Category Archives: Sermons

17 February – Rooted, Resilient, Reconciled

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Epiphany 6
17/2/2019

Jeremiah 17:5-10
Psalm 1
Luke 6:17-26

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

Our readings today are a little bit full on. Each of them puts into stark terms what is at stake in hearing and responding to the call of God.

Happiness and blessing are set in contrast to wickedness and woe.

As the Psalmist writes:

“Happy are those | who do not follow the advice of the wicked, … but delight in the law of the Lord, | on which they meditate day and night.” (Ps 1.1-2)

“The wicked … are like chaff that the wind drives away. | [they] will not stand in the judgement, | nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.” (Ps 1.1a, 4b)

Wicked sinners are advised that this would be the time to step outside.

This theme from Psalm 1 of the blessed and the cursed, those who trust in mortals and those who delight in the Lord, is echoed in Jeremiah 17.

In both cases we hear the faint echoes of the ancient Jewish Wisdom tradition – which we see most clearly elsewhere in texts like ​Proverbs and ​Ecclesiastes​. This tradition within our Scripture emphasises the right or wise way of living, underneath the sovereign gaze of the Lord above.

Texts within this tradition emphasise the importance of living in a way that respects the eternal wisdom of the Lord. And these texts call on human beings to acknowledge their weakness and limited knowledge in the face of our common mortality.

Jeremiah reflects on these themes in reference to the weakness of mere flesh, and the devious and perverse nature of the human heart. We are led, in response, to trust in the Lord above who tests the mind and searches the heart.

All of this seems rather familiar to anyone who has read the advice of Scripture to live an upright life. To attend to an ethical standard in one’s conduct. To be moral, and wise, and good.

There is enough wisdom in simply saying that we should all seek to do what is right and moral, under the gaze of the sovereign Lord.

Perhaps this should be a short sermon.

However, … what struck me in Psalm 1, and in Jeremiah 17, was not the reminder of the sovereign Lord above. But rather this common image – which recurs in other parts of Scripture: of a tree planted by a stream of water.

Those who trust in the Lord are rooted by a stream. A stream that feeds, and nourishes. A stream that nurtures resilience. A stream that helps us to bear the fruits of goodness, even when the rains do not come, and the sun bears down upon us.

What struck me in the call to a good and wise life in our readings was not the sovereign Lord above, but the Lord below: in whom we are rooted, and nourished, and fed. From whom flows all goodness, and through whom we are able to bear good fruit.

There is a not so idle point here in how we should read these texts from the Hebrew Bible that are also part of our Christian Scriptures. An older attitude saw in the First Testament an emphasis on law and the call to right living, and therefore an emphasis on our own efforts and moral character. What we see in this image of being rooted next to a nourishing stream is, in fact, the deep well of love that runs through the Hebrew Bible. The love of God for people who seek to remain rooted, and trusting in the Lord.

These readings do not call on us to rely on our own strength. Quite the opposite. They call us to be rooted next to the stream of God’s love, from whom all goodness flows: that we might be resilient, and that we might bear good fruit.

The call of God is not first and foremost to aspire to the lofty heights of perfection. But to settle into the rooted nourishment of the love of God.

Settled here the power of God flows out for healing and comfort.

…

This is where we pick up our reading from Luke’s Gospel.

Gathered on a level place, people come to gather around Jesus. We are told that the people tried to touch him: the power of God flowed out of Jesus for healing and comfort.

And so the people gathered to sit alongside the one who elsewhere offers a wellspring of living water.

And this is what came out from the mouth of the river:

“Blessed are you who are poor, | for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, | for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, | for you will laugh.”

(Lk 6.20-21)

What struck me in our Psalm, and in our reading from Jeremiah 17, strikes me again here. Not the God who is above, but the God who is below. The God who offers blessing to the poor, to the hungry, and to those who weep.

What Jesus offers here, as the power of God flowed out from him, is healing and comfort to the poor, and to the lowly.

Jesus makes clear where the stream of God’s love flows. Jesus makes clear how the river marks the borders of God’s new kingdom.

The river of God’s love, flowing out with healing and comfort, twists and bends towards the poor: they are within God’s kingdom.

The river of God’s love, nourishes and nurtures the land, that those who are hungry should be fed by the land.

The river of God’s love washes away the tears, and becomes a babbling brook in which to splash and play with joy.

Rooted by this river, following where the stream flows, we “shall not fear when heat comes, | and [our] leaves shall stay green; … and [we will] not cease to bear fruit.” (Jer 17.8)

Jesus offers us here an echo of what we find in our Psalm, and in the words of Jeremiah. Not simply a path which we must travel alone to moral perfection. But a grounded, rooted resilience.

Jesus’ teaching is not first a statement about what we should do, but is first a statement about the contours of God and God’s love.

The challenge this teaching poses to us is whether we will allow ourselves to be caught up in the contours of this love of God, flowing through the world. The challenge is whether we will live out our participation in Christ, through our baptism in water: a grounded, rooted resilience. In Christ we have the hope of new leaves, and new branches, new fruit, and new life.

Jesus tells us clearly in today’s reading what this participation, this rootedness, in the life of God’s love will look like. And he places in stark terms what failing to participate in this love will mean.

Will we heed the calling of God, to settle by the river? To gather together and nourish and feed one another, and so be fed by God? Will we follow as the streams of God’s love ebb and flow, carving a shape into the landscape: bending towards the poor, and the hungry, and those weeping? Will we be rooted next to the river of the resilient love of God?

I want to finish with a short quotation from the chorus of a beautiful song by two artists, Laura Marling and Johnny Flynn:

“The water sustains me without even trying
The water can’t drown me, I’m done
With my dying”

This is the new life of baptism, the new life offered in Christ. Amen

————-

We offer thanks and praise, O God, because you have created and sustained us and all things.

And yet, merciful God …

Forgive us when we have failed to be rooted in you Seeking to fix the world in our own mortal strength
Relying on ourselves and not you, Lord

Forgive us when we have failed to follow your ways
Following the advice of the wicked
And not reflecting on your wisdom

Forgive us when we have failed to listen to your call Like shrubs in the desert that refuse the rain
And those who live in wilderness that refuse help

Above all,

Forgive us when we have failed to be sustained by you
Failing to live out our baptism
Failing to be fed at your table

For failing to be your beloved people
For failing to love the poor, and the hungry, and those who weep

Forgive us, O God

Amen.

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10 February – ‘Forgiven’ is ‘commissioned’

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Epiphany 5
10/2/2019

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 138
Luke 5:1-11

In a sentence:
To be startled by the call to follow but not by the declaration of forgiveness – this is not yet to be forgiven.

The story of the call of the disciples must be one of the more terrifying passages of the New Testament: ‘…When [the fishermen] had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed Jesus’ (Luke 5.11).

If this is intended to demonstrate what it is to be a Christian, it is a very hard word for most people to hear, ourselves included. Yet it is Jesus who makes the call; and we have heard it – some of us – scores or even hundreds of times. To be free to follow – although we romanticise it hopelessly – would this not be marvellous? For many of us, our memories of Sunday School or similar are of heroes and heroines of the faith who seemed to do the kind of thing these disciples did. And yet many of us are not free, at least in the way that the disciples seem to be in the story.

Still we do not despair, for we can rationalise their response to Jesus. Perhaps they heard him many times before and it is just that it is this time, after a long period of reflection, that they happened to put everything down and follow him. Or perhaps it was their understanding of the nature of the world which made the difference. You would be much more likely to drop everything and follow the prophet of the impending doom if you believed that the world was soon coming to an end. Or perhaps the fact that these men didn’t have very much in the first place meant that it was easier for them to cast it all aside. With arguments like this we finally reach a comforting conclusion: they are freer than we because their situation and expectations were quite different from ours: there is no fair comparison to be made between them and us.

Yet this way of thinking denies the text of the Scripture as it stands. If we were supposed to understand that the disciples’ thinking along these lines we might expect that the Scripture would say this but it doesn’t. Instead of trying to explain away the actions of the disciples here we need to shift our focus from a timid hearing of the text to the theological centre of what happens when God meets the world in Christ.

It is our tendency to want to place conditions on our response to God’s call. Yet, while we approach God with our terms and conditions, the church declares that God approaches us unconditionally. There is no calculation on God’s part of achievement, no reckoning of debt or interest or repayment. This is the meaning of the word ‘grace’ which is so loved by Christians.

Now, the question is: despite all of our attempts to rationalise our response to it, can the call to follow – when it comes – also be a word of unconditional grace? When we try to rationalise our response to God’s call, we demonstrate that we hear it only as law – as mere demand, and so as bad news – for rationalisations are simply the application of laws. I suspect that this is typically how we approach the question of God, or God’s questions to us. We hear a command – perhaps to follow Jesus, or even ‘simply’ to believe – as bad news, and we seek to see whether, on balance, we can find any good news in it for ourselves; ‘balance’ is what it all comes to be about.

But, can the call of God be a word of grace and not merely a demanding command? Church talk about God’s ‘unconditional grace’ is usually talk about our access to God: by grace we are free to approach God. But unconditional grace is not about our access to God – our freedom to find salvation; it is about God’s freedom to find us. There are no conditions which might separate the love of God in Jesus Christ from us, and so no conditions which God has to meet before he may heal us; God’s ability to heal is simply a matter of his choosing to do so.

Now, if God is free to approach us to heal, he is also free to approach us to call; there are no conditions God needs to meet to call us to follow. So we must say not only the part which appeals – that ‘by grace we are saved’. We must also say what unsettles: by grace we are called – the same grace as that by which we are saved.

And it is the same grace. To defend ourselves against God’s freedom to make a claim on us is to deny that we are saved by grace. To say No to the call to obedience – whether it is obedience in dropping everything in response to a ‘special’ call or merely obedience in following God’s ‘standing orders’ – is to deny the salvation by grace we claim so strongly. To be startled by the call to follow but not by the declaration of forgiveness – this is not yet to be forgiven. To be uninspired by the direct call of God is to have become bored with his forgiveness.

To be called to follow, then – to be commissioned to ‘fish for people’ – this is the shape of healing and forgiveness from God. There is no forgiveness which then seeks an action in response – which looks for something to do – and actually might not get around to finding an action; the one who knows herself forgiven is the one who is free to respond to God’s call. ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ cries the frightened Simon Peter after the great and unexpected haul of fish. But the decision of Simon to follow Jesus is the response of a confessed sinner who nevertheless has also heard that he is deemed fit for the service of God’s unfolding kingdom. That is, Simon has received God’s welcoming grace in the call to mission: he is commissioned to God’s mission in the word of forgiveness.

This is what we miss in our allergic reaction to the disciples’ following Jesus so seemingly carelessly. ‘From now on you will fish for people’ is not simply a task given to these disciples but the word of acceptance by God – the demonstration of forgiveness. What seems to us to be a careless and risky throwing away of their lives in launching after Jesus is in fact their taking up of the free offer of a share in God’s healing work in the world, a healing which begins with their acceptance of the invitation to participate.

In contrast to the idea that this commissioning is itself the word of forgiveness, our own reality is too often that we freely embrace what we consider the gracious gift of God – his forgiveness – and quickly name as an affliction what we consider the unreasonable conditions of discipleship: that we should follow.

But we explain away the first disciples’ response to Jesus at our own peril, for to save ourselves from participation in God’s mission is to insulate ourselves from God’s salvation. It is the call to be available to God which is the word of forgiveness.

Surprisingly, perhaps, what is needed to be able to say yes to God’s call is a greater sense of our unworthiness: ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinner’. For the call to service in God’s kingdom would then entail a greater sense of forgiveness, and so of gratitude, and so of freedom to say yes to the one who has given without bounds.

We have heard the response of those few disciples to the call of Jesus, and now it is over to us.

May God’s people not baulk at the invitation to follow but embody the grace of God toward them in service towards others, and this not in fear or resentment but with joy. Amen.

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Ecumenical Lenten Studies 2019

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Each year for many years now Mark the Evangelist and St Mary’s Anglican Church in North Mebourne have enjoyed an ecumenical Lenten study series. This year our studies are on the theme of ‘The Spirit in the Desert’ — the title of a series of talks by Rowan Williams on the faith of the desert monks of the fourth century.

The studies will introduce the thought of the monks and invite us to be more aware of our own calling to be Christians in the place we find ourselves, with the people with whom we have been placed.

The audio will be sourced via YouTube and will be heard in the study sessions, so there’s not much which needs to be prepared beforehand. That said, you might find Williams’ book on the theme (developed from the lectures and published as ‘Silence and Honey Cakes’), very helpful supplementary reading.

Copies of a study guide for the series will be made available a couple of weeks prior to commencement, but can be found in advance here.

In addition to the ecumenical series in North Melbourne, there will be another in Hawthorn; you are welcome to mix and match as you like!

The dates for the study groups are:

  • Wednesdays March 13, 20, 27 and April 3, 630pm for a shared supper and 700pm for the study in the hall, ST MARY’S Anglican Church, 430 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne.
  • Fridays March 13, 22, 29 and April 5, 930am at HABITAT UNITING CHURCH, 2 Minona St Hawthorn.
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Life under the sun — the book of Ecclesiastes

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The book of Ecclesiastes is scarcely scarcely straightforward. It is at the very least enigmatic. Beyond this, some find it anti-religious, many find it pessimistic, and most would find it quite self-contradictory.

In order to discover the best ‘the Teacher’ has to say to us today, we will be using his reflections on ‘life under the sun’ as a foil through March and April 2019 to engage with the ministry of Jesus, especially as we follow him through Lent on his path to the cross.

As usual, the sermons will be available online after each Sunday. It will be fine just to come to church and hear the sermons each week but if you’d like to be stretched a bit further in your understanding of Ecclesiastes, some of the following might help, among the many, many resources an online bookstore can provide:

RESOURCES

  • Jacques Ellul, ‘Reason for Being’ — This is a very readable extended meditation on the book by a well-known commentator on the ‘condition’ of the modern world
  • R.N. Whybray’s ‘Ecclesiates’ is a brief thematic commentary and less daunting than fuller expositions
  • A more substantial commentary but still quite accessible is William Brown’s ‘Ecclesiastes’ in the Interpretation series
  • A little more in-depth is the commentary of Julie Ann Dungan in the Abingdon Old Testament series
  • [Any one of the above four would probably be enough!]
  • Robert K Johnston’s ‘Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the lens of Contemporary Film’ might interest movie enthusiasts!

THE SUNDAYS

The focus texts from Ecclesiastes for each Sunday will appear in the weekly MtE news posts on the website homepage, but the Sundays over which the series will unfold are as follows :

February 24

[March 3 — Guest preacher, off series]

March 6 (Ash Wednesday)

[March 10 — Guest preacher, off series]

March 17 (Lent 2)

March 24 (Lent 3)

March 31 (Lent 4)

April 7 (Lent 5)

April 14 (Hymns and readings service, off series)

April 18 (Maundy Thursday)

April 19 (Good Friday)

April 21 (Easter Day — series conclusion)

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3 February – God comes to us, to save another

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Epiphany 4
3/2/2019

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71
Luke 4:21-30

In a sentence:
My neighbour is the shape of my salvation

Jesus stands before the good people of Nazareth and tells them: I have not come for you.

Things had started well: ‘all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth’ (v.22). But they have missed the point – not that we could blame them – and Jesus goes on the attack. First, we hear two proverbs as direct challenges thrown to the congregation: ‘Doctor, cure yourself’ and ‘no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s own town’. The first names the people’s not unreasonable expectation that Jesus would perform among them acts of power he had been said to have worked elsewhere. The second then accuses them of being unable to receive him.

As confronting as this might have been, the clincher is the two biblical stories Jesus retells. In both cases great prophets from Israel’s past – at times of great need in Israel – bring God’s healing power not to Israel but to Gentiles. And the crowd goes ballistic – or intends to – with Jesus!

But why does Jesus go on the attack in the first place? There is not here the holy righteousness of, say, his attack on the money-changers in the temple, or his anger against the attitudes of the Pharisees and scribes. This is not an attack on a moral failure – something the people had or hadn’t done.

Jesus’ assault is not on what the people had done but rather on what the people were – as the good people of Nazareth. Jesus accuses the people as a class. They have, in fact, not done anything yet – right or wrong – other than expect that what Jesus had done elsewhere he might also do at home. And so their initial response to him is not unbelief but actually what we might even call faith.[1] The expectation of the congregation seems to be that they will receive from God through Jesus and yet, in a manner seemingly uncalled for, Jesus tells them that not they but others will be blessed.[2]

What are we to make of this? Of the four evangelists, Luke is the most overtly ‘political’ to modern ears. It is Luke who most uncomfortably confronts the comfortable with what has been called God’s ‘preferential option for the poor’. And the class distinctions which Luke draws are unqualified. It is not a matter of some of the religious leaders having lost the plot, or some of the poor and outcast having received God’s favour. Rather, we hear from Luke (chap 6): blessed are the poor; blessed are the hungry; blessed are the weeping; and woe to the rich, those with full stomachs, and so on. There is no careful distinction between those who are poor because of the injustices of an economic system and those who are poor because of their own stupidity, and no distinction between those who have full stomachs because they have taken advantage of others and those who have full stomachs because of long and hard work.

The obvious danger in this is that individuals are treated according to how we’ve sorted them, according to their ‘class’. But a Muslim is not, thereby, a terrorist; a poor person is not, thereby, righteous; a politician is not, thereby, unreliable; and to be sitting in the congregation at Nazareth when Jesus speaks is not, thereby, to be ruled out of God’s favour.

And yet this is what Jesus says: as a group, these will be overlooked, for the blessing of others. We could only avoid this conclusion by attributing what he says to the unbelief of the people, but the text itself – in Luke’s account – doesn’t do this (even if Matthew and Mark do). It is not that they have not believed, for they have been impressed by him. It is rather that they are the good, religious people of Israel.

Yet, while there exists here the very serious dangers of racism and classism, addressing the good folk of Nazareth in this way (as a whole) and contrasting them with the Gentiles as a whole enables a central aspect of the gospel to be put in the starkest of terms.

It is easy and tempting – now, as then – to focus on the justification and healing of the individual, or on the class of individuals, separate from other individuals and classes. This leads to a focus on personal or communal righteousness, individualised. Here I would be saved independently of you if, say, I am the righteous Jew and you the unclean Gentile. Or, within the class I, as the righteous Jew am saved independently of you, the unrighteous Jew. This leads to that kind of judgementalism which is one person or group standing divided from and over against another.

And this is what makes the offence taken by the congregation is understandable: Are we not the keepers of the tradition? Are we not the observers of the rules? Are we not the donors to the cause? The language of ‘fairness’ and the earning of blessing creeps in.

But earned blessings are always a saving out of the world: isolation and insulation from that which is not saved. Salvation for what we have earned is always finally salvation in solitude – salvation into aloneness, for I may be the only one who has earned it.

The blessing of God is never for our isolation, even if we think that is what we want or need. The blessing of God – a blessing which is not earned – is always reconciling, and so always communal. It levels and equalises, without making the same. The love of God comes to the chosen people, that those who are not chosen may know the love of God.

This is a difficult lesson. Not the synagogue nor the church are safe-place refuges, and neither is anywhere ‘outside’ these communities. It is perhaps too difficult a lesson even for Luke himself, who doesn’t include in his gospel the story which best complements Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth – that rather uncomfortable account of the Syrophoenician woman’s meeting with Jesus. That story, found in Mark (7.24-30) and Matthew (15.21-28), has Jesus saying to a Gentile what he says here to the synagogue – I have not come for you: ‘it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs’. The difference – and perhaps the irony in Luke’s omission – is that she accepts this order of things (‘but bread has crumbs!’), and so receives the blessing Jesus was going to deny her. This is just what the Nazarenes do not do.

Jesus comes to us today to declare: ‘I have come to you in order to go to another. I have come not that you might be blessed, elevated and separated from the rest of the world. I have come to move beyond, to extend to, to open up. I have come to reconcile the Jew and the Gentile, the rich and the poor, the slave and the free. Your salvation begins today, in your midst, in this messily class‑ified world as it is; there is no plucking-out-of the world or a leaving-behind-of those you might think I do not love. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to bring good news, to announce liberty and a new vision, and to proclaim the Lord’s favour.’

The Lord’s favour is without bounds. If it were not so, we who imagine that God’s favour is ours would be without hope or salvation, because our imagination is just not broad enough. God comes to us to declare that he is leaving to bless our neighbour, and he declares to our neighbour just the same thing. It is only if this is so that we may speak with any sense of grace which is not reward and reconciliation in spite of what we have done: that we might be blessed through someone else being blessed. This is what it means truly to give and to receive, whether in the case of the grace of God, or a helping hand.

Jesus says, Your neighbour is the shape of your salvation. Let us, then, live as if that were the case: as if giving were receiving.

For the good news of the gospel – that God can turn even what divides us from each other into the very means of our salvation – thanks be to God.

[1] Note the difference here from the way in which Mark (6.1-6) and Matthew (13.54-58) tell the story, attributing the few works Jesus does in Nazareth to a lack of faith.

[2] Note also, the issue is not really one of inclusion or exclusion – except for the possibility that the good people of Nazareth might themselves be excluded (some commentators seeing here an objection to the inclusion of the Gentiles).

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27 January – Captive to freedom

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Epiphany 3
27/1/2019

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Psalm 19
Luke 4:14-21

In a previous life, I spent a couple of months in Freiburg in Germany, where I was learning some German as part of my postgraduate studies. There’s a large university there, and on the walls of one of its largest buildings are the words (in German!), ‘The truth will set you free,’ the motto of the university.[1] These words are a quote from Jesus (John 8.32), but I suspect that they were borrowed, or at least are typically read, through the filter of the modern mind as it imagines itself maturing, growing into truth – and out of untruths – and so becoming more liberated.

To be free has been a central concern of western society since the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century. And this aspiration would seem to many today to have been largely realised: we are, largely, free in comparison to our forebears. Most of us are free to pursue education in a field that interests us, free to marry someone who appeals to us (or to divorce them), free to have children or not, free to wear what we like, watch what we like, and so on.

The theme of freedom is at the heart of our reading from Luke this morning – Jesus comes to bring release to the captive, sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed. Yet Jesus assumes that there is captivity to be overcome and so it is far from clear what he has to do with those who imagine themselves already to be well on the way to freedom.

But then, perhaps we are less free than we imagine. One of my favourite illustrations of this comes from the movie ‘The Devil wears Prada’ of a decade or so ago. The story takes place at the cut-throat edge of the fashion industry. In one particularly memorable scene the head of a fashion house takes on her new assistant’s impression that she, the assistant, had freely chosen to wear what she was wearing to work that day:

‘I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blindly unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic ‘casual corner’ where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room…’ [2]

Perhaps that seems trivial but it could be extended much further. Have we been ‘selected’ to drive the car we drive, live in the locality we do, have the apps on our phones we have, vote the way we do, go or not go to church as we do?

For our free decisions are less free than we might imagine. Someone has chosen for us the language we will speak, the school we will go to, the people we will associate with, the aspirations we will have – all of this before we had the slightest inkling that we might want to have a say about such things. We are not free because of the parents we have and how they themselves have been formed, regardless of how much they might do to allow us a free and open upbringing. We are not free because even our modern talk about freedom has been delivered to us through a tainted political and social process which has privileged – or made ‘free‑er’ – some, while disadvantaging others.

And this brings us to the effect of being deluded about our freedoms: blindness to the violence which lurks in the world we think supports our freedom. Violence springs from the desire that others conform to my understanding of what it means for me to be free. If my freedom means the ‘right to bear arms’, then my community is free to die from the use of those arms at extraordinary rates. If my freedom is to consume at a rate which pretty much everyone agrees is totally unsustainable, then the fact that such consumption may cause enormous damage to the environment or require almost slave labour conditions in some far-away corner of the world is the price someone is just going to have to pay. This is the violence of men who presume that freedom is taking from women what they consider their right to demand, the violence of states which build walls to keep others out, the violence – even if it seems rather a strong word here – of those whose little screens are more important than the people standing next to them.

Freedom misconceived brings violence – gross or subtle – by requiring that my sense for freedom be the right one, and be defended.

Yet if delusion and violence spring from mistakes about what freedom is, then we might think backwards to an important question: if we live in a world where there is no shortage of delusion and violence – and surely we do – could this not have something to do with our being fundamentally mistaken about what it means to be free, or what freedom looks like?

In John’s gospel there’s a little exchange about freedom and truth between Jesus and some Jews who had come to believe in him. It’s here that we hear those words on the university building in Freiburg. Jesus says to some disciples: ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’ But then they come back at him with, ‘We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean by saying, ‘You will be made free’?’

This is the response which many would want to make today, if perhaps not with the reference to Abraham: are we not already free? Jesus’ disciples find it offensive that they might need to be freed from something, as perhaps do many of us. Yet the unfolding of Jesus’ story is such that the clash of the freedom he announces and the freedoms which the social establishment values lead to violence – Jesus’ death on the cross.

Jesus’ work is God’s response to the captivities in which we find ourselves, even in our very aspirations to be free on our own terms. Defining our own freedoms is dangerous because we finally end up like little gods – or big gods if we’re powerful enough – with the violence to ourselves and others which such delusions bring. It’s we who make others captive, or oppress others, or keep others poor. And others do the same to us. In coming among us as one who attacks oppressive economic and social and political systems, and the blindness and lameness and imprisonment they bring, Jesus comes to set us free from ourselves.

The life of Christian discipleship is a life of growing into this freedom. It will take the shape of a life reflecting that of Jesus himself which, paradoxically, often looks like it gives up freedom. Jesus willingly becomes poor, and captive, and oppressed when that is what is required to be true, and not violent.

That Jesus is free is shown in the absence of violence in him, which can only be the reality of someone who has nothing to fear. This might be another definition of what it means to be human, if truth and freedom are also such definitions: fearlessness. Not even the fear of a godless death on a cross is enough to stop Jesus from being true to himself and the loving humanity which was his calling.

The truth which will set us free is not that we can become like gods, free of anything that bugs us, but that, in looking to Jesus for his truth in freedom from fear, we might actually begin to become human. The way to this truth is ‘continuing in Jesus’ word’ – growing into the free humanity which was his as we become more faithful reflectors of his light. The truth which will give us the freedom to discover this is to be found in what Jesus teaches and does for us: inviting us out of ourselves, into a new vision of God, the world, and each other.

Seek this freedom, then. Look to him, listen to him, and listen to him, and discover the liberating grace of God…

[1]‘Die Wahrheit wird euch frei machen’ – see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Universit%C3%A4t_Freiburg_Epitaph.jpg

[2] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja2fgquYTCg

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20 January – Mourning and Dawn

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Epiphany 2
20/1/2019

Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 36
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

In the revised preamble to the Uniting Church’s constitution we confess that:

‘The First Peoples of this country had already encountered the Creator God before the arrival of the colonisers; the Spirit was already in [this] land revealing God to the people through law, custom and ceremony. The same love and grace that was finally and fully revealed in Jesus Christ sustained the First Peoples and gave them particular insights into God’s ways.’[1] (UCA Revised Preamble to the Constitution §3)

In the continuing attempt to listen to the particular insights of first peoples the national Assembly of the Uniting Church has set aside today as a day of mourning. A day that recalls us to the terrible history of the treatment of indigenous people in this country by second peoples. In setting aside this Sunday as a day of mourning the Uniting Church has sought to hear the voice of God through the voices of our indigenous brothers and sisters.

As we gather in this place, we acknowledge the commitment of the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation to nurturing this sacred Land from time immemorial. We acknowledge their elders: past, present, and emerging. We strive to hear their voices.

The commitment to listen to the voice of God through the voices of our indigenous brothers and sisters sets the context for my reflection on today’s readings. This context challenges the very act of preaching and proclaiming the Gospel. The Uniting Church confesses that the very integrity of the Gospel was diminished by the church’s failure to speak the truth about Australia’s First Peoples, and in the church’s complicity in dispossession.[2]

I want simply today to proclaim the Gospel with integrity. And to explore the way in which the proclamation of the Gospel can be both good and mournful news.

Our reading today from the latter part of Isaiah shows us how the proclamation of God to the world carries within it both goodness and mourning. This is a poem written out of the experience of exile, proclaiming hope for God’s people. In holding together both the experience of exile and the proclamation of hope this poem may help to guide us to appreciate the mourning we are recalled to today.

Scholars have suggested that this latter part of Isaiah was written towards the end of the Jewish people’s exile by the Babylonian empire – or perhaps during the period the Jewish people had newly returned to their homeland. This text, therefore, speaks out of an experience of people being stripped of their land, stripped of their identity, stripped of the cultural and religious practices that sustained their relationship to God. If we hear the words of Isaiah 62 as the words of a people trying to find their roots again in their own land, we may hear the solemn undertones of grief beneath the surface that talks of hope.

Isaiah speaks a word of hope on behalf of Zion, the land of the Jewish people, and a word of hope for Jerusalem.

“For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, | and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest | until her vindication shines out …” (v1)

It is important to note the focus of Isaiah’s hope: vindication. In pursuing vindication Isaiah does not simply hope that God’s people would be happy in their land. But Isaiah recalls the period of exile and suffering through which God’s people have come. Isaiah at this point refuses to understand the period of exile as a sign of failure or unfaithfulness, as a simple punishment from God. Vindication is the revelation that God’s people are justified, are right with God, and have remained faithful through their experience of dispossession. In setting up this song of hope with a focus on vindication Isaiah carries the history of his people into this song.

Isaiah’s hope is not abstract. It is not detached from reality. It does not look up to heaven and expect everything to be washed away. Isaiah’s hope is rooted in the survival of his people. Isaiah’s hope is rooted in resilience and return to land: in people who are faithful to God. (Faithful to a God who in turn is faithful, as in Psalm 36, whose steadfast love reaches from the land to the skies.)

That Isaiah forges his hope out of the experience of survival during the exile adds a solemn undertone to his hope:

“You shall no more be termed forsaken | and your land shall no more be termed desolate…” (v4)

For God’s people have been through the many years of forsakenness in exile, the land still bearing the marks of their dispossession and of desolation.

The newness of life and name that are heard in Isaiah’s song carries with it the memories and scars of the history of exile.

Isaiah, I suggest, teaches us about the solemn grief we are called to share with our indigenous brothers and sisters. By holding fast to the hope of God, but not allowing that hope to easily erase true and painful history.

Our indigenous brothers and sisters too have experienced dispossession. They too carry with them a history of pain, trauma, and suffering. Many were killed by the white settlers that built modern Australia. Many were subject to slavery, and slavery like conditions. Many were treated as little more than animals. Refused the basic rights that others enjoy: citizenship, voting rights, land rights. Children were stolen from first peoples. Our indigenous brothers and sisters have been shaped by experiences of survival. Experiences of forsakenness and desolation. We cannot erase this true and painful history.

And yet …

Can we hear the ancient words of Isaiah’s hope for our indigenous brothers and sisters? Can we bear a hope that refuses to see the suffering of first peoples as a just punishment? Can we bear a hope that does not erase solemn grief, and yet brings new life?

This is the task we recall ourselves to today. As we mark today as a day of mourning we are challenged by the hopeful song of Isaiah, that yet carries within itself solemn grief. We are challenged to ask ourselves what the hope of the Gospel might mean for our indigenous brothers and sisters. We are challenged to proclaim the Gospel with integrity.

The Gospel is the proclamation that in the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, Israel’s Messiah, the reign of God’s love has been established once and for all. This love is made visible through acts of mercy and justice. Through the Spirit we are empowered to faithfully participate in making this reign of love take root in this world. Like Isaiah we do not proclaim an abstract hope, detached from reality. But a hope rooted in the experiences of people who have suffered, people who have survived — and many who have not. We preach a hope that moves towards us in Christ, and catches us up in the movement of God in the world. We preach of a love the traverses chasms, and reconciles communities.

To proclaim this Gospel with integrity means we must commit ourselves anew to the experiences of our indigenous brothers and sisters. We must commit ourselves to hearing their stories. We must commit ourselves to telling the truth about our collective history.

In so doing we participate in the ever unfolding reality of God’s reign of love in the world.
Echoing Isaiah:

For Australia’s sake we must not keep silent, | and for the sake of our indigenous brothers and sisters we must not rest, | until their vindication shines out like the dawn …

We must learn to understand our Christian hope in the light of Isaiah. Pursuing concrete forms of love, through mercy and justice. Rooting our hope in the history and the land in which we find ourselves.

In this may we follow Christ to the cross, and be led to the hope of resurrection.

Amen.

[1] UCA Revised Preamble to the Constitution §3.

[2] UCA Preamble §5-6.

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13 January – Ends as Beginnings

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Baptism of the Lord
13/1/2019

Isaiah 43:1-7
Psalm 29
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

I imagine that many of us will know the celebrated words from TS Eliot’s “Four Quartets”: “In my beginning is my end” or, even better in expanded form: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from”.  The older we get the more this truth becomes apparent. When we are young, and without a perceived end, we have no real awareness of those moments when a recognisable beginning in time might be happening that is the start of what will consequently really shape our life. Only as our lives mature to their end do the apparently disconnected arbitrary events in the past begin to assume a focus. Only then do we become conscious in a real sense of a personal history that in hindsight is grasped as being inevitable. Beginning and end become one. Not only: “In my beginning is my end”, but, equally, we eventually come to understand that: “In my end is my beginning”.

What is true of the lives of each of us is absolutely the case of the gospel. We can’t be told too often how it is that the gospel takes shape, and how it is contrary to everything that we assume is the way things work: the conventional assumption that life moves from a beginning to an end has to give way to a much richer journey – a rear view mirror from an absolute finality to what was originally a beginning whose implications were not yet transparent. As Eliot tells us: “The end is where we start from”.

In liturgical language this means that Easter precedes Christmas.  Having lived all the years of our lives where the opposite is relentlessly absorbed, that babies come before adults, makes it all the more mandatory to register without any hint of contradiction that Easter precedes Christmas. Or, if you like why, in the chronology of the New Testament, the apostle Paul precedes the narratives of the Gospels.  That is to say, there is a period of at least thirty years that bridges the gap between the event of the experienced end of Jesus of which Paul is witness, and the accounts of the beginning for Jesus as that is unfolded in the Gospels. Indeed, this temporal hiatus is the very reason why the gospels were written.

All that the earliest Christians needed to know was Paul’s declaration of the continued presence of Jesus after his crucifixion. This end expressed the finality of the whole purpose of his coming. But as the first generation of Christians died, this message of Jesus’ end was in danger of being divorced from its beginning in his earthly ministry. Which explains why a theological biography needed to be constructed, and why we today have the narrative of Luke’s account of this beginning in the baptism of Jesus.

In that day there were at least three distinctive racial and religious communities; first, Jews living in Palestine; then diaspora Jews living in the Greek and Roman cultures; and finally, outright non-Jews, the Gentiles. Each community required a different explanation within their own framework of how the beginning of Jesus needed to be unfolded. “Within their own framework” is the operative phrase. That is why we learn everything we need to know of these differences when we take account of where each of the gospels frames the beginning of Jesus. The earliest Gospel Mark, wanting to show how it came to be that Jesus finished on a Cross, establishes Jesus’ baptism as that beginning. The next Matthew, writing for Christians previously Jews, constructs a genealogy dating Jesus’ origin from Abraham, their founding Father. Luke, the Gospel before us today writing for Gentile converts, constructs another genealogy, dating Jesus’ origin from Adam: Why Adam? Because Luke is writing a truly cosmic history – from its earliest human origin in the Gospel to its geographical conclusion in the Book of Acts, foreshadowed as it is in  the ascension mission mandate at the beginning: witness away to the “end of the world”, the pagan city of Rome as the absolute antithesis of the city of Jerusalem. And then, finally, the Gospel according to John grasps that Jesus’ real beginning cannot be dated as world history at all, but arises in the very life of God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”.

So today, on the first Sunday after Epiphany, we make a real beginning in hearing of Luke’s purpose of the cosmic Jesus for the world – his baptism. But immediately we are told that this baptism has a context. The crowds came to be baptised by John the Baptist, a baptism of repentance. We live in a culture that has moralised the word repentance virtually out of existence. Repentance for this, repentance for that – always for individual acts on a scale either trivial or devastating.

This is not what the Gospel intends. Here repentance is altogether a much more encompassing symbol. It is essentially a theological, not a moralistic, necessity. Repentance is perhaps best understood as the need to make a U turn with the whole of one’s life; to engage the oncoming reign of God for our life by facing the other way; by a turning to glimpse a lifegiving future, not a dead past. And it is just this vicarious baptismal repentance which Jesus shares with us, and this we are told before he does anything else at all. But then everything which follows his baptism falls into place. Each of the Gospels as they unfold demonstrates how his baptism, as an apparent beginning in time, has the Cross as its end. This means that his baptism already encompasses that end. There is a seamless connection between the beginning, his baptism, and his end on the Cross. “In my end is my beginning” Eliot proposes. And if this is the truth of our life, how much more is it also of the life of God. What greater identification of the life of God with the life of the world could be made than this ending of a beginning – the end of a cross of blood concealed in a water of baptism?

It is this same identification that has already been proposed when we hear Isaiah say to Israel: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine”. For Luke, Jesus in his baptism is reaffirming: “you are mine”. But wait. The presence of the crowd offers much more. His communal baptism foreshadows the embrace of all humanity; Isaiah’s prospective “east to the west, the north to the south” are already incorporated in the real beginning being made in Jesus’ baptism, which for him turns out to already encompass his end. It is a baptism into death, even death on a cross, but which will take another three years to be realised. In very truth, Eliot’s words are as true for God as they are for us. “What we call a beginning is … the end”.

It is learning about just this end which is revealed in the passage from Acts. As Luke unfolds the spread of the gospel into alien lands, here into Samaria, a territory half Jewish half Gentile, he reports that “they had only been baptised into the name of the Lord Jesus”. That is to say, theirs was only the sort of baptism offered by the Baptist – a real baptism of water, and hence a baptism of repentance, a turning in principle but without a fruitful promise. As such it had no future, being merely a truncated sort of baptism. It was only when Peter and John laid their hands on them that “they received the Holy Spirit”. It is the Spirit which opens up a future. It is the Spirit which accomplishes the U turn, which makes baptism effective as the sign of an accomplished end. It is only the Spirit who can make an end of a beginning.

And so it is for the Church down through the ages, and therefore for us too. We receive these readings on this the first Sunday after Epiphany, that is to say, after the revelation of the Jewish Jesus to his future home in the Gentile world – our world.  Epiphany is that period when the Church reflects on the manifestation of Christ to all people. This first manifestation is his baptism; the last manifestation of the period of Epiphany will be his transfiguration. They belong together. A baptism at his beginning; transfiguration, as a disclosing hint on the way to his ending.

In very truth – as Eliot asserted – the end for Jesus reveals the baptismal place where he began. In the same way, as those attempting to become disciples, will we too find ourselves, sooner or later, confessing: in his conferred end – now made my own – is my beginning –  a beginning which is also my end.

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6 January – Another Way

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Epiphany of the Lord
6/1/2019

Isaiah 60:1-6
Psalm 72
Matthew 2:1-12

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

“They left for their own country by another way”. Matthew 2:12

6 kilometres north west of Nazareth is a significant archaeological site. A few years before the birth of Jesus, Herod Antipas started to build his administrative centre at Sepphoris, a sort of Canberra in the Galilee. Before that, it had been a tiny village, said to be the home of Joachim and Anna, parents of Mary. If you are romantically inclined you might like to think that Joseph met Mary while he was working on the building of this new city. But that’s quite irrelevant to the point I want to make. Sepphoris was destroyed by an earthquake in 363. So it’s a time capsule spanning the period in which the early church lived. This is the picture that it gives. It was strongly Jewish. As a Roman city it cooperated with the punitive invasion Vespasian in 68 – 70 A.D. So Jews migrated there for safety. It was wealthy, as indicated by the exquisite mosaic floors in many villas. There was a large number of Gentiles, Roman officials, collaborators and traders. It was influenced by religions of the east, especially astrology, as indicated by the signs of the Zodiac on the floors of several first century synagogues. So a story about a star would go down well here.

No commentator actually suggests that Sepphoris was where Matthew wrote the gospel, but most agree it was near here, maybe across the border in Syria. See how the gospel, and this story of the Wise Men in particular, fit these characteristics. His 130 references to the Hebrew Scriptures would appeal to a Jewish audience. Unlikely foreigners, Gentiles, keep appearing unexpectedly. Gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh appeal to the wealthy, and a story about magi from the east following a star picks up on the connections to the east and the astrology.

Further internal evidence in the Gospel suggests that Matthew was writing for a congregation of Jewish Christians that was well established, but rather more concerned with their tradition than their mission. “Settled and content” says one commentator (Herman Waetjen), who then says that Matthew’s intent is to “unsettle, rather than endorse”. That is, he advocates “another way”. Look for example at the genealogy with which Matthew begins. It includes women, unusual women! They were foreigners, whose marriage involved scandal. There is Tamar, a Canaanite, Rahab another Canaanite and a harlot, the wife of Uriah the Hittite, Bathsheba (you all know about her), and Ruth, the Moabite, whose book we have just been studying. Straight down the line Hebrew matriarchs like Sarah and Rachel are overlooked.

Then we get the Magi, a recognised group in Eastern religions, a bit like alchemists in Medieval Europe, perhaps Zoroastrian priests, or maybe Persian shamans. Once you see this intent to challenge closed attitudes, you notice subtleties. For example, the Canaanite woman wanting the crumbs under the table shouts and is insistent in Matthew’s version, whereas in Luke she bows and is respectful. Or the centurion at the cross who proclaims “This man was the Son of God”. In Luke it is the centurion only, but in Matthew it is the “centurion and all those with him”. It all builds up to the grand finale, the great commandment that closes the gospel “Go and make disciples of all nations”. Show them another way.

When you read this story of the Magi, read it as a beautiful, if challenging, image. Some open-minded strangers see a light, a shining star, and they follow it. It is a difficult journey. “A cold coming we had of it. Just the worst time of year for a journey”. These were the opening words of Lancelot Andrews sermon around 1610, and which T.S. Eliot picked up in his poem “The Journey of the Magi”. The difficult journey crossed barriers of race and religion, it side stepped cultural norms and social status. It avoided government interference. It ends up with them going another way. But the centre of the story is sacrificial worship at the manger of the Christ child.

I began to tick off these characteristics in relation to Mark the Evangelist.

  1. We honour our tradition, especially in our worship. “Lift up your hearts” is attested as early as 252 A.D. by Cyprian. It works on 2 levels. We rise above the mundane to the sacramental, and we are united with Christians through the ages.
  2. We are on a hard journey where the development of our property is concerned.
  3. A large part of the work of Hotham Mission is with Moslem immigrants, many from the East, well, the Middle East.
  4. We have a vision, a star to follow, even a vision statement at the beginning of the Mission’s Strategic Plan

“Out of the goodness of God’s creation and in response to God’s continuing acts and promises to all, our vision is for abundant life in which our mission may be restorative and transformative, constantly responding to the gospel hope of cosmic reconciliation”.

  1. The Mission goes another way by not accepting any government funding, and in so doing has cut quite a lot of the red tape imposed by both state and church .
  2. And the central focus is always on the presence of Christ. There is now a cross and an icon on the meeting room wall in the cottage as well as the Christian symbols of font, table (Sacrament) and lectern (Word) here in the church.

As I ticked off so many good points I began to feel rather smug. It was then that I realised that the purpose Matthew has in mind is to disturb a church that is settled and smug. Perhaps our vision could be wider. After all there are many shining lights out there.

Let me tell you about one I saw in Ethiopia. In the town of Bahar Dar we visited one of the five Fistula hospitals now operating in Ethiopia. Catherine Hamlin, now in her 90’s, went there as a young doctor and saw the plight of women with this problem. She began to treat them, and witnessed the way these outcast women were restored to their families and villages with dignity and purpose. The work grew, and grew. First a specialist hospital, then another and another, till last year (2018) 5 doctors trained at the main hospital in Addis Adaba in order to help women in Madagascar, Ghana, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

There are many such stars shining: The Christmas Bowl supports some. The National Council of Churches is putting new energy into the fight against modern slavery. There is a glimmer of hope that Australia might recognise the Nuclear Ban Treaty.

The Magi followed a star, opened their treasure chests, worshipped with costly gifts, and found another way.

We read their story on the first Sunday in Epiphany. An epiphany is to see yourself as you are and then catch a vision of what you might become. There is always another way. When you see the light, follow the star, and become.

We are also at the beginning of a new calendar year, a time of refreshment and resolution. Don’t let your stars disappear with the fireworks. As a congregation Matthew speaks to us as a community. He honours the tradition, challenges our self-satisfaction, points to the real source of light and commands us to go into all the world – to find another way.

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