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Advent 2
8/12/2019

Isaiah 11:1-10
Psalm 72
Romans 15:4-13
Matthew 3:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

“You brood of vipers!” I get the impression that John the Baptist was not too impressed with the attitude of those Pharisees and Sadducees, the cultural leaders of his day. The point he held against them was that they didn’t act. They didn’t “bear fruit worthy of repentance”. They thought they were all right because of their past, they were descendants of Abraham, and that was all that mattered.

Matthew presents John as Elijah come again to announce the coming of the Messiah. The belt, the camel’s hair, the diet, all paint a picture of Elijah. And Elijah set the pattern for being critical of the prevailing culture. Though the lectionary points us to Isaiah for a description of the messiah: – a shoot from the stump of David, a branch that will bear fruit, … with righteousness he will judge the poor. … Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist. … And the whole of creation will be transformed. The wolf shall live with the lamb … They will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.

The pattern for preparing for the Messiah is first exposing unrighteous attitudes towards the poor and then taking action to relieve poverty. But it is also interesting to note that John was actually executed for his criticism of the marriage of Herodias to Herod Antipas, while Elijah didn’t like the marriage of Ahab to Jezebel.

In his address to the Anglican Synod recently, Archbishop Freier pointed to the marriage debate as “the issue of our times”. The Anglican position is at variance from recent legislation about marriage equality. This leads the Primate to make several points:

• Our society no longer looks to its Christian roots on moral issues,
• The Church must point to the coming reign of Christ, and witness to the judgement of Christ in order to transform the culture around it,
• that witness needs to be expressed in actions that minister to the poor and oppressed.

Without this last point, action on behalf of the poor, there can be little impact on our multi-cultural society. John the Baptist was right about that. There is plenty to criticise in the world around us, from banks to cricket balls, and the attitude of ‘Whatever it takes”. As Thackeray put it in Vanity Fair, “We live in a world where everyone is striving for that which is not worth having”. But just verbally resisting corrupt practice or progressive legislation, only paints the church as reactionary. There is a need to create evidences of the reign of Christ, signs of that which is to come. “Your kingdom come on earth as in heaven”.

Meredith Lake has stirred up a lot of interest with her book, “The Bible in Australia”; – two literary awards, favourable reviews and insightful interviews. I heard her give some examples of the way the Bible has influenced Australian society, and they fit the pattern of seeing something wrong, calling it out, and then doing something about it.

In 1849 there was a Bible Study Group meeting in Sydney. They were discussing poverty in the light of Scripture, and came to the view that belonging to a provident society and having life insurance would give hope to the poor. So they founded the AMP. A decade later another Bible Study Group thought poverty was still a blight on society. They saw the need for the poor to have a means of building up their savings. They started the Bank of New South Wales, which we know today as Westpac. Fast forward another 20 years. There was a committed and fired up Wesleyan layman, whose name I didn’t manage to get. He was critical of the previous approaches and argued that the only way to relieve poverty was through a just wage. He became instrumental in the foundation of the Australian Workers’ Union.

We have the history. Abraham is our father, if you want to use John’s phrase. But appealing to the past is useful only in so far as it inspires us to act in the present. Each Sunday, in our liturgy, we say: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again”. We call it the Easter Mystery. It is a tiny creed. Note the change of tense in the verbs. “Christ HAS died”. We have an unshakeable heritage from the past. “Christ IS risen.” We live in his company and can act with confidence in the present. “Christ WILL come again. We have the vision of the reign of Christ to guide our actions in the present. The vision that the prophet Isaiah put so poetically: “With righteousness he shall judge the poor …. The leopard shall lie down with the kid. … They will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain.” It is a whole new creation.

So hear this voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord”. “All the people were going out to him”. It is not surprising that people, then and now, should fervently long for authority figures and institutions that they can trust. “They were baptised, confessing their sins”. That is the place to start, with the plank in your own eye. John’s baptism was for repentance because the kingdom is near.

Then “Bear fruit worthy of your repentance”. Act on behalf of the poor. Restore the sanctity of marriage. “Do not … say, “We have Abraham as our Father”. It is not enough to live in the past. “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down.” Royal Commissions will see to that. “One who is more powerful than I is coming.” Do not reduce the messianic vision to a set of statistics, focus groups or a marketing survey. “I am not worthy to carry his sandals.” That was the task of a slave. John sees the difference between himself and the Messiah as even greater than that between master and slave. (When Ghandi was in prison in South Africa he gave General Smuts a pair of his sandals. Many years later, when Ghandi was leading his non-violent protests against British rule, General Smuts sent them back, with a note saying he was not worthy.)

“He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” The Holy Spirit is the power that moves us from conviction to action, and the fire is that which gets rid of all the useless baggage we carry. It is the presence of Christ in our midst that enables judgement between the wheat, the good fruit, and the chaff which is blown away or burned.

So, this present Advent, “Prepare the way of the Lord.”

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Pentecost 23
17/11/2019

Isaiah 65:17-25
Isaiah 12
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-9

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

It begins in a temple. Where the wind meets the sea.

Where light and dark, sea and sky, water and earth, are set in their place.

Where there is a place for buying animals, and a place to sacrifice them; a court for Gentiles, and a court for Jews.

It begins in a temple.

It begins in a temple. Filled with the breath of life.

Filled with lanterns to guide our path; teeming with fish and birds, creatures of kinds beyond kinds, and our humanity among them.

Filled with conversation in the marketplace, teaching and prayer, devotion and piety and praise.

It begins in a temple.

And God was there. Where the wind meets the sea. Filling it all with the breath of life.

But then the world of order descended into chaos. There was a war, and wars after wars. And the Jewish people lost. Placed under foreign occupation, sent into exile, returned … placed again under foreign occupation, and eventually crushed.

And the temple?

Years upon years, history has marched on. The temple mount in Jerusalem remains in ruins, the site of bitter conflict … and creation is on fire. The teeming life of fish and birds is at risk; the sea is reclaiming the land; our places of worship are literally and metaphorically crumbling; from where will the prayer and praise and devotion come?

The temple has been torn down.

Is God there … anymore?

“By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

These are the words of Jesus that we are left with at the end of today’s Gospel reading. Our Gospel reading recalls the culmination of the defeat of the Jewish resistance by the occupying Roman army: the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. This defeat continued as the Jewish religious movement which would become Christianity began to spread throughout the empire. Moving from the temple to houses, this new movement was met by persecution as it grew.

Luke’s Gospel does not recall these stories of defeat, destruction, and death as memories of long ago. Rather, the Gospel gathers contemporary experiences into the prophetic words of Jesus. Like all good prophets Jesus is not a seer who peers into the future, but is a voice calling out what is true behind the veil of history and the present world.

The words of Jesus pierce through the intervening years between Jesus’ earthly life and the communion of Luke’s audience as the Spirit-filled body of Christ.

Luke’s original audience knew what it meant that they met in a house, no longer able to worship in a destroyed temple. They knew what it meant to be members of a movement where their spiritual siblings were being killed. And so when we step back to see Luke’s Gospel alongside Luke’s other work, the book of Acts, we can see how the text tells the story of Jesus, while also structuring the story to make sense of the experience of early Christians and catch them up in the ongoing work of God in the world. The Gospel of Luke begins and ends in the temple; and the book of Acts moves from the temple to a house, and then to the furthest reaches of the world.

What is at stake in Luke’s two-volume work is nothing less than the coming to fruition of Isaiah’s vision of a new creation. When we step back to see how Luke takes us from the temple — which served as a symbol of God’s heavenly palace — to local places of worship in houses, to the ends of the Earth, we begin to see how Luke compresses the biggest stories Scripture has to tell into the person of Jesus.

Whether we are talking about creation and new creation, God’s promised liberation of Israel, the reconciliation of all nations or the tender presence of God to those who worship, Luke brings these all together in Jesus himself — it is telling, after all, that Luke’s genealogy of Jesus goes back to the very first human, adam, and ultimately to God.

What holds together the cosmic vision of Isaiah, the destruction of the temple, and the endurance of the persecuted is the central thread of God’s presence in the midst of hardship.

God is present in Jesus as he walks the road to the cross.
God is present with Isaiah in the midst of exile — sustaining the hope for a renewal of creation and the return home.

God is present with the first audiences of Luke, as they formed new communities in the face of persecution.

We should be wary of too easily reading our experiences back into the ancient texts we call Scripture. As if the concerns of a church in modern urban Australia can be simply read into the wise reflections of writers in the Ancient Near East. As if the experiences of people under foreign military occupation, facing exile and persecution, can be identified with our situation. In our situation we find ourselves members of a religious movement that has significantly shaped the majority culture of our colonial society.

This wariness about reading our situation back into the texts of Scripture is not simply a reflection on the incongruence, or implausibility of connecting our direct life experiences with those recorded in Scripture.

At the heart of what it means to receive Scripture is precisely to be bound in some sort of continuity with the people and communities that gave us these texts: to

see our God in their experiences of God; to see our experience of the Spirit in their experience of the Spirit.

In other words, what makes Scripture so central, what makes our sacred texts so vital to the life of faith isn’t that our lives look like the lives witnessed to in these stories. But that our God is reflected in these stories, the same Spirit we encounter breathed these words into being. This is to say, we should read Scripture not to find ourselves, but first of all to find and be found by God.

It is from the centre point of an encounter with God, who we meet fully in the person of Jesus, that our connection with one another here, and our connection with the writers and first audiences of these texts opens up. What binds us together as a community of faith across time and place is not that we share an old book, but that we share the living presence of the same Spirit, and the same Risen Christ. It is Christ and Christ alone, by the power of the Spirit, that constitutes our unity.

At the end of it all, what should strike us about the talk of calamity in our reading from Luke isn’t simply that it gives voice to the experience of some Christians, though this is important. Rather, the talk of calamity prepares us for the coming betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion of Jesus.

The promise of God’s presence in the midst of difficulty is assured because God in Christ willingly goes into the midst of hardship. God chooses to be present even among the crucified, even among the dead. Because of this fact, that Jesus is present even where we think God cannot go: into the place of death beyond life, we are assured of God’s presence wherever we are.

The centre point of the cross gathers the calamities experienced by the faithful through time and place, it gathers the experiences of persecution into the experience of the one who is himself God. And from this centre point opens up a tomb, the place of death, and from it comes life; and cascading from the risen Christ is the outpoured Spirit which remains with us.

Not a book, or a building. It is this Spirit which remains with us, makes Christ present for us. Which calls us out to seek the God who creates new life out of death, and gives life to the whole of creation.

Because God acts in Christ to go where we once thought God could not go, we are assured of God’s presence even in the midst of calamity. It is this act which creates the new temple: us, you and me. It is this Spirit who forms us into the body of Christ.

Even as the sea is reclaiming the land; and our places of worship crumble, still we can say:

And God was there. Where the wind meets the sea. Filling us all with the breath of life.

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Pentecost 22
10/11/2019

1 Timothy 6:1-5
Psalm 145
Luke 20:27-38

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In a sentence
The fanatic knows and mis‑takes; the believer is known and finds peace in this

One of my all-time favourite little quips by a theologian is from Gerhard Ebeling: “Theology is necessary because [the human being] is by nature a fanatic.” This little remark has exercised me somewhat recently.

Ebeling is almost certainly right here. Yet, correct – and cute – as the comment is, in the hands of fanatics themselves it quickly becomes something like ‘we’ need theology because you are fanatics. The ‘we’ is intentionally inclusive – for theology must ‘include’ – but the ‘you’ is quite exclusive: you are fanatics and this theology will tell you why.

If course, this won’t work because it indicates what we already know: that fanaticism just as much springs from theology as it might be treated by theology. The word ‘fanatic’ springs from a Latin word for ‘temple’; the fanatic is en‑thusiastic, filled with God (from the Greek en theos – ‘in God, God within’). Ebeling, then, is correct but uselessly so. The problem is not the absence or presence of thought about God but the quality of that thought. And the quality of our thoughts about God is always hidden from us. This is signified by a crucified Christ: ‘oops’…

Some of my thinking about Ebeling’s remark has been in relation to the fanatics the Pastor deals with in the letter to Timothy, of whom we have heard a little this morning. Yet, their particular mistakes aren’t so important here as the fact that the Pastor does not offer much good argument over against them. His approach is narrowly credal: here is the true faith, asserted without engagement. Orthodoxy agrees that the Pastor is correct but his failure to engage with his opponents leaves him himself open to the charge of fanaticism, and illustrates the problem with Ebeling’s explanation of the need for (good) theology: all theology borders on the fanatical.

In our gospel reading today we hear something rather more engaging, if we are not distracted by the form of the question put to Jesus. That form is a challenge about marriage and resurrection, put to trip Jesus up. If a person is legally married multiple times before death – which is common enough – to whom is she married in the resurrection?

Jesus’ response is first clever and then rather shocking: marriage doesn’t really matter much in eternal life. The life lived in God’s restored kingdom is oriented toward God and not toward the history which has led up to it.

This is surely troubling. The argument for life after death is won at the expense of the life we might have valued before death and look forward to continuing in eternal life. And it cannot only be marriage that is affected here. What Jesus says affects also parent-child relationships and friendships and even enmities. It affects our greatest achievements, and our worst. This doesn’t make such life experiences unimportant but it does relativise them, and starkly.

In fact, Jesus’ point is less about marriage or resurrection than it is about how the things of the world are related to the things of God. Marriage is a part of our present experience of time. Yet our experience of time and God’s experience of time are as radically different as if it were the case that the bonds of marriage could be broken. Or to put it differently, the difference between our experience of the world and God’s experience of the world is the difference between life and death.

What has this got to do with fanaticism – whether explicitly theological or in its more ‘secular’ forms?

The fanatic gets hung up on marriage, or resurrection, or life, or death, or the nation, or race, or youth, or health, or money or any other thing we value, as things in themselves. The Sadducees separate both marriage and resurrection from the reality of God. Marriage is ‘a thing’, and resurrection is a thing and God, too, is a thing, each in themselves. Against this, Jesus refuses our division of ourselves into parts with their own intrinsic value. Everything is finally relative to – oriented towards – God.

The fanatic requires that our experience becomes God’s experience. From here, my faithfulness – as I understand it – becomes God’s obligation to honour me. And so I know what God’s future looks like, or can’t look like. For the Sadducees, the divinely sanctioned series of marriages of their highly tragic serial widow means there cannot be a resurrection.

The fanatic requires that our experience becomes God’s experience. It’s part of what we do in gathering in this place to suspect that we all might be fanatics of this sort.

What hope do we have if we must believe and act and yet know also that we might find good reason later to repent of our creeds and actions? How do we both know ourselves to be right and know ourselves to be wrong?

While the fanatic requires that our experience becomes God’s experience, hope is found in the promise of the reverse: that God’s experience might become ours. This promise is the word of peace brought by the risen Jesus.

God’s experience is quintessentially the impossible mismatch of the source of all life dying on a worldly cross. Here good and evil coincide, the Word marries flesh. But God’s experience is also that the cross is God’s own, and not only worldly. The cross, then, becomes a lively place, despite all appearances. It was set up by us as a final word, yet God makes of it the beginning of a conversation.

That conversation runs something like this:

“Here is your final word,
be it your marriage or your divorce or your singleness;
be it your pride or humility;
be it your greed or generosity;
be it your fear or confidence;
be it your grief or happiness;
be it your life or your death.

“And here am I, God, taking those things and making them my own.
And when I make them my own, I fill them with life.

And I give them back to you, that I might be all in all, and that you might know the peace which passes all understanding.”

The fanatic knows that he understands, and expects peace to drop out of understanding’s equation. My future with God can be calculated.

The true child of God knows only that she is understood – comprehended – and loved nonetheless. It is a mystery how this could be so, but peace is peace, even when we do not understand it.

There is much to comprehend, much to argue, much to fight for, much to testify to, much to grieve over… We wed ourselves to many things and make them our own.

And yet, the argument and the struggle and the testimony and the grief are finally God’s, and God will overcome. This is the mystery, the secret, of our lives.

In the resurrection, whose wife shall the much harried and fanatically married church be? She will be Christ’s wife: peace beyond all understanding.

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All Saints
3/11/2019

1 Timothy 3:14-16
Psalm 149
Luke 6:20-26

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In a sentence:
The ‘piety’ of Christians always joins them to the broken world, and never separates them from that world

Working constructively with 1 Timothy in our reading over the last couple of months has proved more of a challenge than I expected – certainly more than was the case with Hosea and Ecclesiastes earlier in the year. This is partly because the Pastor – the writer of the letter – doesn’t say much I, at least, find especially interesting. With a couple of important qualifications, there is nothing wrong with the letter but that in itself doesn’t make it enlivening or even necessary.

The principal theme of the letter is summarised in our snippet from the middle of this morning’s short text: ‘how one ought to behave in the household of God’ (3.15). In this connection the letter expands on how bishops and deacons ought to conduct themselves, and women, and widows (apparently a kind of religious order), and elders and slaves, and Timothy himself. All of this is directed towards ‘a quiet and peaceful life in all godliness and dignity’ (2.2).

And who would not want this: a community carefully ordered so that all know and prosper in their station?

And yet, this might also be characterised as what a poet once called a ‘blessed rage for order’, ‘blessed’ in the ironic sense of ‘damnable’ (Wallace Stevens, ‘The idea of order at Key West’). There is a rage for order which seems to be required – which seems to be blest – but which may finally be blesséd – cursed.

For alongside the Pastor’s encouragements we have texts like today’s beatitudes (or ‘blessed-s’) from Luke. Luke’s beatitudes differ starkly from Matthew’s, in that they seem to allow a stark identification of the groups blessed or threatened by God, according to economic and social categories: the poor, the sad and the powerless, over against the rich, the happy, the powerful.

But we’ll allow Luke his own take on things and notice instead the contrast between the order of the world in Luke and that of the Pastor.

While the Pastor is right that there is a virtue in good order, his rage for such order must be held in tension with the blesséd disordering which is the work of God Godself.

Where the Pastor will have it that a woman will not speak in the orderly Christian assembly, Luke allows for a God who disorders and makes her the means by which God will be heard. Where the Pastor will have it that the upright bishop or deacon will be all good things to all good people, Luke allows for a God who does not need such good order, a God through whom even poverty or grief or brokenness might yet be blessed.

The kind of life to which the Pastor calls us is a good one, and rightly commended. Yet such life always carries the potential of the error of the morally and religiously upright. We heard of this last week, when Jesus contrasted a Pharisee and a tax collector together in the temple. There the self-contained and orderly religious hero poured scorn on the one whose righteousness, or order, could only come from God.

Against this, Luke’s beatitudes present the righteousness which can only come from God. This is not foreign to the Pastor although he doesn’t make much of it (perhaps apart from the biography of Paul himself [1.12-17]). At the end of our short text today we heard again doxology which has been part of our Great Prayer of Thanksgiving over the last 5 or 6 weeks.

The translation is not straightforward. We heard ‘great is the mystery of our religion’. In fact ‘our’ is not in the Greek, and ‘religion’ can also be translated ‘piety’: great is the mystery – or great is the ‘secret’ – of piety. This mystery or secret is Christ (or God – also unclear in the Greek) ‘manifest in flesh’. The secret of piety is God in the messy midst of ‘flesh’ – God in our messiness.

At the heart of Christian confession is this rage for a new order out of disorder, even ‘in’ disorder. The holy life is not simply ‘in the household of God’, as if holiness could limited only to that place. The life of holiness is ‘in the flesh.’

Among ‘the saints’ the temptation is great to separate themselves –those who are saved from those who are not, those predestined from those not, those who know from those who do not, those who have from those who do not. This temptation, of course, is not merely a Christian one. The same rage for the same kind of order is heard each day in school-yard bullying, on talk-back radio, across the chambers of parliament, in the bombs rained down on distant enemies or carried into their midst in backpacks. This is a purity which atomises and isolates, the purity of ‘holier than thou’.

But a piety which begins with God manifest ‘in the flesh’ disrupts the order of the pure and separated. It is no ‘holier than thou’ but ‘holy for thee’. This is a holiness which makes holy, which brings ‘value’ to other things, other persons. Such value – true holiness – is only ever received; holiness is always gift.

The holy, saintly life is certainly one of action, and so is properly about ‘how to behave in the household of God’. Yet it is always first an activated life, activated by the God who would be manifest even in our unholy lives.

‘Unholiness’, then – ‘unsaintliness’ – is that attitude or orientation which will not receive or give such ‘value’, which will not be disrupted or disrupt orderings which seek to constrain God.

Jesus himself was both an ordered life such as the Pastor describes and the presence of God’s own blessed disorder. Blessedness is turned on its head – or not; when this God is the source of holiness, we can never know quite how orderly we are. We can only know that, in the end, it will have been God who has set us straight.

To worship this God is to give thanks that God meets us wherever we are, for, in the end, the household of God is the whole wide world.

To worship this God is to be willing to be drawn forward from where we are to a new and better place, and to be willing to call and draw others there with us.

So, saints of God, lift up your hearts, and see what God does with you.

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Pentecost 20
27/10/2019

Joel 2:23-32
Psalm 65
2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18
Luke 18:9-14

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

Today’s readings centre around the temple in Jerusalem, the temple atop Mount Zion.

The psalmist proclaims:

“O God, in Zion …
Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts.
We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, your holy temple.” (Ps. 65.1, 4)

The prophetic voice of Joel calls out a divine promise:

In the last days, “in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem … shall be those whom the Lord calls.” (Jl. 2.32)

Narrating the last days of the Apostle Paul, Second Timothy speaks of Paul:

“… already being poured out as a libation …” — the image here is one of being poured as a sacrifice on God’s altar.

And in the parable taught by Jesus:

“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector.”

And the tax-collector prays like a prodigal son — “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

And the Pharisee prays like an older brother — “God, I thank you that I am not like other people …”

What strikes me about these four reflections centring on the temple is how each of them speak differently about the saving work of God.

The Psalmist speaks of the temple as the place where God forgives transgressions. And from this centre point in Zion the deliverance of God opens up and reaches out to the whole world.

“O God of our salvation;
you are the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas.” (Ps. 65.5)

Psalm 65 gives us this sense of the reach of God’s saving power from the temple to the world. Earth and water, sea and sky, mountains and valleys, the teeming life of God that covers the earth, that is tended by the Great Gardener of Eden: showered by rain, carved by the natural “wagon tracks” of God’s intimate mercies through creation, overflowing joy, and abundant bounty, richness. All creation sings — from the mountains to the valleys — sings and shouts together for joy!

For the prophet Joel, the rain of creation is not simply for the grain. But becomes, in the prophetic utterance, the healing rain that reconciles and redeems in the aftermath of struggle. The lost become found. That which was consumed by hopper, destroyer, and cutter is washed away in readiness for renewal. And shame shall be no more. For the Lord our God will intervene and pour out — like a libation — an offering of the Spirit to the world: on young and old, free and slave, male and female, on flesh: the bodies sustained by the overwhelming grace of God in the food we eat, the lands we dwell in, the people who are gathered together in communities of love and trust.

Throughout today’s readings from the Psalms and the Book of Twelve Prophets we hear the effusive praise for a God who bears with God’s people. The unashamed thanksgiving to God who gathers a people in the temple, and from the temple expands the reach of saving glory to the whole world, to all people, for healing and renewal: as the Spirit is poured out, and the healing waters over which the Spirit brooded in the beginning, continue to cleanse and restore the world.

These themes of praise for God’s faithfulness continue even as the end of the Apostle Paul is narrated. The same clear ring of praise can be heard, that God has granted favour to the Apostle to the Gentiles. Though Paul was deserted in his time of defence God was there, giving him strength. And so, “To [the God of our rescue] be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.” (2 Tim 4.18)

Across these three readings — from the Psalms, from Joel, and from Second Timothy — we hear a note of praise: “Thanks be to God who has chosen to grant us favour, in the temple, in the world, by his Spirit, in the midst of times of defence and in the aftermath of struggle.”

Praise the Lord! For the Lord has chosen to bless us with all good things!

…

As if to provide a counter-voice to this effusive praise rising up to heaven with open

hearts, Jesus says:

“… the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Lk. 18.13-14)

There is a certain sense in which our Gospel reading cuts across the grain of the other readings set for today. Unlike the calls to praise that we are invited into, the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector cautions us about the misuse of praise.

The two figures:

a Pharisee — a religious leader, a diligent keeper of the law, a teacher, a good man, pious and true.

and,

a tax-collector — worshipping in the temple, and so a Jewish man, trying to be pious, and yet a tax-collector: collecting taxes for the Roman occupiers, whose presence placed the Jewish people under burden; perhaps perceived as a traitor to his own people, complicit in the ongoing occupation; perhaps dishonest, taking more than he was rightfully owed.

These two figures gather together in the temple. And pray. One a prayer of praise; the other a prayer of repentance, a call for mercy. Jesus says, it was the one who prays for mercy that is justified.

What has gone wrong with the Pharisee’s praise?

At first glance the lesson seems to be one of humility. The Pharisee’s praise goes awry because he fails to be humble, emphasising too much that he is the special recipient of God’s grace, one of the chosen few. And for that reason is a Pharisee, and not like those thieves, and adulterers, or — thank God — a tax-collector.

Of course the lesson that we should be humble is the stated lesson of this parable, and so we should heed this lesson.

And yet, like all good parables, if we dig a little deeper, if we take a step back we might see something more.

This parable in Luke’s Gospel sits within a broad movement of sayings, and parables, and teachings of Jesus. From stories about lost sheep and coins — and a lost son. Banquets and managers and widows seeking justice. Mercy sought by the tormented rich man, from the one who God saves. There are themes of hospitality, mercy, and generosity: in other words, grace, running throughout these stories and teachings. I want to suggest that these themes continue into the story of the Pharisee.

The Pharisee does not get wrong the importance of praise. We have heard from the tradition we share with the Pharisee today in a Psalm of praise, and a prophetic voice speaking of God’s salvation. And both of those readings speak quite clearly about the ones God will and does choose in the temple, and in the end days.

But what about the hospitality of God? In the prayer that says, “oh, but not like the thief, or the rogue, or the adulterer, or the tax-collector — they are not welcomed in my prayer of praise.”

But what about the generosity of God? In the prayer that says, “well, I do the right thing, so I must be good; and if that one over there betrays his people, or doesn’t take responsibility, then nothing good can come of them.”

But what about the project of the great and generous God we meet in Jesus? In the prayer that says, “forgive us our sins … for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”

It is fitting that we should read this caution about praise in Luke’s Gospel. Because Luke’s Gospel constantly pushes us to think about the open arms of God for the world. The open arms that welcome home a lost son, and warns us not to be a resentful brother. The open arms of those with plenty to give to those with need. The open arms of simple faith that welcome the grace of God into the world in surprising ways.

The Gospel of Luke is not saying that we should not offer prayers of thanksgiving. But if we must praise, let our praise recall the grace at the bottom of the well of God’s deep, deep love. Let our praise recall our freedom to be honest about our failure. Because our praise should be marked not by self-righteousness, but by the hospitable, merciful, and generous love of God.

What goes wrong with the praise of the Pharisee is that he does not see that the tax-collector too is found and held by the overwhelming grace of God. That psalms of praise that begin in the temple often open up to the whole world. That prophetic words of divine promise that begin with restoring what is lost for the chosen, often open up to the bountiful outpouring of the Spirit.

The Pharisee needs to look further along in the Gospel of Luke. When the temple gives way to a house, and the house gives way to the Spirit, and the Spirit promised by Joel gives way to a new temple: the holy communion of saints, moving out into the world with the proclamation that God’s hospitality, and generosity, and mercy: the grace of God has come into this world and embraced us all! From the waters that grow the plants, the beauty of the world we are given, the restoration we find in tender mercies, the grace of God blows through the world and holds us, finds us, loves us.

And so … let us never look to those who stand a little way off and say they are not sought by God, that we are loved and they are not, that we have received mercy and they must still be uncertain.

Let us be freed by the knowledge of God’s grace. And recall the deep praise of our ancestors. For in the embrace of God’s grace we are free to confront our failing, because even that shall not erase the generous gift of God’s love.

Amen.

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Pentecost 19
20/10/2019

1 Timothy 6:6-12
Psalm 40
Luke 18:1-8

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In a sentence:
The good fight of faith is the struggle to let God be God

Most of us are fully aware that we are going to die. With that comes for many also the awareness – even the fear – that much of what we have done in our lives might well be mucked up by those who come after us.

This concern, of course, doesn’t need our impending death to be active for us. It might only be that we vacate a position in which we think we have done well done and then see that much of that achievement squandered or thrown away by our successor. We have fought a good fight, and then someone else seems to throw in the towel.

It takes great humility to be freed from fear of such loss, or from judgement of those who follow us. Or, to put it differently, it takes great humility to die: to have done what we had to do and then move on, without looking back, perhaps without any ‘true’ successor.

This dynamic of perceived loss is sometimes read into the letters to Timothy and Titus: the writer seems to weaken the penetrating and dynamic work of Paul, in whose name he writes. Paul is captivated by the justifying righteousness of God while the writer of Timothy seems principally concerned with the righteousness we ourselves must achieve.

We have already touched on the theme of ‘pseudonymity’ – the theory that Paul did not write these letters but another wrote them in his name. We won’t spend much time on why this theory is strongly held by many biblical scholars (check a commentary!) but, assuming the theory to be correct, why might someone engage in such an ‘impious’ act as forging letters like this. Why does ‘the Pastor’ (to borrow a name some have given our unknown author) write in Paul’s name?

The simple answer is the authority that name carries, and the Pastor plays heavily on Paul’s authority in the letter. But this is not yet enough. What is the need to add to what the real Paul had already said? The answer here is that Paul is no longer available, while the church has continued and now has new issues which require an authoritative word.

Paul wrote when the Christian movement was small and its organisation was strongly ‘charismatic’. Apostles could relate directly to the few scattered communities.

For the Pastor, it is quite different. If Christ has not come as we expected, what then are we to do? The answer is a kind of ‘settling’ of the church into an ongoing life in the world. And so the church takes on a clearer institutional order, apparently now authorised by one of those great charismatic leaders. Authority shifted from the conviction and encouragement and correction of recognised apostles to authority reflected in structure.

And so the Pastor is interested in bishops, deacons, elders and even a kind of order called ‘widows’. Orientation to the imminent coming of Jesus shifts to living lives which reflect that Jesus is Lord, irrespective of whether he might come again. Paul expects the arrival of God to vindicate Christian conviction and practice. The Pastor expects piety and peacefulness to speak for themselves.

Which of these responses to the times – Paul or the Pastor – is the ‘truer’? Were we to ask Paul, we might find that he would read these letters in his name with disdain, or even horror. There is not much wrong with what is in the letters, but there is much missing which mattered greatly to him. And yet the letters remain – for us – Scripture.

We noted in our first reflection that, ultimately, all Scripture comes to us under a pseudonym – necessarily separated from the real people who wrote it and who feature in it. We can have no confidence that we read it with a historical correctness, in the sense that we understand what the writer might have intended. This is, in part, because we are in a different time and place. Paul may not hear himself in our reading of him. In this way, we change the author as we read.

But, perhaps more importantly, all Scripture is pseudonymous because we cannot be confident that the authors themselves quite knew what they were doing. Certainly they did not imagine that they were writing Scripture. This categorisation comes later, when the church hears something in the material which makes Jesus present again. We speak of ‘Paul’ for convenience’s sake but, for the sake of faithfulness to the gospel, it is ‘Scripture’ and not ‘Paul’ which addresses us. On the breath which is the Spirit, Scripture speaks a word which has a history in such a personage as Paul but the true orientation of which is toward making history. When the Pastor claims Paul’s authority he does what we all must finally do: he ‘becomes’ Paul, becomes scriptural authority in a new situation, even if Paul would no longer recognise himself.

To preach the word, whether in words – as from a lectern – or in actions, is to say or do what matters now. It is possible that we do this badly, but even this is difficult to recognise. Hindsight only guesses at what might been better. We know that every moment is different although we never really know properly how it is different. In every moment we must speak and act, seeing only as in a glass, darkly.

This would be to almost reason to give up the game altogether, for what is righteousness if we cannot know that it is righteousness? What could keep us in the game is the true miracle at the heart of the gospel. This is the cross – which was so central for Paul, if almost totally absent from the Pastor’s writings.

The cross is the sign that, even though every ‘now’ is different from every other ‘now’, the God who alone is present to every ‘now’ is present to claim it as his own. Wherever we are, whatever we are doing – and whatever others are doing – God claims our and their ‘now’ for God’s own live-giving purposes.

The life of Jesus himself is the life to which the Pastor calls us: the good fight of faith in righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness as the Pastor describes it (6.11). Faith holds that God was present to this life in Jesus. At the same time, the cross is the denigration of Jesus’ life and ministry. In the light of the resurrection, faith holds God present also to the crucified Jesus. Judged by us to be righteous or unrighteous, Jesus remains God’s.

Jesus becomes, then, two things at once: the ‘good life’ of one who is truly righteous, godly, faithful, loving, steadfast and gentle and, at the same time, he is the crucified and so at as great a distance from God as one can be.

What bridges that contradiction is nothing in Jesus himself but only the desire of God that Jesus be God’s in whatever situation he be found.

The Pastor’s call to the good fight of faith is not merely call that we be righteous and piety and steadfast and kind in a simple moral sense. Such things are too relative to the times in which we happen to live, and change with cultural seasons.

The good fight of faith is the struggle to allow God to be the one who is righteous and who justifies, the one who is kind and makes gentle, who endures and causes in us steadfastness. The good fight of faith is the struggle to allow God to be our only true successor – the one who follows and proves and justifies.

To let God be the God who made and still makes us is to die the death of the humble, and so to be raised to the life of the humble in righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness.

Let this life be yours.

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Pentecost 18
13/10/2019

Micah 2:1-3
Psalm 10
Romans 7:7-12
Luke 18:18-27

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, (therefore)….
“You shall not Covet”

Considering the nine weighty matters with which we have previously been confronted, we seem to be concluding not with a bang but with a whimper.  In comparison with where we have been, “You shall not covet” seems somewhat innocuous. Until we consider this. Unlike the previous five commandments bearing on how to live, “You shall not covet” is beyond all legislation. Killing, adultery, stealing, slander, even – in former generations – Sabbath observance: all have legal constraints. Break these, and you break civic law. But not the covetous spirit. It’s not for nothing that envy is held to be one of the deadlier of the seven sins. Like the power of the tongue, nothing external can control the covetous heart. Ability to keep this commandment, then, will prove to be the ultimate test.

As we have seen in our eleven-fold journey, the commandments exist positively to guarantee what we call the good life; they are not tedious moralistic fences to rein everyone in. So, the question here is: what can we do with covetousness? How can we move beyond assuming that here we encounter a merely conventional moral exhortation about the need for economic restraint?  And if we take the prophet Micah seriously, how must it sound in our day to those who are forced to rent, or are homeless, while others are not only home owners but are also paying off investment properties? Who is prepared to propose observance of this commandment to this increasingly disadvantaged population?

In any case, experience surely demonstrates that moralism never really works, which makes it all the more depressing that society has come to accept that Christian faith is only morality “slightly dressed up”- for many, unnecessarily, if not incomprehensibly. At any rate, the crisis adverted to in the commandment is way beyond legislation and high-minded approval. Only a firm theological grounding will be able to carry the day.

But let us stay with the moral dimension a little longer. The commandment reveals that the natural estimation of the “good life” has apparently become inseparable from the maximum possible consumption of things and experiences. To those trained for decades to desire change through obsolescence, or to compile “bucket lists” of new experiences, or to want new things even before the old have been partly worn out or used up – in other words, to the majority of  us – the commandment highlights the gravity of  the imminent global ecological and environmental catastrophes we now face.

At the same time, the antique quaintness of the commandment confirms that it would be a mistake to assume that covetousness is only a modern problem, as if the last two centuries were an ungodly mistake. Clearly it is not technological advances in themselves that have let loose a deluge of covetousness and greedy hearts. On the contrary, to a large extent the materialism of Western culture has realised an age-old dream, even as we are beginning to register the downside of what we call the market economy.  In this respect, we can surely be grateful for the now growing Western realisation that enough is enough, and that increasingly the critical issue is not the accumulation of resources, but rather that of their global distribution.

One way or another, it seems that every civilisation has sooner or later got around to discovering that it is a matter of diminishing returns when happiness is equated with an insatiable appetite – in the manner of Oliver Twist in the poorhouse holding up an empty bowl and begging: “I want some more”. The solution of the religions of the East, with their espousal of non-attachment, does have the advantage of rescuing people from slavery to their envies. Yet wanting nothing, when carried to extremes, leaves one not wanting help, not wanting love, not wanting God – and the name of this self-sufficiency is pride.

The ancient Hebrews saw such matters clearly. They recognised that the secular gifts made possible by the God of the Covenant are certainly worth having, but they forbade desire for them in the wrong way. So it is that here in this tenth commandment we come to the heart of what was at stake from the very beginning. That is to say, “You shall not covet” is a direct corollary of the first commandment: “I am the Lord your God…..”

This final commandment reminds us, then, that every other commandment that has come between the first and this last must be obeyed in spirit as well as in letter, with the heart as well as in the outward life. Pointing in this way to the heart as it does, the tenth commandment makes compelling the coming to grief of the so-called “rich young ruler” in the Gospel. He was able in good conscience to claim to have kept the five commandments referred to by Jesus – until challenged precisely on the ground of this tenth commandment. Hearing this, he had no option but to turn sadly away.

If nothing else, this encounter helps us to fill out more precisely one dimension of what it means to understand how we are, and will remain so while this life lasts, sinners before God. “Sin” is certainly a depressing, and, by virtue of its current trivialisation, has in our day become a useless word. But if we let Paul speak, it may possibly be retrieved. He proposes that covetousness is the very essence of sin. Who, in one way or another, can claim to have escaped this universal attachment to wanting and dreaming of something larger, whether that be something tangible, or more likely an intangible? One thinks of the envy that wells up from the subconscious accusing us of our inferiority when we wish. or wished, that we could be like X or Y or Z. The fact is that every apparent presumed lack we experience is being challenged in the call of this commandment.

Certainly, when he measured his life against it, the apostle Paul was brought into a state of deep despair. He was like the rich ruler in the Gospel, only conceivably more so. As we hear him this morning, apparently above all others, he had made scrupulous, noble and sustained efforts to keep the commandments so that he might please God. He felt that he had achieved considerable success, and had made substantial progress until the true meaning of “You shall not covet” dawned on him. So, he writes: “I had not known sin, except that the Lord said: You shall not covet.” Are we reading autobiography here, or is everyone included? Surely both – his own history, now universalised.  He proposes that this commandment brings the core of the human problem to the light of day. When we come to realise that what is at stake is obedience of the heart as well as the outward life, then the reach of the commandment is truly exposed. Here, then, is both its power as well as its weakness. The strength is that it holds up a mirror to our real situation; the weakness, that its counsel remains only negative. It forbids coveting, but it does not tell us what to do instead.

Except when it comes to us as hidden promise. A promise always awaits a fulfilment. So it proves to be when the gospel is grasped that we do not really any longer need to make comparisons between ourselves and others with regard to talents, privileges, deprivations or, at its most trivial, just “stuff”. This, Paul never tired of repeatedly saying to himself, and to any prepared to listen: “All things are yours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come. All are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” This is only another way of saying that all worldly life exists primarily as a kind of currency of love – a means whereby we can exchange justice with one another on a macro as well as a micro level, and so enter into the love of the creator who, in Jesus Christ, has given his creation all things.

Were these words to be heard, that is, if they were to be lived, then not just this old commandment: “You shall not covet”, but equally all the previous nine would have been stunningly fulfilled. Indeed, all commandments – of any sort – would then be quite superfluous, for we would have truly passed from a land of slavery into the undreamt freedom of God’s new creation. Which surely warrants the only proper worth of the slogan beloved by the current Prime Minister: what could be better than this?