Category Archives: Sermons

23 June – Eavesdropping

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Pentecost 2
23/6/2019

Hosea 1:1-10
Psalm 85
John 16:12-15

In a sentence:
God speaks to us by speaking to others

‘The Daily Prophet’ is the news rag in the extraordinary world of wizards and witches conjured up by JK Rowling in her Harry Potter series. There it serves in the way our own newspapers do, both advancing the common good and keeping it down, subject to the politics of its editors and the fears of the people. For better or for worse, Harry Potter and his exploits are often front page headline news in ‘The Prophet’.

If we were to imagine a different ‘Daily Prophet’ in eighth century Israel which gave account not now of wizarding news but of the oracles of purported prophets of God of the day, on which page would you imagine that Hosea’s preaching might feature? For then, as now, projections from the signs of the times would have been across a very broad spectrum, each voice refracting what seemed to be happening through a theological and political lens different from the others, each coming to a different conclusion. Would Hosea have been a page one or a page five prophet?

‘The word of the Lord that came to Hosea son of Beeri, in the days of…’

As we will see over the next few months, this was a concrete and specific word in a context very different from ours. Hosea makes a lively and vital address to his people in a time swirling with prosperity, religious and moral aberration, and looming geopolitical threats. Yet part of the liveliness of his preaching is that no one knows that God speaks through him. Is his word truly headline news, or just the odd-spot? No one knows at the time, and we can’t even speak here of the need to have ‘faith’ that Hosea speaks as God’s voice, for that speech was being heard for the first time in a context of plausible contradiction.

As it happened, the events unfolded in the way Hosea said they would and so Hosea’s interpretation of those events became an authoritative reading of the history, in retrospect. More important than this, however, is that Hosea’s interpretation became an authoritative interpretation of the character of God and of the relationship between God and Israel.

And so Hosea’s voice did not fall silent with the collapse of the northern kingdom. His oracles were preserved and became a tool for interpreting the prospects and then the fate of the southern kingdom, Judah, 140 years or so later. Now Hosea’s voice is heard differently. It has the authority of the events of 722 behind it. Back then a great divorce was said to be coming, and Assyria executed the judgement. But now there is a different dynamic in reading Hosea. The question is no longer, Is Hosea correct? This is already held to be the case, given what had happened in the north. The question is now, Do Hosea’s oracles apply here and now, in Judah, in relation to the threats and opportunities of the new situation? And in what way do they apply?

Again, events affirmed that they did apply, and this is reinforced by Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others who expanded upon the work of Hosea, Amos and Isaiah a century before. We hear Hosea and the other prophetic writings today on account of this ancient Jewish affirmation, taken up without question by the early church and retained by the church ever since as ‘witness’ to God’s work in and for the world.

All of this is to say that Hosea does not now address us directly, particularly if we simply decide that, for a while, we’ll sit with him and hear what he said. Our hearing of God’s word to Israel through Hosea is more like an eavesdropping on a conversation. If what Hosea said to Israel all those years ago is a word to us today, it is indirectly so.

Yet this indirect ‘overhearing’ of what passes between God and Israel is not just a matter of our being at a bit of a distance from the action and having to do deep interpretative work to get to the heart of the matter. There is certainly going to be plenty of that but, more importantly – and to exaggerate only slightly – our overhearing another God-conversation is the only way in which God communicates with us. Our relationship with God is always a matter of being ‘caught up’ in a communication which is not, at first, one which involves us. To be ‘saved’ is to overhear something someone did not first say to us.

We touched upon this last week, although it was hardly clear at the time. There we heard – as again this morning (John 16.12-15) – that the Spirit realises for us all that is of Jesus and – in Jesus – all that is of the Father. But prior to our receiving this communication of God to us through the Spirit, another communication has already taken place between the Father and the Son: ‘All that the Father has is given to me,’ Jesus says. This exchange between the Father and the Son does not, in the first instance, involve us. The Father and the Son are ‘in communication’ whether we are in the picture or not. That is all the names Father and Son denote: that these two, in the Spirit, are oriented toward each other in giving and receiving. The gospel is that the same Spirit is given to us to make ours what was not in the first instance about us.

Though Hosea would have little notion of what we call the Trinity, when we confess in the Creed that the Holy Spirit has ‘spoken through the prophets,’ this speaking does not in any way precede or go around the cross and all that Jesus’ ministry brings, even though Jesus comes after the prophets. The tension in Hosea between Israel being now ‘my people’, now ‘not my people’ (Hosea 1) and promised again to become ‘my people’ is the same tension in the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus. The old prophets do not only suffer – in some cases, at least – as Jesus later did, they proclaim him and his suffering.

To listen to the prophets, then, is to listen to what is happening in the very heart of God. What is happening in God preceded us and so is something which doesn’t need us. Yet, because of what love is, that divine discourse of love creates and embraces in a single motion – creates and embraces even us.

It will take us some time to come to a fuller account of what this means, and this is one of the strengths of working in detail through a text as we will do over the next couple of months.

But for today it is enough to understand that we are here – that we are created – because there is already a conversation going on which is worth hearing. Our lives are a matter of tuning into that exchange – connecting into God by connecting into God’s conversation with those who went before us – and becoming ourselves a conversation which others will need to overhear.

Let us, then, in the weeks to come with Hosea, open ourselves to the word of the Lord which came to him, that we might learn the word which will come to us today, and the word which God will make of us. Amen.

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16 June – The simple Trinity

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Trinity
16/6/2019

Romans 5:1-5
Psalm 8
John 16:12-15

In a sentence:
Trinitarian faith expresses what God must be like if love is to be possible.

Despite the fact that Christian trinitarian doctrine has not often lent itself to comprehensive expression in less than several hundred pages, John’s gospel this morning puts all of the ‘dynamic’ of that doctrine into just a few words.

John can put it so briefly because is concerned only with the ‘What’ of the dynamic of salvation which eventually becomes fully developed and defended ‘doctrine’. Argued doctrine is usually about the ‘How’ of what is believed – how to make sense of God-things. This involves intersecting such simple statements as the New Testament makes about God with the vast and complex theories we bring with us about what the world is and what a god could be. In this way we sometimes seek to ‘prove’ trinitarian doctrine.

But we will stay with the simple What this morning: the Spirit will glorify Jesus by taking all that Jesus has – which is all that the Father has – and giving it to the disciples. To borrow from a chapter or so back: to see Jesus is to see the Father (John 14.9), and the Spirit makes it possible for us to see Jesus.

This pretty much sums up the church’s interest in trinitarian doctrine. Without Jesus there is nothing to look at, without the Father there is nothing to see, and without the Spirit we wouldn’t know what we were looking at in the first place.

In itself, this is straightforward as a set of connections, whether we believe it all or not. The question then becomes, what does it mean to believe it?

Believing, here, cannot mean simply reciting the creed happily as a set of things to which we give assent, agreement. This is because ‘the things of the Father’ which Jesus brings are not a series of beliefs. What Jesus has is the Father. This, then, is what we have.

Yet having this is not clearly relevant to every other thing we have, until we place flesh on those connections – our own flesh.

One way of doing this is to consider the Eucharist. Here we pray for the gift of the Spirit, that the elements of bread and wine might be for us ‘the body and the blood’ of Jesus. That is, we pray for what Jesus describes in our reading: when the Spirit comes, it will bring me. The prayer for the Spirit – for the ‘Remembrancer divine’, as we’ll sing later – is a prayer that the Spirit will ‘declare’ Jesus to us, make him and his benefits present to us through these elements and through our consuming of them together.

But there is one more thing to add to this. Eating the Eucharist does not ‘save’ us in the narrow sense that the elements might be a kind of medicine. Rather we eat and drink, as the prayer goes, that ‘he may evermore dwell in us, and we in him’. The ‘in him’ is the clincher. Clearly Jesus is ‘in us’ because we have eaten and drunk of him, if even in only a figurative sense. But this does not account for our being ‘in him’. To be ‘in him’ at this point is to speak of the effect of his being in us: ‘in him’ means becoming as he is.

This is the truly confronting thing of Christian faith. Cut apart from what Jesus promises with the Spirit, trinitarian doctrine looks quite foolish and unnecessary.

But there is something much more foolish at that heart of the matter, which is that the Word did not just become flesh – a couple of thousand years ago, around Christmas. It becomes flesh – our very flesh – here and now. The foolishness of faith is in the notion that God might lift human beings to such heights, for how could mere mortals as us be crowned with such honour, as our psalmist today wondered (Cf. Psalm 8)?

It is not only in the Eucharist that we encounter this understanding but the Eucharist is especially rich in language and symbol which make the point. We pray that the Spirit make Christ present to us in the elements, and we speak of becoming what we eat – Christ’s Body. This ‘Christ’s Body’ is ‘Word made flesh’, but now our very ordinary flesh lifted up, filled out. We become here what we have prayed for: an ‘on earth’ which is ‘as it is heaven’.

Jesus says, ‘When the Spirit comes it will announce to you all that I am. And I will be yours, and all that is the Father’s will be yours, in me’. This is not information about God. It is the promise of transformation of our bodies into the body of God in the world.

Now that is a foolish and even dangerous thing to say. And so it must seem that it cannot be true. And yet it is.

The only safeguard in place is the consequence of such a claim for those of whom it is said – for us. It is not for nothing that John – the evangelist who most encourages this kind of problematic thought – is the one who states most explicitly and pointedly the ethic which corresponds to such thinking: Love one another. Why? Not because love is good. But so that ‘the world may know’. And may know what? That God has sent the Son, that we might find ourselves in him.

We don’t need several hundred pages of theological ‘How’ and all the necessary political and ethical qualifications to prove the gospel’s bold assertion about God’s trinitarian presence to the world in the Body of such bodies as ours. The proof of the gospel of God is in the love God’s body manifests. Trinitarian is a question to us as much as it is a statement we might make: Is there love here?

What leads to trinitarian thinking is the experience of that divine love which crowns even us with glory and honour. What flows from trinitarian thinking is an answering love which receives God’s embrace and, as the body of God, extends it towards others.

‘When the Spirit comes, it will declare to you all which is mine, which is all which is the Father’s. And your joy will be complete. And love will be the only response which can make sense of it all.’

Let us, then, strive ever more earnestly to prove what we confess, in love which startles, as God is startling.

By the grace of God, Amen.

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9 June – On not being religious

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Pentecost
9/6/2019

Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104
Acts 2:1-12
John 14:8-17

In a sentence:
Our calling is not to religion or spirituality but to a reconciled humanity, the gift and glory of God

‘God’ is probably the most useless word in the Christian vocabulary.

I mention this only because this morning I want to lead us into a reflection on the second and third most useless words among our faith-words: ‘Spirit’ and ‘religion.’

The uselessness of these necessary words is in that they are so compromised by common use that they are not – by themselves – able to point to what we hope they might point to.

‘Religion’ is, these days, a dirty word. There’s the friendly neighbour who believes in God (or something godlike) ‘but I’m not religious’. By this she means that she is not overbearing in her beliefs, is not likely to try to impose them on anyone, or is not into churchy prescriptions for how to pray or worship. Here ‘religion’ is merely an unappealing way of approaching God.

Then there’s the larger scale aversion to religion on account of its apparent capacity to stir strong emotion and even violent behaviour. This is religion as potentially dangerous. The danger is particularly present when religious fervour does not correspond to other fervours – when the wider community or the nation as a whole is not religious in the same way and so religious conviction is divisive of the whole.

The divisive dimension of religious conviction is one cause of a more subtle and so much less obvious sense in which ‘religion’ functions as a category in contrast to ‘secular.’

It is in this use that the word ‘religion’ becomes particularly useless – or worse than useless – for Christian attempts to make sense of its faith to itself and to the wider community.

When we hear the word ‘religion’ in contrast to the secular we are instantly made to think of a reality smaller than the whole: the religious within the secular. Whatever a modern western liberal society understands itself to be, it is not as a ‘religious’ reality but as a ‘secular’ one. The sphere of ‘religion’ sits somewhere within the larger sphere of secularity.

‘Religion,’ then, and ‘spiritual’ interests, mark us off from each other at a level below the overarching realities we have in common.

And now we come to our texts from this morning – in particular Genesis 11 and Acts 2. The relationship between the readings themselves is that one is the answer to the other. In the mythical story of the Tower of Babel, human division arises from God’s response to the attempt to overstep the proper boundaries of human existence. Not content to be named by God, the people seek instead ‘to make a name for themselves’ and build a tower up to heaven. God responds by scattering humankind, confusing language, and so setting in place the very divisions which such things as religion seem to embody and reinforce so effectively for us.

In contrast, the story of the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost relates a miraculous overcoming of these divisions of humankind. The preaching of the apostles strangely bypasses the natural divisions of language: though they preach in their own native tongue, the apostles are heard by people from many lands in their own languages. The confused babble of Babel becomes the clear speech of Pentecost. (Just in passing, this event is not ‘speaking in tongues’ – glossolalia. Glossolalia, St Paul remarks, in fact brings confusion and requires translation, the opposite of the Pentecost experience; cf. 1 Corinthians 14).

But this is to say that the Pentecost experience – as a ‘spiritual’ or ‘religious’ event – precisely does not correspond to divisions in human society. It breaks those divisions down. If, as its critics argue, religion represents and reinforces human division, then the gift of the Spirit of Christ is an anti-religious event. Perhaps the only positive way we could put it (in contemporary parlance) would be to say that that Pentecost is a truly political event, in the sense that it overcomes human division to establish a human city or polis in which all speak a common language.

Pentecost does not, then, make the already religious even more so by injecting a more potent Spirit and, thereby, exacerbating the differences between us with even more religious fervour. Historically there has certainly been plenty of that but Pentecost is the possibility that political differences might be dissolved, not aggravated. The peace and human unity today’s vocal critics of divisive religion strive for is in fact already there in the events of Pentecost.

This is to say, then, that Christian are neither religious nor spiritual people, in the sense in which those words are usually heard. This is the reason ‘religious’ and ‘spirit’ belong on our register of useless words, however necessary they might seem.

The pathos of all this, of course, is that it is impossible for Christianity not to be ‘a’ religion in a secular world, not to be a pursuit of ‘spirit’ in a material world. The wider world cannot comprehend this, and neither can the church most of the time. How can it be true that such a small part of the whole could be anything more than just a part? How could what we do here on a Sunday morning – or every morning, afternoon and night, if we wanted – be crucial for everything else?

The thing about the divisions in human society is that they are always matters of the past. The Babel myth captures this for us: we are divided now because there was a point at which we parted company and that parting has remained insurmountable. The Babel story locates the cause in human pride and divine correction (we would have to say, divine grace) both of which continue, but it is history which divides us from each other. The Pentecost story looks like this as well, in that it is also in the past and looks like the energy behind another separation – that which opened between synagogue and church, another ‘making a name for ourselves’.

But while the Pentecost story (not unlike the election of Israel itself) enters our imagination as an historical event and then quickly becomes our past, it brings a content which concerns our future. The community which concerns itself with this spirit looks forward to a politics like the Day of Pentecost, and not back to the beginning which makes it distinctive from other communities. The religion which springs from this orientation is not a religion of withdrawal into a separate identity springing from past events. The religion of this spirit points toward its own coming irrelevance, when the vision it has been given is realised.

Christian faith is concerned with the strange dynamic of remembering our future. As a ‘remembering’, we recall and retell things which have already happened. But what is remembered – election, cross and resurrection, the creation of the church with the gift of the Spirit – these are a promise of what is yet to come.

We live less from a particular historical religious and spiritual impetus than towards the future that impetus imprints on us. ‘What does all this mean?’ ask the amazed crowds. In contemporary parlance, what it means is that when the Spirit of this God comes, there is neither religion to separate us nor the secular to hold us together. There is just the Spirit, and just us – God ‘all in all’ – united in understanding and amazed because of it.

We might finish simply, then, with a prayer: that the church which God created by the gift of God’s own unifying Spirit might rediscover in itself the reconciliation of difference this Spirit brings, might know this healing as God’s own work, and might become an instrument in God’s hands in the world, not to its own glory, but that it might fade into the background of a reconciled humanity, the gift and glory of God. Amen.

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Hosea – Love lost and found. Sermons in 2019

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Over the months of June to September(ish) in 2019, Craig will be preaching through a series of sermons on the book of Hosea.

    The prophet Hosea preached to the northern kingdom (‘Israel’, ‘Ephraim’ Samaria) in the eighth century BC. His preaching spanned many years, from times of great prosperity in Israel up to the imminent threat of war with Assyria, with no small amount of local political anarchy in the meantime (Hosea 1.1 lists a turnover of five kings). Assyria overcome the northern kingdom in 733-32 (BC), with Samaria falling in 721.

    A striking and, to modern ears, somewhat disconcerting image which dominates Hosea’s preaching is that of marital unfaithfulness expounded with the powerful language of whoredom and prostitution. Hosea’s personal life becomes a model for the relationship between Yahweh and Israel when Hosea is told to take ‘a wife of whoredom’, ‘for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord’ (1.2). The theme of Israel’s unfaithfulness is then developed in terms of adultery and seeking other ‘husbands.’ The children of this union are given names which symbolise the impact of Israel’s turning away from God.

    The charge of unfaithfulness is brought with anger and hurt on God’s part, and with the threat of dire consequences. At the same time, Yahweh’s willingness to forgive and be reconciled, by which Israel returns as ‘wife’ in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy (e.g., 2.14-23), is also a central theme of Hosea’s preaching.

Preparing for the series:

  • The best introduction to Hosea is to read the book itself. It’s not long and a half hour might get you through it. Plan to do this a few times through the series!
  • A short animated video introduction can be found here, which summarises the book a little simplistically nevertheless tells the story pretty well (how much can you expect from 7 minutes!?).
  • A more sophisticated introduction (with Isaiah) can be found in this lecture
  • So far as commentaries go, the ‘Interpretation’ series provides reliable introductions to biblical books for those who don’t need a full-blown scholarly treatment. The volume including Hosea can be found here, among other sources. Beeby’s commentary is a bit more expansive but still very accessible (here, among other places). A more general volume on the prophets, such as Brueggeman’s ‘The prophetic imagination‘ might also be helpful.

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2 June – The Sixth Commandment – “You shall not kill”

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Easter 7
2/6/2019

Genesis 4:1-9
Psalm 71
Hebrews 12:18-19; 22-24
Matthew 5:21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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

To this point the commandments might easily be heard as if they had relevance only for a special people.  However, it is crucial to take account of the fact that from the very beginning the whole of creation is embraced in principle in the particular status which the Hebrew people enjoy. As early as the call of Abraham we hear that “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). Therefore, assumptions like the slick couplet: “How odd of God to choose the Jews”, is only half the story.  This apparently exclusive election actually anticipates that the blessing which Israel is called to embody will be universally celebrated. To this end, obedience of the commandments offers the promise: that the Gentiles are indeed destined to come to the light. In other words, the very existence of this chosen people is the mandate for their mission. They don’t have to do anything else but to live the covenantal promise as light to the world. Easily said, of course, given the way their history went, as does ours. If we wonder what mission means for churches today, here is a powerful precedent. The decisive matter is simply that if all of these commandments were to be obeyed, then the whole creation would receive new life.

This is the context for this sixth commandment: “You shall not kill”, which more accurately reads: “You shall not murder”. The distinction is important. It reminds us that the commandment is directed in the first place against violent, unauthorised killing. It forbids people from taking matters into their own hands, remembering that at the same time the law of Moses did provide elsewhere for both capital punishment and war. Military conflict between the nations, for example, often had as its object defence against an intolerable threat to human life.

Those who delight in taking a scalpel to the Bible observe this apparent inconsistency that the killing of people is not only reported in the Old Testament, but occurs often without any objection; indeed, it may even happen in specific instances in obedience to the command of God.  But it is equally clear that such apparently justified killing is an exception. It occurs only within the wider judgement of God penetrating human history and society. It is never something which can be contemplated in the spirit of human revenge.

We might readily conclude that all of this is really of little help in giving a clear answer to the enormously difficult ethical questions that confront us in such a changed social and religious situation. The distinction between killing and murder seems to be only of historical interest. It remains relevant, to be sure, for those who are tempted to take physical vengeance into their own hands, and for thugs who go about with flick knives or who carry shotguns in their cars to be fired off when the whim takes them. But most of us do not find this to be a real temptation to be overcome.

Much more pertinent in the recent past were the distressing and perplexing questions that confronted our society, and still remain in force in others, such as the conflicts about capital punishment, or the legitimacy or not of taking up arms in time of war. More specifically, in our own day the commandment has a bearing on two fundamental issues having to do with the beginning and end of life: abortion on demand, and assisted dying. It is telling to note the euphemistic language frequently employed when each is the subject of debate. Such new- speak suggests an awareness that there are darker realities hidden below the surface that require to be sanitised. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to disregard appropriate guidance in particular instances from qualified experts, perhaps as a first word, if not as the last. But these considerations are quite other than what is surely inconceivable from the standpoint of this commandment – the unrelenting shrill demand that “My body is my own”. One cannot imagine any clearer illustration of the death of God in our culture than this dogmatic assertion. The truth is that this commandment cannot have any future wherever the culture insists in principle that in any action bearing on the preservation, or yielding, of life, anything more than my individual decision needs to be considered.

But where a society still feels the need for such a commandment prohibiting killing, we might reflect on the fact that what is at stake here comes as a commandment.

“You shall not kill” is quite specifically a command of the God confessed to be the creator of life. This means that it is not a piece of human wisdom which human beings may feel free to modify according to inclination or prevailing circumstances. What’s more, because the prohibition against killing is understood to be a commandment of God, it follows that God is not to be made subject to his own law. That is to say, the commandment is not greater than the one who gives it. Since it is God, and not human beings, who is the creator and preserver of life, it follows that human life is not a kind of “second” god. This means that the commanded protection of life may conceivably in extreme circumstances consist in its surrender and sacrifice.

This was the agonising decision which dissenting Christians involved in the plot against Hitler in Nazi Germany had to wrestle with. In order to keep faith with the commandment, they had to break it in this literal specific case. The “many” prevailed over the “one” in order to honour the preservation of larger life. As practising Christians, those involved knew that human life is not sacred in and of itself. They came to do what they did, not out of some expedient disobedience of the commandment, but in obedience to a more immediate and costly word.

Which helps us as we come to the Gospel today. Here, the focus of the commandment is disconcertingly concentrated, potentially nailing each and every-one of us to the ground. We are confronted by its radical expansion: “You have heard that it was said to the people of old ‘You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgement’. But I say to you that everyone who is angry with brother or sister shall be liable to judgement …” (Matthew 5:2l-22).

It is significant that Jesus does not speak against killing as such, but rather radicalises the concept of murder: whoever is angry with another, and calls him or her a fool, incurs the judgement of the commandment in the same way as the one who in the simple sense of the term wilfully takes the life of another. Who can claim to be guiltless in the face of this expansion?

For most of us, the murderer is suppressed or chained, whether by the command of God, or by convention, circumstances, or fear of punishment. Yet if it is anger that is the ultimate problem, then the killer is very much alive in the cage, ready to leap out at any time. After all, Cain as we heard, was not an especially depraved type, but simply a man living in the heart of an ordinary family. What marks the difference between Cain and Abel is that Cain is not reconciled to God; he is, we might say, theologically unreconciled. And it is this anger that transfers to Abel, and so gives rise to murder. The point is that – incomprehensible though it be for contemporary society to grasp – anger is ultimately a theological problem.

Which explains why it is in the midst of this angry and murderous world, in which both God and humans are implicated, that a word of life and resurrection has been spoken, precisely by the Murdered One, “whose sprinkled blood, as we heard in the Epistle, speaks a better word than the blood of Abel”. The sprinkled blood of both was shed, not by “killer types”, but by ordinary people like ourselves. Perhaps it all comes to rest in the simple question of the black American spiritual: “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

In the light of Jesus’ expansion of the ancient commandment, and of which his fate is deadly illustration, must we not give an answer like this to that simple but penetrating question: “I was there, and I still am”.

And if this be so, then the conclusion is surely inescapable.

It becomes impossible to imagine ourselves saying: “‘You shall not kill’ is at least one commandment I’m not tempted to break”.

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26 May – I believe in miracles

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Easter 6
26/5/2019

Revelation 21:10, 22; 22:1-5
Psalm 67
John 14:23-29

In a sentence:
Jesus, crucified and risen, is the one miracle in which the church believes

Our Prime Minister believes in miracles. More than that, he has apparently recently witnessed one.

At the same time, critical analysis has felt less need to invoke divinity and has pinpointed clever or even cynical political strategy as the cause of the election ‘upset’. If there were anything miraculous about the election result, it looks like God had at least a little help.

It doesn’t much matter how serious the PM was in his remark; my interest this morning is that doubtless many have sent thanks heavenward for the outcome of the election, even as the political strategy is acknowledged. In the interests of full disclosure, no such thanksgiving has been heard from me, but my point this morning is not narrowly political but broadly theological: what is a miracle? To turn the matter around, would it have been ‘miraculous’ had the opposition been successful? Probably not, as many thought this to be the most likely scenario and miracles are not usually what we expect to happen. Still, many would hold that a Shorten government implementing its proposed policies would at least have been ‘good’, even excellent. And surely ‘and it was good’ denotes the miraculous.

To some extent we’re just playing with words here but it’s in an effort to give substance to the question of miracles, or to what is sometimes characterised as ‘divine intervention’. More put helpfully, Where and how is God active in the world? For talk of miracles is talk of the activity of God.

The Bible, of course, is full of miracle stories: an axe head floats, the sun stands still in the sky, and a little boy’s lunch feeds a great crowd. But the Bible is not a collection of historical ‘facts’ from which we deduce a few definitions or patterns in which to believe. What holds the Bible together is not similarities between the stories it contains or even common themes which might be discovered between the covers. What hold the Bible together is very covers themselves. Those covers have been put there by the church – that community which springs from the pre-biblical confession that the crucified and risen Jesus is Lord. It is the experience of continuing to engage with this Lord which causes the Bible and our ongoing engagement with it.

This is to say that, so far as miracles are concerned, the one determining miracle of the Bible is the resurrection of Jesus. Yet this needs to be qualified immediately because the resurrection looks too much like miracles looked ‘before’ the resurrection of Jesus(!). The resurrection looks to be ‘miraculous’ in itself, as might a dead-in-the-water government being returned to office.

But the resurrection is not like this, is not the most impressive of all the impressive miracles in the Scriptures. The qualification of the miraculous nature of the resurrection needed here is the totally un-miraculous-looking crucifixion, such that we must also say that the one determining miracle of the Bible is the crucifixion of Jesus.

There is, of course, apparently nothing miraculous about the crucifixion. It’s the ‘natural’ thing which happens when matters get a little too ‘out there’ for comfort, rather like what might be expected to happen to an opposition with too many new ideas for a loss-averse community.

Separated into mere history on the one hand and divine intervention on the other, the crucifixion and the resurrection become mere ‘seasons’, of the type we saw Ecclesiastes – a time for dying, a time for rising, a time for the Right, a time for the Left (Ecclesiastes 3.1-14; see the sermon for April 19). Elections are mere seasons. There are no miracles here – at least, nothing which endures – for history allows a time for everything. History buries all political messiahs without hope of (political) resurrection.

When the church as church gives thanks for God’s miraculous gifts, it is not for anything which comes and goes in the manner of the seasons. The quintessential thanksgiving of the church – found in the Great Prayer of the Eucharist – names the miracles of God as creation, redemption in cross and resurrection, and consummation of all things.

These defining miracles endure through the vagaries of history. And so, in seasons rich and poor, they are named as sources of peace, and this brings us finally to the Scripture text for this sermon!

The risen crucified Lord stands before his seasonally troubled disciples, and declares, ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.’ ‘The world’ gives now peace, now division; now hope, now despair; now sunshine, now storms; a time for every politics under heaven.

Jesus does not give this way; what he offers here is not ‘with’ the times but through them – for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. The ‘my’ peace is crucial here, for the peace of Jesus is not the peace of the risen Jesus only but also the peace of the Jesus with a crucifixion looming in the near future. The miracle in which we are to believe is the peace which was Jesus’ own way in the world. His way was as a presence of the kingdom of God in a time and place in which that kingdom was apparently quite absent. The miracle of God is the possibility of peace in the midst a world which is apparently hopelessly divided.

This is not an easy miracle in which to believe, because it touches us here and now, in our own sense of the absence of God’s kingdom. To believe in such a miracle requires that we rise to the command we most desperately want to hear and obey, and yet find most difficult to hear and obey: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid’. This is not a word of ‘comfort’; it is no less a command than any other ‘do’ or ‘do not’ we read in the Scriptures.

As a command it is hard to hear because to let go of trouble and fear would be to rise to our responsibility to love and serve without reading the seasons as if they were signs of God’s power, without despair because of what has or has not happened, and without elation praising God for an accident of history.

Dis‑appointment ends when we recognise that our true appointment is to know who is God. To know who is God is to know what the miracle is which is being wrought: that, in life or in death, our mouths will be filled with laughter and our tongues loosed with a joy which will not end with a change of season, or an election, or even death itself. Any laughter or joy which might be ended by such passing things has known no true miracle, no deep good.

The miracle of this God is that, as much despite our efforts as because of them, God works our works to God’s own end. This end – in life and death, in wins and losses, in all things ‘under the sun’ – is a peace which passes understanding but under which we are to stand: to live and love and serve, testifying that even here the Father and the Son come to make their home with us.

May this peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds in Jesus his Christ, now and always, Amen.

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19 May – Not a politically correct God

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Easter 5
19/5/2019

Acts 11:1-18
Psalm 148
John 13:31-35

In a sentence:
God does not merely call us to love, but makes that love possible

The whole of the New Testament is written against the background of an unflinching belief in the resurrection of Jesus, not simply as a thing which was now ‘believed’ but as a thing which made a difference to the way we live and experience each other and the world. ‘Jesus is risen’ is code for ‘the world is now a whole other new place”.

The book of Acts, from which we hear quite a bit each year after Easter, looks like a history of what happened next after Easter. Yet, more than this, it is history as an account of the kind of thing which would necessarily take place if it were the case that Jesus was risen from the dead.

We can see the difference between a mere historical account of what happens next and the theological, resurrection-informed experience of what happened in the details of our reading this morning – in particular in the unexpected way in which Peter defends what happened in the house of Cornelius.

The crisis is that Peter seems to have transgressed the hard boundary between Jew and Gentile: ‘Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?’ From the moral and ethical outlook of modern liberal western society it looks as if what Peter has done is ‘obviously’ the right thing. Most of us today hold that everyone should be treated equally, have the same rights, not be put down or otherwise mistreated, and so on.

Yet Peter does not offer a moral argument for his actions along these lines. Instead, he accounts for his actions by ‘blaming’ God. Speaking of his vision of being commanded to eat unclean foods, he quotes God:  ‘What I have made clean you must not declare profane.’ The reason for the breaking down of this barrier – that between Jew and Gentile – is not liberal ethics but divine command. Peter doesn’t know about the ‘brotherhood of man’ or any such thing; ‘God made me do it’ is the reason he gives for doing what we would consider simply to be the clear moral choice.

Now, there is nothing wrong with the moral ideals we have about everyone being equally human to everyone else. It is just that that is not what our text is about. The Cornelius incident is about what was thought to be a God-imposed distinction between Jew and Gentile now being overcome by God. And so the resolution of the dispute back in Jerusalem is not, ‘Ah, yes, of course the Gentiles are people too! How foolish of us!’ Rather, the Jewish Christians turn to the praise of God saying, ‘Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.’

In the election of Abraham and Sarah as patriarch and matriarch of the people of God there is actually nothing to suggest that God’s love for this people means God’s hatred or exclusion of all other peoples. In fact, just the opposite is found in the covenant with Abraham: ‘through you will all peoples be blessed’ (Or, ‘will all peoples bless themselves’, depending on the translation.)  But there had developed a very sharp distinction in the minds of the Jews by the time of Jesus, so that Peter could say to the Gentile Cornelius, ‘Even you yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile’ (Acts 10.28).

This distinction had taken on God-proportions, and its violation was understood to have consequences for a person’s standing before God (in terms of ritual cleanness). It doesn’t go too far to say that, for pious Jews of the time, God required of them their self-isolation from Gentiles – it had become to be understood to be divinely instituted. And so it would have felt to Peter that God was changing God’s own rule here: God was contradicting what had being held, and held for the sake of God.

And now we can see how this is an event which has to do with the resurrection of Jesus, and so with the power of God, and not simply with human ethics. For it was for God’s sake – as an act of piety – that Jesus was executed, because he was perceived to be a threat to the religious and political safety of the people. The resurrection, then, is God standing against God, God in heaven contradicting the God in our hearts, revealing that the two are not the same and that we are serving the wrong one.

When God pours out the Holy Spirit on the household of Cornelius the resurrection happens again: God raises the dead. Only, those who are raised are not just Cornelius but Peter and, later, the other believers back in Jerusalem. These are raised in the sense we know from Saint Paul, who describes this God as the one who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which did not exist. What ‘did not exist’ for Peter and the other Jewish Christians was that God’s work in Christ had anything to do with the Gentiles, for how could it? ‘It is unlawful for a Jew to associate with Gentiles…’

But now that Christ clearly did have something to do with the

Gentiles, a new beginning met with a new understanding and the dead were raised, eyes were opened, and God was glorified.

If we take away from the story of Peter and Cornelius only the message that God loves everyone and so we ought to too, then we render the story irrelevant because it tells us nothing most of us don’t already know. Perhaps more problematically, this seems to imply that such love is actually possible – that we ought to be ‘able’ to love each other, and so to usher in the kingdom.

But the Jewish Christians back in Jerusalem praise God for what Cornelius experienced, and we must take this with utter seriousness. The implication is not simply that we should be loving and accepting of each other but that such love and acceptance begins as a work of God.

This being the case, we might also note that the rather modern notion of ‘love and acceptance’ doesn’t really fit the story, or isn’t rich enough for the story. For the Gentiles are not given a mere welcome but a repentance: ‘… God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life’ (11.18). The love of God is that the loved are now free, or even ‘allowed’, to change. Their humanity is indeed recognised but so also its deficiencies; God’s ‘love’ is here the possibility of repentance, and not of mere ‘inclusion’.

So neither the Jews nor the Gentiles are the ‘good guys’ here, or the victims. Borrowing again from Paul, all have fallen short of the glory of God. This is the accusation, the ‘bad news’ of the gospel.

But the important thing is that the accusation is a diminishing echo which sounds after the ‘big bang’ – the moment of creation – the act of resurrecting grace which stands Peter and Cornelius and all they represent on an equal footing of being loved, forgiven and accepted by God.

And so it is, as we sang in our opening hymn, that we pray that we might love, and see whatever love we might manage as an answer to prayer – the acts of today’s apostles, working out the logic of the resurrection of Jesus, to the glory of God.

For the benefit of all God’s people, may this prayer be ever on our lips, and find its answer in the faithfulness of the God who keeps his promises by making it possible for us to love one another.

Amen.

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12 May- The Fifth Commandment – “Honour your father and mother”

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Easter 4
12/5/2019

Exodus 20:1-2, 12
Psalm 71
Mark 10:28-31

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery”, (therefore)….
“Honour your father and mother”

It is entirely a happy coincidence that we have this text before us on what society calls Mother’s day. However, as we reach the halfway mark in the journey that the commandments unfold, this fifth offers us the chance to do something different from what might be expected on this secular occasion. Two preliminary observations deserve some thought.

The first has to do with its location. It falls between the commandments that have to do with the proper worship of God, and those that have to do with right conduct towards other people. Right conduct is certainly the case for the commandments to follow.  When we come to them, six, seven, eight and nine are now all enforceable by criminal and civil laws. But this fifth: “Honour your father and mother”, like the tenth: “You shall not covet”, is not legally enforceable. The interesting question then is this: does “Honour your Father and Mother” belong to the first table of the things that have to do with the proper worship of God, or is it the first of those that have to do with right conduct towards others? A further intriguing question follows: Should the commandments be read as occurring in order of importance? If so, then the commandment to honour father and mother is more important than not committing murder! Imagine that! We ought at least to be open to the possibility.

The second observation is that we need to remind ourselves that in the nature of the case this commandment is a word directed to adults, not children. What might it mean for adults to hear: “Honour your Father and Mother”? Perhaps what is at stake is best summed up by the difference between the word “authority” and the word “authoritarian”. Authority is a good word, authoritarian not so much. Authoritarian people are fundamentally insecure. “Do this because I say so”, or “Because I am wearing a uniform”.  Fathers and Mothers are not immune to the authoritarian mindset, not to speak of contemporary politicians. It’s a bit like the preacher’s text found in the pulpit with the marginal note: “Argument weak – shout here”. Authoritarian people shout.  “Authority”, on the other hand, is an innate gift. Some have it, others don’t; some have it in some matters, but not in others.

This commandment, then, like all the others, is about true authority, not a demeaning authoritarianism. This means that they are to be understood “gracefully” – as expressions of life, and love, and joy, and power, quite literally as grace: not as legalistic fiats, as might be supposed, given the clout of their divine origin. So here parents are to be honoured as those given the task of communicating the authority of God as the guarantee of a genuine freedom for their children.

This is why the fifth commandment offers a future promise: “that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God gives you.” Today Israel’s promise of a specific physical territory is unquestionably politically inflammatory. At the very least, we may well reflect that the only possible way to resolve the contemporary fate of the land of Israel/Palestine is this ancient promise of a grace – a grace now to be shared, rather than as an oppressive national self-possession.

At any rate, it is crucial to grasp that for the people of Israel, then and now, the community of faith and the social community are identical. The religious necessity of honouring parents is at the same time a cultural tradition. It was taken for granted, for ancient as well as modern Judaism, that fathers and mothers are to be human mediators of the promises of God to their children, with the consequence that parents are to be reciprocally honoured.

But not for long. As we heard in the gospel today, that given identity was radically, indeed explosively, called into question by Jesus,: “Truly I tell you,  there is no-one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake, and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age – houses and, brothers and sisters, mothers and children… In the midst of such radical disjunctions did you notice what is missing? Fathers. Why are there no fathers in this list? Because God has become the only necessary Father through the obedience of the Son.

What could be more iconoclastic in a patriarchal society than that! Now a true Son has emerged as the ultimate radical, reconstituting the whole Hebraic succession of generations of male and female parents and children. This means that this side of Easter, where we stand as Christians rather than as Jews, we literally have a new creation to explore, “a new land” to live in. Now that land is not just a piece of turf, but a world that is given to us from the hands of this paternally obedient Son.

But just here let us take the full weight of this revolution. In the gospel, the community of faith in him has been radically severed from the cultural community. Who would have imagined such a fulfilment of the Old Testament expectation of the promise: that here final authority is taken away from natural fathers and mothers? That is to say, “where God is”, parents and children by nature give way to parents and children by grace. That grace is a “Son”.

Now remembering that the entire people of Israel, male and female, were designated Yahweh’s “Son”, it is crucial that we understand that being a Son is not a gender word, but a theological designation. That is to say, in being a true Son, Jesus has at last accomplished what to that point was deficient by the whole people of Israel in enacting their “sonship”. This means that because the  “sonship” of Jesus is not a gender description, it is an inclusive possibility for both human daughters and sons. For this reason, a disciple of this Son, must renounce parental ties precisely because of the urgency of this promise. Parents who have understood this reformulation of the fifth commandment should be neither surprised nor resentful that this should be so.

But now we live in a society that increasingly celebrates not this theological disengagement envisaged by Jesus in the gospel, but rather an increasingly Western cultural disengagement from the Christian community that gave it its life. In varying degrees this has always been the case. But it is increasingly apparent that today the community of faith is in principle in the process of daily being severed from the wider society. This is inevitable when our contemporary culture insists that whatever “religion” might be, it must necessarily be a private matter.

The question then is pertinent. Has the original implication of the commandment any social future, not to speak of any radically reconfigured Christian form?  What sense can be made of the role of fathers and mothers in today’s culture – parents whose only purpose in the light of this commandment is to be mediators of a life-giving tradition: the promise and the mystery of the grace of God to their children?

Especially in our day do we face an even greater contemporary expression of the commandment’s distance from its foundation. Today we are required to recognise that we inhabit a culture neither envisaged nor comprehensible to that of our text, or indeed to that of every subsequent culture up to our present day. For example, what is the status or meaning of the commandment in the majority of Western societies that have made lawful same sex marriages where the duality of mothers and fathers is in principle rescinded?

In the same way, our text can make nothing of the provision for the bearing, or the adoption, of children to partners of same sex marriages. It is more often the case than not that in later life – when they become adults – such children are likely to want more than surrogate fathers and mothers. Will their search for their biological parents be a “faint echo” of the force of this ancient commandment: to honour father and mother?  Will they find themselves to be in a better or a worse position to receive the benefit of this commandment than the children of broken marriages, where fathers and mothers, though no longer living together, are nevertheless still in principle accessible to their children?

Perhaps it is too early to assess the implications of this change to the law that has now been enacted in Western cultures that were originally formed by the gender particularities of this commandment. At the very least, it now appears to make obedience to the commandment anachronistic in principle, if not seriously problematic.

Regardless of contested answers to this question, this fact is inescapable – that there can be no history if there are no mothers and fathers. And if there is no history, then there can be no God worthy of the name. Christians, then, must continue to hear the commandment’s ancient words of promise of parenthood in their original intention, no less as in their revolutionary reconstitution in the gospel.

To this end, we might well take to heart the declaration of the great third century Bishop of Carthage, St Cyprian, when he proposed: “You cannot have God as your Father if you do not have the Church as your Mother”.

If this be so, see how the commandment looks now:

“I am the Lord your God who brought you out of slavery”
(therefore) “Honour your Father and Mother”.

God and Church – a reconstituted Father and Mother – inextricably united as true source of healing in a now fragmented world. God as Father, Church as Mother: surely a climactic fulfilment of this fifth commandment.

So, remember this transformation when in our final hymn we will sing the lines: “Who from our mother’s arms – has blest us on our way” (TIS 106).

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5 May- The inversion of Saul

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Easter 3
5/5/2019

Acts 9:1-6
Psalm 30
John 21:1-19

In a sentence:
Conversion to Christ is an inversion of the world as we know and expect it to be

Saul’s Damascus road experience has long stood in the church as the archetypal conversion experience, looming large in the church’s imagination of what conversion is, at heart: sudden and ironic. Saul, the henchman of the religious authorities, suddenly finds himself in the employ of the enemy. But what does he now believe?

His new faith is summarised in what he declares to the surprised synagogue, ‘Jesus is the Son of God.’ To have become a Christian is to believe this.

I suspect that if there is anything which catches our ears in this six word sermon, it is not ‘Jesus’ but ‘Son of God’. This will be the case for believers and non-believers alike, although for different reasons. For those who consider themselves non-believers, the problem is ‘God’, to say nothing of ‘Son of God’. Among the various types of believers it is not ‘God’ but the ‘Son of’ which tends to cause a problem. These objectors might include Muslims, or Christian Unitarians, or Christians who are not Unitarian but wish that they were, for simplicity’s sake: God is a ‘simple’ concept which ‘Son of God’ seems to complicate unnecessarily.

For Saul what catches the attention is Jesus: ‘ “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” … “Who are you, Lord?”, … “I am Jesus…”.’

‘Son of God’ was an idea Saul knew very well, but to join ‘Son of God’ and ‘Jesus’ was to link apparently mutually contradictory terms. From this cultural and religious distance, we miss the contradiction and the scandal; it has become a merely ‘doctrinal’ point to assert or deny. ‘Son of God’ was originally a title of the king of Israel and so was easily transferred to the figure Israel came to expect from God, who would set right what was clearly wrong in the world. To suggest that a man who had been crucified was the Son of God was to say that God had failed. That is, God failed, unless something like a resurrection contradicted what was seen in the crucifixion. This would then be to say that Israel’s leaders had failed when they crucified him. Neither of these options was palatable, for obvious reasons. And so there is no godly place for either a crucified or a resurrected Jesus.

(It is in fact the same with most of the other titles used by Jesus – ‘Lord’, ‘Christ’, and so on. ‘Jesus is the Son of God’’, or ‘Jesus is Lord’, or ‘Jesus Christ’ are all contradictions-in-terms of the same order. They originally were addressed to the hopes and fears of the whole Jewish community. To fit ‘Lord’, ‘Christ’, ‘Son of God’ terms together with the crucified ‘Jesus,’ then, is like saying that black is white, or up is down – and believing this to make sense).

Saul, then, doesn’t simply come to have a new thing to believe about Jesus. Rather, if the crucified Jesus is the Son of God – the ‘king’ – then a serious shock is felt, with the effect that all things are now seen radically differently from how once we saw them. We could begin to imagine that God might be found in the brokenness of one of our discarded ones – the foundation of Christian ethics. God might be seen in the unclean person of the infidel. The whole, dirty world might be God’s. Thus begins the ministry of the Apostle to the Gentiles, and we are seated here this morning because of it.

Yet the contradiction between Jesus and ‘Son of God’ is scarcely an interesting one today. Who cares about the Creed? In the days after the resurrection – for the first few centuries even – the controversy between the synagogue and the church (and the academy, in a different way) was clear: accept the contradiction of terms, or not. After that, religious authority held sway on the identity of Jesus for a thousand years. Today, however, the average person in the street (and often enough, in pews) simply couldn’t care less: ‘Son of God’ is dead in the water.

Still, if we have no common sense of a messiah or anything comparable today – of which the nastiness of the election campaign is evidence enough – there are universally held values, of which our election campaigns are also evidence.

One of these values – very strong with us – is that we are, each of us, the most important person in the world, without reference to the importance of everyone else. This lurks everywhere. We see its effect in modern school principals living in fear of the next phone call from little Cklancy’s parents (now wondering why some other child was chosen for student representative), or in the very fact she is even called Cklancy, or in that her name is spelled with a K (granted, a silent K – you only pronounce the C). (At this point I ought to acknowledge that I’m called ‘Craig’ for similar kinds of individualist reasons, if now rather weak by comparison!) We see how important every individual is in the campaign propaganda requirement that everyone gets a tax cut in order to fund the increased services to which we have a right. We see it in the assumption that because I’ve got it I can spend it on anything I like. We see that I matter most in the otherwise contradictory rights to demand medical treatment for as long as I can breathe, or to demand that I be treated with death-dealing substances long before I would otherwise stop breathing.

The apparently ‘doctrinal’ question of whether or not Jesus is the Son of God seems to come nowhere near to this crucial engine of modern identity – the centrality of ‘I’. And yet, nothing ‘cruc‑ial’ – even such a godless thing as the individualism rampant in us all – is ever far from the ‘crux’, the cross (Latin).

If the shock Saul felt was the tying of the most important of things to the least important, then for us perhaps the shock of the gospel lies in the opposite: the separation of ourselves from the most important. To say, then, that Jesus is the Son of God, becomes saying that we are not divine progeny, to do and be as gods like to do and be. While the New Testament speaks occasionally of us as ‘children of God’, we are not directly so. Ours is only an adopted relation; only Jesus is a ‘natural’ Child. Jesus is the Child of God, and you and I are not.

To land it in relation to I-matter-most thinking: this is to say, Jesus matters more than you do. That Jesus lived matters more than that you have lived, and so also his death matters more than yours. The New Testament hints at this in its linking of Jesus to creation and salvation: this one is more important than all the rest, in the same way that the beginning and end are necessary for there to be a middle.

Saul went about the synagogues saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’ This can’t have meant very much to him at that early stage, other than that it turned his world upside down.

But evangelism does just this. It turns a world upside down. For some, this is immediately good news – ‘Jesus is Lord, and I don’t have to try to be’; this is the hallelujah of the broken-hearted. For others, it’s Saul’s punch-drunk, ‘Jesus is Lord? This is the disorientation of the proud, I’ve-got-it-all-together victim of God’s blinding love.

We might wonder what the world would look like – or even what the election campaigns might look like – if our political stars didn’t know that we know we matter most. Perhaps the struggle for the common good – which is surely somewhere close to the heart of our politics – would be articulated in a way to moderate our sense of need, rather than pander to it. Perhaps what always seems scarce might be shown to be more abundant than we’re usually told, if only others mattered a little more than we do. Perhaps our competitors, even our enemies, might begin to take on the form of ‘brother, sister.’ For Jesus, as the Son of God, matters most because such a Son of God as a crucified denotes one given for the life and well-being of others.

The church still says ‘Jesus is the Son of God’, even though it no longer has the cultural sense it did for Saul, but this is less a statement of a metaphysics than of the new order breaking into the world. To say ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ is simply to put him first, in order that we might come in a very close second.

To speak about Jesus in this way is to show forth a world
upside down, inside out,
back to front and,
for all that,
now just how it is supposed to be.

For the gift of such a renewing, re-creative word, all glory and thanks be to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, how and always. Amen.

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28 April – The Pointy End of John’s Gospel

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Easter 2
28/4/2019

Acts 5:27-32
Psalm 118
John 20:19-31

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

How was Thomas to know that the end of the story could change? Everyone knows that when a person is dead and buried, that is the end of the story. Friends and loved-ones will go on with their lives changed but it will not include the living presence of the deceased. How was Thomas to know that the Jesus story would not end like all other human stories?

Thomas is the archetypal sceptic. John’s gospel sets Thomas up as the sceptic on behalf of all the sceptics in the church through the whole life of the church.

It is a dramatic device that helps to draw us into the story. Sue and I recently saw an opera that had a changed ending. A character in the drama expressed the emotions of the audience on our behalf. Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg traditionally finishes with the girl standing looking adoringly beside her man as he succumbs to the sickeningly nationalistic arguments of the chorus and accepts the invitation to join the Singers in order to strengthen the domination of their culture. In a recent production of the opera the girl, without a word said (or sung) indicates her distain for what is being argued and her man’s compliance with the invitation. Instead of joining the cast in their adulations, she storms off stage. As the arguments to join the singers unfolds the audience grows in its understanding of why this opera was so loved by Hitler. The heroine’s reaction expresses the horror of a modern post World War II audience and makes it known on our behalf.

Thomas is the dramatic sceptic on behalf of us all. He will not believe that Jesus is alive until he sees him and touches the wounds by which he was killed. Time for a trivia question. How do we know that Jesus was nailed to the cross? Answer: because Thomas mentioned the marks of the nails in his hands. This is the only time in any of the gospels that nails are mentioned in connection with Jesus’ crucifixion. It was usual for the crucified to be with attached by rope. The Life of Brian is the best evidence for this.

So, Thomas stands as the representative sceptic to the resurrection. He does not explore any of the common conspiracy theories as to why the disciples thought they were seeing the Lord. They make intriguing reading – they include the idea that there was a quick substitute made at Golgotha, or that he only seemed to die. My favourite suggests that he was resuscitated and moved to the south of France with Mary Magdalene. No, Dan Brown did not invent that conspiracy.

So, how does John’s dramatic device work in his story of Thomas? Mary Magdalene told disciples that the stone had been rolled away. Peter and the Beloved Disciple inspected the empty tomb and then went home. Mary stayed in the garden and met who she thought was a gardener. Some art work I have seen recently explains her mistake. Jesus is depicted carrying a spade – very helpful. At the sound of her name she recognised the Lord. Mary is the first witness to the resurrection, and she tells the disciples. The same day Jesus appeared to the disciples and showed them his hands and side and breathed the Holy Spirit upon them.

So far belief has been dependant on seeing the risen Lord. It is not enough for Thomas to be told by the disciples. Belief for Thomas will require the same evidence as the others had. Seeing Jesus and the marks of crucifixion – the signs that the one who was dead is alive.

John the evangelist is starting to come to the pointy end of his gospel. If there is one purpose for his telling the story of Jesus that stands out above all others it is that the world should believe. The other gospel writers have a similar purpose, but John mentions the purpose at every opportunity. The word ‘believe’ arises nearly 100 times. That is why this part of the story is a pointy end. The circle of believers is opening out.

John courageously raises the possibility of doubt. In the late 1970s John Westerhoff, an American Christian Educationalist, visited Melbourne. One of the things he advocated was that the church tends to be in too much of a hurry to confirm and or baptise its members too young. He advocated that there should a be rite of passage for adolescents in which they are enrolled as catechumens and given permission to doubt, and that this rite should be celebrated on the feast of St Thomas.

In John’s story he grapples with the issue of doubt. But, more importantly, he deals with the issue of belief, of coming to faith. The intention of Thomas is that he will be the man of action. He will see Jesus. He will put his finger in the nail prints. He will put his hand in the spear wound. But faith is a gift of God not a human accomplishment. It is a gift to the first disciples who saw and touched and to those who follow who say they cannot see and touch Jesus.  In the event all the action is initiated by Jesus. Thomas looks and does not touch. Artists have led us astray on this point too. In some he conducts a gruesome forensic inspection. That is not how John tells it.

Thomas encounters the risen Christ and makes his monumental proclamation. No one has seen the situation in quite the same way as Thomas does at this moment. Yes, in Mark and Matthew the centurion acknowledges Jesus as God’s son, but in John it is Thomas who makes the credal statement, ‘My Lord and my God’. This is the pointy end because it ties right back to where John started – ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Thomas is given the insight the one they all called ‘Lord’ is God.

Faith is Christ as Lord and God is not my accomplishment. It is given me in the church. It is in the church among other believing and doubting Christians that I discover Jesus alive. It is in the church with all its complicated structures, its petty disputes, its incompetence, its scandals, with all its signs of antichrist, nevertheless the Spirit of Jesus who taught love and forgiveness in the face of hate and vengeance, who touched the contaminated with compassion, who gave sight and insight and life, and who did this on a backdrop of complicated structures, petty disputes, incompetence and scandal.

The living light of Christ blazes precisely because he is set on a dark canvass. The resurrected life of Christ is set right up against the crucified death of Jesus. For me it works like art. In order for the artist to depict a bright image there must be dark shadow. Take a look at how artists depict light particularly in art depicting sunlight, just how much and how dark the shadow is. Without shadow, the eye cannot perceive that the sun is shining.

We await a day when the light of Christ will be perfectly perceived in a place where our perceptions will not need shadow or death.

Posted in Sermons
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