View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 15
10/9/2023

Romans 13:8-14
Psalm 119:33-40
Matthew 18:15-20

---

In a sentence
The ministry of Jesus in the world’s dark places is a call to us to be, ourselves, light

As in the day
Though it is night, St Paul declares, live “as in the day”.

Clearly, he doesn’t mean, Sleep less! Rather, he takes the natural division of day and night and uses them metaphorically to develop a subtle account of the human situation after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The day-night metaphor serves Paul in two principal ways. The most obvious is the suggestion that the night is nearly over, and that it is time for sleepers to wake. Dawn – the expected return of Christ – is about to break; awaken, then, and prepare for it.

But it’s important that Paul’s call here is not built on the threat that God is about to arrive, so you’d better look busy at good works. (Although, more good works is always good! ). The possibility of living day-fully despite the night is found in the ministry of Jesus. For Paul, even Christ on the cross is night inhabited “as if in the day”. This is God in the world’s night. The resurrection of Jesus reveals not only(? ) that heaven is coming but that, in the person of Jesus right through his ministry, heaven was already present, in the world’s night. It is just this Jesus whose future is coming.

Night as day
This means that Paul’s metaphorical night and day are now not a thing which will pass or arrive but are interwoven here, in the moment within which we live. Time now no longer “flows” – second by second, hour by hour – from bad night to good day. Time is now a choice: to continue to sleep is now to acquiesce to the dark, letting it tell us what to do or to be. To awaken is to contradict the night, without wiping it away.

When Paul reminds us, then, “You know what season it is”, it is not to present the threat of the proverbial bus which might run me down tomorrow, so that I might get right with God now. He means rather: though it feels like night, life is possible here and now. The day is not so much “coming” as an addition to night, or its completion. The day is an overlay of the night, with the implication that we are what we do in the night.

Paul’s own account of what constitutes night-like activities is somewhat moralistic, although covering the kinds of things most people would think should be avoided – drunkenness, debauchery, jealousy, and the like. To these, we might add other modern immoralities operating under the cover of darkness: the anonymous internet troll hides in the dark, as does the hidden-in-plain-sight child molester and the online scammer.

But darkness is also active in more subtle ways. Consider our modern denial of death, treating it as a night we would rather pretend is not there. Or consider our next month in politics in terms of a struggle over what is night and what is day in the form of debates over the question of the Parliamentary Voice. What are we to do with the dark colonial history and its continuing effects? We cannot simply declare – as elements of the No campaign do – that the night is overcome with the passage of time, and we are now in a new day. The night continues, but the glimmer of day is possible.

And debates about global warming will themselves doubtless heat up if the coming summer here is like what it has been in the northern hemisphere this year. What does Paul’s “as in the day” look like in the deep night of an intensely carbonised economy?

Being day
Of course, living “as in the day” is not always straightforward. But Paul calls us from any refusal on our part to see, as if we had grounds to claim that we are blinded by the night. Christ on the cross is the presence of God in the dark, God’s kingdom come. It is by this strange light that the church sees. The call to discipleship is the call to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13. 13), and be such light in darkness. Take up your cross and follow: be day in the night. Be hope calling to despair. Be forgiveness where it is not sought. Be mercy.

None of this is because “God is coming,” and we better be ready. It is because God has already come, light shining in the darkness, revealing the truth and destiny of us and all things. God’s approach in the night of the world is the only thing which will light the darkness in and around us. For God is neither afraid of the dark, nor hides in it, nor simply washes it all away. God is the possibility of day in the night.

And this is what the disciples of Christ are to be as well. We are here today because we suspect that – though it is night – day is more than a rumour.

More than a rumour, it is a revelation – in the ministry of Jesus – and a calling – live “as in the day”.

Let us live, then, as in the day, as light in the midst of darkness.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 14
3/9/2023

Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105
Matthew 16:21-28

---

In a sentence
We cannot (re-)construct ourselves, but find wholeness in God’s construction of Godself

“Who am I?” asks Moses. Who am I to do what you have asked?

Moses was many things. He had Hebrew roots but was probably raised as something like an Egyptian prince. He was a known murderer who now hides in the hills. He was married to Zipporah, who was neither Hebrew nor Egyptian, and now watched over his father-in-law’s flock. It is this multi-fractured Moses who asks, “Who am I?” as counter God’s request.

We are all fractured like this, perhaps increasingly so in late modern society.

The fundamental fracture in our lives is natural: the knowledge and experience of death. Death tears at us and through us. If I was a child or a parent, a spouse or a friend, death forces the “Who am I?” question upon us: Who am I? What am I now that she, he is gone?

Alongside this natural fracturing of our identity are myriad social, political and historical ones. At a national level right now, we are wrestling with the re-discovery of what it means to have a colonial history. The question of how to respond to this discovery has driven a wedge between us – between the post-colonial peoples and the indigenes of the land, as well as within both of those communities themselves. If, a couple of generations ago, mainstream Australian society knew what “Australian” meant, that is now under renegotiation, whatever the outcome of the approaching referendum.

The church has experienced a massive fracturing of identity since the 1950s. If once it was the engine of much of what happened in society – or at least partner in that action – the church is now often simply overlooked or perceived to be an obstacle. “Who are we?” is a question hidden within a lot of talk in small congregations and shrinking denominations. We ourselves at MtE have something of this question in our minds as we begin to find what it means to have sold our historic property and now to be sharing this one.

And there are myriad fractures in social and economic experience which are similarly shaking our sense of human identity. The deeply anti-social possibilities of social media come to mind, or the impact of telephones and cars on the integrity of local communities, or the raging debates about race and gender.

That Moses’ question is over 3000 years old reminds us that, in fact, the fracturing of identity is scarcely new. The “times” – where we find ourselves – are less the problem than we ourselves. The looking glass is cracked, and its angled shards now fracture the image of God in our own image. But it has always been so.

We are here today, as always, seeking an answer to that irrepressible and urgent question: Who am I? Who are we? We ask this because the answer tells us “what to do”. If I am a parent, I know that I should care for the kids; if I am a consumer, I know that I should buy and consume; if I am a leader, I know that I should lead.

Moses, of course, has a working theory on who he is, something out of the mix of being Hebrew, Egyptian, murderer, fugitive, husband, son-in-law, shepherd, and the rest. Not being dead yet requires such a theory if we are to be at all – if we are to do some next thing. But the encounter with God casts his working self into question. “Who am I to do what you ask, God? How do my many parts become that one person?”

Left hanging, this question would be enough to let Moses off the hook. He could, like many of us do, just bob around on a sea of possible identities, never taking one up or living into it – just bobbing, up and down.

But Moses dares to press the matter by asking God, “And who are you? Who would I say sent me?”

God has already been identified in the story as “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. This might be heard as similar to Moses’ own fractured self-identification: I am what I have been – prince, fugitive, shepherd. But now God recasts this identity by giving the divine name: “Yahweh” (“Jehovah” in the old money). The Hebrew here is typically translated as “I am” or “I am who I am” – “Tell them, I Am sent you”. Yet this is too static. “I am” is the old God: I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel. “I am” is the God of the fractured past out of which uncertain Moses has arisen, with his “Who am I?”.

But Hebrew grammar – not to say, the very nature of how this God interacts with God’s people – requires that the translation be more open: “I will be who I will be”. This is more than grammatical correctness. The Moses who is constructed as a pastiche of unreconciled human fragments is met by the God who claims to be utterly self-determining. The Hebrew Moses whose Egyptian name was the first fracture in his identity is drawn towards wholeness as that name is spoken now by the undivided God: “Moses, Moses, come and be made whole”.

It is God’s self-determination which overcomes the divisions in Moses, God’s       open nature as “I will be what I will be,” which integrates the divided heart.

While Moses is trapped in – or trapped between – the clamour of many identity-voices, one voice addresses him as a whole and draws his many parts together. This is the God not only of the Hebrew Moses but of the Egyptian; not only of the shepherd but of the murderer, not only of who Moses was but of who Moses will be.

And so it is for us. The divided national heart, the unmoored church and congregation, the multiply-intersectioned soul, the dissipated spirit, the unresolved yesterdays that keep us from reconciliation within ourselves and with each other today and tomorrow – these are met with the call to rest in God’s own resolve: “I will be what I will be”

Moses is called to be more than the sum of his parts or, perhaps more evocatively, he is called to be less than the sum of his parts. He is no longer to be all things in competition with each other, consuming him in their contrast and conflict. He is called to be one thing – God’s “thing”. So now, though he will still burn, he will not be consumed with the work of making himself. Moses is no longer to exhaust himself in the construction of a soul out of pieces which don’t fit together, as if each piece mattered as much as the other. God’s call is to leave this drive aside, and to live. Recalling Jesus’ call to take up the cross – Moses, with each of us,  is called to lose his life in order to save it.

With me, God says, you are to be what you will become. Because I will be, says God, so will you be.

My being is the gift of your life. So live.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 13
27/8/2023

Exodus 1:8-2:10
Psalm 124
Matthew 16:13-20

Sermon preached by Chris Booth

---

I think that what we have head in our reading from Exodus is a story of new life flourishing in the midst of death. It starts off by setting the scene: the people of Israel are living in Egypt, but a king has risen to power who does not remember Joseph. He doesn’t remember Joseph, the Israelite slave who became one of the most powerful people in Egypt, who brought his people into Egypt so they could survive the famine and find a homeland. This king doesn’t remember Joseph. And yet he rules using Joseph’s methods. Joseph was a shrewd ruler, buying up all the grain on behalf of the king, because he knew that a famine was coming. When the people came asking for grain Joseph made them sell their land so they could eat, then made them sell themselves into slavery. If we’ve just read straight from Genesis into Exodus, it’s hard not to hear that this new king is doing the same kind of thing. When he notices the Israelites, another nation living among the Egyptians, he feels afraid, and so he enslaves them – and puts them to work building storage cities for storing up wealth.

The king is worried that these foreign people living among the Egyptians cannot be trusted – that they might rise up and join Egypt’s enemies in the event of a war. And he becomes more and more afraid, because enslaving them and putting them to work at hard labour has not made him feel any more safe. In fact he now feels like there are even more of them and they’ve spread to every corner of the country. Everywhere he looks he sees a potential threat. And so he feels he has to treat them more harshly, forcing them to work harder and harder.

It seems the king feels particularly threatened by Israelite men, and so he goes to Shiphrah and Puah, who serve as midwives to the Israelite women, and he tells them to kill all of the Israelite boys as soon as they are born – commanding them to participate in genocide against their own people. The thinking would be not just that there would eventually be no young Israelite men for the king to be afraid of, but also that this would mean young Israelite women would need to find Egyptian men to start families with, and this would dilute Israelite identity. This is the same kind of thinking that informed policies of removing Indigenous children from their families in these lands that we now call Australia. An attempt to erase culture and identity.

The king does not appear to be afraid of women, or suspect that women might conspire against him… He may be the most powerful man in the land… but he knows nothing about childbirth… Perhaps he’s never been present at the birth of a child. And so Shiphrah and Puah are able to take advantage of this power that they have, the knowledge of bringing life into the world. And so they disobey his orders, they are able to make something up, and he has no idea, he can’t question it because he knows nothing about birth. And they manage to do it in a way that messes with the fears and prejudices that are swirling around in his head, the fears about Israelites being stronger than Egyptians – able to give birth in a flash, before a midwife can even get there. The king may think he has the power to kill, but Shiphrah and Puah are more shrewd in their protection of new life. And it seems that God is pleased with them. God blesses them in their trickery, in their conspiracy to protect the lives of children.

This doesn’t stop the forces of death. The king sees that the Israelites are continuing to multiply and grow stronger. And he demands that all the little Israelite boys be thrown into the river, the great river that flows down from the mountains of Ethiopia and Uganda, through Sudan, to irrigate and fertilise Egypt. This river nourishes the earth and makes life possible, but the king wants to use it to kill. Once again we are told a story of Israelite women’s resistance against genocide. The mother of one of these little boys keeps her child hidden – I don’t know how – until he’s three months old. And then, at three months, she knows she can’t hide him any longer. So she comes up with a plan that will allow her to keep her baby. She makes a basket for him made out of papyrus, makes it waterproof, basically turns it into a little boat or an ark. And she takes him down to the river in the basket, right near where the king’s daughter is bathing, and places the basket in the water, leaving him there in the river. She’s done what the king has said. Obviously, when the baby notices his mum is gone, he starts bawling, the king’s daughter hears the cries and comes and finds him. The child, Moses, is adopted into the royal family, but raised by his own mother, who ends up receiving a parenting payment to raise him. Moses ends up being raised in such a way that he knows both worlds, the world of the Israelites and the world of the Egyptians, and this prepares him to lead his people out of slavery, into freedom.

Is there somewhere that you can think of, where you have witnessed new life flourishing in the midst of death?

In the gospel reading we heard about Jesus asking the disciples who they think he is. All of their initial answers are things they’ve heard others saying, suggesting that he is someone who has somehow overcome death. Some say that he is John the Baptist, who they remember being executed by the king. Some say that he is Elijah, an ancient prophet who never died, but was whisked away to heaven. Some say that he is Jeremiah, or another long-dead prophet. All of these speculations point to Christ’s death and resurrection later in the story – as though the crowds are anticipating it without realising. And Simon Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of the living God. We aren’t told here what kind of Messiah though.

What kind of Messiah is Jesus? Jesus is the kind of Messiah who comes to us and joins us in a world where human life is fragile and resilient. We have heard this at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel. Like baby Moses, baby Jesus also risks being killed in a genocide by a paranoid king. His family flee and find refuge in Egypt, where they can raise him safely. In this story Egypt is a hospitable place, sheltering the baby Jesus and his family from harm.

In our church, and I actually believe in all the churches, there is a lot of fear about death and decline of churches. That’s a real concern, and I think we need to be present to the grief of dying. But in the midst of that, I think we also need to be present and attentive to where new life may be growing. Jesus reassures us that the gates of death will not stand against the church. As we continue our worship today and throughout the week, lets be present to the grief of death, and alert to the signs of new life springing up in the midst of death.

View or print as a PDF

Mark the Evangelist Uniting Church @ St Mary’s, North Melbourne; 24/8/23

2 Corinthians 4:16-18
Psalm 121
John 10:11-15, 27-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

---

 Jn 10¹¹ [Jesus said,] ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

And the verse before it, which we didn’t hear:

¹⁰ ‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’

When we read John’s Gospel, we are aware that it has a different scope. As we say on one of our Uniting Church prayers at the Table, ‘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.’ So begins the work of the Trinity of love.

And the stories he tells are not so much about events in Jesus’s life as reflections on the meaning of that life, that death, that rising in glory from the cross. They are, as he says, ‘signs… that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’. (20:31)

One of the signs is Jesus’s testimony, ‘I am the Good Shepherd’.

You may like to have Norma’s ikon on the front of the service booklet where you can see it.

Between the 2^nd and 4^th centuries, it was the main image of God in human form, then it largely disappeared but is now universal. I suppose it was a familiar sight in ancient Palestine; indeed, there are statues from pagan times of a beardless youth with a lamb slung around his neck which might have provided a model. (Sheep in their time were smaller than ours!) I’m not good at dating sheep, but Norma’s one is, I think, still young, and Jesus – the mature Jesus with a beard – is holding it firmly.

The halo forms the shape of a cross around the head, and you can see the marks of the nails in his hands. ‘The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’.

And since you’re looking, you can see the letters O and N, by which the icon-writers identified the principal figures. The O at the top is for ‘the’, and another O (Ω) hidden under the lamb on the left side, and N on the right, form the Greek word for ‘Being’, Existence Itself, and translates the Hebrew I AM – so there you have our text.

Jesus, after all, was not a shepherd, even when young, and on the whole in the Bible, shepherds get a pretty bad press. They may be wolves who attack the flock.  Ezekiel in particular goes to town, calling them thieves and robbers ‘who do not care for the sheep’.

But the addition of the adjective ‘Good’ to ‘Shepherd’ takes the matter right out of an agricultural context. The Roman and English traditions which paint Jesus cuddling a lamb with little children at his feet in a flowery field have missed the point. It is not meant to convey a family-friendly, sentimental image to make us feel warm inside.

At the centre of this passage is the One ‘who lays his life down for the sheep’. In all the references to shepherds throughout Scripture, none goes this far. This shepherd goes even beyond the mere ‘good’. And it is saying something else: this goodness is not human virtue; it is divine, it is of the essence of God. The combination of ‘shepherd’ and ‘good’ should have been a shock to its first hearers.

The evangelist is saying something important about Jesus. The human divisions and conflicts in the earlier verses are set aside. This shepherd knows his flock, and the word ‘know’ means to know intimately, knows every one of the flock and knows them thoroughly (or in the old use of the word, ‘throughly’, through and through). And the flock knows their shepherd, just as thoughly.

This is exactly how St John speaks of Jesus’s relationship to his Abba, Father. And he goes on to offer the same intimacy to us: ‘I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’

And amidst of the babble and noise that surrounds us – more than a shepherd ever knew – we know him by his voice.

^2’7My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.’

I looked at dozens of Good Shepherd ikons in my preparation. They come in all shapes and sizes, all comfortably settled, half-awake, gazing nowhere.

This is where Norma’s ikon has a surprise.

This is a lamb that knows, knows her keeper (Ps 121) and knows she is held. Her eye is unwaveringly intent on the Good Shepherd. I think that is a detail unique to Norma’s ikon.

For he has heard her voice too and has come, picked her up and carried her, he, the holy One, the I AM.

‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.’ (John 10: 28)

‘So [as St Paul wrote] we do not lose heart.’ (2 Cor. 4:16).

Into that loving, life-keeping embrace, we entrust our beloved Norma.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 12
20/8/2023

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Psalm 67
Matthew 15:10-28

---

In a sentence:
The love of God finds us all in the end, whoever we think we are

Dogs
Today, continuing on from the readings of the last couple of weeks, we hear another miracle story. Yet this one is different because the problem it presents is not the problem of miracles but the shock to modern sensibilities of what Jesus says (recall the scandal of the parables). The modern response here is less, “Jesus could not possibly have healed the girl,” than it is, “Jesus ought not to have said that.” “Dogs” is not a very nice way to speak about people who are different from us. Such a sentiment, then, on the lips of Jesus, is more than a little “uncomfortable”. If Jesus doesn’t jump in quickly with the mandatory celebrity apology, he risks being cancelled.

He doesn’t apologise, and if the church also can’t quite cancel Jesus, it’s common these days to imagine that here even Jesus reveals himself to be “human” – even he has things to learn. And thanks is then given to God for this courageous woman who, through her persistence, teaches Jesus an important lesson. And yet… Why is it that, in every other instance in the Gospels, Jesus is apparently always the one who understands, leads, directs, challenges and rebukes appropriately, but that just here – at an otherwise unremarkable point in the story – he drops the ball? More likely, he does not, and our gut response springs from simply seeing and hearing the wrong thing here.

What, then, is being seen and not perceived, heard and not understood, as we hear today’s story? If we attend to what in fact happens in the exchange between the woman and Jesus, we see that her faith is affirmed not because she shames Jesus but because she agrees with him: “Yes, Lord”; “Yes, Lord, a dog, and yet even the dogs gather up the crumbs from under the children’s table”.

Faith
The woman’s “Yes, Lord, and yet…” is met with Jesus’ response, “Great is your faith!” But what is this faith? It is not that Jesus could heal her daughter, otherwise her first request would already have proven her faith, and led to the healing. Her “faith” is that Yes, it is the children’s bread, and yet it is for me, too. Her faith is that she recites the promise of God that all the nations will be blessed with, or through, God’s “children”, Israel. Her faith is in the one who made this promise, and she speaks God’s promise to Jesus – with you, Jesus, crumbs are enough – and Jesus replies, Amen.

But can crumbs be enough? Not with “real” bread, which is why Hotham Mission has put much time and money into food programs and food security research. But this is not a story about bread; it is about relationship, participation and blessing. Bread is here a metaphor for these things, which is to say that these things are as essential for life as bread.

The woman’s quip about crumbs stretches the metaphor beautifully, by which she declares not “I also deserve to be fed” but rather, “So abundant is God’s provision of bread to his children that there are leftovers” – “crumbs”. (It is worth noting in passing that we’ve only just heard of a miraculous feeding, after which twelve baskets of “crumbs” were collected, and another follows today’s story, after which seven baskets are collected.)

Whereas our concern tends to be about the woman’s feelings at being called a dog, she appears in the story not as one offended by Jesus but as one confident in the quality of the bread he brings to the “children”. We are, then, not to defend her but to believe as she believes.

She believes that it is through God’s few that the many are blessed. And what does this mean, practically? How is this also our truth – for that is the only reason we might bother with it? We can perhaps drive the point home most clearly with a little “embodied” demonstration. Turn and look at the person next to you, and now say to them, “Woof!” Are we not all here “Gentile dogs”? The church – which almost completely Gentile – has its very being from the crumbs of God’s love for Israel. We forget this, of course, and in the forgetting we harden grace into law. We make ourselves the source of a blessing we can give or withhold, according to whether we think we’re dealing with children or dogs.

We here are one small part of the emergence from a blessing which took place in a particular time and place which is not our time and place. We are a part of the people of God not because God is one and loves everyone the same way. God loved someone else first, and we have been picked up along the way. Of course, in the end, it does not matter who is first and who is second, who is fed at the table and who is not, for all will be fed.

But we forget the ordering at our peril – the peril of self-righteousness – and at the peril of all to whom we might be a blessing. This is because we obscure the way God works in the world at the risk of what God actually offers. We speak so easily in the church of forgiveness but what is forgiveness if not a gift of life from outside of us, a blessing with its origin outside of us?

For‑given
And this leads us to a connection which is little short of horrifying for good-minded people such as we think we are: we can now see in our story this morning that the Canaanite woman is “for‑given” for not being a Jew.

This, of course, makes no moral sense, because morals are all about responsibility for fault, and this woman is no more responsible for her heritage than anyone could possibly be. This is why we take offence here, moralists that we tend to be. It makes no moral sense but it makes good theological sense to speak of her being “for‑given” in this way, because forgiveness is properly defined not by the fault but by the gift. And the gift is always the same: Sinner? You are mine, says God. Canaanite? Mine. Dead? Mine.

The basis upon which that extraordinary woman made her appeal to Jesus is the same basis upon which the Christian becomes a Christian in conversion, on which he confesses sin and expects to hear the absolution, on which he takes as his own the death and life of another in sharing bread and wine around a table as a source of new life.

The gift is always the same – that we are claimed by God – and it always comes from beyond us. This is why Christians are called to be lovers and givers in evangelism and the service of others. Love is not mere attraction but is, more completely, gift.

He probably didn’t, but Jesus might have said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of heaven, or what parable will we use for it? It is like a dog who licks up the crumbs under the children’s table.”

The ministry of Jesus was to feed the children, and to let the dogs in. Such love and such a flow of blessing are to be the shape of our own lives.

Let us, then, love and give, puppy to puppy, to God’s greater glory and to the richer humanity of all who still hunger for the children’s bread.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 11
13/8/2023

Psalm 85
Matthew 14:22-33

---

In a sentence:
Though it might feel like we are falling, Jesus is a very good catch

Sur‑prise
Last Monday morning, I went down to the Curzon Street church to take some photographs of the inside of the empty buildings before the sale was finalised the next day.

It was a poignant moment, although it was no surprise that the moment would come. Standing in the empty, dusty Union Memorial Church led me to reflect that those who built the place would have been surprised at what it had come to. Reflecting further, the more I pondered the word “surprise”, the stranger it became.

For us today, “surprise” describes something which breaks in as a momentary disordering of our world, whether for good or bad. But the word comes to us from Latin through French, and has a root meaning of “over-taken”. A sur‑prise is a grasping or a seizing. To be surprised is to be captured. Perhaps it’s not surprising(!), then, to learn that the words predator, prey and reprieve are related to surprise.

Now, the problem with getting into the background of words is that we – or the preacher, at least – might be tempted to make modern words mean now what they clearly don’t. And yet, this is precisely what preaching is supposed to do. Our language, like our bread, grows stale with time. Familiarity here breeds not so much contempt as simple indifference or even ignorance – that we don’t know what we are saying. We know, of course, that our times are constantly changing. But as the times change, our language no longer works as it once did. This is particularly the case with social, political and theological language – language which gives contour to the heart of our being. We could, perhaps, invent new language, and this happens as well. But we also need to strange our language to make it not only new but vital – life-giving.

Consider hearing “surprised” as “captured”. It now becomes the case that we are always surprised because we are always captive to something. We are captive to our bodies – which kind we got and what our lifestyle and age have done to it. We are captive to fear of whatever kind presently presses in on us. We are made captives when we fall in love, to the economy we live, and to our mortality. In various ways and to various things, we are captive, we are seized, we are “sur‑prised”. This is inescapable, whether in our personal lives or in our lives together as a society or a church.

As a community, we were surprised by the problems with Union Memorial Church. We were surprised, in the ordinary sense, by the unexpected movement of the foundations. But, more profoundly, we were seized by the need to do something about it. For about 15 years, we were over‑taken – “sur‑prised” – by the problem. We could more dramatically extend this characterisation of that experience by bringing in the related predator-prey language. Were we not prey to our desires to remain in that place, and to our sense of responsibility for it, but also to the dilapidated condition of faith in contemporary society, and to the financial decisions of the wider church, and to the foibles we each brought to the process? This is not necessarily to criticise anything which happened, but only to make strange our way of talking about it. Were we not grasped – predated as prey – by things much bigger than any of us? Was this not a “sur‑prising”, a seizing, a capture?

I think that this way of talking about what we’ve been through. But it also tells us something about our present experience here, now that we have moved. For though we are now here at the CTM, it has not yet sur‑prised us, it has not yet grasped us, it does not yet hold us.

Falling
And this brings me to the problem of the moment: not yet to be held is to be falling, one of the most disorienting experiences we can have. In its own frightening way, a fall surprises us – it takes us over. We know it is happening but we can’t do anything about it. We have to ride a fall – we have to ride nothingness – to the ground, until the ground captures us again, and not usually very gently.

At last, then let us look to our reading from Matthew this morning. Out on the water, the disciples are seized, surprised, overtaken by the wind and the waves, and there appears in the midst an impossible thing which seizes them more tightly in their fears. It beckons to them but they don’t believe, and so Peter proposes a test: “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Jesus replies, “Come.” So Peter gets out of the boat and starts walking on the water toward Jesus. But he notices the strong wind, becomes frightened, begins to sink, and cries out, “Lord, save me!”

We here have stepped out of a boat on the high seas, imagining that it is better to respond to Jesus’ command than to let the ship suck us down. Perhaps some of us have also done this in some way in our own lives. But, having disembarked,  there is a lot of water to cross before we get to him, before we are held again. And in that space, it is as if we are abandoned: Lord, is that you? Is this you? Or have you forsaken us? (We might note here, in passing, that Jesus’ cry of dereliction from the cross is just such a “crossing of the water”).

“Lord, save me!” Peter cries, and Jesus reaches out and seizes him and says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” But doubt what? Doubt that water can hold us up? No. Christian faith doesn’t believe that, with enough faith, we could walk on water. We believe rather that, though we are falling, Jesus is a good catch.

Caught
No small part of the life of faith – in fact, of any life – is waiting to be caught in God’s secure hands as we take a step away from what can no longer sustain us into some new sur‑prising. Faith is living in the expectation that we will be caught, that we will be surprised by the embrace of God. Of course, we work hard most of the time to ensure we don’t fall; this is what strategies, planning and training are all about.

But falling is inevitable, and once it happens, we can only let it happen. If we are falling then, the only question is whether we think we will be caught, or come crashing to the ground.

In terms of the gospel story, we ride the fall waiting for the hand of Jesus to grasp us by the wrist and drag us waist-deep through the fearful nothingness to himself, to God.

If this is what we believe, our present and unavoidable finding-again of ourselves in a new place is not the end of the story but a necessary thing if we are to discover God again and anew.

We once had to “lean into” the decision to move here; with Peter, we started walking on the water.

Now that we are here on the water let us again lean into what this surprising God will do to make this time and place ours, and to remake us for this place and time.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 10
6/8/2023

Isaiah 55:1-5
Psalm 145
Matthew 14:13-21

---

In a sentence:
In the hands of this God, the one pearl, invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish is enough

Parables versus miracles
Over the last couple of weeks, we have heard – although not looked very closely at – some of the parables of Jesus. Today, by contrast, we hear a miracle story.

We respond differently to the various reports of what Jesus said and did. Mostly, we are happy with the parables, if sometimes a little mystified. Many of us, however, suffer from a nervous twitch when it comes to the miracle stories. We feel an urgent need to get around the miracle, an urgency we don’t feel when it comes to the parables.

The parables and miracles might be contrasted as thoughtful, scratch-your-head texts (“Hmmmm…”) and spectacle texts (“WOW!!) – even if we might be sceptical about the miracle report. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven added to the dough” – “Hmmm… That’s something to think about”; “Jesus broke bread and fed over 5000 people – “Wow! Did you see that?”

Of course, we might wonder about the miracle, but that’s not the real problem. The problem is that we don’t say “Wow!” when we hear that the kingdom is like leaven added to the dough, and we don’t really scratch our heads wondering what it could mean that a hungry mass is satisfied with one bag of groceries.

We touch here upon what someone raised last week in our brief conversation about the readings: why does Jesus justify his use of ambiguous parables with a troubling quote from Isaiah, along these lines?

‘To you [disciples] it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to [the crowd] it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13.11ff)

Jesus means here that these parables are not easy. What they relate to is about as easy as it is to perform a miracle. The Kingdom of Heaven in the parables is a very strange thing.  A little later in last week’s collection of parables, Jesus asks the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” (13.51) They answer, “Yes”. For Matthew, it is important that this is a “YES!!” but it was more likely an uncertain “Ummmm…yeahhhhh…could you say all that again?”

On the one hand, the shock to the senses of the miracles illustrates what the parables are about: they have to do with the miraculous. On the other hand, the miracles are mute and meaningless without the parables. A curious thing about today’s account of the feeding of the 5000 is that it doesn’t actually tell us what we are to do with it, which is also the case with just about every other miracle story in the Scriptures. There is no “Believe this” – that I did it. There is no “Do this” – as I have done. There is no “watch for this again” – so you’ll know when I’m around. There is just the story, and the narrative moves on, kind of like how the parables are told, leaving us to scratch our heads.

Here you are, Jesus
With all this in mind, let’s consider today’s particular story. In the middle of the account is an exchange between Jesus and his disciples about who will feed the masses. “You give them something to eat”, Jesus tells them.

The standard reading is that here the disciples are being tested, and fail. And they do fail. But what is the test? Again, the common reading is that they didn’t have “enough faith” – they couldn’t summon the magic – to do what Jesus then had to do in their stead.

But if the feeding has something to do with the Kingdom of Heaven, “not enough faith” doesn’t ring true with the Scriptural understanding of who does what in that Godly kingdom. For a contrast with these disciples here, we might jump gospels and watch what happens in Cana when the wine runs out (John 2.1-12). There Jesus’ mother Mary, the quintessential disciple, nudges Jesus and whispers, “They’re out of wine,” and then tells the servants, “Do whatever he says”. Problem solved.

This suggests that if the disciples fail a test before the hungry masses, it is not that they didn’t have enough “faith” to feed them. The failure is that they didn’t see that the test was whether they would defer to him and respond immediately, “Here you are, Jesus: we can toss in a few loaves and a couple of fish.”

The work of the miracle is to communicate that the world the parables describe can only be realised by God. The Kingdom is God’s work. Put differently, the parables tell of the miraculous nature of God’s reign.

What does this mean for anything?

It means that all of our great efforts at working miracles – our planning, our negotiations, our careful liturgy and our new organ, our food programs, education programs and asylum work – these things are but a few loaves and a couple of fish to be presented with the words, “Here you are, Jesus”.

The miracle – the unbelievable thing – is that this is enough. In the hands of this God, the one pearl, the invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish… is enough. And faith, when it comes – the faith that so little is yet enough – this faith is what it looks like for God’s kingdom to come, on earth as in heaven.

“The” parable, and miracle
So little is enough with God because at the heart of our confession is a single, baffling parable: “A person of faith freely walked a path to condemnation on a cross”. “Hmmm…”, we might say, “Not sure I get that”. That one parable is met with a single, spectacular miracle – “The crucified man was raised to life”. “Wow!!”, we might respond, “Although not sure I can believe that”.

But it also applies the other way around: the raising of the condemned man is the parable, and the steady path to the cross is the miracle. We don’t get the parables without the miracles. The easy-to-comprehend cross is only ours with the impossible resurrection. The glorious resurrection is meaningless without the gritty reality of Jesus’ life and death. What we find easy in the parables and hard in the miracles lean in toward each other, fill each other up, and there the Kingdom of Heaven is revealed.

When the kingdom of this God draws near, everything becomes a parable, and everything a miracle – even us with our hesitations, our lack of faith or vision, our fears and our graspings after empty hopes. And the same for our more “positive” experiences – our dreams and visions and joys; the Kingdom of Heaven “makes strange” everything, for the good.

Our life together as Mark the Evangelist in this place, and the quiet hopes and anxieties of our hearts, are the stuff of parable and miracle, where God’s will is done, on earth as in heaven. We will be God’s parable and miracle.

Let this be the light in which we do our next thing.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 9
30/7/2023

Romans 8:12-25
Psalm 119:129-135
Matthew 13:10-13, 31-35, 44 46

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

---

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18)

Sixty-two years ago, when I was a second-year theological student, I first proposed this text as a sermon offered to the Friday student preaching class. Having long forgotten its drift, I decided, perhaps foolishly, to read it again – now as an act of penance. Preachers have long been advised never to keep their early efforts, but perversely I have, if only in the hope of doing better.

What was the sound and fury of this first amateurish offering that led to my effort’s missing the point? It was interpreting Paul’s “sufferings”, and the “groaning of creation”, to be the cultural conversion of living Christian faith into conventional formulaic religion. This arguably imaginative imposition on the text might have been excused, because for some years before becoming a theological student, I had been captivated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s intriguing concept of “non-religious” interpretation of Christian faith in his “Letters and Papers from Prison”. If you haven’t ever read them, I urge you to do so, for eighty years later what he wrote has all come true. So, even though it was misconceived, and would certainly need a different text, my sermonic exertion was not entirely wrong. The fact is that emancipation of Christian faith from the category of “religion” is still a – if not the – major discovery that awaits a largely hostile or apathetic “No-religion” Western culture.

I suppose that every generation hearing this text will look to the issues of the day to find a correspondence to Paul’s “sufferings of the present time”. To be sure, it would be understandable hearing in our day his striking phrase, the “groaning of creation”, to conceive of our “sufferings” as the escalating horrors of climate change, not to speak of the ambiguous potential of burgeoning artificial intelligence. These, of course, overlay the more enduring candidates we experience as human suffering – incessant global warfare; our physical frailties; the pain, intended or unintended, that accompanies our mutual interactions; even the closing of our churches. All these which we experience as ‘suffering’, understandable though they be, would actually be a misreading of our text.

The reason why all such interpretations of the “sufferings of the present time” identified as being one or more contemporary cultural phenomena misses the point – or at least Paul’s point – is to be found in the little word in the text, “time”. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time….”  The Greek word for time that Paul employs here is not, as we might hear it to be, tick-tock, every-day, worldly time; the faces of a watch; the dates on a calendar or a tombstone, but rather is a time that comes laden with significance – he uses a word that really means something like “opportune” time, eventful time, filled time, time having real significance. Well, we might roundly assert: what could be more evocative as being absolutely decisive, cataclysmic even, of the lists of human “suffering” that we can readily compile?

But the fact is that Paul’s “filled-time”, “the sufferings of this present time”, is about something other than the world in its always-present unpredictability. Rather, he is writing to a persecuted church facing absolute predictability, whose “suffering” members know themselves to be well and truly “cultural resident aliens”. Since that is increasingly how we find ourselves, Paul’s “eventful time” should prove to be the greatest encouragement. With it we are being drawn into a new perspective as to how the world looks viewed from beyond its suffering self – a view of our everyday plain, we might say, from an elevated ridge.

We get a sense of what is at stake in standing on such an elevated ridge when we hear the cryptic repeated Heaven-on-Earth parables offered to us this morning in the gospel of Matthew. In each we hear of the essentially “innocent” everyday world – of an insignificant mustard seed planted in chronological time, but destined to become a tree robust enough to accommodate “the birds of the air”, a then-synonym for the Gentiles. What Matthew is prefiguring here is an unanticipated “filled time”, soon to unfold as inclusive Easter gift replacing what was then a daily Jewish necessity of Gentile exclusion. Or we hear of yeast, in itself pointless, now transformed when added to flour to make the human necessity of bread. Or again, an unobserved hidden treasure is secured by a man’s parting of his total wealth, as indeed is that of a merchant in his everyday employment coming across a pearl of such value that absurdly he is prepared to sell everything for it. Or, if you prefer a contemporary parable, what about likening an earthly “heaven” to a spare temporal moment visit to an Op shop – an “Opportune” Shop remember – only to exclaim discovering an unanticipated find: “I’ve been looking for one of these!” Time well spent indeed!

The point is that all these everyday chronological activities have the potential to become transformed when the gospel is at stake into something radically more – a “more” which Jesus, surely extraordinarily, identifies as an experience of heaven-on-earth. In just this way, in our text, Paul is proposing a freely-embodied conscious taking up of “suffering with Christ” as being different from all every-day “sufferings”, an experience of being offered a potential new shape to the world different from the harsh realities of everyday life.

This embodied suffering with Christ comes as both a participation as well as an anticipation. Participation obviously, in an already willing sharing – but doing so as the anticipation of something not yet at hand. He calls this duality of participation/anticipation the pre-figuring of a “glory about to be revealed to us”. His point is that this future is no longer merely an extension of the present. It is an alternative to it. This radical reversal of time proposes a transfer from one domain to another – from the ambiguities of “everyday time” to a discovery of “opportune time”. It consists of living a life that is coming from an assured future into our present uncertain time. If participation emphasises the “already” of this arrival, anticipation proposes its “not yet”. For this reason, we hear that this “not yet” is to be experienced as “hope”.

But with this little word “hope”, we clearly have a real problem. Like most Christians words today, “hope” has been cast adrift from its theological mooring. We speak of those who live by hope as optimists – “glass half full” people, unlike “glass half empty” pessimists – with a distinct preference for the former. “I hope it won’t rain for the match – I’m optimistic!  And then, when it does rain: “I suppose that I should have been more pessimistic”. Either way, true hope doesn’t stand a chance. For, as Paul observes, who exhausts hope in what is seen, that is, when we already know that the day will either be sunny or wet? We need something much more reliable than this – to grasp a better true hope that has its ground beyond the inevitable paralysis of an always capricious optimism or pessimism?

Our text proposes an answer.  Grounded hope will emerge when “suffering” is grasped as the necessity of a daily fundamental reorientation – what the Gospel calls “repentance” – a willing taking up of that inevitably concealed unobservable union between God and the world once and for all revealed in the Cross and resurrection of Christ. But, if this sort of hope is to have any contemporary force, we really do need to find a better word. What about when you hear the word hope, substituting for it something like “assurance”? Because assurance has a ground, a rationale, that evades a “whistling in the dark” vacuous hope that could go either way.

In a few moments we will be invited to stand and confess the faith of the Church. Amongst many things, we will find ourselves saying: “I believe in the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”. What are these assurances but simply “symbols of glory”, the luminous unveiling of what it has all been for? This most decisive assurance of all is what the Gospel calls “joy” – that no terror awaits that has not already been defeated – a solidity quite other than mercurial “happiness”. For with joy we live, not towards what may be, but to the vindication of what has already been secured.  And this is simply to endorse Paul’s confidence for ourselves:

“I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits….” 

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 8
23/7/2023

Romans 8:18-25
Psalm 86
Matthew 13:24-30

---

In a sentence:
Faith acts and speaks with patience because it is confident that God has and will triumph over all things.

Faith, Nature, Art and War
As I sat on down at my desk earlier this week, I was struck by the titles of two books I’d placed there next to each other.

I had just finished the first book: Gerhard Ebeling’s The nature of faith. Ebeling attempts to lay faith out in such a way as to connect to the broader university community where he taught. I wonder whether this could, in part, be the kind of work we might be doing now that we are in a university precinct among colleges.

The second book was what I am now reading – Sun Tzu’s The art of war, a classic Chinese text on martial strategy. I’m reading this for a similar reason: how does one engage with strange others, whether those in the university, those in the Synod’s Centre for Theology and Ministry(!), or just in the wider world? The terrain is unfamiliar, and we don’t know what to expect from the natives. Some anticipation and strategy would seem to be required!

Common to these two books, and central in my own motivation in reading them, is the question of engagement. But what struck me about the two sitting next to each other on the desk was the similar structure of their titles – The “This” of “That: “The nature of faith” and “The art of war”.

And a somewhat silly question came to mind: are these two books about the same thing, even if written perhaps 2400 years apart and on seemingly divergent topics? Has the nature of faith got something to do with the art of war? This strange connection persisted, and now you will have to think about it with me!

War as an Art
War is a human endeavour which is, crucially, everywhere and at all times a reality or a near possibility at one level or another. This is the case whether you’re on a battlefield, struggling to get some new business startup off the ground or just preparing to visit the in-laws. Politics – our very life together – is, broadly, war.

War is then something we make or fashion, as a matter of course. As such, it can be done well or poorly. The art of war was written so that war be done well. It doesn’t matter here whether war or any human struggle offends us. None of us can do much about these struggles when they come, or even avoid them. We can only respond well or not. And this response – this art of doing war is – like any art – not easy. (A recent book makes this point by reversing the title of Sun Tzu’s book: The war of art [S Pressfield]).

It makes sense, then, that we might think about the art of war in the way that we might think about any art: How do we do this well? How do we enter into the fray? How do we engage others, perhaps against their will? If we are going to be living with other people we need to know something about the art of war; it’s just part of life, just natural.

Faith and nature
What about The nature of faith? The proposal here is that faith has a nature appropriate to itself. It has its own way of being, self-understanding, and expression. Just as sparrows, pelicans, and ostriches are each their own particular type of bird, faith – among other human endeavours – is and does its peculiar thing.

But on this account (which is not quite Ebeling’s argument), faith is a different human thing from war. If war is “natural” – by which I mean that it is everywhere at hand – this is not so for faith. Faith might have a nature of its own, but we don’t think that faith is “natural”. War and struggle are everywhere and are, in this sense, natural. Faith is not everywhere – or at least this is how the secular world frames the matter. Faith might have its own nature, but it is not natural, not fundamental, and is actively excluded from some places.

The question for us is, is this the proper reading of faith? And the answer is, No.

But it’s one thing to say this, and another to know and embrace what it means to say it in a context where it is denied.

The war of faith
The only way we can contradict this marginalisation – in ourselves and in our relationship with the world – is surprising and horrifying: faith must go to “war”. With all political struggles, war is about the crossing of boundaries. We push back invaders or become invaders ourselves. Not surprisingly, this is precisely what it feels like to ourselves and to the broader culture whenever the church presumes to speak out on some topic or to evangelise. We – the church – strategise, and the world responds as if under attack. It is almost impossible – outside the church and inside it – to hear the word “faith” without faith already being outside natural human endeavour. In a culture like ours, to propose faith is to cross a boundary, so that the very notion of faith is heard as a rumour of war.

I suspect this seems rather extreme to some of you, but consider the response you might expect from family, neighbours or colleagues if you suggested a bit of theology might do them good. The defences will go up, for an enemy is at hand.

Of course, the problem with war language in connection with faith is that there is a kind of faith which literally goes to war. The young fanatic with a bomb in his backpack is a version of faith at war, as is the Christian reactionary blowing up an abortion clinic. This is war, and it is a kind of faith. But it is bad faith. For there is an art of faith which determines what the war of faith should properly look like, and this art can be badly or well done.  We need to know about the art of faith in order to know how faith might properly wage war.

Paul and the patient warrior
And now I come(!), briefly, to our text this morning from Paul’s letter to the Romans. What does the war of faith look like, according to Paul?

The condition for war is the world’s “bondage to decay”, the “sufferings of this present time” and the the great groaning” of creation and the human heart, at the struggle for life. Faith holds that this is the struggle, and that it will be a victorious struggle because the only combatant who matters is the God and Father of Jesus Christ. It is God’s own struggle.

And us? What is faith’s part here? What is the art of faith in the one struggle which matters? Faith wages war, Paul says, by being patient.

I didn’t expect that when I started pondering those book titles. If we are in a war, patience is almost a horrifying suggestion, sounding like resignation and capitulation. But this is faith’s war – the struggle of the faith which trusts in this God, who will overcome the bondage of all things, all relationships, to decay.

The art of war is, for faith, the art of patience. This is because faith holds that the war is already won. And now the groaning of all creation is no longer “mere” suffering but is transformed into the birth pangs of God’s future: the whole world is pregnant with God’s promise. There is then now, no further blow to strike. Patience need only wait for the birth of the children of God; this cannot be induced or hurried.

But the patient art of faith is not passive. Patience expects something, and faith’s mode of waiting points towards what we expect, testifying to what is to come. Faith, then, refuses to shut up about the coming reconciliation of all things, the overcoming of all boundaries, the end of all struggle and war. If faith seems to cross boundaries, it is because this crossing itself is testimony. The war of faith is not incursion into foreign territory, even if the foray makes us nervous and we are rejected as enemies. Anywhere faith goes, it knows that place as God’s own and goes there as proof of this.

This is to say that faith is at home in the world, in the entirety of the world. Faith is at home on Curzon Street and on College Crescent. Faith is at home in the rigour and passion of politics and in a solitary, quieted heart. Faith is at home in death as well as in life.

This is because faith holds that we are already conquerors through him who loved us; there is no war to wage, only the busy, witnessing work of patience. To anticipate what we will hear from Paul again next week in his great crescendo to this chapter in Romans: faith does its work patiently and without violent struggle because not death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,

is be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8.27-39).

Faith struggles here and now – but patiently – in words and works which express the reconciliation of all things which God will bring.

Our new start here today is just a part of that struggle, which we take up with joy – which is to say, with courage. We are here because it is, for us, faith’s next thing, whatever comes of it.

And so, let us lift up our hearts as, in fresh words and deeds, we begin again the patient life of the children of God.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 7
16/7/2023

Isaiah 55:1-13
Psalm 65
Matthew 13:2-9

---

In a sentence:
Thanksgiving, properly, opens us up to God’s next good thing

On Saying “Ta”
It is not long after our children begin to develop a sense for language that we teach them to say ‘ta’. This is an important lesson for at least two reasons.

First, and obviously, we want to instil a sense of humility and gratitude in our little ones. We can’t do everything for ourselves, so we learn to say thanks when someone gives us something we need.

But second – and less obvious in the lesson – saying “ta” is an essential social noise. Many personal exchanges require this of us, and so we learn to say it almost automatically. We say “Good morning” and “How are you?” when we meet someone, without really thinking about the quality of their morning or wanting to know too much detail about how they are. Similarly, saying “thanks” brings closure to a personal interaction. We say thanks when someone gives us the few coins we are owed in change, or at the end of an email, or we give a wave of thanks when someone lets us into the line of traffic. Saying “ta” is a kind of social lubricant.

Our thanks can, of course, be much more heartfelt than this, just as our greetings can be more sincere than they often are. Yet saying thanks is always at least the social noise.  And, as a social noise which concludes some human exchange, thanksgiving is an inherently past-oriented action.

“Thank God”
What does this mean for saying thanks to God, as we might understand ourselves to be doing today, now taking leave of a significant part of our past?

We get some sense of the church’s thanksgiving by examining how we sometimes pray. We thank God, perhaps, for a good harvest (“Harvest Thanksgiving”). We thank God for new members who join the congregation or for the excellent weather we had on the church picnic (at least, in those days when we had church picnics!). We thank God because one of our number escaped harm in some recent catastrophe. We might even dare to thank God for the outcome of an election. Such thanksgiving as this is in the standard mode of exchange and closure. Something has happened that we attribute to God’s action, and so we respond with the necessary social – or necessary pious – noise.

Of course, thanking God is often contentious. The lovely day we enjoyed for the church picnic might have been one more day on which a desperate farmer did not get the rain she so earnestly prayed for. And the test case for all pious thanksgiving in closure mode is the crucifixion of the Christ: Thank God that we are finally rid of Jesus the Nazarene.

We might reasonably suspect, nonetheless, that we must make some thanksgivings like this. We give thanks for worship services in workshops and hotels here in North Melbourne in the early 1850s, for the laying of various foundation stones between 1859 and 1898, and for the taking of responsibility as circumstances changed. We give thanks for the consolidation of earlier communities here in 1987 and 1996, and for all the efforts over the past 15 years or so which sought to maintain our presence here. We must do this because the social noise – and its pious version – does matter. People have done their best, and we thank God for them and for the benefits of their labours.

And yet, thanksgiving like this also brings each of these exchanges between God and us to their respective closures. As such, our thanksgiving here remains oriented towards “yesterday”.

Eucharist: Thanksgiving as Becoming
But the church does more than this in its thanksgiving. At the heart of the life of any (small c) catholic Christian worship is “the Eucharist”. We know it also, of course, as “the Lord’s Supper” and “Holy Communion” or even “the Mass”, but perhaps “Eucharist” characterises the sacrament best. From a Greek root, the word means “thanksgiving”. How does the church give thanks here?

A major feature of that part of our worship is the “Great Prayer of Thanksgiving”. This prayer tells the story of creation, of the call of the people of Israel, and of God’s struggles with that people. We hear of the sending of Jesus, of his death and resurrection, and of the fruit of God’s saving work in him. All of this is told in the past tense, and so it looks very much like saying thanks in the mode of exchange and closure. In the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, we say “Ta”.

But the Eucharist – the thanksgiving – is not yet over. We move from the prayer into the actions around the bread and wine: the blessing, the breaking of the bread and the eating and drinking. This, too, is thanksgiving, but now we are not bringing closure but opening up, not drawing to an end but becoming the shape of a beginning.

And what is beginning is the Body of Christ – the church – nourished by and participating in the humanity of Jesus, which is signed in the eating and drinking of bread and the wine said to be the body and blood of Jesus. We persist in this ghastly image because we are what we eat. Let us receive what we are, Augustine says, Let us become what we receive: even the Body of Christ.

For the church to say thanks, properly as church, is then not to look back to some closed past of Jesus. For the church to give thanks for Jesus is for it to become itself the Body of Christ. To give thanks for Christ is to become an openness to the future. If we remember the work of God in Christ, we remember our future, so that thanksgiving is a process of becoming that future.

And so, to thank God is not bring closure; it is to make a commitment. “Do this”, Jesus says, “for the making again of me”. For the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist to give thanks for all that we and our predecessors have known of God’s grace of God is, then, for us to re-commit ourselves as bearers of God’s grace. There is no closure here, only openness to God’s next good thing.

When Gods call us to thanksgiving, we are not only to remember the past but are challenged to make a commitment to a future about which we know nothing except that the Father’s heart is there, waiting for the arrival of the Body of the Son – waiting of our arrival. And to arrive, we must go, now as always.

We don’t know where we are going, in the sense that really matters. We know only that God will be there.

Thanksgiving, then, is a risky venture and not for the fainthearted. Thanksgiving remembers and closes and releases and, from there, turns to the openness of a genuinely new and unknown day.

How does the church say thanks? In fear and trembling, throwing ourselves forward into the promise of God.

God says to us now, “Say ta. I dare you. And when you do, you shall go out with joy, and be led back in peace, and the mountains and the hills will burst into song, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”