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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 23^rd 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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Pentecost 6
1/7/2018

1 John 3:1-3
Psalm 30
Mark 5:21-43

‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God.’

The attraction of the phrase, ‘children of God,’ is that it carries the warmth of an intimacy of the human creature with God, such as we see in the best of parent-child relationships.

The problem with the phrase is that, today, we are easily tempted to interpret it apart from the gospel, as a ‘religious’ element of a general theory about what a human being is: that we are all ‘children of God.’ Regardless of our confession, this is part of what it means to be human.

John’s affirmation is not quite as open as this. He is not saying here that God is a kind of sky-father and all people, by virtue of simply being born under that sky, are God’s children. John speaks here only of the community of faith to whom he writes: you are children of God.

This can sound arrogant to us, for it seems to imply an exclusivity: that ‘we’ are more than ‘they’. And there is a differentiation being drawn, although ‘exclusivity’ is not the most helpful way of expressing it. ‘Exclusive’, for us, hangs off ‘inclusive’ as harsh black-and-white, yes-or-no, categories requiring that we have to be one or the other. But this is not John’s game. If he is not ‘inclusivist’, this doesn’t mean that he is ‘exclusivist.’ John’s point is that it is not a natural thing that we are called the children of God; we are not ‘naturally’ part of God’s family in John’s sense. To be a child of God not a status or a dignity of the human being. Rather, this is something which happens to us, a condition in which we find ourselves (or not). John differs here from our well-intended but ultimately confusing insistence that, because God loves all, all are necessarily God’s children and welcome as such.

The notion that all are God’s children can seem justified even by John himself, who insists that God gives Jesus for love of the world, and not for the holy huddle only. Yet, when John uses the term ‘children of God’ here, he speaks of being ‘called’ children before affirming that we are. He indicates a particular claiming of us by God which changes what we are in our reception of his gift in Jesus. The condition ‘child of God’ is, then, conferred and not natural. ‘Children of God’ and the ‘world’ – even the world God loves – are not synonymous. Not everyone is a child of God in this sense because not everyone recognises and receives the gift.

This offends against our sensibilities, because we are accustomed to thinking first about ourselves, and then about God. Liberal humanism has taught us – appropriately – that if it looks like a human being, walks like a human being and talks like a human being, it probably is a human being. From here we conclude that if I am a loved human child of God – because the Bible tells me I am – then you must be, whether you know it (or like it) or not, for we are both human.

Of course, at one level again, we must say that this is Christianly true. At another level, however, it cannot be. This is because Jesus the Son (the child of God), is crucified by those we might call his brothers (and sisters, to be inclusive, but basically it was his brothers!).  John continues on after today’s passage to recall the murder of Abel by Cain, of the righteous by the unrighteous, the murder of the child by the not-child. Adam’s family is highly dysfunctional, from Cain to Christ, and we are part of that family.

The death of Jesus is a death at the hand of the ‘not-children’ – at our hand. It denies that Jesus is the divine Son (which, we have seen, is another recurring theme in 1 John); the death of Jesus denies, then, the possibility of our own life as children of God. When John says of his church that they are called children of God, he means that they know about, and have repented of, crucifixion-like, not-child sin and its lesser manifestations in themselves.

If we want to insist that the expression ‘child of God’ means anything thing more general, then we have to reckon with what John says a child of God would look like: ‘no one who abides in him sins’ (3.6); ‘those who have been born of God [who are God’s children] do not sin’ (3.9). If ‘children of God’ is all-embracing of humankind, then it comes with the impossible qualification of sinlessness. John is not being naïve here, happily overlooking sin even in Christians; quite the opposite. It is because of sin that he is excited to be called a child of God – how else could this be possible but by a work of grace?

For this is the gospel: Behold the love of God, that we are ‘called’ God’s children. It is because God calls us this that we are, despite the un-child Cain-and-Abel aspect of our lives together and with God.

To be a child of God is to see what it would take for broken humankind to be claimed by God as God’s own children – to be said to be God-like. John speaks of this in terms of sinlessness. To be a child of God, then, is to see that we cannot achieve this ourselves. To be a child of God, then, is to receive this relationship as a gift. The child of God – this side of Eden’s Apple – is a child of God by accepting the reality of sin in herself and giving thanks that this is overcome.

There is a humility called for here but not a belittling. There is a confession required but it is not the mere confession of sin. We confess also our faith that this is the God who loved us before it occurred to us to ask for love.

Our children don’t need to be humble in order to be our children; they are this by nature. But to be called children when we are not yet children requires a change in us and in the one who now claims us as his own. This change we model as move from Word to confession of sin to confession of faith to thanksgiving in the Eucharist. In this process we are ‘adopted’ as children, and God becomes ‘Father’ to us.

To be the children of God – of this God, at least – is to be adopted into God’s life of love. It is, then, to begin to become more God-like, to take on a family resemblance.

See God’s love for you – you are called God’s very children. This is what God desires. And for God to desire it is for God to give it.

Rest in this, then, by doing what God does:

seek for yourselves more brothers and sisters to know themselves as part of God’s family.
God’s love is not exhausted in but a few children; we are only the beginning.

———

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 sinned against you and against each other.

Forgive us when the un-child in us presumes
too quickly a happy standing before you
which precedes your call and grace.

Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie eleison;

Forgive us when the un-child in us
fails to see that you would embrace all
as your children,
even those we would not have as
sisters and brothers.

Christe, Christe, Christe eleison;

Forgive us, then, when the un-child in us
– the angry word, the lack of generosity,
the envy, the fear –
separates others from knowledge
of your desire to claim them as
beloved children.

Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie eleison.

Almighty God,
to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known,
and from whom no secrets are hidden:
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
and create in us clean hearts
which beat with yours, heavenly Father,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your holy name;
through Christ our Lord.

Amen.

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22/6/2018

Psalm 139:1-18, 23-24
1 Corinthians 13:8-13

In a space like this we gather to tell not one story but two. The one is our story with each other, of which we have just told a little (and it is always too little); the other is God’s story with us, to which we now turn.

Yet, in this turn, we don’t leave the first story behind; we tell the two because they are intertwined. Their relationship can be treated in all manner of ways but today, taking the lead from the psalmist and St Paul, we’ll consider the relation of these stories through the question of what it is to know .

The quest for knowledge drives us, whether it is what we hope to glean from staffroom gossip or from probing an atom with a laser. Yet, among all the things that might be known, are we ourselves not what we really seek to know in this world? Of all the objects of knowledge we might encounter, are we ourselves not the most interesting, the most extraordinary?

Anthropology, sociology, psychology (of course!); medicine, linguistics, economics, politics, history, literature, arts: together such pursuits constitute the search to understand and express what makes us tick. For we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we delight to know this.

Even the driest of sciences, which seek as thoroughly as possible to exclude from their quest for knowledge the unreliability of human perception – even these cannot finally exclude the human as the one who knows and marvels and searches, or who will benefit from what is discovered.

Do we know more than Paul, writing 2000 years ago, or the psalmist, 500 or 1000 years before that? Certainly, in terms of the kind of knowledge which lends itself to publication in journals and books. The wonder which we are is reflected in that knowledge.

And yet it is of a certain, limited type. It is oriented toward the human being as ‘problem’: the What and the How and Why of what we do, or need, or suffer. This type of knowledge we seek principally with a view to unravelling the tangles, solving the puzzles, resolving the issues.

The knowing we encountered today in the psalm and St Paul is of a different order.

Psalm 139 is one of one of the most intimate passages of the Scriptures, in which the poet marvels at his very self, and at God’s knowledge of that self.

¹ O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

¹³ For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Alongside the poet, we heard from St Paul, who is not often accused of poetry. Yet if not aesthetically, he poetises technically – not so much in his selection of words but in his sense for the order in which things should be said, the way in which things should be made relative to each other:

I know, but only in part; yet I shall know even as I am now fully known.

These two write not of knowledge of as answer to question or as resolution to problem; they intimate knowledge of mystery.

Mystery has degenerated as a notion for us these days. We imagine that a mystery is a problem: the murder mystery is a puzzle to be solved. More to the point, this kind of ‘mystery’ is understood to be solvable, given all the evidence.

But, for the poet of the psalm and for Paul, mystery is that which, of its very nature, is impenetrable. It is unmistakably there, it can be seen, it matters, but it resists comprehension.

‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is so high that I cannot attain it…’

‘…For now we see through a glass, darkly’ (as we said it in the old tongue).

The particular mystery they contemplate is their own irreducible being, known to them, and yet unknown.

We are driven to know ourselves, and we must let ourselves be propelled by that drive. And yet, what are we to do with the thought that we will never reach our destination, not because it is too far (there is too much to know) but because comprehending in this way is not the point of it all.

What we are to do is, in short, nothing. The mystery which we are is not a thing to be ‘done’ with. It is not a useful thing, not a tool in our hand, certainly not a problem to be solved. It is something within which to live, from which to take reference.

Paul was writing against a certain use of knowledge and interpretation of experience. In a 2000-year-old kind of way, it was the kind of knowledge which correlates to the facts and figures our sciences, or just our ordinary experience, yield for us today.

His criticism of the use of this knowledge in the community was that it didn’t carry humanity with it, the mystery of who they were, and the mystery of whose they were – whose we are. And the community was breaking apart all over the place.

You are more than this, he insists. And the only way you can know it is, love. Properly to be the mystery you are, is to be loved, and to love.

Love relativises everything we think we know, our drive to know, our pride in knowing – all of this is subjected to the gift of being known. The subjugation of knowing to being known reflects the dynamic of love, in that the love which makes us is, first of all, the love we receive.

It is the love which nurses the unknowing infant; it is the love which teaches those who don’t know yet what I know, that they might know themselves better; it is the love we hear in the ‘I do’; it is the love which holds the hand of one whose knowledge now passes in and out of reach, who is beginning now and then not to know himself; it is the love which causes us to gathers as we have today because we knew someone who no longer knows anything, and yet is loved.

Whatever we might strive to know, it is finally only that we are known – loved – that makes us.

Prophecies, tongues, knowledge – these things of ours, Paul says, all come to an end. If love ever ended, then we would too, even if we lived on.

But Paul and the poet testify: Love never ends, because it does not begin with us. We were known before we knew; we know now only in part; we will be known still, once we cease to know any more.

In Alec we saw something of what we can be, if we know ourselves known and loved: a glass which refracts – even if darkly – the possibilities of love.

We are fearfully and wonderfully made, for love.

Live, then, from, in and through love. For God’s sake, and for your own.

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Pentecost 2
3/6/2018

1 John 2:11-17
Psalm 81
John 2:23-3:6

In a sentence:

Love not as the world loved – to divide – but as God loves: to reconcile

‘Do not love the world or the things of the world.’

One of the principal criticisms of Christian ethics is a perceived nay-saying to the world and all that the critic considers good in it. Without doubt there is good reason for the criticism, in that Christians have not always smiled enough. Does John’s ‘Do not love the things of the world’ lead us astray here? It does not, but for this to be clear we see how we live in multiple worlds, not all of which are life-giving.

‘The world’ has a range of meanings in the Bible. It can mean, of course, simply ‘everything’ apart from God: ‘the heavens and the earth’ (Genesis 1.1). We strike a more nuanced sense when John’s gospel affirms that God loves ‘the world’ (John 3.16f), or 1 John affirms that Jesus is salvation for the whole world (2.2). Here the world is ‘humankind in its need,’ although it doesn’t leave the broader sense (‘everything’) behind.

And when today’s text says, ‘Do not love the world,’ we are dealing with yet another distinction: ‘world’ as the sphere of human intercourse and exchange, specifically in opposition to the will of God.

When John says ‘do not love the world or the things of the world’ and declares that ‘the world and its desire is passing away’, we have to draw on these shifts of meaning of ‘world’, and on the links between those meanings. The Scriptures ever play a subtle game in language, in order to honour the appropriate distinction and the relationship between God and the creature.

That subtlety is here in John’s affirmations and warnings about the love of the world. On the one hand, he is very ‘pro’ world. He insists – to the point of labelling the alternative view heresy (e.g., ‘antichrist’ in 2.18ff and 4.3) – that the divine Son took a very worldly human body, susceptible to worldly mortality on the cross. He goes further to insist that the divine Son – and so the very being of God – continues to be identified with that body. To speak about God is to have to refer to that body; the world ‘anchors’ God, and this is good.

On the other hand, it is the world in its opposition to such Godly worldliness which crucifies Jesus. God takes hold of the world in Jesus, and the world shrugs that hold off. The world embraced by God’s openness to it breaks, and breaks precisely at the point of the embrace. By crucifying Jesus we turn not only from God but from the world God turns towards. The crucifixion rejects God and rejects the good worldliness of God, manifest in Jesus.

This might seem all very complex but the complexity is in us – broken images of God that we are – and not in God. The gospel offers a turning from the brokenness of that image, from that world of human intercourse which chooses against God. This is the world which is passing away, the world which God has overcome by vindicating Jesus and his particular worldliness in the resurrection.

As we turn from the passing-away world, however, we turn not only towards God. This is because God is never ‘only’. God is anchored to the world: this is the God who loves the world, who has turned towards it, who even ‘cleaves’ to it (cf. Genesis 2.24). What God has joined – the world to Godself – we cannot separate. To turn towards God is to turn towards what God loves: the world.

So when John says, Do not love the world, he does not mean that the world does not matter, that we should concern ourselves only with ‘spiritual’ things. He does not mean that the present does not matter but only the promise heaven to come.

We are to turn from the world-in-itself to the world-in-God. This is only possible if we see that there is a way of being in the world different from that which is obvious: a different set of expectations, a different set of responsibilities. Such different expectations and responsibilities are the ground of the impossible demands of the gospel: Love your unlovely neighbour, Do not worry, Give away your precious things, Give up even your life. And they are the ground of the impossible gifts of the gospel: Hope, Peace, Joy.

The impossible things of the gospel are impossible in that world where ‘love’ is coloured by fear: a world which imagines that love only need reach to a concrete wall which divides peoples, that love only applies within a sovereign border, that it is only required within the limits of a commonness of creed or language or clique, or imagines that charity not only begins but also ends at home. The world loves by dividing up the world: us from them, here from there, now from then.

John’s ‘Do not love the world’ is better translated, ‘Do not love as the world loves’. Rather, love as God does, to reconcile what is separated: ‘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’ (cf. 4.10). God’s love gives an atoning, ‘at-one-ing’ sacrifice (‘atonement’ is literally as at-one-ment), which reconciles us to God and, so, to each other.

God’s love of the world we are is where love starts, and were it will finish. God loves us as we are, into what we shall become. Life – even ‘eternal’ life – is living within such love as this.

Let us then, love not as the world loves – to divide – but love to reconcile, with the ‘love of the Father’ (1.15), for this is how we are loved.