View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 14
29/8/2021

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

---

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.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 13
22/8/2021

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

---

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.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 12
15/8/2021

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

---

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.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 11
8/8/2021

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

---

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]

——————–

• 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

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 10
1/8/2021

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

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

---

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.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 9
25/7/2021

Ephesians 2:11-3:6
Psalm 91

---

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.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 8
18/7/2021

Ephesians 2:11-22
Psalm 90

---

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’).

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 7
11/7/2021

Ephesians 2:1-10
Psalm 89
Mark 6:14-29

---

In a sentence
We don’t get the Good God without recognising the bad and the ugly God overcomes to love us.

In 1966 there appeared the ‘spaghetti western’, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the title of which has become a catch-phrase among us ever since. ‘The Good’, ‘the Bad’ and ‘the Ugly’ designated the three main protagonists, each heading towards the same stash of gold buried in a grave in an old cemetery, and each ruthless as he makes his way towards that goal; ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘ugly’ are relative terms in this view of the world!

The film itself isn’t my interest this morning so much as the catch-phrase: there is a Good, a Bad and an Ugly in our reading from Ephesians this morning, at least in the way in which Paul’s language seems to be received these days.

The ‘Good’ is the easiest to identify. This is the God who is ‘rich in mercy’, who ‘by grace’ and ‘not the result of works’, ‘out of the great love with which he has loved us’, saves those who are lost.

The ‘Bad’ is ‘the ruler of the power of the air’, and the ‘spirit at work among us’, which Paul considers to be oppressing human existence.

The ‘Ugly’ is the human being we seem to strike here. Paul speaks of the human being as ‘dead through … trespasses and sins’, living ‘in the passions of [the] flesh’, ‘those who are disobedient’, ‘by nature children of wrath’.

The Good, the Bad and Ugly, on this reading, correspond to Paul’s account of God the benevolent grandfather, the world of oppressive powers and the human person wallowing in that oppression.

This is to misunderstand Paul, but he is commonly heard this way – as casting the world and us within it only in the negative: bad and ugly. But this negativity about human being is not quite bearable toady, and so we are tempted to focus on the good over the bad and the ugly. Thus, we embrace the God of ‘love’ who has embraced us by grace. God becomes now more the God who ‘loves’ than the God who forgives or has mercy. This approach adores the idea of grace but has difficulty with the language of salvation and mercy, because these two concepts seem to imply that we can’t quite get rid of the ugly ourselves – that we are in some ways not loveable. We claim the good, but not the ugly, and there develops an almost childish assertion that there is only good, and that we don’t need to acknowledge the bad.

But, if not this, what are we to do with the ‘ruler of the power of the air?’ How do we reconcile our understanding of ourselves and our potential with Paul’s apparent pessimism about human character? Can the good and the bad and the ugly be reconciled in a way which will make good sense of us, and of the world, and of God? Does Paul indeed know us better than we want to know ourselves?

We might take a lead here from the last verse of this morning’s reading:

‘For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life’ (2.10).

There are two things to note here. First, the emphasis of this sentence (in the Greek text) falls on the ‘he’ (that is, ‘God’, not the masculinity of the pronoun): ‘For we are what [he/God] has made us…’ – translated differently, ‘by [God] we are…’ The contrast is drawn between what we make of ourselves (things of which we might ‘boast’, in the previous verse), and what we are if we truly spring from God.

And we note, second, the emphasis on being ‘made’ – our nature as creat‑ures: ‘… [God] has made us, created in Christ Jesus…’. Here we have to drive from our heads all anxieties about modern science and the book of Genesis. Biblical talk of creation is not cosmogony – talk of the origin of the world – but cosmology, talk of the nature of the world. These two ideas are fused in modern scientific thought, but they are then typically confused when we try to compare scriptural talk about creation with the discoveries of science. Genesis 1 is not told to explain where the world comes from but what it is and – more pointedly for us – what it is not: the world is not God.

That might seem obvious but in practice it is extraordinarily difficult to live, which brings us back to the bad and the ugly. It’s when worldly things take on divine significance – when we make gods of things that are not gods – that the bad and the ugly arise. When Paul talks of ‘the ruler of the power of the air’ (v2) and of good works we do in order to boast (v8f), he is not being unscientific or pessimistic, but giving a specifically Christian account of what happens when this particular God drops out of the picture: such things as ‘the power of the air’ and ‘good works’ are examples of ordinary worldly things taking on the dimensions of the divine, and so becoming grotesque and oppressive.

Of course, few moderns give much credence to the idea of spirits wafting about causing us to do this or that thing, but neither is that the point of Paul’s language here. The ‘powers’ which might have us in their grip are not otherworldly but precisely this-worldly, yet given divine status. Consider ideas and realities past and present which hold in their grip: notions of human worth according to race, religion, gender or age; or our own personal histories – what was done to us, or not done to us, which now determines our actions and responses in ways of which we are quite unconscious; or the weight of cultural mores: who may talk to whom, knowing one’s place, what is or is not honourable; or the influence of political and economic systems. And consider how often the injustice we’ve come to see in such realities was justified by reference to divine ordinance and will.

The Swiss theologian Gerhard Ebeling once observed that theology is necessary because the human being is by nature a fanatic. That is to say, we are prone to fanaticise about the world – to turn parts of it into the presence of God, whether that bit be an ordering which is there for our well-being – such as the economy or our social rules of engagement – or whether it be our own personal achievements. It is this fanaticism for the things of the world which gives rise to the bad and the ugly, for the bad and the ugly are simply creaturely things which been turned into divine things.

We are, Paul says, what [God] has made us. This is asserted as the possibility of a life free from the disorder our fanaticisms bring with them. Such a life begins with being made, or remade, and not with what we make of ourselves or our world. For we are fanatics, and we will worship things which are themselves only creaturely, and so in the end fail to be ourselves, and reduce others around us.

To cast it in the negative, our calling and so our humanity is in that we are called not to be God. The creature and its creator are their true selves in their proper relationship to each other. If what matters is not what we make of ourselves but what this God will make of us, then our life becomes gift and not a burden to be carried or worked out, and the world becomes open possibility and not some divinely-ordered constraint or ‘power of the air’.

Honesty would place most of us, on the terms as we’ve described them, among the ugly in the realm of the bad. For us, Paul speaks not only of creation but of the good re-creation – a starting again, life out of deathliness, a return to our humanity, an overcoming of those powers we appoint to overcome us.

Paul’s gospel matters, for surely this world needs fewer gods and more humanity. The question is whether a human being which makes itself is capable of getting itself right, or will in the end turn itself into yet another god. The evidence to date would suggest that the latter is the more likely.

For all the apparent ugliness and badness of his worldview, Paul sees more clearly than we do with all the marvellous things we now know. Perhaps it seems quaint or craven to suggest in this age that we need a God in order to be more human. But the irony is that, whether the suggestion is made or not, we will make the gods anyway. Paul simply points to what kind of god might actually work.

A god who sees the ugly and loves it by overcoming the bad is surely the good we need.

Let us reach, then, for such as God as this, for goodness’ sake.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 6
4/7/2021

Ephesians 1:15-23
Psalm 149
Mark 6:1-13

---

In a sentence
Hope is not a wish but the beginning of a new creation.

—–

What we hope for
            Where we hope
                        How we hope
                        How God hopes
            Where God hopes
What God hopes for

—–

‘I pray’, writes St Paul, ‘that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…’

What we hope for…

We hope for love. We hope for understanding. We hope for acceptance. We hope for recognition, for affirmation. We hope for restoration of what has been lost, of who has been lost. We hope for security. We hope for justice, for vindication. We hope for healing. We hope for life. We hope for peace. We hope for hope.

Where we hope…

We hope from a low place, from a trough. We hope out of the experience of something having been lost, or of a promise which is not yet fulfilled. We hope out of chaos, or darkness. Recalling what we said about the book of Job a few months ago, we hope that our story follows not tragedy’s plummeting path into oblivion but comedy’s rising path to a restoration or fulfilment. Hope always looks up.

How we hope…

We might distinguish two types of hope, ultimate and penultimate. Penultimate hopes are those which seem to us to be steps on the way to our ultimate hope. Penultimate hopes invite action. Within the dark places in which we find ourselves we discern enough light to be able to work or clamour to see some of our hopes realised.

Ultimate hopes – or perhaps there is just the one ultimate hope – of these we also discern a shape and a location and so a way towards them, but the shape and location keeps moving. We take steps towards our ultimate hope as we work on our penultimate hopes but the ultimate finally eludes us, personally and communally. We will die before we experience our ultimate hope fulfilled.

It is important to distinguish between these two hopes because we tend to collapse them, imagining that our efforts to take the steps towards our ultimate hope could finally have brought us to fulfilling it. In this way, we make the fulfilment of our ultimate hope our own responsibility. And we disappoint ourselves.

This is human hope in brief: what we hope for, where we hope, how we hope. What, then, about divine hope? What and where and how does God hope?

How God hopes…

For us penultimate hope and ultimate hope are two things. For God they are one. When God hopes, the matter is resolved. This is to say that with God there is only ultimate hope. We said earlier that our ultimate hope is thwarted by death. It is not for nothing then that there is a death at the heart of Christian confession and the declaration that death is not the final word. God’s hoping begins at the point our hope fails: at the point of nothingness and death. God hopes by creating: by calling into being that which did not exist, by raising to life what is dead.

To say that God hopes is to say that God creates. There are no penultimate hopes with God because there are no half-creations. To say that we cannot realise our ultimate hope is to say that we are not our own creators, that we cannot overcome our creatureliness to remake ourselves.

Where God hopes…

God hopes in those troughs within which we hope: within the world, generally, and within the church, particularly.

God hopes within the dissatisfaction and disorientation and the disappointment of the world. But more specifically, God hopes within the church. This is not to say we are special in any moral sense. The church is not ‘above’ the rest of the world but it is particular and unique. The church is that part of the world within which the hope of God is discerned, which is to say that the church is that part of the world within which God’s creative activity is recognised and anticipated. Most particularly, it is here that we speak of the resurrection of the least – of the outcast, rejected and dead – and anticipate the same in ourselves. And this recognition and anticipation is itself creative. The hope of God – the creation by God – begins here.

And, finally, what God hopes for…

God hopes for us. This ‘us’ is, again, the church and the world, but now in the reverse order. God hopes for – creates within – the church, but not for the church’s sake. It does not matter whether God hopes-creates apart from the church. It remains the case that what happens here happens not merely for our benefit. It happens for everyone’s benefit. The church is for the world. If God hopes, creates, in this space, that is not the end of the story but its beginning.

———-

‘I pray’, writes St Paul, ‘that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…’

The hope to which we are called is that there is one who hopes for us, who creates us. To hope is to turn towards this one. To hope is to expect to be created. This is to see in our disorder and in the shadow of death in our lives the same kind of chaos over which God’s Spirit once moved to bring the world into being, the same kind of death which the cross was. And it is to expect that, over us as over the chaos and the cross, the hope‑full creative word of God will be spoken: Be. Mine.

Yet, to hear that creative word and to rise to it is not to be called and elevated out of the world. To be of this God is not to buffered from chaos and death. To hear the creative word and to rise to it is to begin to learn to hope as God hopes. To be of this God is to begin to create. For us, too, hoping means creating.

The hope to which we are called is to be creatures who create. It is to do as God does: to love where there is none, to bless where a curse is expected, to have mercy where harsh justice is demanded. It is to give more than is asked for. It is to be light in dark places.

‘I pray’, writes St Paul, ‘that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you..’

…and that you may become part of that hope, for the healing of the whole world.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 5
27/6/2021

Ephesians 1:1-14
Psalm 91
Mark 5:21-43

---

In a sentence
God’s story for us is wider and richer than the ones we tell ourselves

Some 15 years ago there appeared a film, ‘Stranger than Fiction’, which told the story of one Harold Crick. Harold is an ordinary kind of chap who, in the course of going about his daily routine, suddenly begins to hear a voice narrating events in his life. The voice describes the way he brushes his teeth or what he is thinking as he walks down the street. As the tale unfolds, Harold begins to suspect that he is, in fact, a character in someone’s novel.

This realisation doesn’t concern him too much until a day when, standing at the curb waiting for the bus, his watch stops. Asking a bystander for the time, he resets his watch and, at that moment, hears once more the novelist’s narration: ‘little did he know that this seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.’ You can imagine what effect such news has on poor Harold and the efforts he goes to, to change the course of his story.

Now, the point of introducing Harold here is just this: we are, all of us, all of the time, hearing a narration of our life story; we are just much less conscious of it. We are constantly being told what to eat, what to buy, how green to be, how much exercise we need, what we can and can’t expect from our relationships, how much we should work, what we need to earn, that we need a new phone or computer or car, where the best place to live is, how to bring up our children, who we should vote for, who the good guys are and who are the baddies, and so on. All of these things have, in a sense, already been worked out for us, and are presented to us as our story. We largely do and are according the background plot which is ours by virtue of when and where and to whom we were born: this is who you are, and what you must do, and what you can expect. Harold had been living the life of the immortal and is reminded that it is not his true life.

Yet, our mortality is not the point of invoking his story today. The point is that it is quite possible to live a life of apparent freedom but be entirely oblivious to the fact that we are caught in the flow of some grand narrator’s telling of a story. This is the case even in our particular culture, with its heightened consciousness of the ‘binding’ nature of tradition. We are suspicious of received ‘story‑ings’ of who we are. We consider ourselves ‘enlightened’ people who have outgrown tradition and now live and move freely, according to our true story as human beings. Yet even modern enlightened thinking on the past is constantly being revealed to be inadequate. Much of the thrust of modern identity politics (‘critical theory’) is oriented towards a radical destabilising of all story that might confine us. In its most extreme versions, the postmodern principle presses towards the revelation that our story is that we have no story, no narrative curve which causes us to move or by which we can expect others to move.

This is surely a counsel of despair but an understandable one. For stories don’t merely entertain or sustain. They also crush. I rain bombs rain down on you because you don’t fit into my story; you simply shouldn’t be there, says the Jew to the Palestinian, democracy to dictatorship, murderer to victim. Asylum seekers languish because they don’t fit into a nation’s story. The claims of indigenous peoples don’t register with the broader body politic because that story has already been told, and those peoples should reconcile to having been crushed. The story my mum or dad or teachers told me was my story can cripple me.

All of this is to say that there are stories that give life and stories that take it. Each tells me what to do, what to love, what to fear. The question is, which story is the best one?

The work of the letter to the Ephesians – indeed the work of every proclamation of the gospel – is to tell yet another story. In these opening verses of the letter, Paul tells a story of the world. He tells it as the story of all stories. As such, it both must be told and cannot be told. It must be told because it is the key to all stories, all histories. It cannot be told – properly – because it can only be heard as yet ‘another’ story among other stories.

And so, Paul’s language is pressed to its limit. This is a story which begins – nonsensically – ‘before the foundation of the world’, in time before time, in ‘time beyond our dreaming’. Yet the point is not nonsense; it is the sheer excess and abundance of the story Paul wants to tell. The ‘breadth and length and height and depth’ (3.18) of God’s approach to us reveals a love which ‘surpasses knowledge’, so that we ‘may be filled with all the fullness of God’ (3.19) – which is to say, that we may be filled with what could not possibly fit. This excess is Paul overflowing with the gospel story.

The only way to assess the story Paul tells, over against the one I am already living, is to uncover which gives a better account of me and my world, a more desirable account for us all. Or, to put it more succinctly: which story makes us better and freer people? Which reveals to us who we are, the bad and the good? Which shows us the best ethic for that life of peace we considered last week, peace‑full not only for ourselves but for others also?

These questions are not usually to the fore in our day-to-day thinking. Instead, we nestle into the story we have been given, and its flow takes us from day to day, conversation to conversation, joy to joy, sadness to sadness. This is the life ordinary.

This was the story of Harold Crick until he was jolted into lived awareness of a deeper story. But our point here today is not that we know our mortality. The gospel’s word to Harold and to us is unexpectedly different. We are all standing at the curb wondering what time it is as we hear Paul narrate our story: ‘Little did they know that the crucifixion of Jesus would result in their imminent life’.

This is also a life which knows its mortality but does not fear it, even if it should suddenly become apparent how imminent death can be.

This is the life of those who know themselves to be adopted children of God. It is, then, the life of those who are clothed with a new self – a new story – in the likeness of God (4.24), and who are learning to imitate God in humility and gentleness, patience and love, in the unity of the Spirit of the bond of peace (4.1-3).

Paul overflows with the gospel because this new life is a miracle.

Let us, then, not simply acquiesce into the old self – the familiar story which merely tips us into the next thing. Let us not be weary, resigned, or predictable within those stories which drain life away to nothing.

Let us become God’s miracle, for the fuller, richer humanity of us all, and for God’s greater glory.