Category Archives: Sermons

9 September – On being careful what you pray for

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Pentecost 16
9/9/2018

1 John 5:14-21
Psalm 146
Mark 7:24-37

In a sentence:
We pray for those things for which the church gives thanks

There is to be a lot – again – going on in our reading today. While I’ll focus on just one aspect of the passage, I suspect that the point drawn from that illuminates the other seemingly problematic and challenging assertions John makes here. I’ll leave the work of finding that illumination to the hearers and readers of what I do say!

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Conventional wisdom has it that we ought to be careful what we pray for, lest we actually get it.

The point here – not often made explicit – is that we don’t know what to pray for, that we don’t see clearly enough our confusions about our needs, and so we shoot prayer off in the wrong direction.

What, then, should we pray for, keeping in mind that our answer must be a specifically Christian one, springing from of what we know about the God who deals with us in Jesus? John helps us with this in our final text from his first letter today: pray for those things which are ‘according to God’s will’.

Immediately, of course, the question arises, What then does God will? Again, John helps: we have heard over and over in our meandering through the letter that God wills only one thing which might be expressed in two ways: that we believe that Jesus is the Son, that we love one another.

Put differently, God wills reconciliation, for this is the substance of God’s work in Jesus and of the life of love we are to live. We pray for reconciliation because reconciliation is what God does, what God gives. Praying for something which God does not give – the answer to the exam question, the parking spot in front of the bank or even, perhaps, the long and happy life – is not prayer in the Christian sense.

It is God’s will that the world be reconciled to God and to itself, and it is this for which we are to pray. The absence of such Godly reconciliation is seen in human hubris and selfishness; it is seen in the fear of our creaturely mortality and the denial of the life of the body; it is seen in the borders and the ‘-isms’ which drive us apart. To pray according to the will of God is to pray that those things be taken away which divide us from God, from each other, and from peace with ourselves.

Prayer is, then, ultimately not prayer that this or that thing happen or not happen – it is not a kind of spiritual technology for getting things done. Prayer is our stand against sin and its divisive effect. (In passing, we might note that John moves directly from the affirmation about prayer to praying for sinners).

More specifically, Christian prayer is prayer that we never despair, that we never collapse into action or attitude which expresses that, in the end, not the God who raises the dead but some other is Go – perhaps Death itself. The sin against which we pray is not naughtiness; it is the false perception of who really is God, and so the wrong conviction about where hope really lies. The final verse of John’s letter, ‘Keep yourselves from idols,’ seems to hang rather strangely from nothing in the text unless we see that it is as much a remark about what prayer is, as it is about who we are to pray to.

We can never know in advance precisely what prayer for reconciliation sound like, for it springs from a particular situation. Yet the basic orientation of a Christian’s prayer is given in the established prayers of the church. Specifically, if we want to know what to pray for, we look to what it is for which the church gives thanks. This is because when the church gives thanks as the church, it does so in its priestly function in the world. The church responds on behalf of the world to what God gives to the world: the promise and ongoing work towards the reconciliation of all things with God.

The thanksgiving prayer of the church sits at the centre of its liturgy – at least its theological centre, even if it might be the first prayer in a particular liturgy. This prayer ‘controls’ the other prayers of the service, which either lead up to the thanksgiving, or follow from it. In our liturgy here at MtE, thanksgiving features principally in the ‘great prayer’ of the Eucharist (‘the Eucharist’ means, from Greek, ‘the Thanksgiving’).  This prayer gives an account of gift of creation and the gift of salvation.

The familiar Great Prayer from Uniting in Worship – heard often enough here and in other Uniting Churches – runs like this:

Thanks and praise, glory and honour are rightly yours,
our Lord and God,
for you alone are worthy.

In time beyond our dreaming
you brought forth life out of darkness,
and in the love of Christ your Son
you set man and woman at the heart of your creation.
We thank you that you called a covenant people
to be a light to the nations.
Through Moses you taught us to love your law,
and in the prophets you cried out for justice.

In the fullness of your mercy
you became one with us in Jesus Christ,
who gave himself up for us on the cross.
You make us alive together with him,
that we may rejoice in his presence
and share his peace.

By water and the Spirit
you open the kingdom to all who believe,
and welcome us to your table:
for by grace we are saved, through faith.

This might be said in any number of ways but the point today is not to thanksgiving it itself. Rather, we are to see in it the clue as to what we are to pray for – those things which the prayer declares God gives. We are to pray that the thanksgiving of the Great Prayer be truly our thanksgiving, that our lives be lived in the assurance of that reconciliation with God, with ourselves and in ourselves that the prayer names.

We will all, at times, be poor, sick, hurt, disappointed, oppressed, afraid or guilty. The words we say in our prayer will be expressed in these terms, although we may not receive what we asked for in the terms we asked, because brokenness does not define wholeness.

The basic prayer of the church on behalf of the world is that God be ours, and we be God’s: your kingdom come, your will be done – earth be heaven. Another biblical writer in the family of John put the object of prayer this way: that the home of God be among mortals,
that he will dwell with them;
that they be his peoples,
and God himself be with them;
that he wipe every tear from their eyes; that Death will be no more; nor mourning or crying or pain (c.f. Revelation 21.3f).

Whatever it is which causes us to turn to God in prayer, this is the substance of what we pray for, and it is no mean prayer.

The guarantee of God’s response to this prayer is that it is God’s own desire that it be so, and that God gives us what he desires for us.

Let us, then, meet God’s desire with our own, and pray as he wills, that all which God has to give us will indeed be ours.

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2 September – Having life

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Pentecost 15
2/9/2018

1 John 5:9-13
Psalm 15
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

In a sentence:
Love is defined in the coming of the Son in Jesus

Christian faith has an extraordinary capacity to become its opposite, at least in the hands of Christians. We have seen this recently in the scandals about cover-ups of child sexual abuse in the churches. We can see it also less dramatically but no less seriously in understandings of how God deals with us.

Consider, for example, John’s declaration this morning: “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (5.12). This, with a good number of similar verses in the New Testament, is a matter of scandal even in many churches. The scandal is the exclusivity it seems to imply: that only those who ‘have’ Jesus have life. This seems obviously to be wrong on account what we’ve just noted – that Christian confession is no guarantee of moral righteousness. And even when this isn’t the case, it seems seriously wrong to suggest that only those who know and confess Jesus ‘have life’, that there are not other ways to life.

Often posited over against the notion that ‘having’ Jesus is the only way to life is the confession that ‘God is love’. God’s love is felt to ‘supersede’ any requirement of confession that Jesus is the Son, to overcome the limited scope for life which knowing and confessing Jesus seems to imply.

The irony is that it is the same John who tells us both that only those who have Jesus have life and that God is love. We address any embarrassment about the need for confessing Jesus only if we force a split right down the middle of John’.

We might believe we have good reason for this, that we can see more we know than John could. But, then, we cannot then sensibly appeal to John’s declaration that God is love. For to do this would be to turn Christian faith into its opposite, no less so than when the church covers up the abuse of innocents for the sake of its own good name.

This inversion, this making-opposite, is in that what we do here is turn the statement ‘God is love’ into a premise – a starting place – rather than a conclusion.

For John, ‘God is love’ is a conclusion. Love is nothing other than what God does, and the central, fundamental thing God does is send the Son in the person of Jesus that we might live through him (4.9,10). John’s ‘take home’ message is not so much ‘God is love’ but what we’ve heard him emphasise a number of times now – that the crucified human being Jesus is the divine Son. That this is the case – or at least the confession – is the meaning of ‘God is love’.

‘God is love’, then, cannot ‘correct’ any overemphasis the connection between Christian confession and having life. For John, having life is what comes with seeing that the crucified Jesus is the Son; life is not some other thing than this. Love is what the cross means and does, as the very cross of God in the Son.

It is, in fact, not clear how the cross does this. There is no divine equation or formula or recipe which shows how the cross of God saves. John knows only that it does save, does bring life.

And so it is at least clear what the cross means. It means life: a life founded on the cross as an act of love. For John, this life springs from, and so looks like, love.

Our anxiety with John’s connection of ‘having’ the Son with ‘life’ – including ‘eternal’ life – comes from our concern for the lovely – those whom we love – and our concern for the loving – those in whom we see good things. That is, in rejecting John’s connection life with Jesus, we make judgements: this one deserves love, deserves life, because of what we see and judge to be of value in him or her.

The declaration that God is love, however, is not a judgement about anything in you or me. We want to say: if we are valuable, then God will love us. John says, God loves us – we must be valuable. Nowhere in John or in the gospel as a whole is love bound up with judgement. Nowhere is there an ‘If this (the condition) then love (the judgement)’.

Love is, rather, judgement overcome. ‘God is love’ does not supersede the confession of Jesus as Lord; it is the meaning of it. The two things are the different ways of saying the same point.

And so we are not to judge the love of others, or their loveliness – for better or for worse. We are to love them, as God has loved us, because it is in this kind of love that God is met, that we have life.

This life is not a thing we have earned, and so not a possession we hold; it is a common-wealth. It creates, it transforms, it connects – to God, to others.

To have the Son is to have life in all its fullness. It is to see life not in effort and reward, not in what we hold to be lovely, but in need met with gift. The need is very great; the sign of our need is Good Friday. The gift is even greater: it is Easter’s transformation of Good Friday from our judgement of God into life together beyond judgement, life on God’s own terms.

Imagine what ‘Life together beyond judgement’ would look like. Imagine what it would look like in the family, in the work place, in the church, across divisive borders, across racial and gender divides.

To ‘have’ the Son, to confess that Jesus is Lord, is to have begun to imagine such things, and to live them, because Jesus is where our own experience of love without judgement has begun. Discovering this, and then exploring what it means in the lives we are given to live, is the meaning of ‘God is love,’ something which we speak only in hope as we ‘prove’ it in testing and demonstration.

Our faith does not divide us from others, neither does it place us above or before them. It turns us towards them, that the life we are discovering in God might be uncovered by them also.

To ‘have the Son’ is to have work to do. This is life.

Let us, then, live that work, that the world may know…

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26 August – The Ten Commandments: Old Prescriptions in a Culture without purpose

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Pentecost 14
19/8/2018

Deuteronomy 5:1-6
Psalm 19
Matthew 5:17-20

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

Confusing one’s own state of mind with the state of the world is one of the professional hazards of a certain sort of preacher. However, one is not alone today in asserting that, together with other Western cultures, we inhabit a world dedicated to a flight from truth. Some characteristic marks of cultures in decline are these: an ideology of relativism with regard to all claims for truth; inward self-protection from a questioning of the socially approved status quo; a secular religion which worships choice above everything; the cultivation of detachment from ultimate claims.

Why then bother with commandments from a world long gone?

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Deuteronomy 5:6:  “Then God spoke all these words: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery…..’

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More than one hundred years ago, the British novelist and poet, Rudyard Kipling wrote these lines:

“Ship me somewhere east of Suez where the best is like the worst, where there ain’t no ten commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst”.

Kipling’s implication is that west of Suez, that is, in what we then called Christendom, there was no getting away from the Ten Commandments. Culturally, if not geographically, Australians, too, have been very much “west of Suez”. Then, if not now, nearly everyone throughout the Empire knew about the Ten Commandments, and a great many people could recite them by heart. They were included and explained in Church catechisms taught to children; they were read at the beginning of every communion service. And not only were they impressed on the ear, but also the eye as well. Many were the Churches in which the Ten Commandments looked everyone in the face as they sat in the pews. So it is that until about seventy years ago it was impossible for churchgoers to be ignorant of them, and even non-churchgoers who rejected Christian doctrine would largely not have dreamt of rejecting their moral claims, at least in theory if not always in practice.

Not so today. Even influential clerics pour scorn on them. Their purported irrelevance, and their virtual eclipse, is undoubtedly due to the increasing secularisation of our society, whereby everything to do with “religion” has been banished to the domain of a private experience. Another reason, perhaps more alive in intentional Christian circles, is the idea that “the law of Moses” has been superseded by “the law of Christ”. And there is truth in this claim. A well-known saying of Martin Luther that “each Christian must write one’s own ten commandments” has been understood to mean that Christians are free to substitute for those long received more or less what they like, whereas Luther actually meant that Christians are free to hear the commandments as gospel rather than cold, external law. In other words, Christians are free to obey the commandments rather than knowing themselves required to obey them.

It is indeed unfortunate that the Ten Commandments have come to be associated with the English word “law”, with its many meanings. If we use the word “law” in Christian language we should understand law as the Bible does, not as our judicial systems do. The word “law” has traditionally been the English word employed to translate the Hebrew word Torah, but Torah means the first five books of the Old Testament, not simply these ten commandments. The original meaning of “Torah” then is not so much “law” as it is “instruction”.  Torah really stands for the whole revelation of God – all that has made known the nature, character and purpose of God as the basis for what as a consequence we must be and do.

This is clear from the introduction to the Ten Commandments as we encounter them in this fifth chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy: “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb….” (Chapter 5: 2). We then go on to hear how this covenant, although made with a significantly earlier generation of the Hebrews, is still being made effective “with us who are all of us here alive this day” (v.3). The substance of this covenantal promise is then given in the preface to the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt and of the House of Bondage” (v.6). It is to this covenantal reality that the law is then unfolded in the shape of the Ten Commandments.

Although not present in the Hebrew text, the consequential sense for all the ten that follow this introduction is an implied: ‘Therefore…’.  For this reason, on each occasion in the future that we make our way attempting to mine the import of these ten injunctions, we must as a reminder insert this crucial word therefore between the promise and the command. The point is that everything that can go wrong will go wrong when this introduction is passed over as if it has no interpretive force. To detach the commandments from their grounding in this event of deliverance, which is how they are inevitably heard today, is guaranteed to lead to a devastating misunderstanding.  They are then required to stand without any context in all their forbidding starkness.

Of course, it is only common sense to grasp that for the protection of common life any society must abide by a set of agreed rules. In this respect there is nothing novel about the latter half of the table of the commandments, which can be found in similar form in the law code of the Babylonian king Hammurabi, at least six centuries before Israel’s founding. But there they stand without this liberating introduction before us today. Everything, then, hinges on its force: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out ….”

The fact is that the commandments exist to make clear to the people of Israel exactly what is involved in the covenant, and to maintain that relationship of God with his people. Through the commandments, a practice is appointed for a way of life for Israel different from that of any other people on earth. In other words, Israel’s God does not intend to leave this people to follow its own devices, nor to work out its own destiny.

This foundation to the giving of “the Law” has not been readily understood by us, and it certainly wasn’t understood by the people of Israel. Time and again, we hear how they gave themselves to ever new and more grievous forms of slavery than that which they had left in Egypt, that living symbol of the despots by which people then, as now, are enslaved. The commandments, therefore, are ingredient in the promise of the Covenant for Israel, and in turn for us:  that the God, who calls a representative people into being, has left neither nations nor individuals in a state of bondage, or of hopeless moral confusion.

Indeed we can go further and embrace these commandments as our best protection against all the unjust commandments that might be foisted upon us by unscrupulous manipulators, by despotic governments, by insidious media pressure groups of all persuasions who seek to control the lives of others for their own purposes. On the strength of these commandments we can say “No” both to the unruly passions and desires that seek to tyrannise over us from within, and to all dictators who seek to tyrannise us from without.

If this understanding of the commandments is news to some people, then it must surely be “good news”. To say again: to wrench the Ten Commandments out of their context, leaving them standing only in their cold authoritarian isolation, is completely to miss the point. It means that they will inevitably become graceless, and therefore destructive, because they will lead either to pride or despair. And then, probably at the same time, they will serve as instruments of silent judgement over others.

The truth is this. At no time does God ever intend that law without grace be a means of salvation for people. This must be one of the hardest conclusions for serious and sensitive human beings to accept. We have so often been told, and thereby assumed, that by trying harder, by erecting more and more safeguards against the infringement of the law, there is still hope for us. But this is the ancient heresy of Pharisaism, though it is not at all peculiar to the Pharisees.

Pharisees are simply the representatives of all forms of religious and moral legalism. Not until it sinks in how extraordinarily good the Pharisees were – and they are usually made out to be unpleasant – will we appreciate the difference between the hopeless justification that they represent on the one hand, and, on the other, a hopeful justification for all.

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says: “Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the Pharisees you shall never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:17-20).  How revolutionary is that judgement. “Exceed” here means not “more of the same”, but the need to run on quite different tracks. Only by such a fundamental diversion will the promise of the Sermon be realised: “I have not come to abolish the law and the prophets, I have come to fulfil them”. And what a fulfilment! For here is the old commandment made flesh. Here in dramatic concreteness is the law rightly lived, Here we find each commandment – inevitably in every generation either rejected or fired as a constrictive weapon – now beautifully and graciously embodied and lived.  Here is One whose being from beginning to end is marked by the law. Born under the law, he lived and taught under the law, and was crucified under the law ostensibly for the sake of obedience to the covenant between God and Israel. And it is by this perfect obedience that he shows the meaning of the fulfilment of the law, and therefore the meaning of life.  As the apostle Paul confirms: in Christ all the commandments of God are fulfilled as a resounding “Yes”.

As we approach each of these Ten Commandments in turn, it is in this graceful grounding that their meaning and fulfilment is to be found. To this end, we note how the Gospel of Matthew announces that Jesus teaches the Sermon on the Mount only to his disciples. Just as Yahweh of old calls his people out of the bondage of Egypt to the life of promise and destiny of which the commandments are sign, so the new “Israel” here is called on another mountain by a new Moses – called out of the bondage of the religious law to a life where the law becomes grace, active, fruitful, life giving.

But let us not overlook this. The sermon is uttered in the presence of the crowd. The point of this scenario is to make clear that literally any apparent outsider is free at any time to become a disciple. This should not be a surprise. Even before Moses and this covenantal pledge introducing the commandments, Abraham was promised a similar outcome: that through his obedience “all the nations of the earth will bless themselves”. The point is that the covenants, old and new, with their accompanying commandments, are for the sake of a world blessed. God and the world, here as everywhere, always belong together.

May it be so for our day too. Embraced by this promise, we will then find ourselves properly prepared to embark on this tenfold journey of freedom to a promised land.

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19 August – Conquering the world

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Pentecost 13
19/8/2018

1 John 5:1-12
Psalm 34
John 6:51-58

In a sentence:
Love conquers the world by
winning it over

We sometimes get the sense that theological specialists get a little het up from time to time on matters of precision and correctness in faith. I’m probably not immune to such a charge myself. Why bother with the language of the Creeds, with doctrinal precision, with correct liturgical structure?

As a way towards answering this, let’s consider the theological intensity in the middle of our reading this morning from 1 John: ‘[Jesus Christ] is the one who came by water and blood…not with the water only but with the water and the blood.’

If nothing else, this is dense theology. It is neither immediately clear what it means nor why it matters. At the same time, John insists on it, rabidly, foaming at the mouth: this really does matter. There was obviously some controversy in John’s community about ‘the blood’, and whether or not belief in ‘the blood’ had to be added to belief in the ‘the water’. Perhaps the most likely scenario is something like this: there was an argument about whether or not the redeemer – the Son of God – was present in the baptism of Jesus only (the water, or the waters of birth [cf. John 3]), or whether he has also present in the death of Jesus (the blood).[1] What seems to be at stake is the relationship between ‘Jesus’ and ‘the Son of God’.

That is, John defends here what we now call the doctrine of the Incarnation – the meeting of God and the world in the human being Jesus of Nazareth. Yet, if this makes sense of the statement, we must then wonder about the next thing: why does the Incarnation matter?

As far as John is concerned, the doctrine matters not for its own sake but for its crucial pastoral implication: it is those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God (that is, who believe Jesus came ‘in the water and the blood’) who ‘conquer the world’.

‘Conquering the world’ is perhaps not the best way of putting it for modern ears anxious about histories of colonisation and so on, but we get the point if we invert John’s way of putting it: it is those who believe in the meeting of Jesus and the Son – in the ‘water and the blood’ – who are not conquered by the world. ‘The world’ is here anything which might constitute a threat to us – the fears in our love, as we considered them last week. To believe that Jesus was the Son is to get a grip on the world, rather than be gripped by it.

This is so because the world ceases to be a place which comes between us and God – and so between us and our true selves; the world becomes the place where God is met and embraces us. In the person of Jesus God meets with the real world, as lived by a real person in time and space, with all its joys and sorrows.

We declare this each week in our recitation of the Creeds: Jesus is ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’… residing in, coinciding with, ‘was born…suffered…was buried.’ This is not mere doctrine; it is a way of saying that true God and true world can meet. The Creed declares that such a meeting has happened, and it is the hope of all who say the Creed that this will happen again.

And so the Jesus of the gospel is not a solitary individual, a tool in the hand of God, a means to some divine end. He is a real person engaged with other persons. His death is not mere mortality or tragedy, and it is – again (see July 29 sermon!) – not something God demands. The cross is a failure of the world to bear God – a rejection of such a presence of God to the world.

A sad philosopher once observed that ‘hell is other people’. It would have to be said that this was the experience of the crucified Jesus, because it was only by other people that he found himself on the cross; the physical suffering of the cross represented the suffering of the conflict endured throughout his ministry.

But the point of his ministry, and the point of John’s preaching through this dense and circular little letter, was to declare just the opposite: that heaven, also, is other people. This is why – as we saw last week – the love of whatever in the world it is appropriate to love can be the love of God – our love of God and God’s love of us. Our presence to God and God’s presence to us ‘looks like’ loving one another.

We do not believe ‘in the Incarnation’ as a thing which happened. The thing which happened, we believe, is the defining instance of God’s en‑fleshing of himself in our very lives, and this matters for the continuing shape of our lives. To believe that Jesus was the divine Son is not so much to ‘conquer’ the world with right doctrine as it is to declare what the world truly is: a vessel – even ourselves – which God has created to fill with himself.

To believe that Jesus – even ‘in the blood’ of the cross – is ‘true God of true God’ in the world is to believe that there is nowhere in the world which is alien to God, nothing which cannot be raised from the dead.

This is why we are to love not only the lovely but also those who it seems even love would do little good. Such love always seems wasteful, always appears as a throwing of good after bad. But this is not to say that such love is then an expression of kindness or compassion. As a throwing of good after bad, in the manner of God’s own work, our love of the unlovely is an experiment in resurrection. Is there really a passion stronger than death, as Solomon puts it in the Song of Songs (Songs 8.6)? A ‘Yes’ to this question is what marks the Christian.

The world, then, in its constant turn towards deathly things, is not conquered for the sake of the conqueror – whether us or God. It is conquered for its own sake. For the weapon in this struggle is love, and love conquers as much for the beloved as for the lover. God, then, does not conquer the world so much as reach out to gather it to himself; for the closer the world is to God, the more it is what God intended it to be.

This is the promise of the gospel.

And we ‘prove’ the promise – in the double proving of testing and demonstrating – in the love we show to those in need of it.

Once again, then, let us love one another. For nothing else will help.

[1] This occurs elsewhere in John; cf. John 3, where a contrast is drawn between being born of ‘water and the (s)Spirit’. There is also the reference in John 19.34f: ‘one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth.)’ That is it necessary to emphasise the truth of this indicates that the matter was very important in the understanding (and debates) in Johannine community.

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12 August – How to love God

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Pentecost 12
12/8/2018

1 John 4:10-12, 16b-21
Psalm 34
John 6:35, 41-51

In a sentence:
The love of God is always concrete and tangible – the love of our human neighbour

A few weeks back I preached on ‘God’s unnecessary love’, trying to indicate how there is nothing compelled about God’s love. Today, the shape of our love for God. Once again, John’s first letter informs this thought.

‘There is no fear in love’, John asserts, ‘perfect love casts out fear. The fear which might confound love is of two kinds. The most obvious is the fear of losing the thing we love. Trivially, this is fear for the new toy – fear of a scratch on the new car, shattering the screen on the new phone, or having our nice things burgled while on holiday. More significantly, of course, we fear losing the child, the parent, the spouse, the job, the house, the reputation.

For those of us who hold that there is a just God, it is the loss of the object of love which gives rise to the questions of theodicy – is God righteous, given that such loves, such valuable things can be lost? How can injustice and disorder like this – such contradictions of all we thought God promised – be ‘allowed’ to happen?

The fear to which John refers in his ‘no fear in love’ is not quite the fear of loss, but it is related. This is the second fear associated with love: the fear that we might be found to have loved the wrong thing. Here the emphasis is not as much on the loving as on the being found – being dis‑covered, exposed, judged for loving what is not the final object or goal of ‘true’ love. Those who love truly, John says, do not fear judgement.

(As an aside: This connection of fear and love is quite different from fear of losing what we love. We lose our beloved for ‘natural’ reasons, for reasons beyond our control: accidents, theft or simple mortality. John’s fear of judgement is a fear related to our choices – what we bring about, not what happens to us. This is the fear of having contravened some kind of implicit or explicit commandment, of having misunderstood or deliberately chosen against the order of things.)

Again, there are greater and lesser versions of this love-fear. At the softer end, this might be fear of judgement because I dress differently from the masses, or that I believe in God when most don’t (or the other way around), or that I refuse to eat meat (to the unhappy inconvenience of my omnivorous family and friends).

More substantially, it might be that I refuse to answer a conscription call up because of pacifist convictions, or the fear of retribution when I become the whistle blower. The particular concern of John is the question of judgement before God: love does not fear God’s righteous judgement for having done the wrong thing, for having loved the wrong thing.

With this second reference to righteousness, we can now see the relationship between the two love-fears. In the first love-fear we fear the absence of justice, the loss of what we love. In the second love-fear, we fear the presence of justice, the loss of ourselves if we have loved wrongly.

Love, then, is not the simple thing we often imagine or declare it to be. The pathos of human love is that it fears both the absence and the presence of the justice of God, as we seem usually to understand that justice. Love – the most natural thing to arise in us, and so the thing most naturally expected of us – turns out to be fraught. Our loves and our fears constantly pose the question, Is this right, Will it be right, Does love end?

If love as we usually know it is fraught in this way, what does John’s ‘perfection in love’ look like?

Surprisingly, perfected love doesn’t look like ‘loving’ God in any internal or spiritualised sense.  John never calls us to love God. In fact, he seems to back away from saying this:

4.10 In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.

That is, John does not say here, ‘we ought to love God,’ which would be the more natural complement to the declaration that God has loved us. He does recognise that it makes sense to speak of loving God (e.g. 4.20f, 5.2) but there is no imperative to love God as if this were in any way separable from the love of others, or even prior to such ‘neighbourly’ love.

Perhaps more to the point, John does not allow that our love of God is a kind of invisible ‘spiritual’ counterpart to visible ‘embodied’ love in human relationships. God’s love is entirely concrete: the sending of the Son and the rehabilitation of the cross (on this ‘rehabilitation’ see the July 29 sermon). Our love for God is also entirely concrete: loving the brother, the sister, the neighbour. Love always looks like something – even the love of God. Love is always embodied. The perfected love which does not fear looks like the love of those in need of love.

If there is fear in our love, then, John implies that it is because we do not yet love in this concrete way, and not because we have not yet sufficiently trusted God. That is, our love for God is incomplete, and so our sense of safety in God, because we do not yet love the ones close to us: ‘If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us’, John says.

Yet, even this can be too abstract. Perhaps strangest of all here is that love might look like coming to church. This is not because at church you ‘learn how to love’; such basics are learned elsewhere. It is because ‘church’ is a concrete and specific community which ties us down. For love, in being embodied, is also tied, bound. It is often noted, in critique, that in the letters and in the gospel of John, the focus of human love is not on the ‘neighbour’ (as in the synoptics) but on the sister, the brother, of the Christian communion. This looks embarrassingly ‘in house’ and self-interested. Yet John’s focus makes love very specific and concrete – not the love of anyone who might or might not cross our paths, who might or might not be the person I’m supposed to love, but the person to whom God binds me – the one who also claims to be claimed by God.

For, if nothing else, coming to church binds us strangely to each other. We are not natural family here, not tribal connection. And so this is a place where love’s fears might be challenged in learning to love those we would not normally love, simply because they refuse to go away. It is only in this way that love grows and thickens, and the fears in love begin to diminish because we see that love finds a way.

There is no fear in love. Or, put positively, love is fearless – God’s love, and so the love to which we are called. The fearlessness of love is not in its courage but in its indiscriminateness. Love is not a choice, it is a call which takes the form of the person sitting next you to, or who lives behind you, or who shares your office.

John’s declaration that ‘We love because God first loved us’ is not an explication of how we have come to love God. It is a statement of mission, of how to love God: we become God’s love for us in the love of sister, brother, neighbour.

To say it then, for the umpteenth time in our reflections on John’s letter, Let us be fearless in our love another, for this is what it means to love God. Amen.

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5 August – The spacious God

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Pentecost 11
5/8/2018

1 John 4:13-16
Psalm 78
John 6:24-35

In a sentence
God does not have context but is a context

Believers generally have in common with unbelievers a sense of where God would be, if God were anywhere. What is held in common here is not the particular place or time of God, but the thought that God might be ‘there’ – anywhere – at all.

‘There-ness’ – a location – seems a sensible thing to propose about God. Our religious language is loaded with this assumption: God is ‘in heaven’. It doesn’t matter precisely where heaven is, only that it has an implied ‘there’ which matches our ‘here’. With more sophistication, we might say God is in the ‘future’ – a ‘there’ which matches here-and-now. Or, more lamentably, God might be in the past – yet another ‘there’ which is located in relation to here.

Of course, that God is somewhere is how belief tends to put it. Unbelief understands where God might be in the same way, and simply asserts that, in fact, God is not in any such place.

Yet, the real difference between belief and unbelief is not that belief insists that God is there and that unbelief insists that God is not. The difference between belief and unbelief is that one holds that God does not have a ‘where’, and the other holds that God must have. Perhaps it will come as a surprise that I say that it is unbelief that holds that God must be somewhere, to be ‘related’ to, if God is to be all. Belief – Christian, trinitarianly-informed belief – does not require God to be ‘anywhere’.

How can this be so? The problem with a God who is ‘somewhere’ is that such a God tends to be either too small or too big.

Such a God is too small because if God exists in a space, there must be space ‘around’ God – a not-God space. So if, as believers like to do, we were to ‘meet’ this God, it would be like meeting a friend in a café: indeed we meet, but neither of us is the café. The meeting space – the ‘café’ – is a kind of ‘neutral’ zone in which we and God meet; think of God meeting Adam and Eve in the Garden after the Apple Incident.[1] The difference between the believer and the unbeliever on this understanding is that the unbeliever knows that she can drink coffee on her own and that sometimes coffee is better that way. Whether God is ‘there’ or not becomes a matter of mood and taste.

This is not a God to be taken seriously, which is why unbelievers and believers alike do not. Unbelievers don’t take such a God seriously because moods come and go but taste is eternal, and they have no taste for God.

Why believers don’t take the small God-in-a-space seriously is seen in the way that this God seems to want to grow bigger, threatening to take up too much space. We feel this whenever we sense that we are in competition with God for our lives in the world. When we rationalise to ourselves why we should be able to do or say as we would like – despite what someone might tell us God requires – we seek to limit God to God’s own proper space. Believers also find that coffee is often better enjoyed alone.

The God who is ‘there’ – the God ‘to’ whom we might relate at a place between ourselves and God – begins to look not much different from a questionable moral upbringing, a nagging conscience, a cultural formation which might have been different – an isolatable, dismissible thing.

But the properly Christian confession is that there is no space ‘around’ God. God does not have a context, has nothing by which to locate him. God, rather, is a context. God has no ‘where;’ God is a ‘where’. And this brings us, finally, to our reading from 1 John this morning and once more to John’s language of ‘abiding.’

We noted John’s interest in abiding a few weeks ago. We focussed then particularly on where we abide: the options we have to locate ourselves, and the call to rest in the present, in God. Our thinking this morning about the ‘where’ of God touches upon God’s abiding: Where does God abide?

The only answer of interest to the church is that which John gives: in us.

God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. 16…God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. 

God is not located abstractly in space or time, to go to or come away from as we or God choose. There is no Godless place from which God might be absent, or to which God might then become present. God is located in relation to us: where we are, there is God.

This is dangerous talk, of course, on account of the risk that we now turn God into what we are. This becomes not ‘God is love’ but ‘love is God’: how we love being how God loves. If we cordon off your community or bulldoze your homes, if we strand you on a distant island, or beat you, or limit your options for a full life, it is because God requires it, and this is God’s love for you.

This is not the faith of the church. To say that God abides only in relation to us is not to say that whatever we manifest is the manifestation of God. But it is to say that we need a shift in the metaphors which dominate how we think about our relationship to God. The metaphor of God in a space is what gives us the notion that God ‘sends’ – sends the Son, sends the Spirit, sends the church in mission. This gives us the notion that there are places where God is not, and that God comes to meet us or we go to take God somewhere new. This is the possibility of the heresy against which John writes – that the world, the body of Jesus, is not a place God can inhabit.

But let’s take up the thought from a moment ago – that God does not have a context but is a context. This is to say that God is not in a space but is, rather, spacious. God is not in the world somewhere; the world is in God.

It might not look that way, but this would change how we experience the world and what we understand the call of God to be. The world ceases to be a godless place; it is a place in God and so inherently Godly. And mission – being called to God and calling others to God – ceases to be about going to a place where God is not and bringing God there. Mission becomes ‘turning on the light’, that we might see what space it is which, in fact, we inhabit.

‘…this is the judgement,’ we hear in John’s gospel, ‘that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God’ (3.19-21).

Our deeds are done in God. Our lives are lived in God, whether they are yet capable of reflecting the divine light or not. We do not see God because God is not ‘there’ to be seen; we see by God. God is the eyes by which we see. These ‘eyes’ are the gift of God’s own Spirit, which speaks to us the meaning of Jesus, and so our very own meaning – who we are, where we are, the space we inhabit. This is much, much more than we have yet to see.

The call of the gospel – and its promise – is life in all its fullness: opening our eyes and conforming to our divine habitat, coming to be in the world as Jesus himself is – as light, as promise, as hope.

Let us, then, open our eyes to catch that quickening ray which is the light of God’s call and promise – this to God’s greater glory and our richer humanity. Amen.

[1] It is noteworthy that the mythological presentation of God in a space (the Garden) takes place after the Apple.

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29 July – God’s unnecessary love

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Pentecost 10
29/7/2018

1 John 4:7-12
Psalm 145
John 6:1-13

In a sentence:
God does not ‘have’ to love us but does, unnecessarily

‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God’ (4.7).

I want to unpack today why the church holds that the love which is from God – of which the gospel speaks – and the love to which we are called to demonstrate, is unnecessary love.

To the unbaptised mind this is clearly wrong. Surely, What the world needs now, is love sweet love, because Love makes the world go around, and so All you need is love: the Love which lifts us up where we belong. Even the church’s foundational texts – from which we have heard this morning – seem to contradict this: God is love, God loves us, let us love one another.

How, then, could love be unnecessary?

For the church to say that love is unnecessary is to say that the love which is our particular concern here – ‘gospel’ love – is unnatural love. Natural things are necessary things. We can rely on what is natural, because it unfolds predictably: apples fall from trees, very cold water freezes, nobody gets out alive. The love about which the gospel speaks is not predictable in the way of nature. It is in this sense it is not necessary love.

What this means is that the love of which John writes is not familiar love – the love which comes and flows naturally. And so, when he lays love out for reflection, he doesn’t point to mothers or to lovers or to the best of friends. Rather, John points to the cross: ‘…In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins’ (4.10).

This is, again, incomprehensible to the unbaptised mind, for where is the natural love in this? Is it not a ghastly, bloody God who requires atoning sacrifices in the first place? How is it that God cannot simply forgive? Would that not be true love?

All of this would be ‘necessary’ love: sensible and understandable love. But when it comes to joining the cross and the love of God, we cannot say that even the cross itself was necessary. All theories of the atonement which suggest that God was too righteous to forgive the unrighteous, so that there was some deep law which required blood, make the cross necessary and either tie God’s hands to a law outside of God or split God into two parts, one part demanding a price which the other pays.

But the cross is not magical in this way. It is not an incantation or formula which brings salvation; it is not the necessary key which unlocks God’s heart. If the cross is not necessary in this way, then neither can any love associated with it be a natural, necessary love.

In fact, the cross is not, in the first instance, God’s work at all. It is ours. And it is ours – we imagine – as a necessary work: ‘is it not better that the one should die than that we should lose everything?’ Do the gods not require the expulsion of the blasphemer? Must he not die at our hands?

The cross is – in the first act of the drama – a work of ‘un-love’ if Jesus is not a blasphemer but the messenger of God. The cross is necessary for us because in Jesus we meet a God we cannot bear: ‘What the world needs now,, is not love, sweet love, but less Jesus. But, while necessary for us, the cross was not necessary for God. The ministry of Jesus and his call to follow was open to the possibility that people might actually follow – that the cross would not be necessary. (If not, it was all just play-acting).

In what sense, then, does God ‘send’ the Son and the cross, given that that is where it all ended up? God sends the cross in the resurrection. Our word to God – the cross – becomes God’s word to us in the resurrection: God’s Yes to our No.

And this is the unnecessary, unnatural thing. It is not the case merely that God ‘loves’ us but needs the cross to get past what is unlovely about us. The cross is the unloveliness of the human creature. This is our godlessness – and so our lack of humanity – that we employ such things as crosses and that we sometimes find ourselves on them. God does not so much use the cross to save as overcome the cross and our shame in crucifying the Lord of glory.

But it is not obvious that God will do this. John declares ‘God is love’ as an answer to the question of Easter Saturday: What Will God Do? The unnecessary, unnatural, unlawful thing God does is raise Jesus and return him to the disciples (in person) and to Israel (in preaching) with the words, Peace be with you. Not a sword of divine wrath but an offer of peace.

This is love: God’s devotional persistence, despite the cross: unnecessary, unearned love – a breaking of the law rather than an observance of it.

The resurrection becomes a revelation of God’s power in relation to the cross. Here we see God’s willingness to embrace and use the least lovely of all things – even the murder of God himself on a cross – in pursuit of those God loves. This is not necessary love. It is so much more than that. It is gloriously unnecessary, because it springs from the very heart of God. The only question which matters is whether God will set right what is not right among us. If the answer is no, then surely we are all lost. If it is yes, then it is the God’s identification with the cross by overcoming the cross which proves it. We hope in this God because this God has overcome the cross.

And the love commanded of us? ‘If we love one another,’ John says, ‘God lives in us and his love is perfected in us’ – God’s love is perfected in us. This perfected love is not the easy love which – if we are lucky – comes naturally, although that too is of God. The love which is not natural but which is commanded is that which loves as God does. This is our calling, because it is a calling to become like the one who calls. Love where and how God does. Love where love is not sought. Love where love is not expected. Love where it is not deserved. Love where it would seem love will be wasted and so is unnecessary, not required.

Such love is difficult because we cannot see where it goes, whether even it will go anywhere. It was not different for God in Jesus and yet God loved, and here we are 2000 years later.

‘Beloved,’ John writes, ‘since God loved us in this way, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us’.

Let us, then, become lovers after the love of God. That is all that is necessary.

 

By way of response, a prayer of confession..

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

And yet, we confess that in thought, word and deed
we have not loved you or our neighbours
as ourselves.

Forgive us when we allow only that love
extends only to the familiar and easy,
when the charity which begins in the home
also ends there.

Forgive us when we imagine that your love is like ours,
that you love us because we are deserving of love,
that there is nothing in us which needs to be overcome,
nothing which will be revealed as shadow
by the light of your love.

Forgive us the lovelessness which says No when a Yes was possible,
which withholds what is excess to our need,
which is unnecessarily jealous,
destructively envious.

O God, the protector of all who trust in you,
without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy:
Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that,
with you as our ruler and guide,
we may so pass through things temporal,
that we lose not the things eternal; [Proper 17]

just so, gracious God, have mercy on us…

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The Ten Commandments 2018-2019

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Ten Commandments

An Old Prescription in a Culture without Purpose

The Ten Commandments series – Now completed!

Together with other Western cultures, we inhabit a world dedicated to a flight from truth. Some characteristic marks of cultures in decline are these: an ideology of relativism with regard to all claims for truth; inward self-protection from a questioning of the status quo; a secular religion which worships choice above everything; the cultivation of detachment from ultimate claims.

Why then bother with commandments from a world long gone?

From August 2018 to October 2019, Rev Bruce Barber presented a series of sermons on the 10 Commandments; the the full suite of sermons is gathered below:

INTRO: The Ten Commandments – Old Prescriptions in a Culture without purpose

  1. The First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me”
  2. The Second Commandment: “You shall not make for yourselves any carved image”
  3. The Third Commandment: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”
  4. The Fourth Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy”
  5. The Fifth Commandment – “Honour your father and mother”
  6. The Sixth Commandment – “You shall not kill”
  7. The Seventh Commandment – “You shall not commit adultery”
  8. The Eighth Commandment – ‘You shall not steal’
  9. The Ninth Commandment – ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour’
  10. The Tenth Commandment – You shall not covet

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22 July – Knowing and Believing

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Pentecost 9
22/7/2018

1 John 4:1-6
Psalm 139
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

In a sentence:
Our knowledge of God must yield to God’s knowledge of us

Just between us I confess that, most of the time, I am not a very good believer. By ‘most of the time’, I mean those times which are not between 10.05 and 11.10 on a typical Sunday morning, (assuming that the Sunday service runs for an hour and finishes about 11.00).

For that 65 minutes or so I find that what I do and say and think is a matter of believing. It is ‘easy’ to believe here, because in this space we hear what it is to believe. For the rest of the week I am less a believer in God than an aspiring knower of God. I suspect that I am not alone in this, and so with John’s help we’ll consider today the difference between these two ways of being before God – knowing and believing.

As we have worked through the text of 1 John we have noticed that ‘knowing’ is something which pops up quite a bit. This is because of the approach to God which John’s opponents have taken, which is ‘gnostic’ in its tendencies. ‘Gnostic’ is a technical word in religious studies, and has a connection to our English word ‘knowledge:’ they both spring from the same Greek root (gnosis), to do with knowing. The Gnostics were those who ‘knew.’ If we aspire to know something about God, then John has something to say to us.

As a matter of course, we need to know things: where to find water, who our parents are or the difference between a red light and green one on a street corner. Such knowledge locates the world around us and renders the world safer. The one who does not ‘know’ lives in peril, which is why we spend so much time educating our children. Not to know what kind of world it is in which we live makes us unsafe, unable to fend for ourselves, unable to defend ourselves (‘fend’ being a contraction of ‘defend’). This is to say just what conventional wisdom has long known: knowledge is power.

Yet, in relation to God – at least, to the God of Jewish and Christian confession – this is catastrophic. We can, of course, know things ‘about’ God. But what we might know about God gives us no handle on God, no leverage, no influence. It is not like mundane knowledge which maps the world with its treasures and pitfalls. Knowledge about God does not work in this way because not because our knowing of God is deficient but because – to put it bluntly – there are no defences against God, not even knowledge.

Perhaps it is even surprising that we might want to defend ourselves against God. After all, as John goes on to declare in the verses which follow what we’ve heard this morning, God is ‘love’ – something which is heard much about the churches.

But the thing about this declaration is that it only makes sense actually to declare it if there was good reason to doubt it in the first place. ‘God is love’ is a powerful and reorienting statement for me if, in fact, I previously had good reason to think that God is not love, that God is a threat and so I would do well to smart-up in order to reduce the risk God presents. If God is a threat, knowledge of God’s weak spots would be more than valuable.

It is this kind of ‘smarting-up’ against which John writes: there is nothing you can know which will protect you from God. Faith is not about our knowledge of God but about God’s knowledge of us. My faith in God, properly, has to do with God’s knowledge of me – knowing that God knows me.

And so Christian ‘spirituality’ – the interest in God’s own Spirit – looks not like our knowledge of God or our spiritual techniques but is a confession that God knows us. In John’s own community, this was the difference between two live choices. One option was knowledge of the ‘mysteries’ of God. The mysteries were the knowledge of where God is, how God can be accessed – basically, God in a box, bound up in theological theory. The other option was believing that God had searched and known us in the person of Jesus – that the being of God entered into the very human life of Jesus.

God-in-a-box is attractive because, in the end, things in a box remain there until we open it – or perhaps the image of a genie in a bottle is more apt! It is good to know where God is, because then we can avoid God (tell ourselves that God doesn’t matter in this question, this decision, this action); or we can access God easily when a God seems to be needed.

By contrast, John says: in this is knowledge – not that we knew God, but that God has searched and known us (cf. Psalm 139 – heard also today). This has happened in the meeting of God with us in the person of Jesus; this is the test John applies for ‘orthodoxy’ in today’s reading. This orthodoxy – what we now call the Incarnation – is not mere doctrinal correctness. It is a word to our desire to bottle God up in a remote heaven, over against God’s free entry into the world on God’s own terms. An incarnation even to the point of a death on a cross is a free act of God which undermines all human aspiration to know or control God. Such an incarnation is a wisdom which looks foolish, a strength which looks like weakness.

In the end, the difference between being a knower of God and a believer of God is whether or not we hold that God is free. To imagine that we know something is to imagine that we have secured it, put it in its place, can get to it or around it as we need to. This is as much the case with God as it is with anything else we know about how the world works.

Yet in this place we pray each week: your kingdom come, your will be done, earth become heaven: provide, forgive, deliver. These are all impossible things for a God who is not free, who is bound by the rules we ‘know’ a God should follow. But we pray this because we believe that God is free – a freedom over against us in our desire to control but, because of the nature of God, a freedom which is also for us.

For God’s knowledge of us is not a confining, objectifying knowledge but a liberating knowledge, a loving knowledge. We are not objects which God could love or not. We are persons created for relationship with God. That this is so we see in the coming together of humankind and God in Jesus.

This is harder to hold to than might seem, because it is not ‘knowledge’ of the ordinary kind.

This is a knowing-in-relation. Our worship is just such a knowing, or should point to such a knowing. Here we do not discard all that we know, but let it sit in its right place – at the service of the God who will take it and make a means of revealing even more about himself.

To believe is to know that God is greater than what we know, ‘greater than our hearts’ (3.20). And because this is the case, we will be yet greater, for God knows us in order to bring us back to him.

For this grace in Christ Jesus, all thanks be to God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, now and always. Amen.

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15 July – Abide

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Pentecost 8
15/7/2018

1 John 3:18-24
Psalm 85
Mark 6:13-29

In a sentence
Our calling is to live in the moment given to us to live

‘All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them.’

The notion of ‘abiding’ is an important one in the writings of John. When the disciples of John the Baptist (a different John, we also met in our readings today!) first meet Jesus, they ask him, ‘where do you abide?’ (John 1.38f; translated in NRSV as ‘where are you staying?’). We meet the notion more strongly in John’s gospel when we hear Jesus speak of the relationship between himself as being like that between a vine and the branches (John 15.1-8; see also John 17.20-24). The Greek word can be translated a whole range of ways: remain, stay, abide, live, dwell, and so on, carrying a strong sense of ‘where we are’. In the letters of John, the word appears a couple of dozen times – several of which we’ve heard this morning.

Yet this abiding in God, or God abiding with us, is not simply a nice idea, intended perhaps to evoke a sense of cosiness with God. Most of the things which matter in scriptural descriptions of the relationships which stand between ourselves and our gods are a matter of polemic – of argument and contrast: not this, but that; not here but there; not this way, but that way. It is the same with the notion of abiding: abide here, not somewhere else. Or, let this one abide in you, and not some other.

There are many places where we might abide. Among these the geographical options are the least interesting. Much more important is how we are living wherever we happen to be. This is, at one level, a matter of morals – what we do and don’t do to ourselves or each other. There is certainly a strong commandment to be heard in our reading this morning: ‘love one another’. John gives some basic shape this: ‘How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?’ But the idea of abiding is not the same as the moral commandment. It is where we ‘abide’ that determines what we do, even what we are able to do.

Many abiding places present themselves to us. The past is one tempting place to live: nostalgia for a time when things seemed simpler. Perhaps they were simpler, perhaps not, but the point is not whether it was better back then but whether we seek to be there again at the expense of living here, in the now.

The future is another tempting abode: we put off making the most of where we are now, even perhaps denying justice to ourselves or others now, because of where we think this sacrifice will get us somewhere in the future. This is the logic of communism, of capitalism and of colonialism in their worst forms: it will all be for the best in the end, even if it might require an enormous amount of injustice or suffering along the way.

Whether it is nostalgia or a vision of where we imagine we are heading, where we actually are here and now is reduced to something we simply have to endure, either because the best is now behind us, or we must wait for it to come. Our abiding place – the place where we will be (or were) safe – is not here but behind us as we wind down to death or still in front of us, as we wait for life to begin.

Or, if not in another time, we might desire to abide in an identity other than the one which is really ours – denying, or at least lamenting, the religious or cultural or gender or age or economic identity we actually have. Here we would be different, would have more, would be related to different people, would be more valued than we are. This is not to deny the importance of self-improvement or the cry for justice, or that there is much wrong when those cries are not answered by people who have the power to make a difference.

But for the moment we should not be distracted by what are, for most of us, extreme or theoretical cases, as important as they are as demands God makes of us. Just as important, in general terms, are those limiting experiences when we are not acknowledged for what we think we are worth, for the effort we have put in, when things just seem unfair, when we find ourselves resenting that more of the cost of something has fallen to us rather than someone else.

In a penetrating statement about the nature of sin, Rowan Williams has remarked that, ‘our failures are all about our fearful longing to be somewhere else.’[1] We might say, our failures are about not wanting to be abiding here, now, under these conditions, in this set of relationships.

Where we would abide, where we would live, is the place where we would feel safest, where we would feel at most able to be ourselves. Yet life is not simply a matter of safety; it is also a matter of truth. Truth and life meet in our vocation, or calling – God’s calling to us that we be what and where and when we are. We abide in God (and God abides in us) when we live in the world in which God has placed us.

This dynamic is active at every level of our lives. It has to do with being with the people to whom we actually are married, or with whom we actually do work, or next to whom we actually live, or with whom we share an identity as members of a church congregation or denomination – and not those we might like to have in those various roles. Who wants to abide with the cranky or noisy neighbour, the unfaithful spouse, the self-righteous pew-sitter? Which nation wants to be in the political context of massive human displacement, bringing refugees who need more that we’re prepared to give and for whom we haven’t budgeted, who are different from us, whom we don’t understand?

Our not wanting to be in such places – to recall the 23rd Psalm – is a longing for green pastures and still waters without the need of walking through dark valleys. It is a longing for the spreading of an abundant table without the presence of enemies. The desire is understandable but it is also a denial that God can be found in such troubled places, and indeed has been found there. For John insists on identifying the crucified Jesus with the divine Son not simply because it is good theology but because it is good anthropology – not only because it gets God right but because it gets us right. The divine Son takes up and lives not in all places and all times but just one – a place and time as real as our own, shot through with the dark valleys and the enmity, the threats and dangers, which every time and place hold. This Jesus does, even to the point of death on a cross. It is for this reason that he is exalted – not the ‘sacrifice’ he makes but the life he lives in unswerving commitment to the one who commanded that God be honoured in such a time and place (cf. Philippians 2).

It is this possibility which John says is called forth from us, if we abide in this Jesus and he abides in us. This is not a mere ‘calling’ to do what is difficult; it gives value to the lives we are actually given to live, in the places and times we are given to live them. To live in Christ, and for Christ to live in us, is to be present to where we are, is for that place to be the place where God meets us, the only place we can be whole.

The moment in which we live demands that it be taken seriously, in the love of those with whom it is given to us to abide, for it is the only moment we are given, the only place where God can meet us: the kingdom come, the will of God on earth. The moment, and our life with God, requires that we be respond to the demands of the present. This is the work of our lives: to be where and when we are, without fear, and in love, abiding in the God who chooses to abide in us.

By the grace of God, may we find in our here-and-now our abiding place, our habitation, our home, a dwelling place with God all the days of our lives.

Amen.

[1] Rowan Williams (2003), Christ on trial: how the gospel unsettles our judgement, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans p.133.

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