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Pentecost 21
2/11/2025

Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4
Psalm 119:137-144
2 Thessalonians 1:1-4: 11-12
Luke 19:1-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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I don’t think I am racist or sexist. I certainly try not to be. And yet I must admit that I am conscious of race and gender differences whenever I am relating to another person. I am aware of the different things appropriate to my speech and behavior according to the other or others in any interaction. Do we not do this all the time. Are we not particularly aware of this as we are bombarded by news local and international conflicts fueled by human racial, political and religious differences.

The Melbourne scholar, Brendan Byrne, offers a startling new reading to this story about Zacchaeus. In his commentary on the gospel of Luke called The Hospitality of God Fr Byrne’s reading of the text suggests that Zacchaeus was not a bad man who became good, but that he was always a good man who was sadly misunderstood. The whole problem lies in the tense of the verbs..

This is not the conventional view. Digby Hannah’s children’s hymn gives the traditional view – “There once was a man as mean as could be; if he could take two then he’d try to take three. Then one day he took Jesus for tea: and Jesus helped him to change.”

Luke tells how Jesus was passing through Jericho and there was a large crowd. Zacchaeus, chief tax collector, and known around town as shorty, wanted to see Jesus because everyone else was taller than him. No one was going to make way for Shorty the tax collector in a crowd seeking to see and hear Jesus who proclaims God’s salvation. If he was to get a look-in, he must abandon any self-dignity. He climbed a tree. This was not the behaviour of a man who aspires to stature and wealth. This was a man desperate to see salvation.

Jesus stopped under the tree and called Zacchaeus down because he was to stay at his house that day. To the chagrin and horror of the good people of Jericho the visiting celebrity chose hospitality from Shorty the tax collector. Tax collectors were sinners because they worked for the Romans, the occupying force.

Zacchaeus hurried down and made a marvelous speech. Zacchaeus said: (here comes the problem with the tense of the verbs) the translators say “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.”

Naturally that makes sense to have the speech using the future tense – Zacchaeus has been a rotten cheating tax collector and when he was brought face to face with Jesus he changed and made retribution for his past. He will do the right thing to make amends.

Brendan Byrne reminds his readers that the speech in Greek is not future tense at all, but present tense. “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I give to the poor; and if I defraud anyone of anything, I pay back four times as much.” It is as if the translators have joined with the socially prejudices Jerichoites and judged Zacchaeus to be a cheating swindler because he worked for the wrong administration.

This tense change leaves a more open interpretation possible. For centuries the translations have forced a particular interpretation. The way Luke tells the story another interpretation is possible. If Zacchaeus is telling Jesus what his business practice has always been then we are not meeting a bad tax collector, but an ethical and generous tax collector. If this is the case then the hostility of the good citizens of Jericho is based on prejudice. He works for the wrong company so he can’t be worthy of our society.

Luke concludes the story by reminding his readers that the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost. Our traditional reading of this story suggests that Zacchaeus’ lostness lay in his cheating. Another reading of the story suggests that his lostness may have sat in being ostracised by the prejudice of his community. He could not know the assurance of God’s acceptance of him while his society with its religious leaders, its God people, would not convey their acceptance.

This amounts to a brutal rebuke of all who hold prejudices. Luke has Jesus remind them that Zacchaeus is also one of God’s elect, a son of Abraham. This alternative reading of the story raises new considerations, the possibility that God’s word reaches deeper into our prejudice-ridden society.

We don’t need to get too excited about the different possible interpretations of this point raised by the tense of the verbs in Zacchaeus’ speech. Was he bad and he had a wonderful conversion or was he good and badly misunderstood? What really matters is what Jesus said about him. Jesus received Zacchaeus into the community of the Kingdom, not because of his conversion nor because he may have been good all along. Jesus announced, “Today salvation has come to this house, because he too is a son of Abraham.

Zacchaeus may be a tax collector, but it does not stop him coming within God’s covenant relationship as a descendent of Abraham. But neither does it stop the tax collector hating community who were lost in their prejudices. The argument that assures Zacchaeus of salvation must hold good for all.

Luke makes a lot of the status of being descendants of Abraham. For him it is a touch stone of being worthy of God’s favour. He had Jesus argue that the crippled woman he healed on the Sabbath was a daughter of Abraham and therefore worthy. He had John the Baptist denounce the self-righteous who claimed their decent from Abraham as their right to God’s favour when he declared that the stones that surrounded them could be raised up as descendants of Abraham.

This all presents a problem for those of us who are not descendants of Abraham. Thank goodness we have St Paul to argue our case. To the Galatians he points out that God honoured Abraham’s faith and that it is by faith that we are saved. To the Thessalonians Paul wrote, ‘we always pray for you, asking that our God will make you worthy of his call and will fulfill by his power every good resolve and work of faith,  ¹² so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ. (2 Thessalonians 1:11-12).

There is a consistency in all this. Salvation for Zacchaeus, salvation for the crowd that ostracized him, salvation for the Galatians and the Thessalonians, salvation for us in our prejudice ridden societies belongs to the people of God by the grace of God declared and availed in Jesus.

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Pentecost 20
26/10/2025

Psalm 65
John 17:11-17

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ForeWord

Something must be done

Our most recent “Quarterly Conversation on the Quarterly Essay” – looked at Marian Wilson’s “Woodside versus the Planet”. Wilson recounts the processes towards extending fossil fuel extraction permissions for the energy company Woodside, in the context of growing concern about climate change.

There are no real surprises in the Essay, including the not particularly encouraging conclusion that the “next three years are crucial”, but we live in a world in which are continually made the kinds of compromises Wilson describes in the Woodside saga.

A couple of leading reasons present themselves as to why we might act with respect to climate change. One is the perceived necessity of preserving nature as it is. With all its creatures great and small, the world is bright and beautiful, and must be preserved for its own sake. A second reason is that we depend on the world for our own survival. No healthy world, no human future (and we have an interest in a human future). An extension of this concerns the human generations that will follow us, who could be significantly affected by what we do (or don’t do) now.

Behind both of these concerns, of course, is the assumption that we can make a difference here. The expected climate changes are not natural effects; they are the result of human action, human decision. This is why we think climate action matters: we have acted to cause this, now we must act to mitigate it. Natural processes involve no decisions and so have no moral element. But this looming crisis seems to be a matter of decision, and so is experienced as a moral imperative.

But, now being moral, the question ceases to be “scientific” or “rational” or even “natural”. We are now in the realm of balance and interpretation: a question not of the necessities of nature but of risks of action and accountability.

This becomes clearer if we shift from the possible extinction of beautiful but dumb creatures to the plight of future human generations. Less predictable weather patterns, higher temperatures and rising sea levels could adversely affect, displace, or kill hundreds of millions of people. What responsibility do we have towards them?

The easy answer is at least “some” – we have some responsibility. Many would say that we have much more than just this. But why does this not move us to radical action, even if just for the sake of our future selves?

A failure to love

The answer is that we do not love the people of the future as we love ourselves. Perhaps it’s surprising that love might appear here, although less so when we consider that this is a question of moral action, which action is always finally about love.

We have done so poorly in responding to a crisis which has been looming for more than 40 years because we are lousy lovers, especially outside of our closest connections. The difficulty we might have in sympathising with future generations and moderating our actions to improve their prospects is precisely the same difficulty we have here and now in acting sympathetically towards those around us. We are afflicted here and now by contempt and violence, ideological and economic divisions, loneliness and oppression, for the same reason that climate futures look bleak: the lack of respect for the other, the poverty of our efforts at love. We do not love others – present, or to come – as we love ourselves.

Now, that’s pretty bleak, pessimistic even. But, bleak or not, is it correct? Because if it is right, we are about as likely to act successfully in the future interests of the bright and beautiful creation as we are to act successfully to bring peace with justice in our own time, here and now. (And where is that peace? )

This is not to suggest that there is nothing to be done about climate change, or that what action we might take would be pointless. It is to say that, to the extent that what needs to be done depends on human moral agents like us with our limited capacity to love each other as we love ourselves, we will not do enough to avert a major environmental catastrophe. Things are going to get a lot worse, climate-wise. And, in view of what we are – as evidenced by our collective action – there is little we can do about that getting worse.

As pessimistic as this sounds, it’s closer to the mark to speak here of gospel realism. This realism hears a command to love across 2000 years (and more) as a new word, because we are not yet good lovers, despite how many times we have heard the command to love. The new problem of climate change is the old problem of love.

And, as we’ve seen before, the old problem of love – as a problem – is shown in the appearance of love in the Gospels in the guise of a command. The problem in the struggle with climate change is the problem Jesus addresses in his great prayer for his disciples (John 17), and at the heart of his moral teaching: love one another, as I have loved you. That we need to hear the command to love is the bad news here – and why we’ll likely not act according to the threat of climate change. The good news is in the “as I have loved you” – that we have been loved in a particular way, which is where the good news begins.

The long defeat

What are we to do with the gospel’s uncomfortable realism about our moral capacity, in the face of the very pressing moral imperatives, not only of climate change but also the many other encroaching powers which reduce us to less than the glory of God? Is nothing to be done? Is it all hopeless?

That depends on what we think “hope” is. Towards an answer, we must keep in mind that the biblical testimony has always been pessimistic about us. But this has also been part of the gospel, part of its good news. Things are no more hopeless now than they ever were. Hope just isn’t what we usually think it to be – the hope that we can win, that we can save ourselves, whatever we think “win” or “save” might mean here.

In another piece on climate change I read earlier in the year, I came across a notion from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth sagas: the notion of the long defeat. The long defeat refers to a struggle against the odds in a losing battle – a defeat which is long precisely because of the struggle and which is inevitable because of the kind of world we’re in. The life of the long defeat is one in which you know you are going to lose, and yet you fight on anyway. Why? Because that struggle is the form truth’s light takes in a dark world. The struggle will yield victories along the way, but the challenges will continue. What victories we might manage, are only temporary.

On that happy note, let’s pause to hear again part of a passage we visited a couple of weeks ago, within which Jesus draws a distinction between being in-and-of the world, and being in-but-not-of the world.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 1711-19)

Word: Proclamation

In the world.

We’ve already thought a bit about what Jesus had to say in our text today – being in-and-of, or in-and-not-of the world. The point there was that generative AI tools are in-and-of the world, and so lack any novelty; they produce more of the same.

But we can come at the passage from a different direction, beginning with the “in” the world. Jesus prays for the novel – for what is not “of” the world but jis still in the world. The disciples might – might – change, but the world does not. And what of the world does not change? The world’s need for the command to love, given its continued failure to love.

The shape of this general condition is the experience of Jesus himself: Jesus struggles and finally succumbs to the unloving world. Jesus is finally defeated, on the cross. A reading of the cross as defeat is much stronger in Mark and Matthew than in John (or Luke), and we’ve seen how John twins the defeat with victory, making the cross itself in-but-not-of the world: the cross is more than defeat. (Paul is clearly here, too).

But it is still a defeat; God is rejected, the resurrection notwithstanding. And then prays precisely that this experience – his experience – be the experience of the disciples. This sharing he calls “a sanctification in truth”.

And what is this “truth”? It’s not a doctrine, not a list of credal statements. It is a way of living in a defeating world. It is Jesus’ own way of living: in the midst of death, life in all its fullness. The of-the-world defeat still looms but the gospel refuses to allow it to be understood on the world’s own terms.

And so the defeat, in Jesus’ terms, is “not of this world”. It is not tragic. It speaks something new. John’s word for this new thing is “love”, a love-in-the-midst, : a local, temporary, re-ordering “of the world” into something not-of the world.

Perhaps the work of love stands for a while, perhaps it is fleeting. Whatever the case, the imperative is the same: not “save” the world but “love”. Be human in the midst of inhumanity, because the inhumanity will continue.

Love has failed; long live love.

Discipleship – being friends and followers of Jesus, loving despite unlove – is about having cool heads in a hot world. It is the willingness to struggle against the long defeat. The world is going to need love, and heads, like this.

Let us, then, play our part in love’s work. And all God’s people say … Amen.

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Pentecost 18
12/10/2025

Psalm 111
John 17:6-8, 13-19, 22-24

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ForeWord

The AI-generated sermon
I was at a church committee meeting a couple of weeks ago, the kind of meeting that has an opening “devotion”.

The colleague leading the reflection began by observing the increasing presence and usefulness of “artificial intelligence” (AI) in our lives, and then asked what this might mean in a churchly world of smaller congregations, fewer trained ministers, and so on. To demonstrate what might be possible, she declared that her reflection had been totally written by an online AI text generator.

As those of you who have used these online tools might already suspect, the generated material was in fact very impressive. It was clear that the machine had “read” the Gospel text, and no small amount of commentary and sermon material based on it. The teaching was along the lines of what you would expect to find in a devotional resource or a general homiletical guide on how one might preach on that particular text, with a moral or spiritual lesson presented at the end. The output was the kind of thing we’ve heard others do with the same material.

At the same time, precisely because we recognised it, there was also something rather prosaic about the analysis of the text and its application to our context. It lacked freshness. And there is a reason for this. To overstate it just a bit, this kind of program – a so-called Large Language Model text generator (LLM) – works by summarising pretty much everything that’s ever been written about a particular subject. And so, these machines work by telling us what is already known. We might not know that we already know it, but it is part of us, nonetheless, to the extent that we are part of the same world and discourse.

Now, I’m not really concerned here with whether or not one “should” use AI in this way – to write devotions at meetings or write sermons. There was nothing inherently wrong with what the machine had generated. The risk it presents is not that it might be wrong (although it could be that, too). The real risk is that it might just be boring, the summary of a whole lot of things we have heard before, which we already know. (The most interesting thing in the presentation at the meeting was a remark the leader made about the reading before we heard the AI-generated stuff – interesting because it drew attention to a part of the text usually eclipsed by the standard and familiar focal points. )
John’s Gospel might not be the most obvious source for thinking about the limits of Large Language Model text generators. But, having in mind what we’ve just said about what those machines do and the kind of stuff they produce, let’s now listen to some selected verses from John, with an ear for what Jesus says about being “in but not of” the world.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 17. 6-8, 13-19, 22-24)

Word: Proclamation

Being of-the-world

Our condition is, generally, that we are a product of everything that was ever said or done up to this moment. This is more obviously the case when we consider our immediate personal experience. We are the product of our family, our language, culture, and education. But each of those is itself the summation of a vast number of actions and words which preceded them in history. Every one of us is the smallest tip on the most massive but hidden iceberg.

LLM text generators tap into that deep subsurface of our being. Any question we ask of them has already been asked and answered. You might not yet know the answer – which is why you asked the question of the AI – but you recognise the answer because of what else you know about the wider context of your life. The answer “makes sense”, as we say, because we’ve been there, thought that, and the machine, in a way, just reminds us of what we’ve forgotten. (There are shades of Socrates’ midwifery here, for those who know of that).

This relationship between what we are and the whole world of words and events which have created us is part of what Jesus speaks about in our passage from John this morning. Several times, he draws a distinction between being “of the world” and not of the world. “Of the world” is what LLM text generators do. What they produce impresses us because we recognise it: this is how such things are said, described, properly structured. An AI-generated sermon on a scriptural passage sounds like all the other ones we’ve heard. That sermon, then, is “of the world”. Our computers have the capacity to do all this very, very, very quickly and, because processing speed is a characteristic of intelligence, AI looks particularly intelligent. But whether the work is done quickly or slowly, it remains a reconfiguration of something which is already in place. What is produced is in the world – obviously! – but also of the world. The limitation of AI is that it brings us nothing new; what it produces is, quite literally, mundane.

Being not of-the-world

But Jesus speaks of something else – what is in the world but not of the world. Perhaps more clearly, he poses the possibility of the radically new. “In” the world and “of” the world is more of the same – as in the case of AI-generated texts. In the world but not of the world is the presence of the new. Jesus speaks here about this kind of newness.

Yet it’s one thing to see that this is what Jesus poses; it’s another thing to conceive how such newness might be possible. Can anything be radically new in this way? This question arises not because our text prompts it. It’s in the text because our deepest desires are about precisely such newness, about the possibility of starting over, about the clean slate. But how could we possibly get to there – to the profoundly new and restorative – from here, mundane as we are? We are as constrained by our icebergs as AI is.

Not surprisingly, John’s response to this desire is “Jesus”. But we need to hear this in a new way. “Jesus is the answer” is a tired trope. John doesn’t present Jesus as answer-to-question but as new in place of old, as outside in the inside.

Shifting from in/of language, John hints at the excess in Jesus when Jesus speaks of his having been with God “before the foundation of the world”, another impossible thought – that Jesus had time before time. But John has to strain the language in this way to speak about the possibility of something new happening, something which could not have been predicted. This unpredicted thing is the appearance of Jesus himself, who, beginning before time, is more than time contains, is more than just “of the world” and so is the presence of something not mundane but “new”.

Now, if you’re keeping up with all this, congratulations! I’m trying hard not to present a “heard it all before”, AI-style sermon! What we desire, need, is the newness Jesus presents, and not more of the same. Can there be something new in this way?

The possibility of the new: prayer

The possibility of something new can’t be separated from how such newness might be realised among us. When we ask “Can? ” we also ask “How? ”: how could such a thing be, to quote old Nicodemus again (John 3), for the umpteenth time in our reflections on John.

For a thought about this, let’s note one last thing about our reading today. Jesus is not teaching here, is not giving moral instruction, is not arguing. He is praying.

Prayer – for ourselves or for others – is always for the impossible, for that which has not yet been observed or experienced and so which cannot be predicted. Prayer seeks what cannot be generated out of the world itself, what is not mundane. Prayer asks for an occurrence within the world of something which is not worldly: in, but not of, the world.

AI can write prayers because it can read our liturgies, which are simply the product of all the church has prayed through the ages. It predicts what a prayer would be in a given context. But AI will never pray, at least not the AI we have now. It only knows the “of” the world, and not the “not of”.

But prayer is not about reconfiguration of the parts we already have, of all we have already prayed. It is not about what, by earnestness or cleverness, we have earned. Prayer is about gift. Or, in older churchly terminology, prayer is about miracle.

It is for such a miracle, such a gift, that Jesus prays. “May they have what we have, Father”, he prays. And this for no “thing”, shiny and new in our midst for honour and adoration. The prayer of Jesus is for a new kind of relationship, and so a new community. “I pray for them, that they might be new as I have been new, that they might enjoy what we enjoy, Father”.

And this is not a withdrawal from everything in the world but rather for its enrichment. This strange newness, not-of-ness, is for the life of the world.

Whether or not we imagine Jesus is the answer is the wrong place to start. The Jesus we usually think of here is merely “of” the world, an answer on the same terms as the question, and that isn’t going to get us anywhere new.

The crucial question is whether what Jesus talks about, and is said to have been himself, is important. Is the human just more of the same, merely “of the world”, or are we really only ourselves when we exceed all that has been, when we are not “of the world”? And if the latter, what might it take to see and feel the new and the fresh?

This is the concern of faith, and why we come together each week like this: the desire, the possibility and the way of becoming something new, fresh and enlivening, in and for the world.

Most of our lives, most of the time, are about where we have been and how that limits what we can be. Faith – at least, faith in a God like this – looks for more. This more is God’s call to us, and God’s gift when we respond. Let us, then, open ourselves to this new, this excess, this more.

And all God’s people say…

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Pentecost 17
5/10/2025

Psalm 42
John 13:1-35

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ForeWord

Last week, we recalled the genre of comedy, noting among other things that a comedy is not necessarily a funny story. It is, rather, a story that follows a particular narrative arc, opening at a comfortable emotional level before the protagonist is pushed into some uncomfortable situation, before a final resolution of some sort. Most of the stories we tell are comedies, even if most of those stories are not necessarily very funny.

But today I want to pick up on the concept of “funny”, and to come at this from some reflection on what we do when we laugh.

What’s so funny?

Why do we laugh? The obvious answer is that we laugh because we’ve seen something funny. But then we have to push the question a little harder; what is it that makes something funny?

When we watch a movie intended to be humorous, we laugh at the point at which everything goes wrong. The funny thing is that the protagonist finding herself in some difficult situation. We laugh at her vain attempts to get herself out of that situation and the silly faces that she draws as her situation gets worse and worse despite her best efforts. In a humorous story, laughter is our response to the trough in the comedic arc.

And so, the laughter stops once things begin to settle again. That final settlement might well be a place of relief, but it’s no longer a place of laughter. We might be happy there, but we don’t laugh because we’re happy. We’re happy because we have laughed and no longer need to. What makes us laugh – what is funny – is displacement. Someone is suddenly and unexpectedly where they should not be. Our laughter points to that being out of place, to that being wrong, and we stop laughing at the end because the wrongness has been resolved, and we anticipate “happily ever after”.

There is, then, something slightly sadistic about laughter. The object of the laughter – the displaced protagonist – is not the one laughing. It is we who watch them. There’s nothing that the protagonist wants to laugh about when he or she is at the bottom of the trough. She doesn’t know she’s living a comedy and fears the tragedy of never getting out again. Laughter, then, is one of our responses to suffering.

This, I think, is unexpected and provocative. But laughter gets still more interesting. We know very well that laughter is contagious but it’s not the case simply that we laugh because somebody else laughs, like catching a cold.

Laughter is invitational. It proposes a community. By noticing that something is going wrong, we invite others also to notice the wrongness, and so we create a space within which a certain sense of normality is implied. This normality is stated negatively in laughter when we see something outside of that zone: “Hey, look at him – ha ha”. Joining in laughter is not catching a cold, it is expressing agreement – “Yeah, that’s pretty weird”. Laughing with others creates community over against that weirdness.

Funny as exclusion

This is why laughter can hurt – it’s socially exclusionary. It is inherently critical and exclusionary, although of course in varying degrees. There is a place for the gentle and good-natured gibe, but the nature of laughter as invitation to community also operates in more malicious circumstances, where laughter indicates mockery. Mocking laughter invites us not only to notice that the funny person is outside the group’s norm, but to reject him because of this. We laugh here because he is not one of us, and the laughter marks this outsideness. Mockery makes fun of – makes funny – a black person in a white space, a woman in a male space, a captive in a free space, a native in a colonial space, a poor person in a rich space, a short person in a tall space, an awkward person in a graceful space, or a saint in an unholy space. We know all these tropes from our comic stories, funny or not.

We might wonder then, if it is a reconciled and inclusive place, whether there is any laughter in heaven. Laughter would have to be something else if there were to be.

So, with all that in the back of our minds – the dynamics of laughter and its connection to inclusion and exclusion from a community – let’s listen to a passage from John’s Gospel about community and the laughable Jesus.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 13.1-25)

Word: Proclamation

The laughable Jesus

As is usual in John, a lot’s going on in the passage we’ve just heard, but there are two things we might notice today in connection with comedy and community.

First, the funny thing – the odd, wrong thing – which happens in the story is that the rumoured messiah takes the role of the servant. No one bursts out laughing, of course; it is more a case of shock, as Peter expresses. Jesus is funny – in a funny peculiar, rather than funny ha-ha, kind of way. And this peculiarity, this outsideness, is something all the disciples see, as all Jesus’ opponents have already seen. (Judas the betrayer is woven through this story, and while we don’t know his internal motivation, his actions are consistent with a mocking rejection of the ministry Jesus has exercised.) The community of disciples has in common that what Jesus does is not common but is strange. In terms of the comedic arc, Jesus is here at the low point, has fallen from the messianic perch, from normality, from his place in the community. This is the cross.

But, as we noticed last week, though Jesus has bottomed-out here, the arc of the story doesn’t do the natural comedic thing. He isn’t persuaded by Peter, and so doesn’t stand up straight, apologise and get on with being a proper messiah. And if this humility is the equivalent of the cross, there comes here no equivalent of a resurrection fix, swung in to salvage the moment now that Jesus has lost his mind.

Rather, Jesus pushes further into the humiliation:

What I have done down here in the lowly place is odd, strange, funny, mockable. And you are to do and become this as well. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another – love such as I have shown you.

This is not a call simply to do what Jesus did. It is a call to be strange, as Jesus was. It is an invitation to be remarkable by not avoiding the humiliation of the comedic protagonist who then desperately wants to get up and out again, but by becoming intentionally displaced. This displacement has something to do with the oddness of the command to love we considered a few weeks ago. And so the imperative here is not to be “loving”, in a moral sense, but to enter into an ethic of strangeness.

The community of the laughable God

More pointedly, the call to discipleship is a call to be laughable, in the mode of the laughable God – the God who does weird, ungodly things. The thing about the gods is that they are all about order and appropriateness, insideness and outsideness. The gods define and guarantee the nation, or the religion, or the class, or the race or the gender, or whatever. And so the gods tell us what to laugh at, in the mocking and exclusionary sense.

The God of the gospel, however, is laughable, is the definitive outsider who does strange things. This God kneels to wash our feet, is mocked under a crown of thorns and a purple robe, is crucified outside the city.

Love is strange. In a world like ours, specialising as it does in mockery and exclusion, love which reaches further than the community of the local gods. And to be of this particular God – a disciple of Jesus – is to be learning to be as Jesus himself was. “As I have loved you” means “Remarkably”, “Strangely”, “Laughably”.

But things are twisting now, so that what was laughable and excluded becomes the means of community and inclusion. A new kind of community is proposed, in which being laughable – being different, being outside, being less than others – is embraced.

Laughter is now being transformed, rehabilitated. Instead of the laughter of the many which expresses oneness by marking the outsider, the wrong, Jesus’ action is a Laughter-of-One which proposes a community, a oneness, a normality, which is not yet there.

Because it is properly always particular, love always isolates – always laughs. Yet this is a laugh which does not exclude but embraces the funny other, the lost, the not-fitting, and gathers them in. And so, unlike with the other strong, mocking gods, this laughable God’s laughter creates a new kind of community and calls us to laugh with him, to laugh as he does, to laugh into being what does not yet exist – the community of peace and justice which comes from loving as Jesus loved us.

Laugh, Jesus says, as I have laughed you.

And all God’s people laugh, Amen.

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Pentecost 16
28/9/2025

Psalm 23
John 5:19-25

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ForeWord

There is an old joke about asking for directions, which comes in many versions but generally runs something like this: a city slicker finds himself out on the back roads in some sparsely inhabited part of the countryside, trying to find the church at which his cousin is being married that afternoon. Exasperated, he pulls up to ask directions from an old farmer he sees leaning on a fence. Hearing where the cousin wants to go, the farmer responds, “If that’s where I was wanting to be going, I wouldn’t be starting from here. ” The local then proposes how the visitor might get to the point from which one should begin such a journey.

The reason for telling the joke is fairly obvious, and it’s often told to mock the Irish or some other national identity. But if we look past the mockery, we can see something of ourselves in the lost cousin – having a very strong sense that we should be somewhere else, but also having no idea how to get there. We knew where we were, but now we don’t, and we want to know again.

We’ve noticed before that this sequence of good-bad-good-again reflects the literary form of the comedy. A comedy is not just a funny story – not even necessarily a funny story. It’s a story the arc of which moves from a happy beginning through a troubled middle into a happy – often happier – resolution at the end.

In a comedy, the good guys ultimately triumph, no matter how catastrophic the odds. And the vast majority of stories we tell are comedies, as distinct from bad-guys-win tragedies which never rise out of the catastrophe. We see the comedic in the children’s classic, in the latest easy-watch rom-com, the smash hit sci-fi action flick, and even in your average horror movie.

The joke about the yokel farmer’s directions has the city slicker stuck in the middle of a comedy. But he doesn’t know this, doesn’t know whether he’ll get to the wedding on time. And this is one of the problems with recognising the genre of a comedy. Our stories generally follow the comedic arc, so that in the end at least someone survives and lives happily ever after. But, as we live our own lives, even if we imagine that they might be comedies, we don’t know how or in what way our story will be positively resolved. In the middle – and pretty much the whole of our life is spent “in the middle” – it feels like it might yet turn out to be a tragedy.

We’ve also noticed before that comedy is very much the genre of the biblical narratives. Consider the stories of Ruth, or Abraham and Sarah, or of Israel taken into exile and then restored it again. Even the book of Job follows the comedic arc. More broadly, the whole biblical narrative moves from the paradisial Garden of Eden, through the struggle of fallen human life, to the promised reconciliation of all things in the book of Revelation. And, within all of that, is the story of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus, which also appears to follow the comedic arc.

When I spoke a few weeks ago about the reference a Christian funeral makes to a “second story” within which ours is placed, this indicated the greater divine comedic arc within which we live our own personal story. And that is all very good and true. But along the way, our lives are mostly lived in that trough between the happy and joyful promise we were at our beginning and the promised eternal life at our end, whatever that looks like.

And, in this middle, we find ourselves very much in the situation of knowing where we want to be, but not being in the right place to start from to get there.

(With all that in mind, let’s hear a short passage from John’s gospel in which Jesus speaks to the where and what of our life and action)…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 5. 19-25)

Word: Proclamation

“. . . whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me”, Jesus says, “has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life. ”

I suspect that our hearing of this declaration typically falls on the first part: that we need to hear and believe Jesus. This is true. But what comes at the end of the declaration is unexpected: not that there “will” be life for the believer, but rather that the judgment has already been set aside. The one who hears and believes has already crossed over from death to life. Such faith doesn’t secure a future but effects a new present.

The strangeness of this is not unlike the strangeness we’d hear had our yokel farmer told the lost fellow that he was already where he wanted to be, when that was clearly not the case. How can “here” be “there” when it doesn’t look like there? In the terms in which Jesus speaks, how can what feels here and now like the comedic trough be its elevated resolution? How can the uneternal now be eternal life?

In this connection, we also noted a couple of weeks ago that the resurrection of Jesus didn’t “add” anything to him. Jesus’ death was not an incompleteness; he was as much king upon the cross as he was when risen from the dead.

This is why Jesus can say that eternal life is already present to those who understand the gospel. If there is nothing to be added to Jesus beyond his death, there is nothing to be added to us either if, like Jesus, we are doing the works of the one who sent us. Now is enough to be whole. Unlike the lost cousin on his way to the wedding, we are already precisely where we need to be. By the word of Jesus, the eternal life typically held over until some distant future becomes a possibility here and now.

Jesus says this to those of us whose experience of day-to-day life is probably closer to being lost on the way to a wedding: feeling that we are not where we need to be, or want to be. And the incompleteness in this is made worse by the feeling that we need to be somewhere else in order to begin to become ourselves. There are no signs to tell us where we are or where to go. We don’t know whether the serial killer is still in the house. We don’t know whether we should go through with our convenient engagement for marriage, or let it be swept aside by the new and disruptive love interest which has suddenly appeared. We don’t know whether our fairy godmother will arrive in time to lift the witch’s curse. We don’t know what the good is we should be doing. This is what it feels like to be told we’re living a comedy when we’re still only in the troubled middle.

And it’s this experience that Jesus addresses: “who hears and believes my word has eternal life”. To believe Jesus is to hear that you are already where you need to be.

The gospel has much less to do with the promise at the end of all things than with the promise which might be realised within the uncertain, messy middle of all things. The gospel is concerned with the fullness of the here-and-now life Jesus once lived, and the continuing presence of Jesus’ word so that we might also live here-and-now in the same kind of fullness. That word doesn’t point beyond the life we live but directly to it. Eternal life is less what happens tomorrow than what happens today. And what happens today is not what we do to bring about or earn ourselves a happy tomorrow. It is testimony to the truth of human being: fullness of life is for now, whatever our circumstances , not later.

There is, then, a kind of collapsing, or reaching back, of the comedic ending into the unhappy middle, so that there will sometimes be something quite unfunny about the comedy of the gospel. Sometimes it looks and feels like a cross.

But the cross is now not the triumph of the tragic but the refusal of life to give up, a testimony to a different way of seeing.

And so the struggle is no less the truth, no less a fullness of life which contradicts its uncomfortable form to declare: God is already here, in the messy middle. Eternal life, then – the life of a different time – is a life we can live now, a life which can make our times different.

This is God’s call to us, and God’s gift.

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Pentecost 14
14/9/2025

Psalm 98
John 15:1-17

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ForeWord

If there is any place where we might expect that love could most confidently be taken to be present, it is surely at a wedding. And yet, we begin today by noting something about the standard Marriage Service which is both surprising and deeply significant.

I hadn’t noticed it myself until preparing a particular wedding 15 or so years ago. Wedding preparation includes meeting with the couple a few times before the day to discuss the nature of marriage, what will be done and said on the day, and so on. This often involves tweaking the vows a bit for personal preference, within some set limits.

When I received back from the bride-to-be one of the service drafts I’d sent her, there was something unfamiliar in the suggestions for the vows that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. And then I saw it: she had inserted a couple of lines by which the couple would express how much they loved one another, or something to that effect.

Why not? , you might ask. But this was novel at that point in the service, and the penny dropped on what I hadn’t seen before: the Marriage Service doesn’t care whether the people standing at the altar love one another. This is the case in both the broadly catholic “religious” service of the Uniting Church and in the civil service used at the State Registry Office. The only question asked of a couple about their being present on the day is whether they have come willingly, which is not the same thing as “Do you love one another? ”

Of course, in a modern liberal society, we expect that, if there is a wedding, there are no shotguns in sight and that the wedding has been convened because of the couple’s affection for one another.

But the Marriage Service itself doesn’t ask about that. The substantial question put to the couple is not, Do you love? but Will you love? This is a place for promise-making rather than stating what is presently the case. Affection might still be expressed in any particular service, but it’s not prescribed. Whatever is at the heart of the wording of the traditional “religious” and “secular” marriage services, it is not affection.

Perhaps that seems rather a subtle distinction to make, given that, in societies like ours, couples tend to turn up at the altar based on their affection for each other. But it’s worth noting here that the Marriage Service could work just as much for a traditional arranged wedding as for a modern “romantic” wedding. It’s neither here nor there, so far as the Service itself is concerned, whether the marriage originates in romance or arrangement. What matters is the promise, and therefore the implicit command to love.

This bizarre notion – that we might be commanded to love one another even on that occasion – runs quite counter to our modern sense for what a wedding is about. But my concern today is not wedding vows but the simple strangeness to our ears of a command to love. Perhaps the wedding service is the only place we hear that command today in the secular world, if indeed we can hear it against the background noise of self-interpretation, self-love and exclusion of the other, which seems to be growing louder around us.

How can we be commanded to love? We return to this after listening for God’s word in a hearing of a passage from the Gospel according to St John.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 15:1-17)

Word: Proclamation

“This is my commandment, that you love one another”.

Clearly, the love at stake here is not the love we feel. It is not that kind of love that is our natural resonance with another person. Affectionate love, of course, is central to our being. Romance, family, friendship – these “felt” loves are as essential to us as they are inevitable.

But Jesus claims there is a love which is not natural, which is not innate, which is not an expression merely of what we feel or want. That claim must, therefore, come as a commandment, as something which contradicts what we think is normal or natural.

Yet, there’s a world of difference between what we are commanded not to do and what we are commanded to do. “Do not kill”, “Do not commit adultery” and “Do not lie” require that we recognise the other without requiring any recognition of our connection to that other. A “Do not” commandment is how we keep our distance, and an investment towards not being mistreated in return. “Do not” is generic: Do not kill means do not kill anyone.

But the command to love is not generic; it is specific. “Do not”. If we are not to lie to anyone, we are to love some particular one. The command is not to love “everyone” or “humanity” but some particular person, in front of you. “Love one another”, Jesus says. This is direct and personal: love that one there.

If this were easy, it wouldn’t be commanded. And sometimes we just can’t do it, even when everything began so well. There’s nothing to be said for getting judgmental here. And the imperative to love can be manipulated to force people to stay unwillingly in life-threatening relationships, which is also misses the point. Such ruptures of what was love show just how hard love is, and how the command to love understands our faltering capacities for love.

Perhaps all this is obvious, or at least familiar. But the question is, can such a commandment be heard today? What is a call to love in the midst of assassinations, inflammatory presidential blustering and gleeful anticipations of death penalties? What is the command to love while occupations continue and racism flaunts on our streets? We cannot help but be sceptical here. Can love really be a serious political option?

It can, but only if the work of politics is reconceived. Politics, particularly in its law-making and -enforcing mode, finds it easy to say what love doesn’t look like. This is what the “Do not” commandments are for, and a developed society like ours has thousands of them.

The politics of love would be entirely different. “Do not” is open-and-shut easy: he did it, or he didn’t.

But the work of love is hard to pin down, harder to identify. It is gift and invitation and response. And we don’t really know when it is done. Or how long it lasts. And so the command to love continues to be stated. “Do not steal” speaks to the opportune moment. “Love one another” speaks to the next moment, and the next, and the next.

We know when we’ve got the “Do not” right or wrong. But love both succeeds and fails at the same time. Even if it’s rebuffed, love has been right. And when it’s received as right, there is yet more love to be done.

The “Do not” commands are about quantities that can be counted – what has or hasn’t been done. The command to love is a quality, a value, a means of being present. “Do not” commands keep us safe for a while – if we have enough of them – like a heavy lid on a pot threatening to boil over. The command to love turns down the heat.

And is this not what we need – a turning down of the heat?

And do we not have a part to play in this?

And so, stop counting the rights and the wrongs, and hear the command: love one another.

Love one another. In the home. At the workplace. On the roads. In the shopping centre. In the Parliament. In the Church and the Mosque and the Synagogue. In the council meeting. In the university. On the tram. In the café. In the library. At the concert. In the park. In the queue. Even at the football.

Love. One. Another.

There is no other way out of all this.

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Pentecost 13
7/9/2025

Psalm 1
John 12:27-36

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ForeWord

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council is probably not a name any of you have ever had reason to invoke.

That said, some of you will have fond memories of having read or listened to the radio play versions of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Vogons feature, and which opens with the destruction of Earth to make way for an intergalactic highway.

The end of our world is announced with the arrival of a fleet of bulldozing spaceships. A line which has fixed itself in my mind ever since I first read the book describes the sight of these “huge as office blocks, silent as birds” ships: The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

Quoting more fully:

The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

The striking thing about this last sentence is that it’s both immediately clear, and then immediately not so clear, what is meant.

Clearly, bricks don’t hang in the air, if we take “brick” and “air” to mean what they usually mean. And a spaceship, in this description, corresponds to a brick. But it is clearly also not-brick, because if the air is just air, the spaceship should fall.

It matters here that the ship doesn’t hang in the air in the way a helicopter might. The noise a helicopter makes indicates how hard it is trying not to be like a brick. And, presumably, there would be a technological explanation for why the spaceships don’t do what bricks do. But this is not the point. The point is the “blasphemy against nature”. The ships don’t “fit”. They have no meaning in the sense we’ve considered before: we can’t “locate” them. And yet they are there, in such a way that we have to speak about their “thereness” as something sheer. They are wrongly, but starkly and strongly, “there”. And this sheer thereness corresponds to the shock of the news: the world is about to end.

My interest in all this is not the possibility of space travel or how advanced alien tech might be. I want instead to compare Douglas Adams’ description of those cosmic bulldozers to the crucifixion of Jesus.

Admittedly, this is a connection you’ve probably not thought much about until now, so let me fast-track you into it. An apparent difference between Jesus and the spaceships is that Jesus hangs in the air (on the cross) precisely the way a condemned criminal does. There is no surprise here. Seen it all before. People get crucified, and this is what it looks like.

If we think about the cross these days, it’s typically in terms of the suffering it entailed and so the “price” Jesus paid. But there’s not a lot of this in John’s Gospel. Disrupting once more our normal sensitivities, John doesn’t quite do suffering. He’s not dispassionate; he is just doing something else. (We might note in passing here that Jesus asks, ”…what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour. ”)

Our Gospel text today has Jesus speaking of his being “lifted up”, in an apparent reference to his crucifixion. But, for John, this is not merely a crucifixion. While Jesus is made to hang there in the way that condemned criminals typically did, this lifting up also has Jesus hanging there strangely, in the way that bricks don’t.

But, before we go any further, let’s pause for a moment to listen for the Word of God in the hearing of the Scriptures…

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 12. 27-36)

Word : Proclamation

Jesus speaks several times in John’s gospel of being “lifted up”. The expression is one of John’s many wordplays.

The lifting up is clearly a raising in the ghastly mode of a crucifixion. But the term also has overtones of a different kind of elevation. In particular, this elevation can also be a coronation.

And this changes dramatically what we are invited to see. The cross is now not a place of suffering or some saving transaction. The cross is here more like a throne upon which is “seated” (hangs) the king.

But, as an elevation, a coronation, the point is not quite that a king is crucified, whether intentionally or accidentally. To the extent that the crucifixion is a coronation, Jesus becomes king in the process of crucifixion. And so, on this reading, Jesus’ death upon the cross becomes the high point of the story, the point at which he comes to himself, rather than merely the point at which his executioners reject him.

But now a strange question presents itself. If the cross is indeed the high point of the story, what then of the resurrection? We have to say that the resurrection is no longer necessary for the story to be true or complete, although it’s essential if we are to know that the cross is the high point. We’ve seen this once or twice in our Gospel of John reflections over the last few months. The story peaks at the cross, but no one will know this unless something happens to give us a different way of seeing the cross, which is the work of the resurrection.

But if the cross is the climax of the story – the point at which Jesus becomes king – then the crucifixion is no longer a familiar tragedy but is suddenly deeply anomalous. Jesus, like those cosmic bulldozers, hangs “motionless, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature” – against everything by which we have measured what is right and what is wrong, what is divine and what is worldly, what is life and what is death.

Here, as with the arrival of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz with all his bureaucratic planet-destroying efficiency, is the end of the world, the revaluation of all values, a kind of blasphemy against what had been true until that moment. The cross is the least human, least kingly, least Godly of places. But it’s here that Jesus is declared to be the one in whom God reigns: the “king”.

This is not merely neat or even profound “theology”. Faith doesn’t interpret the stories of Jesus to make sense of them. Rather, out of those stories, faith interprets the world to make sense of it. The cross is to our sense of ourselves and our world what a suspended brick would be: a blasphemy against our typical ordering of things and, so, a new thought, a new vision.

How Jesus is, is how we are to be. The Christian – or, better, the properly and truly human being – will be strange like this, will be blasphemous like this, will surprise and shock.

The cross is what it would be like for all the guns and the bombs just to stop, without explanation. It is like the soldiers just packing their gear into their jeeps and going home, not because the war is over but to make the war over. The cross is the stunned, brick-in-the-air-like silence which such an impossible thing would require – before the ecstatic, jubilant, shout-out-loud joy.

The cross is like living as if death were not there, lurking, fearsome.

The cross is mercy which shatters the shackles of hard justice.

The cross is all such impossible things, hanging in the air in much the same way that a brick doesn’t, inexplicable, and utterly glorious. In the midst of death’s dismal order, this has the power to draw all people, to see and to marvel that such things could be (Nicodemus, again! ).

This is our faith. And to hold this faith is to hear that this is what we ourselves are to become: such impossible things, such unexpected blasphemy against the natural but oppressive order of the world – the light of the glory of God in a humanity fully alive, contradicting the reign of death.

This is our gift, our calling, and our prayer.

And all God’s people say…

 

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Pentecost 12
31/8/2025

Jeremiah 2:4-13
Psalm 81
Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16
Luke 14:7-14

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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A “Jeremiah” is a word for a pessimistic prophet who foresees a calamitous end. That is unfair to the prophet who addressed us so powerfully this morning. True, he lived through a disastrous time in the history of the people Israel, he saw the signs plainly.  He had his own exile in Egypt, but he knew the destructive power of the neighbouring nation of Babylon and in his last chapters, he returns to a message of hope.

The psalm we have just read has the same message in brief, and was written around Jeremiah’s time – so Howard Wallace assures me.  It begins “Sing merrily to God our strength”, recognizes that God’s people preferred their own counsels and were ‘sent away’, but ends with that intriguing image of the honey from the Rock. The moderns among you will also recognize a recent Hillsong hit with that name, which combines several such images to form a song of hope – there’s water from the rock too, and manna on the ground, all of them difficult to imagine, which is the point. Grace often appears in unexpected, even impossible places!  In the same spirit, in the early centuries of the Christian faith, the newly-baptized were welcomed to the Lord’s Table with a cup of milk and honey.

So between promise and hope, both the Old Testament readings remember the troubles of the journey of the Exodus. Jeremiah has hard words to say about their faithlessness as they marched towards the land of milk and honey.

The final verse of our reading sums it all up in a watery image:

¹³ My people have committed two sins:
they have rejected me,
the source of living water,
and they have dug out for themselves cisterns,
cracked cisterns which can hold no water.

These were the people who were called ‘holy to the LORD’ (2:3). This is covenantal language, expressing a sacred bond between the people and their God; yet they had abandoned the God who called them out of enslavement and had led them to a land where they could flourish in the freedom which faith in the LORD gives.  On the journey, they received the Ten Words to live by. It is unfortunate that they gained the title “Commandment”; the Hebrew simply has “words” and commandment opened the door to legalism and punishment; they were words of fullness of life. Yet, settled in the Promised Land, they strayed from their high calling and pursued what passed for religion where they now dwelt.

Thus the LORD’s question:

⁵What fault did your ancestors find in me,
that they went so far astray from me,
pursuing worthless idols and becoming worthless themselves?

The religion of the ancient East took many forms but the most popular was the fertility god, Baal, for reasons obvious to us!  It suited their most carnal desires and demanded nothing of their way of life.  One commentator (R. E. Clements) says, “Religion cannot remain true religion if it bypasses genuine moral concern for the welfare of society”.  Faithful believing and living demands the distinction between true and false, otherwise you are living an illusion.  The illusions are on offer every day in our present world culture, in the news, in the evening’s entertainment on TV, in the commercials, and through those mobile telephones.

So Jeremiah goes on to notice others who also lost their way:

⁶ The priests did not ask, ‘Where is the LORD,
who brought us up from Egypt
and led us through the wilderness,
through a barren and broken country,
a country parched and forbidding,
where no one ever travelled,
where no one made his home?’

His words even heighten the difficulty of their trek.

Perhaps the question “Where is the LORD” might be put differently: “What is the LORD doing?” Where is God in our experience, in our life, our culture, our nation? Where does the LORD discover himself to us?  It was the priests’ business to know that.

The “people who handled the law”, a nice phrase – and the prophets, all of whom had a holy obligation to the God of the Exodus, all failed. The lawyers did not know the source of justice and morality – they rejected the very source of living water; the prophets preferred to trust in Baal, a god they made with their own hands. Yet, ⁷ “I brought you into a fertile land to enjoy its fruit and every good thing in it”. So,

¹³ My people have committed two sins:
they have rejected me,
the source of living water,
and they have dug out for themselves cisterns,
cracked cisterns which can hold no water.

“Foolishness followed faithlessness” comments Howard Wallace, as it inevitably does. Of course, not all priests, not all prophets, not all rulers of the Law were faithless, as the scriptures themselves attest.

Jeremiah took care to address all of them, people, priests and prophets. He spoke to Judah and to the families of the house of Israel. With St Paul, he believed that “all have sinned and all are deprived of the divine glory” (Rom. 3:23 REB).

The lectionary’s choice of Hebrews to accompany Jeremiah is helpful. The chapter consists of a series of instructions to Jewish Christians. Every one of them deserves a sermon. They begin with the beautiful ‘Ἡ φιλαδελφία μενέτω”, “brotherly love, let it remain” – but that won’t do these days, so “let mutual affection continue”.  Be hospitable to strangers, Resist the love of money. Remember in prayer those who lead you in the faith. Live life as a continual sacrifice of thanksgiving to God.  Do not neglect to do good and share what you have.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is contrasting troubling table manners with what true hospitality involves: not the admiration of the wealthy and influential, but of aligning ourselves with “the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind. This is the way to find happiness, because they have no way to repay you.” (14:13-14).  And with their modern additions: those who suffer from the wars of ‘strong men’, and all whose lives are turned upside down because of our neglect “to care for our common home” as Pope Francis put it.

No-one will pretend that this is any easier than some parts of the Ten Commandments, but we are bidden to remember the generosity of God, and the indiscriminate divine love in Christ Jesus – and how we live derives its truth and its strength from there.  Jeremiah has several more chapters of indictment. There will be a call to repentance, and there will be a final judgement, but not ours.

And so we come before God in repentance, that is, to turn our lives again on to the path of Christ, to make our offerings of our concern in prayer, and to offer our gifts in response.  And then to the table of the eucharist, the place of thanksgiving where sinners are welcome.

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Pentecost 11
24/8/2025

Psalm 148
John 11:20-24

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ForeWord

Some of you, of course, attended Norah’s funeral earlier this week.

I want to introduce our Gospel reading today by saying a bit more about what I offered in the sermon there, which has become an almost “standard” thought in my funeral sermons over recent years. (And so this could be an insight into what I might say at your funeral, should that privilege fall to me).

To remind those who were there, and bring everyone else up to speed, I observed on Tuesday, the obvious: that funerals are convened not least to remember the one who has died. But, when a funeral is intentionally “Christian”, a second story is also told. If the first story is the story of our experience of the one who has died, the second story is an account of God’s experience of her, and of us.

This seems to me to be a useful framing of what a funeral does for two reasons. First, it’s true. Christian faith sees our lives as resting in a larger work in which God is engaged. Second, this framing seems to be a gentle way to invite everyone gathered – believers and unbelievers alike – to think a little differently about their own story. Do I understand myself to be living within a bigger story? And what is that bigger story?

One of the things we’ve seen over the last 30 or 40 years is the growth of eulogies in length and number. This is undoubtedly true in non-religious funerals, but we see it even in the churches. And it makes perfect sense. If we don’t believe that we’re part of a grander story than our own, then it becomes imperative that we tell our own story as loudly and lengthily as we can. This is for sheer sanity’s sake, else what was it all for? If there is nothing that makes sense of us, then what little sense we’ve managed to make or be becomes even more important.

But my concern here is not how to do a good funeral. The two-story concept is a thought we might entertain at any time, and certainly long before we’re dead. The question is then only, What is the second story which justifies, which gives sense and meaning to, our own personal story?

Our Gospel reading for today tells part of the story of the raising of the dead Lazarus. Up to the point at which our reading begins, Lazarus has died and Jesus has arrived, and speaks with Martha and Mary, the dead man’s sisters.

We’ve thought about this text a couple of times before, with closer attention to the miracle itself, but today my interest is in what Jesus says about his relationship to resurrection and life, that he says this before his own resurrection, and what this might mean for our two-storied humanity.

Word: The Testimony of Scripture

(Hearing: John 11. 20-44)

Word : Proclamation

Last week, we noted two related things about Jesus’ death and resurrection, one more straightforward than the other. The simpler draws on what we saw then in the exchange between Thomas and Jesus: the risen Jesus still bears the scars of the crucifixion, which seems to be the basis of Thomas’ extraordinary confession: “my Lord and my God. ” The risen Jesus is the crucified Jesus; the marks of Jesus’ life are not expunged with the resurrection. Jesus’ history continues into whatever resurrection life he now lives.

The second, more challenging thought was this: that the crucified Jesus is the risen Jesus. What this doesn’t mean is that the crucified Jesus is the one who will be raised. Rather, he is crucified as the risen Jesus. Or, still more pointedly, Jesus is “already” risen when he is crucified (and before the crucifixion). This makes little sense because we are accustomed to thinking about the cross and resurrection as sequential events, for the obvious reason that this is how the story unfolds.

But, as we’ve noticed before, the Gospeller John does not much respect our sense for things. What is at play for John is more who Jesus is than what he does or is done to him. Central to the “is-ness” of Jesus is that he does not change throughout the narrative (which John has in common with the other Evangelists).

To say that nothing of Jesus changes is to say that nothing is taken from him, and nothing is added, throughout the story. The Jesus calling disciples in chapter 1 is the Jesus raising Lazarus in chapter 11, is the Jesus being crucified in chapter 19, and is the risen Jesus in chapter 20. The stable thing throughout the narrative is the identity Jesus has from the one who sent him, and towards those to whom he was sent.

What this means for the cross and the resurrection is that Jesus is the same before the cross and after it; the resurrection doesn’t change anything about Jesus. (What does change at Easter is perception, but this is outside of him. We saw this last week in Thomas and Peter, and earlier again in Mary. )

To put it perhaps a little surprisingly, the resurrection doesn’t matter for Jesus. It doesn’t add anything to him.

It does matter for us, although not for the reason we usually think. The resurrection doesn’t tell us that there is a life which follows death. This would be resurrection-as-addition thinking: that the dead Jesus got a bonus extension, as Lazarus did, and so we might too. Rather, the resurrection matters for us because it is light by which we see now what Jesus was all along: he was always the presence of the reign of God in the world. And what else is the resurrection but just the sign of the presence of God in Jesus – which was always the case. Even before he died, then, Jesus was living resurrection life. His word to Martha – “I am the resurrection and the life” – is about now, not what’s to come.

This is not a straightforward thought, but an important one. But even if we can accommodate it, we might well ask, So what? This is all quite neat theology, stitching up who Jesus is (or was), but why do normal, sensible people (as distinct from theologians) need to think such curly thoughts?

The thing about neat, stitched-up theology is that it’s only properly neat when it makes a human difference. Here, to get our head properly around who Jesus is and what happens to him, is to get our head around ourselves.

Remember that we began all this by recalling a funeral sermon’s proposal that our experience of ourselves rests in the broader and deeper experience God has of us.

For Christian confession, this broader and deeper experience – God’s experience of us – is Jesus himself. As small as one person is, in the context of all the people who will ever live, this one person’s story is confessed to be the story within which all our stories are properly nestled.

For Jesus to be “the resurrection and the life”, then, is for him to be the possibility that we can be like him: living a “resurrection life” now, and not in some distant (or not so distant) future, as if we would be incomplete without a resurrection. The second story, God’s experience of us, is our completeness.

That Jesus is the resurrection and the life might be proven to be true by his resurrection, but it doesn’t become true at that point. It was always the case: he lived as if there were no death.

And so also for us; our second story becomes our first. Whether we think we’ve a little time left or a lot, whether it will be energetic time or now has to be less so, what matters is that the life we have now is given for living, now.

To believe in Jesus is to believe that we have been given all we need to live life in all its fullness. It is, then, time to begin to live.

Do not wait for heaven.

The resurrection and the life are much, much closer than you think.

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Pentecost 10
17/8/2025

Psalm 118
John 20:19-31
John 21:15-19

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Gearing for hearing

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve set myself the goal of slowly working through the book, “1001 movies you must see before you die” – an exercise pitting cultural breadth against personal longevity.

One of the films I’ve recently seen from the list is the 1972 Academy Award winner for best film, actor and director (among other things): The French Connection. Some of you probably saw this when it first came out. For my part, it wasn’t a good film for a six-year-old. The French Connection is a gritty police drama treating the rise of the drug trade – in this case, out of Turkey through France into New York. It’s still well worth watching if crime dramas are your thing.

But I mention it because I had previously seen another movie on the same drug trade but set on the other side of the Atlantic: the 2014 French film La French, for which the English title was The Connection. You can see the connection!

The French film is also worth watching, but something which struck me about the two had nothing to do with the stories themselves, but a feature of the timing of the storytelling in each case. The 1971 film was shot in 1971 and told the story of things happening in 1971. This meant that, once the drama moved onto the streets, we saw a 1971 New York street just as anyone would have seen it as they left a New York cinema after watching the film during its first release.

The French film, however, tells the story of 1970s Marseille from some 40 years later. And so everything must be reconstructed to translate the viewer back to the 70s. They do a pretty good job. But the thing which struck me was the cars. While the production assistants of the 2014 film had done a marvellous job finding all sorts of 1950s, 60s and 70s French cars to stretch along the roads in the street scenes, every car is straight and shiny. The problem here is that only dedicated collectors keep old cars. And they don’t keep them “old” – they fix them up like new. Every second car lining the street in the 1971 version of the story is dented, rusted and muddy. Every car in the 2014 version of the story looks like it just rolled out of the showroom. The collector doesn’t want the dents; she wants the “real” car – the car before anything happened to it.

This might really spoil your enjoyment of new movies about old things because it happens everywhere. New movies featuring old streets seem always only to have new (old) cars. There’s no place movie makers can go to find a car that sits between the painstakingly restored classic and the rusted out, utterly unroadworthy equivalent languishing in some farm shed.

But at this point, I’m more interested in the collector than the movie maker. The collector identifies the real thing as that which is as close as possible to its original condition. Something is of greatest value when it is closest to what it was in the beginning. A mint-condition coin is worth more than one that has been spent, and collectable toys are worth more if the box has not been opened.

In all of this, it seems that the wear and tear we call life is a process of diminishment. At least, this seems to be the case with “things”: tools, clothes, toys, cars.

And what about people? If we ourselves were collectable, as dolls or stamps and Lego sets are, what would constitute the ideal of a person – the ideal of any one of us? What does the “collector” edition of a John, a Sue or a David look like?

It’s a stupid question, of course. But it goes to what we think we are, and so what is of value about us, and when we are most this valuable thing.

This brings us, finally, to our readings for today – two texts from John’s Gospel, from the resurrection narratives. In one, Thomas makes a statement about what he thinks the real Jesus – a resurrected Jesus – would look like. In the other, Jesus reminds Peter what his – Peter’s – reality is. Listen for how the scratches and the dents are handled.

(John 20. 19-31
and John 21. 15-19)

Extending the hearing

Most of us know those texts pretty well and so know also how they are typically interpreted. Thomas is the apparent sceptic who won’t believe unless he can see and touch; Jesus interrogates Peter three times, seemingly to drive home Peter’s earlier three-fold denial that he knows, loves, Jesus.

But there’s more to be found here. Thomas finally declares that Jesus is “Lord and God” when Jesus’ wounds are revealed, but it is precisely the scratched and dented Jesus who is praised there. The marks of the crucifixion are not marks like the colour of Jesus’s eyes or the shape of his nose. The marks are not the means by which Jesus is identified; they are his identity. The real Jesus is not the perfect “no crying he makes” baby in a manger, before he says or does anything, or before anything is done to him. The real Jesus is the “used” one: dusty, dented and discarded. What is raised is not a fully restored, just-rolled-out-of-the-showroom Jesus. The scratches and the dents are not “on” him; they are him. It is not Jesus, the confessing Thomas says, if he’s not marked with the marks of the crucifixion.

And as it is for Jesus, so also for us. In Peter’s exchange with Jesus, the great disciple learns this for himself. Our few verses today began mid-story, but the narrative commenced with Peter declaring, “I’m going fishing”: a return to Galilee, a return to the beginning. It’s as if nothing has happened, and Peter and the rest of the disciples have hit the reset: forget and begin again. And then Jesus appears, as if to affirm the re-fresh.

But, in what we heard today, Jesus draws the enthusiastic showroom-restored Peter to one side. And with his repeated question, Jesus presses Peter to acknowledge his own brokenness. There is no mere forgiveness here, in the forgive-and-forget mode. It is as the one who three times denied Jesus that Peter is installed as the shepherd to Jesus’ lambs.

This is one of our “know-ing” texts, which we considered last week. Lord, Peter says, You know everything; you know that I love you. But by the third posing of the question, Peter’s statement of his love is deepened, because with that third question from Jesus, two things happen.

First, Peter’s failure is revealed to him again – Jesus “knows everything”; Jesus knows that Peter has failed him in his threefold denial.

And yet, second, the Jesus who knows of Peter’s failure is also the one who now appoints him as pastor: feed my sheep. Peter says three times, “Lord, you know that I love you”, but the third is different from the previous two, because the Jesus who is loved has now changed in Peter’s perception. This is no longer the Jesus the enthusiastic Peter wants him to be. This is the Jesus who knows the dinged-up, broken-down Peter and loves him nonetheless, just as he is. And more than loves him, Jesus commissions him to continue Jesus’ own work.

And so the collection-edition Peter is not the strong, vital fisherman at the start of the gospel, is not the confident, sometimes over-reaching disciple mid-story, is not the fearful one at the end. The collector-edition Peter – the truly valuable Peter – is the one who – at each stage, in every condition – has been loved. Peter’s value doesn’t change with his changing behaviour and fortunes in the story. At his best and his worst, and despite his own attempt to go back to BNIB, what has mattered most is that he has been valued. We are not our best selves at any stage of life, but in life, in flight.

What does the collector’s edition you look like?

You are each, here and now, the best you’ve ever been. Now are your glory days, now matters as much as any other moment you imagined was more “you”.

And so this can have nothing to do with how you feel about yourself. God help us if we were worth only as much as we think we are. And God does help us here, because this is a scratch-and-dent God. Our here and now is our best time because, at each stage of his life, Jesus was the presence of God: in the heady days of the calling the first disciples and in the glory of a resurrection from the dead, but also when struggling with the powers and nailed to a cross. The crucified Christ is not the one who will be risen, but the one who is risen; the risen Christ is not the one who was crucified, but the one who is crucified. This is the point of Thomas’ insistence on the marks of the crucifixion. The marks are not “on” Jesus, but are him. It’s as if everything which Jesus does and everything which happens to him is coincident: it all occurs at once, in the sight of God, and each is as valuable, each is as much the true Jesus, as the other.

The gospel is that, as with Jesus, so also with us. All that we do and is done to us coheres in God. There is no better you than the you sitting here and now because your here and now is wrapped up in the God who draws near to us in all things and binds them together, to make all things God’s own.

Understand, then, as Thomas understood, and step up, as Jesus called Peter to do so. Because if, in all things – in our very best and our very worst – we are already seen and loved, then we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.