace in the world which God is healing.

Stand firm, Paul says to us, echoing the call of God. Act firm. Work firm. Pray firm.

In this way is Christ’s Body risen among us, here and now, we its members, for our life and for the life of the world.

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Pentecost 16
12/9/2021

Ephesians 5:21-6:9
Psalm 116
Mark 8:27-38

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In a sentence
Make the most of your time, while the days are evil (5.16)

Some Bible texts are too dangerous to read in church, or so it would seem. And so our reading from Ephesians this morning never appears in our standard lectionary readings for Sunday services, and neither do similar readings from other letters in the New Testament. This is to say that, if you’re only going to hear from the Bible on Sundays, this is not a text you need to hear. This means that this text may not have been heard in this congregation in living memory (One of those parallel texts has been heard and considered at MtE at least once!)

Why is this a text we need not hear? The problem will seem obvious to most listening in just now: she subordinate to him in a hierarchy within marriage. And the teaching on masters and slaves is scarcely more palatable today, although we’re probably less troubled by the direction that children should honour their parents!

The problem is that this sounds like divine law, and we are all biblical literalists at heart – believer and unbeliever alike. What else could this be but a moral claim made on us? Or, if we imagine ourselves not to be biblical literalists, we expect that the next person might be a literalist and that she will either seek to impose this understanding on us or be willing – and dangerously so – submit to it herself. We have no desire to return to a social order like this, and so it’s best not to read these texts in church.

Let it be clear that we’ll make no defence of the notion that Paul’s directions here should order our lives today. But we will consider, in a roundabout way, whether it might still have been good that this was written to those who first heard it, perhaps 1900 years ago.

This possibility is difficult to comprehend from the point of view of a strict sense of moral justice. Justice tends to be set, such that if something is wrong once (now), it is always wrong (then). The moral campaigner, or the campaigner for justice, struggles for all people in all times, not least those who have suffered and endured in the past.

As far as it goes, this is a sound argument if we overlook the possibility that a historical snobbery might be lurking within it – us, now, looking down on them, back then.

On this moral understanding, justice and righteousness can only occur when justice (the communal dimension) and righteousness (the personal dimension) are both in place.

Yet, the world is not a just place. Here and there, we strike a workable balance between justice and injustice which is workable for some of us, at least. Perhaps – at least in modern western society – we have moved past the worst of patriarchy and the suffering of slave economies. And yet, our lives are not just, from the perspectives of others. Is the world, then, a place without true righteousness?

Consider…

Whatever else might have happened in the process of colonization of Australia, we know what did happen, and we cannot change that. The language of justice surrounds indigenous issues today; can any of us be righteous in the midst of it all?

We strongly suspect that the future of life on earth might hang in the balance and that the ‘smart’ – the just – thing to do would be to wind down fossil fuel use dramatically. The solutions are obvious: stop mining coal and pumping oil; perhaps tax large cars highly and transfer those funds to low emission transport. We cannot, of course, do this, even though it would contribute greatly to heading off the threatened disaster. Injustice will abound here. Where will righteousness be found?

The seas are choking with micro-plastics. How hard would it be to wind back plastic production or to skew production towards biodegradable materials? Have we fulfilled all righteousness by taking our soft plastics back to the supermarket?

We know that it is unjust that millions of lives are wasting away in refugee camps and detention centres. Can we do nothing about this? Perhaps, we cannot, even if we started some of those fires in the first place. Can, then, true righteousness be found on either side of those fences, if the fences may never be torn down?

We might quibble about any such injustice and the degree to which we can or can’t change things in any particular case. Yet, the point is that there remains much that is unjust which we cannot change, whether because it is too entrenched or we are too complicit in the structures which oppress.

Is the world, then, as irredeemably unjust, a place where righteousness can occur?

The writer to the Ephesians could not change patriarchy or slavery, if it ever even occurred to him that he might try. What then? What does a righteous life look like in the midst of injustice? More pointedly, because we will come to this in a few minutes’ time: what does the word of divine forgiveness mean when sought by and granted to those whose lives are caught up in variously suffering from and contributing to the injustices of the world?

The moralist in us is tempted to a kind of ethical mathematics, balancing demands, striking compromises or, at the full extent of frustration, flinging accusations about the place.

For all the felt need for such moral calculus, a central faith-question at stake: can the good God ‘appear’ in the broken world? Can righteousness coincide with injustice? More pointedly, can injustice be a source of righteousness, or can injustice be a blessing?

Each of these questions escalates the problem, in turn.

Can the good God ‘appear’ in the broken world? This is what we speak about at Christmas, in particular: God takes on flesh – our flesh. God and the world are seen to sit within each other. This might be an interesting thought but it has little moral traction, which is why most talk about the Incarnation at Christmas doesn’t come close to convincing us that Jesus is better than Santa.

Can righteousness coincide with injustice? The Incarnation can be read in this way, but more moral traction is found here when we observe that, while Jesus was righteous, his rejection and crucifixion was unjust. Righteousness and injustice here coincide in that the injustice is in the wrong reading of righteousness. The moral lesson is, Don’t get righteousness wrong, but the possibility is also raised that we can’t be confident about what is and is not righteous or just. Good people, after all, crucified Jesus.

Can injustice be a source of righteousness? This is surely a horrifying suggestion and raises the moral tension to a fever pitch. Yet, something very like this is affirmed at the heart of Christian faith: the unjust crucifixion of Jesus saves the world, brings righteousness. No moral theory can account for this, despite all the valiant efforts of atonement theorists through the centuries. The true moral outrage of the call to deep forgiveness is revealed here. Jesus cannot be un‑crucified, history cannot be changed, and yet not death but life is granted to the guilty: righteousness under the condition of injustice. The injustice which cannot be changed becomes the source of a strange righteousness: a righteousness which changes the meaning – and so the possibilities – of injustice.

Our passage from Ephesians today – on a charitable reading – does not require mere acquiescence to injustice but a transformation of its possibilities. And so the writer addresses both those who might be oppressed and the ones who might be oppressing them.

If we, today, are beginning to put behind us the legacies of the patriarchy and slavery of biblical times, good for us! But we still have injustice enough to which we are subject or of which we are guilty, and about which there is very little we can do to change how things are or work.

And so we still need to hear that gospel word which responds to what we have done or what has been done to us – the word which, in the guilt and the suffering, miraculously liberates us for whatever righteous thing we must do next in the midst of injustice.

‘You are forgiven’ breaks all moral expectations and possibilities, and sets us free to live toward a deeper justice, making the most of our time, Paul says, even though the days are evil (5.16).

Let us, then, work and pray to discover the shape of righteousness in our own situation, however just or unjust it may be.

In this, we live towards the hope at the heart of our confession: the day when righteousness and justice will finally be the same thing.

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Pentecost 15
5/9/2021

Ephesians 5:8-16
Psalm 146
Mark 7:24-37

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In a sentence
What we do reflects what we think we are

‘Live as children of the light’, Paul says, ‘…Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness.’

Plucked out of context like this, this scripture passage says everything, and nothing. It says everything, in that all the bases are covered: what else is there but ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ as options, the yin and yang of life choices? It says nothing, in that it does not tell us what ‘light’ and ‘darkness’ actually look like when it comes to making those choices. And so, in the end, the little section we have heard from Ephesians this morning is, by itself, not very interesting. There is nothing here to engage us. We might say that it is so right that it’s really not worth saying.

But when we look at what comes before and after these verses, we see that two of the things Paul addresses more specifically are sex and heavy drinking. And these things are of great interest to us – or some of us, at least. Because they are more interesting, we’ll think together a bit about them this morning to illuminate a little more what is at stake in what we do being ‘light’ or ‘darkness’.

We get nowhere if we reduce Paul’s direction to mere moral decision, in the sense of our moral decisions over against Paul’s. Morality is more than the choices we make. Paul does not simply say ‘Do this, don’t do that’ for us to agree with him or not. Rather he says, Understand what you are, and be reconciled to that.

The question is, then, What is a human being such that casual sex and getting drunk might violate not simply the moral code of some god but our very being?

Concerning sex, and contrary to the dominant understanding today, what is important for faith is not that we have bodies with which we might do this or that, but that we are bodies. The difference is subtle but very important. To have a body is to be somehow separated from it, somehow for the ‘real’ me to dwell within my body so that whatever happens to my body doesn’t quite happen to ‘me’. Consequently, if I give my body or take yours in sexual exchange, neither of us need really, wholly, be there.

This is not the understanding behind Paul’s exhortations here. Our bodies are not merely fleshy appendages to our true selves but are so tightly intertwined with our inner being that what happens to the one happens to the other. Contrary to the modern split of mind from body, it is indeed our whole selves which the Scripture understands to be caught up in sex and not ‘just’ our bodies. The joining of bodies is also a joining of souls, just as the loss of our body is the loss of our soul.

The question then becomes: Can what is joined this way be casually separated again? Scripturally the answer is no, not without radical damage, if there was a true joining.

Yet, for perhaps most of us, this doesn’t feel like a radical and damaging rupture in what we are – a ‘work of darkness’, as Paul puts it – because the lights have already gone out long before we get to this point. The base problem is not the sex but the division of spirit and body, which runs right through us as individuals and as communities. The manifestation of this division in the way modern society encourages us to treat sex is just one of many ways it affects us. If you imagine that when you die, your body stops but some other part of you keeps going, you are caught in the same misconception about what it means to be human. Whatever the scriptural talk of death and resurrection means, it is not that when our bodies die our spirits gives up their tenancy and continue on. When the body dies, so does the spirit. And you stay dead until God says otherwise.

At another level, any political or ethical strategy in which it is implied that the end justifies the means similarly divides bodies from souls, suggesting that only the souls really matter and the bodies can be done with as we like. The frustrations of COVID lockdowns are the effect of limiting the movement of bodies on minds and souls; what must be happening to the spirits of bodies locked in refugee detention centres or behind similar walls? The concern for justice is the recognition that bodies break souls.

In moving from sex to death to politics and justice we’re not losing our topic. Rather, debates about the so-called ‘morals’ of sex are not merely a matter of who says what about what I can do with ‘my’ body. The point is, What am I? What makes a human person human? And when do my decisions and actions draw me away from what I have been created to be? The same principles are at play in the righteousness of personal conduct as in the justice of conduct in community.

Whatever sense of intimacy and closeness it might seem to promise, the mere feels‑good approach to sex is – at the deeper level of the being and needs of each of us – as much a matter of denying myself and the one I am with, as it is affirming some felt need. This is the case whether in or out of marriage. From the point of view of Scripture, we are simply confused here: the contemporary ‘celebration’ of our ‘embodiment’ through sexual liberation also denies that our bodies are really us.

For the sake of not going on much longer we’ll not spend too much time on what Paul says about drunkenness, but the same kind of issue is operating. As bad as the health and broader social impacts of drunkenness might be, Paul’s focus here is how the one who drinks herself to excess is expressing her humanity. Working a pun, he draws a contrast between filling ourselves with strong spirits and being filled with the Spirit of God. Here the problem he addresses is not so much the body as our desire to displace the Spirit which gives life with some other spirit, denying again what we are given to be by replacing it with something else.

The moral guidelines Paul puts here are not anti-sex or anti-alcohol. More deeply, the question is, In what does our humanity reside and what kinds of behaviour accord with that? Paul’s interests in his moral teaching are not merely what we do but what we are intended to be, and how we are more fully to become that kind of creature.

Of course, on both the simple moral reading, and the deeper theological one I’ve suggested, the teaching looks the same – don’t sleep around and don’t get drunk. In both cases it sounds like a ‘No’ to things some might prefer at least to be free to do, should we want to.

It can only be a ‘No’ on the merely moral reading There is here really only darkness. But, on the deeper theological reading, the No is preceded by a Yes. The Yes is an affirmation of both our spirits and our bodies as fundamental to what we are. It is the ‘Yes’ which affirms the ‘resurrection of the body’ – our bodies in the Body of Christ – whatever that might ultimately look like. This ‘Yes’ declares that even what seems to threaten us most – the loss of our bodies and spirits in death – does not have ultimate sway. The ‘Yes’ of the gospel is a light by which we see God’s faithfulness to the world as he has created it. We are created as truly spirited bodies which have their fullest life when my connection to others – my reconciliation to others – matches my reconciliation to the connection of my own body and heart.

The ‘Yes’ God speaks is the gift of God’s own Spirit in the risen Body of Christ, given that our minds and bodies might be reconciled – within us and between us.

It is simply for us to pray and act towards the enlivening of our bodies and spirits through what God has promised, and to look for that new life in relationships and actions which reflect God’s own faithfulness to body and to spirit.

Let us, then, so pray and act: as children of light.

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Pentecost 14
29/8/2021

Ephesians 4:17-18, 25-5:2
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

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In a sentence
Forgiveness is the creative ground of all things

A passing amusement in the schoolyard when I was a kid was to sidle up to someone else – usually a friend – to give him a good punch in the arm and then step back in feigned horror to declare, ‘the Devil made me do it’. The principal purpose of the game, of course, was not to demonstrate some profound truth about the motivations of human action but the chase which ensued, in which the puncher tried to avoid what the Devil would cause the punchee to do in retribution!

Of course, modern sophisticates are beyond believing that there even exists a devil, let alone that such an entity could motivate us to act. This is the part of the joke in the schoolyard.

But this unbelief has rather far-reaching consequences. If what I do wrong cannot be attributed to a higher power, then I become solely responsible for the evil I do. This is also part of the schoolyard joke and why my friend chases me rather than rails against the devices of the Devil.

This is may not yet seem to a problem. Yet, without the Devil, not only what wrong but also what right we do comes to be centred on us as individuals. I and I alone am responsible for what good I do and for what evil I do.

This is assumed by the simple moral systems operating in, through and around us most of the time: we are free moral agents and what good or bad we do is our own work. And it mostly works in day-to-day life. So far, so good.

However, how do I know in the first place what is good and what is wrong? There are two basic options here. The first is the simplest but also the most terrifying and so the less palatable and stable: something is good because I do it, or bad because I do it. That is, I am myself the definition of goodness and badness. This is the argument of those whose actions can only be described as sociopathic – whether those actions are bad or good by other measures. It is not only the diagnosed sociopath who thinks and act this way.

The second source for goodness and badness is most generally characterised as being ‘outside’ of me. Moral measure is located in society or culture, the family or the tribe. This is our usual operating assumption when it comes to sourcing moral truth. It is on the basis of morality-as-communal that most people more or less adhere to the current lockdown directives, and are horrified that a few loud and angry voices are heard in the streets in protest against this corporate definition of the good. Yet this moral reference point is also unstable, for we also know that truth is sometimes on the lips of the contrary voice in the streets and not in the churches or halls of power. Of this, the old prophets are the proof, with Jesus himself.

The tension between individualised and communalised moral authority cuts right through us. And it is impossible to relax the tension, other than temporarily. History is driven by the struggle between the one and many, the familiar and the novel, the choice of the individual and need of the many.

We’ve not yet come to our focus text for today, which we do now! There is much moral direction in and around today’s reading: do this, don’t do that. And, for the most part, it’s correct: do what Paul says and don’t do what he criticises. It’s not exactly rocket science.

But it is boring. Morality is boring. This is not to say that it is not necessary. It is necessary and, once more, do what Paul says, and don’t do what he criticises (read it again for yourselves).  Morality is essential but it is also dull. It’s not dull in the sense that it is uneventful; history is the struggle over moral vision, over what human beings should do and become, and it often becomes a matter of life and death. Morality is boring in the sense that it is always there. There is always a decision to make, a balance to strike, a wager to make with respect to the next crisis – literally, the next ‘judgement’, ours and God’s. Morality is boring because it is mundane – it’s what comes with living in the world together.

Yet Paul is not boring here, if we are paying close attention. He makes his moral declarations and then, strangely, undermines them all: forgive one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you (4.32). The strangeness here is that forgiveness is not a moral action in the way that other exhortations are, to do this or not do that. Properly, forgiveness sets aside all rule-making for the sake of something other than the rules. A kind of amorality, even immorality, is implied. There is something to be forgiven – but forgiveness sets the mundane aside, devaluing the moral expectation which has not been met.

Struggles over morality typically – boringly – end in alienation or annihilation; bombs in Kabul airport this week are an instance of this, but so too is this or that lesser and more local moral outrage in the newsfeeds which caught our attention for a few minutes, or perhaps which happened at home. But forgiveness neither alienates nor annihilates. Instead, forgiveness creates where otherwise would have been only the nothingness of moral failure. And the appearance of something where there was nothing is never boring.

The problem with morality is not that this or that thing we might or mightn’t like is encouraged or forbidden. The problem with morality is that it is usually equated with Godliness. This is why ministers preparing funerals will sometimes have to endure the declaration that, while the deceased was a committed agnostic, she was nevertheless a good Christian woman.

It’s not much better in the church, of course, where we are strongly tempted to turn forgiveness into another moral action: one more good thing we do, by which we distinguish ourselves further from those who don’t do the right thing.

But Godliness in the gospel is not a doing of good things but a making good of things. Doing good puts things in order. It is the grammar of day-to-day life together, by which we make sense to each other. Morals are standing orders, permission granted.

Making good, in contrast, asks no permission. It simply creates new things where there was no hope of anything. It raises the dead, breathes spirit into dust.

This creativity is what it is to forgive.

This is why forgiveness is the hardest thing we can do, but also the one thing needful.

Maybe the Devil makes us do stuff, maybe not. But God makes us – ‘for‑gives’ us into being in order that we might do what God does.

We are, that others might be.

Hear St Paul, then, once more:

^4.31 Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, ³² and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. ^5.1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children…

Forgive. Create.

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Pentecost 13
22/8/2021

Ephesians 4:1-7, 10-17
Psalm 34
John 6:56-69

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In a sentence
Peace is not freedom from each other but freedom for each other

I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace…

‘The bond of peace’ is a lovely-sounding phrase and yet one which also becomes a little problematic when we press it for meaning.

There is much which embodies or creates ‘unpeace’ among us. The most obvious right now is the long tail of COVID-19 and the ongoing havoc in our lives and economies. Looming on the horizon is the possibility of a climatic instability which threatens much wider and longer suffering. The news tells us of the return to power in far away places of people whose idea of peace is very different from ours. Colonial arrogance and the impact of war mean that many labour under the continuing impact of colonisation or have their lives limited by the wire or guns which contain refugee camps. These are ‘bonds’ not of peace but which bring anxiety, pain and death.  We are bound in these ways by physics and chemistry, by history and politics.

Our sense for what peace might be in relation to all this is perhaps best summarised in the broad notion of ‘freedom’: peace is freedom from what fetters us.

When Paul speaks of peace here, however, it is of ‘the bond of peace’ or – a possible translation – the ‘fetter’ of peace. Being bound or fettered seems a strange way to speak of peace. Paul’s precise meaning here is not clear but what is clear is that ‘freedom’ as we usually it conceive doesn’t sit comfortably with the ‘peace’ he implies. For Paul, either we are bound up for peace – perhaps restrained so that peace might be realised – or peace itself binds us. In either case, we are not ‘free’ in the way we normally think of freedom.

This is surely offensive to the sensibilities of the modern heart. The struggle for freedom is one of the driving engines of modern western society. What place has a ‘binding’ – even a peaceful one – in the free lives for which we long?

The tension between peace and freedom arises when we imagine that our familiar notion of freedom is itself the fundamental expression of peace. We hold freedom to be good, and peace to be good, and so peace and freedom to be the same thing. Yet it is likely that here we hold two loosely-thought things together as if they were one, but in fact they remain two. And so we can’t work out why all the freedoms we now enjoy – at least in our part of the world and in the social stratum most of us here occupy – why these freedoms have not led to peace.

The problem is that the idea of being absolutely free is finally incoherent, and so also is the notion of peace we associate with it. We are always bound by something. Aspiring to absolute freedom is ultimately a rage against that fact that we are embodied. For, if we were able to liberate ourselves from all external constraint we will surely still grow old and die. Death only ceases to be our enemy – ceases to be our limitation – if our mortal bodies don’t finally matter. If our freedom were absolute, peace would mean that our bodies and their needs only seem to be important, that neither they nor the wider world we see around us are finally real. There is no radical freedom from all things, all persons, all constraints, which does not relegate those things to nothingness.

But Paul does not deny the reality of the world or us within it. The peace he envisages is not an escape from all bonds, but being subject to the right bonds. The ‘fetter of peace’ is not a binding in place of freedom, it is one kind of binding in place of other bindings. Paul will come later to our own particular bodies as ‘bound’ in certain ways within peace. Here, however, the body which is in view is the body politic of the church as a whole – and so by extension what is held out to the wider human family.

The metaphor of a body for a human community is powerful here because no part of a body is free from any other part; everything is bound together – we are ‘joined and knit together by every ligament’, as Paul puts it. In this way the body grows – and every part within it. In this way, the body and its parts are at peace with each other – bound to each other – and yet wholly free to be themselves. It is this binding which frees us to be ourselves.

Peace is not isolation but connection. And not connection as mere juxtaposition but interconnection: each part bound to the other for its own sake and for the sake of the other: for the sake of peace. Peace, then, is not a freedom of one from the other, but a freedom of one for the other.

The peace Paul commands will not be realised in separating ourselves from each other – rich from poor, young from old, Jew from Arab, Muslim from Christian, or whatever. Such separation is just cold war, and a cold war is still a war. Peace is the peace we need when justice takes shape among us: when my well-being is dependent upon yours, and yours upon mine. The ‘bond of peace’ is this fundamental interconnectedness.

And because we are ever living and moving and changing, the peaceful life is one of ‘humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing one another in love’. Peace does not stand still, there is no resting in peace.

In this way we share in the work of God in Christ, growing into the promised humanity of Jesus himself, whose own gentleness and patience and bearing of us builds us – here and now – into the peace of God.

Let us, then, set each other free by building each other up in love – from, in and for the bond of peace.

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Pentecost 12
15/8/2021

Ephesians 3:7-21
John 6:51-58

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In a sentence
God gives us a new name by making us part of God’s own family

Every one of us has been given a name. Some of us have had the responsibility of giving names to others, and some of have changed their name at some time. Clearly, we need names. Yet recent changes in how we name ourselves indicate that the seemingly innocuous necessity of having a name is rather more charged than it first appears.

It was not so long ago that a child would almost certainly be named to honour a grandparent or an aunt or a king, so that names like John or George or Mary or Elizabeth have had a very long history and been quite common (at least, in Western English-speaking society). This is not because they necessarily sound nice or mean much in themselves, but because they placed us within a certain family, tradition and culture. The same kind of thing happens when women change their family name on being married.

Today, however, a kid can be called anything from Apple to Tiger Lily to Zeppelin, or once common names will be assigned with a spelling no one could possibly guess. This probably reflects a shift from the desire to be associated with another named person – a name as giving communal identity – to a desire to stand out from all other names: naming as individuation. In a similar way, an increasing number of women retain their family-of-origin name when marrying. Retaining a family name after marriage claims an identity which is not to be reduced who your husband is.

These shifts in naming reflect changes in what we think we are, how we stand in relation to each other, and where our value comes from. How I name myself reflects what (and who) I think I am: our names place us, locate us.

The implication of this is that the ‘same’ thing can be quite a different thing if its name is changed. Naming is a process of association – a process of linking one thing with another – and these associations matter for the reality of a thing – for our reality.

Paul touches upon a naming in the prayer at the heart of today’s reading, where he identifies God as ‘the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name’. A more literal translation would run like this: ‘… I bow my knees before the Father, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth takes its name’. This language is ingloriously patriarchal but is important for understanding what Paul means. His intention is not to be patriarchal, despite all the possible abuses which might be built upon the language of ‘Father’ for God in the New Testament. What Paul is doing is challenging the way in which we name ourselves, and undermining patriarchy along the way.

Paul wrote in a time when who we were, what was expected of us and what we might ourselves expect out of life was starkly determined by what might broadly be called our ‘family’. That these families – whether clans or religions or nationalities – were very often patriarchal was just how it happened to be. But precisely because it was that way, Paul takes the ‘fatherhood’ of our race, culture, clan, religion and nation – our assumed way of naming ourselves – and contrasts this with what it means to live under the ‘fatherhood’ of the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ. Paul does then what he always does: he calls us to consider whether our lives are built upon what God sees in us and calls us to be, or whether they are built upon what we call ourselves and see in ourselves. Which name and corresponding set of relationships is most fundamentally ours?

We believe, of course, that we already know who we are, and that the real question is only what we do. This is why, when it comes to matters of belief, we are more interested in action than in talk, more interested in doing than in ‘merely’ being. In the three chapters up to this point in the letter Paul has been giving an extended and rich account of what God has done for Jew and Gentile alike. This tells us who we are – we for whom God has done this – and what we have become through God’s work.

With today’s passage we come to the turning point in the epistle, and from here Paul moves to the question of ‘how then should we live?’ Yet the ‘then’ matters: how therefore, should we live? To understand what we are to do, we have to understand what has gone before – Paul’s account of who we are – else the ‘therefore’ makes no sense. Paul means that to ‘do’ properly, we must ‘be’ properly – we must know our true name.

But this is not easy, and so Paul is moved to prayer:

¹⁸ I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, ¹⁹ and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

¹⁶ I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, ¹⁷ and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. [NRSV]

Paul prays here that we might learn the name by which God would call us. To name ourselves is both necessary, and only a guess at what we are from the vantage point at which we stand. Paul prays therefore that we might yet comprehend – might yet see – with breadth and length and height and depth, that we might know what surpasses knowledge, coming to know more than can be known.

To know more than can be known is to be. Knowing how God renames us is to become something different: children. For God’s naming of us does not just re-label us, it makes us what we are called – children. We hear what Jesus hears: ‘You are my children; today I have ‘begotten’ you’ (cf. Ps 2, Mark 1).

The manner of love God has shown us is one which does not simply ‘forgive’ or ‘heal’ or ‘promise’ – does not merely re-label us – but claims us as children, as those who have in common nothing other than God’s love, and Jesus as Brother, and the Holy Spirit who makes this so.

In our lives many things make us who we are: what my father did to me, what I experienced in school, what my children haven’t done for me, or that I don’t have children, or where I work. Even if they are not the heart of what I am, these things are important because they mark me off as someone unique, for no one else has experienced what I’ve experienced, felt what I’ve felt. These things are part of my name, and give colour to the history which my name brings to mind.

But these details are not yet me, and neither can they be the final ground of my relationship to you, for you are different in the same ways.

Yet our difference from each other is not the most basic thing we have in common; this is the argument of the radical but unreflective inclusivism which abounds at the moment. Rather, as we are children of our parents, children of our age, children of what has happened to us, so now, by God’s grace, all our families are brought together under the one name as sons, daughters, children and siblings.

The miracle at the heart of Christian belief is not this or that wonder or spectacle – whether the healing of a blind person or the raising of a dead one. Rather, the heart is what these ‘lesser’ miracles refer to: that the secret of what we really are in all our living and dying is that God would make us his children, that our naming of our many and varied lives might be coloured by God’s name for us, a naming which declares that we are God’s, and God is ours.

This is the gospel: that, whatever has been the quality of the ‘fatherhood’ or ‘motherhood’ we have known, this God embraces, surpasses and perfects. We have a new name.

This is indeed something far more than we could ask or imagine – being filled with all the fullness of God – and yet the power of God is present to make it happen.

This fullness is the meaning and goal of all that we are and do.

Let us then, be and do as the children of this God, sisters and brothers in this family, that all human families might become one.

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Pentecost 11
8/8/2021

Ephesians 2:1-10
Psalm 34
John 6:35, 41-51

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There is a story that comes out of Poland around the time of the Second World War.

In a certain village there was a man who was not particularly wealthy, nor a native of the village, nor did he attend the village church. Yet, if a stranger came to the village and needed a place to stay, this man would offer a cot in his little home. If a village family ran out of food, he was among the first to offer a loaf of bread or some flour from his own meagre supplies. If someone was in trouble with the authorities, who by and large oppressed the citizens of that nation, or if the Germans or, later the Russians, were performing a sweep of the village to collect up the young men for either imprisonment, or conscription, or worse, he would help hide the would be victims in the woods outside town or in some other way.  He was loved very much by the villagers on account of all these things and many more.

Finally the man died.

The villagers asked the priest to perform the burial service and to bury the man in the church cemetery. The priest, who knew and loved the man as much as did the rest of the villagers agreed to conduct the funeral Yet he insisted that he could not bury the man inside the church cemetery because he was not baptised. ‘Our cemetery is hallowed ground’, the priest said, ‘He must go where those who are not baptised are buried.  These are the rules of the church and I cannot change them.’

The villagers appealed even more earnestly to the priest, saying that this was a good man and surely loved by God as much as any of the baptised on account of all the good that he had done. The priest agreed about the virtues of the man but insisted that the protocols of the faith were clear and could be not be broken.  Yet he proposed a compromise. ‘In recognition of your love for him and his love for you and all of God’s people in this village’, the priest said, ‘I will bury him on church land, near to those who have gone before him – those whom he has loved – but it will have to be beyond the fence that surrounds the consecrated ground of our cemetery.’

And so it happened.  A grave was prepared just outside the fence surrounding the cemetery, and the body of the man was processed by all the villagers to the site, where the priest conducted the ceremony. The grave was filled and a stone placed before the night fell.

During the night something beautiful happened – something that became apparent when the priest went to the church next morning to conduct morning mass.   The fence that surrounded the cemetery had been moved by some of the villagers – so that it now took in the grave in which the man had been buried.[1]

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• That is, undeniably, a lovely story. We might even say that it’s a very ‘Uniting Church’ kind of story. It tells us how a certain group of people overcame what was felt to be an unfair prejudice in their community and religion. And yet, as moving a story as it is, what do we think it teaches? Who is it who causes the problem in the story? Certainly most in the modern liberal West would consider the villagers to be on the right track. They recognised in someone different from them a humanity they wanted to embrace, and to identify with.

Our reading from Ephesians this morning spoke of a fence which divides people: listen again for the word of God in this section from what we’ve already heard:

Remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth…, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, [were] strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.

He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross… So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near…

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

This all sounds very similar to our story. And yet there is an important difference between what we heard in the story of the cemetery fence and what Paul says about what Christ has done in his crucifixion. In our story, the townsfolk want to say that they have seen in the man who died a goodness independent of his being baptised or a committed member of the congregation: ‘So what if he wasn’t baptised, or a Christian, he was still a good man.’ This is the argument of no small number of funeral eulogies even today.

But in what Paul says, the dividing wall between us is not overcome by our deciding that others are like us, and so we’ll treat them nice; it is overcome by Christ who brings together peoples who don’t care for each other at all.

We know that the church could often benefit from being reminded that there are ‘good people’ outside the boundaries of the church, and this reminder is scarcely needed only in the churches

But the gospel would remind us that what the church calls good is not actually this or that moral act, but God’s reconciling work in Christ. The first word Paul speaks here is not ‘be reconciled to one another’ or ‘move the fences out’ but ‘you are reconciled to one another’ or ‘there are no fences’.

The importance of this becomes apparent when we test our fence-adjusting will. Suppose the fellow who had died in our story had not had so good a reputation in the town? Suppose he was not a bad person but also not notably good. Who would have pleaded for him then? How good is good enough to ‘deserve’ to be buried in heaven’s cemetery? Or suppose he was baptised but scarcely impressive as a Christian. What then is the case for burying him inside the fence if we wonder whether baptism might not be enough? Questions like this remind us that we who can move a fence out to include can also move it in to exclude. And, if we are honest, we would like to move a few fences in.

But when Paul says that Christ is our peace – that Christ will be the source of true peace among us – he is saying that true peace comes not from us trying to get over each other’s little foibles or working out who is good and who is not – who is inside the fence and who outside. Paul’s point, rather, is that God moves fences, whatever we think we are doing with them. No one comes to me, Jesus said in our gospel reading today, unless the Father draws him. The only question, then, is who is drawn in this way by God, or where God sets the fences.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the fence around the hallowed ground of that cemetery – or the sacrament of baptism – does not declare who is good and who is not. It indicates only who knows – or who should know – that there are no fences with God. To baptised is not yet to be good. It is, rather, to have given up all hope of goodness apart from what God bestows.

This is not to say that we leave it all to God, as if we have no part in the work of reconciliation! We must move (out!) all the cemetery fences we can, so to speak! But watch out when you find that there are people you’d be happy to leave outside the fence. There may be a sign here that there is something between you and another which is beyond your ability to overcome, and yet it must be overcome if there is to be true peace and right relationships between us – if, indeed, God has removed all the fences.

And watch out if there are some inside the fold you wish were buried a little closer to the fence so that you could move it in a bit, so now they are outside! Some Christians are the worst! An interesting thing about a line like that in a sermon is that preachers have to decide beforehand who they will be looking at when it is uttered. By a curious twist of fate, via this medium, I’m looking directly at all of you at once, and myself as well!

‘For he is our peace, in him the fence between the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs’ – the hostility between us – has been broken down.’

This is not a naïve or blasé dismissal of the problems which beset us. It simply indicates our investment in fences, our confidence that we know who is righteous and who is not.

To say that God has torn down all fences is to say that God loves with ‘undistinguishing regard’, as Charles Wesley put it – without even the distinction we draw between the good and the bad.

We desperately want to be good, and to discover an imperative to doing good in the gospel. This is, indeed, part of Christian discipleship. But we first become disciples of Jesus when we discover that, whatever we have been, we are now drawn by God to Jesus as his sisters and brothers. This is to say that we now share in Jesus’ own experience of the liberating love of God. And so, like him, everything we then do and say is to be said from that liberation.

Jesus is our peace. Jesus is our promise of God – the promise indeed of our very selves, restored not only to God but to each other.

We wait, of course, for the full realisation of that promise. But we do not wait passively. We wait in that active prayer which tears at the walls within us, that there might be no walls between us.

For what God has done and will do – that we might know him and be a part of each other, without distinction – all thanks and praise be given.

[1] Story from Richard Fairchild, http://spirit-net.ca/sermons/b-or16su.php

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Pentecost 10
1/8/2021

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a
Psalm 51
Ephesians 4:1-16

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

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Therefore is a significant word throughout the Bible. The prophets in particular used it like a fulcrum. Because of this therefore that.

Consider Hosea 10: 13-14 for example: “Because you have trusted in your power and in the multitude of your warriors, therefore the tumult of war shall rise against your people.” Amos, Habakkuk, Micah and Zephaniah all use it in the same way.

And there it is at the beginning of our reading from Ephesians 4:1 “I, therefore, … Beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called.” It is a little different from the prophets. It is more positive. But the pattern is the same – Because of this, therefore that.

Paul takes three chapters to describe the supremacy of Christ over all things.

1:9 “God has made known to us the mystery of his will …that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and on earth.”

1:20 “God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion….”

And the prayer in the third chapter which leads into the “therefore”, 3:21, “I pray that you may be filled with all the fullness of God … therefore.

Because of the greatness of Christ, lead a life worthy of your calling…. One specific of this worthiness is “speaking the truth in love” (3:15). It is a phrase frequently taken out of context, and with the assumption that the truth referred to is the way you feel, venting your spleen, speaking your mind, like people do on social media, … in love of course.

But the truth Paul refers to is not about your feelings, but the truth about Christ, as described in those first three chapters. We are not very good at this kind of truth speaking. Once a lady returned to the Uniting Church after a sojourn with the Assemblies of God. She observed to me that the difference between the two congregations was that after a service the charismatics talked about the sermon, whereas here people talk about the football. This wasn’t at Mark the Evangelist, of course. But as a denomination we seem to be reluctant to name the name. Therefore our care agencies are just called “Uniting”, our financial service “Uniting Ethical” – It’s starting to sound like chapter 4 of Ephesians without chapters 1-3.

During this lockdown week I had a friend in Cabrini hospital. Unable to visit, I rang the hospital. The lines were busy and I was put on a recorded message which, from memory, went something like this: “Cabrini hospital is owned and run by the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The hospital is an expression of the care and compassion of Mother Frances Cabrini and seeks to bring the love of Christ to the world.” I thought, ‘That’s pretty full on, but it doesn’t seem to be doing them any harm!’

It can be dangerous to speak Paul’s kind of truth. The danger we seem to be afraid of is that non-believers will think us odd, religious fanatics without credibility, or perhaps likely to offend Moslems, or indigenous people, or Buddhists or the devotees of Star Wars. But to say nothing is to say something. Nihilism is real and not uncommon

But there are many times and places where the risk is much greater.

When Nathan approaches David he could well pay with his life, as Uriah did. David has done a despicable thing in the eyes of God. Therefore Nathan rebukes him with a parable. Then we read (2 Samuel 12:10)” Now, therefore, the sword shall never depart from your house…” And, instead of anger and violence, David responds with contrition. Psalm 51 is introduced with “A Psalm of David when the prophet Nathan came to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba.” Scholars say there are a few anachronisms in this version of the Psalm, but it may be an embellishment of something David wrote.

There are many examples of Biblical figures confronting oppressive and powerful rulers with the word of God. Think of Moses, or Elijah or Jeremiah or Daniel, or Esther, or Peter, or Steven or Paul. Here’s an exercise for you to do over lunch. How many more people can you think of in the Bible who took the risk of speaking God’s truth? And when you have done that, see if you can name a few historical figures like Ambrose, who was so upset by the Roman Emperor, Theodosius, for sanctioning a needless massacre in Thessonolika that he made the Emperor wait in the snow for three days before granting absolution. Or Martin Luther with his “Here I stand” in front of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Or Martin Niemoller, the German pastor who at first supported Hitler, but then turned and defiantly opposed him. On one occasion he was asked how he survived when so many other pastors were executed. He replied; “When I was brought before Hitler the conversation became tense. I leaned across the table and said, ‘God is my fuhrer’. Hitler was furious. He thumped the table and shouted, ‘Never let me hear the name of this man again’. So when the death lists were prepared for Hitler to sign, my name was always removed.

In my own lifetime I have seen figures like Martin Luther King, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu confess the truth of Christ and say therefore this oppressive situation must change.

The World Council of Churches is active in many situations where human rights are threatened and there are organisations with an even broader base supporting people in prison. P.E.N. is celebrating its centenary. Founded in 1921, in the aftermath of World War 1, it advocates for imperilled writers around the world. Currently it has just on 1,000 poets, essayists and novelists on its books. When Amnesty began its operations in 1960, it consulted PEN’s constitution and broadened its concern to include all kinds of prisoners of conscience. Now it is a worldwide, international body.

We are well off in Australia. As I posted our last letter to Maurice Payne, criticizing the government for not signing the Nuclear Ban Treaty, it coincided with news of a journalist who had been shot on her front doorstep and I thought that in many countries we would be arrested for less.

But we do need to be vigilant. At the last meeting of Hotham Mission Board attention was drawn to a bill which is currently finding its way through parliamentary process. If passed it will ban all charities for making any comment that is critical of Government policy. Board members saw this as a suppression of truth telling, and unanimously decided to speak out against it. So letters are going in many directions, but especially to the Independents in the Senate, for this is where it could be voted down.

We, who have glimpsed the grandeur of Christ, as Paul describes it in those first chapters of Ephesians, therefore engage in the world, putting God’s power to work. Some of us work at peacemaking, some of us are ecumenists, stressing our unity in Christ, some have a passion for justice, some tackle the problem of food deprivation in our local community, and so on. But wherever that “therefore” takes us, we are all sustained by the bread of life, the living presence of Christ, who is all in all, and received by us in Word and Sacrament.

So go on “thereforing” with boldness and enthusiasm, speaking the truth of Christ in God’s love for this post-modern, secular and troubled world.

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Pentecost 9
25/7/2021

Ephesians 2:11-3:6
Psalm 91

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In a sentence
God creates a peace in the midst of an unpeace bigger than we can comprehend

Those who watched the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics yesterday might have noticed the theme of peace in the speech of Thomas Bach, the head of the International Olympic Committee. Yet it seems to me that, however well-intended were his words and other peace-themed elements of the opening ceremony and commentary, talk about peace deserves more.

We considered peace a few weeks back, and it appears again in today’s passage from Ephesians, and so we’ll press more deeply into what peace is in Paul’s account of the gospel. Paul addresses here a peace which has been found between the Jews and the Gentiles through the work of Jesus, who ‘came and proclaimed peace to you were far off [the Gentiles] and to those who were near [the Jews]’ (Ephesians 2.17).

It’s easy to be distracted from what Paul says here by things we think we know about Jews and Gentiles from reading the Scriptures and hearing that relationship preached for many years, perhaps intensified by contemporary Jew-Arab struggles in Palestine. So far as the Scriptures go, most influential for our hearing of the Jew-Gentile distinction is probably, first, our sense that Jesus was a radical inclusivist and, second, the resistance of the first Jewish Christians to Gentile inclusion.

The notion of Jesus the inclusivist owes most to the Gospels. We might take from texts like these that the Jews were exclusivist and that Jesus challenged this. Yet this reading forgets other things Jesus says and does – that John’s Jesus declares, ‘Salvation comes from the Jews’ or that Mark (and Matthew’s) Jesus characterises Gentiles as ‘dogs’ unworthy of the ‘the children’s bread’.

Jewish Christian resistance to Gentile inclusion began when Gentiles responded to the gospel about Jesus. The early church was composed of Jewish Christians, and the surprising conversion of Gentiles to the gospel caused much confusion and not a little resistance from Jewish believers.

Under the influence of these readings and perceived attitudes, the inclusion of the Gentiles looks like God overcoming human racism and bigotry through Jesus. The problem is cast as a lack of love on the part of ‘the Jews’, ‘finally’ overcome by God. Yet this is not what Paul says here. We presume ‘exclusivism’ because the outcome of what God does looks like political ‘inclusivism’. What God does here looks similar to what we aspire to do with our modern liberal notion of a broad common humanity and its corresponding commitment to a list of universal human rights. Because God looks inclusive in the way we seek to be, we easily conclude that it is exclusivist attitudes God overcomes, just as we seek to overcome them.

Yet Paul doesn’t speak of cultural or racial bigotry overcome in the newfound peace between Jews and Gentiles. He speaks instead of a divine intention previously hidden – and so unknowable – but now revealed. The absence of peace – the location of the Gentiles outside God’s house (2.12) – is not the result of a bad attitude on the part of the Jews. It is – or was – God’s ordering of things. Until it was revealed, there was nothing anticipated (or rejected) like the newly proclaimed relationship between the Jews and the Gentiles. The Jew-Gentile antagonism began not with the Jews (or the Gentiles, for that matter) but with God. We might say, then, that this unpeace was a God-sized problem.

To reinforce the point, we should also note that here it is not that the problem was a mistaken ‘idea’ about God and what God intended, God’s intention then being corrupted by religious bigotry. Paul doesn’t criticise the concept of divine election, the priority of the Jews or their distinctiveness among the nations. It was, for Paul, right that the Jews were separate in the way they had been. This distinction was God’s ordering of things. What happens now then, with the incorporation of the Gentiles into God’s house, is a total surprise or, in Paul’s language, a ‘mystery’.

The ‘mystery’ here is the co-existence in God of Jewish priority and Gentile equality. We don’t know how it is possible – apart from it having to do with the life and death of Jesus – but only that it is the case. And so Paul does not call us to peace here but declares peace – a peace which is already established, and established apart from the efforts of Jew or Gentile.

This has a strange consequence. For Paul the fundamental division in humanity is that between Jew and Gentile. Yet sin does not account for this division; the division arises – extraordinarily – from the grace of God towards the Hebrews. The strange thing is, then, that it is not sin which is overcome in the incorporation of the Gentiles into one body with the Jews, as God’s house.

It is because of this that Paul parts company with such talk of peace as we heard in the opening ceremony, including the unfortunate singing of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. When we say ‘peace’, we accuse each other because, in the secular world, there is no else to say it to, no one else from whom to seek or to expect peace, apart from each other – the implied sources of unpeace, now required to be different. When Paul says peace, it is not an imperative but an indicative: Paul says not ‘become peace’ but ‘here peace is’.

And so there is one other strange thing hidden in our passage today, related to what we’ve just said. The reconciliation Paul describes here is not quite a reconciliation of Jew and Gentile to each other. It is a reconciliation of each group to God (2.16). If there is a reconciliation between these communities, it springs from their respective reconciliations to God. This is to say that peace occurs between mutually antagonistic communities when God comes between them. As the Jews turn towards the Gentiles they see, as it were, through the God who is looking at them. And as the Gentiles look at the Jews, they too see through the God who is looking at them. There was a wall between them, now there is Jesus: to the Jews a blasphemer, to the Gentiles just a dead Jew. This is a peace out of nowhere.

Of course, despite what we’ve said about the divine source of the distinction between Jews and Gentiles, we know ourselves to be quite capable of bigotry and racism. And so, despite what we’ve said about God being the final source of peace, we can also ‘imagine’ ourselves capable of less bigotry and racism, and we can begin to act towards reconciliation. To proclaim peace as a gift already given is not to say we have no work to do. But it is to say that our work has the fundamental character of prayer. To build bridges is to give shape and body to God’s promise, the basis of all Christian prayer. Let us, then, pray for peace by working for peace, and call others this life-giving work.

And if this work were to be expressed as prayer, what might the words of that prayer be? Perhaps they would run something like this:

Our Father in heaven, may your name be profoundly honoured.

And so, may your kingdom come, and earth become heaven.

Give.

Forgive.

Lead us.

Deliver us.

For the coming of the peaceable kingdom begins and ends with you.

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Pentecost 8
18/7/2021

Ephesians 2:11-22
Psalm 90

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In a sentence
God embraces every ‘here’ and ‘there’ of our lives, and so we are never outside of God’s ‘house’

We were, of course, anticipating a conversation this afternoon around the theme of the future shape and location of the life of the Mark the Evangelist congregation. Yet, here we are staring at screens again, with that conversation probably a good month away!

I’ve decided, however, to continue with the sermon which I’d planned as a prelude to that conversation because what we need to consider as a congregation is not confined to one day and one conversation, and neither is what we are to decide only about our future.

Let’s then, through what we have heard today from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, consider ‘How things look from here’. We consider this in view of the fact that we have resolved not to continue to seek to fix Union Memorial Church, and have resolved to make preparations to sell the site.

From here, we look towards a period of significant change – change about which we don’t yet know very much. ‘Not here’ doesn’t tell us much about ‘where’!

We are, of course, well-resourced and have a range of viable options before us. Yet, because we are not forced to do any particular thing, we fall in the realm of responsibility, on two fronts. The first is the front the gospel presents. We want to be peculiarly Christian in what we do, and so such themes as mission, community and worship are important for us. Yet, it’s by no means clear what would be the best way for us to be Christian in our decisions – assuming, of course, that there is a ‘best’ way.

The second front of our responsibility here is to each other. We are called respond to the gospel together, as part of a community. This includes not only ourselves as the congregation but also the wider church. Yet God has the most irritating habit of whispering into the ears of each of us different ideas about the best shape of that response. At least, it will seem that way when it comes to making decisions that matter. Yet, out of these murmurings must come a determination, unless we opt for a status quo.

And the status quo always seems to hold some promise, for it carries its own kind of peace. We are still where we are today because we can live with it all, given what benefits it provides, even if these are not all the benefits we (or God) might look for.

How things look from here, then, is a rather fraught. We sense that God wants something of us, and the church wants something of us, and we want something of each other. Yet, from here, the ‘there’ of our next life is not only different but is an uncertain and potentially risky place.

Our reading from Ephesians this morning features an account of ‘here’ and ‘there’ which is important for our own situation as a congregation, although Paul begins with the ‘there’ and moves to the ‘here’.

The community to which he writes is Gentile, and he reminds them of the ‘there’ of their previous lives. Then, they were ‘outside’ – outside the covenantal promises of God. This location is expressed relative to a ‘house’. House-language runs right through the last few verses of today’s reading, although our English translation obscures the connections. A more literal translation than we heard today might run like this:

¹⁹ So then you are no longer strangers and outside the house [NRSV aliens], but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, ²⁰ built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. ²¹ In him the whole house [NRSV structure] is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; ²² in whom you also are made a house [NRSV built together spiritually into] – [a spiritual] house [NRSV a dwelling place] for God.[1]

Paul tells of the movement of the Gentiles: you were outside the house but now you are members of the household of God.

Yet, this is no mere ‘coming inside’. Paul’s house-talk morphs through the passage. He begins with the notion that there is ‘a’ house which God has, implying other houses which God does not have – including the Gentiles themselves. By the end, however, the Gentiles – with the Jews – are made into God’s own house: a ‘dwelling place’ for God.

This lovely image is moving in itself but it has a far-reaching implication. From the outside there is a fundamental inside-outside division. Yet, once the Gentiles ‘come in’, there is no longer any outside. There is no ‘there’ which is outside God. From inside there is nowhere else we can be but within the household of God.

Paul is dealing with the Jew-Gentile question. We sometimes reduce this to an account of how God overcomes difference, but reconciliation is the effect of something more basic: that God incorporates all things.

What this means for us is that where we are, there God is and where we will be there God will be. This is a dangerous thing to hold, and it should only be said in hushed tones with evangelical fear and trembling: we believe in the church; we believe that our ‘here’ is God’s ‘here’, and that our ‘there’ will be God’s ‘here’ as well.

The promise in our decision about what happens next for Mark the Evangelist is not in our cunning or calculation. The promise is that God will be there, because for us there is nothing and no-one outside of God.

The eighth-century thinker Alcuin of York once observed that place is finally irrelevant in what passes between us and God. Had place really the power to make a difference, the angels would never have rebelled in heaven, nor Adam and Eve in paradise. The question is what we make of the promised presence of God in the place in which we find ourselves.

In our deliberations over the next few months, let us not imagine that we are reaching for heaven or for paradise or even for some approximation to these, as if our calling is to get the place right, as if there is a ‘there’ which is radically different than, and more promising than, ‘here’.

Of course, there is much to be said for a place which is comfortable, convenient and which we have some confidence will serve God’s mission well. Yet let us note that comfort and convenience and confidence are ‘communal’ words, ‘with’ words (Latin, con/com = ‘with’). To ‘comfort’ is to strengthen-alongside. Convenient is ‘convene-able’ – amenable to our coming together. ‘Confident’ means to believe or trust with others.

The comfortable, convenient, confident place is properly a communal one. And so the place we seek – the very temple of God – is the place we are called to become.

But neither are we yet to become this. We are indeed imperfect here and now but will not be less so in our next shape. Being the dwelling place of God is not something we are about to choose but is our calling here and now: today, in our conversations over the next few months, in the transition period and in the new place, whatever it is. Yet, as our calling, it is also God’s gift: in being the community of faith we are given the object of faith, even God.

This is to say that our ‘here’ and our ‘there’ are – in God – the same place, because the fundament – the basis – of here and there is what God is making and will make of us in Christ. We are God’s now and will be then. We do not, then, choose more of God in the next step apart from choosing more of each other, for that is where God will be found: among the living stones which constitute God’s own home, even us.

There is freedom in this. It is not incumbent upon us to find God in our next thing, for God has already found us. To know ourselves as found and then made God’s home is to have no place we can go where God is not already there.

We have, then, work to do but it is a work which declares that God is with us, and not which anxiously seeks to find God.

This is work, then, we can do without fear of recrimination from God or each other.

Work like this would scarcely be work, at all.

[1] ‘Oikos’/house appears in the Greek as part of various compound words which yield the different translations we have into English. It is also worth noting that the idea of ‘city’ (Greek, ‘polis’) – closely related to that of ‘house’ – also appears a couple of times in the whole passage: v.19 citi‑zens, v.12 citi-zenship (NRSV translates this as ‘commonwealth’).