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Pentecost 21
29/10/2017

Deuteronomy 34:1-12
Psalm 90
Matthew 22:34-46

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God, help me by your Spirit to proclaim Jesus as Messiah and Lord; and help those who listen to proclaim him where I fail. Amen.

In our Gospel reading for today Jesus offers his two great commandments: love God with the fullness of who you are, and love others as you do yourself. In a sermon I once heard on this text the preacher compared the two commandments of Jesus with the ten offered by Moses. The preacher summarised glibly: “there used to be ten commandments, now there are two; times change, what are you going to do about it?” While for me this was less than helpful it raised two important responses:

First, not every sermon is a good one – this could be one of those.

Second, it raises a question pertinent to our first reading today from Deuteronomy: is Jesus really trying to bring an end to the law of Moses by instituting his own commandments? As it were, taking the death of Moses further by replacing Moses’ law.

Many commentators have noted the parallels between Moses and Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, suggesting that this Gospel paints Jesus as a new Moses figure. Motifs from Moses’ life recur in the way Matthew’s Gospel tells the story of Jesus:

A ruler ordering the murder of firstborn Jewish sons, time spent in Egypt, and then a flight into the desert, delivering commandments from atop a mountain.

Is Jesus, then, simply a new Moses? Replacing the old with the new for a changed time and place?

Our Psalm for today, Psalm 90, cautions us against this suggestion. This prayer, ascribed to Moses, tells us of the God Moses and Jesus worshipped. Standing before all of creation — “from everlasting to everlasting” — for the God of Moses a thousand years is like a day. This God is a dwelling-place for all generations, overwhelming our afflictions with endless gladness.

It doesn’t seem that the God of both Moses and Jesus is subject to the changing of the times, in need of replacing and updating the old law with the new.

Jesus’ response to the Pharisees isn’t first and foremost a question of changing religious law – not least because it repeats commands already present in the Mosaic law. If there is a parallel between Moses and Jesus in today’s reading we should not think of the Jesus preaching from a Mountain, proclaiming new commandments. If there is a parallel, it is with the Moses who plays a central role in the foundation story of Israel: the Exodus out of slavery in Egypt, into God’s reign over the promised land. In Matthew 22 Jesus’ encounter with religious leaders expands this same story of God’s reign: from the promised land to this veiled notion of the Kingdom of Heaven. What Jesus begins to explain in the parable of the wedding feast — (about which Craig preached a couple of weeks ago) — is further developed in Jesus’ responses to the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Jesus’ teachings on the greatest commandment and the question about David’s Son is not a demonstration of Jesus as legal and Scriptural exegete. Rather, these teachings shape the identity and place of Jesus within the story of Israel – a story over which the God of Moses reigns. Indeed this is the same story in which Moses played a central role. This is the same story in which King David is heralded as the great King, mediating God’s rule over the promised land. The same story into which God reveals the very commandments that Jesus cites in retort to the Pharisees.

The Catholic New Testament scholar Brendan Byrne notes that it was not unknown within the Judaism of Jesus’ time for the law to be distilled to a single principle or all-embracing command. But what is particular about Jesus’ teaching is that he distills the law to two deeply connected commands: love God with the fullness of who you are, and love others as you do yourself.

The rejoinder Jesus offers to the Pharisees in today’s reading is not that they have misunderstood the law. Rather, they have misunderstood the story of God’s people into which the law enters. As we read this passage Christologically, and with the foreknowledge of where this story is headed, we can see that it is Jesus who carries this story in his own life. Jesus’ expression of his love of God coincides with his love of neighbour, on this basis he is able to counter the Pharisees’ myopic focus on questions of law.

Tying together the commandment to love God with fullness, and to love your neighbour expands our vision of righteousness. The demand for personal piety before God is incomplete without a concern for one’s neighbour. Allowing these two commands, taken together, to shape our imagination of God brings focus to the central event of Christian faith: the cross. In this event Jesus’ own love for God draws him fully into love for neighbour. And so the two great commandments of Jesus are not abstract commands, but in an odd sort of way they narrate Jesus’ own life, death, and resurrection. These commands place Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection at the centre of the drama of God. These commands tell of a God who is ultimately known in the salvific act on behalf of neighbour: the salvation of humanity and the world on the cross.

The God who draws together the love of God with the love of neighbour is none other than this Jesus, the Jewish Messiah.

“What do you think of the Messiah?”

As I reflected on this text in preparing this sermon I was drawn more and more to reflect on the second part of today’s reading. The questions Jesus poses became my questions:

“Whose son is the Messiah?”

“The Son of David?”

“How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord | If David thus calls [the Messiah] Lord, how can he be his son?”

Jesus the Messiah is the culmination of the story of Israel, the same story in which Moses played a central role, the same story that continued after Moses’ death with the reign of God in the promised land. Connecting the identity of the Messiah to David, the great king of Israel, connects the Messiah to the ongoing reign of God in the world. What Matthew calls the Kingdom of Heaven.

The question about David’s Son makes clear that the Messiah is the one that ushers in an expanding vision of the reign of God. Jesus does not deny that the Messiah is the Son of David. Indeed Jesus is introduced in the opening line of Matthew’s Gospel precisely as Messiah, the Son of David. But insofar as the Messiah continues the role of David in mediating the reign of God into the world he takes this reign further. The Messiah is somehow more than David. The Messiah further unfolds the story of God’s reign – the story of the Kingdom of Heaven. Beyond the people of Israel to all peoples and the whole world.

For those of us in the Reformed-Protestant tradition, gathering on the Sunday before the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, these are not idle or distant observations. We ourselves are heirs to the idea that the Good News is still unfolding, and we are called to participate in this unfolding. Responding by proclaiming like David that the Messiah is Lord — in fresh words and deeds. Recognising that our proclamation is shaped by what has gone before us, but always seeing in Christ a growing and ever expanding vision of righteousness.

The Good News is the story of Jesus Christ in whom the story of God’s people is brought to its culmination. For in Christ the love of God has been brought together with the love of neighbour, for our gain and Christ’s loss. This is Good News! We are the neighbours that receive the gracious love of God. We are brought into the story of the people of God by the Jewish Messiah who carries that story in his body. And in response we are called to proclaim as true what is true: that Jesus the Messiah is also Lord. We are called to participate in the righteousness that Jesus offers us, the righteousness that brings together the love of God and the love of neighbour. We are called to proclaim the Good News not as a lifeless end, but as an ongoing story that generates Hope, that expands the reign of God, the reach of love, and the care for neighbour.

May we, like David, proclaim by the Spirit that Jesus the Messiah is Lord. May we receive the gracious love of God. And may we tell the story of Jesus until we too are caught up in the drama.

Amen.

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Pentecost 20
22/10/2017

Exodus 33:12-23
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:17-4:7

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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Exodus 33: 20 “The Lord said to Moses; you cannot see my face, for no-one shall see me and live” and then: “While my glory passes by I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you will see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

2 Cor. 4: 6 “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.

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Our texts offer two perspectives of God’s anatomy: back and face. They are texts peculiarly relevant to the times that we are living. Both are far removed in popular culture from whom or what God is thought to be – if God is thought about at all. We read these texts in a day when the most serious of the three daily papers that are available to us presents an extended essay under the title: “Is God Dead?”  Whatever be the truth of the matter, many testify to the conclusion that, at the very least, God is imprisoned in a dead language, if not so much dead.  It all seems to be confirmed by the fact that since the previous census, 30% of the population, and the number is growing, ticked what has now become the first box of the 2016 Census: “No Religion”.

Both our texts, of course, are rich and colourful metaphors. The striking imagery of the Exodus text was the only way that the Hebrews could think to express the ineffability of God: not a face as a beginning, but only the back after the event.

We might have learned something from these our forebears, not least that even the glory of God is too incandescent an experience for myopic human eyesight, such that the cleft of a rock and a covering is required until – let us be clear about this – until God has passed by. While the world’s history unfolds, the backside of God, not the face, is the only human possibility. We hear that that is all that the people of Israel were promised, and for them that was more than enough. God as a hint in history was sufficient, whereas all that the culture has left three thousand years later is at best the headline question: “Is God dead? Or, at worst, the statement “God is dead”.

We have just sung “Immortal, Invisible, God only wise” which has been our Western way of saying the same thing as this ancient text – namely what God is not: not subject to death, not visible, not accessible and so on and so on. Much more will soon need to be said, of course, but with our Hebrew forebears we start only with the back of God not with the face.

The point is that whereas the reality of the God of the Exodus is entirely positive, these intriguing images now have an increasingly negative character. We live in a day when what was a majestic safeguard to Moses: “You cannot see my face and live, for no-one can see me and live”, has now become a self evident commonplace. What if in the 21^st century we read this text not as safeguarding the majesty of God but as the narrative of the sad demise of the history of God over the last two thousand years? Of course there have been occasional brief moments of illumination – one thinks of Thomas Aquinas in the C12, of Martin Luther in the C16, of John Wesley in the C18th and of Karl Barth in the C20th. But otherwise we have experienced the last two millenia pretty much as the passing by of the glory of God, while we have sheltered in the darkness of the cleft of a rock – until now it is virtually too late.  We can presume that from God’s side we are still covered by his hand, but for an apparently increasing number of our contemporaries, God has well and truly “passed by” leaving only a rumour of his past traces, They conclude, either sadly or triumphantly, that God has taken away his hand, so that all that the culture is left with is the residue of an absent deity. Western culture is indeed living in the cleft of a rock.

It is possible to assume that all this is an exaggeration. But let’s rehearse the sad religious history of the West and its prevailing domestication of God.  Think again of what we have done with God.  God has been used to fill gaps when human knowledge was lacking; God has been used to solve, or more likely to fail to solve, admittedly real, but nevertheless contrived problems – earthquakes, tsunamis, cancer and the like; God has been used to accommodate our projected human needs powerfully exposed by Sigmund Freud; God has been used to solve the problem of insurance claims; God has been used as a mascot to accompany crusaders; God has been forced to adorn the belt buckles of  German soldiers, “Gott mit uns”, to accompany the opposition’s rally cry: “For God, King and Country”. God is presently required, though not for much longer, to open Parliament in what, in an ever more shrilling mandate, is an avowedly secular country.

This is the God who has come to an accelerating end in our day.

I have recently been given a book about the life of one of the most effective Anglican chaplain at Gallipoli in the First World War. It tells of a constant request for his services in the trenches in the middle of battles, usually the Eucharist. It tells of the request of soldiers by the thousand wanting Church parades. Remember, this is only a hundred years ago. What I found most remarkable of all was this statement of the Commanding officer to his fellows: “The most important officer we have is the Chaplain! And why? Because for the military machine he was there, not to perform religious duties, but “to build up morale”, to “endorse battle strategies”. Surely here is the most telling illustration of the eclipse of God in the guise of God.  But the really sad disclosure was that this brilliant selfless chaplain, who put himself on the front line over and over again, mostly burying corpses, survived the war only to become an agnostic. Why sad? Perhaps because he accepted his role as a “morale booster”. It is a puzzle how a priest ordained to a ministry of a bloody crucified Lord could not see the connection between the Lord of his calling and the grisly fate of young men sacrificed to the war machine.

I speak as the son of a father who was seriously wounded at the third battle of Ypres, and who later sought ordination precisely because he saw the congruence of Christian faith and the catastrophic human misery being played out, of which he was a part.

Well, so much for the death of God in our culture.

But what of Paul this morning? Here not the backside of God, but now the face. Yet even here, things are not as straightforward as we tend to presume. I imagine it likely that you can call to mind an especially significant personal biblical text. This is mine, for this reason.

Twenty five years ago I joined a bus tour travelling from Athens to Corinth. Greek light is intense, so naturally our guide reminded us that Apollo was the Greek god of light. A little further on, she told us that Diogenes, a famous philosopher of the day, lived in Corinth.  A contemporary of Plato, whom he loathed, Diogenes embodied the Hellenistic ideal – “to know the self”. To that end, he repudiated all the paraphernalia of civilised society, and lived in a barrel – actually it was a large amphora – with his dog, a kynikos in Greek, our word cynic. Now Diogenes preceded Paul in Corinth by four centuries. Why am I telling you this? Because only knowing this background will you understand what Paul is doing in this text, or indeed everywhere. Hear him this morning:

“God who commanded the light”: implication: ‘light’ is not a deity as the Greeks embodied it in the figure of Apollo, but now light is merely a player in nature. Light can be commanded: “God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness – then this – has shone in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge, not of the self, as Diogenes advocated was what the pursuit of knowledge was all about, but now the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

See how Paul creeps up on the sacred mystery. It is bracketed all the way. Not God as a problem solver, a need fulfiller, a gap filler, but the only God there is. Here it is for the first time – now not the backside, not even its veiling, but the very face of God.

Putting all this together twenty five years ago, which from the guide’s side was merely inconsequential information, I wept – tears not only at this stunning revelation of Paul’s brilliance, but equally that I had wasted half a life time in ignorance of what this text has transformed: no longer “No-one can see my face and live”, but precisely its denial: “the light of the knowledge of the glory in the face”.

I hope that this revolution might be something for you too.

Because the truth is that for the coming days, all we have to do is to live with Paul in this miracle of light, and tell the darkening world:  this is God.

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Pentecost 19
15/10/2017

Isaiah 25:1-9
Psalm 23
Matthew 22:2-14

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Our gospel reading this morning is something of a dog’s breakfast of a text. The general story is well known to Christians, although we’re much more familiar with the simpler version Luke gives us. In Luke, a feast is prepared, but many excuses are given as to why the invited guests can’t come. The insulted host then sends out to the streets and lanes, and has anyone encountered compelled to come and take the place of the original guests: end of story, with a clear moral – don’t miss the invitation, because your place will easily be filled.

In Matthew it is rather more complicated. The host is a king, and the feast a wedding banquet for his son. The invited guests don’t simply dismiss the invitation (twice); they mistreat and even kill the servants sent to announce the feast. This much is straightforward, at least. But, notwithstanding that the food is presumably sitting on the kitchen bench about to be served, the enraged king then enters into a small scale war to destroy those evil-doers and their city. He then sends out again into the streets to gather in all they could find, “both the good and the bad”. And finally we have a strange encounter between the king and a guest who has no wedding garment on. It’s strange, because presumably none of those who were plucked from the streets were wearing their wedding-best at the time. Yet only this one features as offensive. The dumbstruck guest is then cast out to weep and gnash his teeth. And the text concludes with one of Matthew’s little summarising lines: “for many are called, but few are chosen”

It’s quite a lot to get your head around! Some scholars account for the strangeness of the story by proposing that here Matthew weaves together a couple of different stories, retold this way for reasons and a context quite different from Luke’s account. Yet, while that makes good sense in terms of accounting for the text as we now have it, it doesn’t really help us with understanding it as Scripture. The historical and critical tools we have for understanding texts these days are only relatively new. Until they were discovered, the church dealt with these difficult passages with their apparent contradictions and all. We also have to receive it as having its own authority, apart from how we might explain away its contradictions. What the historical approach allows us to do is to break the text up and explain each of its parts. But to explain the story and its oddities by these means is to render it of no use to us. What we can explain is something we already know – because we know the things in terms of which we explain it.

The truly interesting question is whether or not there are things in the text which we can’t easily explain, or which sit somewhat uncomfortably with us. Such things call us into question. They confront us with thoughts we don’t yet comprehend. It is only such things which lead us into new realities, new ways of seeing.

So it’s easy, for example, to draw “morals” from the story: take care to respond to God’s call when it comes. And when you do accept the invitation, take care to “dress” yourself appropriately by living a life worthy of one called by this God. But there is no real gospel here. This is all law – all imperative – do this, don’t do that. There is no liberation here except possibly the news that we are called. If it’s a calling to do things we don’t want to do, then it’s hardly good news.

What is the good news? The good news of the gospel has to do with Jesus Christ, and so if there’s any good news in this mixed up story of the king’s banquet, it’ll be ours only if we read it christologically – or if we allow it to read us christologically. We have to ask: how does the parable speak to us about Jesus Christ, and about us in relation to him? If the story of the king’s banquet tells us what the kingdom of heaven is like (22.2), and if Jesus himself is the presence of the kingdom of heaven, how is the story about Jesus and not simply about us as we accept or reject God’s invitation? The good and the bad are gathered to replace those cast aside. How is this so, christologically? The guest is inappropriately dressed and cannot speak for himself, and is cast out for that reason, and not because he is one of the “bad”. How is this so, christologically?

To answer these questions most succinctly: to read this parable christologically is to see that Jesus is both the invitation to the wedding banquet, and the wedding garment the guests are to wear. What does this mean?

The first part – that Jesus is the invitation – probably makes sense to most Christians. We are used to the thought that the kingdom is open to all – to both good and bad. Once the original guests refused the invitation, the banquet was thrown open to all, and Christians can understand this to be about God’s grace in Christ.

But what then about the guest who is thrown out? He gets in the same way everyone else did – in Christ, by grace, good or bad. The typical explanation here is that, having received grace, this chap did not rise to the challenge of decking himself in righteousness by growing in grace with good works. This is an important lesson, and it echoes themes in the earlier part of the parable where the invitation is rejected outright. Put differently, and more technically, this sees the parable as being about the importance of growing in sanctification after having received justification: coming to look like a “wedding guest” in good works after having received the gracious invitation.

But, in a specifically Christian reading of the parable, we can’t just leave the matter there. The separation of an initial justification from the subsequent sanctification is convenient for theology but, probably in direct correlation to that convenience, it is just not going to work. What we end up doing is turning justification by grace into a ticket with an expiry date such that, while we get into God’s good books by his grace, we stay there by our good works. (Recall here the problem we met a couple of weeks ago in the parable of the workers in the vineyard). We imagine that while we might get into the wedding banquet dressed only in street clothes, once there we have to cobble together something to dress ourselves more respectably, lest our host ask us some uncomfortable questions about our attire.

But this, in fact, is not how we order our lives as church. We gather each week not to compare moral achievements but to be lifted up, once again: once again to be invited to the wedding feast. This is named in our opening prayers and hymns. Each week we hear afresh that God knows us more deeply than we know ourselves, and loves us nonetheless. This is named in the preaching, the confession and the declaration of forgiveness. Each week we hear that even the breaking of the body of God by us is made – by grace – a breaking of God for us. Each week we gather as we are around a table abundant with symbols which speak the extraordinary thing we are going to become: Christ’s very Body. All of this contradicts any simple notion of an initial justification followed by a life of sanctification. If sanctification is something into which we are growing, then it is a very strange growth indeed. For what we grow into – if it is grace – is an increasing awareness of our ongoing need of justification, of our need of being set right again despite having heard the gospel a thousand times before. Our holiness increases with our increasing awareness of our need for mercy. In terms of the parable, our growing in grace is a growing in awareness of just how poorly we are dressed for this wedding reception.

Of course, there is much to be said for trying to put a special stiches into our ragged outfits. Even on our own we can do better than fig leaves. But whether we are good or bad matters less than whether we know what gives us a standing before the king who would ask us how we dare to attend his banquet unadorned. When the question comes, such a king – such a God – is to be answered according to his own decree:

I stand before you in the wedding robe which is the groom himself: Christ, in whose honour this party is thrown, and for whose honour I was called from my business to be here; Christ, for whose honour this world was created, and into whose image I am being conformed.

The grace of God in Christ is not simply the invitation, the way into God’s kingdom. Christ is also our wedding garment – our way of eating and drinking and laughing and dancing our way through the celebration – what we are to be wearing when our host greets us in the mingling. The confused guest in the parable is thrown out not because he answers wrongly but because he is struck dumb with fear. It is not that he wears no wedding garment, but that he doesn’t know that in fact he does; he doesn’t know the grace by which he could stand in confidence before the king. For none of us wears garments appropriate to the kingdom, save the garment we wear when we put on Christ. In Christ we are always well-dressed.

So then, may the Spirit of this Christ enliven the people in this place and all places to hear again the invitation of God: be yourselves in the Christ in whose name you are called, and by whose grace you stand.

And for the boundless grace in this invitation, all praise and honour be to God, now and always. Amen.

Amen.

 

 

[This is an extension of an earlier text distributed but not actually preached at MtE]

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Pentecost 18
8/10/2017

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Psalm 19
Matthew 21:33-46

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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Today, the lectionary places in front of us the Ten Commandments. In an era when all law seems to be under challenge, from the law regarding marriage, to gun laws to the laws of ethnic minorities in Spain – and here. And challenging law is legitimate. After all, the Basis of Union of the UCA says,

The Uniting Church will keep its law under constant review so that its life may be increasingly directed to the service of God and humanity, and its worship to a true and faithful setting forth of, and response to, the Gospel of Christ.

That is a noble sentiment with noble ends. The ‘service of God and humanity’ is something we do well in the Uniting Church, and here ‘law’ does not mean endlessly tinkering with regulations. But the interesting part is that it mentions ‘worship’ – law as it keeps our worship a ‘true and faithful setting forth’ of the Gospel. Few people realise how important that law is, or that it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.

If church law rapidly descends into regulations, worship laws soon focus on rubrics – the directions of how to do it. Perhaps that’s because people find small things easier to deal with, but they will soon lose hold on the Big Picture. The Big Picture is that we gather, not primarily for human fellowship, but to worship God. Interestingly, the Basis says very little about that, but it does name the centralities. It describes Word and Sacrament in dynamic terms, not theoretical ones. It doesn’t get into centuries of arguments stemming from Reformation disputes over what has been called the ‘Supper strife’. And in any case, we have the two editions of Uniting in Worship to guide us.

Trinity College asked me if I would help teach ‘Prayer Book Studies’ this semester. It’s been an interesting experience. For three centuries Anglican worship was characterised by the use of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. For three centuries, Presbyterians and Congregationalists have defined themselves over against it. I remind you that 1661 was the year that the King – Charles II Stuart – returned to the throne after a couple of decades marked by civil war – the worst kind of all war – and Cromwell’s experiment at a republic, the Commonwealth. Whatever you think of Cromwell, it was a bold vision, but it failed. What it did was to bring all the Puritans – our forebears – outside the Church of England where we could be seen. With the return of King and Bishops, we were exposed as the enemy. King Charles did have to restore order, but he did it with an Act of Uniformity and by imposing a Book of – literally – Common Prayer on all subjects. Folk memory is a powerful thing, and it explains why our church traditions are so opposed to liturgical books, to bishops, and to uniformity. There were no alternative ways of legally being an English Christian. Over two thousand clergy lost their livings, including my personal hero Richard Baxter, a Presbyterian, and both grandfathers of the Wesleys. Why? Because they agreed either to use, without change, the BCP, or they claimed liberty in worship and paid for it. On that date, two new traditions were born: Anglicanism was invented, and Nonconformity defined – by law.

Of course, things are very different today. If in the 17^th century we had been presented with A Prayer Book for Australia (1995), there would have been no crisis of conscience, and no divided church. Even the liturgical laws the Anglican church has, have their counterpart in our authorized worship books. They are slightly more insistent on priests using the prayers laid down in the book, but they already represent a variety.

But we are all now facing a common challenge. Ever since Anglicans began translating the BCP into the languages of their former colonies, there has been no uniformity, because languages express ideas differently. Think how different Tudor English is to us today. But we are all affected by two further, connected, revolutionary inventions – the computer (with the internet) and the photocopier. My first liturgical experiments were facilitated by a very grumpy greasy Gestetner (remember?).  The writing of liturgies and sermons, the choice of music, the use of images, are all now immeasurably assisted and expanded, and we are grateful for it.

But now it is possible – and a fact – that any worship leader can find any prayer anywhere on the internet, from any theological tradition or none, and copy it, and edit it, as s/he drops it into the Sunday leaflet of the congregation. Uniformity is inconceivable. But what of the faith of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church? What of the integrity of a Uniting Church or an Anglican one? What makes our worship the faithful inheritor of what our forebears fought to retain? What makes it Christian?

Many of my former students quote back to me a remark I often made; ‘In liturgy, there are no laws’ and I did say it. That’s partly because there was a consensus, a deposit of faith, doctrine and liturgical customs which could be trusted to express worship which carried the worshippers’ consent. We have been blessed in this congregation by a series of pastors with very great ability to articulate the faith and to create the texts and acts of worship for our use. We may trust Craig Thompson, but what about his successor?

My ‘no laws’ quip is unpacked by an article one of my teachers wrote, which he headed, ‘You are free – if…’  If you know what a liturgy of baptism is intended to achieve, you are free to draw together the resources you need (always remembering that congregational assent). The same for a marriage, or a Christian funeral, or a service of lament for a broken world. You could say that the whole of Uniting in Worship consists in providing models which our leaders are trusted to use or adapt. It stands in the tradition of the first Nonconformist Directory of Public Worship in 1644 – not a required book of common prayer. How many of our present ministers own or consult a UiW?

There is in fact one liturgical law, and it is more of an observation. Lex orandi lex credendi, which in its efficient Latin means, ‘The way we pray determines what we believe’. Not the particular words, but what we do in worship sets the pattern of what we believe.

So the fact that we do Word + Sacrament every Lord’s Day here, already speaks volumes about who we are. We hear the scriptures in an orderly way (lectionary) and we break bread as the body of Christ, and we sing all those responses. That we praise the Triune God in hymns and songs, and pray prayers of confession and hear words of assurance, and prayers of intercession, keeping our ears open to the cries of the suffering and needy of the world, adds up to a book of practical theology. The pattern is our tutor, our connection with something deeper. True, it is very fragile indeed, but so is faith in a crucified God.

Our foundations are there, but they are also being undermined in this increasingly dominant secularist and selfish culture. I don’t think we have begun to address the deeper questions of our futurity.

This may not be a biblical sermon, but it is a ‘church’ sermon, for it concerns us all – and let me end by showing a connection.

The Ten Commandments have a long history of us in Christian worship, but their very presence raises questions. I don’t just mean the ones that are daily broken across our present sad humanity. I mean the laws themselves. How do we use them in worship?  Thomas Cranmer, the composer of the Common Prayer, set the Commandments to be read before a prayer of confession, the law as a canon to judge ourselves by; Calvin placed them after the Assurance of Forgiveness, the law as a guide to right living. You need not choose between them! Ancient patterns still have creative things to say to us.

The 12 units of the CTM’s training modules for church council/elder training are combined in one document here.

If you’d like any of these separately, send Craig a note…

 

 

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Pentecost 17
1/10/2017

Ezekiel 18:1-4, 25-32
Psalm 25
Matthew 21:23-32

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In our gospel reading today the elders and the chief priests ask a question which seems reasonable enough: by what authority do you do these things – “these things” including the overthrowing of the temple marketplace? We understand that particular answers might be dangerous for Jesus but, still, we listen for a straightforward answer from him. What we hear, however, is a clever answer which seems simply to allow Jesus to avoid the hard question. Yet the point of the story is not that we might remark, “Clever Jesus.” The text lays before us a challenge about the relationship between how we think the world is or ought to be and how we actually live in that world.

Jesus counters with a question of his own, about the authority of the now dead John the Baptist. The elders and chief priests carefully weigh up their answer-options: if we say John’s ministry was from God, we’ll be shown up as in error, for we did not welcome him as a prophet; but if we say John’s ministry was of human origin, we risk the anger of the people. Finding both of these outcomes equally unpalatable, they are forced into a public and dishonest agnosticism: “…we do not know…”

The public nature of their refusal to know is critical. They know very well what they think privately, for we see it in their earlier rejection of John. But they dare not think this out loud. For fear they refuse to declare the truth as they see it. In this dishonest turn the elders sever the relationship between their “internal” and “external” selves: what I am in myself and what I am in public are here demonstrated to be two different things. My private self is created by my own thoughts, experiences, emotions, desires, etc., and those of the people close to me. My public self is what I think I need to be in order to protect my private self. The elders and the chief priests protect themselves in their private beliefs by refusing to have a public opinion about John.

Things are very different when it comes to Jesus himself. God reigns in a certain way “inside” Jesus and in the same way “outside” him: internal motivation and external action are the same. In Jesus, God’s kingdom is come and will is done, “on earth, in heaven”. Jesus is what we see him to be; he has what we might call a “plain sense”, nothing hidden.

This is not how it is for the rest of us. Whereas the duplicitous religious leaders could think one thing and say or do another, Jesus could not because God does not. There is no distinction between how this God is in himself, and how God is and acts among us; there is a cohesion between God’s private life and God’s public life.

And this brings us to a surprising connection: this exchange between Jesus and the elders hinges on what the church has sought to mark with its classic confession of God as Trinity. This is surprising, first, because neither Jesus nor the elders have any notion of the church’s later trinitarian confession. It surprising, second, because few Christians actually believe that trinitarian doctrine is about anything that matters, believe that it is more than some strange thing we are made to say and believe.

What is the church’s confession of God as Trinity?  It is not, in the first instance, that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the form or “shape” of the confession. More fundamentally, the confession of the Trinity is concerned to affirm that the “inside” and the “outside” of God are “the same”. The doctrine says that God is-in-Godself in the same way that God is-in-the-world. There is no deception, duplicity, or dissembling. With God it is not “What you see is what you get”; this is the game of the elders and the chief priests, and ours with them. With God, it is “What you see is what there is”. So far as what we see can be labelled, those labels happen to be “Father”, “Son” and “Holy Spirit”, but this is just so that we can say something about these identities as they converge in Jesus. The matter of central importance is that the way in which Father, Son and Spirit “play” before us in the person of Jesus is how they play when they’re not in front of us. How God is in the world is how God is in Godself.

The importance of this here is the contrast between this divine way of being and that of the chief priests and the elders – and of us with them. They, and we, are different in ourselves from what we are in public. I don’t refer here to those things which are properly personal and not appropriate to public space. I mean rather those circumstances when we find ourselves doing the kinds of calculations the chief priests and the elders do in response to Jesus: knowing what we think but sparing ourselves the grief which would come from speaking it, choosing to divide ourselves into two identities – the one I think I know and the one I dare to show. God gives us each one face, and we divide it into two, each side looking in different directions, each ear listening for different things.

The counter-question of Jesus demonstrates that, in their dissembling, their deception, the authority of the chief priests and elders to ask their question evaporates. They know two authorities, Jesus knows only one. Authority rises from a single voice, from both ears hearing the same thing. It is on the divine cohesion of his own inner life and outer ministry that Jesus’ authority is founded.  In contrast, the priests and the elders – and we with them – are divided in themselves; they are spiritually “schizophrenic” (Greek: “divided mind”).

Such dishonesty about myself before others arises from fear: I don’t trust the world with my true self. Fair enough: the world is a dangerous place and a self-preserving instinct does not always deny God. But at the same time dishonesty like this also gives rise to fear, because no one really knows what’s lurking beneath the surface. Fear breeds dishonesty and dishonesty dissolves community.

In contrast, honesty – being the same in myself as I am in public – gives rise to love and trust. It is not easy, and often dangerous. I have to put myself at risk by revealing who I am so that you can know what to expect from me when the relationship between public and private is pressed. And when you know what to expect, your world is safer. Love – community and a safe public space – grows from honesty, and enables honesty.

The gospel is that Jesus – and the God working in him – is not different in himself from what he is in relation to those around him. He names fearful dishonesty and calls it to account. He loves with a creative honesty otherwise unknown to us.

The gospel is further that, while we will fail at being Jesus – of which the cross is the sign – God remains inside as God is outside: ever for us. God is faithful to Godself and to the creation which was, and will again become, “very good”. The body of God – the convergence of Father and Son and Spirit in the person of Jesus – the body of God broken by us is still God’s body for us. And so we take and eat and drink, and declare in these actions that what we have seen in God’s work in Jesus is how God is in Godself: love on the outside, love on the inside. This love we take to our insides that our outside might begin also to become love.

So fed, we are made to become, however fleetingly, ourselves the body of Christ: a community in which the public is built up by the private, and the private is built up by the public, a community not of fear but of faith and hope, in love.

This is the gift of the gospel, and its call to us.

All thanks and praise be to the one who loves us inside out, calling us to this love and making it possible among us.

To God’s greater glory, and to the richer humanity of all God’s people, let us, then, look to be made love, inside and out.

Amen.

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Pentecost 16
24/9/2017

Jonah 3:10-4:11
Psalm 145
Matthew 20:1-16

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[There is something is very troubling about God’s economy. It’s bad enough that those who work only an hour are paid the same as those who’ve worked the whole day. But the point is made without apology, and events unfold so that the unfairness is emphasised and made unmistakable to all. The landowner deliberately pays first those who’ve worked only an hour, so that there’s no possibility that anyone misses the point. We’re expected to be offended. Now, clearly what we have here is not a proposal for an economic or industrial relations policy, but a statement about what it is to deal with the God who sent Jesus. The concept which is usually thrust forward here to help us understand what is going on is “grace”. God freely does with people as he wishes, and he wishes to bless. But we need to think more deeply than such an all-too-easily applied theological label as “grace” might suggest.]

One thing we understand straightaway in Jesus’ story of the workers in the vineyard is that those who’ve worked the whole day are horrified at what has happened. At the same time, we are supposed to see that the all-dayers have received exactly what they contracted for, and so the landowner rightly rejects their objections. It’s his money. If he wants to fritter it away with such extravagant payments, he may. And so we might see that the parable points an accusing finger at those pious and upright people who would deny that God can be gracious even to those who have not contributed much in God’s “vineyard”. The point seems simple enough: do not presume to limit God’s freedom to be gracious to whomever he chooses.

But this is still all too simple if we think the point is merely “grace to late comers”. For if God shows “grace” to those who start work at 9am, noon, 3 and then 5 o’clock, what does God show to those who began work at the start of the day (6am)? Simplistic talk about the grace which God shows to the late starters actually turns his relationship to the early starters into a graceless contract of work and reward. The late starters were told: “go into the vineyard, and you will be paid whatever is right”. But the early starters were later reminded, “did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Did we not have a contract?” On this reading, while the late starters receive more than they would normally be due, it seems that the early starters receive only what they were due. The late-starters have been gratuitously blessed, but early starters have been paid.

Simplistically naming as “grace” God’s blessing of the late-comers leaves us with a problem: some seem to receive what they need on account of what they have done, and some receive irrespective of what they have done. If the lucky latecomers get into God’s good graces simply because God chooses to bless them and does not require that they do as the all-day workers have been doing, what does that say about the work the all-dayers have been doing? Or, more generally, if grace is overwhelming, what is the value of work?

The only answer which makes any sense of the paradox of work and grace – here and elsewhere – is an extraordinary one: the work we are given to do is the form of the grace we receive. The lavishness of the landowner shows clearly that he doesn’t measure the workers’ value by the quantity of work they do. Yet all have been put to work. At the same time, the landowner is able to bless the workers whether they’ve put in a full day’s work or not, for he clearly doesn’t need what they produce in order to bless. If the owner does not need the work to be done in order to pay the workers, then the work must actually be for the workers’ sake, and not for his.

The “grace” here, then, is not the generous payment at the end of the day. The grace is the invitation to see our lives as lived in the vineyard of this master. Here, the payment is not for the work done but is the sign of what they have been engaged in. It is easy to read this story as a parable of the “end-times”, so that the real pay-day is at some time yet to come. But the very opportunity of working in this vineyard, now, is itself the grace.  The early-starters thought they were merely toiling away, earning what was really a freely-given blessing. Their error is not that they moaned about the others being blessed. It was that they thought that they themselves worked in order to be paid. (Cf. the parable of the two sons [the prodigal son, Luke 15.11ff], and in particular the protests of the elder son at his father’s response to the return of the younger, and the father’s response to this objection.) In fact their work was their pay, only they did not experience it as such.  The day’s pay is the sign, the meaning, of the work which has been done, not the consequence of it. The work to which God’s people are called is blessed work because in it – in the concrete and tangible necessities of daily life – the kingdom of God becomes present.

The parable challenges us: Reassess your understanding of the work you have been given to do. You are engaged in the work of grace. What you do is a participation in the very act of creation. What else is grace but the calling into being of things which do not exist? A life lived in grace is no different.

More typically, work is associated with fear. We fear that the work we do will not be good enough to warrant our pay. We fear what others will think if we don’t get it just right, or even fear our own judgement of ourselves. We fear for our prospects if it seems that neither present nor future work will deliver the kinds of resources we think we need for life. We that what we are required to do might not, in the end, actually matter.

But if, as in the parable, the owner of the business of life doesn’t really care how much we produce but pays us regardless, the fear in the labour of our lives disappears. Work becomes activity in grace – even “toiling in the hot sun”. Work becomes something we are freed for, rather than by which we are bound.

Divine grace is not about our standing before God in some as-yet unspecified future, receiving then our daily bread. It is about God’s standing before us now, inviting us to work in the vineyard, redefining for us what we are doing, sustaining us in that work with the manna of grace. The work God gives us to do is central to the way God blesses us. This is the case for us as we make our way through Christian life by attending worship or giving of our resources as we are able. It’s the case for a church council which is confronted with the challenges of maintaining properties, paying stipends, making ends meet, growing congregations. It’s the case for a congregation having to deal with the revelation of abuse in its midst. It’s the case for an individual who finds herself moved to share faith with a neighbour. It is the case for the difficulties of coming to terms with our property challenges here, and for the hard work of Hotham Mission. It is the case for the struggle of dealing with overwhelming illness and grief.

How often these things are for us imagined as sheer burdens we have to bear. And, if we manage to bear them, how often we then secretly imagine ourselves worthy of reward. But if Christian existence is a burden which we bear in order to be rewarded by God, or by those around us, then it is not Christian existence. Taking up the cross, as Jesus invites us, is not a matter of subjecting ourselves to heavy burdens in order to achieve righteousness. The cross is a lens through which we see what a true life is like, in the world and before God.

What do we see through this lens? The life of Jesus himself, grace in the midst of ungrace, given to us our very own life. We see that we are co-workers with Christ in the vineyard which will be God’s heaven. We are co-creators with God. Our work is a share in the calling to order of the chaotic world around us, a calling to fullness of the void of meaningless effort.

That is the blessing of the gospel. It is this to which we invite others, and it is because they will also be blessed in such work that we celebrate should they join us.

So let us, then, rejoice that God gives us a life to live, work to do, a vineyard in which to labour. And let’s get on with it, looking to see what good God might do with our efforts.

Amen.

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Pentecost 15
17/9/2017

Romans 14:1-12
Psalm 103
Matthew 18:21-35

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Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. I’ll not continue to 77 times (much less 70 x 7 times – an alternative translation)! Jesus clearly sees forgiveness an important part of the life of the community of his disciples. So far as it depends on you, forgive. We might add to this, so far as it depends on you, seek forgiveness and to live a forgiven life. And here we strike a problem for the forgiven life.

The parable Jesus uses to illustrate the nature of forgiveness is clear enough in itself. A slave with an impossibly large debt has it forgiven and yet is unwilling to forgive another slave a miniscule obligation. The comic difference of the debts illustrates the failure of the one who is forgiven. We learn that, having been forgiven, we are expected to become forgiving. The kingdom of heaven is like this.

We’ve noted before that the parables are not properly allegories in which the characters or exchanges are codes for characters and events in our typical experience. This parable, however, lends itself quite well to being read as an allegory: the king is God and the slaves are us; the king is clearly merciful and just and we are taught to honour and to echo that mercy and justice.

Let us, however, change the parable along these lines: A slave owes a great debt to another slave. She is called to account for what she owes, but cannot pay it. She begs, then, for more time to pay but he is unwilling, and requires that she and her family and possessions be sold in order to pay for what she owes. The king – their master – however, hears of this, and forgives her the debt she owes to the other slave, saving her from the loss of everything. The one to whom she owed the great debt is left without satisfaction. Is the kingdom of heaven also like this? For there seems to be an injustice here, to which we might strongly object – especially if we are the ones left without repayment.

And yet, consider the way we speak of God’s forgiveness in the church. Does not the liturgist invite us to confession of sin and then declare a word of forgiveness, in response to which we express our thanks and sing a doxology? And is not that confessed sin usually “real” sin, concrete in real interactions with real people, most of whom are not here and not party to this exchange of confession and forgiveness? To put the question most concretely, How can I be forgiven by God for sins against another person who would still hold me to account for that sin, who still withholds her or his forgiveness (or, perhaps, is dead)? Here we speak of ourselves as “fully” forgiven – for God does not half forgive – and yet the effect of our sin continues in the rupture between me and the one I’ve hurt.

We might put our question about forgiveness from God a little differently: What does it mean to be forgiven – to be in right relation to God – and still to be labouring under the effects of sin? To this framing of the question, the following answer can be put: to be living in right relation to God and yet also to continue to labour under the effects of sin, is to be living the life of the incarnate Son, Jesus. What else is the life of Jesus but that of a human being living in right relation to God? And what else is the life of Jesus – culminating and so defined in his death – but a life lived with the effects of sin?

We can say, then, that it is possible to be reconciled to God and yet still be unreconciled to those who have not forgiven us, simply because Jesus the incarnate Son lived precisely this life – our life. His was a life lived in full orientation to God. The fullness of this orientation for us is that which divine forgiveness brings; God does not “half” forgive. The life of Jesus was also lived in full orientation to the world and its lack of reconciliation within itself. Jesus lives fully oriented towards God – we might even dare to say, Jesus is “forgiven” – and yet still has enemies, is still unforgiven by the world.

“Christian forgiveness,” then, is not so much being “forgiven” our sin as simply being given – to put on as our own – the humanity of Jesus with its double orientation – to-and-from God and to-and-from the broken world.

Talk about Jesus as human and divine is not, then, abstract and groundless speculation on his nature or character. This “dogma” goes straight to the heart of the affirmation we happily make about forgiveness, and sadly make about the continued brokenness of the church and of the world and about our part in that brokenness. We need to be able to say how it is that we can speak of ourselves as whole before God – as restored, forgiven – knowing that we continue in broken relationships, with debtors and accusers who have no interest in whether God has “forgiven” us or not. To put the matter more “theologically”, we need to be able to say how perfecting divine action meets imperfect human actions. This is what the Christ-dogma does.

In fact, the church does not actually say how this is possible, for the how is a “mystery” – an impenetrable and yet clearly given thing. So the church says simply that the divine and human coincide. It says this not primarily in its dogma about the humanity and divinity of Christ; that comes later. What comes first, and gives rise to the dogma, is the declaration of forgiveness we dare to utter here every week. Here the church declares that it is possible that grace and ungrace can come together without confusion of the two, without the one changing the other, without radical division, without separation. Not only is it possible, it has happened in Jesus. And so, in one of its early councils (Chalcedon 451ad), the church declared what I’ve just said: that in Jesus the truly and holy divine meets the truly and broken human in the most intimate of ways, and yet “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” of the divine and the human.

This sounds like hifalutin and so quite “optional” theological speculation but its meaning for us is that we can make a Christian declaration of forgiveness: you are forgiven by God for things you have done to people who have not forgiven you. It is the understanding of Jesus as the coming together of the divine and human which makes this affirmation possible. If Jesus is “only human”, then God is unjust in forgiving us our sins. Forgiveness from God, then, takes place to the extent that we are “in” Christ, to the extent that we become the Body of Christ: even if someone holds something against us, we can still receive forgiveness from God for whatever that thing is.

At the same time, this does not make the brokenness of our worldly relationships go away. The wholeness of the humanity of Jesus did not mean that the ongoing effect of broken human relationships did not continue. Jesus dies on the cross – fully in right relation to God, fully in the antagony of being human. And we might expect the same for ourselves, one way or another. This is not necessarily “good” news, but it is the news of the gospel. It is the “cost” of forgiveness. Faith receives a gift of life in the shadow of death. The death will still come, but it will no longer be death to those who have received the lively gift.

What does all this mean? It means that the grace of God is not “cheap”. To receive forgiveness from God is to be called to suffer unforgiveness in the world.

Let us, then, confess our sin, receive the lively gift of forgiveness, and rise with the courage of freed souls to live alive in this antagonistic and broken world.

Amen.

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Pentecost 14
10/9/2017

Ezekiel 33:7-11
Psalm 119:33-40
Matthew 18:15-20

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“If a brother sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If he listens to you, you have regained him. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let such a him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.”

We can imagine that this process has been faithfully applied in a literal sense many times in the last 2000 years. Yet a “faithful” application of the process is not necessarily a good one. We can also imagine that the application of this process has often led to great injustice. This might be the case when the one accused of sin is actually the prophet, standing courageously against an unjust congregational practice or culture and being named “sinner” for her trouble.

The scenario Jesus describes here, then, is idealised; things are rarely this straightforward. The biblical text does not deal with all scenarios. We have comprehensive legislation for that kind of coverage, and case law to cover what the legislation doesn’t. This is why we need (or at least use) lawyers; but the Scripture does not facilitate in the practice of law in this way.

Rather, this idealised example stands for, or represents, all instances of the rupture of a Christian community. It stands, then, even for what seem to us to be impossible and intractable situations, in which we might find it impossible to clarify blame or to forgive as our reading might imply should be the case.

What are we to do with today’s text, then? The context might help. Preceding today’s reading is the parable of the lost sheep, in which the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine he still has to go searching for a lost one, and rejoices more over the found one than the ninety-nine not lost. Following today’s reading is Jesus putting it to Peter that forgiveness might be required of him to the extent of seventy times seven times. These passages suggest that the overcoming of whatever separates us from God and from each other is paramount.

In between these two readings stands the shocking possibility of the excommunication that Jesus allows here, or even mandates. Where is the seventy times seven forgivings here?

Let’s allow that tension to hang for a moment, and note a couple of other things about our gospel reading this morning. After the possibility of excommunication, Jesus returns to the “binding” and “loosing” we met a couple of weeks ago: whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed heaven. This is reinforced in the next verse: “if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.” And then we hear why this is the case: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

These texts seem to work better for us when we don’t hear them all together – the parable of the lost sheep, the challenge of endless forgiveness, the dispute resolution process for churchly conflicts, the uncomfortable binding of heaven linked with the doubtable promise about agreement in prayer and, finally, that wonderful invitation to self-congratulation, “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them”. By themselves we can make some sense of them but, in fact, they are not discrete texts: Matthew lumps them all together. This might have been because they sound like they’re about the same kind of thing and so were gathered together for commonality’s sake. That is, Matthew may or may not have had a clear thought about what putting these things together meant. But even if he did, I don’t know what he was doing (and I’m going to presume that you don’t either!). I, with you, have only the series of verses with their consistencies and contradictions, and an imperative to understand them.

What do we do when we can make no sense of the Scripture? One option is simply to let the absence of meaning stand. A preacher, however, can’t quite do that. He or she is forced to write Scripture to fill the gaps, even to make the Scripture say what it seems it clearly does not, but must intend. This, of course, is a very impious proposal, and so you didn’t hear it from me. However, impious or not, it is important for understanding the peculiar task of preaching. No sermon – and certainly not this one – carries the authority of Scripture for the church as a whole. The Scriptural canon is closed because in it enough – although not everything – has been said. A sermon exists for a local community in the space between the “everything” which might have been said and the “enough” which has been said. A sermon is something which might have been Scripture but doesn’t need to be, because Scripture is already enough. We might say, then, that a sermon extends Scripture without quite adding to it. Or, to use a different metaphor: a sermon which meets its mark – striking the heart of the sinner – will from that point “infect” that heart’s reading and hearing of the Scriptures. The Scripture takes on a new clarity because of the way it has been expounded.

How might this help here? Like all things which really matter, this is more easily demonstrated than described. We have left hanging the tension of today’s reading with the preceding the parable of the shepherd’s desire for the lost sheep and the following call to eternal forgivings. What is necessary for clarity and meaning here?

The new thing might be this: the excommunication of the unrepentant brother is not the application of the gospel, but the mandated sign of the failure of the gospel. In this failure – a binding – on earth, there is a binding in heaven. But heaven bound is no longer heaven. The failure of the gospel in our failure to live as God’s reconciled and reconciling people is, already, the failure of our prayer – we are not in agreement and so our prayers are not granted. And, finally: we have generally been given to imagine, on the strength of today’s text, that only two or three are necessary to get Jesus into the room, so that the presence of Jesus seems to be the easiest of things to effect. But we might also say that the sheer scale of the call to forgiveness and reconciliation surrounding this text is such that it will take a loosing of all of heaven and all of earth for two or three to come together in this way. In human terms, this is not going to happen.

But, of course, the Jesus who is present to the two or three is not gentle-Jesus-meek-and-mild but the crucified Lord. We imagined a couple of weeks ago that, when given authority to bind and loose, the church sought immediately to bind Jesus. This led to Jesus proposing the cross as what it would take to loose both heaven and earth from such a binding. It is the cross which would appear among us, if we were to gather “in his name”.

Thinking about church life – reconciliation, authority, prayer and the very presence of God – cannot be done and be Christian without the cross. A church which excommunicates is an impossible possibility which only the cross can treat. Excommunication is impossible if the church is reconciling in its nature, but it happens, of course. Or, if as in churches like the UCA, it doesn’t happen, we still fail by baptising unbaptised “diversity.” Nothing is easy here – not the life of the Christian community, not its prayer, not its experience of the presence of Christ.

What does all this mean? It means that we have nothing we can do but throw ourselves onto the mercy of God, as we work for reconciliation, make our rules, pray, and seek to gather as God’s very presence.

This mercy, we believe, takes shape precisely as we gather. Here – in this space – Christ, as the crucified one, is “remembranced” – made real to us again. “Do this for the remembrance of me” is to say, Do this, that I might be among you again. This is to say, Do this, that the reality – the judgement and the mercy – of the cross might be in your midst, judging and dividing, forgiving and reconciling.

It is in the Eucharist, as the presentation of the cross, that all our gatherings and our hopes for gatherings have their meaning. It is in the Eucharist, as prayer, that all of our prayers take their meaning and seek their union. It is in the Eucharist, as the re‑present‑ing of the Jesus, that we encounter the mystery of the cross – the mystery of one who loved abundantly more that he was loved, and who continues to do so, that we might know ourselves as loved despite the poverty of our Christian community and the contradictions of our prayers and visions of God.

The work towards reconciliation, the making of our rules and regulations, the prayer for the ourselves and the world must, of course, go on. But it is in the cross – God’s crossed-shaped key to heaven and to earth – that these things are effective, for us and for the world God loves.

Let us, then, in all that we do as God’s people, let the light of the cross be the light in which we seek to see and be seen.

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Pentecost 13
3/9/2017

Jeremiah 15:15-21
Psalm 26
Matthew 16:21-26

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“For what we are about to receive, Lord, make us truly thankful, for Christ’s sake. Amen.”

What have we just prayed? This is surely a reasonable question, given that it is prayed often enough at the tables of the pious. Clearly, we prayed that we be found to be grateful for what is to be received. In this context, that’s the sermon, which perhaps makes it a bold prayer for me to put on your lips at this point!?

But notice what we use to lever the prayer: “for Christ’s sake.” What on earth (or, in heaven), does this little phrase mean? The easy answer we can find in a dictionary: “For Christ’s sake: prepositional phrase, used to express surprise, contempt, outrage, disgust, [boredom], or frustration” (wikitionary.org). In response to this definition we might feel moved to remark, “For Christ’s sake!”

But setting profanity or even blasphemy aside, what is going on in our table grace or in a text like the one we have heard today: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it”?

Having dealt with the profane sense of “for Christ’s sake”, we must turn to another more insidious sense which accords to what these words usually mean. When I say, “I did it for Jane’s sake”, I mean that I acted for her benefit. My efforts accrue in some way to Jane’s account – she is the beneficiary. Yet this is not the case in our gospel text. Jesus has no interest in what we do. If, in some way, we lose our life – literally or figuratively – Jesus does not benefit. Jesus does not need us to take up our cross and follow. We add nothing to him in our response to his call.

This was a something of a shock to me as I wrote it. How can it be so? It is the case because this is how it is with Jesus’ own work. What Jesus does is not “for God’s sake”, in the sense of adding to what God is. God does not need Jesus to do anything or, to put it differently, there is nothing which it is necessary that Jesus do it. This is a thought which will likely give rise to “surprise, contempt, outrage, disgust, or frustration”. Do we not imagine that God needs us, that God calls us to do certain things – maybe Hotham Mission things, maybe certain liturgical things maybe “Marriage Equality” things – all “for God’s sake,” understanding that without those things God’s project is diminished or thwarted? Even closer to our sense for the confessional heart of the matter, did not God have a “plan” for Jesus, in which it is “necessary” that he be crucified? Does not Jesus die for some “sake”?

Those who took offence at Jesus in the gospel story, of course, did not express their contempt, outrage, disgust and frustration with, “For Christ’s sake!” Their offence and their actions against Jesus were summed up with “for God’s sake” or “for Rome’s sake,” but operating precisely with this sense of for the benefit of. “For God’s sake” and “for Rome’s sake” express contempt and outrage on God’s behalf and Rome’s behalf. Seen from within this understanding, Jesus is perceived to be doing nothing to help God or Rome. He is, then, perceived as having a negative impact in a world where the good is dependent on our attitudes and actions. The programs of God and Rome are understood to be advanced when the troublemaker is dealt with, so that it is necessary that Jesus die, if God is to continue to be God and Rome to be Rome.

This sense of necessity is the essence of sin. Sin becomes possible because of a perceived need. Random, unnecessary sin is just capricious sociopathy; a good sinner as a reason to sin, and justifies his or her actions by reference to that reason, that necessity. We appeal to the notion of “rights” by telling ourselves that we deserve something we probably don’t, or we appeal to the notion of necessity by telling ourselves that we are not free to act otherwise. If indeed there were rights or necessities involved we would not be dealing with sin but simply observing nature following its course. The accomplished sinner knows this and appeals to nature as a justification of his or her sin.

The thing about Jesus is that he doesn’t do anything because it is necessary. It is not even “necessary” that Jesus die in order to save sinners, as our atonement theories sometimes have it. Rome and religion find it necessary to kill him, but Jesus simply lives, even on the cross, until nature does finally take its course.

To lose one’s life for Christ’s sake is not to add to him but to take up a share in his strange freedom. It is a strange freedom because it is both the freedom for which we are created and yet a freedom from which we are alienated. Most of the weight which crushes us – perhaps all of that weight? – is necessity of our own making, rods for our own backs, or for the backs of others.

The freedom which Jesus lived revealed these things as secondary, as idolatrous. But this revelation brings a conflict, the result and sign of which is the cross. The cross, then, is not merely a righteous or undeserved suffering; it is the mark of a free life – a life free from false necessities, from fear of things which look like gods but are not and, so, are unnecessary. The cross marks a particular kind of suffering – the suffering which comes from the clash of the freedom for which we were created with the unfreedoms we create. Think back to our reading last week: Peter, set free to bind and loose both earth and heaven, immediately tying himself in knots. It is just this which brings Jesus to talk of his cross, and of ours.

We won’t labour this much more now, but the call to the cross is central to Christian discipleship and spoken in many ways in the gospels. To finish up, let’s hear one of the more colourful – although no less terrifying – accounts of the call, given a little earlier in Matthew’s gospel, in that account of the crucified life we call the Sermon on the Mount:

^6.25 ‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? ²⁶Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? ²⁷And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?^* 28And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, ²⁹yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. ³⁰But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” ³²For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. ³³But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Or, as we’ve heard today,

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?”

A life lived – a life “lost” – for Christ’s sake, is a life in which the only thing which is “necessary” is that we rest in God’s knowledge of what we need.

“For what we are about to receive, Lord, may we be truly thankful” is a prayer which looks forward into life acknowledging that not even we are necessary. All that we are is gift. This is the meaning of a life lived as a prayer “for Christ’s sake”.

Let us then – with Christ, in Christ, for Christ’s sake – strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and watch for God’s addition of all other things.

Amen.