Category Archives: Sermons

25 February – How not to fall on your face

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Lent 2
25/2/2018

Genesis 17:1-10, 15-19
Psalm 22
Mark 8:27-38

Conventional wisdom has it that falling on your face is, generally, not a good idea.

And yet in our story this morning, in which God repeats the covenant promise to Abraham, the patriarch falls on his face twice – once for better, once for worse.

For the better, Abraham’s first fall is in holy awe. God declares ‘I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous’. This is, for Abraham, a very good thing. Falling on his face is an appropriate response to the presence of one whose intention is sheer, overwhelming gift.

But then, for the worse, Abraham falls on his face with laughter at the suggestion that he and Sarah would now share a child. This is not happy laughter but derisive, and Sarah later laughs in the same way (Genesis 18.12ff). ‘Come on God, let’s not be silly’, and he takes God aside to show him Ishmael: ‘The son I already have can be your means.’ And God says, No. So much for at least one human reception of divine gift.

Yet, when we swing across to the gospel we see the same dynamic. In response to the question about the identity of Jesus, Peter apparently answers perfectly: You are the Christ. In Matthew’s more expansive account Jesus congratulates Peter for recognising who Jesus is. We are here at the midpoint climax of Mark’s gospel: Jesus accepts the title ‘Christ’, and the very next episode is the Transfiguration of Jesus: This is my Son; here is the sheer gift of the God. Peter’s declaration is a falling down moment of holy awe, even if he remains upright.

But then comes the derision. Jesus tells of his coming rejection and suffering at the hands of the people and Peter takes him aside and begins to rebuke him – another falling down in mocking laughter. And Jesus says, No.

If, on account of their significance in the biblical stories, we were to take Abraham and Peter as types – as models or patterns – of how the holy people receive the holy God – then there is something about us which both enables us to recognise God, and causes us not to.

What are we to do with this? I’ve titled this sermon, How not to fall on your face, to which we now come: the ‘application’ of what we’ve seen in the readings today.

It hurts just as much whether you fall on your face with holy awe or with derisive dismissal of God’s proposals. But there is a difference between the pain of these two falls: one is God’s gift and the other is God’s curse.

The gift is the shock which wakes us up in the way that only a fall can. And we need to be woken up, sleepwalkers through life that we are.

The curse is God’s response to our presumption to speak too quickly. Having just woken and opened our eyes, we imagine they are already adjusted to the light. No longer asleep but blinded, we find God to be a stumbling block and we hit the ground again, now unnecessarily.

Falling on your face for the better is an entirely appropriate response to a God whose approach fills and illuminates and completes far beyond your wildest dreams.

The way to avoid falling on your face for the worse is simply not to get up after the first fall. Presumably Abraham recovered from his initial shock and climbed to his feet before he hit the ground the second time. For Peter, the difference between a fall for the better and one for the worse is the difference between answering a question Jesus had asked him and presuming to answer a question Jesus had not asked.

Christian discipleship is about not getting up after falling on your face that first time. This is what it means to take up a cross and follow Jesus.

This is all metaphorical, of course. I’m not talking about ‘giving up’ or refusing ‘to get back on that horse,’ or staying on the ground as a doormat for others or even for God. It is important to counter such defeatist mindsets when we meet them but we are far beyond the power of positive thinking here.

Carrying our cross, or falling on our face for the better, is a matter of adopting an appropriate posture before a God who draws the world as it is into the world which is promised by such crazy means as a Geriatric Conception (let alone a virginal one) and a crucified Christ. For these are the same thing: God pressing through what we believe him to be, to become the God he wills yet to be.

To take up a cross and to follow Jesus is to look up from the ground and to blink into the light at the sight of an impossible child in an impossible place – Jesus on the cross. It is to let the light which that sight is slowly to wash out the shadows, slowly to come into focus. It is to see that the last thing God should do is the only thing God does.

To take up our cross and follow, or to remain prostrate in holy awe, is to live in thanksgiving, that even the unholiness of the holy people of God is no barrier to the overwhelming gift of God.

According to your preference, then: Take up Your Cross and, or just Fall on Your Face, and watch as God calls into existence things as yet unimagined and raises the dead – even us.

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18 February – Living with a forgetful God

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Lent 1
18/2/2018

Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25
Mark 1:9-15

Noah-and-the-ark is perhaps the best known of all Bible stories, not least because it involves animals, and animals make great toys, and so nearly every kid gets to play Noah-and-the-ark at some stage or other. But what we all know about the story is typically the form and not the substance. The form of the story is Noah and the animals and the rainbow. The substance is, How to keep God under control or, perhaps better, Living with a forgetful God.

Of course, notions of keeping God under control, or God’s forgetting of his promises, are impious. But, as it happens, that such thoughts are necessary comes from God himself. We know well enough the flow of the Noah story. There is sinfulness across the face of the earth, except for Noah and his family; God resolves to wash away all humankind but them; the flood comes and goes; God resolves not to do this again and gives the rainbow as a sign of this resolution. It is the rainbow stage of the story which matters for God-control purposes.

As a sign, the rainbow is not a mere sign, in that it could have been something else. A rainbow bends in the way an archer’s bow bends; more than a sign, it is a symbol, in that it resembles and so reminds of an archer’s bow. The rainbow signs that God has laid down his weapon and will not attack again: “I have put my bow in the sky.”

But notice to whom the sign-symbol is given. Specifically, it is not given to us that we be reminded; it is given to God, in order that God not forget the promise, Never Again. The rainbow declares that the people stand only when God remembers the covenant; only God can control God. The point at which heaven and earth meet is marked with something of such scale that God cannot miss it, and in such a way that we know God cannot miss it.

This pre-historical story with its ancient mythological symbolism seems a long way from the much less mythical gospel narratives of the ministry of Jesus. Yet it is not so far as we might first think. For Jesus is himself the point at which heaven and earth meet; Jesus is himself the New Testament’s rainbow.

But at the same time Jesus’ ministry culminates in the cross, a crisis of divine forgetfulness: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, forgotten me? (Mark 15.34). It is all the more poignant that Jesus should cry out so with the baptismal declaration still ringing in his ears: You are my Son, the Beloved. The cry from the cross is precisely a challenge to God that a covenant has been forgotten, despite the faithfulness of Jesus. Such a death for Jesus ought to be impossible, for how can God forget the Beloved? Yet the chaotic flood of human politics, religion and morality washes him away. This was not “the plan” as if it were supposed to happen; nothing is supposed to happen except that God remembers.

Has God forgotten, forsaken here? Yes, and No, as it always is between us and God. Yes, for what else could the cross be but God turning away? No, for what else is a resurrection but God remembering a beloved? The cross and the resurrection, the forgetting and the remembering, have to be held together in this way.

But it is a tight tangle of thought threads here, almost nonsensical. The language of forgetfulness and remembering makes no sense if we begin with the conviction that God knows everything and so cannot forget. But the Scriptures reduce neither God nor us to such simple notions. Simple ideas cannot reflect the experience of what passes between God and the world, between life and death, between remembrance and forgetfulness. These are never poles between which applies a strict logic; God-and-the-world requires its own way of thinking, part of which is a tangle of remembering-and-forgetting.

Jesus is baptised into our world, into the realm in which it is imagined – and so experienced – that God has forgotten. And so his being in the world is, specifically, as one of being forgotten and being remembered by God. The very baptism of Jesus at the outset of his ministry involves the recognition of Jesus by God – the re-cognition, the re-thinking, re-calling of him: You are my Son, the Beloved. God re‑cognises, remembers, Jesus as the Beloved, and this is the basis of Jesus’ own life and joy: the joy of finding himself thought again by God.

And us? God recognises us as beloved in another sign, given for divine and human remembrance. The sacrament of broken bread and blest cup is a drama of remembered forgottenness: a broken body, healed.

Do this for the remembrance of me.

The remembrance here is no mere “thinking about old stuff”; it is a more potently a making real and present here and now what Jesus is. What is Jesus? The forgotten, forsaken world, remembered. And, when remembered, healed, because healing is what happens when God remembers.

The rainbow is an enormous sign at the point where heaven and earth meet. God cannot not but see it and be reminded of how he has promised the two shall be related.

The enormity of the sign which is Jesus himself is not spatial but relational: My Son, the Beloved. This God cannot forget, and it is God’s remembrance of Jesus which is the sign given to us. We break bread and bless a cup, we eat and drink, that God’s remembering of the forsaken Jesus might again be among us, that we-in-him might know the joy of being remembered.

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14 February – Light for the dark

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Ash Wednesday
14/2/2018

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17
Psalm 51
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-20

Over the next six weeks we take time to reflect on “treasure,” the theme of our reading from Matthew this evening.

Our readings thought Lent will take us through the unfolding of the covenant of God with Israel, and this we will hear in the context of Jesus’ ministry of engagement with Israel, fulfilling and renewing that covenant.

It is a story of love and conflict, of confusion and re-orientation. But it is not simply a story of to-and-fro; it goes somewhere. The scriptural story is an unfolding revelation, an account of gradually dawning light.

We gather this evening to mark the beginning of this process as a beginning in darkness, symbolised in the imposition of ash. We are from dust, and we return to dust, and there is no treasure to be had along the way which will endure. All that is earthly goes the way of all the earth. This ancient sign of the ashes speaks of the frailty and uncertainty of human life, and marks the penitence of a people prone to treasure the wrong things.

But the gospel is also that there is light – a treasure which shines in the dark and will not be overcome by it. The light illuminates, and calls forth, and makes clear the path which leads not to more dust but to life.

Our repentance, then, anticipates God’s forgiveness – our recognition of our breaking of the covenant takes place in the light of its renewal.

With this in mind, let us make our confession…

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4 February – God is not a god

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Epiphany 5
4/2/2018

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147
1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Let us consider the following proposition: if God is God, then God is not a god.

Chances are that makes no sense to almost anyone – yet – but it matters. It matters because we need constantly to work on how we speak about God, and it matters because we how speak about God affects how we speak about ourselves, and how we act towards each other. A sense for God is implied in how we relate to each other.

Last week we noted that polytheism – the belief that there is more than one god – is the natural environment of the Scriptures. In such an environment religious conviction is not about whether you believe “that” there is a god (our contemporary question), but about which of the many candidates for divinity in your life you’ve committed to. In such an environment, the Scriptural imperative is: believe in this god – the Lord, Yahweh – for this is the one which matters.

Of course, things which concern us deeply are never that simple. At the same time, parts of the Scriptures do insist that there is only one god and that the other candidates are not gods.

This, however, has very a strange effect. If the others are not gods, then God – the one god – is not a god either. In order for there to be “a” god, there has to be more than one.

To justify this assertion, let’s consider the less controversial matter of the plurality of “Davids.” Davids are useful for our purposes because they are everywhere. On account of this, we might say “Oh, we have a David in our congregation” (or, in our case, four or five Davids). A David is a kind of thing, of which there are many instances.

By contrast, we don’t say that we live in an Australia. There is only one Australia (at least, as a geographical entity); it is not a kind of thing which Australias are, and so the name and the thing coincide.

As it is with Davids and Australias, so it is also with gods. If there are many gods, each is god; if there is but one God, God is not “a” god, but a name of a unique “thing”.

This brings us to Isaiah’s vision of God this morning. The second half of the book of Isaiah is characterised by an extraordinary sense of the uniqueness of the God of Israel, summed up in verse 25 today: “To whom shall you compare me?”

But an enormous theological problem is now beginning to open up. If there is nothing with which to compare God – if God is not a god – then from where do we get our ideas about God’s godness? We might think we know what “a” god is, but if God is not a god, then… what? With Davids, it’s easy. There are many Davids because Davidness is comparable and transferrable; this is why they were named David in the first place. We bestow something when we name a child: perhaps we honour an ancestor and hope for something of the same in our son, or perhaps we simply resonate with a cultural vibe which mysteriously communicates that now is the time for more Davids (which is why Davids tend to come in generational clusters).

But Isaiah’s vision pulls this rug out from under us. If the one which Israel and the Church designates as “God” is not a god, then what we think a god is, or whether we think we need a god, tells us nothing useful about this One: “To whom shall you compare me?” To no one, and to nothing.

The biblical answer to the whence of a proper sense for God is God’s words and actions: God is what God says and does. But I don’t want to develop this much further today. Rather, I want to move to how the incomparability of God affects the way we relate to each other, for there is political or social effect of such a sense for God.

Last week we noted the relationship between the plurality of the gods and the plurality of our fears. The gods divide us along the lines of our fears. This has always been recognised. A single religious conviction is a useful political concept for stability within national borders (cf. the post-Reformation notion, Cuius regio, eius religio, which stabilised nations by allowing monarchs to specify which of the warring religious factions would be “the” religion of that country).

But unity of conviction for political or philosophical convenience simply shifts the problem of divided hearts and minds, or just ignores it. The political solution of a single religion with a single god moves the problem of division from communities within the national borders to the borders themselves. The philosophical solution of a single god or the naïve proposal that there is no god are both abstractions which simply don’t take seriously how we actually are.

For how we are is that we are divided. But it’s important that we are not divided simply because we have gods; we also have gods because we are divided. The gods are extensions of us. They are ourselves with our contrary fears and aspirations, writ large. It is because I can compare myself with you that I can invoke a contrary god against you; the gods are many things to many people. This comparability and contrariness runs very, very deep. The political and philosophical solutions don’t work because the divisions are not overcome; they are either pushed into the background or ignored.

By contrast, consider Paul’s declaration in our epistle this morning: I have become all things to all people. He speaks here of his particular vocation as evangelist but, adapted for each particular vocation, this is how each Christian disciple is called – and enabled to be – if the God of the church is truly “incomparable”.

Paul’s being “all things” is not in any sense about him being “flexible”. It is about seeing the barriers between himself and all others as broken down. He sees others not in terms of their difference from him – the comparability of their fears and gods – but in terms of their commonality with him, in Christ.

This would be socially and religiously arrogant were it not that Paul himself has been subject to precisely the same redefinition. What he once thought was a matter of comparative wisdom and strength in himself – his God over against the gods of others – has been stripped away. What he has met in the crucified and risen Jesus is the sovereign freedom of the One who does not fear the cross, who is not bound by death. The incomparability of the God Isaiah proclaims is the freedom of the God of encountered in Jesus, and this is the God in whom Paul now lives and moves. It is God’s divine freedom which frees Paul, on the one hand, and binds him to his neighbours, on the other.

God does not divide because he is free to be against all who would wrongly claim him as an ally, and free to be for all who can do nothing other than simply wait on him. This for-ness and against-ness – of the same people – is the incomparability of the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ. All other putative gods are for us and against our enemies, such that we can only be some things for some people.

This God enables and calls us to more.

With Paul, then, let us allow ourselves to be found within the incomparable God, that we and those we meet might know something of the blessing of the God who keeps his distance from any one of us, that he might be the God of love for all of us.

Amen.

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Oasis of Peace Behind the Wall: Bethlehem University in the Holy Land

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Come and hear Vice-Chancellor Brother Peter Bray speak on what is happening in Bethlehem University and in the Holy Land

Thursday 22 February 2018 6.30 pm
Public Gathering: all Welcome

Venue: Elm Street Hall, 4 Elm Street, North Melbourne, near cnr of Curzon Street
(Melways ref 2A H10)

Presented by the Uniting Church in Australia, Congregation of Mark the Evangelist, North Melbourne in collaboration with the Palestine Israel Ecumenical Network Inc.

 

 

 

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28 January – On the fear of God

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Epiphany 4
28/1/2018

1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Psalm 111
Mark 1:21-28

To endeavour to learn a new language – particularly to speak it – is to wander into dangerous territory. Even when the words are not lacking, nuances of meaning are often hidden from the learner. Great confusion and embarrassment await those brave who risk a strange tongue.

The world of Scripture is a new language, even when translated into the vulgar tongue. It, also, is riddled with nuance and hidden meaning to trip up the presumptuous novice.

Let’s consider the closing thought of our psalmist this morning: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” If a beginning in wisdom is taken to be a good thing, is “the fear of the Lord” the best – or even a good – way to such beginning? Ought we not rather love God? We know fear as a basis of relationship, and we agree that love is a much more desirable way to relate. Or, perhaps, we might try to bridge the gap between fear and love by reading “fear” as “respect.” “Respect” allows that God could be feared but need not be.

Linguistic refinements like this make an apology for how the psalmist portrays God here. If love is good and fear is bad, then relating to God on the basis of fear is unpalatable. We refine the text to do God a favour. We ought, however, to keep in mind that God generally gets along quite well without our help, and that the text generally means what it says: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This doesn’t yet make the sentiment any more palatable but, like any strange mode of expression, it might give us pause: what could this mean?

The distance between our culture and context of Scripture is often obscured by things we imagine we have in common, like cognates between two languages. The Bible is interested in God, and we are interested in God, thus we presume that when the Bible refers to God it does so in the same way that we do. Yet “God” – as a concept – is for us something quite different from its conceptualisation in the Scriptures. In particular, we tend towards the idea that there is only one God, and “God” is in fact a viable name for God. Strictly speaking, God can only be God’s name if there is one God. In the Scriptures, however, the basic assumption is that there are many gods – as we heard from Paul this morning – and that “God” is not so much a name as a type of thing.

In fact it’s much messier than that, but this much helps us to get inside our psalmist’s thinking. For we can say that, in the Scriptures, a god stands for something the present or absence of which we fear. Do we fear the absence of life or money? Then Death and Mammon become gods. Do you fear the absence of power? Then that which gives power, mythologised as a god, becomes what we fear, lest it withdraw that power. Because there are many who fear such things, and often in contradiction of each other, there are many gods. The important thing is, then, not whether you fear “God” but whether you fear the right one among the many feared gods: the god properly feared if we are going to fear anything.

For us today, “God” means almost nothing like this. Whereas the atmosphere of the Scriptures is polytheism, philosophical pressure has driven us to monotheism. It is this monotheism which makes us squirm – especially in the churches – when it comes to “the fear of the Lord”. Because the gods are no longer a given, we imagine that “mission” is about making the gods – or just “God” – palatable again, and love is more palatable than fear.

But the Scriptures know us. Even if our modern world is emptied of gods, it remains filled with fears. And these fears work on us as they always have. The “‑isms” of our world indicate our new pantheon: racism, sexism, nationalism, fundamentalism, conservatism, progressivism, scientism, Islamism… each invoked out of fear. Knowing the human to be a creature which fears, the scriptural question is simply: What is best feared?

For this reason the psalmist proposes fear not of a generic “God” but of “the Lord.” It is a subtle nuance which the novice in religious language will miss but it is crucial, and is really only evident in the speaking: Not “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” as if we might relate to the Lord in some other way but “the fear of the Lord,” as if there were other things we might fear. This nuance moves the declaration from our concern about the appropriate emotional response to a God who might or might not be there, to the question of which realities in our life are actually worth worrying about.

“The Lord” – Yahweh, Jehovah – is the name of one God among many, one candidate for our allegiance among many. “There are many Lords and many gods”, Paul says, “but for us the one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Do you fear? Fear this one.

But why? Precisely because of the love which we might want prematurely to edit into the psalmist’s thought to make him declare that the love of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. There are as many lords and gods as there are contradictory fears and desires in us; these things we serve and invoke over against each other. In Paul this morning we saw the logic of fear and love set in their proper place in relation to God. Yes, there are real fears – real enough to cause division in the young Christian community about what could be eaten, and so who could eat with whom. A fear of the gods of old and a fear of a loss of freedom clashed to fracture the community; dividing the communal mind and rendering asunder the communal body is what fear does.

The unity of the body, or its division, is the sign of the Spirit active within it, the sign of what is feared. There are many lords and many gods, Paul acknowledges, but for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. All things are from and to the Father; this we might call the “generic” function of a god: the beginning and the purpose of the world. The specifically Christian nuance is in the “through” used with respect to Jesus: “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”

To live in and through the crucified Jesus is to live in and through the victim of human fear. It is to see where fear takes us – the cross – and what it takes from us, even the God we might think demands the cross.

But, just so, to live through the crucified Jesus is also to see grace in action because our fear and loathing is not met with God’s own. In the world fear begets fear; in heaven, fear is just one more human characteristic God can use to reveal love and bring healing. The fruit of fear is a broken body and blood poured out. Grace is the broken body raised and given to teach that with this God there is nothing to fear.

To learn a new language is to wander into dangerous territory. Even when the words are not lacking, nuances of meaning are often hidden from the learner. But when God speaks our language – takes our words and actions seriously – there is no embarrassment, even when God uses those words and or interprets our actions in the wrong way. God’s creative work with us is to change our grammar, to speak our words and ways in such a manner as to re-make us and, in this, to make possible us a new beginning in wisdom and in love.

The fear of this Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever. (Ps 111.10).

[Amen.]

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21 January – God’s new soundtrack for our lives

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Epiphany 3
21/1/2018

1 Corinthians 7:29-32a
Psalm 62
Mark 1:14-20

It is very strange to watch a movie with the soundtrack turned off. You see the action and hear the dialogue but the clues as to how to interpret it all are missing. For the soundtrack serves to tell us how to “feel” about what we are seeing.[1] It colours our experience of the drama.

From Paul we have heard this morning not, of course, about soundtracks but about the way in which Christians live most faithfully.

…let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it.

Live “as if not,” Paul counsels, although this is not a stoic counsel. He proposes here not a detachment from the world’s challenges and disappointments but rather an awareness of what time it is:

…the appointed time has grown short… the present form of this world is passing away.

What has happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus causes a re-reading of the time in which we live, and so a re-reading of the end or goal towards which we are living. To live “as if not” is to change the meaning of what we see and do. It is to change the soundtrack behind the action of our lives.

The action itself doesn’t much change, at least to begin with. Our relationships continue, our sorrows and our joys, our buying and selling and the other dealings which make up our lives. But a changed sense of the times, and so a changed sense of our end, changes also how we experience what happens around us.

And so Paul does not say Do not mourn but mourn “as if not”: for there is a joy in Christian conviction which colours all passing sadness. He does not say Do not rejoice but rejoice “as if not”: there is a realism in Christian conviction which recognises that the Kingdom is not yet fully come. He does not say Do not deal in worldly things but deal “as if not”: as if they were not merely worldly things but realities within which God might dwell, with blessing.

For the times, and the world in time, are different if Jesus is Lord: they are not closed in on what we can only see. This is why we can tell the story of a crucified man “as if not” an abject failure but the very triumph of God. It is why we can eat and drink “as if not” bread and wine but the very substance of God’s life with and for us. We can see in what we have not possessions but common wealth. We can see in another’s need not merely their misfortune or fault but our responsibility.

Christian discipleship is life to a particular soundtrack, a particular set of interpretations. It is an experience of life as charged with God, coloured by God, resonating with more than the old sound track will allow us to hear.

And, in the end, the change of sound track will be involve more than simply a different beat, a different mood. The action itself will begin to change because of the different experiences. Different relationships will develop, different experiences will cause mourning or joy, different things will be bought and sold, because values shift when the times change and the end is something different. To live “as if not” is to begin to change the world. Live like this, Paul says.

When the psalmist declares You, Yahweh, are my God, and Jesus calls Follow me, we hear precisely what we’ve heard from Paul: live as if the world where not what you have imagined so far but according to God’s own imagination.

And the world will move.

And you will begin truly to live.

By the grace of God, may this world and life be ever more fully ours, to God’s greater glory and our richer humanity. Amen

[1] For a demonstration of how easily a story can be manipulated with a bit of careful cutting and a different soundtrack, it’s worth looking at some of the spoof movie trailers on the internet, casting such as Mary Poppins or Frozen as horror movies, or The Silence of the Lambs as a romantic comedy.

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14 January – Samuel’s Ear

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Epiphany 2
14/1/2018

1 Samuel 3:1-20
Song of Hannah
John 1:43-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

Listening is a virtuous act. It takes a deliberate choice, to stop talking, to stop offering your own point of view. It is a part of ‘loving your neighbour’. ‘Listen, my son’ is the first line of Benedict’s Rule, the guide for monastic communities around the world. Careful listening prepares one for life.

Listening for God is part of this. Generations in the biblical stories have listened for the voice of God in their mind, in their dreams. Creation began with such a word: ‘In time beyond our dreaming, you brought forth life out of darkness’, our prayer at the Table today will say, echoing John’s Gospel. God spoke, and the Word became flesh.

Do modern people listen in the same way? We may have outgrown the pieties of the past, but have we also ceased paying attention? If we have rejected the idea of hearing an actual voice, because people who do are put in mental hospitals, are we not ourselves rather too literal? Do we listen to the word of the scriptures, to the word in hymns and prayers – as well as those of our friends and lovers? Listening for a word which will change our world, the world in which we have sometimes confined ourselves.

For myself, I have never ‘heard’ God speak in the literal sense, but I am who and where I am because of the unmistakable conviction one morning in Queen’s College Chapel that the Law was not my calling.

Do you remember this children’s hymn?

Oh, give me Samuel’s ear.
The open ear, O Lord,
Alive and quick to hear
Each whisper of Thy word!                 [Hushed was the evening hymn]

This morning, we have sung Frances Ridley Havergal’s Master, speak, thy servant heareth, also a touch sentimental and decidedly an expression of individual piety, but both imprison this story in childhood, safe and secure childhood. Such words and quivering tunes remove the sting from a biblical story, and that is a heinous crime. Sentiment can be the enemy of truth.

Our own modernity can also stand in the way of hearing the word from God. I studied in an era when we were told to search for holiness on the streets of the ‘secular city’. We were told that the Bible had nothing to say because it was written for a ‘pre-industrial world’.  So, listening for the word of God in a book begun some 28 centuries ago is a challenge.

We must acknowledge that Samuel’s is a different world from ours, yet by no means strange. Of course, their gods have unfamiliar names, but people of power tried to harness them to their own ends, using human beings as sacrifices in more ways than one.  Of course, it is odd that the Ark of the Covenant should be wheeled about in battle as if it were a nuclear weapon (I Sam. 5 & 6). Fertility has different issues around it in our own times, and so on – but we are naïve if we think that it is not the same human world. Even the desire for a king, which YHWH was so reluctant to deliver, yet bade Samuel do so, was called for because the tribes would like to see ‘Israel made great again’. In fact, that is the deep purpose behind the whole book of Samuel. But it’s not strange. Its translation needs thought, and imagination, because we too pray for change.

Samuel’s saga begins with a tale of a man with two wives, the first with several children, the second with none, and the very recognizable way in which the first exercises emotional blackmail. Then Hannah prays for a child.  The text says, ‘As she continued praying before the LORD, Eli observed her mouth. Hannah was speaking in her heart; only her lips moved, and her voice was not heard’; many people today would recognize that way of praying – ‘charismatic prayer’. Eli thought she was drunk; so the crowds thought the disciples were at Pentecost! And we cannot sing Hannah’s song of triumph, from chapter 2, without Mary’s song in the Gospel echoing in our minds, their celebration of a God who does new things.

The story of the boy Samuel is a kind of dream sequence in the middle of some hard political facts.  There are Eli’s family problems: ‘Now the sons of Eli were worthless men; they had no regard for the LORD’ (2:12). There is the ongoing conflict with the Philistines.  A mysterious visitor pronounces doom on Eli’s priestly line. A story we thought suitable for children now engages the adults. The LORD has spoken to Samuel.

The first thing is that the relationship of Samuel to Eli has been reversed. Samuel has gained authority, and Eli has lost it. The youth is now in charge; the ancient priest must serve him. Eli told Samuel how to listen; and Samuel stands now in God’s presence, his ears open.  Truly, as Hannah had sung: the Lord raises up and brings down.

Samuel kept silence that night. Next morning, Eli called for Samuel, with the familiar response: ‘Here am I’. Did you hear the state of the nation? (3:1-2) ‘…the word of the LORD was rare in those days; there was no frequent vision’. The times were about to change.

The second thing is what he heard. Samuel had listened to the oracle which is the point of the whole story – and it is against Eli, his sons and the future of his priestly house. The house of Eli, which had been promised ‘for ever’ (2:30) will be punished ‘for ever’. No sacrifice or offering can countermand that fate. No ‘comfortable word’ this, for the LORD said, ‘Behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel, at which the two ears of everyone that hears it will tingle’.

Remember the strange voice in the wilderness, crying to God to make his paths straight? From John, son of a barren woman – and a priest? Calling the world for a radical change of direction?

We too live in a world where regimes rise and fall, after wreaking havoc among their peoples, killing and maiming, and exiling more. Think Mugabe. Think, the present Ayatollah in Iran. Remember Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, ISIS/Daish. Eli’s fall is just as complete; just as sudden. Eli’s wastrel sons die in battle with the Philistines.

So, what are we hearing here? The writer of I Samuel is clear that the word of God comes through a human voice, is enacted on the ground by human hands. Samuel – no more than the Gospel writers or Paul – is no mere automaton, speaking an infallible word from God, reliably predicting the outcome. There is a distinction between the word of God, and of those who deliver it: ‘God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe’ wrote St Paul (1Cor. 1: 21b). And, he adds, the weakness of God is stronger than human strength (1Cor. 1: 25b).

God is doing a new thing, and God keeps God’s promises. We may think our time is one where there is no vision, when the word of the Lord is a rare thing. O for ‘frequent vision!’ Samuel’s story gives us encouragement and hope. For Samuel is one of a long line of people whom God raises up in history, who are not elected to office because of their genius, or their useful information, or their political clout, or their muscles. God has no time for such things, as the psalmist often reminds us. God is a creator, and he makes things happen where nothing was possible. God can even work with a David!

Walter Brueggemann, the great Old Testament scholar, writes this:

In the midst of all these seductions, however, there is a season of naiveté when a young boy can receive a vision, an old man can embrace a relinquishment, a surprised mother can sing a song, the ear of the conventional can tingle, and life begins again.’

That should be no surprise to readers of the Gospel, or the followers of the Crucified One. The task of the ancient prophets and ours is the same: to discern what God is doing, and listen for the God who is living and active among us, yesterday, today and forever. That is why we read old stories in church.

Because they knew God’s history with their people, Philip and Nathaniel recognized who Jesus was, and followed him. We too may listen and learn to be a people of hope in Christ.

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7 January – A Secret Epiphany

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Baptism of Jesus
7/1/2018

Genesis 1:1-5
Acts 19:1-7
Psalm 29
Mark 1:4-11

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, help me by your Spirit to reveal who you are, and help those that listen to reveal what is left obscure. Amen.

Yesterday was epiphany: the day we remind ourselves to check our star signs — just in case. More straightforwardly, epiphany reminds us of the surprising revelation of God: that moment when the incarnate Christ is revealed to Gentiles, represented by those star-gazing wise men from the East.

Today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark tells the story of Jesus’ baptism. This seems at first glance something quite removed from epiphany. There seem to be no Gentiles to speak of, just a wild desert preacher and a young Rabbi about to take his mantle.

In fact Mark’s account, when set aside the other Gospel accounts, is the most restrictive of all. In Mark’s account it seems only Jesus can see the Spirit descending like a dove. John and the crowd are not privy to this divine revelation, as they seem to be in Luke and John’s Gospels.

The divine voice from heaven is likewise restrictive. It addresses Jesus directly: “You are my beloved Son.” The indirect and public declaration of Jesus’ divine sonship, through the mouth of John the Baptiser, or a booming Heavenly voice is absent.

The first Sunday after epiphany here we are: no gentiles, no public revelation. And worse: as soon as Jesus’ divine sonship is revealed he is drawn out into the desert. Upon his return he begins a ministry, dare I say, marked in this Gospel by a messianic secret. No one is allowed to publicly utter that Jesus is the son of God.

This is turning out to be the worst Epiphany ever.

If epiphany is about God’s surprising revelation to the gentiles, and we have today no Gentiles and no public revelation, perhaps we can see in today’s reading something of a surprise.

Or perhaps it’s simply unfair to frame this text as an epiphany text when in fact it’s simply the story of Jesus’ baptism. This is, perhaps, an instance of setting unfair expectations.

Be that as it may, I really want to press just how surprising the story of Jesus’ baptism is. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, it is so surprising that the Gospel accounts written after Mark – as the others were – felt this story needed to be retold differently. The other accounts broaden the audience of revelation. Matthew’s Gospel even inserts a short conversation between Jesus and John the Baptiser, acknowledging the awkwardness of John baptising Jesus.

The baptism of Jesus by John is awkward – and surprising, a point we will return to.

But what it is also surprising that Jesus’ baptism by John is not Jesus’ first baptism. At least, not according to some Theologians – particularly from the rich and broad Eastern Orthodox tradition.

These theologians suggest that the first baptism of Jesus was his conception. There the Spirit enabled Christ’s participation in humanity. Recalling the great birthing waters over which the Spirit hovered in the beginning, God came to dwell fully in and with our humanity.

The idea of baptism in which, through the symbol of water, we participate in Christ, is mirrored in the Spirit’s enabling of Christ’s participation in humanity.

We might say that the liturgical period we have just passed through – advent, Christmas, epiphany – narrates the first baptism of Jesus. We have taken time to marvel at God becoming human. What, to recall last week’s sermon, is the marvel of the big God coming close. The Creator God becoming human.

And yet … Is this not old news? Good news, to be sure, the Good News: but we have already understood this much.

Indeed, this much is captured in our reading from the book of Acts. What we need, above all, is the same outpouring of the Spirit that enabled God to become human. This same Spirit that hovered over the waters of creation, hovering over the waters of our baptism.

Hallelujah!

But today we are more narrowly focused on Jesus’ second baptism. Not a baptism into humanity, but a baptism of repentance.

Baptised by John: not proclaiming the new creation, but proclaiming repentance: the ruin of the old creation. John proclaims the same note of judgement that was a feature of Jewish eschatological expectation. That is, the judgement associated with the end of days, when God would wrap up this creation and begin a renewed creation.

This is the judgement that we recalled last week in recognising that in the context of the sheep and goats, we are goats. In the context of the hungry, the naked, and the stranger: we are least of all.

The broad Jewish expectation was that the Messiah would come and mete out this judgement. Dispensing God’s wrath on the enemies of God, as this created order fell into ruin and a new one emerged. Perhaps this is why so many thought that John the Baptiser was the Messiah. He came, after all, proclaiming judgement, calling people to repentance.

And yet in all of this, John points beyond himself. He points to someone else. He points to the Messiah who is yet to come.

And this is the surprising bit: when this Messiah arrives he does not meet the expectations of the people. He does not come as a Messiah dispensing judgement. He comes as one who submits himself to being baptised. A baptism of repentance.

What on Earth does Jesus have to repent of?

Having already been baptised into human form, Jesus further humbles himself, by being baptised in repentance, bringing himself under judgement.

In doing this Jesus subverts the expectations that he would come to give out judgement, by suggesting that instead he would undergo judgement.

And as Jesus does this, as Jesus is submerged in repentant waters, and rises out of them, the Spirit that hovers over the waters of creation comes down. As Jesus enters into our judgement he brings new creation, all of a sudden, very close.

At that moment, the new creation is begun – not at the end of time, but at the beginning of the Good News of Jesus the Messiah – the new creation is begun at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. At that moment a voice from Heaven reveals Jesus to be the Son of God.

Not only is it surprising that God would become human. But even more surprising that God would become fully human: mired in our failings, our sufferings, and our tragedies. What is most surprising is not simply that God would become human, but that God would become even the least among humanity.

Is this surprising revelation of the lengths God has gone for us an epiphany? The surprising lengths that lead to us being reconciled with God, and with each other? Is this an epiphany?

Or perhaps, we have to wait for that moment.

Mark’s Gospel, written with sheer genius, has us wait until what seems the end of the story, to truly have our epiphany. That moment when a voice once again declares – in public – that Jesus is the Son of God. That moment on the cross. When it is no longer a voice from Heaven, but the voice of a Gentile Centurion.

Jesus does not simply show us an icon of perfect humanity. But by becoming subject to judgement, by placing himself in a state of abandonment and dereliction on the cross, he shows us how to be imperfect humanity. Jesus shows us how to live as those under judgement. To follow the way of Christ, the way of the cross, is not to abandon our fragile humanity, but to more fully acknowledge and embrace it.

To follow the way of the cross is to stand in relationship and solidarity with those who are also mired in failings, in sufferings, and in tragedies. And it is from that sharing in weakness, that sharing in the suffering of Christ, that we follow the way to new creation. The way of surprising revelations of God – perhaps even in star signs, or strange tongues.

What Jesus acknowledged on our behalf in his baptism by John is the surprising way of the Spirit hovering over birthing waters. A way that is mired, to be sure, by blood, and tears, and pain; but a way that also calls new life into being.

When Jesus stands under judgement, crying out in abandonment, in dereliction, he no longer connects himself with God, but connects himself with us and us with him. It is at that moment that a human voice can finally confess to his divinity. We are bound together by this act, by this event. And as we walk the way of the cross, we are all bound together as a community of solidarity, reconciliation, and love.

Let me finish with a quote from Lilla Watson. A Gangulu elder, artist, and indigenous activist from Queensland.

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.

But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

…

Amen.

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31 December – The Judge Judged in Our Place

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Christmas 1
31/12/2017

Revelation 1:1-6a
Psalm 8
Matthew 25:31-46

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God, help me to say what is helpful, and help those that listen to judge what is not. Amen.

Those of you who follow the lectionary closely will have noticed that our Gospel reading for today has not been gone for long. A month ago the Christian liturgical year ended with the feast of Christ the King, and with it came our reading from Matthew 25. Today marks the end of the year within the civil calendar, and with it Matthew 25 is back.

And if it is back, let it come back with a vengeance.

In fact I mean that quite seriously.

The texts that accompany Matthew 25 today set the mood rather differently than the feast of Christ the King.

Our Psalm of praise expands our imaginations to a cosmic vision. Everything – all of creation – is caught up in the sovereign majesty of God. From the mouths of infants, to the moon and stars in heaven. Humans and beasts, over the earth and under the sea:

“O Lord, our Sovereign,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Ps. 8.9)

The persistent rhythms of this created order are expressed in today’s well-known reading from Ecclesiastes. There is a time for everything: living and dying, loving and hating, throwing stones and gathering stones, mourning and dancing, embracing and casting out. And standing above the constant hum of these rhythms of creation is the sovereign God. God who’s good gifts consist in our eating and drinking, and taking pleasure in work.

This background sets the scene of a God many people are familiar with. We have here a God that reflects much of what we confess in the first article of the creed: the article of God the Father, creator of Heaven and Earth. Who stands sovereign over the created world, seemingly at a distance.

And yet our psalm begins to question this distance: “what are human beings that [God] is mindful of them, | mortals that [God] cares for them?” (Ps. 8.4)

What is, dare I say, revealed, in our reading from the Revelation of John is precisely that this God is not distant. The home of God is among us. Our hope is that God will dwell with us, and we will be God’s people. The old rhythms of living and dying, mourning and dancing will be interrupted. And the sovereign rule of God shall come down into a new and renewed earth – a new creation.

Today, Matthew 25.31-46 needs to be read with this background in mind. We have a building sense of two things:

On the one hand, a grand vision of God’s sovereignty over all of creation. The story we tell about God is cosmic, it expands to incorporate everything.

While on the other hand, this sovereign God seeks to dwell among humanity, this God seeks to embrace us as God’s people.

God is at once very big, and at the same time very close.

The coming together of God’s bigness and God’s closeness finds articulation in Jewish and Christian eschatological hope.

Eschatological: a term referring to the end times. When the normal rhythms of our world will be interrupted. When all of this big wide world will be wound up. And when the God who stands sovereign over this world will become – all of sudden – very close.

In much of the Jewish and Christian traditions this coming close of God is thought to involve a significant amount of judgement. As it turns out not everything for which there is a time is good. As one quite well-known writer has suggested: “the time is out of joint.”

And so when I suggested that Matthew 25 was back with a vengeance, I meant it. The whole chapter forces us to reflect on the quite harsh message of the Kingdom of Heaven – what other Gospels call the Kingdom of God. What we might simply refer to as the bigness of God coming close.

It is in Jesus that we see God closest of all.

And as God comes close in the ministry of Jesus many are left out in the cold.

The parables Jesus tells leave maidens wandering darkened streets for lamp oil, slaves have what little they have taken away. Earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, the wealthy and poorly dressed are shut out from a banquet. In today’s reading, the careless are cast out, gnashing their teeth in everlasting torment.

Jesus meek and mild I think not.

Jesus’ teaching cannot be understood as saying that there is no inside, and no outside. Jesus does not fail to give voice to eschatological judgement. Jesus does not fail to take seriously what it means for the bigness of God to encounter us closely, bringing with it judgement.

In light of these teachings about judgement many commentators note that what is distinctive about Jesus is the basis of his judgement. Unlike the religious leaders of his day, it is not righteous adherence to religious law that will sway the judge. Rather, it is love: enacted love is what sets some aside for embrace and others for casting out.

And so we have inherited a tradition marked by the command to love others.

But, we might ask: a command to love who? Who are the others?

In the most exhaustive study of the interpretation history of this text Sherman Gray sheds some surprising light on answers to this question.

Up until the 8th century, less than half of commentators addressed the question of who we are called to love in Matthew 25. But of those that do: only 13.5% suggested we are called to love everyone — 86.5% suggest we are only called to love other Christians.

This overwhelming majority continues through the middle ages and into the modern era.

When I first discovered this I found it unsettling, to say the least.

Could the command to love really be so narrow in its focus?

Perhaps, the Gordian knot of this parable is not so easily untied.

The standard interpretation of this parable calling us to the command to love locates us at the centre of the parable. It is our moral virtue – wittingly, or more likely unwittingly – that counts in the end. In this we are at risk of losing the cutting edge of judgement that has run through this entire chapter – and many of Jesus’ parables.

Have we forget so quickly that we ourselves are under judgement?

Have we forgotten that we are the needy; we are the least.

We are the maidens left wandering darkened streets, slaves who have what little we have taken away. The wealthy shut out from a banquet. We are the careless gnashing their teeth in everlasting torment.

Christians are rightly the recipients of the command to love: for we are the needy; we are the least. And if it were a test of moral virtue we would almost certainly all be goats.

It is when we realise that we are such needy people as these that God comes the closest of all. We are not the righteous, following the command to love out of righteousness. We ourselves are the needy that receive love out of unrighteousness.

We see Christ in our experiences of suffering and loss when we remember that Christ too experienced suffering and loss on the cross for us. Suffering and loss we remember with cup and bread.

As we see ourselves as the least, we see a God big enough to hold our weakness, and close enough to care.

We see from behind the closed door the resurrected Christ – who passes through that door towards us.

As we see ourselves as the least, we see Christ as the big God who comes close, by himself becoming least.

We can take from this a moral lesson, indeed that same lesson of love. But no longer out of our own righteousness. No longer our means to sway the judge. For the judge is judged in our place. In today’s reading Christ the judge literally stands in our place.

Our love flows from our being loved. Our giving from our receiving the love of God. Love follows the way of Jesus, the way of the cross. It is our means of becoming like Christ, like the one who too became least.

And so if we are to find ourselves wandering the streets in darkness, let us clothe those we find there. If we find ourselves shut out from a banquet, let us provide food and drink for those also outside. If even what little we have is taken away, let us take ourselves to visit and care for the sick and incarcerated.

If we are to fall under judgement, let us follow the way of the judge who is judged in our place — let us follow the way of Christ, the way of the cross, the way of love. Amen.

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