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Easter 6
9/5/2021

Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
John 15:9-17

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In a sentence
The inclusion of the Gentiles into the promise of God is a resurrection-like change in human history

Imagine that, when it comes to our leaving these buildings, the benefit of them passes to those you would least like to enjoy them. And that they didn’t even have to pay for the privilege.

And imagine that you yourself finally came to have every good reason to believe that this was not a failure of the church or even of the power of God but was precisely God’s plan.

Perhaps such a scenario might help us to feel something of the impact on the young Jewish church of the conversion of the Gentile Cornelius and his household.  For this was an extraordinary development in the life of the people of God: the spilling over of the promises of God out of Israel and into the wider world.

Immediately following what we have heard, Peter is taken to task by other Jewish Christians for having gone to the Gentiles in the first place, and the matter finally goes to a council of church leaders in Jerusalem to seek a common mind on the matter. From the perspective of the Jews – and these first Christians still very much identify as Jews – it is the fundamental division in humanity which is overcome here, and the appropriateness of this required careful attention and testing. The inclusion of the Gentiles as beneficiaries of God’s promise to Israel is mind-blowing, and is not resolved for the early church by this one event. Paul will be dealing with it again, perhaps 20 years later, in Galatia. There is in all this a fundamental violation of expectation.

What is the meaning of this for us, here and now, as Gentile beneficiaries of this shift in perception of the divine plan? Protestant activists that we are, we are tempted to make God’s work into our own, tempted to hear in the story of God’s inclusion of the Gentiles only the imperative that we must be “inclusive” (to use the political buzzword which currently applies here).

Our love and welcome of the stranger is, indeed, an essential part of Christian testimony. Yet to see in the baptism of Cornelius a moral imperative to be more loving reduces the standing Jew-Gentile distinction to one of mere moral exclusivity. That is, it casts the distinction between Jew and Gentile as a moral failure.

But we should be careful here. The Jew-Gentile distinction, from the perspective of the Jews themselves, was not a matter of inclusivity or exclusivity – was not a matter of moral evaluation of the Gentiles. It was not, that is, a question of the presence or absence of love. The ‘chosenness’ of the chosen was a statement about God’s action and not about the character of the chosen people themselves. Of course, in any particular time and place, the moral judgement may have been made but it is not the heart of the matter. The shift which takes place here is not a decision of the Jews themselves to be more loving but looks like a shift in God, so far as Peter and the early Jewish church are concerned. It cannot be accounted for on any terms other than, ‘God did this’.

The ‘Gentile question’ – the fact of the inclusion of the Gentiles – features prominently in some of those New Testament letters associated with St Paul. Paul is the great defender of the incorporation of the Gentile as Gentile. That is, he argued strenuously that the Gentiles don’t have to become Jews in order to be Christians. This is the argument made in Galatians, made against the Jewish expectation that Gentile Christian men be circumcised. Again, this is not the moral point that the unique quality of being Gentile should be respected, as we might hear argued today under the influence of identity politics. Paul was working out of the universality of Christ, not the particularity of the Gentiles. The letter to the Ephesians (possibly not directly from Paul’s hand) presses the Gentile question to the utmost degree.

‘…surely you have already heard of the commission of God’s grace that was given me for you, ³ and how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I wrote above in a few words, ⁴ a reading of which will enable you to perceive my understanding of the mystery of Christ. ⁵ In former generations this mystery was not made known to humankind, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: ⁶ that is, the Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body, and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.’ (Ephesians 3.2-6)

The ‘mystery of Christ’ is just this incorporation of the Gentiles into the divine inheritance. This is to make central to the gospel what happens to Cornelius and his family – and to us as Gentile believers.

I suspect that this comes as something of a surprise to some of us – that we ourselves, as Gentiles gathered for the sake of the God of the Hebrews, are the sign of the gospel.

Surprising as that might be – shocking even, knowing ourselves as we do – there is more surprise to be had, or more profound illumination. We have seen before that one method of interpretation which the biblical writers sometimes employed was to take two things which are both important and look to be the same kind of thing and make them the same. One example is the interplay between the creation and the Exodus, both seen as the drawing of something out of nothing; another example is Paul’s connection of Adam and Christ – one incorporating all humankind for curse, the other for blessing. The logic of this typological thinking is that nothing God does is separated from the other things God does. The meaning of what God does ‘here’ is illuminated by what God did ‘there’.

Taking a lead from this interpretative method, we can compare two purported centres of the gospel. The one is the centrality of the incorporation of the Gentiles we’ve just been considering. The other is the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus. This equation is more than the New Testament itself ever does, but it is consistent with the meaning of both the resurrection or the Gentile inclusion.

What becomes possible now is entertaining the thought – and more than merely a thought – that these two ‘centres’ are the same kind of thing. This is to say that the Gentile inclusion is a resurrection-like event. Or to say that the reality of the resurrection – its meaning – is connected to its effect – the incorporation of the Gentiles. When Peter goes back to Jerusalem to defend himself  (in the next chapter of Acts), his defence is, ‘I didn’t do anything. God did it. I merely saw what God did and blessed it’. Peter might have added, ‘Jesus is risen, after all’.

As a resurrection-like event, the inclusion of the Gentiles ceases to be at all moral in its dimensions. Or, perhaps more precisely, the possibility of a morality which can cross a divide like the one between the Jews and the Gentiles requires a resurrection-like event.

Our society is divided on many fronts, and the church is not different. The demands are strong and loud for correction and redress in relation to race and gender and colonial history and environmental injustice, and many other things. This rage – not too strong a word – is, at its best, a cry for morality, for love. Without question, we could all do much better in the ways of love.

But if the ancient division and antipathy between the Gentiles and the Jews has anything to do with our own divisions and antipathies, then it is not that our experience of the need for love should read theirs, but that theirs should read ours.

For we will not reconcile ourselves to those we think to be too distant from us. We cannot unravel the complex intersections of identity and power, and their manifestation in histories of harm, and their ongoing effects. We can’t unravel all this because we can’t even agree on what divides us – where the knots are. And so reconciliation is reduced to tolerance at best or, at worst, rejected altogether in genocides and holocausts.

But where we cannot reconcile, God can. A Gentile church is the sign of this, the sign that – by the grace of God – something can come from nothing.

So love and reconcile where you can, of course, and rejoice where that makes a difference. Where you cannot reconcile, rejoice that God can.

And when God does, expect it to be like life from death.

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Easter 5
2/5/2021

Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22
John 15:1-8

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In a sentence
God makes our past and present God’s own, and will make of them God’s own future with us.

Up to this point in the Acts of the Apostles, we have heard much about the impact of the preaching of Peter and the other apostles.

There has certainly been resistance: the disciples have had several stints in prison for their evangelistic work, and a convert – Stephen – has been stoned to death.

Yet, the reception in faith of the apostles’ preaching has been overwhelming. Three thousand are said to have been added to the number of believers on the day of Pentecost (2.41) and 5000 (more?) after Peter’s preaching follo1wing the healing of the lame man (4.4). Great ‘crowds’ also responded to Philip’s wonder-working and preaching in Samaria (8.4-15).

The story we have heard today stands in strange contrast to this wide reception. The earlier mass conversations are mentioned almost in passing, but now we hear a detailed account of the circumstances around the coming to faith of just one believer. An angel directs the apostle Philip to a particular place, and then the Spirit tells him to trot along beside a ‘chariot’ – perhaps a carriage – which happens to be passing by. The Ethiopian man driving the chariot is reading from the book of Isaiah. Philip engages the other in a conversation which leads to the Ethiopian finding faith and being baptised (there being, happily, water on hand for the purpose!). The Spirit then whisks Philip away to some other place, and the new convert continues on his way, filled with joy but never to be heard from again (at least so far as the Bible is concerned, although some traditions identifies him with Simeon the Niger/Black in Acts 13.1).

The account of the conversion of the Ethiopian is almost intimate in contrast to the accounts of the mass conversions, just as our own coming to faith was precisely ours and no one else’s. If we link the story of the one convert to the responses of the crowds, we see that the mass conversions are not mass conversions. They are the coming to faith of thousands of people whose stories would not be different in type from that of the Ethiopian. A person is placed for the giving of a word to ears which are hungry to hear, and faith arises. Whether only one person or a thousand people in one go, each person is acted upon by God in this same detailed way, according to their own history, the roads they have travelled and are travelling now.

Our histories and paths to God are deep and intricate. Faith does not arise from a spur-of-the-moment ‘decision’, even if that’s all we or others notice. Our faith has arisen from the confluence of all sorts of unseen influences.

Or, to put it differently, our future with God – for this is surely what our faith is – rises from this tangled and detailed history. This is the case for us as individuals and also for us as a community. As we consider our future as a congregation we are not unlike that man in his carriage, riding along and reading from a holy book and wondering what on earth it means for us. In fact, we are quite like him, for the text we read is the same as his – concerning God’s Servant, destined to deliver God’s people from their past into a new future.

It’s perhaps hard to imagine that we require conversion, for faith is what sees most of us here in the first place. Yet, there is not that much difference between those who have just come to believe and those of us who have long believed. ‘What is to prevent me from being baptised?’, asks the official, with the implied answer, ‘Nothing.’ This cannot be quite our question, but our question involves the same kind of shift: what is to stop us from … staying or selling, buying or renting, amalgamating or dissolving? Nothing, is the implied answer, or certainly not God. History and heritage might stop us. Fear might stop us. Indecision might stop us. Perhaps even irritation, frustration or anger. But not God.

Our faith – our future with God – is God’s future with us. This is to say that God moves with us as we are. All that we have been and done – and that has been and done to us – has brought us to this point. And we are not at the end but at the next point in the history of our particular life in and with God. And God will deal with us on the terms which we are.

We are, as it were, seated in our carriage and making our way, reflecting on the Servant of God, when God meets us on our way, and we are blessed and continue on that way. Faith does not constrain; it liberates. Our future with God is not is limited but open and free.

Over the next few month we have work to do, which is to answer the question ‘What is to stop us from…?’ Or, perhaps more positively, ‘What next’?

I remarked earlier that the Ethiopian official went on his way never to be heard of again. In fact, tradition – perhaps only legend – has it that he returned home, preached the gospel and established the basis for the ancient (and continuing) Ethiopian church. That it might be a legendary extension of his story matters for us as we step into the future because the thing about legends is that they might or might rest on historical events. And it doesn’t really matter whether they do or don’t. In either case, the legend itself an after-story in which original names and events wax larger and are carried further. There is something about the gospel which requires that it be expressed in this way: as a legendary waxing and growing larger of God’s good, an extension beyond what we can be confident of, into other truths.

What happens next in our story with God will be ‘legendary’ in this kind of way. It begins with God meeting us on our path from one place to the next. And it ends…we have no idea where. But this ‘no idea’ doesn’t matter. Beginning the Ethiopian church was not on the mind of our charioteer when he answered his own ‘What is to stop me…?’ by being baptised. And maybe he didn’t get that church rolling but it was never going to be possible that he be connected with it if he hadn’t taken the step of faith. If his conversion and the later fact of the Ethiopian church are eventually linked, the link itself is enough to make the legend true in a gospel sense, for the faith of one Ethiopian and the establishment of an Ethiopian church are the same kind of thing. The God’s future claims our past as God’s own.

For our story to be a legendary one, requires only that we choose a future in the freedom of the gospel. What we hope to achieve will only be achieved in the very hope which chooses. There is nothing to be said for choosing legendary outcomes; this would be to reduce what we do next to shrewd calculation. The outcome of our choices are God’s work and not ours. And so we need only choose in hope – the hope that hope will continue and grow in what comes next. Faith sees and chooses as through a glass darkly. We do not know what comes next, but neither are we anxious about it if our hope is God and not our trying to balance all the equations.

The God who meets us on our way does not do so for some mass effect but for ourselves and for those whose lives we will then touch: hope created that hope might be created, again. To see that there is nothing to stop us is to see that there is everything for us in what comes next.

God makes our past and present God’s own, and will make of them God’s own future with us.

This is why we face that future with hope, in anticipation of joy.

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25/4/2021

Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18
1 Corinthians 13:8-13

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When we gather like this in a place like this, it is to tell not one story but two. The one is our story with each other, of which we have just heard a little today (and it is always too little); the other is God’s story with us, to which we now turn.

Yet, in this turn, we don’t leave the first story behind; we tell our own story and God’s story because they are intertwined. This relationship can be treated in all manner of ways, but today, taking the lead from the psalmist and St Paul, we’ll consider the relation of these stories through the question of what it is to know.

The quest for knowledge drives us, and some of you are here today because Audrey’s own quest for understanding drew you to each other. Among all the things that might be known, we ourselves are what we most deeply desire to know in this world. Of all the objects of knowledge we might consider, we ourselves are the most interesting, the most extraordinary. For, as the psalmist whispers, we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we delight to know more of this.

The knowledge our searching will reveal by itself is of a certain, limited type. It is oriented toward ourselves-in-the-world as ‘problem’: the What and the How and Why of what we do, or need, or suffer.

Yet the knowing we encountered today in the psalm and St Paul is of a different order.

Psalm 139 is one of the most intimate passages of the Scriptures, in which the poet marvels at his very self and at God’s knowledge of that self.

¹ O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

¹³ …For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Alongside the poet, we heard from St Paul, who is not often accused of poetry. Yet if not aesthetically, he poetises technically – not so much in his selection of words but in his sense for the order in which things should be said, the way in which things should be made relative to each other, the grammar of our being:

I know, but only in part; yet I shall know even as I am now fully known.

These two write not of knowledge as answer to question; they intimate knowledge of mystery. This mystery is not a solvable problem but that which, of its very nature, is impenetrable. It is unmistakably there, it can be seen, it matters, but it resists comprehension.

‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it…’

‘…For now we see through a glass, darkly’ (as we said it in the old tongue).

The particular mystery Paul and the poet contemplate is their own irreducible being, known to them in part, and yet fully known by another.

We are driven to know ourselves and to understand, and yet we will never reach that goal. This is not because it is too far – not because there is too much to know about ourselves – but because our comprehending in this way is not the point of it all.

The point is to know that we are known, to seek to understand out of that knowledge which is God’s knowledge of us. The mystery at the heart of our being is God’s knowledge of us, in all our strengths and all our weaknesses. We strive to grasp that God has grasped us in all our breadth and length and depth and height.

To know ourselves as God knows us would be to change what we think knowing is all about. Paul was writing against a certain interpretation of knowledge and experience. His criticism of knowledge in that community was that it didn’t carry the mystery of who they were, and the mystery of whose they were – the mystery of whose we are. And so the community was breaking apart all over the place. There was at play a knowledge which puffed up and divided rather than built up and unified.

You are more than this, he insists. And the only way you can know it is to love. Properly to be the mystery you are, to know yourself in this way, is to love. Love is the knowing which creates and builds.

For love always begins before we do, outside of us. Love is, first of all, the love we receive.

This is the love which nurses the unknowing infant; it is the love which teaches those who don’t yet know but now can understand. It is the love we hear in the ‘I do’. It is the love which holds the hand of one whose knowledge now passes in and out of reach, who is ceasing now even to know herself. It is the love which causes us to gather as we have today because we knew someone who no longer knows anything and yet is loved.

Whatever we might strive to know, it is finally only resting in the knowledge that we are known which will answer that striving.

Prophecies, tongues, knowledge – these things of ours all come to an end, and we will leave them behind. Yet if love ever ended, then we would too.

But Paul and the poet testify: Love never ends because it begins not with us but with God. We were known before we knew; we know now only in part; we will be known still, once we cease to know any longer.

We know and love – and strive after these things – because God knows and loves us. We know less than we should and love less than we ought, but God’s knowledge and love exceed ours.

This excess is like wisdom to foolishness, strength to weakness, life to death. And so when, for all our best efforts to understand, to love and to live, we find ourselves to be fools, or indifferent, or dead, God abides and exceeds and carries us over to himself.

This is how our stories are intertwined with the story of God. It is given to us to find our way to God, in the knowledge that God has already found his way to us.

To know as one known, to love as one loved: this is the call of God and the gift of God.

Let us, then, open our ears to the call that we might receive the gift.

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Easter 4
25/4/2021

Acts 4:1-13
Psalm 23
John 10:11-18

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In a sentence
There is no salvation without reconciliation – the reconciliation of real persons in real disputes; this is what God promises.

‘^{Acts 4.12}  There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.’

That name, of course, is ‘Jesus’.

Here, perhaps, we find the heart of all objections to Christian faith, whether against doctrine or biblical testimony or Christian ethics. To modern ears, Peter’s declaration seems to be about as exclusive as could be made: only here, in the name of this one person among all persons of history, is salvation to be had.

And so the desire to discard this declaration, or at least soften it, is strong, whether it be from our concern for the ‘salvation’ of those good people who don’t believe – perhaps even members of our own family – or our rejection of the idea of salvation altogether and the triumphalism of those who consider themselves saved and others damned.

What the various objections share is a concern about the exclusivism implicit in this announcement. The problem is that the name of Jesus is not common to all people. The implication seems to be that only those who come into contact with the name ‘Jesus’, and then have believed on it, only these receive ‘salvation’. If salvation is tied to one such event – as the name ‘Jesus’ suggests – this is, at the very least, unfair. Historical events and persons are common only to those who come into contact with that event or its ‘downstream’ history, and not everyone will have that contact. How much better it seems to us that, whatever salvation is, everyone has equal access to it.

But we ought to give a little thought to what ‘saved’ might mean. The history of religion has delivered us a notion of salvation deeply coloured by the negative: we are saved from something. That something is, broadly, ‘damnation’: the wrath of God and associated hellfire, in the various versions of various religions. But salvation is properly also – even predominantly – salvation for something.

We are saved for what we are saved as: we are saved as human beings to fulfil our very humanity. Put more simply, to be saved is to be made fully human or, as is more the case for us, the process of being saved is one of becoming more fully human.

If Jesus is somehow the means of this, it is hard to see how he is of use to those who do not – and could not – know him because of his historical particularity. And so we seek other things we think make us human, or more fully or valuably human. The most common appeal here is to one form or other of moral achievement. When we feel moved to say something like ‘all religions are really about love, and even atheistic secularists are really about love too’, we are asserting that salvation is not about what we know – the name of Jesus or whatever – but about what we do. For, while people will always know different things because of their different histories, they all have to act in relation to each other and, we presume, all know what it means to act ethically or lovingly in their own situation. Surely, then, salvation is about being the right kind of person – being human in the right way – for everyone surely has the opportunity to be that. In this way, no one is implicitly excluded from at least the possibility of salvation; we include everyone.

Yet, a strange irony now emerges from the broader sweep of Peter’s preaching. We object to the declaration of Jesus as the way to God because it seems to exclude so many people but, in fact, the Jesus Peter proclaims is the excluded Jesus. The words which come just before today’s problematic text run like this, referring back to the lame man healed in the preceding story:

^{Acts 4.10}… let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. ¹¹ This Jesus is ‘the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.’

It is only then that we hear the disturbing assertion,

¹² There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name…by which we must be saved.’

It is not simply the name Jesus presented here as the means of salvation, as if it were like the magic spells we considered last week. The name refers to particular events in which the specific people to whom Peter preaches are implicated: this Jesus ‘whom you crucified’, ‘rejected by you’. The reason Jesus is the only means of salvation for these people is that he is their victim – the one they have excluded – now presented back to them in a reconciling offer of forgiveness.

If Jesus is the means of their salvation, and their salvation is a turning to a fuller humanity, then this fuller humanity has to do with overcoming the exclusion: a reconciliation to their victim. Salvation comes only with the reconciliation of oppressors and victims, the overcoming of exclusion.

Thinking about salvation in this way, we have also re-thought the problem to which Jesus might constitute an answer – what it is from which we are saved. While we might be troubled by Peter’s declaration as a verse plucked from its setting, the full context of the verse suggests that perhaps the thing we all have in common with each other – if not yet the name Jesus – might be the fact that we all have victims, that we all exclude.

We here today cannot be guilty of the crucifixion of Jesus. Indeed, may whom Peter addressed in his sermon would not be directly responsible either. But we can learn from the preaching of Peter to those who were guilty what it would take for forgiveness truly to be discovered in our lives, with our particular guilts and afflictions. Salvation begins with a repenting – a turning towards our victim and a receiving of forgiveness. Salvation has to do with reconciliation – not ‘merely’ to God in the abstract but to each other, concretely.

Today, of course, is ANZAC Day, on which we recognise many things, if perhaps not sufficiently what it signals about the victims we make or are of each other and the need for difficult reconciliation war creates. The following is a poem from the American writer and poet Hermann Hagedorn, published in 1917, which conveys a vision of salvation as post-war reconciliation, under the title ‘Resurrection’.

NOT long did we lie on the torn, red field of pain.
We fell, we lay, we slumbered, we took rest,
With the wild nerves quiet at last, and the vexed brain
Cleared of the wingèd nightmares, and the breast
Freed of the heavy dreams of hearts afar.
We rose at last under the morning star.
We rose, and greeted our brothers, and welcomed our foes.
We rose; like the wheat when the wind is over, we rose.
With shouts we rose, with gasps and incredulous cries,
With bursts of singing, and silence, and awestruck eyes,
With broken laughter, half tears, we rose from the sod,
With welling tears and with glad lips, whispering, “God.”
Like babes, refreshed from sleep, like children, we rose,
Brimming with deep content, from our dreamless repose.
And, “What do you call it?” asked one. “I thought I was dead.” 
“You are,” cried another. “We’re all of us dead and flat.”
“I’m alive as a cricket. There’s something wrong with your head.”
They stretched their limbs and argued it out where they sat.
And over the wide field friend and foe
Spoke of small things, remembering not old woe
Of war and hunger, hatred and fierce words.
They sat and listened to the brooks and birds,
And watched the starlight perish in pale flame,
Wondering what God would look like when He came.

‘Resurrection’, by Hermann Hagedorn (George Herbert Clarke, ed.,  A Treasury of War Poetry.  1917)

If there is the slightest critique which might be made of Hagedorn’s vision, it is what we might read into the last line – ‘Wondering what God would look like when He [comes]’, as if God has not already come in the vision.

For, what Hagedorn has already recounted – the reconciliation of victims and oppressors, of those who revel in war and those who just want to go home, of the innocent and the guilty; the reconciliation of the German and the French, and the Australian and the Turk; the reconciliation of the Bolsheviks and the Czarists, the Americans and the Japanese; the reconciliation of the Nazis and the Jews, of the Israelis and the Palestinians, of needy refugees and the blind eye; the reconciliation of the Aborigines and we colonists – all of this is what God ‘looks like when He comes’: the reconciliation of the living and the dead.

There is no salvation without justice, no justice without peace, no peace without reconciliation, no reconciliation without grace.

To say that Jesus’ name marks salvation is not to exclude anyone. It is to draw to our attention what about us is excluded by others, and what about others we exclude. In one excluded man’s grace towards those who cast him out, we see the beginnings of a reconciled humanity.

To declare that salvation is found in Jesus is not arrogantly to exclude an abstract person in some distant time or place who could not possibly know Jesus’ name. It is humbly to preach and seek reconciliation wherever we can with the real and tangible people who are part of our lives.

There is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved but the names we would rather we did not know. These will save us, or we will save them. Salvation is reconciliation of what we have divided and separated.

This is what it is like when God comes.

A number of elements of this sermon have been drawn from Rowan Williams’ very helpful study, Resurrection: interpreting the Easter gospel, Morehouse, 1994 [1982].

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Easter 3
18/4/2021

Acts 3:1-19
Psalm 4
Luke 24:36b-48

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In a sentence
The miracle at the heart of faith is that God makes sense of us for our own understanding, and calls us to renewed life.

The events at the Easter-heart of the Christian story seem to beg to be ‘made sense of’. How can we comprehend a resurrection or any purported miracle around Jesus?

Yet, while the desire to make sense is a natural one, we must recognise its limitations. This is not to say that we ought to allow ourselves to be ‘unsensible’ or irrational. It is more a question of what makes sense of what. What will bring us closer to the heart of Christian experience is entertaining the possibility that these biblical texts might ‘make sense’ of us, might comprehend us

The story of the man miraculously healed in our Acts reading today is another ‘need to make sense of’ passage in the Easter account, reflecting as it does the ongoing impact of Easter and Pentecost.

While there is a lot of scepticism these days (and, even back then!) about miracles, even those who stand as a matter of principle against any purported miracle retain an interest in the idea of miracles. The credulous and the sceptic alike, we all would that someone enter our lives and declare, ‘in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk!’ or ‘be poor no longer’ or ‘be lonely no more’, and not only declaring this, of course, but the miracle then taking place. This is a story we would all love to believe for the relief it seems to promise.

However, as we ponder the idea of a miracle, we must be mindful of what the miraculous is not: miracles are not magic. Magic has to do with the possession of a certain knowledge about the way the world works and, so, possession of knowledge about how things might be manipulated. If you know the correct incantation and say it in the right way, then you can bring about what you desire. And so in the Harry Potter stories, for example, the young witches and wizards are gradually inducted into the mysteries of their craft: the words which must be said, and how they must be said. We see them struggle to get their Latin phrases right, and to wave their arms in the right way, in order to make happen whatever the spell is supposed to effect. In this, magic is much closer to modern scientific technique with the potential of its descriptive formulas than it is to biblical miracle.

On a magical understanding, Peter knows the magic word – ‘Jesus Christ’ – and the lame man is healed. (A little later a magician named Simon even offers to pay the apostles if they’ll teach him the ‘magical’ gesture by which the Holy Spirit was imparted to new believers ([Acts 8.9-23]). Yet, neither Peter nor Luke are interested in magic. If there is a tendency towards a magical interpretation of miracle stories like this, it is in us and not in the story itself that the magic is found. Such a magical understanding appears in us when we find ourselves thinking that, if only we knew the right words to pray, and if we prayed them with an appropriate air of authority or with the right degree of sincerity, or with the right amount of faith, or if we could find someone else who can do that for us … if only we knew the spell, we too could do what Peter did.

Yet, closer attention to the story contradicts this reading. Whereas our interest here is most likely to stem from the possibility (or the impossibility) that we too might share in such a healing, Peter is interested in communicating the possibility of the forgiveness of sin. He makes no implied promise of the healing of our bodies; the healing of the lame man is almost incidental to the point of the passage. Recall here what we said last week about the secondary status of the resurrection of Jesus itself: the resurrection is not the main event but a sign pointing to something else – in fact, a sign that also points to matters of judgement and forgiveness.

Peter declares not, ‘Repent and turn to God so that you may all walk again, or see again, or stand up straight again, or be healed of your sadness’, but ‘Repent … and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out.’ The big news in the story is not that God acts in the name of Jesus to enable a lame person to walk again, but that God acts in the name of Jesus to forgive sin.

The introduction of the theme of forgiveness here disrupts the magical reading of the miracle. Magical thinking, with its the desire to know how to make this or that happen, is not just about what we might be able to do but is also about how we understand ourselves. To want to change things magically is to demonstrate that we don’t think of ourselves as part of our problems. Magic doesn’t change us in ourselves but changes others or the world: my love potion is given to change you, not me. Magic is a tool in our hands for shaping what is outside us.

But Peter’s preaching is directed at a different target. With the charge of sin and offer of forgiveness, Peter opens up the thought that we ourselves need to be changed. To be guilty of sin is to have a share in the reason for what is wrong. ‘Sin’, as an idea, gathers us into the problem, makes us a part of the problem.

The difficulty of the miracle now shifts. In terms of where we started, the hard text we seek to make sense of now offers us a new sense for ourselves. The crowd respond to the showy miracle, but Peter wants to show them themselves.

This is a bigger shift than we might think.

It is as difficult to believe that I might need real change as it is that the lame could walk again in this way. Pressing further, it is as difficult to learn and understand what might need to be done in me as an individual or in us as a community as it is for a dead man to stop being dead.

It is much easier to make sense of something – to know it on our own terms – than to be made sense of – to know ourselves on another’s terms, especially if that ‘other’ is one whose knowledge of us cannot simply be dismissed.

The death and the resurrection with which Easter faith is concerned is not the lame man’s disability and healing or even the death and resurrection of Jesus himself; it is the death which is in the people – the capacity to ‘kill the Author of life’, Peter says (3.15) – and the possibility of their rising from that in repentance (3.19). Jesus dies and rises, that we might die and rise too.

To proclaim Jesus as risen is not to believe in magic; it is to declare ourselves to be under judgement. And yet, miraculously – here is the miracle – to proclaim Jesus risen is also to declare that we are within reach of forgiveness by the sheer grace of the one who brings the charges against us.

We will hear more about these charges next week. But, for now, the point is the need to entertain not the abstract idea of a miracle but the concreteness of the repentance to which the miracles point. It is only when we let go of making sense of Easter on our own terms, and let the story speak to us of things we don’t yet know, that a rethinking – itself a kind of re­pentance – becomes a real and close possibility. And with that comes the possibility of a life lived with new understanding, vigour and hope.

This life is what the people of God – and all people – deeply desire: hearts once crippled now having cause to run and leap and praise God (3.8).

This life is what the gospel of the risen, crucified one makes possible, by making more profound sense of us than we yet have made on our own terms.

Jesus dies and rises that we might, too.

So let us die, and rise, and walk and leap in love and praise.

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Easter 2
11/4/2021

Acts 4:32-35
Psalm 133
John 20:19-31

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Imagine that tomorrow morning’s news bulletins reported six new locally-acquired COVID-19 infections in Melbourne today; and that then, on Tuesday, there were ten more; and, on Wednesday, another 25. This being the case, we would be right to guess that next week’s worship service would be pre-recorded and that we would need to re-stock our mask supply!

In a way which, 18 months ago, would have been unimaginable to all except infectious disease epidemiologists, we all now know the signs of an approaching community lockdown. Rising infections from unidentified sources mean a tight constraining of community movement: if this – rising infections – then that – isolation.

Yet, if tomorrow we read a well-corroborated report of the return to life of a person previously quite dead, it would have almost no meaning for us whatsoever, in the sense that almost nothing would change in our going about our daily routines. Our contemporary thinking is that the dead can’t rise. This means that, even if we are wrong about this, we have no framework for understanding what ‘risen’ might mean. If the resuscitation of a well-dead person could be established, it would quite simply be meaningless. By this I mean that talk of a resurrection would have no application for us: it would not signal what we should do next.

In Jesus’ time, this was not the case. While our way of thinking about ourselves and our world is such that the dead don’t rise because they can’t, many of his generation held also that the dead don’t rise, but that they can. This difference is what makes the New Testament proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus at least possible: the dead can rise – or God can raise them, even if God usually doesn’t do so. And, of course, the New Testament declares: now one has been raised.

But there is more to resurrection than this in the New Testament. The notion of resurrection was an element of apocalyptic thought. This arrived late in Jewish thinking and was attractive because of the kinds of problems we have recently seen developed in Job (and also in Ecclesiastes and the Psalms): the world as it stands is unjust, and it seems that God must also, then, be unjust. ‘Apocalyptic’ concerned itself with the ‘apocalypse’ – literally, the ‘revelation’ of what has been hidden (Greek: apo [from/out of], kalypt­o [hide]). What will be brought out from hiding is the righteousness of God: God’s inherent righteousness in God’s setting right what is wrong. God will judge the world, and reveal righteousness in the process. Resurrection matters here because the judgement is of the totality of history, including those who have already died, and we cannot hear the judgement of God if we are dead.

This judgement – the revealing of where righteousness resides – is the heart of the matter, and not the rising. This is to say that ‘resurrection’ – often thought by us to be the central notion – is a subordinate idea in apocalyptic thinking. Resurrection is like the money we need to have in our pocket in order to buy our lunch. The money is not the point – the lunch is.

To say, then, that a person has been raised from the dead, is to say that this process has begun: the end of the world has begun, with ‘end’ now meaning not termination but completion, goal, final purpose. God is about to do what needs to be done to set things right – to set us right, to set the world in the way it should be.

If this is what we expect – as first-century Palestinian Jews – what are we to do if a resurrection signals that the judgement is imminent? We are to turn from what is not right to what is right.

And this brings us to the potentially terrifying passage we have heard from Acts this morning. We read to this point of the unfolding ramifications of Jesus’ resurrection and the gift of the Spirit that thousands of people have believed the preaching of the apostles. And now we hear, ‘for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need’ (4. 34f).

Of course, this will likely only be terrifying for those who have lands or houses, and if the implication of Luke’s telling us this is that we should do the same, even now. We have already decided this latter is not the case if we have heard this passage before and not done as they did! (And that we need not do so is suggested in the story which immediately follows – the death of Ananias and Sapphira, not for failing to sell their property ]they did sell it] but for lying to the community about the proceeds).

In fact, in view of other aspects of the New Testament witness (later, for example, Paul plans to take up a collection among the Gentile churches for the poor Jerusalem believers), we might conclude that the sale of these assets is a naïve and harmful response to the resurrection, assuming that they did as the text tells. But we must be careful here. We are not the judges of these first believers, least of all if we judge them as an act of self-defence.

As we have just outlined, their belief in the resurrection of Jesus entailed also a conviction that the final resolution of the tensions of history was imminent. In their selling and sharing, a belief about the true nature of the world, now about to be revealed, takes concrete and specific shape here and now: ‘there [will not be] a needy person among them’. They ‘believe’ by ‘acting’. As the apostles have been testifying with great power, so also do these new believers also testify to their conviction with great power: with economic and social action which reflects the promise in the apostles’ preaching.

It might seem that it was easier for them to let go of their things because they expected not to be needing them much longer; this was indeed likely part of their thinking, and was still in Paul’s mind 25 years later (see his teaching on marriage, ‘in view of the impending crisis’, 1 Corinthians 7). Yet, it was not so much easier as clearer to them how to testify to the resurrection and the impending judgement it signalled. There being no tomorrow changes our sense of what matters for today, and we declare that there will be no tomorrow by acting like it is the case.

But what does resurrection faith look like for us, who have every confidence that tomorrow will come? A general policy of selling, dispersing and casting ourselves onto the generosity of others looks like irresponsibility.

About this, three things…

The first thing is that our resurrection faith – like theirs in Acts – will ‘look like’ something. Faith in this God takes a recognisable, lived shape in this world. The believed word only makes sense when it is reflected in a life which corresponds to what is believed. If our beliefs do not make sense to us, it is likely because our actions don’t resonate with them. That we are forgiven will only ‘feel’ true to the extent that we live like forgiven people, and forgive others. Resurrection-talk only makes sense when the power of death in its many forms is seen to be pressed back in our lives and relationships.

The second thing is that our resurrection faith – like theirs in Acts – will ultimately be seen to have taken the ‘wrong’ shape. There is no pre-determined set of self-evidently righteous actions for expressing Christian belief or, if there is, we can’t know what it is. What is justified is so from God, and not because we got the formula right. It was once the right thing to do, to sell possessions and share the proceeds. It was once the right thing to do, to build 900-seater churches with towers. These were appropriate forms for the expression of a resurrection faith – and indeed may be again in the life of any individual or community.

The third thing is that God nevertheless looks to us to see what shape our resurrection faith – like theirs in Acts – will take. If we cannot know beforehand what we ‘should’ do, then God cannot know either. If there is any requirement God has, it is only that God’s people not look like they are dead. To us, in age and in youth, in health and infirmity, in darker times and lighter, when alone or in company, God commands: Don’t look dead.

To the church as a whole, confronted by wide-ranging changes and challenges around its place in the community, Don’t look dead.

To us as a congregation, anticipating a differently shaped future, Don’t look dead.

How we act – how we appear to ourselves and to others – is what we believe ourselves to be and testifies to what we think will come of us. The gospel is that Jesus is risen, and that we are being raised with him. This will only make sense if we don’t look dead, if we – and others – see in us that the worst of death is behind us and that before us is only deeper, richer life.

To recite the creed of the church, with its central theme of creation out of nothing, of life out of death, is to declare ourselves equipped and ready for the task of living and enlivening.

Let us, then, receive this life, live it, and give it.

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Easter Day
4/4/2021

Job 38:1-18
Psalm 118
Mark 16:1-8

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In a sentence
The resurrection is the surprising Jesus simply being consistent.

Preamble to the sermon

There is a textual-come-literary question as to whether Mark intended to end his gospel at 16.8. The textual question arises from the fact that the oldest manuscripts end at v.8, while other manuscripts have one or both of the two shorter endings included in our Bibles. The literary question is whether there is enough evidence internal to Mark to settle the textual question: could Mark conceivably have meant to end his gospel here, or has his ending been lost and replaced by the other two endings? Perhaps these questions matter less than might first seem. Indeed, the question of where Mark intended to end is important for assessing his literary stature – even genius. Yet, in the end, it is not Mark who is the subject of the gospel but Jesus. Even if there were originally a couple of concluding ‘pages’ now lost, we would still have to make sense of these few verses as they stand – the ‘terror’ and ‘fear’ in response to the report of the resurrection, in particular. This is the assumption of our treatment of the passage in what follows.

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Following chapter upon chapter of Job’s crying against God, God finally speaks: ‘Who is this who darkens counsel by words without wisdom?’

The stage is set, God has announced his intention: now comes the divine wisdom.

And what we get is Shock and Awe: no engagement, no argument, nothing that looks like the wisdom which Job and his friends have wrestled to uncover. Chapter upon chapter now of rhetorical questions from the divine whirlwind. And Job, filled with the fear of the Lord (cf. 28.28), will be crushed and will repent in dust and ash.

Today’s gospel reading is not different:

‘So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid’

Shock and Awe.

———-

When we pose a question about the reported resurrection of Jesus, we usually consider ‘resurrection’ before considering Jesus. For reasons which seem obvious to us, the possibility of resurrection is considered independently of anything else the gospel says about Jesus. We understand life and death as natural categories, apart from Jesus: we are alive, we have seen the death of others and fully expect to ‘be’ dead ourselves one day. A report of a resurrection is only a radical violation of our lived experience of the natural world, on these terms.

Yet, it is alien to the New Testament to separate life and death as natural phenomena from what is said about a person as a historical phenomenon. We might say that, instead of adding resurrection to Jesus, the New Testament adds Jesus to resurrection. Instead of saying something unnatural about Jesus, the New Testament says something historical about resurrection. And what is important to keep in mind here is that ‘historical’ here does not first mean ‘what actually happened’. It means human cultural, social and political existence. The New Testament adds the cultural, social and political existence and action of Jesus to ‘resurrection’.

This means that what the New Testament says about Jesus, it says about resurrection. Here Mark’s Gospel is particularly illuminating. The word ‘discombobulation’ comes to mind from a close reading of Mark. Mark’s Jesus is surprising, confusing, even shocking. We hear, throughout, of what we’ve come to call the ‘messianic secret’: the active suppression of premature attempts to understand – and so to ‘box’ – Jesus with prepared labels. Against this, the secret enables that Jesus be heard and observed before labels can be applied, so that the labels are ultimately changed in their application to him. Jesus warps the world and its expectations: ‘Christ’, ‘Lord’, ‘Son’ are twisted around him to become something quite new.

Of central importance here is that ‘risen’ is one of these labels. ‘Jesus is Lord’, ‘Jesus is the Son’, ‘Jesus is the Christ’ and ‘Jesus is risen’ are all the same kind of affirmation. ‘Resurrection’ is an idea bobbing around in the cultural soup alongside other religious and political ideas. To say that Jesus is risen, then, is not a statement about nature applied to what is otherwise a cultural, social and political identity. Jesus – and all that he has said and done – is now added to ‘resurrection’, so that resurrection becomes warped and twisted into something new. Jesus is the surface from which the expectations of ‘resurrection’ are echoed, and they come back to us re-accented, in the way that a foreigner accents words familiar to us but which we are now not sure that we’ve heard correctly.

What Jesus does and says, and what is done to and said about him, are then, not a collection of independent affirmations but are ‘of a piece’: a single, seamless garment. To tear that garment into teachings here, miracles there, is to do violence to the integrity and identity of Jesus as the New Testament presents him. Jesus has no parts.

So too, then, is the response of the women to the tomb of a piece with the responses of Jesus’ friends and enemies as a whole, throughout Mark’s account: surprise, disorientation, discombobulation everywhere. The resurrection is no more – or less – problematic than ‘sell all your possessions and follow me’ (10.21) or ‘whoever divorces and remarries commits adultery’ (10.11f) or ‘the Son of Man will be handed over to be crucified’ (10.33). Jesus the Discombulator: At. It. Again.

We are, of course, very tempted to pick and choose between this and that bit of the story, because the crosslight of Jesus illuminates dark places in all of us. And, more than tempted, we simply do pick and choose – whether it is this or that teaching from Jesus we don’t like or this or that element of the Creed. In this is manifest our own fears and terrors – not so much in response to the proclamation of the resurrection per se but to the claim that everything which matters has its substance here, in the seamless Jesus who asks – and is – too much, and so about whom too much is said: he is risen. Shock and Awe, terror and fear.

To return to the specific question of the resurrection: we only begin to comprehend the proclamation of the resurrection when we see that the gospel has no ‘parts’. The gospel and the Jesus it proclaims are of a piece.

Jesus has no parts. The Jesus who is the beloved Son is the one who rails against God’s abandonment, is the one who is said to be risen, is the one we will become around the Table.

Jesus has no parts, that we might have no parts – we who divide ourselves into body versus soul, male versus female, doubt versus faith, conservative versus progressive, today versus yesterday, Job versus God; we who are fractured within and without, and who tear and spill God into parts along the way.

So partitioned are we and what we do, that integrity astounds and confuses.

What is the meaning of the terror of the women as they run from the tomb after having heard the amazing, disorienting declaration that he is risen? ‘Bloody Jesus. He’s at it again. Discombobulating. Won’t. Even. Stay. Dead.’

The resurrection is just Jesus being consistent: his life and death and life are one.

But this consistency runs in two directions – or perhaps many directions. If the resurrection is just Jesus being consistent, then we need not consider it to be the last thing he does. It is possible – on the basis of consistency – that the resurrection is the first thing Jesus does, the defining thing which gives colour to all else said about him.

If Jesus is ‘of a piece’, we can go further: his story begins everywhere: in the resurrection, in the crucifixion, in the confrontations, in the teaching, in the desert temptations; in Job, in the exile, in David, in the Exodus, in grace after the way back into the Garden is barred, in the creation of order out of chaos. Jesus begins, even, today with us – in our gathering around a table which is not ours but his, which gathering brings together as one what is not consistent but lumpy and skewed and divided: us ourselves. A little more resurrection fear and trembling as a grateful people extends its hands to receive its Christ would not be out of order.

The resurrection is Jesus before us and against us in the same moment, as is the cross, as is the proclamation of the kingdom and the call to repentance.

This is what we need, and it is the gift of God.

Shock and Awe: God and us, of a piece.

Come, says God. All is prepared.

Christ is risen.

Jubilate Deo.

Alleluia.

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Good Friday
2/4/2021

Job 23:1-17
Psalm 22
Mark 15:25-39

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‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’

Early in our reflections on Job, we saw that Jesus’ question from the cross is precisely Job’s complaint: why have you abandoned me? And, like Job’s question, the question from the cross longs, yearns, cries for resolution.

For neither Job nor Jesus is this a question about the power of God. It is instead a question about justice. We have heard from Job this morning,

² ‘Today…my complaint is bitter;
his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
³ O that I knew where I might find him,
that I might come even to his dwelling!
⁴ I would lay my case before him,
and fill my mouth with arguments.
⁵ I would learn what he would answer me,
and understand what he would say to me. (Job 23.2-5)

Job is relentless: Let God justify himself. He allows no dualistic release from the tension in this, as if he must await the outcome of a struggle between a good god and an evil god. He models no punch-pulling pietism. Job is simply honest. Job believes that God has the power to overcome evil, and so the justice of God’s actions must be questioned. Where are you, God? Why do you not come with power, to set right what is wrong?

What would the power to overcome evil look like?

The gospel holds that such power looks like Jesus. This is not because he is the heroic saviour who will spend himself as a saving currency in his death on the cross. Jesus is God’s power simply because everything that Jesus says and does is intended to be effective. His confrontations with the powers active in the world are no mere prelude to the ‘main event’ of the cross. These confrontations are the prophetic word, uttered as a call to repentance – uttered in expectation of repentance. Jesus’ word is God’s power to overcome evil. The ministry of Jesus seeks to bring righteousness.

From this perspective, the cross is quite simply a disaster: the failure of God’s righteousness to find a home in us. (This failure Job also knows.)

But now, a question towards deeper understanding: if Jesus has been the prophet of God’s righteousness to this point, is what he utters on the cross still a prophetic word?

This is difficult, but – for Christ’s sake – let us not be timid. The charge of the prophet against the world now becomes a charge against God. To this point, Jesus has asked us, Why have you abandoned God? Now the charge is, God, why have you abandoned me? This takes us by surprise in the Gospel itself, although it is not new in the Scriptures. Job’s double defence of himself against the injustice of his friends and the injustice of God is the same kind of thing, as is the psalmist’s crying out against enemies and the delay of God.

The surprise of this charge against God ought to give us pause. It is not enough that we resonate with the sentiment, as we might with Job’s version of the question. ‘Where are you, God?’ is something we ask, of course, but do we expect it of Jesus? The messianic secret is now open: Jesus is ‘the Son’. He has just acknowledged the coming ‘cup’ of suffering, and committed to it (14.36). We don’t resolve the question by recognising that there’s a difference between knowing that this is going to hurt – that the cup is there – and it actually hurting – tasting the cup. The cry from the cross is on the lips of the Christ. What we see here, then, is not merely that physical pain shapes theology. Pain does inform theology, which is why we have Job and the Psalms in the Scriptures.

But, as it tells what Jesus does and what happens to him, the gospel is always concerned with who he is. It is not merely that he cries out which matters here; it is as the Son, as God’s prophet, that Jesus cries out.

Whom does God’s prophetic word address from the cross? This word is directed to God. The prophet speaks to God a word continuous with that he has spoken to his disciples and to the religious authorities and to those in the streets and byways of Palestine.

How does the prophet prophesy to God?

Christian confession knows that to speak to Jesus is to speak to God, but we only half know this. We know it in the way that delivers Jesus as a ‘human face’ for God, that makes God more ‘accessible’ to us: Jesus is ‘easier’ than God. This is how the children’s talk goes, and not a few sermons.

But this confession is much more profound. If our speaking to Jesus is our speaking to God, it is because for Jesus to speak to us is also for him to address God. When Jesus addresses us, he addresses God. This is not because we are divine but because when the Son speaks, he always ultimately addresses the Father. Only something like a trinitarian logic will make sense of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus here. More precisely, only a trinitarian account of creation – of ourselves in relation to God – will make sense of Mark’s Jesus, with his cry from the cross. What such an account would reveal is that there is no ‘parents’ retreat’ to which the Father and the Son can withdraw to get us – the ‘kids’ – out of their hair for a few minutes (oh, for such a thing!). There is no direct Father-Son conversation across the dinner table without interruption and discord darting back and forth across the other way (oh, oh, oh, for such a thing!). We are ever in God’s midst. God does nothing which does not involve us. There is no divine action in which we are not the cause or the means or the purpose of what God does. The prophetic word – at its harshest and at its most poignant – is directed both to us and to God, just as Job’s harsh case against his friends is his poignant case against God.

God is the end – the goal – of all things,s including God’s own word. Jesus’ cry from the cross, then, does not contradict who Jesus is and what he has done to this point. Rather, his cry intensifies his ministry. He addresses God now not ‘through’ us but as us – as one of us.

Jesus cries out as Job, who asks our suffering questions. And he cries out as Job’s friends who, having mocked him at the foot of the cross, finally discover that they have misunderstood God, for they have been so caught up in their knowledge of righteousness and sinfulness that they had nothing more to hear from God.

Jesus – God’s word to us – speaks our word to God. The sad song of God’s searching after us one evening in the Garden – Adam, Eve, where are you? – finds its harmony in our responding word in Job and Jesus one afternoon outside Jerusalem: God, where are you?

The answer to both these questions is, On the cross: in Jesus-as-Job, in Jesus the Son.

In this double word – Jesus: God’s word to us as our word to God – all things are reconciled in the only way they can be, in a world like ours, with a people like us, who reject the gift of God and ask for it again.

In this, the rule of God finally draws near: the reign of God among a people who would crucify God for God’s sake, and their own.

There is no resolution such as Job’s cry or the cry of Jesus on the cross would seem to seek, considered apart from who God is and who we are, together on the cross.

The cross is where it ends, but also where it begins again.

Repent, then, O Job – re-imagine yourselves and God – and believe the good news: the kingdom of the God we would crucify is come near, in that crucifixion.

In this way, God is finally ours, and we are God’s.

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Lent 5
21/3/2021

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51
John 12:20-33

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In a sentence
In baptism we take on the humanity of Jesus, and God’s love of him, as our own

In our reading from John’s Gospel this morning, some people approach one of the disciples and ask, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’.

Gathering as we will soon around the baptismal font, what do we wish to see?

We will see a child – a vital energetic boy, who may or may not co-operate with what we are going to do him! We will see in him innocence – for the most part! – possibility, promise, hope. We will see his parents and their love and devotion to him.

Now consider, instead, that we were gathering today for the baptism of a middle-aged woman. Her couple of marriages – and a few other marriage-like ‘arrangements’ – haven’t quite worked out. She has said and done quite a bit she regrets, has hurt many of those who loved her, and her possibility, promise and hope have largely been exhausted.

Such a person would have much in her past to overcome; for little Finn, what might have to be overcome is still in the future. For Finn, what is going to happen today will be without his permission and quite beyond his comprehension. For our imagined woman, a baptism would be thoroughly intentional and with at least some modicum of understanding. She would speak for herself; today, others will speak for Finn.

It would seem that two such people are far enough apart in their history, their present reality and their prospects as to make their baptisms entirely different things. For what has infant possibility got to do with middle-aged actuality? What has open promise got to do with proven disappointment? What has innocence got to do with guilt? What has the non-belief of an unwitting infant got to do with the belief of a consenting mature adult?

We must be able to answer questions like these because the baptism of a lively infant and the baptism of a weary mature woman are the same. The water does not know whether we are young or old, and the prayers do not know whether we are innocent or guilty.

We must, of course, each be some of these things. We will be strong or weak, poor or rich, young or old, ill or healthy, wise or stupid.

But baptism is there for all of us, regardless of what we see in the mirror. We might say that, when we are in baptismal mode, we are all innocent, regardless of what we have done, or that we are all guilty, regardless of what we have done: we are – each of us – young and old; we are – each of us – promise and disappointment.

This is to say, then, that there is an important sense in which baptism is not about us at all – at least, not about us as we imagine ourselves to be. As we request baptism, do our preparation, make our plans, gather into this space, pray the prayers, splash the water and make our commitments, what is glaringly obvious to us is just us, we who are gathered here today.

But, finally, to get here and understand where we are, is to find ourselves equalised, levelled. It is these days only the most Christianly ‘religious’ people who are baptised but religion is not the point here. The point here is to say something about humanity – the humanity of the religious and non-religious – in all its height and depth, its richness and its poverty. We say to the one baptised – surely, a most strange thing – ‘You are human’. This is not because he is young, and healthy, and white, and has likely landed in secure social and economic station in life. Someone, of course, has to be these things, just as others are other things. But whatever we are – white or black, straight or gay, old or young, poor or rich – these things do not define us, do not set our outer limits. We exceed all that we appear to be. This exceeding – this ‘more’ – is our connectedness to each other.

I am not myself only – you are part of me. If we wanted to tell the human story properly, we would have to tell the story of everyone who ever lived. We cannot do that, of course. This is, in part, because there are too many stories to tell. Yet, more poignantly, it is also because we don’t really believe that all those stories have the same merit; some are less human than we. This is what we proclaim when we allow male to dominate female, white to dominate black, Christian to dominate Jew, Israeli to dominate Palestinian, rich to dominate poor. In these dynamics, we declare that our humanity is not extended by the other but diminished.

We cannot tell the story of everyone, and we also don’t want to.

To this inability and hesitation, baptism is an answer. In baptism we set in place one story ‘over’ every story. This is not the story of the person baptised – not today Finn’s story, just as it was not mine when I was baptised or any of yours when you were baptised. The one story we tell is that of Jesus. Instead of telling his story alongside mine and yours and everyone else’s in a hopeless attempt to be comprehensive, we tell his story and join ours to his, one baptism at a time.

Why the story of Jesus? Because of what is said of him in the Scriptures: he is the one both closest to God – the Son, the image of God – and as far from God as one can be, in death by crucifixion. He is the one-for-others whose very humanity is for and by his connections to his friends and his enemies, and he is also the one rejected because he is too dangerous to tolerate or to be friend of. Jesus is the one who extends us, and also the one who threatens our sense of our humanity, who does not extend us but would diminish us. Jesus is everything and nothing.

We began by asking, What has infant possibility got to do with old-aged actuality? What has open promise before us got to do with proven disappointment behind us? What has innocence got to do with guilt? What has the non-belief of an unwitting infant got to do with the belief of a consenting mature adult?

What has everything to do with nothing? To ask questions like these is to have in our mind that this or that characteristic is more worthy, more valuable, more human. Our faith contradicts this: it is not enough to see only those things we think matter the most.

‘Sir’, those old Greeks asked, ‘we wish to see Jesus’. Why? Because to see him is to see the fullness of human being – the everything and the nothing – in the form of just one of us. And it is not simply to see this breadth but to see it embraced by God. The cross is the depth of what we can do – the nothing – and the height of what God can do – everything.

God’s arms around Jesus, if we are joined to him, are God’s arms around us.

To see Jesus in God’s arms is to see ourselves there.

As we gather to baptise, this is what we should wish to see.

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Lent 4
14/3/2021

Job 24:1-17
Psalm 107
John 3:14-21

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In a sentence
Moral righteousness can only limit and deny; God’s righteousness heals and creates.

The news has lately been filled with allegations of sexual harassment and abuse even within the highest house in the land. These reports are sad additions to the many horrific stories we have heard over the last few years. Victims – typically victims of powerful men – have begun to find their voice and, in the main, these voices are surely to be believed.

In all of this, we hear an echo of Job’s complaint about the way of the unjust in the world: the thief, the murderer, the abuser and the powerful act under cover of darkness: ‘deep darkness is morning to all of them; for they are friends with the terrors of deep darkness’ (24.17). The darkness, of course, extends beyond the dark of night. It can be behind the locked door of the school counsellor’s office or beyond the barbed wire of the concentration camp. It can be a detention centre on a distant island or mere social convention: the darkness which is our hesitation to talk openly about certain things.

The more recent voicing of Job’s complaint has led to increasingly loud calls for inquiries and commissions and investigations, has led to the demand for light. Strong and bright daylight is to be brought to bear to reveal what has been done in the dark, and by whom.

Such a seeking of light is not new to us. In the last generation, we have sought light via a significant inquiry into the separation of indigenous children from their families, royal commissions into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, into trade union governance and corruption, into child protection and youth detention, into banking and financial service, into aged care quality and safety, and into the exploitation of people with disability. And an inquiry into wrongs against Aboriginal people in Victoria is about to begin.

Not to put too fine a point on all this, we are experiencing a radical disruption: an exposure of works wrought in darkness which challenges assumptions about how the world does or should work. And many of us find ourselves blinking against the sudden light.

In our reading from John this morning, Jesus uses light and darkness to characterise the contexts within which people live and act:

And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.

For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed.

But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.

Yet John’s account of light and darkness in his Gospel goes beyond the necessary but merely moral illumination of our formal investigations and commissions into the dark places in our midst. For the Gospel, light is not quite the ‘answer’ to darkness, not its moral opposite.

In the opening verses of John’s Gospel, we hear of the coming into the world of a light which the darkness does not overcome, extinguish or comprehend (1.4f). Yet, it not as straightforward as might first seem, to say that the light is not overcome.

We are to understand, of course, that the light is Jesus, which becomes more explicit later in the gospel (John 8.12; cf. also John 9 and the theme of blindness). But what are we make of the crucifixion? Does the darkness – if ever so briefly – overcome the light at this point? The easy answer is, Yes. We might imagine Jesus to be like one of those trick candles which, once blown out, flickers back after a couple of seconds. The darkness pulls Jesus under, so to speak, but he holds his breath and wriggles free and resurfaces. The overcoming of the light here is only fleeting and so, perhaps, doesn’t count.

But John would push us deeper here. At the beginning of our Gospel reading today, Jesus invokes an old story from Israel’s history about a bronze serpent lifted high on a pole as a sign by which people might be saved. The details needn’t bother us here today except that Jesus now likens himself to that serpent and its saving powers. The ‘lifting up’ of Jesus now, however, refers to the crucifixion and yet not only the crucifixion. Several times in John’s Gospel, the phrase ‘lifted up’ is used to denote both the cross and a flag-waving social, political and religious elevation – a kind of enthronement (cf. 8.28, 12.31ff). These two types of ‘lifting up’ coincide in the one moment: Jesus is ‘enthroned’ on the cross.

To jump a couple of steps and to compress into a single statement what this means for Jesus as the light, we might say that Jesus becomes the light in the crucifixion. The light which is Jesus and the darkness of the cross cannot be simply – morally – separated. The light which is Jesus is not merely ‘against’ the darkness. It is a ‘dark’ light, a light shining out of the dark cross. The darkness does not – even in the crucifixion – extinguish the light because the crucifixion is the light claiming the darkness, not so much washing it away as ‘un-darking’ it, putting it to work now not as darkness but as light.

Contrast this now with the necessary but merely moral work unfolding in the – entirely justifiable – outrage around us. Our exposés and inquiries and investigative commissions are in defence of those who, we might say, have been crucified by powers exercised in darkness. It doesn’t go too far to characterise the sexual harassment of a subordinate in this way, or the bloody backblock decimation of indigenous communities. Crucifixion was no mere execution. It was precisely about dislodging someone from their own self-perception into our own perception of them and does not require wood or nails to be effected.

But, as important as it is that we illuminate the dynamics of power and the real abuse which happens in our midst, identifying the crucified Jesus as the light of the world reveals something quite different from what can be revealed by the floodlights of moral outrage.

The moral light will reveal fault. It will reveal where power lies, who has it, how they have abused it. The moral light, however, can only condemn, demand restitution and regulate the lighting of more lamps so that the dark can’t provide cover again, at least in that place.

The dark light of the gospel doesn’t do this. The bright light of our justice brings condemnation but the dark light of the gospel does not: ‘Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him’ (John 3.17). The dark light of the gospel is concerned not with the dark but with what people do in it. It is concerned with the reality that we find the dark ‘useful,’ and with our capacity to seek out and create dark places. The light of the world ends up on the cross, and this is the judgement of the world: that darkness prevails among us. Moral indignation will not overcome this, whatever real good it might do for those subject to the darkness of others.

The light on the cross never leaves the darkness of the cross behind. The saviour – even risen from the dead – is always the Crucified One, always a dark light: a light which shines from dark things. God does not banish the darkness but works it into light. Like the bush in the old story, the cross burns with brilliant light but is not consumed; this light is always ‘crosslight’.

And so, crucified and risen, Jesus is the light of the world, not as a threat to dark places but their hope. The promise is not of a world morally erased, of persons morally cancelled, but of hearts transformed.

Put differently, we could say that, whatever else heaven might be, it is populated with agile cripples, the seeing blind, the rich poor, forgiving victims, forgiven perpetrators, holy blasphemers: all, in their own particular way, illuminated darkness, the risen dead. What is dark, debilitating, discriminatory, diseased and deathly – whatever marks us as victims or perpetrators – these things are the nothingness out which God creates, the grave out of which God resurrects.

This is the word of the cross, its foolish wisdom, its strong weakness, its scandal – its moral scandal. Our developing culture of cancellation is the sign that we cannot create out of nothing, bring life out of death. The light which is the cross is the sign that God can.

And more than can; God will create us.

For if the darkness of the cross is our own darkness – if it is, as we considered last time, we-in-Job who are crucified – then so also is the light of the cross our own: the light which God will make us to be.

It is in this light that we are to work, to live and to love: eyes being opened to the darkness, and looking to see it transformed by the grace of God.