View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 12
27/8/2017

Isaiah 51:1-6
Psalm 138
Matthew 16:13-20

---

“…I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16.18f)

Is this not enough to send a shiver down the spine of any modern leftist Christian type (of which there a couple present here today), and enough also to raise the ire of any Royal Commissioner investigating church processes? What are we to do with the binding and loosing authority of the church given its long history of catastrophic failures, whatever good the church might also have done?

As a way into this, a couple of exegetical notes: The function of holding the “keys of the kingdom” appears a couple of times in Matthew. The first is here, when Peter is “given” the keys. The second appearance is in an attack on the scribes and Pharisees:

^23.13 ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. ¹⁵Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.

The word “key” is hidden in the verb “lock”. Jesus gives to Peter what is implicitly held by the present religious authorities. To the extent that Peter does the opposite of what Jesus criticises here, he would handle the keys appropriately.

Linked to holding the keys is the authority to “bind” and to “loose”. This also occurs again later in the gospel, where the shift is from Peter personally to the church more generally (that is, from a singular “you” to a plural “you”; cf. Matthew 18.18). “Binding and loosing” was a technical term for determining when laws apply and when not. Jesus has already done some important binding and loosing in Matthew’s gospel to this point. In the Sermon on the Mount we hear repeatedly, “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you” (with respect to adultery or murder or oath-making, etc.; 5.21ff). This is a “binding”, an extension of a regulation. On the other hand, Jesus’ actions and teachings in relation to the Sabbath amount to a “loosing” of the Sabbath (12.1-14). It is this kind of interpretative authority Jesus gives to Peter.

Of itself, authority to interpret is unremarkable. Any community will find that it has to invest someone with such authority. If there is an offence in the text here, it is the linking of this authority with heaven: whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven. Can God be bound or loosed in this way? It is as if Jesus allows that the church’s will be done, in heaven as on earth. How is this anything other than simply terrifying?

Yet Scripture is not naïve here. The problem of the church mishandling its authority has escaped neither the attention nor the contention of the Scripture. In fact, the authority given to the church, personified in Peter, is immediately over-stepped by the church, in Peter, and receives immediate condemnation from Jesus. To make the connections between the authorisation and its misuse clearer, let’s play a little with what comes next in the story:

²¹ From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be bound [killed], and on the third day be loosed [raised]. ²² And the church [Peter] took him aside and sought to bind him [began to rebuke him], saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” ²³ But he turned and said to the church [Peter], “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you do not understand your confession [are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things].”

What do we see here? See that in Peter’s (in our) identification of who Jesus is – one of the climaxes of the gospel narrative – both the great authority of the church and its failure to exercise that authority appropriately are immediately manifest. From the outset the text demonstrates what we might imagine we now see clearly only with the benefit of hindsight: the church will bind and loosen in the wrong way. The authority and its abuse are part of the gospel story and not a contradiction of it. The Scriptures are not naïve.

And now to push a little deeper: if the first thing the church does with its authority is to bind Christ then it is in fact the only thing the church does with its authority. To put it differently: if Jesus is the presence of the kingdom of heaven – an earthly binding and loosing which makes heaven present – then Peter’s attempt to restrain him is the authorised church manifesting the original, foundational sin. The fall from Peter’s free confession of Jesus as Messiah to his rebuke of Jesus is the Fall we know from Genesis. “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build…”; “You are Adam and Eve, and all of this is yours, except…” Here Peter (and we with him) takes as his own the divine prerogative to know what is good and what is evil, and judges God (cf. Genesis 3).

This arrogance is untenable but it is central to relationship between God and God’s people. And the point of recounting the failure even of those who rise to the heights of Peter is to illustrate that the problem is intractable. Earth will bind heaven. What, then, is heaven to do?

What heaven does not do is convene a Royal Commission into church failures, or in any other way bring an “outside” authority to bear to effect justice. There is no outside authority; “the church” here is all humankind manifest in the unfortunate Peter, in our “parents” Adam and Eve, and so in us. What heaven “does” is the cross: the cross as the place at which the irresistible force of our willingness to bind God meets the immovable object of God’s loosing love.

But the cross is a difficult sea to navigate. This is partly because we consider that the human abuse of its freedom is a moral problem, and so one which we can sort out. Properly, scripturally, the human condition is a mystery within which contradictory things are held in tension. And so the cross is both darkness and light, death and life. The offence of the cross – its darkness – is what forces Peter’s hand to attempt to bind Jesus here. Yet it is this attempt to bind God which makes the cross what Jesus then calls us to as the source of revealing and liberating light.

If the Scripture is right about us and about God and about our relationship, we will not sort out the “problem” of moral failure arising from, or being met with, the blessing of God. This we cannot untangle this knot; the cross marks an impenetrable truth which is nevertheless a necessary truth.

What we can say is that the call to take up the (“our”) cross is not a call to do what Jesus did. The cross marks the collision of our high calling with our capacity to overstep. Jesus will be judged and condemned – marked – by the cross. If Jesus is in any way indicative of the divine, then the divine itself is also marked by the cross. It comes to be that, when we look at God, we can only see as if through a cross-shaped keyhole.

For us to “take up” the cross is for us to see that this is how God lets it stand. Through the cross we see God, and God sees us. We must take up our cross in following Jesus not in order to do what he has done, but in order that we might see him at all, and be seen by him. Perhaps here we can borrow Paul’s “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13): the mystery of the cross is the darkness through which we are beginning to perceive just what love might be, how far it might go, how distant we still are from being such lovers ourselves and, yet, how deeply we are loved nevertheless.

Of course, there is no “keyhole”, there is no “glass”; all of this is a playfulness by which we might be opened to what cannot be directly said or experienced with simple moral logic. We can’t say it directly because, while sin is quite logical and rational, grace is not. Grace looks like play in contrast to hard moral work.

We open ourselves to the logic of grace in a similarly playful way in the drama of our weekly liturgy. A body broken and blood poured out are the signs of human authority over-stepped, even by those who ought to have gotten it right. And so the ghastly act of eating and drinking the tokens of body and blood is supposed to be ghastly. There is a shock here. It is the shock of Peter’s fall from Great Confessor to Grand Inquisitor, which is the shock of an apple plucked greedily from a branch, which is – to proffer but one non-scriptural example – is the shock of cover-ups of the sexual abuse of children in the church, which is the shock of a God crucified by his own people, the heart of every moral shock. Eating and drinking here is a reception of our own brokenness.

Yet, at the same time, we receive the elements as a sign of a reconciliation, and of an overcoming. If God only sees us through the cross, God nevertheless sees us, although not as we do, “in a glass, darkly”. If the gate between heaven and earth has a cross-shaped keyhole, then God’s eye is pressed up against it. You see much, much more through a crevice when you are right up close. We look though the cross from a distance and so see but a little of God and a lot of the cross, but God is pressed right up against it and so sees all which can be seen through it. The closer we get to that keyhole, the more we realise that what is to be seen through it is the eye of God, beholding us, pressed up so close that he can no longer see the offensive cross but sees only through it.

What does all of this mean?

It means that if the church has an authority to bind and loose on earth and in heaven, it is a cross-shaped authority. In the cross we know that everything we will ever do has already been comprehended, understood, judged, for when we look to God for confirmation of our authoritative actions and statements we see only the cross. But we know also that everything we will ever do is also redeemed, for the more the cross fills our field of vision, the more we discover ourselves to be caught in the loving gaze of God.

The cross binds us and looses us. It is only when we are confined and liberated in this way that we have any binding and loosing authority from God.

In all of this – and it’s been a longer haul today than usual – I’ve not said enough to persuade anyone. Persuasion through argument is another form of moralism, and that is not the province of the gospel.

There is here, in the end, just an invitation: to take up the cross, to turn it over in heart and in mind, to consider whether it might be the key to who you are, to who God wills to be for you, and so be the means by which the God’s kingdom is unlocked.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 11
20/8/2017

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

---

“Dogs”, we tell ourselves, is not a very nice way to speak about people who are different from us. Such a sentiment, then, on the lips of Jesus, is kind of “uncomfortable”.

With a view to softening the blow, it’s not uncommon these days to imagine that here we see that even Jesus is “human” – even he can be wrong in his estimation of others, even he has things to learn. This is declared sometimes almost with relief – if Jesus gets it wrong, then we feel a little better when we do – and thanks is given to God for the strength of character of this courageous woman who, through her persistence, teaches Jesus an important lesson.

And yet, why is it that in every other instance in the gospels Jesus is apparently always in “control”, always understanding, leading, directing, challenging and rebuking appropriately, but that just here – at an otherwise unremarkable point in the story – he drops the ball? More likely he does not and we are simply seeing and hearing the wrong thing here.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been playing with the nature of the biblical text – the intention of its forms in parable and miracle, how these elements operate and cooperate in proclaiming God’s kingdom. Here we have another miracle story, although the shock of what Jesus says is so great that it pretty much overshadows the shock of the miracle. The modern liberal response here is not so much, “Jesus could not have healed the girl,” as it is, “Jesus ought not to have said that.”

But let’s take a deep breath and bring our thinking over recent weeks to bear here also. We have heard from Jesus that the parables are told because they both hide and reveal. This we have also extended to the way the miracles stories work in the narrative. What, then, is being seen and not perceived, heard and not understood, as we hear today’s story? If we attend to what actually happens in the exchange between the Gentile and Jesus, we see that she gets what she desires not because of her quick wit but because she actually agrees with Jesus: “Yes, Lord”; “Yes, Lord, a dog, and yet even the dogs gather up the crumbs from under the children’s table”.

“Yes, Lord, and yet…” Jesus meets this with, “Great is your faith!” But what is this faith? It is not that Jesus could heal her daughter, otherwise he would have met her first request with the declaration and the healing. The faith she demonstrates is in the connection between her “Yes” and her “and yet.” Yes, it is the children’s bread and yet it is for me, too. Her “faith” is that she recites the promise of God that all the nations will be blessed with, or through, God’s “children”, Israel. Her faith is in the one who made this promise, and she speaks God’s promise to Jesus, and Jesus replies, Amen.

We are in the same kind of space we discovered last week. There Peter said to Jesus on the water, I will know that it is you if you command me to come to you, and make it that I can. Today, the woman says to Jesus, You are my God too, if you are the God of Israel. With you, Jesus, crumbs are enough.

The miracle in each story indicates the offence – the utter strangeness – of what is said in the exchanges in the story. Does God really give what God commands? Does God command righteousness, and then give it? This is not how it works with our commands and it would be a miracle if it did. We imagine that God commands that we be his, and that we must then become his, earning this relationship.

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

The bread metaphor, however, is extended beautifully by the woman’s quip about the crumbs, by which she declares not “I also deserve to be fed” but rather, “So abundant is God’s provision of bread to his children that there are leftovers” – “crumbs”. She speaks the gospel, as did Peter when he challenged Jesus on the stormy waters. [It is worth noting in passing that we’ve only just heard of a miraculous feeding, after which 12 baskets of “crumbs” were collected; and another follows today’s story, after which 7 baskets are collected.]

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

What is it that she believes? That it is through these few that the many are blessed. And what does this mean, practically? How is it also our truth? We can perhaps drive the point home most clearly with a little “embodied” demonstration. Look to the person next to you and say to them, “Woof!” Are we not all here “Gentile dogs”? The church – which is almost completely Gentile – has its very being from the crumbs of God’s love for Israel. We forget this and, in the forgetting, we harden grace into law – we make ourselves the source of the blessing (which is why we take offence at Jesus here).

But the church is not a community constructed out of the convergence of general goodness (in which, for example, the Canaanite woman shares); it is an emergence from a blessing which took place in a particular time and place which is not our time and place. We have a part in the people of God not because we are somehow equal to everyone else, and so are naturally deserving of good standing before God. God started somewhere else, and we have been picked up along the way.

It does not matter in the end who is first and who is second, who is fed at the table and who is not, for all will be fed. But we forget the ordering at our peril – the peril of self-righteousness – and at the peril of all to whom we might be a blessing.

This is because we obscure the way God works in the world at the risk of what God actually offers. We speak so easily in the church of forgiveness but what is forgiveness if not the gift of life from outside of us, a blessing with its origin outside of us? In fact, this leads us to a connection which is little short of horrifying for good-minded people such as we are: we might see in our story this morning that the Canaanite woman is “forgiven” for not being a Jew.

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

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

The gift is always the same – that we are claimed – and it always comes from beyond us. And this is why Christians are called to be lovers and givers in the form of evangelism and the service of others. For love is not mere attraction but, more completely, gift. Giving is not at all exchange but the one-way flow of love to another in some concrete form of blessing. And this is always good news.

Such love and such a flow are what we see in the Loving Giver in our story today, who has set as his own reason for being: to let the dogs in.

Such love and such a flow are to be the shape of our own lives. Let us, then, so love and so give, to God’s greater glory and to the richer humanity of all who still hunger for the children’s bread.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 10
13/8/2017

1 Kings 19:9-18
Psalm 85
Matthew 14:22-33

---

We hear of Jesus walking on the water and the temptation is strong to ask the question, Did it really happen? To this question the response of the Scriptures is, in no small part, Who cares? Who cares whether Jesus could walk on water? Who cares whether he fed 5000 people with a few loaves and fish? Who cares whether he was raised from the dead?

Now, we can understand the “Who cares?” question coming from the sceptic but could the Scriptures be so impious as to answer in this way? Or, perhaps more to the point, should the preacher be so impious as to suggest this? Just between you and me, your preacher is capable of great impiety – although he thinks that this is probably not an instance.

How could that be so? The problem with the “Did it really happen?” question is that it is a closed question. We might imagine that we are asking it openly, as a scientist might ask about how an apple falls or an acid bites, but the point is that the scientist’s questions are also closed, however earnest she is as a scientist. Such questions are closed not in terms of their sincerity but because there is no deep human meaning attached to the answers. The answers might describe how to move the world but in themselves will not move it; we need to want to move it, and in this is the “meaning” of such answers.

In a similar way, if we could prove a “Yes” answer to the “Did it really happen?” question on any of the miracles of the Scriptures, the Scriptures would ask of us again, So what? What are you going to do with that? What do these 2000 year old stunts have to do with you today? This, of course, is a question often unthinkingly tossed at the Scriptures but the Scriptures toss it right back: what could a Yes mean? The meaning of a Yes is much less clear that we usually imagine.

There are miracle stories in the gospel accounts, of course, but they are largely distractions to us in a way not unlike the distractions of the parables. We’ve seen in the last few weeks that Jesus said he used parables because in them, “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand” (cf. Matthew 13.13-15). The same could be said of the gospel’s use of the miracles. We often imagine that it is quite clear what we are to see in these stories. We might even imagine that, were we ever convinced that we actually witnessed a miracle, we would know what it meant. This is the assumption in the mocking request for a miracle, both in the Scriptures and today. Yet, to recall again last week’s suggestion that the miracles are parables and the parables are miracles, the miracles also have a “seeing, they do not perceive” quality. We think we know what they would be all about if they actually happened, but we are easily mistaken.

How might such a dynamic be in play in this morning’s text? What is there to be seen apart from the spectacle of a person who walks on water in precisely the way that everyone else doesn’t?

We hear that the disciples see Jesus coming to them on the water but fear that it is a ghost. The fear is important. They are not amazed that they see Jesus on the water but imagine something more sinister. Jesus responds to the anxiety. He asks not, “Didn’t you know that I could even walk on water?”, but declares, “Do not fear, it is I”.

Peter’s response arises out of the disciples’ anxiety. We hear not “that’s amazing” in response to the miracle but the surprising, “If it is you Lord, command me to come onto the water with you.” Notice what Peter’s response is not: it is not, “If you, Jesus, can walk on water, then make it such that I can as well. Peter does not say, “Let me walk on the water too”. We hear, rather: “If it is you, command me to come to you.” Peter tests the “ghost” not by wanting to walk on the water himself, but by seeing whether it can command him to walk on the water. The implication is, “I will know that it is you, Jesus, if you command me to come to you.”

This, surely, is an odd proposal to our ears. Anyone could simply utter a crazy command like this, not least a tempting siren in the waters on a wild night. But here is the faith of Peter – and of the church – at its very best: the confidence that Jesus makes possible what he commands. It is for this that Peter listens, and looks.

Jesus gives the command; Peter walks. But this is not Jesus performing a “nature miracle” and so demonstrating himself to have the divine power of the creator. The thing which is established is that the ghost is Jesus. How do I know that it is him? Because he made possible what he commanded; this is the proof of his divinity. This is the work of Jesus, of God; in this are they “miraculous” – that they effect what they command: “let there be light” (and there is); “be clean” (and we are).

If Jesus did actually pull a stunt like this, now – in the text as Scripture – it is something else: something deeper and richer, something which relegates our typical concern with mere miracles to “Who Cares?” Our story this morning declares, What God commands, God gives.

So far as sheer miracles go, if there is a reason we don’t do a lot of walking on water these days it is simply that God doesn’t command such silliness. Instead of wondering why we don’t see such miracles today, we might wonder what it is that God does command of us, how it might be that God might provide what he commands, and what our “posture” as disciples is to be between that divine command and divine fulfilment. So let’s turn to that.

Our lives are filled with commands – to do, to be, to have, to desire, to give, to live – and those people or situations which make these demands of us rarely contribute to their fulfilment. We are made responsible for ourselves, for our standing before each other and so for our standing before God. In this, life becomes a matter of anxiety – whether it is manifest on the surface of our lives, or is deeply hidden behind the protective measures we’ve constructed around ourselves. Do these things and, so, save yourselves.

Now, the point here is not that God must have commanded these things and, so, God will give them. It is the other way around: if what is commanded is not given by the one who commands it, that one is not God. There is certainly something which commands of us that we be relaxed and comfortable, educated, healthy, live in a certain suburb, drive a certain car, speak with a certain accent and style, live a long life, be beautiful according to local expectation. Something commands these things but it is not God. In such things we are left alone to succeed or fail, to attain “life” as we imagine it, or to sink below the waves as we perceive them.

There is certainly something which commands that our data be backed up, our opinions be surveyed, our insurance premiums paid, our budgets be balanced, our accommodations be of a certain type, that the sound system work and that the children be quiet… but it is not God. These commands and the anxieties they create come from elsewhere, however much we might be pleased to hear them.

Any such penultimate things might be used by God, but they could also be different from what we imagine or desire and still be used by God. God does not command that we and our things be useful but simply makes them so. This is the meaning of creation out of nothing and salvation by grace alone.

What does God command? Come. This command is delivered to us as we are and not as we ought to be. There is no moral or spiritual limbo through which we have to pass in order to be able to respond, nothing which has to be gotten straight before we move. Jesus says, Come. “So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus”. As simple as that, if God makes possible what God commands.

There is only one miracle at the heart of Christian confession: a God who gives what he commands and whose one command is that we be his. God says to us, Come to me, be my children. And it is done in our hearing and stepping out. Faith is holding that God commands that we not be lost, and keeps us safe in that command. That being done, we are then free to do with all the other lesser demands of us as we wish. Doubt is holding that everything which really matters is up to us, and sinking under the weight of it all into that which cannot support us but swallows us up.

Let us choose faith, with the life and freedom it brings.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 9
6/8/2017

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

---

Over the last couple of weeks we have been looking at some of the parables of Jesus. This we have done not so much in terms of their specific content but in terms of their character as parables, considering the significance of the fact that Jesus privileged parables in his proclamation of the kingdom.

Today we come to a miracle story. Or, at least, that is how we are likely to understand what we have heard – as a “miracle story”. But I want to challenge this characterisation and the problems it raises thus: if Jesus privileged the parable in his proclamation of the kingdom, and if the feeding of the 5000 is itself a kind of proclamation of the kingdom, is there not a sense in which the miracles are parables and the parables are miracles?

The purpose here is to ask about our different responses to these apparently different kinds of texts. For the most part we are happy with the parables, – if sometimes a little mystified. Very many of us, however, have no idea what to do with the “unscientific” nature of a miracle story.

And yet, these apparently different kinds of texts are part of a whole, and it is this unity which invites the question, Are the miracles parables and the parables miracles?

The danger here is that what I’m going to suggest may sound like an “explaining away” of the miracle, so that we don’t have to believe that “it really happened.” Yet this is not my intention at all. If anything is going to be “explained away”, it will be the nervous twitch or allergic reaction in the face of the bald miracle story. This is the urgent need somehow to get around the miracle, in the absence any urgency to do the same when it comes to the parables. The miracle stories bother us so much more than the parables. Yet in this way we filter or strain the biblical text, despite the whole of it being a pointer to the nearness of the kingdom of God in the presence of Jesus.

Now, of course, parables per se are not miracles, and neither are miracles parables; we distinguish different types of things with these labels. Yet in the Scriptures these different things have an important mutuality. Without the shock to the senses of the miracles, the parables are rather folksy, take-it-or-leave-it images, the starkness of which is easily lost against the sheer familiarity of the images. Hearing the parables in the sight of the miracles sharpens the images. On the other hand, the miracles are mute and ambiguous without the parables. A curious thing about the account of the feeding of the 5000 is that it doesn’t actually tell us what we are to do with it, which is also the case with just about every other miracle story in the Scriptures. There is no “believe this” – that I did it – or “do this” – as I have done – or “watch for this” – so you’ll know when I’m around. There is just the story, and the narrative moves on. “What we are to do” with the miracles is given in other elements of the gospel, including the parables. It is these things which make the miracles “about” the kingdom of God.

With this in mind, perhaps we can now shift gear a bit to look at the today’s particular story more closely, less distracted by the miracle itself. In the middle of the story there is an exchange between Jesus and his disciples about who will feed the masses. “You give them something to eat”, Jesus tells the disciples.

How are we to read this? The standard reading is that here the disciples fail a test. And they do. But what is the test? Again, the standard reading is that they did not have “enough faith” to do what Jesus then had to do in their stead.

But this doesn’t ring true with the Scriptural understanding of who does what in the kingdom of heaven. For a contrast with the disciples here, we might jump gospels and watch what happens in Cana when the wine runs out. That quintessential disciple, Mary, nudges Jesus and whispers, “They’re out of wine” and then tells the servants, “Do whatever he says”. Problem solved.

If the disciples fail a test in our story this morning, it is not that they didn’t have enough “faith” to feed 5000 people, it’s that they didn’t see that the test was whether they would defer to him and respond immediately, “Here you are Jesus, we can toss in a few loaves and a couple of fish.”

The work of the miracles is to communicate that the world of the parables can only be realised by God. Or, put differently, the parables tell of the miraculous nature of God’s reign.

What does this mean for anything?

It means that all of our great efforts – our food programs, our education programs, our asylum work, our pastoral visitation, our careful budgeting, our mission planning and our buildings strategies – these things are but a few loaves and a couple of fish to be presented and accompanied with the words, Here you are Jesus.

The miracle is that this is enough. In the hands of this God, the one pearl, the insignificant yeast, the tiny seed is enough. These familiar miracles point to the unfamiliar ones, and the other way around. This is what it looks like for God’s kingdom to come, on earth as in heaven.

– – – – – – – –

At the heart of our confession is a single parable: “A man of faith walks a path to a cross.” This one parable is met with a single miracle – “A condemned man is raised to life”. Or is it the other way around, that the raising of the condemned man is the parable, and the steady path to the cross is the miracle?

The point is that we don’t get the familiar miracle without the unfamiliar one, we don’t get the parables without the miracles. We don’t get the familiar cross without the unfamiliar resurrection or the resurrection without the cross; we don’t get the familiar Jesus without the unfamiliar God, or God without Jesus; we don’t get our familiar selves without the unfamiliar Jesus, or Jesus without ourselves; we don’t get familiar works without unfamiliar grace, or grace without works; we don’t get the familiar body without Spirit, or Spirit without the body; we don’t get the familiar creation without the unfamiliar consummation, or the consummation without creation.

What we know in the parables and do not know in the miracles lean in toward each other, fill each other up, and then spill out into “more.”

When the kingdom of this God draws near, everything becomes a parable, and everything a miracle – even us with our hesitations and anxieties, our lack of faith or vision, our fears and our graspings after empty hopes. Then according to the word of the prophet, we will be fed with bread which satisfies (Isaiah 55.1,2).

It is given to us, then, to pray that, in parable and in miracle, God’s kingdom come that earth might be as heaven, that God might open his hand so that the desires of every living thing be satisfied (Psalm 145.16).

Let us, then, pray.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 8
30/7/2017

1 Kings 3:5-12
Psalm 119:129-136
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

---

The thing about the parables of Jesus is that they are his message.

As we noted last week, the parables are not something to be translated or reduced to some more basic concept. To hear the parables is to hear the “word”. It would seem, then, that the work of the evangelist – the preacher – is done when the parables are read. So it might be said, Here endeth the lesson; and I could now sit down. Perhaps, however, we might still say something useful, not so much about what the parables “mean” as about how they mean, or how they point us out of ourselves into the kingdom of heaven.

If there is a “heart” to Jesus’ message, it is that the kingdom of God – the reign of God, the proper relation of God and the world – draws near. The parables are “windows” into this nearness of the kingdom.

We can begin to get a sense for how they are such windows by noting just how ordinary are the things presented to us as parables: a treasure hunter, a woman making bread, seeds in a field, farmers and fisher folk. The images are concrete and familiar. Sometimes there’s a surprise – especially in the longer narrative parables – but even the surprises make their own kind of sense.

Because of their concreteness and day-to-day familiarity we might not recognise that there are, in fact, no ideas in the parables, no abstractions. The existence of God, the question of suffering, the meaning of life – no such things are entertained or addressed in the parables.

The parables are concrete, but Jesus’ use of what is ordinary and tangible to speak of the kingdom of heaven gives the familiar and concrete world a peculiar depth and colour, as if wiping away dust which has settled on all things. What is ordinary is tied to what, we imagine, is not: God. This world – where any netting at life catches the good and the bad, where it takes so much effort to leaven the dough, where distorting desires for treasure are the way of the human heart – this world becomes a new kind of “ordinary”, teeming with God.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

From almost nothing something grows in which God make a home.

“The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

A woman toils to pound the yeast throughout the whole batch of dough, that God might be leaven not just to a part but to all of creation.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.

A man discovers a pearl which is worth all that he has – as God values and purchases each and every one of us.

How God is for the world in the parables is how, properly, the world is within itself: open to be receptive of God, however closed it might appear and however distant God might seem.

Jesus uses what is natural to invite us into a new experience of what is natural. No longer do seeds merely grow, bakers merely bake or farmers toil. These things become the possibility of knowing that God is active in and with the world.

We might be tempted in all this to limit parables of God’s activity to “good” images. By this we say that, in fact, God is only present in and to some of the world. Our debates among ourselves – the things that divide us – have to do with identifying those godforsaken places and avoiding them, as we imagine that God must.

Probably, we cannot avoid those debates.

But at the heart of Christian understanding is precisely God’s presence in the godforsaken, where no one can see God, where the window to the kingdom is broken and we have boarded it up and there is nothing to be seen.

We are almost at the point in the gospel story where Jesus begins to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life (Matthew 16.21ff).

This history – the Passion – becomes a parable itself. It differs from the other parables in that it is a history and not a general image about seeds or wedding feasts.  But its historical character is not something in itself to believe. We don’t have, on the one hand, historical facts and, on the other hand, general observations extracted from experience, so that we can recognise the meaning of the parable images but not of the cross, or the other way around. The cross and resurrection point to the parables, and the parables point to the cross. The cross tells us that what is broken – broken even to the point of godforsakenness – even in this God can be for the world. The parables take the secular and mundane and do just the same. God is near to us in all things.

This is not easy to grasp; perhaps we will not, in the end, understand it.

At the end of our reading today, Jesus asks the disciples, “Have you understood all of this?” They answer, “Yep!”.

This has to be an ironic answer – if not for the half-understanding disciples themselves, then for the gospel account as a whole. And it has to be ironic for us too, were we to be asked the question and to answer it in the same way.

For we, as did those disciples as the story unfolds, experience no small part of life and world as places where God is not, as Godless and so hopeless. In this we find ourselves disoriented from God. The world is cut adrift.

But this is what the parable-windows of our baptism and Eucharist open onto: life out of death; godless brokenness by you and brokenness of you now made a near-God brokenness “for you,” that you might be made whole. What we would leave behind and forget as old, godless and dead, God makes a treasure, a lively seed in the fertile soil, even himself.

To be trained for the kingdom of heaven, Jesus says, is to be one who brings out of his treasure old things, as new. It is to be one who sees the world with new eyes and is beginning to experience what she sees with a growing joy and more confident hope because she is discovering that the kingdom of heaven is very near.

To what shall we compare the kingdom of heaven? The world, the lives of each and everyone of us. Because God is very near, to finish the creative work of love we are to become.

By the grace of God may the discover of God’s closeness, and the joy in hope which comes with it, be ever increasingly our reality and that of all God’s people.

Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 7
23/7/2017

Isaiah 44:4-6
Psalm 86
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

---

The need for “interpretation” is felt by anyone who reads the Scriptures. This is, sometimes, because we find in the Scriptures things we simply do not understand; the “plain sense of the text” is not plain at all to us. Other times, we understand the plain sense very well, and find that Scripture has us in its teeth. Interpretation – now a kind of rationalisation – is required in order that we escape that threatening situation.

We see “interpretation” operating in our reading today. Jesus has told the parable of the wheat and the weeds. There is a break in the reading as we heard it (filled with a number of other shorter parables we skipped over) and then the disciples ask for an interpretation of the parable: this is apparently a case of the plain sense not yet making sense to them.

Many biblical scholars question whether the explanation Jesus gives is, in fact, Jesus’ own sense for the parable, or whether it is Matthew’s. The fundamental issue is this: why bother telling parables if you are then going to “explain” them in “plainer” terms? This treats the parables as mere allegories which hide some deeper meaning. But why not simply go straight to the deeper meaning?

As it happens, the allegorical reading which Jesus – probably Matthew – offers here is not a very good one. It is implied that the sower creates the good people out of the good seed and the enemy creates the bad out of the weed seed, as if there are two creators, two kinds of people. A closer allegorical reading would be that we are all the soil, into which good and bad seed is planted. This creates a complex, blended humanity in which it is impossible to distinguish precisely what is good and what is not until God’s final and decisive action.

But which reading of the parable is better doesn’t really matter for my purposes this morning. More important is whether we can actually pluck a simpler allegorical meaning out of the parables.

When we hear from the gospel itself about why Jesus used parables, two apparently contradictory reasons are given. Asked directly about this – in the midst of last week’s reading – Jesus responds,

^13.13The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.”¹⁴With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says:
“You will indeed listen, but never understand,
and you will indeed look, but never perceive.
¹⁵ For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and their ears are hard of hearing,
and they have shut their eyes;
so that they might not look with their eyes,
and listen with their ears,
and understand with their heart and turn—
and I would heal them.” 

That is, the parables seem to be told to conceal.

Yet, a little later in the same chapter we hear the evangelist Matthew give an explanation:

^13.34 Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. ³⁵This was to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet:
‘I will open my mouth to speak in parables;
I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.’

Here, the parables are told to reveal. Jesus, then, seems to tell the parables in order that the truth be hidden from those who cannot hear or see while, at the same time, using parables to reveal what has been hidden from the beginning.

The only thing which will make sense of this contradiction is if the parables themselves are central – as parables and not as things to be “interpreted”: a kind of revealing in the hiding. The hiding is that the parable carries the truth, as a parable, and not some deeper meaning. What is revealed is that this is the only way this truth can be conveyed.

It is common for us to dismiss the parables as pictorial representations of deeper truths, colourful ways of representing the truth for the simple: theory and doctrine for the profound, stories and images for the uncomplicated – for children and the childlike.

But there is none of this in the gospels: the parables are a form Jesus directs at both the simple and the sophisticated: “To what shall we compare the kingdom of heaven?”  A sower, a mustard seed, a pearl, a woman who loses a coin, a wedding banquet… There is very little “doctrine” in Jesus’ teaching.

As we look to “interpret” the parables, we seek the firm ground underneath the imagery, truth “hidden” from view but which carries the parable. Here we might be likened to the ancient Asian philosophers who wondered what it was upon which the earth rested, and concluded that it must be something like a great turtle, and imagined that the problem was solved. Of course, it occurs occasionally that someone asks what such a turtle would be standing on. The half-joking, half-serious answer is, It’s turtles all the way down.

Our interpretations seek the great turtle “under” the parable images. Upon what deeper truth do they rest? To this pressing question of interpretation the gospel answers, half jokingly, half seriously: It’s parables all the way down.

Our push to interpret, to understand, is a push to make God appear as the ground under the image. But a parable is a way of talking about God in which God never appears. What does appear – seeds, weeds, sowers, soils, birds, yeast, treasure, pearls – these serve for “comparisons” to God and his kingdom, but we get no closer than that.

In his use of parables Jesus honours the second commandment: Do not carve God in eternal stone. God is “presented”, in contrast, in the most fleeting of things – words. Or perhaps, more to the point, in the even more fleeting connections between words, between images.

Christian life and confession are built like this, out of things like this. “This is my body, broken for you”. What does this mean?

It means, “I believe in God the Father, creator of heaven of earth”.

But what does that mean?

It means, “Your sins are forgiven?”

But what does that mean?

“Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.”

But what does that mean?

“Lost in wonder, love and praise”

But what does that mean? …

The word “parable” literally means a “throwing alongside”, a “heaping up”, of things. Christian speech about God and experience of God, is Parable.

And we ourselves are Parable: thrown alongside each other, heaped together, good seed, bad seed, friends, enemies. To what shall we compare the kingdom of God? A professor and a mechanic and an asylum seeker and a prostitute and a teacher and a vagrant and a little girl are thrown together – are parabolised – and they gather around a table. And they are given a parable to eat and to drink. And they become what they eat. And the world is suddenly theirs, and they are for the world: thrown-alongside, heaped together, the good seed with the bad, the good for the bad, so closely bound together that to pull up the one would be to pull up the other.

In this way God parabolises us and all things – heaping himself in with us, heaping us upon each other, throwing us in alongside the world.

This is how God gives himself. Let us rejoice in his, and so allow ourselves to become something to which God’s kingdom might be compared, that others might share in that joy.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 6
16/7/2017

Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 145
Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23

---

The parable of the sower, the seeds and the soils is one very familiar to most of us.

Familiar also – perhaps even “standard” – is the interpretation of the parable in terms of the response it seems to demand of us. The sower casts the seed on a number of different surfaces, only one of which provides the conditions for the seeds to germinate and the grain to flourish and give an abundant yield. The lesson of the parable, or the question it asks of us, would seem to be this: What type of soil are you? A hard path, stony ground, full also of weeds, or “just right”? The required response to the parable then becomes the imperative, be good soil. Accordingly, not a few commentators today insist that this is properly not the “parable of the sower” but the “parable of the soils.”

The problem with this interpretation is this: if you are a hard path, how can you become good, productive soil? If you are filled with weeds, how can you weed yourself? That is, if all we take from the parable is the imperative to make ourselves open to the Word of God, we declare that the capacity of God’s Word to work in the world is limited by our willingness or ability to receive it. Not to put too fine a point on it – God can do nothing, unless we are the right people with whom God can work. This is not a thought far from us in the Uniting Church; it is a principal motivation towards strategic reviews and sustainability goals – becoming people God can work with.

Whatever this conclusion is – that God needs the “right” people in order to do his stuff – it is not good news. There is no hope to be had here if our situation is dire and our survival is dependent on our capacity to realise a hope. To put it in the stark terms of the New Testament: to read the parable in this way is to assert that the dead can raise themselves.

But this does not happen. Ever.

To read the parable as being fundamentally about the soils is to read it as a moral imperative. Moral imperatives have to do with human possibilities: you can do this, so do it. Moral tales require no resurrections because the actors aren’t actually dead yet; it is assumed that they still have enough life to stand up again and keep going. It is not coincidental that, with their particular focus on moral exhortation, liberal and progressive theologies are sceptical about the language of resurrection. It is here not merely that God doesn’t raise the dead because such things must be impossible but also that God doesn’t need to. It looks like doctrinal modesty but it is really hubris and delusion. The moralism of the simple call to follow in the way of Jesus is a declaration that we can raise ourselves, here and now.

But to read the parable as the parable of the sower is to hear it in a wholly different way which has nothing to do with the goodness of our actions.

Jesus’ parables are peepholes into the operation of God’s kingdom: “the kingdom of heaven is like this”. They have to do with how God reigns – how God is God among us.

In this God-space – which is the same space as the world filled with us and our different soil qualities – it is indeed the case that the seed falls and is variously received, rejected, fruitful and wasted. Yet, as the sphere of God’s reign, these losses are not the main issue. The kingdom of God is not a sphere of scarcity and loss. What matters is not the soils, but the yield given at the end – what finally comes of the sower’s work. Many commentators note that the yields suggested by Jesus border on the extraordinary for grain production in that time. The point is that within God’s kingdom the yield from the work of God’s Word on these faithful ones is enough to cover what seems to be lost from all the seed which fell on the other areas. The extraordinary, superabundant yield is enough for the purposes of the sower.

The gospel is that with this sower, there is enough. To push this gospel to its core: it is enough that only one small square of soil be good soil – even Jesus himself.

In our reading from Isaiah we heard God declare:

…my word that goes out from my mouth will not return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. Then you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace.

To live in the kingdom of God is to hold that there is enough – that God will triumph in joy-bringing and peace-making, that God’s promises will not return empty, regardless of the quality of most of the soil in which they are planted.

 

Our hope lies not in our ability to become more fruitful; this leads in the end only to the kind of moralist recriminations which arise when we are made responsible for realising our own hopes:

“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.” (Matthew 11.17)

Hope lies in the conviction that God is at work in the world – working at us, to be sure, but this only as he works for us. The “necessary” work of being good – by itself – brings only the anxious, Am I good enough?, or the self-righteous, Of course I am! The “unnecessary” work of trusting God as we work brings freedom and peace, and these bring joy, because now the promise of God’s own fruitfulness becomes the heart of our vision and hope, which our work can only ever approximate.

Our doctrine, our worship and our service are oriented toward reminding us of just this: in our efforts as individuals, or as the people of God in this place, what finally matters is not what we yield. The full yield is given already in Jesus himself, who is the table spread before us, the cup which runs over.

What does matter is the word which sets us free from hard labour under the heavy burdens of anxiety and fear: take my yoke upon you – my cross, and its death to death – and you will find rest for your souls.

Our confidence is in God’s confidence, that his word will not return to him empty, but will accomplish what he intends: that we shall go out in joy and be led back in peace.

By the grace of God, may this peace and joy be found ever more increasingly among those who call on him. Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 5
9/7/2017

Zechariah 9:1-12a
Psalm 145
Matthew 11:1-6, 16-19, 25-30

---

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

These are surely words we all hear gladly – the promise of an easy yoke and a light burden: rest for our souls. And yet the yoke which Jesus carries, the burden he bears – the yoke and burden he offers us – is the cross. How is it that this is an easy (or better translates, “kind”, or “good”) yoke and a light burden?

Our passage began with Jesus characterising “this generation”. Here he means not merely the people to whom he was speaking at the time, but all who share in a similar outlook. That outlook, whichever local form it might take, has its substance in a rejection of the kingdom of God as he preached it.

Jesus cites as evidence for this the rejection of both John the Baptist and himself. “John came, neither eating nor drinking, and you said he had a demon; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you called him a glutton and a drunkard”. It is claimed by their critics that John and Jesus don’t “fit”, don’t connect in with what it “obviously” a more appropriate way to do and to be.

But Jesus’ own critique reveals that this is more than a matter of John and himself not simply fitting some particular sense for appropriate behaviour and outlook. John and Jesus represent polar opposites, but neither fit. It is not a matter of the conservatives finding comfort in John but rejecting Jesus, or the liberals rejecting John but finding a kindred spirit in Jesus. There is nothing in the judgement of either John or Jesus which shows us therefore how we ought to be, except perhaps the grey, murky and dull option of “moderation”.

The not-fitting of Jesus and John is more fundamental than their not toeing this or that party line.

Jesus clarifies thus: God has hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.

When we think about our children, the temptation to sentimentality is strong. We love them, they love us; it is not for nothing that the image of God as embracing us as children is so strong in our religious desires and traditions.

But it is not sentimentality to which Jesus appeals here. The characteristic of little children important here is their inability to judge. Children simply receive. An infant does not know whether she is learning the right or wrong way to be, whether her parents are good or bad, whether she is born into privilege or deprivation. She simply is. And receives. And gives.

If I go much further we’ll end up in sentimentality again, because it is also important to grow and learn and mature and discern. What is “wrong” or incomplete about children can certainly be addressed in maturity; Jesus’ point here, however, is that what is wrong or distorted in maturity is present in infancy.

Again: the characteristic of little children important here is their inability to judge.

The inability to judge in little children reflects a kind of absence of knowledge – not knowing what is good or what is evil, but simply acting and being acted upon. It is for this reason that, even when they are being naughty, little kids are so gloriously free of guile, free of calculating shrewdness.

Important for understanding what is going on here is the Genesis apple-munching episode: the desire of Adam and Eve to know what is good and what is evil. And what is the first thing which happens when this knowledge is received? Self-awareness and fear:

…the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked;

Adam then relates to God:

I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.

What is going on here? God has already seen them – us – naked. This is doubtless an occasion of great mirth for God, but is also how we are created and is not a ground for judgement.

The knowledge of good and evil delivers the capacity to judge. But it becomes in our hands a loose cannon, firing wildly in all directions. It first victims are Adam and Eve themselves. They judge themselves as incomplete in their nakedness, and they judge God: that God will also be offended by them in their nakedness. This kind of knowledge brings only judgement and the fear of judgement. It is a knowledge which divides, distances, crucifies.

This is the whole of our human predicament: our judgement of each other, our judgement of God. The whole of the gospel is the converse: judgement itself judged.

If you were to look at John the Baptist and Jesus you would find them irreconcilable: on the one hand, the mad-eyed fanatic beyond the city wall, eating grasshoppers and shouting prophecies; on the other hand, the gentle healing touch brought bear among the city’s best and worst. Who could see the reign of God between these two extremes?

But this is precisely the labour and heavy burden from which Jesus offers us freedom in our reading today: the labour of having to see, to know – the labour of anxious knowledge and the burden of judgement which comes with it. The yoke and the burden which Jesus brings is a death to the hold these things have on us, an end to the ceaseless cycles of judgement and recrimination.

The sign, and the means, of this death is the cross of Jesus.

The cross is the sign because it reminds us that there is nowhere we can go where God’s love does not follow. Our judgement of Jesus – to the point of naming him God-forsaken on the cross – is not God’s judgement on him. The resurrection of Jesus is a vindication which points us back to the cross as a sign of the depth of God’s commitment to us.

And the cross of Jesus is the means of our death to the cycles of judgement because God allows that Christ’s cross also be our cross. Jesus’ refusal to know, to judge, to divide, to distance – even to the point of being “known”, judged, divided and distanced himself – is offered to us.

To come to Jesus is to come to the cross.

Here rest is found because here our propensity for judgement and our fear of judgement are themselves judged and put to death.

Here God takes from the wise and the intelligent who imagine that they know and see, and gives to us who are reborn as children in God’s own kingdom.

Such children know and see only that they belong to God, and God belongs to them.

In Jesus God offers us the light yoke and kind burden of having nothing to fear. In this is rest for our souls.

Thanks be to God.

View or print as a PDF

Trinity Sunday
11/6/2017

Genesis 1:26-2:4a
Psalm 8
Matthew 28:16-20

---

I want to draw our attention to that part of today’s gospel reading we have come to call “the Great Commission”, to tease out our sense for mission and for the God who commissions us in this particular way. I’ll do this by drawing on two pithy little statements I came across in my reading last week, neither of which would seem – on the surface – to have much to do with mission or God as Trinity but which leapt off the page for me in connection with mission two quite different ways.

One is the maxim, “what is measured is managed” and the other is a paraphrase from David Foster Wallace: Everybody worships…and pretty much anything you worship will eat you alive. Let’s see how these illuminate our approach to mission and the God who commissions.

“What is measured is managed”. As soon as I read that I wondered, What do we – as a church – measure? We measure our money. Each year we spend thousands upon thousands of dollars for auditors and our parish administrator and some of my time, and on top of that perhaps hundreds of volunteer hours making sure that the figures are all correct. We present to the Church Council and then to the Congregational Meeting a fat wad of papers that declare what we have measured and how well we have managed what we have. This is straightforward and understandable.

But I wondered, in what way to do we measure – and so manage – mission? Perhaps it’s even a horrifying thought to imagine that mission might be managed. When it comes to talking about mission we think, Worship is mission; we have “Hotham Mission”. But the missional character of these things is hard to measure and to manage. What is going on when we measure so closely one aspect of our lives but for other aspects we make almost no measurements at all?

When Jesus says go forth to teach and preach and to baptize he expects something to happen. We ourselves are here today precisely because something has happened on account of others’ obedience to the call. We manage our resources very well. We understand a balanced budget in terms of those resources. What does a “balanced budget” look like in terms of mission?

I don’t actually know! This is a very open question. But I wonder what, just as year after year we imagine that we have to secure one aspect of our lives – our finances and our resources, our risks – it would mean to manage our mission in a corresponding kind of way. What would it mean for us as a church to say that, at the end of 2017 (’18,’19?) we will have baptized one more person into the kingdom, not just the fortuitous arrivals which come from having young parents in the congregation but somebody who has encountered the gospel in the work of the congregation. There is a measurement there and it would require a certain kind of management: what the minister does with her/his time on? How should the Church Council apportion its time? What sort of things would the congregation do, or what would we expect of congregational members, if we managed our mission in the same way we manage our money?

This is an open question. Yet Jesus says, Go, and he expects something to happen. What do we expect to happen?

I’m going to leave that question there – open.

Perhaps more fundamental is the question, Why engage with mission? What in fact is mission? Why would we consider “evangelism”, something which makes many of us very nervous?

This brings us to the second of our pithy statements: Everyone worships… and pretty much anything you worship will eat you alive. In fact I’m paraphrasing because the original author was merely being insightful but I want to be Christian, and so I’m pushing it a little harder than he did.

“Everyone worships”, which is to say that everyone has at the heart of their lives something which drives them. It is around such things that we orient our lives. It might be security; money and other resources; our relationships and family; our health; our “sovereign borders”. These are things which define our world for us – “everybody worships” whether they imagine themselves to be “religious” or not. Our lives are all oriented around something.

But then Wallace continues (and here is where I intensify him a bit): pretty much anything you worship will eat you alive. What is meant by that is that you are not going to get life out of the things you worship. We see a very simple example of this in the person who worships just her health or primary relationship, or just his money, being reduced in his/her integrity or humanity by focusing so narrowly on such things. But, more broadly, part of what is consumed in this process is not just us but those around us. Worshipping the wrong things reduces not only us as individuals but reduces also our communal humanity. Pursuing something at all costs will cost somebody else, in addition to whatever it might cost us. We will be consumed, and consume others in the process.

Now, the church is not immune to this. The people of God is well able to worship the wrong thing. This is what gets messiahs crucified. But there is, at the heart of Christian confession, a different sense for being consumed, or what is consumed. At the heart of Christian faith we learn that this God does not consume us. God says, rather, Eat me: “This is my body; take and eat. This is my blood; take and drink”. It is a total reversal of Wallace’s point. We don’t live this very well, but this is what Christian faith is about – being nourished by consuming the God who gives himself to us, breathes our very life into us, sustains and promises to us a future. Take, Eat. Take, Drink: “Consume me”. This God is not a threat, will not consume us.

Yet this God is a strange kind of food. Usually, what we eat we turn into ourselves. A soft and sweet cream bun becomes just more Craig, and so forth. But the gospel is that, as we eat God, we become not our own body but the body of God, the body of Christ. Eat this, become this. It is a very strange food indeed.

[And, just as an aside and as a concession to today’s Feast: the reason that the church confesses God as Trinity – that strange and obscure mathematics by which three is one and one is three – is to make sense of how it might actually be that God can give Godself to us in this kind of way: being consumed by us and then making us the very presence of God.]

And this is where mission comes in.

God gives Godself in this way that we might eat God and become the presence of God. And, as the presence of God, we are given to the world to be consumed: the body of Christ, given for you. This is spoken first to the disciples but then spoken to the world as whole: the body of Christ, given for you.

The mission of the church is to be consumed by the world, that the world might become the presence of God.

This is our joy, and our burden, and our joy.

View or print as a PDF

Evensong, Trinity Sunday in Luther Year
11/6/2017

Genesis 1:1-2.4a
Ephesians 4:1-6, 17-32

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben
The joint congregations of St Mary’s and Mark the Evangelist Uniting

---

Martin Luther is notorious for nailing 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on All Saints’ Eve 1517. This is the act which has given this year its universal theme. It does capture Martin’s pugnacity, as does the hymn[1] we have sung, but it’s fifty years since the historians showed that it never happened; in fact, Luther rather boldly sent 95 theses to his superiors, and the rest is indeed history.[2]

These days, he would have tweeted them; all 95 are quite brief, single sentences (with semicolons), many of them under 140 characters. So, I was interested to discover that one of the younger Uniting Church theologians, Dr Ben Myers of Sydney, has recently published 65 tweets – on the doctrine of the Trinity.[3] Here’s #1:

#1. Start by abolishing Trinity Sunday, that fateful day on which preachers think they have to explain the Trinity.

The Uniting Church is a curious combination.  Congregationalism and Presbyterianism, the two closely-associated traditions of British Nonconformity, both derive from Calvin. Even more curiously, the third party in that fateful legislation, the 1662 Act of Uniformity, the Anglicans also shared much of Calvin. And tonight’s liturgy is from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the very book which created the non-conformity which produced Presbyterians and Congregationalists.[4] It is a tragedy that that division remains with us in the 21^st century when different choices are open to us.

So many of the theological and spiritual treasures produced in English during that chaotic period are now read with joy by all of us – well, at least by those who still read books. Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, John Donne, George Herbert – and Daniel Defoe, Richard Baxter, John Milton and John Bunyan. In 1662, the Church of England ejected its Puritans under the name of Nonconformity. And ‘we’ lost episcopacy, and a Book of Common Prayer and feared their recovery every since. We kept the monarch. In the 21^st C, we can share the treasures, and we are able to revisit old disputes and divisions – but few are willing to act with the requisite courage and vision. We have, I regret to say, a long way to go in Anglican-Uniting relationships in Australia.

Tweet #5 The doctrine is not a mystery. It is simple and precise. The reality it points to is the mystery.

John Wesley was not a Calvinistic Anglican. His chief theological dispute was with predestination, which was sad because it was not Calvin’s best work. Calvin is a theologian of grace and joy. Above all, however, John Wesley owed a debt to Luther. Sitting with a group of German Christians in London just before Pentecost in 1738, he listened to someone reading from Luther’s Preface to his commentary on Romans, probably in German. He famously wrote in his diary,

About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.[5]

In short, Luther’s great doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and all that it implied, hit him in an instant, and it brought him confidence and deep happiness. Within weeks, he had gone to what is now the Czech Republic, to sit with the original Moravian community at Herrnhut. There he experienced a kind of evangelical monasticism, for singles and families, small groups set up to promote spiritual life, hymn-singing, the love feast and a strong sense of mission. With a rekindled faith, and a good deal of Lutheran piety (which he shares with J. S. Bach), John Wesley began to create Methodism, as an Anglican society for the pursuit of holiness.

Tweet #54 The doctrine doesn’t have any adequate words for talking about God. But it’s a procedure for speaking faithfully and truly with inadequate words.

The battle-cry of the European Reformation was: Justification by faith. It runs through every nation and state in which the cry was taken up, in every language. It applies to what used to be the ‘mainstream Protestant’ churches of every hue, and it is there among the burgeoning new churches of Africa and Latin America, the Pentecostals and the new evangelicals.

And, perhaps most remarkably, that part of the Church which we call Roman Catholic, the other protagonist in the revolution of those centuries, is now able to say with Luther – and indeed with St Paul – Justification by faith is catholic doctrine. The Vatican set its signature to a Joint Document[6] with the Lutherans, saying so; and I presided at the liturgy in Seoul in 2006 when the World Methodist Council co-signed it.[7]

The Anglican Consultative Council, endorsed it last year in Zambia.[8] The World Communion of Reformed Churches is meeting in Leipzig next month to do so.[9] Each has added insights from its own tradition, enriching the doctrine for the whole church.

A little run of trinitarian tweets: an affirmation followed by three clarifications:

#31 The revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is an unveiling of the incomparable and unknowable uniqueness of the one God.

#32 The ‘oneness’ of God is not a number. It refers to God’s incomparable mystery. This is mysteriously revealed (not contradicted) by the ‘threeness’.

#33 The ‘threeness’ is not a number. It refers to the incomparable fullness of the life of the one God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

#34 So the words ‘one’ and ‘three’ have to be abstracted away from their ordinary numerical meaning, and from any image of three things. The doctrine is not a mathematical puzzle.

The Church has made a mess of most of its doctrines. Sinful humankind continues to use doctrines as weapons of war. But I believe that that is changing, and I especially want to honour the people involved in theological dialogues, national and international, for decades of serious scholarly work, re-opening closed debates, and rediscovering the unity of the one faith in the one Lord. The problem has always been getting the results to the congregations – and indeed the actual reports would probably not help. (They need translation.) Our institutional inertia is a major obstacle. The fallacy that ‘unity means uniformity’ still sits in the pit of our stomachs. Unity in diversity is possible.[10] Ecumenism is all about seeking acceptable diversity. Finally,

#63. Liturgical afterword: A fitting communal response is not ‘Trinity Sunday’, but the whole church year as a symbolic participation in the economy of God’s saving work as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Perhaps that’s why the Book of Common Prayer named the next Sundays as ‘Sundays after Trinity’.

The connection between our two themes, Luther and the reformation, and the Holy Trinity, is this: true reformation calls the church regularly back to its roots. Glance at a page of Luther, Calvin or Wesley’s writings, or any of the great Anglican divines, and you will find the fruit of their study of the theologians of the early Church. The so-called ‘New Reformation’ of the 1960s too often began, and continues, with the passing fashions of contemporary culture, that is, with the world. Trinity Sunday reminds us that the Creator of everything, who is Father, and Son and Holy Spirit, is thereby on a different plane than anything else we can know or imagine,[11] a true Mystery – before Whom there is only one response: worship. That is what our hymns and prayers today have been about – and must always be.

This sacrifice of praise is the highest of our human callings, and from that flows the work of love in the world. From our prayer in common, like tonight’s, comes the gift and the fruit of Christian unity.

[1] Ein Feste Burg, (see TiS 103) words and music by Martin Luther, to a translation by Stephen Orchard of the United Reformed Church, UK.

[2] Dr Erwin Iserloh, professor of church history at Trier, first opened this question in 1961; it was well-known in Cambridge in the mid-1960s and generally acknowledged by scholars today. Luther wrote to his superiors on 31^st October 1517, enclosing a copy of the theses. If he had hung his theses on the church door, as was the custom, they may never have been noticed; Luther ensured that his criticisms were known.

[3]  His blog is at http://www.faith-theology.com/. See ‘Tweeting the trinity: because heresy is meh’, posted 1^st June 2017.

[4] Its liturgies were imposed by law on all citizens: non-compliance led to fines and imprisonment. More than 2000 priests lost their livings after the Commonwealth, because they could not swear that every word of the BCP was ‘conformable to the Word of God’ For them, it was clear that the book was a human construct – and the Bible was not.

[5]  From his journal, written and published afterwards. This experience (its meaning has been much disputed) gives rise to an annual commemoration across world Methodism and in the Uniting Church (see Uniting in Worship-2, 2005, 121ff) called Aldersgate Day. The meeting took place in a home in Aldersgate, inside London’s city walls. His ‘strangely warmed’ was not primarily about emotion: the journal goes on to describe coldness of heart within 24 hours, and Wesley thinks through the role of feelings: that God sometimes give, sometimes withholds them, but our faith assures us of salvation.

[6] See http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/documents/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_

31101999_cath-luth-joint-declaration_en.html

[7] The Methodist codicil, largely about the relationship of justification to sanctification, can be seen at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/chrstuni/meth-council-docs/rc_pc_chrstuni_doc_20060723_text-association_en.html

[8]  See https://www.lutheranworld.org/news/anglicans-affirm-lutheran-catholic-agreement-endorse-reformation-anniversary. See also ACC-16 Resolution 16-16 (Reformation) and 16-17 (JDDJ) at http://www.anglicancommunion.org/structures/instruments-of-communion/acc/acc-16/resolutions.aspx#s17.

[9]  See http://wcrc.ch/jddj.  In recent years there has been a concordat between Lutherans and Reformed Churches on full communion, following differences inherited from the European Reformation. See http://wcrc.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Communion-OnBeingTheChurch.pdf

[10] See the Second Lesson, Ephesians 4:11-16.

[11] Tweet #20, and the First Lesson, Genesis 1-2:4 and Ephesians 4:4-6.

---