View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 4
28/6/2020

Romans 6:12-23
Psalm 13
Matthew 10:40-42

---

In a sentence
Ever tempted to justify ourselves before God, God sweeps our efforts aside and embraces us regardless

In our reading from Romans today, it seems that Paul is going round and round in circles and drawing contrasts which are too stark to maintain.

Indeed, there is a going-in-circles in his argument here, although it is more a matter of him following a helical path – as in a corkscrew. Around and around he goes, but making progress in another dimension – in a direction ‘above’ any of his circling, adding metaphor upon metaphor to develop the contrasts his proclamation of the gospel requires.

But what about those stark contrasts? Central to our passage today are themes of slavery and dominion. Paul holds that we are all enslaved by something, and he reduces these to just two alternatives: slaves to sin, or slaves to righteousness. At first hearing this seems too simple, for surely we are capable of both good and bad. Are we not, then, sometimes ‘enslaved’ by the temptation to do the wrong thing and sometimes freed to do the right thing? It seems Paul needs more ‘balance’ in his account of how we are and how we behave. ‘Balancing’ Paul is what many of his readers spend a good deal of time trying to do.

But this is to miss the force of ‘slavery’, and then to miss what Paul means by righteousness. ‘Slaves’ are subject only to one master; vacillating between masters is not an option. If Paul is consistent here, and we know that we are capable of both good and bad, then both bad and good works on our part fall under the one heading – under the one slavery – which would be Paul’s ‘slavery to sin’. This is where most of us part company with him, and also with his gospel, because for us ‘doing the right thing’ is the meaning not of sin but of righteousness.

Yet, to speak of righteousness as simply doing the right thing lands us back where we were last week. There we considered our tendency to justify sin in terms of its necessity: if I had to do it, then it is not sin, and so in accord with what God commands. This is a negative approach to righteousness – our defence against a charge of having done wrong.

A positive approach to righteousness would to be to do what God has commanded because God has commanded it, for it is a ‘safe’ thing to do. If asked by the Judge why we did such and such, we can happily point to where it is commanded in the law.

Yet, in either case – whether defending ourselves against a charge of unrighteousness, or claiming righteousness for having worked according to God’s law – the law we point to to justify ourselves is external to the relationship we have to God. That is, the law stands between us as a barrier to be overcome, or as a third party with whom we have to check before we and God know that we are in positive relation to each other. If we imagine, then, that we are sometimes slaves to sin and sometimes slaves to righteousness, we end up keeping a balance sheet, seeking to ensure that we are in the black. This kind of righteousness might impress the locals but it places divine commands and our efforts to meet them between us and God as something in their own right, as something by which even God is bound.

Nowhere in such a dynamic is God the God who justifies sinners, for we are constantly required to justify ourselves with reference to the law and God’s hands are tied by this. This means that good news for those who cannot write their own good news is entirely erased.

The stark contrasts Paul draws – between grace and works, Adam and Christ, death and life, sin and righteousness – have their energy in a radical re-imagination of what it means to stand before God. Righteousness is not what we do or can justify to defend ourselves against God. For Paul there is no defence against God, and there is no need to defend ourselves. Righteousness is, rather, what God does to bring justification and relationship with God.

The law is not erased, but neither is it God’s reference point when considering us. In Paul’s terms, being right with God by doing the right thing is displaced from our spiritual imagination with ‘faith’. This is not mere belief – believing for example that God ‘exists’ or that God wants us to do certain things. Faith here is openness to God’s gift of life and blessing, as a simple gift.

The good life – the life of doing good – is still part of our calling, but it is now no longer our way into God but our way ‘out of’ or from God. Good works move from grace, and do not now seek to secure it. Good works, then, become a repetition of grace.

We give richly because we have received richly. We give to liberate and not to bind. We give, in mercy, what is needed but has not been earned.

In all this life flows from grace, with grace, for the purposes of grace. This is God’s gift and call.

Let us then, not from compulsion or anxiety but in joy and freedom, receive the gift and answer the call, that we might become what God gives us.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 3
21/6/2020

Romans 6:1b-11
Psalm 86
Matthew 10:24-39

---

In a sentence
To free us from necessary sin, God kills us in order that we might know the freedom of Jesus

The thing about sin, not immediately obvious to most sinners, is that the sinner will generally argue that it is ‘necessary’ that the wrong thing be done. We rationalise what we do – perhaps especially when we have knowingly done the wrong thing – and in this way we make wrong-doing necessary, unavoidable. If it is unavoidable, we cannot fairly be held to account for our actions. This is the genius of the accomplished sinner.

And so it becomes justifiable to kneel on a man’s neck so heavily and so long that he dies, for he was potentially a dangerous man; and riots and looting are a justifiable response to that calculation, for surely they have put us down for too long; and sending in the troops to ‘dominate’ the streets is surely justifiable because perhaps the looting is not justifiable after all. This is a chain of ‘if-then’ connections: if I don’t do this bad thing, worse things will happen. If I do do this bad thing, then worse things won’t happen. I am not free here, my hand is being forced. If it is sin, it is also necessary.

This applies in any scenario when we feel we need to justify to ourselves or to someone else a decision we have made: spending more on your next car than you really need to, indulging in online porn or not going to church on Sundays (when that is health-safe!). We have rational justifications by which we seek to persuade the judge, the Twittersphere or God that the agreed rules of engagement made it necessary that we did what we did.

We might even add: if God would only make it that our hands were not tied in this way, then we would not have to sin. In the passage we have heard from Romans today, Paul proposes that God indeed frees us from the necessity of doing the wrong thing.

How? God frees us by killing us. God’s liberation is as strange as this.

Today’s passage from Paul has him in mid-flight through a rather complex account of the human condition, around the themes of sin, law and death. At the centre is that God gives us a death linked to the death of Jesus. It is this death which liberates us.

Death is a useful metaphor here because if there is one thing we can say about the dead, it is that they are free of necessity. The dead truly can do nothing, and so truly need do nothing.

The only thing the dead can do is what they are told – either ‘stay dead’ (which is fairly straightforward) – or, in the instance of creation or resurrection, ‘stop being dead’. Having no other option, the dead must rise if there is one who can bring this about, for they can put no argument that they need to do something else. The ‘freedom of Jesus’ is that he, being properly dead, is then in a position to be raised from the dead at God’s command. Jesus being raised is now, surprisingly, simply a matter of obedience.

Paul argues: you must die in the same way, so that you might be raised to a newness of life – dead to the necessities of sin, and alive to God. Surprisingly, being dead to having to justify our actions corresponds to being alive to the freedom of Jesus.

In the life-and-death of Jesus, we are given a humanity which does not have to justify itself. For there is no longer any reference point outside of the God who commands, who addresses. And so there is no means by which we can test that we have done the right thing, no third party justification for not obeying.

Of course, we want such points of reference and will scarcely give them up. We might comfort ourselves with the justification that ‘blacks’ deserve to be treated that way, or that white privilege and affluence justifies rioting and looting, or that peace demands sending in the troops. But this doesn’t work. In this situation, and in all other cycles of violence and retribution, there is always another ‘necessity’ which arises from another point of view, out of the now changed circumstances, justifying more violation.

What does all this mean?

For Christians it means that violence does not justify violence, whether it is the crushing of a possibly dangerous man, the trashing of the shops of the privileged or the threat of violence from armed soldiers. Acting inhumanely – sinfully – has no justification.

But it also means that having power and privilege does not mean that these cannot be shared. It means that wealth – which we think must necessarily be guarded – can be given away. We cannot justify the great differences in power and privilege which cause others to calculate justifications for sin.

It is when the alleged necessities which serve as self-justification are allowed to fall away that the unexpected possibilities of freedom suddenly open up, that grace begins its work. It is to this freedom in grace that Paul calls us.

But let us also understand that letting go of ‘justified’ sin doesn’t mean that very much is likely to change in the wider world. Or we might say that as much will change as changed with the crucifixion of Jesus. Grace is not a ‘method’, is not a means to a calculated end. Means-to-ends are calculations, rationalisations: if this, then that.

Grace certainly brings freedom. Yet, though it might free me, you may not yet be free. This makes you dangerous and can lead to such things as well-rationalised crucifixions: ‘it is better that one die than that the whole people be lost’ (John 11.50).

Grace brings freedom but does not know what happens next. This is because the freedom is a freedom to respond to the command of God: Sleepers awake, rise from the dead. Obediently responding to this call, we then wait to hear what we are to do next.

Dead to all rationalisations of sin, we are free to do what is right, for God’s sake and for the sake of those wait to see God’s righteousness working through us.

Let us, rise and respond, presenting ourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life. For sin has no dominion over us, no argument by which to persuade us not to live the rich and free humanity God commands.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 2
14/6/2020

1 Peter 5:6-14
Psalm 116
Matthew 9:35-10:8

---

In a sentence
1 Peter calls Christians to an extraordinary life of service

[‘]Set all hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring; be holy; love one another deeply; rid yourselves of all malice; let yourselves be built into a spiritual house; abstain from fleshly desires; conduct yourselves honourably; live as free people; have unity of spirit, sympathy and love, a tender heart and humble mind; do not repay evil for evil; sanctify Christ as Lord; keep your conscience clear; live no longer by earthly desires but by the will of God; be hospitable; speak and act as stewards of God’s grace; entrust yourself to the faithful creator; humble yourselves, cast all anxiety on God, resist the devil.[’]

The ‘charge’ Peter puts to his people is nothing less than, ‘Be extraordinary’. Know what you are, and become that ‘thing’. You are of God, in Christ; Be then what you are, where you are.

In this, Peter calls his people not to the ‘ten-million-views-on-YouTube’ type of extraordinary which dominates our sense of the marvellous today – the freak event, the apparently miraculous timing, or the just plain stupid. Peter’s ‘be extraordinary’ is a call to change our sense of what is ordinary, our sense of what is proper and appropriate.

We learn a sense for what is appropriate in the home, at school, in our engagements at work and through other aspects of human society. And much of that is very good. Yet Peter’s ‘be extraordinary’ is not, ‘Be what you have learned to be from the breast,’ but rather, ‘Be as Jesus was’, whose death seemed to his killers to be just what they had long learned to be appropriate. For Jesus’ death was, in this way, an entirely ordinary thing. It was just the cogs in the machine of one particular human society grinding on, producing what that machine is supposed to produce, which includes not a little death of things insufficiently ‘ordinary’ or appropriate, the death of who does not fit, of who is not valued.

Peter’s ‘be extraordinary’ is a call to be willing to be Jesus, in your own particular time and place. And do not be surprised, he reminds them, that it is hard work. There is death in the machine and you can’t fix it. But even if you can’t fix it, you don’t have to fear it, or be forced by it to be less than God calls you to be. A fearless life is not necessarily a long one, or even a wholly ‘happy’ one. It is simply a life which knows where we have come from and what we are here for.

We have come from the God who calls us unto being. This is not a mere calling into existence. It is the call issued to those capable of hearing and responding (or not). We are when we respond. Peter’s people have heard this call, have received themselves from God through Jesus, and now see themselves in the work of Jesus. Here is the new and better ordinary.

We are here, then, that we might become that new ordinary, that ‘extra’-ordinary. We are here as an answer to the question, ‘Where is God?’ We usually ask this question in such a way as to imagine that the answer might be, ‘Oh, God’s just over there…’ Peter’s answer is that God is ‘there’ in the life of Jesus, and wherever that life finds an echo in our lives. God is present in humble acceptance, in the gentle word, in the grace which releases. God is ‘there’ when God’s people speak and act ‘as if the God of grace’, as we saw last week. Do these things, for the remembrance of me.

To know what we are – that we are of the God of grace – and to become this – humble yet fearless, merciful yet strong – this is God’s call to us in Peter’s letter.

It’s all rather simple, then. We have a charge to keep.

Let us, then, humble ourselves, cast our cares on God, keep alert and resist the constant temptation to be any less than the very good God seeks in us.

And may we find that this is enough.

View or print as a PDF

Trinity Sunday
7/6/2020

Isaiah 53:4-6
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

---

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Lockdown has meant getting into overfull cupboards and sorting old notes and memorabilia. Here is one incident I recalled from 35 years ago, or more.

A professional lady of middle years, who had broken with her family and rejected her faith was telling me all the things that were wrong with her parents. Suddenly she stopped, and asked, “What do you think of my mother?” In retrospect, I see that question as a significant step. She had been constructing a world out of her own prejudice and her own resources. Now she was opening herself to something other, another perspective. Let us speculate that she saw me as God’s representative. That would mean that she was wanting the heavenly parent she thought she didn’t believe in to make comment on the relationship with her earthly parent which had caused he much suffering.

Caught on the hop I said the first words that came into my head; “I see your mother as a person who, in the midst of her own pain, has the capacity to reach out and care for others”. I did not realise at the time, how Christlike that sounds. During the agony of the cross, Jesus prays for the soldiers “Father forgive them”, he comforts the thief “Today you will be with me in paradise” and he tells his mother and the beloved disciple to look after each other, “Woman, here is your son”.

Now, the third part. I did get some feedback from this encounter. A different spirit pervaded the conversations after this exchange. Mother and daughter were able to tread on the holy ground of their fraught relationship. I don’t know where my words came from, but I believe that the Holy Spirit was able to use them as a witness to Christ and to move the people in a godly direction.

We can use the three parts of this incident to penetrate further into the experience of God as Trinity.

1. The lady who asked for the opinion of another about her parent represents a society that is trying to alleviate its suffering out of its own resources. We use advanced technology, accept only evidence based research, and bow to the autonomy of scientific data. All good. Yet our troubles don’t seem to be getting any less, – not judging by the appeals that keep landing on my desk anyway. We are even asking the question, “What kind of Australia do we want when this present coronavirus crisis is past?” But we are not asking “How might our heavenly parent view our efforts?” We have a special opportunity to reflect on how God as creator suffers with the pain felt by God’s own creatures, and why we employ the word “Father” to describe God’s concern. If the belief that the earth is the Lord’s (Psalm 24:1) were more widespread there might be some hope for the powers that be to do something about caring for the environment. Climate change is more than a threat to our grandchildren. It is hurtful to God the giver of life, the Father who sees each sparrow fall.
2. The words, “In the midst of his own pain, Christ reached out to care for others” put our present suffering into perspective. In trouble, say, you receive a plate of scones or bunch of flowers from your church congregation. The significance is greater than the gift. Coming from the people with whom you break bread at the Eucharist, those gifts carry a message – The God who bears the pain of the world suffers with you, and Christ, through the sacrament particularly, is present with you, uniting you with the suffering love that is at the heart of God. Athanasius, in the 4^th century, put it, “In Christ God became human so that we might become divine.” Our word is “sanctification”, though I haven’t heard it much lately. It means allowing the Spirit to show you how Christ is with you, bringing you into the embrace of the caring Father. In our present imperfect state we are invited to participate in the life of the heavenly community of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and then to recreate that kind of community here – “Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven”.

 

3. It is the power of the Holy Spirit that can move you from isolation to community, from estrangement to reconciliation, from meaningless pain to participation in the life of God the Father, through Christ the Son. The Spirit of God can teach you how to walk gently on Holy Ground.

What I am emphasising this morning is that to know God is to experience Father, Son and Holy Spirit in one unified episode. While we speak of three persons, it is one God, one unified experience. It is often in our suffering that the closeness of the suffering, caring God is experienced. Isaiah knew this when he wrote about the suffering servant. “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases”. This is the God who hears the cry of the people, and inspires someone to act. This is the creator father who saw all was good, but now grieves for what humankind is doing. This is God the Son who embodies suffering love that we might dwell in the Father. This is God the advocate, who witnesses to the Son and the Father, and who enables us to talk about our experience of God with each other.

In so far as we can do this we become God’s new creation, an earthly community in the image of the divine community of Father, Son and Spirit, where each dwells in the other and all work in unity.

There are several disclaimers I need to make.

All this is not to advocate the seeking of suffering. The prayer of Jesus “Let this cup (of suffering) pass from me is very important.

The discovery that the living God is present with you if you do suffer becomes an occasion for joy.

While suffering can be a way to know God, it is not the only way. The sense of the presence of God may come as you hear the Word, practise prayer, experience self-giving love, and so on.

As you journey on in your knowing God, your attempts to conceptualise this mystery at the heart of God will become less clear. God is so much bigger than our capacity to understand. Words are replaced by a sense of awe.

The formula Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not completely adequate. God is not contained within any name. But this is the best Christians can do. The threefold name keeps us in touch with the church from New Testament times, and in fellowship with the Church in its many forms around the world.

Matthew concludes his gospel with the triune name, and makes it a gospel imperative to baptise and teach in the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit.

Paul uses the formula in another way, to assure us that the grace-filled presence of the Trinity is with all of us.

So, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

---

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost
31/5/2020

1 Peter 4:1-11
Psalm 104
John 20:19-23

In a sentence
God ‘ends’ sin by refusing to pass it on; our calling is to do the same

Breaking open the Scriptures is never a straightforward process.

As we open the book, sometimes we find things which are difficult because it is clear what the text says and means, and we don’t like what it means! Other times we struggle even to follow the text because, from this distance, the flow of thought and character of the references or illustrations the writers use are so alien to us.

Something of this latter is perhaps what we strike in our passage today from 1 Peter. Peter writes of the suffering which indicates that we are finished with sin, of the time lost in pursuing things which don’t really matter, of the nearness of the end and of the possibility of living and acting as if we ourselves were the God of grace. And he moves from the one to another in such a way that it reads a little like a grab-bag of throwaway ideas not quite clearly following on, one from another.

Yet these are a constellation of reflections from a central light – the light of what God has done for Peter’s community in the person of Jesus, and what they might then expect for themselves, and what they owe each other.

‘Whoever suffers in the flesh has finished with sin’, Peter writes, not as a general observation about the relationship between sin and suffering but with direct reference to Jesus. Suffering, in itself, is not the reason we are finished with sin – as if we earn forgiveness and wholeness through suffering. Suffering is the way we put sin behind us, the form such a putting-away will take. Jesus on the cross – God on the cross – is sin stopped. Sin is rendered powerless by its inability – in Jesus – to force the reaction of sin in the other. Sin is a virus jumping from one to another in these reactions. Yet Jesus ‘absorbs’ the fear and brokenness of those around him, rendering sin without power beyond what suffering it might mean for Jesus himself. The matter of the conflict between God and God’s people ends with him.

To refuse to respond to human brokenness by causing yet more brokenness is to set sin and its power behind us. The destruction sin brings stops with Jesus because he refuses to participate in the faulty dynamic of power which nailed him to the cross; Jesus refuses to respond in the terms in which he is attacked.

In this way, though his time is cut short, it is time spent oriented towards God and the full possibilities of life in God. It is towards such an experience of time’s possibilities that Peter calls us: you have already spent enough time doing what ‘the Gentiles’ like to do. Do, rather, what is really creative, what will really fill the times; do what is life, richer in every way than the death which will bring it to a close.

For this is the ‘end’ of all things of which Peter write (4.7) – the goal of creation which has been glimpsed in Jesus and now is a possibility for those touched by him. Creation turned in on itself and its own designs is creation without a goal, moving in cycles of fear and destruction, of mere life and death. This is creation without a purpose other than to continue at whatever cost.

To live as if the end were near is – Peter surprises us – to become ‘as if God’. ‘Whoever speaks must do so as one speaking the very words of God; whoever serves must do so with the strength God supplies’ (4.11). In this way we are ‘stewards of the manifold grace of God’. A steward is one who apportions within the household – on behalf of the master – the appropriate share of the wealth of the house. The Greek word here for ‘steward’ is oikonomos – from which we have our word ‘economy’. In God’ household – in God’s economy, God’s grace is the currency, and God is the effect. Peter does not call his people merely to continue in suffering because that in itself has value. The value is in the gift which ‘absorbing’ sin might bring – the presence of God’s peace-making in the midst of a violent world. Peter calls us to do and speak as if God, apportioning God’s grace to whomever we encounter.

This letter has continually turned our attention away from what we might think is going on in and around us, to see what was going on in and around Jesus. With that in mind, Peter then turns us back to our own time and place with the invitation to respond not merely to direct experience without Jesus, but to what is happening as a sharing in what happened with Jesus.

Jesus himself spoke and acted as the presence of God’s grace to those he encountered – both to the poor in spirit who received him as a blessing and to those proud in spirit who found his God too strange.

Enabled by the Spirit God gives to and make Jesus present among us again, God’s life with us takes the shape of Jesus’ own,

By the power of that Spirit, then, become the presence of God to those among whom God has placed you, with whatever joy or suffering this brings.

Only then does brokenness begin to recede behind us as we begin to move towards God’s end for us: life in love, together in Christ.

---

View or print as a PDF

Easter 7
24/5/2020

1 Peter 3:8-22
Psalm 68
John 17:1-11

---

In a sentence
Fear causes us to act in ways which reduce us and those around us

A quick reading of Peter’s first letter gives the sense that it is his advice to his church as to how it might respond to the difficulties it is experiencing as a community which doesn’t quite fit within its wider social and political context. The advice would seem to be something like this: ‘make yourself a small target by living a life which all will recognise as upright’.

Yet, as we noted last week, Peter’s is not a passive-aggressive survival strategy. In fact, it is the way Peter proposes they behave which attracted the ire of the wider community in the first place: their good behaviour and actions within the wider community are the problem so far as that wider community is concerned.

The life to which Peter calls his community is, then, not a response to the difficulty they are having with their neighbours; it is the cause of their difficulty. Unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, a humble mind, not repaying evil for evil but repaying with a blessing – these are not a solution but the problem. His moral instruction, then, is not something new they should adopt to fend off their persecutors. He calls them to stay the course, to continue in the way they have been going. Peter’s advice is, Do not stop being a problem!

This may be difficult to see because the ethic Peter calls for looks like the kind of thing all communities value, to some greater or lesser degree. Where are humility, sympathy and tenderness not valued? But if humility and sympathy and tender hearts are what all communities commend, then we get the impression that there might be in Peter’s community ‘too much’ tenderness and humility and sympathy.

Certainly such traits as these can be badly distorted, but unhealthy humility is neither what Peter demands nor likely to be offensive to those who oppose his congregation.

We get a clue as to what might be at the heart of the matter in the middle of today’s passage: ‘Do not fear what they fear’. Fear is a great motivator for us. We behave at least as much according to what we fear – what we seek to avoid – as according to what we hope to gain or give.

The reference to ‘fear’ in verse 14 is matched with the word ‘sanctify’ in the following verse. What we fear is what we sanctify. Our fears indicate to us what is most sacred to us: our fears create and call upon the gods. This is as much the case for the Christians as it is the non-Christian neighbours. We confuse the matter if we imagine that for Christians we no longer fear God but love God. In the Scriptures, fear is not a matter of shaking in our boots but a matter of what is most honoured in our lives, what it is we imagine will secure us against the many things which seem to threaten us. Peter says here, then, do not honour what they honour, do not consider sacred would they consider sacred; rather, sanctify Jesus as Lord.

Peter illustrates this with Jesus’ own way. Here is one who does not fear what most of us fear, who willingly submits to God alone, even if that leads to death by crucifixion. Here the crucifixion is not about some economy of salvation which makes it possible for God to love us again; it is about knowing what is truly sacred in the world, what is to be sanctified, and what not.

In Jesus we see a life of humility and sympathy and unity of spirit, of love for the other, of tenderness – a life which submits to those who fear the wrong things but does not submit to the fearsome things themselves. Jesus submits to the powers and institutions and fears in place around him, but without himself fearing anything they might take from him, even should they seem to win in the end. In this way, the cross is itself the victory of Jesus, whatever might have happened on Easter day.

Peter calls his community – and us – to the same humility before those who hold power over us, without submitting to the powers which might cause our overlords to be ungracious and without hope.

In this way, what is truly of God in the world – the human creature made in the image of God – is honoured, even if that human creature is subject to all sorts of dehumanising powers and perhaps even becomes an agent for the dehumanising of others.

This is no easy thing. Peter does not give the answer we seek when we ask the question about dealing with evil in the world. There is here no strategy for alleviating the suffering of his community, although that suffering is radically reinterpreted. Peter reminds them that they suffer because there is a conflict in the world – a conflict between the God from whom all things come and to whom all things will return, and those gods which have us in their grip because we fear death, or fear the loss of some lovely thing, or fear just having to get up in the morning and face the day.

There is a lot we will do when we are afraid. Much of it is hidden in the fabric of our economies and political systems. And it is likely that an awareness of this and a refusal to participate is what causes disruption for Peter’s community: they won’t share any longer in the injustice inherent in the common life of the city. They refuse to participate in dehumanising practices – financial, or relational, or political. And the nuisance value of this will sometimes be very high for the powers that be.

But being a nuisance is not the point. If Peter’s people are refugees and aliens in their own community, it is ultimately for the sake of those who persecute them. To continue to be a problem is to continue to model a true peace, and to make it possible. Only humility, sympathy and love for one another can bring true humility, sympathy and love for one another. And it is scarcely the case that we have too much of these things.

Jesus suffered, Peter says, as God’s stirring nuisance, to bring us to God. We ought not to be surprised, then that we are called to do the same, so that all might see how fear only reduces us, and how only love will expand us.

Let us, then, live lives which conform not to the fears of the world but the freedom of Jesus in the love of God.

---

View or print as a PDF

Easter 6
17/5/2020

1 Peter 2:13-25
Psalm 66
John 14:15-21

---

In a sentence
God heals us by overcoming what is weak in us, and calls us to be healers in the same way

Do we not take offence at Peter’s exhortations in the passage we have just heard? Perhaps even more difficult are the verses which follow from today’s text, which – in the same vein as what is said to slaves – call wives to submit themselves to their husbands. Today we struggle to enforce human rights in relation to poverty and bonded labour, sex slavery, and gendered power dynamics within families and in wider society. And we scarcely hold that every civil authority deserves our humble submission.

Yet, Peter writes: ‘humble yourself before every authority, slaves obey, wives submit’. There are a few things we need to clear out of the way if we are going to hear anything of the gospel in what Peter writes here.

First, Peter does not in any way justify the plight of slaves in that kind of economy, or of women in patriarchy. Certainly what he says has been interpreted in this way, and blasphemously so, as if social oppression were part of God’s ordering of the world, or as if what a civil authority does is justified just because it is the civil authority at the time. Yet Peter himself does not mean that the prevailing order is thereby a just order.

Second, Peter is not addressing those who might be able to advocate for another whose plight is like that Peter describes. If we today imagine we see wrong we can right, Peter is not addressing us. Rather, he writes as one unable to do anything to change the circumstances of those he addresses, just as they can do little to change their circumstances.

Third, Peter is not laying out a general social or moral theory here. He is addressing Christians. These are likely mostly people of low status in their community; certainly they are persecuted. He appeals to them on the basis of what they profess – on the basis of how Jesus was in the world, and what God has done for them through Jesus. This is a word to Christians about the fact that they are Christians, and that this might matter for how they relate to others.

Central to our faith is that God does not work according to the patterns of the world. What is power in God’s work does not look powerful to us. It doesn’t look powerful because it doesn’t operate within the power dynamics familiar to us. God’s power is a power which moves the world rather than merely moving within the world. What moves within the world is merely creaturely. This is the power of the clever, the strong, the vigorous, the rich. But to move the world itself requires something from outside, a Spirit which moves over the chaotic deeps of our lives and brings light and life. Whatever powers operate within the chaos are subverted – the rules of such power are broken – and a new creation emerges.

If we were to characterise what Jesus does, we might say that he refuses to engage with the brokenness of the world by means of the world’s own brokenness: Jesus does not deal with his opponents in the way that they deal with him. If indeed the crucified Jesus is Lord, then there can be no mistaking that this has nothing to do with his being clever or strong or sneaky or even merely lucky in the way that everyone else who claims lordship is. Jesus being Lord has nothing to do with the normal ways of the world; he does not ‘overpower’ the world in the way that gods are supposed to and so doesn’t win in any way we would recognise as winning. (How is the crucifixion a victory, according to anyone’s expectations on Good Friday?)

And yet, Peter’s community – and ours – is built on the experience that something is won here. Though all the rules are broken, we are not. More to the point, because all the rules are broken, we are not. This is what we mean when we say, ‘salvation by grace, not works’: grace breaks the rules of work and reward, so that we should not be broken if we fall short of the righteous demands of the law.

Peter’s call is to manifest in our lives what God manifests in Jesus’ own life. Peter calls us to become the kind of rule-breakers Jesus is. This is different from the rule-breaking of the social reformer. According to the pattern of the world, today’s radicals simply become tomorrow’s conservatives, against whom the next generation of radicals will rage. It is against such unholy rage that Peter writes. If there is a rage for justice in Jesus’ work, it is holy rage – a passion entirely different from the motivations and methods of the world to fix what is wrong.

For us to be ‘holy as God is holy’ (cf. 1.15f) is to do what and how God does. And so Peter writes, ‘Honor everyone. Love the family of believers; have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart, and a humble mind… Do not repay evil for evil or abuse for abuse; but, on the contrary, repay with a blessing (2.17; 3.8f). Or, to sum it up in a word or five: ‘submit yourselves to one another’. ‘Arm’ yourselves not with the power of the world but with the same intention by which Jesus himself lived: to let God be god, allowing God’s creative way in the world to be our own, wherever we might find ourselves (cf. 4.1)

Peter addresses each of us in our situation – not only those who might be in a lowly place but also those more highly placed, as we usually measure such things. For us – low and high – to submit ourselves to circumstances which don’t reflect God’s demand for justice is not to declare those things right. Rather, this kind of submission makes present what the situation itself could not naturally produce: God’s own subversive creativity.

The ‘hard’ justice we look for always breaks things – including us. God’s justice, rather, is ‘soft’. It is the unexpected creativity of mercy: God’s turning toward us when we turn away, God’s persistence with us when we are stubborn.

Whether we are lowly or powerful, to submit ourselves to one another is to enact this kind of soft justice. It is to present to each other a mercy which sets aside hard justice to build bridges, reconcile and re-connect what has been separated.

This is not the only way by which we might be in the word but, if the crucified Jesus is Lord, it is God’s way.

Let it, then, be ours also.

Be holy as I am holy, says God, merciful as I am merciful.

View or print as a PDF

Easter 5
10/5/2020

Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31
John 14:1-14

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

---

The Acts of the Apostles is volume two of Luke’s history of the life of Jesus and the infant church. We call volume one a gospel, a royal proclamation of good news, but in terms of how Luke began each of his books, he was intending to publish under the genre of history. The giveaway for this assertion is the introductions. He addresses his books to Theophilus. Historians of the day commonly addressed their books to a noble patron. Was Theophilus a real noble patron? Difficult to know. The name means ‘lover of God’. Now, that could be any of us who love God. Maybe that was his intention – address his history to all of us who love God. Hold onto that thought. Keep in mind that Luke, indeed all Scripture, is addressed to us.

Keep in mind also that historians of the day wrote more along the lines of a modern historical novel than what we require of academic historians of today. This is significant in Acts because Luke includes many speeches and sermons delivered by lots of different church leaders, all of whom seem to have the same speech writer. We do not so much get inside the minds of Peter or Paul or Stephan than we get inside the mind of Luke. That is not a bad mind to explore. It does not contradict the minds of the saints we find in their letters.

In Acts Luke tells of Stephen. In literary terms alone this account is a master stroke. It marks a watershed in the life of the church at a number of different levels. Stephen wins a number of gold medals – he is the first deacon, the first non-apostolic evangelist and apologist, and, tragically, the first martyr.

It is of his martyrdom that we read this morning. It comes at the end of two chapters about Stephen – his appointment to serve as deacon, his words and works driven by the power of the Holy Spirit, his confrontation with an antagonistic synagogue, his arrest, his very long defence speech (which is not included in our three year lectionary, probably due to its length), culminating in the frenzied attack that killed him.

Reading Luke’s account it is not unreasonable to imagine that as he remembered Stephen’s story, he was also remembering Jesus’ story. He includes some tell tail parallels. To secure an arrest false witnesses testified against Stephen – the same ploy used against Jesus. As Stephen died, he prayed for his attackers, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ Jesus prayed from the cross, ‘Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.’ In no way is the death of Jesus equated with the death of Stephen, or any other martyr. Nevertheless, the church has held its martyrs in the highest regard. Their deaths are regarded as a supreme witness to the gospel of Christ. Indeed, the root word in Greek for ‘witness’ is ‘martyr’.

So, what led to this savage death? What had Stephen been saying that so enraged people? He recited parts of Israel’s history pointing up the times of opposition to the leadership God had given them, especially ways in which Moses had struggled to maintain political control during the exodus. Then he related the account of the building of the temple in Jerusalem, a house for a God who needs no house built by humans. He reminded his opponents of the ancestors who persecuted the prophets and capped the whole speech off saying that they had not kept the law ordained by angels. The antagonists got so incensed they covered their ears and shouted, ‘la la la’. OK, Luke doesn’t add the ‘la la la’ bit, but he might well have done. Luke likes fine detail. He remembered that stoning someone to death was hot work and he had the executioners take off their coats and lay them at the feet of the young man, Saul. This has to be one of the great segues in literature. This is why the story of Stephen is the watershed of Acts. As Stephen exits the main stage, Saul, who will become known as Paul slips quietly from prompt right. Paul will hold centre stage for the next 20 chapters interrupted by brief accounts of other missionaries like Philip and Peter.

At the scene of Stephen’s martyrdom, the young man minding the coats heard the prayer, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ St Augustine wrote, ‘If Stephen had not prayed, the Church would not have had Paul.’

Well, thank God the church has Paul, but Luke would certainly want us to thank God that the church has Stephen.

Thankful for what? Thankful for the order of deacons. Many branches of the church have orders of deacons and deaconesses. The Uniting Church went through a season of examination as we came to a more settled understanding of place of the order of deacons in our polity. In the deaconate established according to Acts the church is reminded that the language of the gospel is not confined to the spoken word but is told in acts of service that imitate the life of Jesus whose hand of care was extended very particularly to the poor, the oppressed, the sick and disabled.

The church can be thankful for the fulness of Stephen’s long-winded defence at his trial in which he reminds his detractors of the history of Israel’s propensity to reject leadership given them by God and to accuse factions of his generation of doing the same thing. What the church can go on to be thankful for is Luke’s reminder to the Christian church through the ages, that this propensity to do violence to God’s leading did not stop with the birth of the church. Our capacity to crucify and stone all over again has not gone away.

In this time of crisis we might remember Stephen’s determination to do and say what was right in the face of his own death, as we watch television accounts of men and women attending to the well being and health care of others, and do so in fear of their own wellbeing, in fear of their own lives.

View or print as a PDF

Easter 4
3/5/2020

1 Peter 2:1-12
Psalm 23
John 10:1-10

---

In a sentence
Mercy makes the church, that it might speak and act out of God’s mercy, that others might know of that mercy

‘You are a chosen race’, Peter writes, ‘a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people’. Whatever we make of this – and the assessments will vary widely! – it is surely strong language and strong enough to be uncomfortable for many, even for those in the church. One reason for this is the ring of arrogance in the claim for a distinctive quality for one historical entity among all. Another is that the church has rarely looked like anything which approaches Peter’s description.

These cautions are all valid. At the same time, they also tend to consider Peter’s language in isolation from the rest of the text, which is precisely what is done when his language is abused. Towards the end of the reading another account of the church is given, this time as a community which is ‘alien and exiled’ within its own space. If Peter’s high church language is a displacement ‘above’, this ‘exile’ is a displacement ‘below.’ Peter’s community of believers is not exalted out of the world but is still very much within it, and even uncomfortably relegated within it.

And there is yet a third marking of the church Peter gives which sits between the ‘royal priesthood, holy nation’ language and the ‘alien and exile’ language, and bridges them. This is the church as the community of those who have received mercy.

It is mercy which spans the space between the high and the low locations of the community of believers. Mercy elevates what is lowly and cannot elevate itself. In so doing, mercy creates. It makes out of nothing. The language of mercy is the language of gift. Mercy sets in place what could not have been there without the gift: now you have received mercy, now you are God’s people (v. 10).

Yet mercy does not merely create or establish. That it might be thought to do this is the source of the danger in Peter’s high account of the church: that the church might stand now as something above and over against all other historical institutions.

Mercy does not merely create but sets in place a relationship between the merciful one and those on whom that one has had mercy. The question with which the whole sweep of Scripture wrestles is, What then is the nature of the ongoing relationship between the merciful and the ‘mercy­‑ed’?

With the rest of Scripture, Peter’s answer is that mercy creates a people whose purpose is not to be ‘above’ the world in splendid isolation but to speak of, and act out of, the mercy it has received.

And so Peter’s high language for the church simply says that the church has a high purpose: to speak of God’s mercy, God’s ‘mighty act’ (v. 9), even as the church itself is that mighty act:

Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy (v. 10).

Perhaps the thing which ought to surprise us most in what we’ve heard from Peter today is not his language for the church but the effect he expects the mercy-ed high-and-low church to have.

In particular, while it makes sense that those who have received mercy might praise God, Peter expects that even those who have not received mercy and who oppose his community will glorify God on account of mercy’s effect in the believers:

Conduct yourselves honorably among the Gentiles, so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honorable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge (v. 12).

This is to say that both the community which receives the grace and those who reject it have as their end and purpose the glorification of God.

This, of course, could make no sense to those outside Peter’s community, for those inside the community can scarcely believe it either.

Believer and non-believer alike trip up at this point, for surely here is the height of arrogance: that not only is the church in some way ‘special’, but that its specialness displaces the ordinariness of all other things. More concretely, not only is the believer ‘chosen’ but her being ‘chosen’ means that others will be too, whether or not they seek or acknowledge it. God’s mercy will out us all.

The ‘great mercy’ which has birthed the church into a new hope (1. 3) by turning us to honour the God of mercy is mercy not only for those who know it but also for those who do not.

The offensiveness of the church – often enough even to the church itself – is that it is a sign that all things have their true being in their being called into being by God – mercy-ed into being – and in seeking to remain in that relationship.

This is not arrogance. If it implies that those outside the church don’t know what the church knows, at the same time the church continually forgets what it ought to know, whether for pride or fear. Not much separates the believer and the unbeliever when it is God who stands between them.

Peter reminds his community of the high priestly calling they have in their low station as aliens and exiles: a people who once were ‘nothing’, placed among others who are ‘nothing’, in order that all might come to something in their honouring of the God whose name and nature is Mercy, the source and goal of our being.

Let us, then, accept mercy that we might be merciful,

and be merciful that we might receive mercy.

View or print as a PDF

Easter 3
26/4/2020

1 Peter 1:13-25
Psalm 116
Luke 24:13-35

---

In a sentence
Though the world shakes around us, though even the faith of God’s people might be shaken, God’s call to life remains constant

Ours is surely – for the moment – a shaken world.

At the same time, it is not quite straightforward to say precisely how we are shaken. Much is obvious, and many effects of what we are presently experiencing under the shadow of COVID 19 we will carry a long way into the future. Being shaken will stay with us for a long time.

At the same time, we expect that ‘this too will pass,’ and some degree of normality will return. Some things will be very different among us in the years to come. Yet we might have reason to wonder whether these will be truly revolutionary or merely evolutionary changes.

The present is revolutionary in that we have all suddenly been exposed to some of the deprivations which are usually only suffered by a minority, but we expect this only to be momentary. As a society, however, there is not a strong sense among us that there is really all that much which will change in the long term, despite what suffering and hardship is presently being felt in many homes and hearts. A return to some semblance of normality is our expectation, however long and hard that road might be. This will pass. We – most of us – will return to our feet again, even if with a bit of a limp.

1 Peter addresses a community which is also shaken, in three ways, and quite unlike what is happening around us at the moment.

The first is that they have been shaken out of one sense of self, the world and God, into another sense. This is the shaking of ‘conversion’. The new sense is hinted at in the contrast Peter draws between what desires are now appropriate to them, in contrast to those desires they ‘formerly had in ignorance’ (1.14). We hear of this shaking also in the language of purification (1.18). There is no sense of ‘going back’, of a return to normal. ‘Normal’ has been left behind for something else. Ears have heard what cannot be unheard, eyes have seen what cannot be unseen, and nothing will be the same again.

In this, ‘normal’ is now longer habitual or regular – what we are used to – but a standard, a measure. And the measure is sufficiently different that Peter can make strong the contrasts he does. Again, in the next chapter:

Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy (2.10).

The ‘new normal’ has not arisen out of normality itself but out of God’s claiming of those to whom Peter writes. The new normal is that God says, ‘You are mine’, and we hear God, and it changes everything.

Conversion shakes us in this way. ‘Normal’ is what we are moving from, not what we are moving back to.

After such a conversion, the second shaking of Peter’s community is that, though they have changed fundamentally in their perception of the world, the world itself has not changed. And so the world becomes unexpectedly a more dangerous place, as we will see when we move further into the letter. Different senses for the measure of the world create great tension when there is nowhere else to go, when we remain bound together with our different perceptions.

We are surely shaken when, finding that God has claimed us as God’s own, this doesn’t seem to make things very much better or easier but even makes things more difficult. The temptation becomes strong, then, to return to the old normal – to ‘the desires that you formerly had in ignorance’ (1.14), as Peter puts it.

And so comes the third shaking which Peter’s community must endure, which is a re-conversion. And it is a third shaking into something yet new again, and not a mere return to what first turned their world upside-down. For the experience of testing and temptation itself has now become part of what they believe.

The better thing we reach for in coming to faith reveals of itself more in our experience of the difference it has from the ‘normal’ we have left behind. This is to say that to come to faith – that first shaking in conversion – is not to have ‘arrived’. The life of faith itself shapes faith. Faith in God is always faith in the world – faith within the world – a world constantly in flux and ever ready to sweep us along in its flow.

In this shifting space it is not what we believe which is constant but God’s address to us. The word of the Lord which – as Peter puts it – ‘endures forever’ (v.24) as the world withers and fall, endures in its continually being put. It is continually spoken because our relationship to God is constantly under challenge in this shaking world.

And so, despite the strong affirmation Peter makes of all which his people have received and are from God (e.g., 1.3f, 8, 22), there remains the need for the imperative: become what you are, live as though this One really were God: ‘discipline yourselves’ (1.13), ‘obey’ (1.14), ‘be holy’ (1.15), ‘live in reverent fear’ (1.17), ‘love one another’ (1.22).

That is, be mine, God says, as I have called you. God’s word is a ‘relational’ word, is always a word which addresses and, in that address, creates again and again in its very being spoken. Only in this do we have any constancy.

What cannot be shaken is that God claims us as God’s own, and calls us to own that claim. This is faith, wherever we are: to see ourselves with God’s own eyes, looking not longingly to yesterday’s normal but hopefully for what God will do tomorrow with what is cracking around us today.

For this God, cracks in the order of things as our foundations are shaken are not to be quickly plastered over but become means of letting in the light.

That light is our faith and hope.

Let us, then, open our eyes.