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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.”

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Pentecost 14
6/9/2020

Ezekiel 16:53-63
Psalm 119:33-40
Matthew 18:15-20

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In a sentence
God’s salvation comes in response to our particular type
of brokenness, and takes the shape of that brokenness

After five months of varying degrees of lockdown we are very much looking forward to putting Covid-19 behind us, however far away that might yet be.

What will it feel like to move out from under the shadow of the virus? For some of course, this will not be possible – the impact has been felt in the death of a loved one or some other devastating effect which will continue. Yet even for these, with most others, relief will surely be at the centre of emotion as things normalise, even if to an as yet unclear ‘new normal’.

Thinking about what a relaxing of the strictures will be like and what the new normal might be is, at this stage, not much more than speculation. But speculating does indicate at least the character of what we hope for: we hope for relief, in the form of freedom to move again, to be together, to work and to earn.

Ezekiel speaks into a context like ours, in that it is a time of loss, of deprivation, of suffering. Although most of the book has to do with condemnation of Israel (or other nations), hope for Israel – a renewed relationship with God in the form of a return to land and temple and kingship – this is also central to his preaching.

Yet this promise has a negative association which jars with our usual talk about forgiveness and grace. We heard this for the first time in the reading for today’s service, which comes at the end of a long diatribe against Israel, characterising the people as a wilfully and wantonly unfaithful wife to God:

^16.59 …thus says the Lord God: I will deal with you as you have done, you who have despised the oath, breaking the covenant; ⁶⁰yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish with you an everlasting covenant. ⁶¹Then you will remember your ways… ⁶²I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, ⁶³in order that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I forgive you all that you have done, says the Lord God.

‘…I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am the Lord, in order that you may remember and be confounded, and never open your mouth again because of your shame…’

This is first of several times Ezekiel links God’s forgiveness to Israel remembering its shame (see also 36.26-32; 43.10f; 44.9-14. 39.26 has ‘forget their shame’ in NRSV, although an alternative reading is ‘bear their shame’, and is favoured by many commentators on account of the other ‘shame’ texts). If we were to ask Ezekiel what the Israel had to look forward to as it moved out of its own particular ‘lockdown’, he could well answer, ‘Shame’.

How is this good news?

Shame is a powerful emotion, and is often confused with its lesser cousin, embarrassment, which also features implicitly in our reading.

Both shame and embarrassment have to do with a disruption of relationships though a violation of the agreed rules of social engagement, but at different levels. Were you to wake up to discover that your nightmare about being naked in a room full of dressed people was not a dream but actuality, you would be embarrassed. Were you found naked in bed with someone you shouldn’t be with, you would – if you were paying attention – be ashamed.

Embarrassment arises from the uncovering of something which we know or suspect might be there but agree should remain covered. Shame is about the uncovering of something which should have not been there in the first place. And so, while embarrassment wants only to be covered up, shame wants to hide. Embarrassment might elicit sympathy but shame demands explanation. We are victims in embarrassment but held responsible in shame.

It is this last observation which locates the embarrassment implicit in our present reading. If it is Israel who will be ashamed, it is God who has been embarrassed. Something has been uncovered – in fact, in the unfaithful spouse metaphor, Israel has uncovered herself – and in this way exposed God who is so closely joined to Israel. (See Leviticus 18.6-8 for an account of the link between the ‘nakedness’ of a husband and wife in Hebrew thinking.) This ‘exposure’ of God is linked to our thinking last week about God’s action ‘for the sake of my name’.

These are some of the dimensions of the shame which features in Ezekiel’s account not merely of the punishment of Israel but, more strikingly, in his account of Israel’s salvation. Shame, by itself, reflects a deep sense of guilt. And yet, while there is much guilt being identified by God in these texts, it is not guilt unto damnation. This ‘shaming’ is not like our current sharpening of political correctness into ‘cancel culture’. There is grievous fault here but it is not named in order to crush.

The guilt and the shame to which it gives rise are part of the relief God holds out to Israel. This is to say that the relief offered here – the restoration of the people in their standing before God – is no mere relaxation of the strictures of exile, no simple putting behind us of what has been wrong, no easy ‘forgive-and-forget’. We might wish that it were otherwise – that the experience of guilt or weakness could be left behind – but this is to deny something about ourselves that God will not.

God loves us as we are – whether that be guilty or oppressed, arrogant or timid, proud or just afraid. Our stories – our histories – make us what we are and it with these stories that we are loved. And so God’s healing, and the knowledge which comes with it – ‘and you shall know that I am the Lord’ – comes with the memory of why healing was required, of what it is God calls us out of.

None of this is to say that the way to God is only through shame or the admission of weakness. The church has sometimes given this impression, whenever it begins with the need of humankind, however great or small, to which God is supposed to be an answer.

Ezekiel’s point is surely the opposite, that God moves first and that it is only in then looking back that we begin to re-evaluate who we are and what we are called to be.

This means that when God ‘gets’ us it will be both exactly the relief we desire, and yet also not. Israel hears that it will be restored, but also that this restoration springs entirely from God’s relentless grace and not from anything Israel has done to earn it. In the same way, the church – that peculiar way of being human which springs from the experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus – marks divine forgiveness with bread and wine as signs of the rejection of God‑in‑Jesus. Blood and flesh are signs in our midst in the same way as Israel’s shame is in Ezekiel: reminders of what has been overcome in order that we might again be this God’s people, and this God our God. Israel’s shame is to the renewal of the covenant as the gospel’s cross is to the resurrection.

To be true to who God is, we must remember the transition from what we were to what God has now made of us and calls us yet to become. In forgiveness, we might say, God forgets but we must not, for it is in our shift from less to more, from enslaved to liberated, from death to life, that we know who God is, and know God’s fundamental character as being for us.

In the strangest of twists, then, the people of God are those who could be said to be – in Ezekiel’s terms – ‘hoping for shame’.

This is not because shame or arrogance or pride or weakness or death defines who we are but precisely because, with the God who can overcome all such things, they do not.

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Pentecost 13
30/8/2020

Ezekiel 36:16-32a
Psalm 8
Matthew 16:21-26

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‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me’.

In this way we exhort our children not to take too seriously the mean things which might be uttered in the playground. What then are we to do with a God who seems to take too seriously the unkind things said about God?

^36.20…when [Israel] came to the nations…they profaned my holy name, in that it was said of them, ‘These are the people of the Lord, and yet they had to go out of his land.’ ²¹But I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to which they came.

²²Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name…

The point is driven home a couple of times in our present text, and we’ve also heard it before (Ezekiel 20).

To act for the ‘sake’ of something is generally to act for its benefit, to bring it direct or implied honour. Acting for ‘sake’, then, is also cast as a kind of sacrifice – something we didn’t have to do but did ‘for the sake’ of (whatever).

In Ezekiel, however, God’s action is explicitly – and with emphasis – for God’s own sake or, more specifically, for the sake of God’s ‘name’. In view of what we normally do in acting for the sake of something, this makes God’s motivation here seem self-involved, self-serving and so almost petty.

At the same time, the effect of this apparent self-interest is the restoration (or at least promised restoration) of Israel. This, surely, is not petty or self-interested.

From this, at least two possibilities emerge to account for what God says and does here. One is that the restoration of God’s people springs from God’s ‘vanity’. On this reading, God thinks, ‘They are saying nasty things about me’, and acts to improve God’s own reputation. If perhaps it seems not a little impious, this nevertheless works reasonably well as an explanation of why God moves from punishment and rejection to forgiveness and reconciliation.

The other possible motivation for God here, and one equally impious in a different kind of way, is that the being of God’s people is intimately and ineluctably, inextricably, linked to the very being of God. God’s concern with reputation is indeed petty for a god, unless God is who God says God is.

Important here is that God’s name is not like our names. ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me’ doesn’t apply to God. The ‘name’ of God is like the ‘appearance of the likeness of the glory of God’ we considered back in Ezekiel’s extraordinary opening vision (1.28). The name of God is as close as we can get to God. It is a placeholder we use to mark where God would be if God is anywhere, a sign to wave if there were anything which could catch God’s attention.

Our schoolyard chant distinguishes between us and our name – it is our bones which are really us, while a name is a mere label. But, for God, God’s name is God’s bones. The broken bones of God – the broken bones of God’s body, Israel – amount to a kind of misnaming of God, a ‘calling God names’.

Here we might also note that it is nothing Israel does in exile which causes the dishonouring of God. It is rather God’s own action in bringing them into exile (36.20).

We arrive, then, at a deep mystery: The reduction of Israel is a reduction of God, by God’s own hand. It is by both God and Israel that God is brought into disrepute among the nations. A restoration of God’s reputation, then, requires a restoration of Israel, because this God survives the death of God’s people and feels their loss.

This is not the impiety of suggesting God is vain but the impiety of tying God so closely to a particular historical people.

Ezekiel is not the first in the Scriptures to hold this impiety, and not the last. The last is the gospel of Jesus, in which a particular human being is condemned, and with him is also condemned before all the God whose kingdom he proclaimed and embodied. To utter another impiety – Jesus becomes, on Ezekiel’s terms – something of a profaning of the name of the God he proclaimed: ‘…let him come down from the cross now’, cry those who witness the crucifixion,

‘and we will believe in him. He trusts in [‘]God[‘]; let [‘]God[‘] deliver him now, if he wants to…’ (Matthew 27.42f)

But to pick up where Ezekiel goes with this: if God is who Jesus said God is, and if Jesus had the relationship to God his words and actions suggested, the resurrection is not an impossible ‘miracle’ but a matter of divine ‘necessity’, if God’s name is not to continue to be mocked. The mockery of Jesus on the cross is the mockery of the God he proclaimed. The resurrection of Jesus is, then, ‘for the sake of God’s name’.

The upshot of all this is that whether condemned as Israel was for getting God wrong, or condemned as Jesus was for getting God right, hope lies not in us but in the God who’s very being is tied to ours.

To have been chosen by God is to have had our lives tied to God’s, such that we are now and forever more, ‘for God’s sake’. Wherever we find ourselves, the question of who we are and what we can look forward to as our hope is always answered with the name of God.

This is surely good news for anyone who suspects that their own name will not be enough to carry them over, and a challenge to any who imagine their name will suffice.

Let us then rejoice, or repent, as God’s name and promise gives cause.

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Pentecost 12
23/8/2020

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 30-32
2 Corinthians 3:1-6
Matthew 16:13-20

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.

A friend of mine recently commented that, in the present circumstances, he was feeling a palpable sense of living through history. Of course we are always living through history in varying ways: our personal histories, family and local histories, and even taking our part in world history. In part accelerated by increased connectivity between all parts of the world, we are constantly aware that there is always something of significance going on somewhere at any given moment. We seem far removed from the BBC news broadcast in 1930 which was forced to end 10 minutes early because there was nothing newsworthy left to report.

This palpable sense of living through history, however, points to the present context of a once in a century pandemic. It feels like we are not simply passing idly through time, but are experiencing the sort of thing that will be recorded in history books, and studied by future generations. The kind of event which in the past has prompted the question, “where were you when …?” The key difference being we will all know the almost universal answer: at home.

This sense that the road of history has come up to meet us, and here we are compelled to journey through it, seems akin to the feeling the prophet Ezekiel is seeking to evoke in our reading today from chapter 18.

Throughout the prophetic utterances of Ezekiel we hear, often with stark imagery and detail, about the judgement due to the people of Israel, and the nations around. Spoken into the context of exile, when God’s people were taken from their land and subjugated, Ezekiel’s prophecies interpret this experience of suffering and dispossession as the result of divine judgement. This judgement is due because of the idolatry and sinfulness of the Israelites: their unfaithfulness to God’s holiness and God’s commands.

As we read through Ezekiel, any notion that the Israelites can be a people apart from God is definitively rejected. They cannot make of themselves what they like. The Israelites cannot fashion their devotion, their common life, or their identity in whatever manner they see fit. The call of God comes relentlessly through Ezekiel: the Israelites are God’s people because they belong to God . They are God’s people because they were called out of Egypt, because they were formed into a people by the law, because they were known by God. There can be no self-reliance, no sense of a people persisting through history apart from the God who has formed them, and sustains them. Ezekiel makes clear the condemnation for Israel’s departure from God, and the judgement which follows from their infidelity.

In one sense, Ezekiel 18 might be construed as a sort of relief from the unceasing judgement of previous chapters. In this text the focus shifts from the broad sweep of geo-political change: the Babylonians rising as an agent of divine retribution against Israel; the history of God’s people narrated against the drama of God’s long-standing faithfulness to unfaithful Israel. In chapter 18 the story becomes, in an odd way, intimate. The striking images of winged beasts, and executioners, and desolate temples, give way to stories of parent and child.

“Know that all lives are mine,” says the Lord, “the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine …”

Against all that has been said about the grand sweep of history here Ezekiel lays out that while the whole world is held in God’s hand, so too is every life. The life of the parent, as well as the life of the child. The God who is Lord over the rise and fall of nations is portrayed here as also incredibly close.

It is tempting to hear in these words a comfort against the backdrop of crisis and exile. God holds each of us, owns each of us, keeps us: every one. Perhaps, after all, everything will be okay.

Yet, in the midst of crisis the closeness of God can rather feel, not like a comfort, but like a cold and bitter challenge. The God who is close cannot plead ignorance, or that we are collateral damage. God holds every life, and yet … the city is destroyed. The people are dragged away from their homes – or locked within them. Many of these lives perish. Far from easing the burden of God’s judgement, this reflection on the closeness of God can make this judgement feel even more acute.

The received wisdom, which might have helped us through the crisis, must be set aside. As the proverb says, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” Perhaps it isn’t us: our forebears were unfaithful, and so we are only bearing the consequence of their actions. While it is true that we are suffering, perhaps after all, we are not the direct targets of God’s judgement. This was not merely the conventional wisdom, but the law. The law sets out that the iniquity of parents will be born by their children, “to the third and fourth generation of those who reject God.” (Deut. 5.9)

Ezekiel challenges this wisdom, and even this law. Through this chapter Ezekiel sets out the story of a parent, and a child, and their child: three generations. The Grandparent is righteous, and so shall live; their unrighteous child shall die for their own sins; and the righteous grandchild shall live, despite the sins of their father. The point Ezekiel is making is not about locating the reader as an individual in the midst of the crowd. As if what mattered was who exactly is at fault for an entire nation being cast aside and dispossessed of its land. Rather, Ezekiel is locating the reader as the focal point of history: it is this generation which is experiencing the judgement of God, it is this generation who is responsible for turning back in faithfulness, it is you : now, dislocated in exile: you are the ones who must walk towards righteousness and life, and away from guilt and death. The road of history has come up to meet you. The responsibility we find here is not the responsibility of blame for what has happened, but the responsibility for acting now in order to shape the life which might arise out of the present circumstances.

Ezekiel’s prophetic address is perhaps not so far away for those of us in the present circumstances, with a palpable sense of living through history. What matters is not who is to blame, but that we (all of us): now, dislocated in our homes: we are the ones who must walk towards righteousness and life, and away from guilt and death. The road of history has come up to meet us. God has come close.

The comfort of God’s closeness cannot be heard without first hearing the seriousness of this responsibility. We are called to respond, called to be concerned with the oppression of the poor and the needy, called to give food to the hungry, to exact true justice, and adhere to the ways of the Lord. Let us cast away a narrow focus on ourselves, and step into the moment which has come to us.

The echo of Ezekiel can be heard saying: God comes to us in this moment, and calls us to respond. This is a serious responsibility.

But let us be clear: God does come to us in this moment; and does call us, that we would respond. The responsibility is great, and also a sure sign of God’s closeness in the midst of crisis. We must not think that God is only a figment of history, or that God is always to come. God is close to us even now. And though it is as much a challenge as a comfort, it is a comfort. Because God seeks for us a renewal in this moment: a new heart and a new spirit. God desires for us to meet this moment and turn in faithfulness and live. God desires us, yearns for us. As a mother yearns for their daughter, and desires that they would grow into goodness. God takes no pleasure in death and suffering, but calls and beckons us – evermore, even now – to come close to God as God has come close to us.

What it means for God to hold the whole world in God’s hand, all of history, and each of us, is not a simple accounting of rights and wrongs. But is a yearning to be bound to us, and us bound to God; a desire that we should turn and be transformed, renewed not by wisdom and law, but by a new Spirit of the living God. In the midst of chaos, uncertainty, and what feels like the crisis of divine judgement, Ezekiel reminds us that God does not cast us down from afar, but turns the divine eyes of life towards us.

May we embrace the God who comes embraces us, yearning with God for the life of the world.

Come Holy Spirit. Come.

Amen.

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Pentecost 11
16/8/2020

Ezekiel 20:1-9
Psalm 67
Matthew 15:10-20

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In a sentence
What holds us together and makes us ‘us’ is God’s address to us, God’s holding of us

Our present circumstances present a considerable challenge to our assumptions about who we are, what we can expect, what control we have over our destiny.

If we are honest about what we’re experiencing, and are to take seriously chatter about the development of ‘new normals’, we might ask what it is we think makes us who and what we are – what it is we seek to preserve in our struggle against the new normal, and what new realities we might look to see develop there.

These are questions which concern our identity. This identity is not merely the kind of thing displayed in a passport or a driver’s license. Those details are only a ‘presenting’ identity which locates us for a particular moment and purpose. But identity is not merely momentary – a here-and-now thing. Identity is also about what makes us continuous with what we were, and what we might yet be. Put differently, our identity is about what makes us identical with ourselves – me, now, with the child I once was, and with the person I might yet be, and whatever – if anything – continues when I die.

Reflecting on what it is upon which are threaded all the pieces we are, we might propose that our body is what holds us together, continuing as it does more or less intact through time for as long as we are alive. A problem here, of course, is that bodies don’t last all that long. If we were to invoke the notion of ‘soul’ to overcome this problem, we then have the difficulty of telling one soul from another – which is what having an would identity allow us to do. Souls require some link to their bodies in order to be the particular souls that they are. Whatever a soul is, it is nothing without reference to a body. And yet bodies eventually stop.

And so one way faith has dealt with the problem of continued identity is the notion of resurrection – specifically the resurrection of the body. It needs to be ‘of the body’ because otherwise we could not know that the thing raised was continuous with the thing which died; recall how the risen Jesus proves his identity by showing the disciples the wounds of the crucifixion. Yet the resurrection of the body raises a whole lot of other problems which we’ll not go into now other than to say that ‘body’ here doesn’t mean quite what we usually think it means, but it does mean at least more than a spooky soul(!).

I raise all of this because the events described in Chapter 20 of Ezekiel concern the interaction of Israel with God over the course of some 700 years, from Israel in Egypt all the way to the exile out which Ezekiel speaks. At each of the crisis points along the way – all rather death-like – the continuing identity of Israel is under threat. Israel is regularly at a point of turning away from God, of ceasing to be the one who ‘wrestles with God’ – the meaning of the name ‘Israel’.

What keeps Israel ‘continuous’, however, is nothing in its own choices. The thread which strings together these various episodes – and many more besides – is the constant presence of Israel’s God, something altogether external to Israel. We have previously noted a ‘refrain’ throughout Ezekiel to do with the revelation of God’s own character: ‘and you shall know that I am the Lord’. Had we heard the whole of Chapter 20 today we would have heard several times another refrain. In response to this or that unfaithfulness of Israel in the story, God remarks:

I thought I would pour out my wrath upon them…, to make an end of them. But I acted for the sake of my name, so that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations… (8f; cf. 13f and 21f)

The possibility of ‘wrath’ is the threat to Israel’s continuity, the point at which it could be dissipated and forgotten, its identity dissolved – ‘I thought I would pour out my wrath…’ At each point along the way, then, it is not anything within Israel itself but God’s own action ‘for the sake of my name’ which maintains Israel’s identity.

This opens for us another way of thinking about what makes us, about what provides us with continuity of identity, about what ‘brackets’ our lives. It is not merely that Israel ‘survives’ because God does not act to destroy it. It is that Israel does not stop being God’s people because God continues to address it, despite its unfaithfulness. When God acts ‘for the sake of my name’ – this is not a petty preservation of God’s own reputation but the grounds of Israel continuing to be identified in relation to God.

This is to say that Israel’s identity is found in God’s very address to it. God names Israel as God’s own: ‘and then you will be my people, and I will be your God’ is another refrain we find in Ezekiel (11.20; 14.11; 36.28; 37.27).

Over the course of those 700 years, and since then, Israel’s continuity is not guaranteed by there being a few still standing at any particular time. Israel’s continuity as Israel, as itself, continues because God keeps ‘saying’ ‘Israel’. Chapter 20 recalls much to be lamented in the tale of Israel. But the very fact that the story is retold with Israel and God as the central actors returns Israel to its true identity. Israel’s character may be sadly wanting but its identity is undeniable – Israel is the one which belongs to God.

This is the case even when Israel seems totally lost – dead, for all intents and purposes. What restores Israel – what resurrects it – is the address of God: ‘you are mine’. To be claimed by God is to be restored to life, from whatever state we are in.

So it is for all resurrection moments, whether the restorations of ancient Israel, the raising of Jesus or coming to faith today.

Whatever it is we think most fundamentally makes us who we are – whether it be our body, our race or culture, our family, our gender, our achievements, our failures, our enemies or anxieties, our being shut down for fear of the coronavirus – these are not the threads of our identity but are rather threaded upon God’s own identity, which causes God to claim us as God’s own.

There may be much of our story on that divine thread which is tarnished, and corrupted, and rank with the stench of death. But this God is a thread upon which all things become jewels. This is the miracle of resurrection by this God: not a mere call to continue but a claiming of all that we have been and done as God’s very own, now made whole and presented back to us as also our own, as a blessed aspect of our identity.

This resurrecting call is the constant in our lives, the key to our identity and so also to our future.

Who we are is not our circumstances. No circumstance – not even those deathly things we weave around ourselves – cannot be re-woven into a robe of righteousness, a garment of joy.

For our name, our identity, is ever on the lips of God: You-Are-Mine.

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Pentecost 10
9/8/2020

Ezekiel 6:1-10
Matthew 14:22-33

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In a sentence
God takes what happens to us – the good and the bad – to tell us who we are and who God is.

Perhaps some of you have seen the recent stage musical Hamilton, an account of the life of the American revolutionary Alexander Hamilton.

The principal comic relief in the show is the appearance several times of King George III, commenting on the action. His first appearance is before the war is lost and so he imagines he still has a chance. His song ends like this:

‘You’ll be back like before
I will fight the fight and win the war
For your love, for your praise
And I’ll love you till my dying days
When you’re gone, I’ll go mad
So don’t throw away this thing we had
Cuz when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family to remind you of my love’

Of course, in an American telling of the American Revolution, the king’s appearances and comments are deeply ironic. The horror, then, that one might show ‘love’ by killing is both very real and yet, perhaps, softened a bit by the fact that the king loses the war and his ‘love’ is unrequited.

By contrast, the figure of God which features in the first half of Ezekiel appears, at least at first blush, not a little unlike Hamilton’s King George but without the relieving irony. The language of wrath and fire and sword abounds, and none of it is good news for those Ezekiel reminds, if not quite of God’s love, at least of God’s righteousness. ‘And you will know that I am the Lord’ – the slogan of God’s freedom we noted last week – finds itself too often at the conclusion of George-like threats, such as we have heard today:

^6.7 The slain shall fall in your midst; then you shall know that I am the Lord.

The horror of it all is sufficient to make atheists of many and to cause even believers to squirm with discomfort. These instincts are pretty good.

Yet it ought not to surprise us that things are not quite as straightforward as simply editing out what seems to be such violence by God’s hand. Not least, it is too cheap to dismiss out of hand God the wrathful punisher of Israel, for would we not need then to deny God’s involvement as happy benefactor in the blessings we think we receive from God and so eagerly embrace? Most of us find it easy to identify God’s blessing action in things which go our way. We thank God that we dodged this or that bullet – that we arrived a moment too late to be caught up in the accident, implying that God caused some earlier irritating delay in order to save our lives; or we think it God’s blessing that we recovered from a serious illness though most do not. ‘Thank God’ is one of the more pernicious throw-away lines on the lips of believers, along with ‘God has been good to me’. Even the expected final receding of COVID-19 will be the cause of thanking God, as if it were something God ‘did’ – did in the same way we might hope God did not destroy Jerusalem in 586BC, or did not cause the pandemic in the first place.

The problem with too quick a dismissal of the divine violence in the prophets is that the texts about God’s wrath are as clear as those about God’s benedictions – to which Ezekiel will also come – so that we can’t have the one without the other. To imagine God active in giving to me but not in taking only really works if we split the world into two – and split God also – one part beneficent and one maleficent, the two battling it out through the course of history, with us fleeing from the one to the other.

Yet this is one thing Christian (and Jewish) confession will not allow; God has no rivals. This is to say that the God who blesses is the God who curses.

What then is happening in these terrifying texts? Is God managing history in this way, happily for blessing and horrifically for punishing?

It is clear that Ezekiel reads the suffering and exile as the sign of God’s wrath. The question Israel asks is, How could this happen? The biblical prophets answer, God is punishing you.

Yet the word ‘sign’ is important here, for it connects us to our thinking last week, when we noted the ‘like’ language in Ezekiel’s description of his vision of God. There he saw things ‘like’ human figures, ‘like’ precious jewels, ‘like’ fire and a throne. God is only indirectly seen, sitting somewhere behind our language but still ‘needing’ it in order to be presented – présent‑ed or ‘made present’.

But if the freedom of God means that God cannot be pinned down with precision, the same must also be said of God’s actions. The ‘error bars’, if you like, which indicate our uncertainty about God apply also to knowing God’s action. This is to say that a stark cause-and-effect reading of the connections Ezekiel makes between history and the action of God – even his own apparent reading of them – is an over-reading of those connections.

It is not that the words are unclear, it is rather that we might mistake the kind of words they are. These are borrowed words of blood and fire laid over borrowed events of conquest and exile. They are borrowed to speak of the relationship between an uncertain and disoriented people and a God we can’t quite grasp. This is a process by which God commandeers history – even ‘hijacks’ it – for use as a sign of God’s own character, or of the consequences of faithfulness or unfaithfulness. God takes historical fortune and make of it a so-called ‘teachable moment’.

To put it more starkly, Ezekiel’s preaching here is a process of adding ‘insult’ to injury. The injury is what befalls Israel as a matter of the flow of historical events. What we’re calling the insult is the charge of unfaithfulness by which that disaster is interpreted, and it’s the insult which matters and which endures. That the very people of God can fail – indeed have failed – is what we remember from these texts. And so we might refine this further and say that Ezekiel displaces injury with insult. The insult endures, long after the injury is past, to the extent that the injury is now only remembered because of the insult, because of the interpretation – because of the revelation of God’s character and what God looks for in the community of believers. Ours is not the experience of the destruction of Jerusalem and loss of all that we love; we do hear the lesson, however: that the people of God can get it wrong just as imagine they are getting it right.

‘Adding insult to injury’ is, perhaps, not the most profound description of Ezekiel’s preaching but it has at least the advantage of being memorable! Yet it does matter that the insult is the interpretation of a history which is then left behind. For these texts then call us to humility, repentance and thanksgiving in whatever historical circumstances we find ourselves. What is excluded, on the one hand is quivering fear before a God who might crush us to remind us of his love and, on the other hand, the arrogance of the faithful that because things are going well for us God must be on our side.

The pressure of Ezekiel’s preaching is not towards the guarantee that all will be well with those who keep the covenant; faithful people suffer and die prematurely all the time. Neither is it toward all being bad for the unrighteous; the unrighteous often do pretty well for themselves.

Rather, Ezekiel presses towards the guarantee that the world is a place which bears God to us, whether it be ill or good which is at play. God is never nowhere to be found. God borrows the world as it is – be it the good of sunshine or the of newborn babe, or the evil of a pandemic or the cross – so that we might be ‘reminded of his love’ in all things.

For, despite what we think we see going on around us, God’s love is what we are moving towards in all things.

It is for us, then, in all things, to adjust our sight so that it is this horizon towards which we are looking as we pass through green pastures and through shadowed valleys.

In all the days of our lives – for better and for worse – ours is the house of the Lord in which all things finally become goodness and mercy.

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Pentecost 9
2/8/2020

Ezekiel 1:1-28
Matthew 14:13-21

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In a sentence
We can’t really say quite what God is like, and this means that God is free to set us free

For 2500 years, Ezekiel’s extraordinary vision on the river Chebar has captured the imagination of mystics and wackos alike. Winged creatures with strange faces, eye-balled wheels within wheels, a throned figure and fire against a thunderous soundtrack – what is not marvellous in this striking account?

Artists, naturally, have also been caught up by the vision, with all manner of attempts to capture Ezekiel’s vivid description as an image. And yet, for all the enthusiasm about what it was Ezekiel saw, there is one word in his account which goes largely overlooked in all these musings – the little word ‘like’.

In fact, ‘like’ (or ‘likeness’) appears 25 times in this account of Ezekiel’s vision, and ‘appeared’ (or ‘appearance’, both in the sense of ‘looking like’) is found another 8 times. The last three verses illustrate the point most intensively (NRSV):

²⁶ And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form. ²⁷Upwards from what appeared like the loins I saw something like gleaming amber, something that looked like fire enclosed all round; and downwards from what looked like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendour all round. ²⁸Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendour all round. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.

The problem with any attempt to portray what Ezekiel sees here is that while we can draw, say, a picture of a person and saw that our drawing is like the person, how do we draw something which is itself like a human person? ‘Like’ a human being is not a human being. ‘Like’ a throne is not a throne, ‘like’ amber is not amber, and ‘like’ fire is not fire. This is to say that representations of Ezekiel’s vision with human figures and shining jewels and fire and a throne are representations of what Ezekiel did not see, for what he was ‘like’ these things.

This might seem rather a subtle distinction but consider the last line of what we heard today, which punches the point home. Ezekiel sees ‘only’ the ‘appearance’ of the ‘likeness’ of the ‘glory’ of the Lord. ‘Like’ language removes God as many as three times from what he actually sees. He sees not the Lord but the glory of the Lord, and not the glory but the likeness (or semblance) of that glory, and not the likeness of the glory of the Lord but something which appeared like the likeness of the glory.

Ezekiel’s account is of a kind of ‘space-holder’ for where God would be or what God would look like, if God were anywhere or looked like anything. To put it differently, here we have an account of the transcendence of God, of God’s being utterly beyond all in the world, and yet – the ‘and yet’ is crucial – still present to the world, pressing upon it. This is a transcendence not primarily ‘over’ or ‘beyond’ the world, but for it.

To capture this, God is indicated not by describing God rather but what God is ‘like’; ‘not-God’ stands in God’s place. God is thus always at least one step removed from anything said about God, properly in the background to what we think we see and name as ‘God’. This is not about the poverty of language to express God, and it is not an evasion by God. In this God is not to be elusive but free.

Throughout the book of Ezekiel we will hear the refrain ‘[and] you/they shall know that I am the Lord’ (in fact, over 50 times). Here the name ‘Lord’ is crucial, as is the fact that this refrain is never ‘you shall know I am God’; it is ‘Lord’ and not ‘God’ which matters here.

‘Lord’ is here the divine name given to Moses in the burning bush episode. We usually say that name in English as ‘Yahweh’ (‘Jehovah’, in the old money). The meaning of ‘Yahweh’ is itself somewhat elusive but we know that it implies self-determination. ‘Who are you?’ Moses asked. ‘I am who I will be’, God answers, or, ‘I will be who I will be’. This is a name which communicates the fundament character of the one whose name it is: I will be as I will to be. God here names Godself as the one free to be God’s own.

(While we’ve remarked on the prevalence of ‘like’ language in Ezekiel’s vision, it’s worth noting here that there are several things which are not described as ‘like’. The ‘wheels’ are apparently not like wheels but are, in fact, wheels. So also for the eyes in the wheels, and the spirit which animates them to move ‘chariot-throne’ – if we might call it that. At this great cultural distance any particular symbolism in the wheels or the eyes is difficult to identify with confidence, but we can comprehend at least the ‘every‑direction’ freedom of movement the wheels have, and the every‑direction vision of the eyes. The one seated on the chariot-throne is free to move, and sees all. There is nothing ‘like’ freedom here but freedom itself.)

God’s transcendence is not about God’s location – over, above, beyond – but about God’s freedom. Ezekiel’s encounter is with a God who relates to the world – as creator, lover, judge, redeemer – and yet is not part of the world, is at best only ‘like’ this or that thing we already know.

The question which might tempt us here is ‘What use is a God like this?’

It is a tempting question because useful things seem to us to be what we most need. We assess our situation and determine what it demands. We are building things and protecting things. Or future seems to us to be in our hands and what is ‘useful’ aids us in our work towards these projected futures. What is free – radically free – is precisely what our projects seek to overcome, because free things break with order and challenge the status quo, be it the wild child, the raging storm or the advanced tumour. Free things disrupt our own stories about ourselves.

A God we cannot get a handle on – who is only ‘like’ this or that familiar thing and so is really unlike anything – is a threat to our stories about ourselves. This the case whether those stories are positive or negative. When our stories about ourselves are arrogant and proud, such a God would reveal to us death, would reveal that our kingdoms are not God’s kingdom. When our stories about ourselves are bleak and desperate, such a God would reveal to us hope, for God sees further than we do.

What might we say such a free God is ‘like’ today?

There is among us at the moment something ‘like’ God in its freedom, at least – a radical disrupter revealing to us that our best laid plans are susceptible to the threat of death, for what else is the virus but such an unfettered interruption? We will, doubtless, yet discover useful tools beyond what we already have, and bring this terrifyingly free agent of death under some likeness of control. Our prayers are with those charged to fashion these tools, be they regulations to keep us safe or the magic of advanced medicine.

But, to add to the tentative reflections of last week on the relationship between the virus and God’s judgement, perhaps we could see in the virus not quite God but a likeness of God’s own freedom to approach us in times and places least expected, whether on the banks of the river Chebar in 593BC with condemnation and promise, or here-and-now with whatever will shake us down into a richer humanity. For as then so also now, it is only such a free God who might be able to dislodge us from our arrogance and self-delusion, our indifference and self-satisfaction, and our grief and fears.

Do we not need such a jolt?

All of this is to say, with Ezekiel, that when the God who is like nothing we know comes to us, it is to reveal that tomorrow belongs not to us with all our plans and projects but belongs to God.

And, unlike a virus which simply wipes tomorrow away, God comes to call us to meet him in that tomorrow, where condemnation resolves into grace, darkness yields to light, weeping gives way to joy.

What, in the end, is not to ‘like’ about such a God as this?

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Pentecost 8
26/7/2020

Ezekiel 1:1-3
Romans 8:26-37
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

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In a sentence
The simple affirmation that ‘God is with us’ in difficult times like the C-19 pandemic ultimately renders God pretty irrelevant to the whole catastrophe; the biblical dynamic of judgement and grace helps us more.

The persistence of COVID-19 – perhaps more urgently now that we see more clearly that we are in this for the long haul, and the potential for suffering deepens – urges us to fresh reflection on its ‘meaning’, if indeed it means anything. To faith the question of meaning seeks after a relationship between the pandemic and God and takes a form something like, ‘Where’ is God in all this?

Connected to this is another faith-question along the lines of, Where are we in all this? Scriptural images of exile and wilderness wandering seem to have pressed forward here. We are in the wilderness, exiled in self-isolation, but surely – to answer the question of God’s whereabouts – God is with us, here in our exile.

Perhaps we are in a wilderness, and perhaps God is with us. But is God’s being with us good news or bad news? In affirming that God is with us, we seek to say something comforting to those in exile. Yet if it is a scriptural wilderness or exile within which we and God presently meet, the notion of ‘comfort’ sits uncomfortably with this borrowed image.

Ezekiel is in exile in the spiritual wilderness which is Babylon, and his calling and visions take place in that far country. Yet his commissioning as prophet is not in order to declare to the exiles that God is ‘with’ them. Or, better, this is not yet a comforting message. As part of his calling, Ezekiel is given a scroll to eat and then to speak. On the scroll are words of ‘lamentation and mourning and woe’ (2.8-10). God is with Israel, but as judge. Ezekiel is to proclaim God’s condemnation of the ‘house of rebels’ which God’s people have become (2.1ff).

What does this mean for us in our current experience of ‘exile’ or ‘wilderness’, if that is truly what it is? If we claim these scriptural images as metaphors for our present experience, do we dare to interpret our suffering as a sign of ‘judgement’?

It is surely a dangerous thing to wonder about God’s hand in particular historical events. And yet it is not therefore an impious thing. If it were, then it would be entirely impious to assert that God is with us here to ‘comfort’, for this is already to have made a judgement about God’s hand in the matter – a black-and-white ‘God good, us good, virus bad’.

If we are to take the scriptural witness seriously, the two options here are equally dangerous. On the one hand we might say that whatever happens to us, we are innocent of the causes and, so, God also is innocent but nevertheless is always there comfort us in our wilderness. On the other hand, we might maintain that the wilderness implies judgement and that God stands over against us.

In churches like our own, at least, we hesitate in relation to the latter, and for good reason. A virus is indiscriminate and we want to say that God is not. We hesitate to entertain certain things about God and the virus, for God’s sake.

Yet – if we are honest – we hesitate also for our own sakes. A week or so ago the Victorian State Premier referred to COVID-19 as “a clever, invisible enemy”. Invisible it is indeed, but ‘clever’ doesn’t quite fit. A virus worth worrying about is not clever; it is merely terribly efficient. It simply does what it is given to do. Like the Angel of Death it is ruthlessly effective by nature and not by cunning – a deadly sword in the slayer’s hand. If that analogy is confronting, we must keep in mind that that is just how the prophets interpret the armies which invade Israel in the eighth century and Judah in the sixth, with a devastation most of us can only imagine.

But if the virus were a sword in God’s hand, why are we being slashed in this way? What is the judgement which could justify this?

Your preacher today is not a prophet, and so won’t be making the direct kind of link between happenings and the action of God which the prophets of old once so boldly made and which have been secured by the Scriptures. But the average preacher ought, at least, to caution against making too easy – too comforting – a borrowing from the Scriptures in order to speak God into our time. If we are going to locate ourselves in a wilderness or an exile, then the question should also be asked, is there a judgement here? The answer to this may indeed be ‘yes’.

This is not, however, because we can now see it as punishment for this or that transgression. It is because – with this God – grace is not grace without judgement, and judgement is not judgement without grace.

We desire only the gracing presence of ‘God with us in our exile’ but grace is only grace in the setting aside of a just condemnation. We reject judgement because we cannot see grace in it but, with this God, judgement is grace‑d.

The problem with the exile metaphor as it is used for our present situation is that, while it allows God to be with us in this place, it is agnostic as to God’s role in getting us here. And, presumably, if God didn’t get us into this and didn’t prevent it in the first place, God also can’t get us out, either. We will just one day be out, and God will just continue on being-with-us.

If we are going to be faithful to the God who interacts with God’s people in the way the Scriptures portray, we need something more than a God who just hangs about, even if we can’t quite say what it is. The church does neither itself nor the wider world any favours by telling half the story of God’s dealings with us.

Even if we may not be able to say what the judgement might be in these circumstances, to be in a ‘wilderness’ or ‘exile’ in any true scriptural sense is to be involved with a God who is more intimately involved in what is unfolding around us than merely as comforting observer. The evidence of this is the old prophets themselves, and Ezekiel among them. There is not much difference between the armies of Babylon and COVID-19, so far as the prophets and the people are concerned. If God can claim the armies as God’s own, perhaps, also then the virus.

And we might ask again: is this good news, or bad news?

It is indeed a scroll of lamentation and mourning and woe which Ezekiel is given to eat. But he says of that scroll, ‘in my mouth it was as sweet as honey’. The possibility that God’s hand might somehow be active in the virus is the possibility that judgement is not all bad, indeed, that it might be ‘as sweet as honey’, that it might be grace‑d. Perhaps, if this God judges, judgement does not mean what we fear it means; it is not made to abandon in condemnation but rather to draw back together.

This will, in fact, be Ezekiel’s message, and a difficult one.

The old rabbis wondered whether Ezekiel was one of those biblical books which most thoroughly ‘defiled the hands’ of those who opened it. Curiously, they held that the holy books of Scripture made unclean those who handled them, and that any book which did not do so was unworthy of being considered Scripture (candidates for this latter included Ecclesiastes, Esther and Song of Songs).

We no longer understand how holy books were thought to do this, but the effect is clear: uncleanness ‘sets apart’ those who are defiled – they are no longer fit for normal social intercourse, and ‘social distancing’ becomes necessary if others are not to be contaminated. To borrow from elsewhere, we might recall in this connection Moses veiling his face on coming out of the tabernacle, shielding the people from God’s reflected glory.

Of course, there is something deeply ironic in describing the holy books in this way. This ‘defilement’ by exposure to the deep mystery of God is to be desired and sought, not – feared – even if it has the potential to separate us from each other, at least for a season.

To see and know about judgement and exile, grace and restoration, what Ezekiel knew about these things will likely cause us to think and say surprisingly things, even uncomfortable things.

That is hard because many are finding it uncomfortable enough as it is. But if it is this God who makes us uncomfortable, we know that it is only for our benefit and wholeness.

Let us, then, in these hard times and always, wait on the God from whose Word there is yet much more light to shine, that we might more truly know God – and ourselves.

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Pentecost 7
19/7/2020

Romans 8:12-27
Psalm 139
Matthew 13:18-23

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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Melbourne is living through a second season of pandemic induced shutdown – maybe a suitable time to reflect a little on failure.

Years ago I was talking with a colleague who was a chaplain in a shopping centre. Part of every day he spent walking between the shops of the huge complex. He said that it is very frustrating work. He couldn’t measure the results. On one day someone would pour out his heart and soul to the chaplain. Two days later the same person would not even recognise the chaplain when they came face to face again. What was the use of being the church in the market place? So much of the effort seems to fail.

It is not an uncommon feeling, not uncommon in ministry, not uncommon in all kinds of walks of life. It doesn’t help when we hear wonderful success stories — stories of flourishing businesses, stories of sparkling achievements, stories that shout bigger and better at us and taunt us in our mediocrity and failure.

Between my ordination and my retirement, every so often I had to fill out a profile on myself for the church. The synod liked to keep a few details about me on their files. One question the profile form used to ask was, ‘What do you think are the most important tasks for the church over the next ten years?’ I never knew what to say. I decided to leave it blank rather than write, ‘blessed if I know.’ It seems to me that a church experiencing success and growth and confidence wouldn’t bother asking that question, and a minister who really knew the answer would have put things to rights by now. It would not be a question to ask of a church with 200 in the Sunday school and thousands of young people rushing off to Christian Endeavour on Sunday afternoons. That’s not what’s happening in most churches at the moment so we ask, ‘Does anyone know what we should be doing?’

Why couldn’t Jesus have told stories about failure, stories that speak to those bits of my life that don’t hold together? Why couldn’t Jesus have told stories that dwindling and confused churches might have resonated with? A nice failure story would speak to most churches.

But of course Jesus did tell some wonderful failure stories. He actually lived a remarkable failure story. Most people who heard Jesus preach didn’t follow him. By the time Passover came round in the third year of his teaching career public opinion had turned completely against him so that even his students ran away when he was arrested. When he was taken out and killed I wonder how close he came to saying, ‘Well what was that all about?’ What he actually said was, ‘My God, my God! why have you abandoned me?’

The church has remembered Jesus failure stories. One of them was the story of the sower who went out to sow and he failed. He sowed seed on hard ground and the birds ate it. He sowed seed on stony ground and it couldn’t take root. He sowed seed among thistles and it choked — complete waste of time really. A sower went out to sow and most of his efforts were unproductive, a complete waste of time.

A story that is not all sweetness and light is easier for us to hear because it more closely resembles our story. The sower failed and so do we and so did Jesus and so did the infant church and so does the Uniting Church — and that is disheartening and frustrating. So why don’t we give up. Why bother trying to be winners in the face of defeat? Why bother trying to be the church when we keep missing the goals? Why do we send chaplains into schools and hospitals and prisons? Why do we maintain worship in this church? Because a sower went out to sow, and some seed fell on good soil.

We know from our recent readings from Paul’s letter to the Romans that Paul would want to add something like, ‘Therefore should we try to fail more so there can be no mistaking that God’s kingdom coming is God’s succuss story, not ours.” Then Paul would add a phrase English translators render as, ‘by no means.” One of my New Testament teachers gave a fruitier translation – ‘not jolly likely’ – at least that was the jist of his translation. We do strive, we do try harder. Paul tells the church in Rome, ‘…the Spirit helps us in our weakness…’

Listen, a sower went out to sow and he failed, but because he sowed God triumphed and God has this habit of passing his triumphs onto his people.

We struggle and strive and fail — even so, God brings in his harvest. Keep struggling and striving — keep risking failure — for God’s sake.

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Pentecost 6
12/7/2020

Romans 8:1-11
Psalm 119:105-112
Matthew 13:1-9

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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We continue to live in unprecedented times as our entire city is once again in lockdown. It is helpful, then, to recognize that the problems all human beings face are likely to be of two kinds. Some we experience only as matters of momentary urgency. I lost my wallet on Tuesday in a shopping centre at the exact time that the lockdown was announced. Which of the two do you think exercised me the more? Other problems endure as issues of lasting concern. Sometimes the two cannot easily be separated. COVID-19 has arrived as a matter of momentary urgency as politicians juggle competing social health and economic claims, but for millions upon millions worldwide life will never be the same again.

However, it is when issues of enduring significance are unrecognized that they readily make life more problematic than would otherwise be the case,

The readings offered to us Sunday by Sunday invariably reflect both sorts of problems – momentary urgency and lasting concern. Today is a case in point.

Paul draws the attention of the church in Rome to what must be the most basic issue of lasting concern.  So, he writes:

“Those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on flesh is death, but to set the mind on the things of the Spirit is life and peace”.

Notice that the contrast he draws is between flesh and spirit, not body and spirit. The distinction is crucial.

In the much-vaunted secular society that we inhabit, “flesh” is likely to be understood merely as an infatuation with the sensual. And spirit? Who knows what spirit might be thought to represent? In former times, spirit might have suggested something non-material, even to be a somewhat ethereal experience eclipsing the predictabilities of the every-day. Today, spirit lacks all definition, except when increasingly rejoiced in as something superior to “religion”. It is far from clear what those have in mind who declare themselves to be “not religious but spiritual”.

This likely secular connotation of what flesh and spirit are thought to mean is not that which Paul is addressing. On the contrary, for him flesh is the whole of life turned away from God – turned away in “spirit”, we might say, as well as in body. Beware of those who imagine the “spiritual” to be benign.  Spirit, it turns out, might well be “flesh” in disguise; as much a disorder of a hidden “inner” as that of a conspicuous “outer”.

Equally, Paul’s “life in the Spirit” is not some self-indulgent solitary religious pursuit, but is rather the whole of life in the body turned toward God and the neighbour.

In another of his letters, this time to the church in Galatia (Galatians 5:19ff), Paul is confronting vital ethical matters of the moment. He chooses to use this flesh/spirit framework by way of their illustration. He first lists the contours of life in the flesh. We should not be surprised to find that fornication, licentiousness and drunkenness qualify as “flesh”. Remarkably, however, there he also lists as “flesh” such susceptibilities as: “idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy”. Who would have thought envy, anger, and jealousy might be described as failures of the flesh rather than of the spirit?

Martin Luther, always the master of the colourful image, once described “flesh” as “a heart curved in on itself”. Or, even better, in his earthy German, he pictured “flesh” as Nabelschau, literally “navel gazing”, a life originating from the centre of the self. How modern is that! And Nabelschau, says Paul, will, later if not sooner, be experienced as a form of death.

By contrast, life in the Spirit he describes as “fruit”, an image which suggests a flowering that is harvest from a lifegiving source: so, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, self-control. Being fruit, it follows that these socially desirable attributes are not likely to be self-generated. As gifts, they supplant a life dedicated to the dictates of the self. Moreover, precisely as bodily actions orientated towards others, this fruit becomes a genuine offering back to its source in the life of God.

The parable of the Sower is not an accidental accompaniment to all this. Here enduring concern and momentary urgency coincide. Employing an agricultural metaphor, it illustrates the consequences of life lived either as flesh or – by grace – the miracle of holy Spirit. We hear that it cannot be taken for granted that sown seeds will find their proper destination. Paths, rocks, weeds – each may well be seeds’ regrettable destination, the rich variety of places where, sooner or later, no life is to be found, therefore, places of death. Only those seeds which find good soil will prove to be productive.

In other words, the only alternative to deathly life where flesh reigns is life enriched in the Spirit which is God. This is why we must allow the conclusion of the parable to leave us with its warning appropriate to every moment:

“Let anyone with ears – listen”.