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Pentecost 24
15/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
Psalm 123
Matthew 25:14-30

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In a sentence
The ‘talent’ the church is given to exercise is grace, which is to yield grace-fullness in us

As over the last couple of weeks, so also today the basic lesson of our gospel reading is, ‘Be prepared’. The suggestion is that God has in some way been absent and will return unexpectedly, and with God’s return comes the day of reckoning, or judgement. The three slaves seem to represent our two basic options while the master is away – to be fruitful with what is left to us, or not to be fruitful.

Once again, then, a moral understanding of the parable is possible. Believers are called to the living of a good life. Where we have an abundance, we are to share. Where there is despair, we are to be sources of hope. Where there is doubt we are to bring faith; where there is hatred, love; where there is injury, we are to bring pardon. We are, then, to give away more, and to receive more, in God’s special economy of grace.

But those who are now accustomed to hearing my sermons will have noticed that I usually acknowledge and then set aside the moral dimensions of readings like this one. This is not because the moral dimensions are unimportant, but because the basic moral compass of the Scriptures is not usually that much different from the moral compass of any society. What the Scriptures value in generosity, honesty, forgiveness, kindness, gentleness, self-control and so on, are also valued in the wider society.

This is to say that, for the most part, we already know what is required of us morally – whether we are believers or not. ‘Don’t waste your talent’ is what the footy coach or the music teacher says to a gifted but lazy student, as much as God might say it so a distracted community of faith. Labouring the point in preaching would be too much a waste of an opportunity. For while anyone can read the parable in this way, the community of faith which gathers to read it is not ‘anyone’. We are Christians. This is not simply Jesus the wonderful teacher we hear addressing us in this parable, but Jesus the wonder – the Jesus who has died, who is risen, and who will come again as the means of the grace of God to us. Jesus is the one who makes sense for us of the kingdom of God, who embodies in his own experience our judgement by God, and so who is the key to our understanding of how we stand before God.

This requires another way of hearing these parables. And so, last week we heard the call to be ready but also saw that Jesus himself can be seen to be the wise bridesmaid who awaits the coming of the bridegroom, and can be seen even as the oil given to us to burn as we await the approach of God. This is what we might call a christological reading, which yields a very difficult result from the important but more narrowly moral reading. A christological reading is not a ‘natural’ or ‘ordinary’ reading; it is more like an allegory of an allegory. We can read these texts in this way because, with the coming of Jesus in death and resurrection, they cease to be texts like others – simple moral teaching – and become texts about Christ himself – a revealing of the means of grace.

So, what does a christological reading of this parable of the three servants look like? It helps to begin by noting a problem in translation. The translation of the central word we have heard this morning is ‘talent’. The Greek word is in fact ‘talanton’, and is simply transliterated into English. The original meaning, however, was not our contemporary sense of ‘skills’ or ‘gifts’ or ‘abilities’, but ‘a thing weighed’ and, by extension, a quantity of money (silver or gold being weighed out to the required amount). Our modern translation, then, as the ‘parable of the talents’, can distract us by suggesting that the parable is about what we know today to be ‘talents’. The parable, however, only suggests that each of the slaves is given a measure of something with which they are then to do something more. A moral reading considers that something to be our gifts and abilities, our intellect or our money, or whatever it seems that we have in some special measure.

But if we read this as the church, so that the parable is now specifically about believers, the question is: What is the specific ‘talent’ the church has? What is it which is given to us in some special measure? To this it must be answered: the gospel of the grace of God in Jesus Christ; or the intimate and childlike knowledge of God as Father, as Jesus himself knew God; or the gift of the Holy Spirit – all different ways of saying the same thing. And now the parable becomes something quite different from a simple reading about using our gifts and abilities wisely. Now it asks – in what measure have you been given grace, and what have you done specifically with this grace?

One possible reading of this parable, given its context of polemic between Jesus and the Pharisees and the way in which Jesus has charged the Pharisees with hypocrisy in various ways, is to see the Pharisees (and the religious establishment in general) as figured in the person of the third slave. That is, the grace which has been given them has yielded nothing – recall the charge Jesus makes that the Pharisees have received and rightly taught the law given to Moses, but have not themselves yielded the appropriate fruit of the grace in the gift of the law – humility and servanthood, as distinct from the self-exaltation which he names in their practice of righteousness (Matthew 23.1-12). The Pharisees’ response to God’s grace is contrasted in Matthew’s gospel with the response of others to grace – the meek, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness (see Matthew 5.1-13). Those who would seem to be outside the reach of God have, because of that distance, received a greater abundance of grace and, Jesus suggests, have yielded even more grace in their now richly graced lives. This is in contrast to those who already had ‘enough’ of the grace of God and yet who have done nothing with it. They have not understood what they have been given and so neither recognise the gift of God or what it should yield when they receive it.

Now, if we don’t read these parables only as moral encouragement, we also don’t read them as history lessons. The story of Jesus and the Pharisees, and Jesus’ charges against the Pharisees, are only important if their story is also our story. As Gentiles, we are the first two slaves, given a particular abundance of grace, which yielded the further grace we see as the rise of the church with its gospel of God’s love for all. But, as now the religious establishment, we are also the third slave, prone to self-satisfaction, prone to mistake what is simply given as in fact a right, prone to mistake our election as God’s people as a sign of our specialness or righteousness.

It is to these dangers that the parable speaks: the talent you have is the grace which is Jesus Christ. In what way is that grace yielding grace in your lives? In what ways do we model the forgiveness which we claim is ours in Christ? In what ways is the abundance which is God’s for us reflected in our relationships with each other? These are rather abstract questions, but they will soon become very concrete for us here at Mark the Evangelist as we begin to ask about our property and our mission: what precisely have we been given, what its value is, and what might we be able to do with that? To think about these things as ‘grace to become yet more grace’ might free us up to imagine even greater possibilities than might otherwise have been the case.

We return here, in a sense, to the moral question, yet now it is not simply about doing the right thing but about the share we have in God’s work of grace. For we do not gather for worship to declare that we are good, but to be ‘made’ good by the gift of God’s grace, and then to take up a share in that work of making good in God’s ‘absence’. The proof of our right standing before God is not moral righteousness but that special kind of righteousness which comes with being adopted as the children of God, and then growing into our own particular God-likeness. This righteousness is not earned, it is given, and it is not then a possession but a thing to be used, a thing to affect the world, a thing to change relationships.

To receive grace is to become grace‑full – to become ‘gracing’ towards others; we might recall here the parable of the unforgiving servant – himself being forgiven an enormous debt but unable to forgive a friend a very small amount (Matthew 18.21-35). The grace of God is not ours it if does not make us the grace of God, make us those who do what God does, in such a way that it would be as if God were not ‘absent’ at all, as the parable of the master who goes abroad suggests.

What might the world – or even the just the church itself – be like if it did not think to wonder at the absence of God because God’s people were sufficient grace that God’s absence was not noted?

To be the people of God is to do as God does, to become a means of grace to each other and to the world around us. This is the proof (or the test) of our righteousness: whether or not it yields righteousness in others, the very thing God has given us.

By the grace of God, may we be found to pass that test in the day of reckoning, that the words ‘well done, good and faithful servant’ may be heard by our ears, and we may enter into the joy of God.

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Pentecost 23
8/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
Psalm 78:1-7
Matthew 25:1-13

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In a sentence
When God comes, it is to put to death death’s fearful hold on us and set us free for life

 

In the gospel today we hear an allegory of the arrival of God and the day of judgement. The bridegroom comes to collect his bride. The bridesmaids wait for him but he is delayed and some of them miss him because they are unprepared for the wait. The lesson is clear: ‘Be prepared, for you know neither the day nor the hour’ of God’s coming. Yet, whereas Jesus himself and certainly his early followers clearly expected an arrival of God somewhat analogous to the arrival of the bridegroom in the parable, we today have been waiting long enough now that we no longer expect God to arrive in this way.

We have not, however, quite dismissed the usefulness of parables like this one. For there is something else which approaches undeniably and unavoidably, and in a way quite like God’s approach. This thing is our biological death. As with the approach of God in the parable, so with our death: it is inevitable, but we know neither the day nor the hour (except, perhaps, in some cases of suicide). We can lay down certain probabilities at certain times, of course, but the angel of death is fickle and we just don’t know when she is going to come. Given that today God doesn’t seem likely to arrive like the bridegroom, but death does, there is an almost universal tendency in popular Christian thinking to equate our deaths with the moment of God’s judgement, such that in the instant that we fade from life here we appear before the throne of God for judgement. Whereas in the parable it is God who is moving, we are now the ones moving; by dying, we are brought to the day of judgement. Our parable then becomes a source of the familiar ‘hit-by-a-bus’ approach to evangelism: repent and believe, not because God is about to return but because you might be run over on the way home, and then have to face God, for it is when you die that God finally ‘gets’ you, when God unexpectedly but undeniably arrives in your life.

While we must reject this attempt to scare people into the fold, there is some truth in the idea that God and death come at the same moment. Yet it is not that God arrives with judgement when death comes. Rather, it is the other way around: when God arrives, death comes with him. This might seem surprising, for one thing ‘religion’ is supposed to be interested in is ‘life after death’, whether resurrection or re-incarnation. That is, ‘religion’ is held to equate an interest in God with the overcoming of death.

But there are two senses in which the arrival of God brings death.

The first sense is that, when God comes as God, when God comes as creator or, we might also say, when God reigns in our lives, we become truly the creatures we were intended to be. The simplest way of speaking of this is to say that we become truly God’s creatures when we acknowledge and live with God as creator. The important point here for our theme of death is that what distinguishes the divine creator and his creatures is mortality. Creatures ‘run out’ in a way that the creator does not. When God is truly God, we are truly mortal. So the coming of God is the coming of mortality.

Of course, we will die whether or not we acknowledge God. We have to say further, then, that when God comes God brings a revelation of our true mortality and a reconciliation to it: we are only creatures and not gods, and that’s OK.

The first sense in which we die when God comes is, then, that God’s presence makes us our true selves, which includes our mortality.

To fill this out, we have to turn to the second sense in which God’s arrival brings death. This has to do with the fact that the coming of God is not simply the arrival of an absent friend, but the arrival of the moment of judgement. This judgement is both a measuring and a setting right of what is found to be wrong. The judgement finds that we don’t much care simply to be creatures; mortality is painful, and we go to great lengths to keep it at bay, to deny this aspect of our true being. These lengths are the extent of our failures to love and serve. ‘Sin’ is the catch-all term for what we do to avoid death and the limitedness of being human.

These two senses in which God’s approach brings death are not limited to the moment of our biological death. We can become more creaturely and less constrained by death before we die, if it is the case that God has already approached us, and continues to.

And it is in the death of Jesus that we believe that God has come to us. Jesus’ life – including the way he died – was a kind of ‘death to death’ – a dying to the power which death exercises over most of us, in fear. Jesus’ life, then was the living of truly human, truly creaturely life. Of course, Jesus dies the death of any creature; one way or another he was always going to die if he was truly one of us. But he lives and dies without the fear of death. He lives in such a way as to deny death’s power over him, a power which robs the rest of us of our true freedom and our true humanity.

What might our lives look like if we did not fear rejection, being unsafe, dying young? Jesus lived reconciled to his humanity, seeing God and not his impending death as the thing to be feared. The way he lived, and so the way he died, denied death its fearful hold on us. In him, then, we have seen a perfected human life. ‘Perfection’ is now not ‘doing the right thing’ – in the sense of moralist achievement. Rather, perfection is living to the very end under God’s reign – which blesses our mortality – and not under the shadow of death, which curses it.

Returning to our parable of the coming of the bridegroom, Jesus is now himself the wise bridesmaid who properly awaits the groom’s arrival. He is the one who knows what is required, what the wait will be like, is prepared and so endures to the joyful moment when God comes.

The meaning of the parable, then, is not merely that we must – by ourselves – wait for the coming of God. Jesus is, rather, how we are to wait: looking not to our own efforts and securing our own survival but receiving the achievement of Jesus as our own. Jesus himself is the reserve of oil we are to burn as we await the approach of God and, with God, the fulfilment of our true selves.

To wait by the light of Jesus is to allow our experience of death to become like his by allowing our experience of God to become like his. This is just what we symbolise in our baptism – that what Jesus has endured and achieved is offered in God’s grace also to us. As he died, so do we die in our baptism that, as he now lives, so might we. As unprepared, imperfect and worthy of condemnation as we often might be, we are not left in the dark if Jesus himself is the inexhaustible fuel which burns in our lamps.

There is a moral dimension to the parable – that we are vigilant during the dark hours, that we are living in such a way that corresponds to the life of Jesus himself. Fearlessness in the face of death is the source of all acts of kindness and justice, advocacy and generosity. For such things call us to make a sacrifice of ourselves which we now can make because, by the grace of God, we are lamps filled with the oil which is Jesus, oil which never runs out.

Let us, then, seek this oil that we might keep burning, the light of Christ, and give thanks to God for the gift of such light and life.

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Pentecost 22
1/11/2020

1 Thessalonians 2:9-13
Psalm 34:1-10, 22
Matthew 23:1-12

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In a sentence
Humility is letting go of self-righteousness and allowing that, whatever good we might do, our place with God is already guaranteed

Given how the Pharisees are portrayed in the gospels (however fair that might have been) it is perhaps surprising that Jesus here commends to us their teaching: they are the contemporary mouthpiece of Moses and so, as the teachers of the law of God, they are to be heard and respected.

At the same time, Jesus charges that they don’t practice what they preach. This is not that simple hypocrisy that says one thing and does something else – teaching not to steal, but themselves stealing. Any particular Pharisee might have failed in this way but, as a group, they were upright and moral people and, for the most, beyond reproach when it came to doing the ‘right’ thing.

Jesus criticises them, rather, for their exaltation of themselves – their interest in being seen to have observed the law, and this in pursuit of the reward of high status in their community.

What is at stake here is the purpose of the law. Jesus accuses the Pharisees of acting as if the purpose of the law was to secure a strong standing before others and before God. Whereas it is usually the case in human society that those who achieve great things are honoured for their greatness, Jesus inverts the whole thing: ‘the greatest among you will be your servant’. The law is not set aside here but it teaches now a radical humility. What the properly righteous know in their observance of the law is not social exaltation but servanthood, a humbling of self before God and others.

And yet it is not as simple as the simple saying of it might suggest. Matthew finishes off this teaching from Jesus with a summary which indicates what can be expected: ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’ In this seemingly straightforward statement is revealed the real difficulty of Jesus’ teaching here – the problem of humility being linked to an exaltation.

If, as the gospels presume, our basic human desire is for a share in the peace and freedom of the kingdom of God, then it is very difficult not hear Jesus advising us to seek to be humble in order that we may enter God’s kingdom.

To see the problem here we might ask ourselves the question, Am I humble enough? To answer the question ‘Yes’ is to make the Pharisees’ mistake, holding that I have achieved true or sufficient humility to have ‘earned’ God’s reward. That being the case, I know that I must answer this question, ‘No’, for surely to say No is more humble than to say Yes.

But this won’t help me either, for what I am now trying to do is manipulate the teaching of Jesus. Clearly, it is ‘more’ humble to deny my humility, and by this means I might imagine that I can fool God into exalting me. Just as there are many people who strive after great things in order to be noticed and exalted in the eyes of others or even of God, there are many who adopt the posture of a ‘servant’ because it can also be a very effective way of securing control over a certain part of the world, a way of proving to us, to others and to God our worthiness of God’s ‘gift’.

This dynamic leads to the uncomfortable conclusion that there is no standing before God on the basis of choosing to be great or choosing to be humble. Serving others in genuine humility is both absolutely required and quite impossible, once we’ve actually heard this teaching of Jesus and turned it into just another law – being humble gets us right with God.

The problem here is the temptation to self-righteousness. Whenever I ask the question of myself, Am I ‘good enough’, or whenever we defend someone else with the argument that they are ‘good enough’, we fall into the deep moralism which consistently confounds our ability to hear the gospel. The call to be good is, of course, loud and clear; there is no softening of the demands of the law. The Pharisees and the scribes sit in the place of Moses and the commands of God they teach are good and right. Do these things!

But the temptation to assess myself or others as ‘good enough’ is almost irresistible, and it is this which Jesus challenges here.

Even if we who believe can find a way to resist it on our part, many of us will baulk when it comes to those we love but who do not believe. We tell ourselves that surely they are good enough, humble enough. For all our talk about justification by grace through faith, and not by our good works, when push comes to shove we take moral offence and fall back on just these good works: surely they – and we also mean surely we – are good enough for God to accept us.

But now we see how talk of grace contradicts humility as a ‘method’; humility does not earn points with God but must be tied up with grace, with the gift of God.

Humility is not a moral method; it is an openness to God’s gift. While still striving to live rightly, humility releases us from anxiety about social conformity, from being seen to be right. Humility declares that God loves me apart from what I do, and it asks you to love me in the same way.

This is very hard. It is difficult to let go of what others think because what others think is a major engine to how communities operate. It is in our personal lives, in our news reports and in our politics.

The gospel, then, reveals what we do not want to hear: that we are all Pharisees, in the sense that Jesus criticises. We need to relax a bit in our critique of those upright and moral men who clashed with Jesus so long ago because the reason we still listen to those stories today is that they are our stories – it is Jesus’ criticism of us we have heard today.

The gospel concerns the judgement of God: guilty of self-righteousness, of self-satisfaction, seen from the perspective of grace already received. The gospel does not distinguish between good and bad, between Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or atheists. It distinguishes, on the one hand, the self-righteous – the children of Adam who presume to judge what is good and what is bad (themselves included) – from, on the other hand, those who receive their righteousness as a gift: those Jesus would make his sisters and brothers, the communion of saints.

Let us indeed seek to live upright, righteous, God-honouring lives, and call others to do the same: do justice, love mercy.

But let this be done in humility, and for humility’s sake: the humility which does not presume to know about our own righteousness but which reflects that God already loves and accepts us, and will love and accept those we live with and serve.

Then we will be living the law, serving our neighbour, and honouring the God who calls us to just such a life and makes that life possible: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly within the grace of God.

To this God be all glory and honour, now and forever. Amen.

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Pentecost 21
25/10/2020

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8
Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17
Matthew 22:34-46

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In a sentence
Our love of each other is always coloured by the influence of a ‘higher power’ which tells us what love is; the question then is only whether that power gives the fullest of life to us and to all.

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind … You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.

With these two commandments Jesus summarises ‘all the law and the prophets’, and so indicates what it means to be a human being from a Jewish – or Christian – perspective: to be human is to love God, and to love those around us.

Jesus addresses, then, not only ‘religious’ people but all who consider themselves ‘human’. And so at this point we can’t hear him if we consider ourselves non-religious, and we will likely mishear him if we consider ourselves religious. For we don’t quite know what being a loving human person has to do with a relationship with God.

The dual love command is heard by many to be an optional religious command (love God) joined to a universal, non-optional secular one (love each other). Those who don’t believe in God – and many who do – hold that we don’t need God to be good to others. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to show that God might make no difference at all.

Consequently, believers find themselves in the position of being like non-believers in all things ethical except in the apparently optional love of God.

This situation has arisen, at least in the West, because God seems too small to matter: we can get along quite well without this little extra addition to our lives together. ‘Let’s not let a little thing like God come between us’, the happy atheist tells us. Believers are, for the most part, confused by this because it seems to make sense: are there not many outside the religions who are morally better than many inside? Do we not want to encourage that good which happens without inserting God into the picture?

Yet the problem here is not really that God is too small to make a difference. Rather, in the churches and therefore in the world, God is usually too large. As an idea, God lacks the concreteness of the tangible human world. We can give an account of the world and our place in it without reference to God. A place might then be found for God at the beginning of all things and perhaps at the end. God is then at best the sphere within which the action takes place but otherwise not part of the action itself. Such knowledge of God is like the knowledge that the world is round when, in fact, for all intents and purposes, it is pretty flat just here. This God has no intrinsic connection to us, and so plays no part in what we do, whether in love or hatred.

So, is the love of God simply an optional extra for those who just happen to be religious? Yes, God is optional, if we mean the too-large God who sits outside of everything we do; No, if God is in fact much smaller than we usually imagine, and integral to everything we do.

We realise that God is a little smaller than usually suspected when we recognise that believer and non-believer alike already love some god or other, and that the pertinent question is not whether God should be ‘added’ to our loves, but asks about the nature and identity of that god which is already intimately active in our lives.

Whether it is explicit or not, believers and non-believers alike have a ‘first commandment’ of some sort which precedes the command to love others, and so tells them what it means to love others, whom to love, and how much. This prior commandment speaks about a higher concern, a higher loyalty, which shapes those relationships we have with other people. We might not identify this higher loyalty as a ‘god’, yet it functions that way for us as we give it something like divine status in our lives.

This higher loyalty is woven into our identity and interprets for us our race, our gender, our nationality, economic status, and so on. And so, on the basis of the spirit of the age in which we live, perhaps black skin ‘means’ something different from white skin, being a man gives different freedoms from being a woman, those with more money are subject to different laws from those with less. Within social systems that allow such differences, observing the social expectations the community sets in place for us what it means to love. To love someone is to act toward them according to how our culture tells us we should, given their age, sex, race, and status.

And so, for example, in Australia we try to love ‘one another’, but don’t so much love asylum seekers. We tell ourselves that we don’t have to love them as much as citizens because Australia – as a nation – is ‘ours’. By ‘ours’, of course, we mean Australia as the nation of those who took the land from someone else who also didn’t have to be loved as we love each other because the British empire was clearly more deserving of this place than those who were already here. Loyalty to our society and its economy, or values we have about skin colour or cultural formation, tell us what ‘love’ is. We have ‘love filters’ for race, culture, gender, education, age, and so on.

In acting according to well established social mores, we honour the god in the machine which permits or limits us in our relationships with others. It doesn’t go too far to say that we are ‘loving’ the spirit of our age as we act towards others according to the spirit’s rules of engagement.

It is too easy, then, to say that we can love each other without loving something else – without loving a ‘god’; we are already loving something else as we seek to love other people. In other words, there is always something between us and those we love (or not). We delude ourselves if we imagine that our efforts to love are innocent, and we refuse to take seriously the quiet whisperings of the powerful social, cultural and economic influences around us and within us. We tell ourselves that we do not need a god to tell us how to love but in reality it is precisely such gods as these which tell us what love is and is not. We may well have ‘invented’ the gods, in the sense of giving them names and building temples for them, but they were always there, intimately close, telling us who we are and how we should be. A simple, secular ‘love your neighbour as yourself’, then, without a reference to the other ‘loves’ which are not our neighbour, doesn’t tell the truth about us and love.

And so it becomes impossible to dismiss Jesus’ double love command as a religious option joined to a non-optional universal and secular one. The dual command to love does not prescribe a requirement for human beings but, implicitly, first describes our condition: your love of others is determined by a prior love, a prior set of conditions and qualifications of what is required of you.

Our love is shaped by our gods, our gods revealed in how we love. Rather than being a problem, then, the call to love God is now a question: on what basis do you love? To love (a) god is not to insert some vague spiritual dimension into our relationships. That dimension is already there, and is much more than ‘vague’ in its effects.

Jesus’ invitation is to love the particular God who is revealed in the way Jesus himself loved. This love was one of openness to all he encountered, while at the same refusing to be constrained by the lesser gods which had power over them.

This love was one which refused to deal in death as a means to an end, and so refused also to fear death when it was used by others as a means to limit him.

The exchange between Jesus and the God he loved is unconditionally concerned with life. This is what Jesus presents to us in miracles and teaching and his simple willingness to be with us, whoever we are: a lively light which reveals the shadows in our midst and invites us to step out of the dark into that light.

To grow in love is not simply to be nicer to those around us – although surely this would be a good thing! To grow in love is also to come to see what has made us less than the lovers we were created to be, and to suspect that there is yet more painful truth God will reveal about us. The command is there for a reason – we have not yet achieved love, of which the world in which we live is ample evidence.

If what God reveals about our love is painful, we do not fear that pain but embrace it. We embrace it not because the pain is good but because it might make us want to put behind us what has come between us and God, us and each other, and so made us less human than we could be.

Love embraces, exposes, heals. It is to this that God calls us, and this that God gives. Let us receive it with joy.

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Pentecost 20
18/10/2020

2 Corinthians 3:17-4:7
Psalm 99
Matthew 22:15-22

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In a sentence
Life in this world – our decisions and actions – are in themselves uncertain; it is God who makes us right

‘Render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things which are God’s.’

Ever since this almost throw-away line form Jesus, hares have been running everywhere concerning the relationship between the affairs of the world and the affairs of heaven. Those with power in the affairs of the world have typically wanted to remind the church that Jesus drew a line between God and the world and our responsibilities to each. Those with a sense that God would see the political world changed have often had to convince even the church that faith can ‘interfere’ – so to speak – in the business of the world.

The energy in those debates comes from a separation Jesus himself at least seems to make. Yet the original question is not about the separation of church and state (as we put it), and so neither could Jesus’ answer be. To pose a separation of the political sphere, the market and the religious cult was not something Israel could do. The prophets preached that allegiance to God is at the heart of the life of the nation, and was to be manifest in the palace, the people and the Temple.

The Pharisees don’t ask about the relationship of the political sphere and the religious sphere but about the relationship between a foreign power and the religion wrapped around it (on the one hand), and their own (subjugated) politics and religion (on the other).

The separation we too easily hear as being along the secular-religious line is, then, actually a question about how these gods and their respective politics interact. Can we know were God is in our complex personal, social, political and religious being, and so can we know what we must do when our convictions are in conflict with our context?

We would have to say that while those challengers went away ‘amazed’ at Jesus’ response, they weren’t any the wiser as to precisely where the ‘things of Caesar’ or the ‘things of God’ have their beginning and their end. We are left still asking ‘How much is enough?’ and ‘How much is too much?’

Yet this way of putting it reveals a concern hidden below the surface question of God versus Caesar. The Pharisees’ question really asks, What are the rules here and what do we have to do to keep ourselves safe from God? This is a concern with self-justification before God and before the world.

Jesus, however, refuses to give an answer which affirms this concern. This is because such an answer would violate the peculiar responsibility we have before each other and before God, and the dependence of those relationships on grace.

While it looks, then, as if Jesus dodges an undodgeable bullet with his own trick question about the head on the coin, a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to the Pharisees would have been not so much politically dangerous as catastrophic for faith. For faith indeed trusts in God but cannot show precisely were God is, and so cannot prove what God desires in any time or place. Jesus’ answer then, with its lack of clarity as to just where the things of God and the things of the emperor start and finish, could be re-expressed as, ‘Live dangerously – take the risk of making a decision here’.

This moves us from the specific question of God and Caesar to a more general question of how we can know whether our choices and actions are correct, and presses us away from considering this text in insolation from the gospel as a whole – as it is usually considered – towards that wider gospel perspective.

At the heart of the gospel story is the crucifixion of Jesus, and this is also at the heart of how we should read our text today. For a deep irony is revealed in the crucifixion when we look back from it to the challenge the Pharisees put to Jesus in today’s reading. If the religious leaders wanted to know how to separate God and Caesar, in the crucifixion they unite God and Caesar in a single offering. The crucifixion is precisely a ‘rendering to God’ in the form of a ‘rendering’ to Caesar. Jesus is arrested, tried and presented to the imperial power for Godly reasons – so far as the religious authorities understand God. Jesus is a blasphemer and is handed over to be destroyed, for God’s sake. This destruction, however, is brought about by giving Jesus to the Romans, for the religious leaders have no authority to make such an offering to God. The death of Jesus is a rendering of him up to God by giving him up to the emperor.

The religious authorities, then, with their proposal that righteousness would separate God and Caesar, combine them to bring about the desired end of Jesus in a kind of ‘unGodly Godliness’.

And yet there is that other ‘rendering’ here – that which Jesus himself makes – also a two-in-one giving to God and to Caesar. On the one hand, Jesus’ life is given up to God: everything he does is from and to God. On the other hand, this is done within an ordinary historical context with its particular empire of needs, desires and powers. So the incarnation itself – the presence of the kingdom of God in a manger or on the dusty roads of Palestine – is an offering to God in the form of a baby in the hay or those roads and all who travel them. Jesus gives to God in the ways and means that are possible to him in that time and place.

Jesus’ unswerving path to the cross, then, is an offering to God in the form of the religious convictions and political powers of the day. It is, we might say, a ‘Godly unGodliness’, the reverse of what the religious authorities have done. Yet the Godly and the unGodly are so thoroughly intertwined that no one can see that the cross is righteous – that it is Godly – because there is no formula in which ‘die on a cross’ equals ‘righteousness’.

Jesus’ offering to God is a life lived in the midst of a world with its many gods and many caesars, within which it is never possible to prove how much the god should get and how much the world should get. And yet his particular performance of that life is declared by the resurrection to be righteous – not because at every point along the way Jesus did exactly the thing God was looking for but because everything was done trusting in the God who makes things right.

Or, to put it differently, to believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to live before God in the world, believing that God has put you here for a reason and trusting that God will declare your earnest response righteous.

The Pharisees’ dangerous question is not really about Gods and emperors. It is about how where righteousness is to be found when we must act, unable to prove to others that this is the right course of action. This is at the heart of any tough decision we have to make.

Our political leaders today are in the midst of this as they wonder when to relax the Covid-19 lockdown, balancing the desire to minimize its impact on life and health with the need for social and economic re-wakening. They – and we – will not know they have done the best thing but only that they have responded in a particular way to that gloriously ambiguous command, ‘Love one another’.

We will not know that we have made the most ‘faithful’ response to the anticipated rise in global temperatures over the next century – despite the eternal confidence of opposition parties that they do know. We will know only that we made a response, and God have mercy on us.

We will not know that we have donated enough money, spent enough time, been patient long enough; we will know only that we have given, spent, waited some…

How then, can we act under these circumstances? Is it faithful to pay ‘unGodly’ taxes? Can we protect ourselves against God in this way?

The gospel is that God knows that we cannot know, even as we beat ourselves up with the thought that we should know or assure ourselves that we do. God knows that there is no ‘protection’ from God in this way.

If God knows this, then God’s call to life is, ‘Live dangerously, take the risk of making a decision here’, for God knows that there are no guarantees in this world other than God himself. So God is OK with what we do as we seek to live a Godly life, peppered with prayers for mercy.

God’s knowledge of us and continuing love for us nonetheless is our freedom to give to God what is God’s and to the world what is the world’s, in everything that we do.

Those who love and serve God as God loves and serve them are free to do what they will.

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Pentecost 19
11/10/2020

Ezekiel 47:1-12
Psalm 1
Revelation 21:22-22:5

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In a sentence
God’s gift is something we have not yet asked for, but the very thing we need

In this last section of Ezekiel, within which his tone shifts from judgement and condemnation to promise, much space is taken up by the prophet’s description of a vision of the new Temple and Temple life, as he is led around the Temple by a figure who measures and describes it in his hearing.

Perhaps most important in all this is the shift in what we might call the ‘location’ of the Temple. This is a shift not in geographic location (the Temple is still in Jerusalem) but in how we relate to the Temple and it to us. The Temple becomes now less a destination than an origin or source.

Signifying this shift is the image of a river which flows from the Temple, strangely getting deeper as gets further from the Temple: first ankle-deep, then knee-deep, waist-deep and finally too deep to cross. Flowing across the land, the river from the Temple supports great forests of trees bearing fruit throughout the year and good for medicine. The water has the miraculous capacity to make stagnant and salty waters fresh, making them habitable for all kinds of fish for food – even the Dead Sea. Sheer abundance flows from the Temple, a marvellous promise held out by God.

Yet, for whom is this vision given? The vision is part of a bigger story, so that the earlier chapters of Ezekiel are not left behind here. The vision of the new Temple and its river of life is given for those who accept the judgment of God as it has been laid down in the prophet’s earlier preaching. The devastating experience of exile has been interpreted as the revelation of the peculiar righteousness of God, and the people’s failures in relation to God. At its best, the exile re-orients the people towards God’s particular way and expectation, and this vision of the Temple with its life-giving waters rises to meet those who accept the judgement as much as the gift. If we were to ask how real is the promise of the new Temple and the life which flows from it in Ezekiel’s vision, the answer would be that it is as real as the judgement Ezekiel has already announced. The restoration and the judgement cannot be separated.

Our reading from Revelation today, however, pushes this a little further. The Seer borrows directly from Ezekiel’s Temple River vision but does so not only with the themes of judgement and restoration in mind, but with these coloured by his experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Whereas in Ezekiel we might be able to distinguish between the judgement of God and the gift of God, in Revelation, the judgement becomes the gift. This is not because God ‘gives’ to us by punishing us; it is because Jesus himself – envisioned as the sacrificial ‘Lamb’ – is where the judgement happens, and this Jesus is given to us as a gift. Judgement and restoration take place not in us but in Jesus himself. We are given, so to speak, our history as judged and our present as acquitted – all in him.

So central is Jesus here that, in the new Jerusalem the Seer describes, Ezekiel’s Temple is gone, replaced by ‘the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb’ themselves. The river of the water of life flows now not from the Temple but the throne of God. (Note that the throne is also present in Ezekiel – see chapters 1, 10 and 42)). In the same way, the sun and the moon are gone, the Lamb now being the lamp of God’s glory. What there is to be seen – and God and ourselves are the most important features here – is to be seen by the light of Jesus the Lamb, broken as we are by the broken world and yet restored as the very centre of all things.

Judgement and grace are now not two things, the one the answer to the other. If our experience in time necessarily means that now we feel that ours is a time of judgement, and then now we feel ours to be a time of restoration, this is not what God sees. God does not see us in two lights, does not have two thoughts about us [G MacDonald] – now judgement, now forgiveness. God’s thought for us is that we be ‘of God’ – ‘begotten’ – after the way in which Jesus himself is ‘of God’ – Begotten. What we separate out as two things – judgement and restoration – press towards this one thing: that we begin and end in God

God does not give ‘little gifts’ – this or that miracle to brighten up our day after some passing darkness; this is why the end of COVID will not be a gift of God like that in Ezekiel and Revelation: there will be other COVIDs.

The gift of God is Godself, ever pressing in on us, not as a burden but as light to drive away shadow, even those shadows we like to hide in but which are really only where we hide from the glory God would make of us. We do not always choose the right, and the world around us is the result. But God will always choose us – sometimes a painful choice which dislodges us from our own too-precious sense of what matters. Ezekiel’s people knew this pain – the pain of being wrong about the promise and glory of God.

If the vision of Ezekiel and the Seer of Revelation are too much for is, it is because we have not yet accepted the judgement: that it is God’s light and not ours by which will be seen the truth of what we are, where we are, and where we might yet be going.

The river of the water of life flows only for those who are learning that they are thirsty: now ankle-deep, now up to the knees, the waist and finally so deep that it becomes our life. This water washes away dirt we did not see, answers questions we have not yet asked.

In this way, God’s judgement and grace coincide: we receive from God more than we have imagined we need, just because God sees further and with greater penetration than we do.

This is God’s graceful justice: to give what we need.

It is only for us to take this gift, to drink, and to live.

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Pentecost 18
4/10/2020

Ezekiel 34:1-4, 9-23, 29-31
Psalm 80
Matthew 21:33-46

Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte

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Ezekiel’s image of the shepherds living at the expense of their sheep reminds us painfully of what perennially seems to characterise the exercise of authority in the world.

It’s not difficult to find instances of these kinds of shepherds in our times, intent on maintaining their own power and security. Shepherds who lie and shamelessly divide their nations with impunity. Shepherds who systematically imprison and persecute a religious minority.

We find ourselves implicated in a divided world of frustrated hope, in the pursuit of the good through the silencing of my neighbour, in the serving of the many by the exclusion of the victim.

It is under such violence, idolatry, pride and vanity that our whole humanity has been labouring. God has given his chosen people to be the light of this dark world – light in the darkness of a humanity characterised by such shepherds.

God promises that human authority will be transformed to serve the healing of the nations. And so God charges the shepherds of his chosen people with the task of allowing God to give through them.

The God who ordinarily chooses to work through human relationships has promised that the nations will find their healing through the life of this people. Through the holiness of the children of Jacob, the nations will come to be purified from the worship of our own security to worship the living God.

And so, Ezekiel reserves his sharpest words of judgement for the leaders of his own people. Those who lead the worship of the people have been given their authority as a source of reconciliation. But their exercise of authority too has become a defence of their own needs against their neighbours, the making of victims, the denial of their own dependence.

In the Gospel reading today, Jesus has entered the temple to cleanse and to judge. He comes not to destroy or to displace the worship of his people. He comes rather to cleanse that worship of the violence under which it labours. And he comes to his people to reveal himself as the true shepherd of the sheep.

In the parable of the vineyard, it is clear that Jesus is denouncing the violence in the tenants’ living to meet their own needs and security over and against others. But there is also a sacrificial image here. For the nations, sacrifice has been a manipulation of the gods to their own ends. But for Israel, sacrifice is the free lifting up of their life in praise.

In sending one lot of slaves after another, and finally his son, the landowner seeks that kind of sacrifice of the tenants – a rendering to God of the whole of life as gift; a reorienting of the various purposes of life towards reconciliation; a new vision of my relationship to my neighbour as one of pure gift and interdependence.

What are we to make of what Jesus says, ‘the kingdom will be taken away from you and given to a nation bearing its fruits’? What must be ruled out here is any sense that the Jewish people are being replaced by others. The inclusion of the Gentiles in Christ is never to be understood as a supplanting of the Jews as God’s people.

Jesus has come to reconcile all humanity by fulfilling and recapitulating the promise to the tribes of Judah. Jesus’ coming in our humanity confronts the fear and despair of the nations with a word of mutual belonging and abundant life. And his coming confronts all of us who would make the purity or success of our lives the prerequisite for solidarity.

Jesus’ words of judgement here pick up the words of the prophet Daniel. In the Book of Daniel, the temple has been defiled by a pagan invader. Daniel promises the return of the Ancient One to take up his throne, inaugurating a kingdom which all nations will participate and where God’s people will in some way rule and judge. He writes:

The kingship and dominion and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the holy ones of the Most High; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom and all dominions shall serve and obey them    (Dan 7:27)

When Jesus speaks of giving the kingdom to a nation bearing its fruits,       he is speaking of restoring the life of the nation of Israel to itself, over and against the desolating sacrilege set up in the holy place. And he is speaking too of all the nations who will be incorporated into the rule of the Lamb who was slain, who have become sharers in the promise.

Jesus enters the temple as its unrecognised Lord, cleanses the temple and denounces the unfaithfulness of the leaders of the people. His parable pierces our hearts as those complicit in the rejection of Christ, in our refusal to offer the whole of our life together as gift.

Against the blindness of those enmeshed in the world’s violence, the identity of Jesus is disclosed. As Ezekiel writes:

I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them…    (Ez 34:10)

I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd.    (Ez 34:23)

Jesus is revealed as the true shepherd of the sheep, who comes not to be served but to serve. Jesus comes as a slave, as the one cast aside, whom in the blindness of our fear, rivalry and pride we did not recognise as the true object of our obedience and the true source of our reconciliation.

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. The unifying principle of the people’s worship, the centre binding together all of creation – and its culmination in Israel’s praise – that centre is revealed in the outcast, in the slain victim, in the shameful death of the cross.

The one who was crushed even under observance of the Law is revealed as the one coming to restore all things by his broken body. The one who was cut off, sealed behind the stone, is revealed as the one coming in confrontation of all that divides the world from love. He is the one breaking open the tombs. He is the victim rising to meet his killers with the judgement of love, with true reconciliation.

And so, perhaps, opening ourselves to God’s grace, giving ourselves up to be shepherded by this shepherd, is to open ourselves to be confronted by this stone; to allow this rejected stone to be an obstacle to us; to allow ourselves to fall upon it.

We learn to deny our own will, or rather to allow our will to be judged and perfected by Jesus Christ. We learn the humility and contrition that trembles at the word of reconciliation and renewed holiness.

Through a life of obedience in prayer; through growing into the self-denial we call hospitality; through receiving the sacramental life of the church as for our neighbour’s healing; we come to see ourselves in greater clarity.

We come to know ourselves even as those crushed by this stone – or to put it another way, as those who have been under the deep waters of baptism where one has gone before us.

We learn to pay attention to Jesus Christ, who will often meet us as a stumbling block to our insularity, our fear or our complacency. We find our lives are marked by stumbling over this cornerstone. We learn to fall over this stone; to fall, not to be destroyed, but to fall as every knee in heaven and on earth and under the earth will fall; falling from blindness to sight, from rejection of the victim to acknowledgement of the crucified slave as the true form of authority and power.

Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem and to the temple begin his movement towards the cross, where his body and the temple curtain will be torn open and the darkness of our humanity disclosed; where the rejected one, hanging on the tree, will be revealed as the Holy of Holies; where the light will stream from the Holy Place to reveal to Israel and all nations their healing:

Our healing found in the one we have pierced; Our common belonging found in the broken body.

At this table, in this covenant of peace,

They shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them;
and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, says the Lord God.
You are my sheep, the sheep of my pasture and I am your God, says the Lord God.       (Ez 34: 30-31)

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Pentecost 17
27/9/2020

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 130
Matthew 21:23-32

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In a sentence
While we associate resurrection with ‘life after death’, its purpose in biblical narrative is the possibility of new life before death

Our reading from Ezekiel today is perhaps the best-known passage from the book. It is obviously a ‘resurrection’ text – which ought immediately to raise an alarm, for when the meaning of something in the Bible is ‘obvious’ it is highly likely that we are missing something.  So let’s look to the passage to see what might be less than obvious.

Ezekiel’s vision unfolds in a couple of steps. First, he sees the valley of bones, he addresses those bones as commanded, he hears the rattle of bones upon bones, and he sees them come together and life breathed into them.

At this stage we have what we might call a ‘nature’ miracle. Something about the usual order of things has been denied: order has been dragged from disorder, life returned to what was dead. The vision then – and it is only a vision – suggests that God is able to do this, to raise the dead to life.

It is helpful to note this ‘nature miracle’ dimension of the vision because it is typically claimed that God can do miraculous things like this. More than that, it is claimed God can disrupt the natural order in this way because God is creator of that order. Control over the world in this way springs from the fact that God created the world in the first place. These are less ‘interventions’, then, than they are re-creations, re-orderings of the chaotic world.

This is to say that creation occurs as much within time as it is the beginning or possibility of time. It is not ‘easier’ to raise the dead than it is to get the whole show on the road in the first place. The beginning of time, and a truly new beginning within time, are the same kind of thing. The distinction between creation and resurrection, then – as manifestations of sheer power – is not a distinction in God. Most succinctly, resurrection is creation.

Ezekiel’s vision moves past sheer creative power, however. To this point, the vision suggests that God can raise ‘the dead’, although we don’t know who the dead are. As is usual in relation to all the wacky things Ezekiel is commanded to do in his ministry, the meaning of his vision is now explained: the bones are not merely the remnants of the dead in general but are specifically Israel’s bones: the bones of ‘the whole house of Israel.’

This unsettles two things which might seem to be ‘obvious’ in the whole vision.

The first unsettling is that this apparent violation of natural law is also a violation of moral or divine law. Almost the whole of Ezekiel’s preaching to this point has had to do with the failure of Israel, and the justice of God’s condemnation and rejection of them. The power exercised here, then, is not merely a power to undo nature’s course by bringing life to the dead. It is the power to undo the effects of divine judgement itself. Not only natural law but God’s law is violated in this resurrection, which is much more interesting than the occasional miraculous conjuring trick.

The power of creation or re‑creative resurrection, then, is not the power to ‘make stuff’ or to re-make it. It is the power to forgive, to reconcile, to gather unto God even what – on account of its own failures – God has rejected. We might say it succinctly: with this God, to create is to reconcile and to reconcile is to create.

The second unsettling of the obvious to note here is that these are the bones of ‘the whole house of Israel’. What is strange here is that the house of Israel is not dead yet. Indeed, many have died – during the Babylonian conquest and before that – but Ezekiel’s ministry is not to those dead alone but – if at all – also to the living.

This is to say, then, that Ezekiel’s vision has to do with the resurrection of the living. Those who are still breathing are as if dead when they hear Ezekiel’s preaching. Death stands now not as the end of life but as a way of life. It is not a good way of life – and it is a way which God promises in these visions to ‘create us away from’ – but those who have died and those who still breathe stand before God as equally in need of God’s own life-giving Spirit. Or, to put it differently, there is before God no real distinction between the living and the dead, and their need. We tell ourselves that being alive is better than the alternative but this is not a joke God ‘gets’.

That joke hides from us something implicit in most of our resurrection-talk, and misleading: that the dead are lying around waiting to be raised to life, that they know they are dead. In fact, they are not ‘waiting’ for anything, for they are dead and the dead don’t do anything – wait or otherwise.

We might think that this is one point at which the living and the dead differ – that the living are hoping for something, waiting for something, working on something. Yet if, in Ezekiel’s terms, the living also are in need of resurrection, perhaps we might put less store in what we hope and wait and work for. It is not that these things do not matter; they will be the form, the shape, of our salvation. But the content or the substance of salvation – what it is to be free from fear and free for each other – is, as St Paul puts it,

‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the human heart conceived…                      (1 Corinthians 2.9, from Isaiah 64.4)

This is to say that what resurrection to life might be – even here and now – is not the answer to any question we might have. It is not the political utopia we dream of, not the return to normal post-virus we long for, not a pie-in-the-sky promise to distract us from our fear of dying.

What is promised here is something which will make the lives we live – as good and worthwhile as some of them might appear to be – seem like death. Our struggles for the good and the right, the clamour of our politics, the urgency of our prayers will seem like the mere rattle of bones on bones which cannot yet imagine that they are destined to breathe and laugh and dance.

The word to Israel then is God’s word to us:

O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord…
I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.
I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin,
and put breath in you, and you shall live;
and you shall know that I am the LORD.

…And the breath came into them,
and they lived,
and stood on their feet,
a vast multitude.                                  (Ezekiel 37.5,6,10)

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Pentecost 16
20/9/2020

Ezekiel 33:10-17
Psalm 145
Matthew 20:1-16

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In a sentence
Most of our life is spent in ‘the air’, but we can be confident that God’s hand is always there to catch us

If you have read Ezekiel up to the point of our text for today you could not help but be struck by the almost relentlessly critical and threatening nature of his preaching.

After the opening vision of the ‘appearance of the likeness of the glory of God’, the text has been dark and anguished. The ‘glory of the Lord’ takes up a sword, first for Judah and then for the nations.

With Chapter 33 there comes a distinct shift in Ezekiel’s message. Jerusalem has fallen and, though it has been briefly touched upon in the midst of his earlier, darker sermons, the possibility of forgiveness and a new relationship between God and Israel comes to the fore.

And yet, there is a sense in which this last part of the book is the true beginning of Ezekiel’s preaching. Clearly this is not the case chronologically, beginning as he does by interpreting so darkly the approaching loss of Jerusalem. But this shift in his preaching is the beginning in terms of the motivation or the ‘engine’ of his preaching.

The wrath of God – a notion some of us find trouble even entertaining today – does not merely destroy, does not obliterate. The wrath of this God is expressed in the context of the covenant: from the covenant to the covenant.

The wrath of God is, then, oddly and unexpectedly creative. Creative intent is present in all that God does. It is God’s intent in the face of the chaos of the primal waters over which God moves to bring the order of the first creation; it is God’s intent in the face of the deterioration of life in Israel and the storm clouds of Babylon’s approach. God is creative as much as judge as God is creative as originator and restorer.

To offer an image which might make this easier to understand, we could say that if God casts the people away – and surely God can do this – it is always, as it were, in an upward direction, such that the people must eventually fall again, back to God.

Such a ‘flight’ of the people of God is a useful metaphor for the relationship between God and the people in Ezekiel’s preaching. Falling objects are unable to do anything to change their trajectory. Just think of those ‘funny home videos’ in which, once the hapless lad has left the mat of the trampoline in a certain direction, there is nothing he can do to stop himself sailing over the fence into the neighbours’, or ending up hanging upside down from a tree. Falling is perhaps the quintessential experience of helplessness and so also the quintessential experience of chaos and nothingness.

What Ezekiel has been describing to this point has been Israel ‘in the air’. And so there is, in fact, nothing to be done. Babylon is coming, the covenant has been broken, and Israel is in freefall.

As we have seen, Ezekiel takes this experience and uses it to speak of God’s freedom to be for or against the people. Ezekiel interprets the chaos of history – our worst fears for ourselves and the worst we can do to each other – as a sign of our distance from God. For reasons we’re heard before God is even understood to be the cause of this suffering, in a carefully qualified sense of ‘cause’.

But the message of hope to which the book of Ezekiel now comes is that, if God has tossed the people into the air, they are not tossed to the wind. God braces to catch them again – to catch us. This is the gospel at the heart of Ezekiel’s preaching, that the beginning and the end of all things are in God’s hand and that, if we find ourselves falling, it is back into the hands of God.

To find ourselves falling is a totally disorienting experience. It is indeed an experience of utter helplessness, and we spend much of our time and energy trying not to be helpless. And so falling is what it is like to hear that we carry a terminal illness, or to lose a job, or for a marriage to fail, or for a child to die. In such moments there nothing to hold on to, nothing with which to brace ourselves, which is not also falling with us.

There is something of this in what we are experiencing at the moment. We are unable to fast-forward the clock so that the virus is behind us, unable to re-establish the patterns that make us feel safe, and exposed also to deep problems in the world and in ways of doing things we thought – not that long ago – weren’t too bad. We simply have to endure the fall.

But were we to dig deeper, we might come to suspect that life as a whole – even at its best – is a kind of freefall, even if we spend most of it trying to find something to grab onto.

If that were the case – if it were that, in sickness and in health, whether poor or rich, whether young or old, we were always ‘falling’ – then in the end there would be not much difference between being held in God’s hand and still being in the air yet destined again to land there again, and we would not worry too much about where we are.

Rather, we might simply allow that most of life is spent up in the air, and get on with the business of learning to fly.

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Pentecost 15
13/9/2020

Romans 14:1-12
Psalm 114
Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

‘The Sycamore Tree’ is a social enterprise cafe run by the Uniting Church in Heidelberg. While I was helping manage it, I placed on the street front a chalkboard sign reading, “Currently Serving Feminist Coffee.” The coffee in question was a blend called Todas las Damas , Spanish for ‘all the ladies.’ It was a blend of coffee from two different locations, which highlight the role of women in coffee cultivation:

One of these locations was the Cauca region of Colombia. Coffee cultivated as part of the Columbian Women’s Coffee Project. Columbia is a country which for decades has been subject to instability: the site of internal political struggles and violence, as well as a lucrative illicit drug trade. The intertwining of violence, politics, and economy has shaped much of the country’s recent history. In the midst of this instability women have taken on a disproportionate role in agricultural work and coffee cultivation; working to support their families after their husbands, fathers, and brothers have fallen victim to the country’s internal violence. The Columbian Women’s Coffee project began in order to establish a network of female coffee growers. The project helps to upskill growers, facilitates the sharing of expertise, and offers micro-financing; and the project works to establish a fair and reliable route to export markets like Australia.

Quite apart from my personal obsession with coffee, the story of the Colombian Women’s Coffee Project is quite instructive. Because it serves to highlight that for many parts of the world — and for large swathes of human history — questions of economics: of debt and forgiveness, cannot be treated simply as abstract metaphors which might serve to teach us simple moral lessons. Rather, issues of economics are connected to concrete concerns for security, and the livelihood of families. The concrete realities of debt and forgiveness are often set within broader contexts of violence and insecurity.

This is helpful to bear in mind when we read in our Gospel reading a parable about a king forgiving the debts of a servant. We are not dealing here with a simple moral lesson, parables never offer us that.

The story of the parable itself is fairly straightforward. A servant owes his king 10,000 talents (a large unit of currency), but the king forgives this debt. We then learn that the servant himself is owed 100 denarii (a much smaller unit of currency), which he refuses to in turn forgive. When this is reported to the king the servant is thrown into prison and tortured.

Commentators are somewhat divided over whether the unrealistic sum of 10,000 talents should be rendered with the sense of a gazillion dollars, or a bajillion. Estimates suggest that 10,000 denarii was equivalent to the entire tax revenue of a country, or administrative region within the Roman Empire. It seems unrealistic that a single servant would have accrued this much debt personally. While it’s possible that the unrealistic nature of the debt is part of the point: look how ridiculous and extravagant God’s forgiveness is! (Which is undoubtedly true.) Other commentators suggest the possibility that the servant had a responsibility for overseeing the tax collection for the king’s territory. The large sum of the debt therefore represents the large responsibility of the servant.

Seen in this light the forgiveness of the servant’s debt is not simply about mending a relationship between the king and the servant, or about the servant being given a fresh chance to live up to his duty. Rather, if we explore the text on the basis that the servant was responsible for collecting taxes, then the forgiveness of the king has much deeper implications.

The original threat from the king to sell the servant, and his wife, and his children, and all his possessions, does not serve to merely emphasise the impossibility of the debt — highlighting how vast the sum of debt is, and how ridiculous it is to suggest that the sale of a few slaves, and a few belongings could repay it. Instead the king’s threat reflects the cycle of humiliation and violent consequences inherent in ancient (and often not so ancient) systems of political order. To be close to power often means being close to the significant violence used to maintain that power.

In contrast to this reality, the forgiveness of the tax collector’s debt does not simply represent a kind gesture, which in any case makes little appreciable difference: whether the king liked it or not such a large outstanding amount was not going to be forthcoming from anyone. The forgiveness of the king disrupts the use of violence as a tool of retribution, revenge, and control. Forgiveness in this parable, in other words, is not simply about letting things go and moving on, returning to business as usual; forgiveness in this parable serves as a starting point for change. Forgiveness has a negative dimension, in the sense that the punishment of the servant is withheld; and at the same time forgiveness comes with a positive and proactive dimension: the kingdom shifts from being governed by violence to being governed by mercy.

When three biblical scholars, Robert Heimburger, Christopher Hays, and Guillermo Mejia-Castillo, conducted a series of bible studies using this text with survivors of armed conflict in Colombia, it was precisely these themes which came to the fore. The connections between debt and violence in the original historical context seem more readily apparent to people who have had to flee their homes due to threats from illegal loan sharks. In more local experiences, the connection between debt and insecurity are much more immediate when you have found yourself at the end of a pay week with no money left to pay bills, buy groceries, or cover rent.

The insights of the Colombian readers of this text point to the need for forgiveness as a key part of restoring communities. Forgiving the perpetrators of violence after conflict is a necessary part of rebuilding the society that violence ripped apart. Forgiveness needs to move beyond the past, and think creatively about projects which rebuild and offer opportunities for a common future. While the NRSV translation from which we heard earlier renders Peter’s initial question about forgiveness — which prompts this parable — in terms of “another member of the church,” more literally the text says, “a brother” (and we might suggest “sister” as well). If forgiveness is part of moving towards mercy, then we should side with Colombian readers who suggest that references to brothers and sisters must also mean those who are not yet part of our community, those who we are beginning to learn to live with.

If we take this parable seriously we might be led to the realisation that forgiveness is not simply about being nice to another person. But forgiveness reflects a deeper concern for transforming the world to be more merciful and more just.

The lesson the tax collecting servant fails to learn is not just that he should be nice to others, because the king has been nice to him. The servant failed to learn that the forgiveness he had been shown began to break apart the cycle of violence which he himself participated in. Forgiveness began to tear apart the connections between politics and violence, and between financial hardship and insecurity. Forgiveness is the ripple which builds to the overflowing river of God’s justice.

Forgiveness does not simply say that, “it’s okay, everything will be alright.” Forgiveness begins the very process of making things right. Forgiveness is both our individual duty, and our collective call. “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice,” said the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” This is what forgiveness leads us to.

When Peter asks, “Lord, if my brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?”

Perhaps we are wise to avoid the disagreement over whether Jesus’ response means 7 times 7, or 77 times.

Instead we can hear in Jesus’ answer: you forgive until the world is changed.
You forgive until it flows out to your sister and brother from deep within your heart.
You forgive until there is peace on the earth, and violence ceases.
You forgive until it melts all anger, and heals all wounds.
You forgive until all are saved from trial, and rescued from evil.
You forgive until justice and mercy come.

Hear these words of Christ,
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”