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Transfiguration
14/2/2021

Job 1:1-12
Psalm 126
Mark 9:2-9

Jim Carey is not everyone’s favourite actor but what he does he does well – playing the part of the happy-all-is-well punter whose life is suddenly sent into tailspin, as any theatrical comedy begins.

Consider the opening scenes of one of his movies Mr Popper’s Penguins. The hopeful innocence of the young Popper gives way to the charismatic confidence of a New York developer, who seals a difficult property purchase and sets himself up for partnership in the firm. There’s a grey cloud here and there on the horizon but nothing Popper can’t handle until there arrives at his door a couple of crates from his just deceased father: 6 live penguins in a New York apartment.

And so the downward spiral begins, with disaster following crisis following catastrophe until, by some unexpected means, balance is restored and so too is the protagonist.

Compare this now to the beginning of Job

¹There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job… ²There were born to him seven sons and three daughters. ³He had seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and very many servants; so that this man was the greatest of all the people of the east. ⁴His sons used to go and hold feasts in one another’s houses in turn; and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. ⁵And when the feast days had run their course, Job would send and sanctify them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt-offerings according to the number of them all; for Job said, ‘It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.’ This is what Job always did.

With the right soundtrack and a sufficiently silly grin on his face, the start of the book of Job could be the start of Mr Popper’s penguins. Then begins Job’s own downward spiral. A conversation in the heavenly court sees the floor drop out from under Job’s happy, secure life, and down he goes. He spends quite a while in the depths before his life is finally restored.

There is nothing at all funny about what happens to Job, but the story as a whole itself is comic, in that it follows the same narrative arc as any comedy we might see in a theatre. As Popper’s life is shaken to its roots by a flock of penguins but is then restored at the end with a reconciliation to all which has happened to him, so also is the life of Job. If there is one thing we might take away from this series of reflections on Job, perhaps it could be that the book of Job is a comedy.

Of course, it is almost offensive to speak of Job as a comedy, given what we usually associate with comedy and what Job himself experiences. Must we not take seriously what he experiences, and what many of us have experienced, or are experiencing right now?

Indeed, but the point of noting the comic structure of the book is not to dismiss what happens to Job; it is to set it in context. The comic narrative arc is the basic story structure of the Scriptures themselves. Last week we heard something of the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry, according to St Mark.

As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John… That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons… And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

This could be the start of the book of Job, or another Jim Carey movie! Jesus is on the field and kicking goals. And, of course, the gospel then follows the comic narrative arc – from the joyful heights of Jesus’ early ministry to the depths of the cross to the even greater height of the resurrection.

In fact, the whole sweep of the Scriptures follows the same pattern, from the creation story of Adam and Eve through the expulsion from Paradise and the long struggle back to the promised restoration in the book of Revelation. The Bible as a whole is a comedy, and so are the leading stories within it. There are – of course – great depths of suffering and loss and despair in the Scriptures, but there is never really tragedy – that narrative arc which also falls but never rises again. Where things are looking catastrophic, irony is in play: not tragic finality but the confidence that there is more going on than meets the eye.

Recognising the comic structure of Job will not make all the tensions in the text go away. Indeed, if we were to take seriously the history of attempts to come to grips with the book, we should not expect that we will resolve these tensions in a few sermons, or ever.

But to see the comic structure of the story, and its correspondence to the comedy which is the whole Scriptural narrative, is to open up possibilities that might have been hidden from us. That the book moves in the same way as the rest of the Scriptures reveals that Job does not stand alone. The book is part of a larger whole: contributing to it, drawing from, reflecting it.

At the heart of that scriptural whole, from a Christian perspective, is Jesus of Nazareth. Today is Transfiguration, and each year the Gospel reading highlights on this day a strange revelation of the identity of Jesus to his disciples upon a mountaintop. Learning that they must see Jesus in the light of the law and the prophets, the disciples hear from the heavens comes the declaration and directive, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.’

This declaration is not far from Job. ‘Have you considered my servant Job?’ God asks the Accuser. ‘There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.’ The correspondence between the comedy of Job and the comedy of the gospel make the end of Job’s story and the Resurrection of Jesus the same kind of thing. Job and Jesus are ‘kind of’ the same figure.

And so Job’s story is not told as mere history about what happened to happen to one person. As we read his story, reflecting as it does the comic arc of all of the Scripture, we are invited to allow his story to be our own. For many of us, this is easy enough, at least that part of the story in which we are first happy and then suddenly we are not.

And this brings us to what is perhaps even more confronting than the bargain God strikes with the Accuser to attack Job: the very end of the story and final restoration to Job of even more than he lost at the beginning. This is confronting because we know that this is not the usual way of things.

And suddenly the nature of faith is revealed in a new light.

We can imagine that we were blessed and we know that we are suffering – as did Job. But we don’t – ‘really’ – expect things to get better; what happened to Job in the beginning and in the course of his suffering feels like ‘knowledge’ but what happens at the end feels like ‘belief’. It seems we know that life is struggle, yet we ‘only’ believe that all will be resolved.

Job’s happy – ‘comic’ – ending, then, challenges us with the same question at the heart of Christian conviction, the question of faith itself: Do we hold our lives ultimately to be tragedies or comedies?

Not to put too fine a point on it, Christians are comedians. This is not a reference to how funny we might happen to be to each other or to the rest of the world. It is a reference to how we are to read our world and our lives in it. There is no shortage of the passingly tragic, breaking our hearts and the hearts of others. And there is no guarantee that any one of us will die happy and content, whatever else the end of Job’s story seems to imply.

The comedy of Christian existence is found in the confidence that there is more going on than we can see. When we sit down to watch a funny movie we know, whatever happens along the way, that everything will be happily resolved. If it is a good comedy, then we have no idea how it will resolve until the end; we know only that it will. We might take a perverse pleasure in the grimaces and groans of the protagonist but we might also – were it possible – assure him that it will be OK. For the antics of the comic actor are less about the immediate discomfort than they are about what it means: will not my life be tragedy, for surely this catastrophe is insurmountable?

We have heard that all the world is a stage; if that is the case, faith expects the show to be a comedy. In view of that expectation, faith acts against the hopeless and tragic narratives which clamour to have us play our sad part.

We align our lives neither to the tragedy of approaching death nor to a bland steady state of eternity but to the promise in Job and Jesus.

‘There once was a man in the land of Uz named Job’. There once was a man in Nazareth. And somewhere between these two the promise realised in both their lives is a woman in Melbourne, and a child in Cairo, and a man in Beijing: you and I.

Have you considered my servants, God asks the Accuser? They are my Beloved, all.

I have made them, I love them, and I will restore them as mine and myself as theirs. And then will our mouths be filled with laughter, and our tongues with joy.

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Epiphany 5
7/2/2021

1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Psalm 147
Mark 1:29-39

In a sentence
God gives more, and looks for more, than our rights and responsibilities

As governments have sought to respond to the coronavirus threat over the last year, the precarious balance between our rights and our responsibilities has been very much to the fore.

Shifting somewhat that balance from how it has been struck in modern liberal democracies, the virus has seen a noticeable re-weighting of our responsibilities over against our rights. In places where this has not been the case – where governments have vigorously upheld the right of their citizens to pretend that the virus will respect our freedoms as modern women and men – the cost has been enormous.

This balance will likely tilt back the other way soon enough. Whatever the case, it is important that talk about rights and responsibilities is fundamentally legal in character. The attempt to balance my rights with yours – my rights with my responsibilities – takes on the character of a a social contract in which we appeal to certain explicit or implicit understandings of what is required of us and guaranteed to us. Contracts – including social ones – reflect an economy of exchange. My responsibilities serve your rights; your rights imply corresponding responsibilities: this is balance without excess. When it is struck, balance without excess is predicable, and boring.

And this brings us to St Paul, the apostle of excess.

Paul says of his preaching: ‘If I proclaim the gospel, this gives me no ground for boasting, for an obligation is laid on me, and woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel!!’ (9.16). This is all responsibility, laid on Paul by God for the benefit of others. This responsibility, however, is balcanced by the responsibility of his hearers to provide him a living.

This is all well and good. Even if we think that hearing the gospel is no desirable thing and that paying evangelists is even less desirable, we know the logic of exchange and can follow Paul’s argument to this point. Yet Paul is not really interested in spelling out how the rights and responsibilities of preachers and their communities should be balanced. Rights and responsibilities are natural components of human existence, and not yet the more deeply Christian ethic Paul goes on to describe. Christian existence does involve rights and responsibilities, but you don’t need to be a Christian to assent to them. If this were all Paul has to say to us, then the gospel is simply a particular set of rights and responsibilities – a particular set of laws, but thoroughly legal in form, nonetheless.

Paul is under obligation to God to preach, and he does. The crucial point, though, is that although he has this responsibility and the corresponding right to claim an income from it, he does not claim money for his work. He points beyond the merely contractual requirements of rights and responsibilities to a possibility of truly good and surprising news: news which is not legally necessary but catches us unawares and, so, news which is liberating. For the good news is concerned not with what is due, but with over-payment, with what is in excess of what is due, with the delivery of more than is legally required.

In the first instance, this means for Paul the exercise of ministry without claiming the payment it is his right to claim. But he goes further.

God has embraced Paul as he is and sent him with a commission to preach as he is, and so Paul can rightly expect of others that they accept him as he is. Yet, for the sake of the gospel, Paul becomes as they are, that there may be as few obstacles as possible preventing them from receiving the gospel: to the Jews he is as a Jew; to the Gentiles, he is as a Gentile; to those under or outside the law, he becomes as one under or outside the law.

Yet, Paul is not merely being helpful or accommodating here. He turns his way of relating to others into the gospel itself. In another place he exhorts his readers: be as Jesus was, who, although he possessed all the rights of God, did not think them things to cling to but set them aside, taking on the form of a servant, humbling himself to the point of giving up any claim on himself – symbolised by the cross (Philippians 2).

This Paul also does, God’s work shaping the way Paul himself works. Becoming all things to all people is not a missionary strategy, although we quickly turn it into that. The point is not that evangelism works best if we become like those we seek to evangelise. The point is that evangelism is excessive service, responsibility which does not claim its right. Evangelism then becomes not the delivery of information but the very expression and embodiment of the gospel itself – a giving of self in loving service – an excess of what might justly be required. The message becomes the medium. The word about love looks and feels like love.

In his closing remark in our passage this morning, there is one final dynamic Paul reveals about his work: ‘I do all this on account of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings…’ (v.23). ‘I do this, so that I may share in the blessings of the gospel…’ Not only does Paul embody, or realize, the gospel in the way he relates to those who have a ‘right’ to hear the gospel. Paul also experiences the gospel himself through his excessive and unbalanced service to them. Faith arises out of action. Belief arises from love. And not only the faith of those we serve, but our own faith.

There are clues here for churches like ours. Our Synod’s Major Strategic Review sprang from a concern for sustainability, realised through strategy. Yet sustainability is an ecological concept, ecology being a profoundly ‘legal’ space of predetermined cause and effect in natural law. Strategy is a military concept, again the realm of cause and effect: the day is won by bigger guns, cleverer plans and sneakier commandos. Strategy unto sustainability is a commitment to balance and not to the excess of the gospel. What the strategy seeks to sustain might be important, but it cannot bring the good news we so desperately need.

We too, as a congregation, have to resolve how to move into the future: what to do with the enormous resources at our disposal? The temptation will be strong to keep strategy and sustainability to the fore in our thinking. Yet the gospel is excessive, and so is the mission to which it calls us. Mindful of rights and responsibilities, our future is also one of casting of ourselves in trust in the one who looks and waits to see what we will choose, and promises to work with even that.

While we must be as clever and careful as we can as we make these plans, it would be well to understand that in fact we are as much ‘forcing’ God’s hand as reading it. This would be an appalling thing to say were it not that this God can take our worst excesses – even the on-balance conclusion that we must crucify the Lord of life – and make of them something life-giving.

The empty economy of right and responsibility cannot bring us life, but only a precarious balance and, with it, anxiety: have we got the equation right? The good news about Jesus tells instead of an excess of love which is undeserved and unbalanced and – just so – is pressed down and flows into a cascade of hope.

Paul finds himself caught up in this gospel current. Drawn into it, he uses its force and power as the means of reaching others, and yet that same force again swirls him around, shifting, buffeting, cleansing and empowering for more such work. This is our calling, and the promise which carries it to us. Tomorrow is not the next thing we do, the next necessary step; it is where God is taking us, and where we will next meet God.

Let us, then, allow ourselves to be caught up in the excessive grace of God and begin to learn to become a little excessive ourselves.

Re-worked from a sermon
preached at MtE, 2015           

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Epiphany 4
31/1/2021

1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Psalm 111
Mark 1:21-28

In a sentence
Freedom is always properly freedom to love and to lift each other

If there is one question which is taxing the best minds of the church in this day and age, it is not the question about whether we ought to be eating meat which has been offered idols. The impact of the gospel has been such that we have pretty much relegated such matters to a forgotten past.

Yet, as foreign to us as those old arguments might be, there is a very close relationship between how Paul approaches the dispute and how we ourselves might deal with problems of difference in our midst as a faith community, as a denomination, or in our wider society. For Paul is interested in the nature of the freedom we have in the gospel, and the consequences of this nature for our exercise of that freedom.

The Corinthians understood themselves to be a people freed by the gospel. Yet their understanding of this freedom was badly skewed, and this was the reason for much of what Paul writes about throughout the letter.  As he often does in this letter, this morning’s reading has Paul apparently quoting back to the Corinthians a saying of their own: ‘all of us have knowledge’. It’s a seemingly innocuous statement, but its purpose here is to justify the practice of eating meat offered to idols. ‘All of us has knowledge’ implies, ‘We know that the idols of heathen worship are nothing, so we may safely eat meat sold from the temples without compromising our belief in Christ; faith in Christ has revealed to us which among the gods matter, and which do not.’

Perhaps surprisingly, Paul has no problem with this. He sees that the gospel does give such freedom. But at the same time he knows that not all Christians are equally free to enjoy the fruits of what they now know. Some Christians – quite probably those who were once regular participants in the temple cults – are unable to get out of their heads the thought that, by continuing to eat sacrificial meat, they are relapsing back into their previous beliefs.

Paul’s response to this situation, on behalf of these so-called ‘weak’ believers, opens up a new dimension on the character of the knowledge and freedom Christians have in the gospel. While there is no ‘in principle’ gospel-objection to taking advantage of the cult to get your meat, there is a local social or communal one. The knowledge and the freedom we have in the gospel is never a knowledge and freedom for us as individuals but for us as we stand together before God in Christ. Paul’s challenge to the Corinthians shifts our attention from the freedom which comes from knowing about God or the world to the freedom which arises from, and gives rise to, love.

If all we know is that we are free to do this or that thing, that is not enough, not the ‘necessary knowledge’. To ‘know’ is merely to be expanded – ‘puffed up’ Paul calls it. The richer possibility is to know, and yet to put aside knowledge and the freedom it might bring in order that another might not fall.  This Paul calls love – that which knows and yet does not allow what it knows to become a distraction for one who knows less. In more tangible terms: love knows that meat offered to idols is only meat. But love is prepared to treat the meat as contaminated by the cult in order not to destabilise the faith of some so-called ‘weaker’ believer who can’t get it out of her head that it’s tainted by the idol. Love abandons its freedoms. Love enslaves itself to the weaker one in order that together we might be strong. ‘Therefore’, Paul declares, ‘if food is a cause of their falling, I will never eat meat, so that I may not cause one of them to fall’.

As we’ve already observed, whether we ought to eat meat sacrificed to idols is not a question which taxes our minds much these days. But Paul’s principle applies far beyond that problem. Whether in the church or out of it, the call is to an exercise of freedom which is the freedom to deny ourselves some of our liberties in the gospel, in order that the humanity of others might be enriched. In the church and in the wider world the variety of possible accommodations of the weaknesses of others is a great as the number of human relationships. Still the call is the same: ‘take care that your liberties do not become somehow a stumbling block to the weak’.

Of course, there are a thousand objections and qualifications which come to mind whenever a preacher generalizes in this way about how we ought to treat each other – whether the preacher is St Paul, or the one to whom you are subject. Fundamentally, we object to how easily an ethical system like this can be manipulated and abused by the hysterical or the tyrannical. God is not unaware of these problems, and even a preacher might sense that it’s dangerous ground. But that doesn’t make the call to deny ourselves go away. Hear the call, and seek to live it in your lives, with all the ambiguities which come with any commandment.

For the problem with commandments is not that they might be abused in their application, but that it is impossible to be confident that we’ve actually met them. Sooner or later we may say a loud ‘No’ to the puritanical ascetic or to the loose libertine; but we will never know just when enough is enough.

Which is also to say, we never really know when God does the same for us, because it is God’s dealings with us which is the basis of the ethic Paul describes here. Though God in Christ could have chosen freedom from the world, he joined himself to a world which neither particularly looked for him nor welcomed him. Paul speaks elsewhere of Christ as the one who had no sin, and yet became sin that we might become righteousness. That is, in his baptism into the highs and lows of human life, Jesus put aside his freedoms in order to be ‘for us’. He does not merely become human but allows himself to be thoroughly marked by human brokenness, to the point of becoming that brokenness himself, on the cross… It is only thus that brokenness itself is broken, in that God took it into himself, allowing himself to become something new – the crucified God, truly God even to those who cry out, ‘Our God, our God, why have you abandoned us?’ Our lives together are godly to the extent that they reflect, not God’s ‘moral’ perfection, but that perfecting liberty of God which is not afraid to be limited and made a little dirty, if perchance it might mean that some will be healed.

Knowledge of our freedoms merely puffs us up in our own little worlds, but loving towards the freedom of others builds us all up.

By the liberating power of the Spirit, may God’s people ever more closely reflect in themselves the freedom of his Son to lay down our lives for others, and to take them up anew by his power!

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Epiphany 3
24/1/2021

1 Corinthians 7:29-32a
Psalm 62
Mark 1:14-20

In a sentence
The fullness of our lives is not in the things we have but in the freedom of God’s children in all circumstances

Chapter 7 of 1 Corinthians is the ‘marriage chapter’, and many people count it among their least favourite parts of Paul. What we have just heard is Paul’s summary of the teaching he has been giving about marriage in response to questions which had come from the Corinthian church:

… from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.[NRSV]

It’s tempting to read Paul as having no real interest in marriage or other worldly experiences. It as is though he says: ‘you might have to marry, you might be moved to mourning or rejoicing, you might need to acquire possessions, but these are only surface things – treat them “as if” they were not really there, as if they did not really matter.’ This does not do well for his reception today, for ours is an age which relishes experience, which encourages immersion in all the things of the world.

The discomfort Paul’s apparent attitude to the world might cause is compounded when he gives his reason for thinking this way: ‘the present form of the world is passing away’. Even if we might make sense of the teaching to live ‘as if’ we had no dealings with the world, it’s hard to take seriously now Paul’s strong conviction that the end of the world is imminent, that the living ‘as though’ we had no dealings with the world was really a calling only for a small length of time before the end. We cannot pretend that we don’t expect to have a long life and to die before there is any ‘end of the world’ to deal with. Add to that the apparent world-hating tenor of the teaching and Paul is easily dismissed here as simply out of touch – even dangerously so.

Yet, to dismiss Paul as a religious ascetic is to miss the point of what he says here. He encourages the Corinthians to live ‘as if’ they had no dealings with the things of the world, not to preserve them from perceived ‘impurities’ of the world, but so that they may be free in the world.

In the chapter prior to this one, Paul quotes back to the Corinthians their own words: ‘all things are lawful for us’ (6.12), with which he actually seems to agree. And yet he qualifies that agreement with the observation that ‘not all things are beneficial’ and ‘I will not be dominated by anything’.

It is perhaps this second comment which gets us closest to the heart of the matter. Paul’s concern is not merely moral but pastoral – what is best for human beings, to enable them to live freely and without anxiety in the world? How can we live free from domination? Out of questions such as these, he puts to us that many of the things we think are expressions of our freedom are, in fact, simply enslavements.

In the matter of marriage, Paul indicates that he personally thinks celibacy the better way to go. Yet, marriage in itself is not wrong, and it is better that we marry than be dominated and distracted by not being married. It’s almost a policy of ‘harm minimisation’, and it applies as much to the other normal and permissible things he lists as it does to our human relationships.

‘Let those who be mourn be as if they did not’ is not to say don’t be sad, but that grief can become an all-consuming thing which we allow to dominate us to the detriment of our own well-being and the well-being of others.

‘Let those who rejoice be as if they did not’ is not to say don’t be happy when things go your way, but don’t be distracted by an expectation that they will or ought always to go as you wish. Do not be consumed by the world’s failure to serve you as you would like.

‘Let those who buy be as if they had not possessions’ is not to say that we ought not to own anything, but that our things or lack of things are not what make us righteous or worthy, and are quite capable of enslaving us and suppressing the fullness of life which comes with the call of God.

To live ‘as if’ is not necessarily to live without – without marriage, or joy or mourning or possessions, or whatever. It is to allow these things to be material for God’s working of grace in our lives, and not to let them dominate or limit us or our possibilities in Christ. When what we have and experience is had and experienced in the grace of God, then it sets us free.

Living this way becomes a possibility when we see it achieved by another. We cannot say with Paul that we think the world is about to end. Yet we can agree with him that, in Jesus, we have seen the world come to an end with the drawing near of God’s kingdom in the person of Jesus. In the life and ministry of Jesus, the world comes to the end of its skewed power over us. In him we see one who lives completely in and through the events which take place around him – good and bad – and yet one whose living through these events is coloured with light from a different source and a different calling. Jesus doesn’t withdraw from the world, or fear it, but embraces it in its transitory character as the sphere in which God acts, to bring about a end of our story which no one has yet heard or seen or perceived.

Living ‘as if’ one were or were not rejoicing, does or does not have possessions, is living which allows God to be the distraction from such things when necessary, rather than allowing those things to be a distraction from God. This is Christian freedom from the world in itself, and for the world and God.

With the Corinthians we can agree that all things are given to us in Christ – only we should not allow ourselves to be dominated or lorded over by anything other than the Lord himself, who does not dominate but sets free.

To get a little more concrete for a moment, at least so far as our life together goes: what would it mean for us in twelve or twenty-four months’ time if – as might be the case – we have moved on and no longer have all this or anything comparable but lived and worshipped and served together as though we did? We can test our answer to that question by asking another: What would it mean for us to live now ‘as though’ we had no suite of buildings such as this, even as we continue live within and enjoy them? Are we more because of what we have? Will we be less if we do not have it? The joy and the grief  will be what they will be, but they are also not quite the heart of the matter.

So it is for any such thing in our common or personal lives. Our lives and all that fills them are given us ‘as if’ they were ours. Through God in Christ they become truly ours to take up, or to put down according to Christ’s call.

It is God who takes what seems to be the mere givenness of things in our lives and makes them the means by which we might discover Christ’s call to us and live our lives in renewed freedom.

May we, then, discover in God and his Christ such a freedom to take up or to put down life’s options in love and desire, in grief and joy, that we may conformed to the likeness of Jesus and be our richest selves in all that is given us.

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Epiphany 2
17/1/2021

1 Samuel 3:1-10
Psalm 139
1 Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

We are currently in the season of Epiphany. The season in the Christian year when we attend to the manifestation of Christ to all people. This is the period of the Christian calendar when we reflect on what it means for God to be made visible in Jesus of Nazareth. What it means that God’s creative works find their centre in Jesus the Christ, from whom radiates the light of the world. This is a season in which we see the God whose pulsating life forms and sustains the world enmeshed within that created order itself. The God who forms us in our mother’s wombs has also been formed in a mother’s womb; the God whose knowledge of us is wonderful and high has now become intimate with poverty and lowliness. It is in this way, in this person — Jesus of Nazareth — that we see God most fully. This is the manifestation, the revelation of God which epiphany invites us to consider.

Just how remarkable this claim about God is can be seen in how long it took the Christian church to truly understand it. Of course in many ways that God becomes human, becomes a part of God’s own creation in Jesus is a mystery which we are still unravelling. But pointedly we can see this in the early debates of the church leading up to the councils of Nicea and Constantinople. There church leaders argued whether or not it would diminish God to be found fully in the created man Jesus of Nazareth. Those who opposed the divinity of Jesus probably saw themselves as the defenders of God’s dignity: surely God, who is above and before all creation, could not bear the indignity of being enmeshed in flesh and blood. God could be represented by a created being, by this one Jesus Christ, as the greatest and clearest manifestations of God in the world; but this could not be God fully found in the flesh.

It is against this that the church emphatically affirmed the full divinity of Jesus in the teaching of the Trinity. Jesus is in fact fully God:

God from God
Light from Light
True God from True God

This is the case even while we confess that he was born of Mary, made human, lived a life marked by history, and died. God is not diminished in freedom or in dignity by being found in the human one Jesus Christ. Rather than making our understanding of Jesus conform to our received assumptions about God, our tradition calls us to always set our assumptions about God alongside Jesus — in whom we see God most fully.

This is important to bear in mind as we consider Paul’s ethical teaching in our reading from the First letter to the Corinthians. I want to suggest that key to Paul’s ethical teaching here is an account of freedom which is bound up with the world of bodies, and our concrete lives in creation. Paul’s ethical teaching cannot be understood without reference back to Jesus, who lived in the messy world of bodies, and food, and flesh.

Paul sets his teaching against what appear to be slogans well known among the Corinthian community:

“All things are lawful for me!”

“But,” says Paul, “not all things are beneficial … and I will not be dominated by anything”

“Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.”

“But,” says Paul, “God will destroy both.”

These slogans, seemingly well-known enough for Paul to quote, represent an account of freedom which Paul seeks to challenge. It’s impossible to get fully behind the text to know exactly what issues are at play in the Corinthian community. Nevertheless, we get the sense that some in the community have taken the teaching that Jesus frees us from being bound by the law to an unhelpful extreme. Rather than calling us to faithfully share in the way of Jesus the proponents of these slogans—

“All things are lawful … Food is meant for the body!”

The proponents of these slogans seem to have taken the freedom Jesus offers us to mean that what we do with our bodies no longer matters. We are free, and this freedom means we can do whatever we desire to do. At first glance, then, the manner in which Paul challenges these slogans seems obvious. Against the permissive, “Yes!” these slogans suggest, old moralistic Paul is heard offering a stern, “No!”

Undoubtedly the Apostle Paul would express rather strong moral convictions were he with us here today — views which might seem strange 2000 years later, and in a part of the world unknown to him. But I want to suggest that what we see in Paul’s ethical vision First Corinthians 6 is richer, and more life affirming than the common moralism for which Paul is usually known.

Paul’s moral lesson here is expressed primarily with the language of bodies — and even the intimate acts of bodies. Within Paul’s broader corpus the language of bodies primarily functions as a metaphor for the community of faith. Most famously later in this same letter: where Paul talks of the church as a body with many parts, each with their own role to play. Here, however, the focus of the body language Paul invokes is not the diversity of the Christian community, but rather its call to united faithfulness.

“The body,” this community, “is meant not for fornication,” that is, intimate unfaithfulness, ” but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” (v13b) As Paul continues, drawing on the language of prostitution, this point is extended. We should think back to Paul’s own scriptures (what we receive as the texts of the Old Testament), and the ways in which prophets also used the language of prostitution as a metaphor for Israel’s unfaithfulness to God. Paul, like the prophets before him, is calling us back to God.

There are layers of meaning operating at the same time here. At one level the body is the church, and Paul is warning the church against unfaithfulness. At another level, our literal bodies — our world of flesh and blood and our encounters with others— is the very stuff with which we are to express our faithfulness: while Paul is using metaphoric language, he is not only using metaphoric language. The reference to the raising of Jesus’ body ties these two layers together: in the fact that God becomes incarnate in flesh and blood we know surely that our bodies matter, that our concrete world of flesh and blood is the domain of God’s redemptive work: our embodied lives are the tools with which we express obedience to God; alongside this, that God breathes new life into the dead flesh of Jesus, opening possibilities for newness beyond what ordinary flesh and blood seems capable, suggests a new order of creation into which we are all, collectively called.

The language of prostitution in this passage, then, may contribute to our views on contemporary sex work. But we should be wary of missing the deeper lesson which is also being taught here. I think we should be wary about too quickly using texts like today’s reading to reinforce the stigma experienced by contemporary sex workers. Regardless of what we might think about sex work today, we should be careful when we read scripture not to avoid how its words challenge us by instead turning the words towards others. Indeed the insights of some contemporary sex work activists can provide helpful insight as we think about what Paul’s teaching might mean for us today.

Setting aside what the Christian tradition might want to say about contemporary sex work, many sex work advocates point out a common pitfall of attempts to reform the sex work industry. Namely, that such attempts are not built upon relationships with people working in the industry, and so do not treat such workers with the dignity which they are due. This is a helpful insight, again, not because it necessarily leads us to a clear view of this industry as a whole, or different aspects of it. But rather because it reminds us that the work of moral discernment, to which the new reality of Christ’s resurrection calls us, must be done in the concrete terms of real relationships, of real communities. It is precisely in this concrete, embodied work that Christ continues to work.

It is this which Paul’s letter teaches us today — and perhaps why it is set along other stories of God’s calling and our human response. That our response to God’s calling is enacted precisely in the circumstances in which we find ourselves: the world of our bodies, of our concrete everyday lives. That our response to God’s calling is discovered through faith-filled communities, filled with the Spirit. That our response to God is not first and foremost found in our ability to be perfect: neither in a divine, “no!”, nor a simplistic, “yes!” to everything. But rather, we respond to God in being willing to learn from each other, holding together as one body, here and now. This is the life-giving message Paul offers us that: that the Lord is for the body: this collective body, and your individual body. This is where God’s redemptive work takes place, this is where the light of Christ shines. In our bodies, beautiful and bold. To the glory of God eternal.

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Baptism of Jesus
10/1/2021

Genesis 1:1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the children of God shouted for joy?”

Book of Job. Chapter 38. Verses 4 and 7.

‘The Tree of Life’, an experimental film by director Terrence Malick, begins with this quotation from scripture. The film itself centres on the death of a child and the reverberating effects of this death on the child’s parents and older brother. To tell this story Malick weaves together images from across all of creation: from the formation of galaxies, surprising acts of mercy from prehistoric creatures, the human anxieties of modern life, and extending to the inevitable destruction of the Earth from the explosion of our sun.

‘The Tree of Life’ suggests that the tragic death of this child can only be understood when it is seen as a tear within the tapestry of reality itself. The singular tragedy at the centre of Malick’s film cannot be treated as an isolated event, but must be allowed to raise fundamental questions about the nature of the world itself.

The film, in the end, poses the question to the characters – and I suspect the viewer as well: is the world fundamentally a world of forgiveness, grace and healing or is everything, in the end, simply the ambivalent march of nature and its forces? More pointedly: by which reality will you respond and live? Will you live out forgiveness and grace in the midst of tragedy, or be consumed by the ever apparent ambivalence of the world?

Something like Malick’s experimental film is what we find in the four readings from Scripture offered to us by the lectionary for today. The central event is the baptism of Jesus. And yet, in order to tell this story the lectionary suggests that this story be set within an ever widening horizon of God’s activity in the world.

The story itself, taken from Mark’s Gospel, already alludes to the Jewish tradition into which Jesus himself was born and raised. The figure of John the Baptiser is cast as a tether between the prophetic hopes of Israel’s history, and the pending arrival of the Messiah, who is said to bring with him the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. To tell the story of Jesus’ baptism requires reaching back into Israel’s history, recalling the hope kindled in the midst of the tragedy of exile. The prophetic hope the figure of John embodies is the hope that God would vindicate God’s people and restore the good order of the world. This hope is echoed in today’s Psalm, as it gives voice to an acclamation of praise and hope.

At the same time we have also heard in the book of Acts a short story from the emerging Christian community in the city of Ephesus. There the community, seeking to be faithful to Jesus, had been baptised as Jesus was baptised: as an act of repentance, in the manner taught by John. Paul encourages these early Christians to see in Jesus not simply an example, but the beginning of a new way which grows out of and continues beyond the history which came before it.

In these references back towards the prophetic history of Israel, and forward to the small community of believers huddled in someone’s house for prayer, we begin to understand how it is that this singular event of Jesus’ baptism is set within the broad tapestry of the world. The full weight of this baptism’s impact can only be felt when we begin to appreciate how it reaches out beyond itself, and stakes a claim about the nature and reality of the world itself.

It is worth being clear about what we are talking about when we talk about Jesus’ baptism at this point. The Basis of Union, the founding theological statement of our church, offers the following:

“[Christ’s] own baptism, [which] was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial, and [which] was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.” (BoU # 7)

In truth these words from the Basis of Union are not so much about Jesus’ baptism – at least not the baptism we are commemorating today. Rather, these words from the Basis help us to distinguish between our own baptism and that of Jesus in the waters of the Jordan. For us, in our baptism we enter the harsher waters of cross and resurrection, where the Spirit of Fire leads us through death and into the new vistas of God’s resurrection. The baptism of Jesus in the Jordan is set quite apart from our own baptism; it is not the primary example from which our own sacred bath is drawn.

Although many were invited into the waters of the Jordan by John the Baptiser, Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan river stands alone, even among these. John, who offered a baptism of repentance, invited people to turn back towards God. For Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, this scarcely makes sense: even John anticipates that Jesus will go far beyond what he has to offer. (For a bit of homework, you might compare this story in Mark to how it is retold in Matthew, where we are told John initially resists baptising Jesus.) There is no need for Jesus, the sinless one, to turn back to the God who is his true Father. Indeed this is precisely what Jesus’ baptism reveals: in rising out of the waters the Spirit descends like a dove, the voice of the God proclaims like a tender Mother who Jesus truly, uniquely is: the Beloved Son, in whom the pleasure of God dwells most fully.

The baptism of Jesus is a free act of obedience: Jesus is not compelled into the waters of baptism because he needs to repent. Jesus’ willingness to enter the waters of John’s baptism is the sure sign that Jesus is already compelled by full obedience to the loving God. Jesus freely demonstrates his willingness to go where God wills to go: deep into the condition of our humanity, sharing with us in the journey back to God – even while he can never be apart from God. It is for this reason that only Jesus could enter the waters of the Jordan as he does. Jesus, the beloved Son, could never be apart from the Father whose pleasure dwells upon him, and because of this his baptism by John can be nothing other than a free act of love, a free act of self-giving, a free act of coming towards us to journey with us back to God.

This is the singular event we commemorate today, the unique act that only God in Jesus Christ could do. And because of this act, because of this free movement towards us to bring us back to God, we see more fully the nature of God. Here we cannot be content with a narrow focus on a Rabbi’s ministry beginning in a river. We must also head the words from the full sweep of scripture, the full sweep of history: the prophetic hope of Israel beginning to be realised, the story of those early communities gathered in prayer, the story of us here and wherever we are. All of this must be told in order to understand what the baptism of Jesus means: that God has come in Jesus the Christ to enter into our human state, not only to call us, but to journey with us back towards the beloved Father.

It is only right that the full reach of this act of divine love and solidarity invokes the deep story of creation from the very beginning. Here our reading from Genesis 1 must finally come into view – at the end, and yet also at a beginning. The God who brings the world into being by speaking light has come into the world to journey with us back to the light. I say here deliberately the God who “brings,” the God who everyday renews the light and life, hope and love of the world comes into this world to re-establish again and again this light and love. This is what the baptism of Jesus is about: it is the anchor of God’s free movement towards us, to call us back to light and life, hope and love. God once and for all came into the world to repair the tear in the tapestry of love which good creation ought to be. This is what is made visible when we recall Jesus’ baptism in the waters of the Jordan: the heavens open and the pleasure of God is proclaimed to dwell in the Beloved Son, so that this good pleasure might again be recalled as God’s good gift to the whole world. This is a story that cannot be told without reference back to the very beginning, to the very foundations of the world: not as a statement of history, but as a proclamation of the ongoing, ever new pulsating creative life of God for the world. God who speaks light into an unlit world, hope into the midst of despair, love into the midst of hate, enters into our humanity through baptismal waters.

We must again ask the question which Job offered as we began:

“Where were you when God laid the foundations of the Earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the children of God shouted for joy?”

By the rivers of the Jordan, when God’s free love was offered in solidarity with our humanity. In exile when God’s people yearned for justice. In small houses gathered for prayer. In North Melbourne, and in our homes, gathering to worship.

Where were we when God laid the foundations of the Earth?

We are here. We are in this world which is renewed daily with light and love, even against all chaos and resistance. Even as the light seems to fade and evening seems to come we proclaim the new beginning of morning. We proclaim the shining light and self-giving love of God, which relentlessly comes to us: journeying with us back to life and hope. This is what the singular event of Jesus’ baptism shows to us: that God is for us, loves, yearns to weave us into the tapestry of love which the world ought to be.

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Christmas 2
3/1/2021

Ephesians 1:3-14
Psalm 147
John 1:6-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

‘No-one has ever seen God; the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known’ (John 1:18)

Arguably there is no more crucial a text for our day than this. Why do I say that? Because it begins by stating the conviction shared by an increasing number of our contemporaries. Convinced that “No-one has ever seen God”, inevitably leads them to their next requirement: “so, prove God to me”. And what they have in mind as demonstration will invariably conjure up God in the shape of a monarchical “Zeus”.

Proof, of course, is a language mistake with regard to God. What this text offers instead is a test. After the negative: “No-one has ever seen God”, then the positive: the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known’.

Let me come at it in a more abstract, even if, I hope, an interesting way. Our text takes the form of what is called a chiasmus. A chiasmus comes from the Greek alphabet letter X. We are familiar in everyday speech with a chiasmus. One example is the observation that: ‘we eat to live, not live to eat’ – most of us are likely to agree with a statement like this, except those, of course, for whom the weekly Good Food section in The Age is sacred scripture.

“We eat to live not live to eat” is a chiasmus: ab::ba – not to be confused with a Swedish singing quartet. Our text also unfolds in this abstract way as a chiasmus. It goes like this: first, a problem in the negative: “No-one has ever seen God”. Then a distinctive Son/Father relationship is offered as a resolution of the problem. After which, the positive conclusion follows: God is now known.

I can sense your delight: why has no-one ever told me about a chiasmus before!

Now, for the gospel of John, we are far from finished with this chiasmus. For the next 20 chapters following this prologue declaration, the entire drama of salvation will unfold as the way of “making known” this Father/Son relationship. For the next six months, every Sunday will take shape around this unveiling, including especially Trinity Sunday. To this end, the drama itself will culminate in a decisive disclosure: the incognito Christ will appear to Mary in the garden. Incognito, because at first she presumes that he is a gardener. The crucial revelatory moment only comes when she hears Jesus speak her name: Mary. Names, of course, offer recognition, so the naming now becomes mutual:

‘Do not hold me… but go to my brothers and say to them:

‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. Mary has a name – and now God has a name filled with content.

The disclosure of this name to Mary now leads to a concluding missionary chiasmus – which echoes the chiasmus at the beginning of the Gospel: “Go and say….: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. And the point? The previously “unknown” God of the first chiasmus comes out of hiding – and God is known.

Can we now see why all this is so important today? Because it begins with the mantra of the agnostic and atheist: that ‘no-one has ever seen God’. But then it offers the drama of salvation by way of solution with its revelation of the unique language of the Gospel, Son/Father, and all that that has entailed. With this conclusion, the problem is resolved, and a face is sufficiently drawn in a mutual knowing of Father and Son in what we call Holy Spirit. Only now is God  recognised and named. In other words: God is now possible – not as a beginning – but as a warranted conclusion.

If God comes as a conclusion, and not a presupposition, then this is surely good news for a culture which assumes that “you first have to believe in God to be a Christian”. To which comes the retort: “I don’t believe in God”, which obviously closes off any further conversation – about anything else of substance really.

This text overturns all the assumptions of the culture. It demonstrates that God appears as a conclusion to a history. God is not a prescribed formal presupposition.

There is nothing new about this: it has been true from the beginning. Abraham, for example, left Ur of the Chaldees acting, we might say, not because of a solid presupposition, but on a hunch – that in that going Yahweh would take shape for the people as a blessing to all the nations of the world. And so, it proved. So, too, for Moses in the Egyptian exodus: the going confirms the reality of the initiating divine promise in the problematic journey via flood and desert to an unanticipated land ‘flowing with milk and honey’.

It is hard to envisage anything more radical than our chiasmus to subvert the hackneyed refrains of atheists, that God is nothing more than ‘an imaginary friend’, a figment of religious imagination, an unconvincing pre-supposition.

On the contrary, this text brings God out of hiding – who would have thought to look for God on the breast of Mary, God at a carpenter’s bench, God on a fisherman’s boat, God on a cross?

But just here today we encounter a major cultural dilemma. Access to this gift of God’s coming to expression as Father and Son has now become a problem not experienced by previous generations: there is a cultural antipathy to presumed patriarchal language, and a refusal to call God “Father”, just as Jesus has to be renamed as “Child” rather than Son. To speak of God as “Father”, it is said, and Jesus as “Son”, is simply a human patriarchal projection, now well and truly passé.

But God addressed by our text as ‘Father’ has nothing to do with the patriarchal language of the surrounding culture of the day, and certainly not for all subsequent patriarchal cultures.  It is of the first importance to understand that the God of our text is a God beyond all patriarchy, and so is beyond all matriarchy as well. Why? Because Yahweh has no consort. Unlike every other then-competing male and female deity, Yahweh is unique in having no feminine partner. For this reason, the God of Jesus is a God beyond gender. This means that if we take this text seriously, then we encounter the name “Father” as the conclusion of an unfolding drama. It is not a patriarchal imposition, now outmoded.

The reason why God is ‘Father’ is because he is the Son’s originating vocational source. This means that if there were no Son, there would be no Father. And because the Son’s Father has become our Father, therefore the Son’s God, has become our God.

“Do not hold me, but go to my followers and say: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God’. With this en-fleshed chiasmus, the radical answer to the problem posed at the beginning has come true:

‘No-one has ever seen God: The Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known.’

Here, indeed, is surely a text for our times, not to speak of a mandate for the contemporary mission of the Church. But first, we have to tell the atheists: we agree with you: “No-one has ever seen God”. And then, we show them the Trinity!

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Christmas 1
27/12/2020

Galatians 4:4-7
Psalm 147
Luke 2:22-40

In a sentence
We are truly ourselves in the time we have when we receive it as a gift from God

In the next few days, our calendars will mark ‘New Year’s Day’ – that most gloriously pagan of the various holydays we mark throughout a year.

The paganism here is in the linking of human possibilities to the patterns of the natural order. In this understanding, our experience of the world and our opportunities within it are a function of how the world moves. The western festival of New Year takes its energy from the northern hemisphere’s experience at this time of the year. The long winter has historically been a period of hardship and scarcity which presented a major threat to survival. With the passing of the winter solstice comes the increase of daylight, sunshine, and the return to production of food for the coming year. The New Year festival celebrates that we have survived another ‘death’ – another winter – and look forward to the coming abundance, encouraging the gods to keep the wheels turning so that we might not be stuck in seasonal or spiritual winters. In this way of thinking, our lives are subject to a law of cycles and natural processes.

While modern technology goes a long way to disconnecting us from the patterns of the seasons, we retain today a significant intuition that there is at least the possibility of change which comes with the end of one year and the start of a new one. Most modern people would be aghast at the suggestion that they should order their lives according to the astrology sections of the tabloid media, yet our thoughts about the New Year are not far removed from just this. As the earth swings once more through the ‘same’ space it occupied 365¼ days ago, we pause to reflect and to utter the closest things to secular prayer we can: a wish for others that they have a ‘Happy New Year’ and a few New Year’s resolutions prayed not to the gods but to ourselves.

What we have heard in our brief reading today from Paul’s letter to the Galatians contradicts both old paganism and our sentimental retention of a few of its vestiges in our New Year celebrations. When it comes to the question of our being subject to time, Paul proposes an understanding very different from the cyclic filling and emptying which seizes our imagination so strongly at this time of the year. For Paul, the fullness of time is not a cyclic recurrence but a singular event: ‘when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law…’ Time is filled not in an eternal return of filling after emptying but in a single fullness.

And yet it is also the biblical witness that this singular event is not located where we might most expect – as an end-of-time fulfilment of all things. The distinction is sometimes drawn between the cyclic time of general human religious imagination and the directional time of the biblical imagination, but this doesn’t quite reflect the biblical witness. The end of all things to which Jewish apocalyptic thought looked gives way to Jesus himself now being the end – the goal of all things – and this not when the world’s final tick has tocked but in the very midst of history.

Biblical time does not, then, march on towards a final arrival of God, as if the later we are born, the greater the chance that we will be alive in the final apocalypse. Biblical time, rather, revolves around a central moment. It is not where the hands on the clock point which matters so much as that they are fixed at a central point around which they move. Every time, then, is equally close to God’s filling of all time with Jesus, just as every hour, minute and second on a clock is the same distance from the axis around which the hands move. If it is necessary that our clocks and seasons go around and around, every moment in each season is nevertheless hinged upon God in Jesus at the centre of the clock face.

God is present to every moment, then, not because God is stretchy enough to extend the whole length of time’s arrow, stretching from creation to Jesus to us here and now. God is present to every moment because it is only from the axis of God that we can truly know the time in the first place – what kind of time it is we live in.

We might, then, dare to rework Paul a little bit here: not so much ‘when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law…’ but ‘the fullness of time has come: God has sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law’. In this way not only does all time look forward to the birth of Jesus – Paul’s fullness of time ‘had’ come – but all time looks back to the birth of Jesus: the fullness of time ‘has’ come.

For all the possibilities we think the New Year brings, our sense that we have here a new beginning (again!) reveals how we are trapped by those things which build up with the old, unrolling year and cause us to yearn for the New Year, with the new possibilities it seems to promise, as if hope comes with warmer days or the accumulated passage of time.

For Paul, however, the time is not a matter of past and future – of old and new – but a matter of enslavement and freedom. The enslaved soul notices only the numbers on the clock, wanting it to be one time rather than another. The free soul takes each moment as an extension of God into her own time and space. She knows the freedom which comes from receiving her time directly from God: now is the time God meets her, not a moment ago, not in the next moment. There was not more of God or of her a year ago, and there will not be more in a year’s time.

All time is marked by God: this is the meaning of redemption. In this God’s timing, today is what tomorrow will be, and also the day after that: not the next day to which we have been given but the next day which God has given to us – redeemed and renewed, a free space in which God meets us to see what we will do with it. Imagine what tomorrow might be if it were not merely what today seems to demand that tomorrow be. This is the freedom of the children of this God: every day, new, with God.

By the grace of God, may the newness of the coming year be found in that we are again blessed with the gift of the Spirit of Jesus his Son, that we might know ourselves again as his children, that in the freedom of God himself we might discover the time of our lives. Amen.

(A much re-worked re‑presentation of a sermon
preached at MtE on December 28, 2014)

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Christmas Day
25/12/2020

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Luke 2:1-20

In a sentence
The defining ‘this’ which is the context of our lives is not what is now happening to us but Jesus himself: we are all in him together

In this most unexpected of years, we have worked up a full oratorio of choruses and chants around the theme of Covid-19. One of the most happily sung among these has been, ‘We’re all in this together’.

By this refrain we remind each other that a virus is indiscriminate, so that we can’t tell who will be next. For it not to be me who is next, I have to act so that you are not next. ‘We’re all in this together’ means that we must cooperate ‘to get through it’. The good sense in this is obvious enough to most of us, and not particularly surprising.

Perhaps less obvious is that we don’t usually tell ourselves, ‘We are all in this together’. Most of the time, we are not ‘in this together’; most of the time we don’t recognise much we have in common ‘to get through’. We are usually – at least on the larger social scale – not ‘in this together’ but rather competing against each other. We compete for university placements, for partners, for jobs, for parking spaces. Colonists compete with indigenous peoples. New refugees compete with old refugees. Cities compete with rural communities. Nations compete with nations. The poor compete with the slightly less poor. Not so long ago, competition was especially fierce around toilet paper, which was unexpectedly revealed to be one of the previously unrecognised cornerstones of modern society. The church, of course, is scarcely immune to this infection.

Competition is not quite everywhere, of course. There’s a little less of it between friends and lovers and within the household, and we are sometimes startled by acts of kindness outside those safety zones. Yet, like our vulnerability to a virus, we are all also nevertheless continually subject to the struggle of all against all (Hobbes, Leviathan).

More insidiously than with a virus, however, we are not merely subject to competition; we also participate in it. A better strategy – or perhaps just the good fortune of having won more often before – sees me step up to bid the highest at the auction for my new home. Getting up earlier sees me at the front of the line on the Boxing Day sales, like gladiators who’ve trained hard to earn a longer sword or wider net. If I work harder, I might pick more bulls than bears, winning more from the losses of others.

Curiously, the virus has made the well-being of the usual winners dependent upon the well-being of the typical losers. Universal cooperation has displaced competition for a while. But competition again lurks around the corner: Who has the best vaccine? And who will pay for it? Who should get it first? And is it, perhaps, best, if others have it first, ‘just in case’? Calculation and strategy in the game of life, all oriented towards not losing.

Outside of the immediate space of Covid-19 and similar ‘war footings’, we are not much ‘in this together’ because, in a world of winners and losers, what you are ‘in’ can be very different from what I am ‘in’. The only thing we are really in together is the competition itself and those social, political and legal conventions which legitimate how society operates and so are powerless to alter it.

If this account sounds rather pessimistic, it matters today in this place because our not being ‘all in this together’ is scarcely new While, in some respects, Augustus, Quirinius, Joseph and Mary, and Rome, Syria, and Bethlehem are thousand of years and miles away, we still recognise many aspects of their stories. An imperial census is an emperor in competition with his people. To hear that ‘there was no room in the inn’ is to know that Joseph and Mary were in that race but lost. There is nothing new under the sun.

In the midst of all that is ‘the child’, strangely anonymous among the names of other persons and places around him. We have learned what his name will be (1.31) but he is yet to receive it (2.21). All around this child, of course, swirls the language of salvation but this also is strange to us today, for what is it from which we would be saved – from which we would all be saved? Do winners need to be saved? To have won is to imagine that God’s kingdom has already come. If around this child there were a universally relevant message of salvation, it would offer salvation from something to which we are all subject. The virus is an obvious candidate but we don’t need a god to do what will probably happen with time anyway.

A more likely thing from which we might be saved at Christmas is the struggle of all against all which creates winners and losers. Salvation is salvation from such things as this. It is not that competition does not touch Jesus. The religious authorities see in him a serious opponent. The poor jostle for access to his healing hand and his disciples calculate for positions of honour in his kingdom or for time to sit at his feet. His family competes with the crowds for his attention. Even on the cross, those with whom he is crucified compete for his attention.

Yet, for all of this, Jesus is himself no competitor. His success does not hinge on another’s failure. He is ‘in this together’ with us, but does not contribute to the struggle even as he is subject to it. Of itself, this might be a remarkable moral achievement but the morality is not the point. It is good for Jesus if he has lived fully without taking advantage of others but bad for us if we are, therefore, to achieve the same.

We sometimes speak about the ‘God with us’ of Christmas in this way – as if God comes to show us the way, and we are to follow. This is a little better than the account of a God who comes among us as a kind of comforter, more or less to suffer with us, but not much better. Certainly, salvation is not something more for us to do.

We get to something more helpful if we take up again the Covid chorus, ‘We’re all in this together’ but sing it now with a very different meaning. Now the ‘this’ is not some passing condition like the health crisis or the next ‘affects everybody’ moment but Jesus himself: ‘we are all in this – this one – together.

Jesus is now not an answer to whatever question we happen at the moment to think is the most important. Rather, Jesus now poses a question about our fundamental situation: What is the context which truly defines us? What is our true condition?

The answer of Christmas – of the gospel itself – is that we are most ‘in’ Jesus himself, and not this or that passing experience, however pressing, painful or exciting it may be. It often does not feel this way. Pain and excitement are highly distracting. In each case, we mistake what hurts us or excites us as immediate – as direct, as sheer us-and-it.

But if our true context is not what is happening in front of us but all these things in God-in-Jesus, then he becomes something like an underlying harmony to everything which happens. Those we love – and sometimes lose – are not ‘immediately’ ours, not ‘directly’ ours. They are mediated by Christ, they are ‘in’ Christ, just as we are. If this is true, they are never solely ours because they belonged first to Jesus, and they are never lost to us because they remain in him, as we do.

It is so with all things. Jesus is given as the theme which threads through and holds together every key, every melody and discord. ‘We are all in this together’ locates us not in some particular time or place, some particular condition or crisis. The ‘this’ is Jesus himself: we are all in this one together.

This is to say that what happens to him is what happens to us. What happens to Jesus is God himself – ever calling, ever-present, ever restoring. Christmas is not so much a divine rescue mission as a radical clarification of who and where we are: children of God in Jesus, from God and towards God.

To believe this is to be freed from the drive to compete for as much life as we can win. And it is to be opened up to one another and to God, in all things, in thanksgiving and praise.

May such openness and praise be ours today, and always.