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Easter 5
14/5/2017

1 Peter 2:2-10
Psalm 31
John 14:1-14

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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I don’t suppose too many people lie awake at night pondering the question why the Bible comes to us divided as it is into its various chapters and verses.

The fact is that when the books of the Bible were originally composed they did not contain the chapter or verse references which are familiar to us. That should not really be a surprise. After all, when we write letters we don’t divide them into chapters or verses. No more would Paul have done when he dashed off his letters to various churches. And the gospel writers were composing a sequential drama – why would they destroy the essential flow of the narrative by inserting chapters and verses?

As far as the chapter divisions commonly used today are concerned, they were developed by an Archbishop of Canterbury around the year 1227, that is, only 800 years ago. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Hebrew Old Testament verses were compiled even later by a Jewish rabbi by the name of Nathan in 1448. The New Testament division into standard numbered verses arrived even more recently less than 500 years ago in 1555, virtually yesterday.  It may well be the case that motivation for the verse divisions we have could be as pedestrian as indicating the amount of ink the quill of a monkish scribe could hold at a single dipping!

At any rate, beginning with the Geneva Bible, these divisions have been accepted in the main in all further translations.

Now if one concedes that these divisions allow us to find various texts quickly, the fact is that in more than a few places the divisions are poorly placed, and in some cases effectively destroy the intention of the writer.

Today is a case in point – John 14, a text commonly employed for funeral services, where it only belongs by real compromise. Sorry about that.  Another purple passage is the so-called hymn to love of 1 Corinthians 13, equally compromised by its use in marriage services without the final verses of Chapter 12.  Cherry picking texts like these without regard to the preceding verses destroys the intention whether of Epistle or Gospel.

So let me remove the chapter heading of John 14, and begin with the concluding verses of chapter 13:

“Simon Peter said to Jesus, “Lord where are you going?”

Jesus answered “Where I am going you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward. Peter said: “Why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you”. Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for me? Truly I tell you, before the cock crows you will have denied me three times”.  Only now can we properly start to read Chapter 14:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places… I go to prepare a place for you that where I am you may be also.”

The point is that in Chapter 13 where Jesus is going to prepare a place for us is the Cross and, lest we overlook the consequent inference, “that where I am you may be also”!  It could not be clearer: “If any would come after me, let them take up their cross and follow me.”

This means that the gaining of the final “dwelling place” can only be secured, literally, by this bloody “resting place” on the way. Disregarding these concluding verses of Chapter 13, the assurance of Chapter 14 about “dwelling places” has been tamed virtually beyond any authentic recovery. Jesus’ promise of “going to prepare a place for you” is first of all the impotent resting place of the cross. It is not, to be brutal, a crossless cloud in the sky.

That is to say, before consoling ourselves with Chapter 14, we have to pan back from Chapter 13 to understand the larger context of the Fourth Gospel as a whole. Then it is that we discover that the whole book is about the revelation of the divine glory precisely in the salvation of the world, and that the way to understand this drama is to see it within the vast and sprawling story of Israel and the whole creation.

In other words, John is writing a new Genesis. In effect, the six stages of Creation of the first chapter of Genesis, concluding with the rest of the seventh day, can be likened to the stages of constructing a temple into which eventually the builder will come and take up his residence in the “rest” of the seventh day. So it is that Israel’s God will say in the Psalms about the temple: “Here is Zion, my dwelling place”, uniting the dwelling place of the creation with that of the holy people.

For this reason, as the Gospel of John unfolds the New Creation, it focuses the story again and again on the Temple; on Jesus’ upstaging of the Temple; on his implicit warning in his ministry of the untrustworthy Temple and its guardians; and on his final performance on the Cross of a new embodiment of Temple that the old temple could not achieve.

Only grasping something like this can we now understand John 14: “In my Father’s house are many “dwelling” or “resting” places. To such a temple place, Jesus is going by way of the Cross as pioneer in order that a true and final dwelling place for God and the creation can be built.

This foundational image of the Temple is brought home to us in the epistle reading today, as it builds on this image of the temple as both creation and the new creation, its corner stone requiring living stones forming a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, the people of God.  Here, after the inauguration of the new Temple of the crucified Jesus, the Creation and New Creation become one in the call to be a chosen race, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order  to proclaim the mighty acts of him “who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light”.

Just here the figure of the Crucified, as the light shining in the darkness, brings the “dwelling place” of the Cross and the “dwelling place” of the new creation together in the construction of the ultimate temple, a single heaven and earth reality. Only by way of the Cross does this one “temple/cosmos dwelling place” emerge, holding together God’s space and our space.

How far all this is from the ancient pagan world, and from our contemporary pagan world. It is in the ancient pagan world, not the ancient Jewish world, that we hear stories of an angry God and an innocent victim. In the same way, in our contemporary pagan world people hear what they think is the gospel, and instead of hearing that “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” they hear the pagan story that “God so hated the world that he killed his only son”.  We have heard this fundamental disaster again just this week in the lamentable ignorance of such an otherwise clever man as Stephen Fry. Popular blasphemy will always get 7 million hits on YouTube.   You want to know what Christian mission today is, given the shame of the long failure of the churches to make absolutely clear this decisive contrast?   This mission is nothing more nor less than unrelentingly confronting this perennial paganism. To this end, John is writing a new Genesis, so that the death of Jesus becomes the new dwelling place of the renewed temple Image at the heart of a new heaven and earth.  It is just here, in this costly “dwelling place”, that the world is invited to recognise and understand its creator as the God of unstoppable love.

This is why John 14 must be glued without any break to John 13. So when you get home, white out the heading “Chapter 14”.

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Easter 4
7/5/2017

1 Peter 2:19-25
Psalm 23
John 10:1-10

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Today we have for our text the most popular of all the psalms. It seems to speak to us in ways as deep as the still water it describes, and so we are very willing to pray and to sing it.

We noted last week that one thing about the psalms is that they speak a range of experiences which far exceed the actual experience of most of us. As such, the Psalms constitute something strange to us if we take the collection as a whole. One of our tasks this morning, then, will be to see in what way this most familiar and loved of the psalms might also be strange to us, or make us strange to ourselves.

We also noted last week that, if the psalms capture the breadth of human experience of the world and of God, then the one who sings them is ultimately Christ himself, who presents to us one instance of that breadth of experience (an insight which goes back at least to Augustine). The psalms are both our prayers and, in a way, come to us as a gift of Jesus himself.

Our approach to the psalms as Christians, then, is peculiar. We do not jump over the person of Jesus to access these prayers directly, without reference to him. Jesus “colours” our reception of the psalms. The still waters are the waters by which Jesus was given to rest; the “dark vale of death” was one through which Jesus walked, the “all the days of my life” where Jesus’ own days.

At the same time, Jesus gives us other things, which also impinge on our reading of this psalm. We’ve heard today from John’s gospel that Jesus himself is the shepherd. In this light, the Psalm turns us specifically to him and his benefits as the key to our singing the psalm. It is Jesus who leads us to safe pastures, whose rod and staff comfort us.

But there is one particular thing I’d like to present today as a focus for reflection – something which strikes me as very important although I don’t quite have a completed thought about it to offer you. Last Sunday I contrived a link between the Psalm 116 and our practice of the Eucharist on the basis of the reference in that psalm to a “cup of salvation”. The same is possible today although it is perhaps slightly less contrived! If we have moved from the Psalm as the occasional prayer of one of us to a prayer of Jesus himself, and from there to it being a prayer about Jesus as the Shepherd who leads and gives, as in the psalm, then another link to the Eucharist appears here:

He spreads a table before me in the presence of my enemies; he anoints my head with oil, my cup overflows.

We gather here, today, around a table. It is the table which this Lord, this Shepherd, spreads before us. It is not difficult to imagine that the table of the psalm is this table of the Lord. But if that is the case, the psalm invites us into an experience of the Lord’s table which, to me at least, is quite new.

The new thing is indicated in the line, “in the presence of my enemies.”

In what sense is our gathering around this table today a gathering “in the midst of enemies”? Or we can put the question differently by noting that this line about the table sits in apposition with the previous line in the psalm; that is, it says the same thing differently. So “the darkest valley” is being in the midst of our enemies; the comforting rod and staff are the table spread before us with the anointing oil and the overflowing cup.

In what sense is our gathering around this table today a gathering “in the midst of enemies”? In what sense is this table today set in “death’s dark vale”?

If we play with these images, and allow that they might inform our understanding of the meaning of the Lord’s table, then the Eucharist becomes something of a safe haven, or even a fortress. That is a new thought to me and, I imagine, also to many of you. I am not entirely sure what to make of it, but I suspect that we must make – and take – something from it.

Not least surprising here is the implicit suggestion that we do have enemies. The language of “enemy” is uncomfortable in modern society, perhaps only natural on the lips of our more belligerent political leaders. Enmity is “uncivilised”. If enmity appears at all in our understanding of the Eucharist it would normally be expressed along the lines of being in the company of enemies rather than in the midst of enemies. That is, we tend to speak of “communion” not only with God but with each other – a sharing around a common table by people who otherwise might even be enemies. The passing of the peace which precedes the communion is a kind of laying down of arms, an act of reconciliation, as is the sharing of the one bread and one cup.

Yet this is not the image of table of the psalm, which is more one of being encircled by external foes – gathering at table in the darkening shadow of death, enemies at the door.

Is this right? Is this table a fortress, a rod-and-staff weapon God wields on behalf of his people? This is strong language and is almost shocking to suggest; but I don’t think we can dismiss the thought too quickly. Note that here, as in the psalms, the weapon is held by God, and not by us. We are but sheep, God is the shepherd; the rod and staff are his to use to protect, not ours to strike those who we imagine stand against us. Vengeance – another strong and troubling theme in the psalms – is the Lord’s and not ours.

But even then this really only makes sense if indeed the people of God do have enemies. Do they? Do we? It is an unappealing, uncivilised thought. We seek to be a peaceable people and imagine ourselves to live in a largely peaceable community. Perhaps that is part of our malaise as a church culture – everything is too peaceable, there is nothing really worth dying for.

But the point cannot be that we need to whip up a bit of controversy, to pick a fight. Enmity for enmity’s sake is self-interested troublemaking. The question is whether the kingdom of this king, the shepherding of this shepherd, the humanity of this God, are sufficiently confronting to the usual way of things to make us strange to ourselves and strange to each other – strange enough even to create strangers of the dangerous kind: enemies.

If indeed we have no real enemies, then good for us.

But if we have blinded ourselves to what is going on around us, to what it is which the gospel names in us as enmity even as it calls us into love and peace, then we have need of having our eyes opened. I don’t intend today to try to list precisely where those battle lines might be; perhaps our looking further into the psalms in the next few weeks might furnish more thought about that.

But we can say that there is something about the nature of the reconciliation which the gospel proposes that is, finally, offensive and creates enemies. What right do we have to green pastures and still waters, to protection and anointing? Presumably, in the eyes of our enemies, no right at all. And yet we claim it, or claim that it has been given to us nonetheless, that our lives are lived in the house of the Lord, whatever might seem to be the case to others.

Though we pray our psalms in the quiet of our hearts, and celebrate our sacraments out of the sight of most of the world, those prayers and sacraments are social and political things and not private devotions. They speak of unexpected, even undeserved, reconciliations among ourselves and with God. We cannot expect that they will not give offence.

And so we will need, all the more, to pray just these prayers, and seek defence in just these sacraments. For they are God’s way with us, that we might finally find our way into God.

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Easter 3
30/4/2017

1 Peter 1:17-23
Psalm 116
Luke 24:13-35

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[Over the next few weeks I’m planning to preach from the set psalm for the day. There are a few reasons for this. One is that I’m now into my seventh full cycle of the lectionary, which makes most of the other texts rather “old-hat”, at least for the preacher and probably for the congregation. Another is that, in those seven cycles, I’ve rarely preached on the set psalm; and another is a remark by Howard Wallace in his book on the psalms, that we cannot expect the heart of the psalms to become our own heart if we do not preach on them. While we hear a psalm each week – beautifully sung – I’m not sure that this is enough for us to be affected by these hymns and prayers. Perhaps a little more preaching here would help.]

I want this morning to draw a link between today’s psalm and our weekly gathering to break bread and bless a cup. The ground for this link is nothing more than a fortuitous phrase in the psalm and so the link is, in a sense, little more than sleight of hand! I think, however, that the effect is such that we might do well to allow ourselves to be tricked here, in order that we might come to see the psalms in a new, richer light, and the Eucharist also.

To read, to sing, to pray the Psalms is to be invited into a new experience…of ourselves. The Psalms are the prayers of people not very much unlike us.

Some of the language of the Psalms we happily embrace; other expressions leave us feeling decidedly uncomfortable. For this reason we are rather inclined to pick and choose between them. Yet the Psalms of the Bible present to us something of a whole. This being the case, we ought to wonder how can we be confident that we are right to reject the harshest of the language of the psalms and yet embrace the more comfortable bits. Few of us are comfortable with a blessing on those who take our enemies’ babies and bash their heads against a rock; some of you perhaps don’t even know that that thought is expressed in one of the Psalms (Psalm 137). We hear that particular Psalm often enough, but the nasty bit is edited out by the lectionary that it might fall more softly on our sensitive ears. Perhaps – perhaps – we might dare to pray with the psalmist, My God, why have you abandoned me? (Psalm 22) But even this seems rather an impious accusation against God, perhaps especially on when it is heard on Jesus’ own lips.

On the other hand, we are less likely to be upset by the psalmist who suffers quietly or simply confesses sin, or who praises God with joy.

It is not hard for us to pick and choose between the Psalms in this way but here we are not simply being lopsided. We are presuming that, on the one hand, we are as contrite or thankful as the psalmist at the positive end of the spectrum but are not, on the other hand, in fact as deep in the pit as the psalmist is when he (she?) gets angry and spiteful and perhaps even – to our ears – blasphemous. Such moderation in reading the psalms is highly risky. A comfortable, moderate reading of the psalms risks a moderate faith, a moderate prayer life, moderate compassion, moderate preaching and liturgy.

So, now to today’s Psalm. In fact we have here an “easy” Psalm to pray. Something is said of the depths from which the psalmist feels that he has been lifted:

³ The snares of death encompassed me;
the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me;
I suffered distress and anguish…
¹¹ I said in my consternation,
‘Everyone is a liar.’ 

Yet the focus is very much upon the response which the psalmist will make to God’s redeeming deliverance from whatever specific thing it was which oppressed him.

¹² What shall I return to the Lord
for all his bounty to me?
¹³ I will lift up the cup of salvation
and call on the name of the Lord,
¹⁴ I will pay my vows to the Lord
in the presence of all his people.

Precisely what this means – the lifting up of the cup of salvation – we don’t know now from this distance. But we who gather in this way each week do know of a cup of salvation, and we can helpfully construct a link between the Psalms as an invitation to a new experience of ourselves and our Eucharist as embodying something parallel for us in our ritual eating and drinking.

We’ve already noted that the Psalms present to us a range of human experience which exceeds the actual experience of most of us, or the experience we are prepared to admit. It is possible to live a pretty charmed life in our modern world, however much our charmed life might cost the lives of others. The depth of the psalmists’ experiences – and so also the height of their exultation – is not often present to us. To take the psalms seriously is to open ourselves to the possibility of such a range of experiences even for ourselves: to allow for the possibility that we might be – even might need to be – jolted out of life in mid-range in order to experience ourselves and God anew.

In the Eucharist, too, we mark an experience which is both ours and yet not ours. Under the guise of bread and wine the body and blood of one of us appears on a table in front of us, not unlike the prayers of some of us appear on the pages of the Psalms. We are not those who put this body and blood there – God has done this – and yet we hear that they are there for us. There is nothing desirable about such nourishment, for it is only nourishment for us who eat and drink if we move past mere eating and drinking to recognise that, here, what we put somewhere else – on a cross – is re-presented to us now in order to move us somewhere else, somewhere beyond the moderation that denies life, even crucifies.

There is something “psalmic” about the Eucharist, or something eucharistic about the Psalms. They are together an invitation into something which is ours, yet is not quite us, and yet must become so.

This is my body for you; feed on this, and be changed into it, and be healed.
These are my songs, my prayers, for you; pray these, and thereby learn to feel them, to live them, and be healed.

It is the same one who addresses us in the ancient Psalms and here in our Eucharist today: Christ who sings in both haunting and jubilant tones, Christ crucified and risen. This is to say that the psalms are not what remains of songs sung thousands of years ago. If they are to become our words, they are in fact the words of Christ, just as Christ’s own humanity is the gift we receive in baptism and now await. Psalm 116 is a song of the crucified and risen Christ:

The snares of death encompassed me…Everyone is a liar…
[Yet] What shall I return to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation…

The life of faith is a life out of ourselves, into ourselves. It is a training in sacred song beyond the keys we think suit us into a range of notes and styles we cannot yet imagine could be ours. It is a feeding on strange food, that we might become in the same way strange to ourselves.

This is possible because, as our psalmist sang today:

“gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful…”

In order, then, to grow into ourselves through this grace and righteousness, let us learn to pray with the psalmists, and with them,

“…offer eucharist and call on the name of the Lord
…in the presence of all his people,
in the courts of the house of the lord,
in your midst, O Jerusalem.”

Amen.

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Easter 2 (Mark the Evangelist Day)
23/4/2017

Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 2
Ephesians 4:7-8, 11-15
Mark 16:9-20

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Wes Campbell

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Today the Gospel reading takes us to an End.

Or rather, to at least three endings: an abrupt ending that leaves the reader hanging, another so-called shorter ending, and a longer passage at verses 15-20. Those endings seem to be providing a missing end to the Gospel, as if its last page was torn off. Now, the consensus among New Testament scholars is that the ‘unfinished sentence’ of verse eight is in fact the end Mark intended. New Testament scholar Davis McCaughey, a longtime member of this congregation, and father of the Uniting Church, was an advocate of this approach. He was a supporter of the name Mark the Evangelist for this congregation.

Does it matter how the Gospel ends? It certainly matters. With these endings, we hear the early Christian community grappling with Jesus who announced the nearness of the reign of God, his cry of abandonment on the cross, and the Easter news carried by women. It is startling to hear, within the Easter announcement of hope, the note of fear and doubt.

Such a commanding word should bind us together: But we know only too well the varieties of interpretations brought to bear on the Gospels: from, on one hand, ‘Literalists’ to so-called ‘Progressives’.

This is not just about interpreting texts, it takes us to the shaping of the Christian community as it addresses issues such as sexuality and war.

A colleague refuses to sing Charles Wesley’s hymn: ‘All praise to our redeeming Lord’ (TiS 442) because it contains verses such as

Even now we think and speak the same
And cordially agree,
Concentred all, through Jesus’ name
In perfect harmony.

It’s just not true that we have the same mind, he says.

And it is also that many have given up on the church, and any expectation that we will be changed.

The collapse of faith we have lived in the past century eats away at us. Consider the remarkable ABC programs on space-watching. There was a viewing of the cosmos – a vast spread of galaxies. Scientific commentators told us that we were looking at the beginning of time. The sense of awe in the presenters was palpable, as was also the lack of theology.

The science of the last century took over the notion of entropy, and the notion that the galaxy is winding down. The German theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865 – 1925) accepted the view that the universe was like a battery failing. The future would consist of the last person sitting in front of the last coal, roasting the last potato, in the light of the dying sun. The cosmos was therefore closed and fading.

For Troeltsch then, the future was lost, not least because these were also the years of the calamitous End brought about in the great slaughter of the First World War. And although this was to be ‘war to end all wars’, only decades later was Europe aflame with its death camps; and the cry ‘never again’.

With the atomic demolition of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then nuclear tests on Pacific atolls, Maralinga, Three Mile Island, Japanese Fukushima, Chernobyl. came an End overshadowed by the nuclear cloud.

Such is the End we experience.

According to Francis Fukuyama with the fall of the Soviet Union we came to the end of history; monetarist economics had won the day. Far from the optimism of Fukuyama’s vison another declaration of the end came from the Russian journalist, Svetlana Alexieich (in Chernobyl Prayer, 1997). She announces an unseen radioactive threat that will last for thousands of years. The Russian author brought many voices to speech, telling of the agonizing deaths. She asked ‘who can we look to for the future?’ Her answer, ‘no-one’.

With that loss, which, paradoxically lasts for centuries, we are tempted to lose hope. And intertwined with the nuclear threat is the emergence of ‘terrorism’ between the so-called people of the book, Jews, Christians and Muslims.

The roots of this troubled world reach back into mechanized warfare, in the nineteenth century. Millions of young men, promised glory and adventure, were cut down by a hail of lead, or became in trenches the living dead.

Recalling the slaughter, certain dates shape us: 25^th April ANZAC, and the Twin Towers of 9/11. Around the globe neighbours are turned into figures of fear.

We might be tempted to look wistfully backwards to a supposed peaceful age. Where many speak of ‘the end’: the texts we have opened this morning promise a new future.

How are we to live in a world that is grieving its past?

In that field of loss, we Christians are pressed to ask about hope.

This is the time when God is silent, dead as attested by voices such as Nietzsche, AC Drayling, Christopher Hitchins, Richard Dawkins. If God is absent, away, in exile, where shall we look for hope and life?

Jacques Ellul who took as one of his titles ‘Hope in a time of abandonment (1976) gives us a clue. He says it is not for us to try to spring across the gulf between the unseen God and our seen world. No, rather, as Jesus cried out in abandonment and was answered only by the Spirit, we too are to wait in abandonment. We must be profoundly aware that we do not have the means for crossing the gulf; the only thing we can do is trust that the God who raises the dead, will come to us to make us whole.

Consider the Letter to the Ephesians probably circulated in the Roman Empire late in the first century. There we are introduced to a number of small communities who are living out a radically new way. Where once those who differed were in conflict, this correspondence advises how new life can be shaped; between man and woman, adults and children, slaves and free. A new relationship has emerged between those who differ. Difference is no longer a reason for conflict. Rather the Christian community is where enemies are reconciled, living out a newly discovered peace. This involves a stepping out of line in the Empire. Instead of ‘Pax Romana’, maintained by the sword, there is a new story being told here.

The writer of the letter sees in these early Christians a pointer to the cosmos as a whole. Once powers held the cosmos in bondage. Now something new has happened which enlivens the whole cosmos. The fact of this new Christian community, gives us a vision of a totally renewed cosmos. The future is intruding into our present, and the letter that turns enemies into friends draws us into that open future.

How crucial is such as vision, when our streets are given over to soldiers and veterans, to weapons that are ‘the mother of all bombs’, nuclear warheads are kept in storage for possible use, where the economics of our nations are dependent upon the trade in armaments.

As we read the letter, it must cross our mind that we are reading the letter some 2000 years after it was written. And for 1500 years we have learned to read the letter in ways that erodes that radical reading. We are taught to accept our place in ritualized prayer and politics.

The question is this: will we trust the future that is pressing onto us?

Like the first Christians who heard of the risen One, and faced fear and trembling and doubt, our task is not to reassert religious language. We are certainly not to re-construct the empire. Nor are we to fit into the world to the present. There is something far more radical going on here in the God who comes to renew the whole cosmos.

Then we will be able to trust, with the Gospeller Mark, the God who is given over to abandonment, yet can bring life from nothing.

Then it will make sense to sing, with Charles Wesley:

He bids us build each other up;
And gathered into one,
To our high calling’s glorious hope,
We hand in hand go on.

(TiS 442)

The point here is this: in Christ the future and the present are bound together. The Risen Christ who has made his claim on the future, also claims us for his present. Here an end is put to violent and destructive ways; and the very particles of the cosmos are witnesses to Jesus Christ, the end and the future, the centre and the far flung boundary of life.

And to him, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all thanks, praise and glory, in his work of renewing the whole cosmos. AMEN

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Easter Day
16/4/2017

Psalm 118
Matthew 28:1-10

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If there is a day in the Christian calendar on which it is especially appropriate to speak about the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, then Easter Day is not that day. So, even though I’m about to preach on the resurrection, it’s not because it’s Easter(!)

Leaving preaching on the resurrection especially to this day only gives the impression that it is just one of the many things which Christians have to believe – like an item on a religious list. Yet our church year almost forces this problem upon us, and we could also say the same about the other major Christian festivals. Talking about the incarnation at Christmas time, talking about the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, or talking about the Trinity on Trinity Sunday – treating such things on those special days gives the impression that the Trinity is one thing we believe, and the giving of the Holy Spirit another thing, and the coming of God in Jesus at Christmas another. In fact each Sunday is a coming together to celebrate Easter, Pentecost, the Trinity and Christmas. Each Sunday’s gathering of the Christian church is made possible by the Trinitarian God, once incarnate by the power of the Spirit in the Son Jesus, this risen Jesus being now present in his Spirit, to the glory of the Father.

Yearly celebrations have something to do with the way we mark time, and that has to do not with the special events themselves, but with the natural seasons. For thousands of years we’ve noted the coming each year of the spring sunshine and rains, the ripening of fruit and vegetable in summer, and then prepared ourselves for the winter again, before celebrating again the coming of another spring. Within that cycle of seasons and moons we’ve also learned to place other special events. We remember that a certain number of days or moon cycles after the longest or shortest day of the year someone was born or died, or some other special event happened. And we count the same number of days in the next cycle to remember it. When it comes to the church’s festivals, the fact that we count 365 days from Christmas to Christmas has nothing to do with Christmas and what it means, but everything to do with the fact that that’s just how long it takes for the earth to get back to the same hot spot (or cold spot, in the North!) each year. Easter, of course, jumps around a bit each year, but the principle is pretty much the same – counting cycles which have nothing to do with the meaning of Good Friday or Easter themselves.

This works very well for natural, seasonal cycles and events but not so well for the historical events the church recalls. With the cycle of the seasons, what we remember is always coming back within the next year, precisely because it is a cycle. Particular, historical events, however, get more distant with each cycle. While Christmas and Easter always come around again as celebrations, the source gets more distant from us. The celebration, then, quickly becomes an experience of looking backwards.

Treating Easter and the other Christian festivals as a “remembering” gives the sense that all that seems to matter is what happened “long ago”. It is scarcely ever said that way, but we sense it. We indicate that this is what we really believe when, at Easter, when we find ourselves asking, “Did Jesus really rise?” “Were the disciples really not mistaken or deluded?” When we find that we can really only use the past tense for God’s actions, we’ve thrown God and the reasons for believing in God into a distant past – a strange place, another country where they do things differently. Easter (and the other festivals) then becomes a mere commemoration. We remember the death and resurrection of Jesus, or remember his birth or the giving of the Holy Spirit to the church. And then, a day or so a later, we get on the real business of living. How long does Christmas last, before we’re back into the normalities of living? These great moments all fall from our consciousness so quickly because we’re really just remembering, and life is too full here and now to spend back there in the past. Yearly celebrations of Easter and the other Christian festivals have ended up like all our other celebrations – memorials. And so talk of such things as resurrection or incarnation make little sense to us.

But when the church speaks about the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, we speak not about something which happened a long time ago, and which we desperately want somehow to drag into the present. The church’s faith is not in some event many years ago, but in the continuing presence of the risen Lord.

Yet even this is perhaps not clear enough. We might say more strongly, the church believes in the continuing presence of the crucified Lord. If we cannot properly deal with Good Friday without reference to Easter, neither does Easter leave Good Friday behind. It is crucial that the risen one is the crucified one, else the crucifixion is meaningless.

To say that the crucified one is Lord is to say that this one rejected is raised from the dead, for a dead Lord is lord of nothing. If Jesus is in any sense “lord”, then we are in the realm of some kind of resurrection. This “some kind of” resurrection, and that it is the resurrection of the crucified Jesus, is laid before us in our weekly gathering around the table for the Communion. The continuing presence of the crucified Jesus is as real and tangible as our breaking and taking of bread.

In this Communion is the body of Christ given and created. The body of Christ is given in the elements of bread and wine, tokens of Christ’s body and blood, broken by the weight of human sin, driven to the cross by our rejection of God’s freedom in our midst. The body of Christ is created in our gathering and reception of the crucified Jesus as Lord, as the source of life, as food and drink. In the resurrection stories crucified Jesus receives those who abandoned him. As we eat and drink he receives us and we receive him: we receive what we are, we become what we receive, the body of Christ, risen now in our midst. The bread and the wine are the body and blood of Jesus – in the strongest theological sense – to the extent that the community which receives them becomes the re-created body of Christ, risen.

Now, there is a lot in these dense little declarations, and it might seem that we’ve wandered a long way from where I began – the problem which our annual celebration of Easter creates for our understanding of the resurrection of Jesus. We might gather these themes together this way:

The word of the angel to those women at the tomb was, He is not here where you think he ought to be; he is risen and indeed goes ahead of you to Galilee. The word of the angel to us today is, He is not back there where you think he can only be, evermore distant with each Easter celebration. He is risen; and, indeed, goes ahead of you. There you will see him. He will meet you wherever you mark him as crucified and as Lord, as Lord and as crucified.

Our annual celebration of Easter does not locate Jesus in time for us – an ever increasingly distant time. To imagine that the church’s confession of the resurrection concerns something which happened to happen a long time ago is to have lost a grip on our language and practice. Easter celebrations remind us who Jesus is, and why we use the language we use and do the things we do: Lord, crucified, risen, breaking bread. We cannot declare “Jesus is Lord” if we trip over the language of resurrection; they are the same thing; a dead Lord is lord of nothing. We cannot declare that the church is the body of Christ but trip over the declaration that the bread and wine are the body and blood of that Christ. The bread is not the bread of life nor the cup the cup of salvation if they do not communicate to us that Jesus’ body was broken and blood spilled by us, and yet that he was restored by God and is returned to restore us, so that all which was his – body and spirit – might become ours. This is the “some kind of” resurrection of Christian confession: Christ is risen wherever the crucified one is received as Lord.

Again, the word of the tomb-side angel to us today is, He is not back there where you think he can only be, evermore distant with each Easter celebration. He is risen; and, indeed, goes ahead of you. There you will see him. He will meet you wherever you mark him as crucified and as Lord, as Lord and as crucified: rejected, but now restored and restoring.

As yesterday, so today and forever, he moves on ahead of us, calling us to meet him in an ever-new place. Resurrection faith hears that call and steps forth in joy.

Let that faith be ours, by the grace of God. Amen.

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Good Friday
14/4/2017

Isaiah 52:13-53:6
Psalm 22
John 19:1-16

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“Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?”

With this Pilate spells out his understanding of the power at work in what is passing between him and Jesus at the judgement seat. Jesus responds, “You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.” What, or who, is this “from above”? It seems obvious that it is God. Quite apart from the idea that God is “above”, this seems obvious to the familiar Christian sense that God intends something like this to take place, that God intends that Jesus be crucified, although this is not present here in the text.

But Jesus goes on: The power you have comes from above, but “the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin”. It is not quite clear who this “one” is. Obvious candidates include Judas or, more likely, the High Priest. But for our purposes this morning the Who is not all that important, only that a distinction is drawn: the one who handed Jesus over is not God. Jesus, then, seems to say two things here: God has given Pilate the power he has, and those who have made Jesus subject to that power have the greater sin. Typically, these two things are treated quite separately: God’s establishment of the political order for the well-being of human society (cf. Romans 13); and the sinfulness of the religious authorities in seeking to manipulate that power to have Jesus executed.

But the text is not that straightforward, in that the first comment about Pilate’s power coming “from” above is connected to the comment about the handing-over with a confusing “therefore”:

‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above; therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.’

Put around the other way, the one who betrayed me is guilty because you have received power from above.

This is very difficult to decipher: God has given you power over me, therefore the one who betrayed me is guilty. This is difficult because God has given the power to Pilate but the betrayer is responsible for Jesus being subject to that power.

A clue to what this might mean is perhaps given in the gospel writer John’s love of double meanings which invite us both to distinguish meanings but also require us to hold them together. “You must be born again”, the teacher Nicodemus heard from Jesus (John 3), although the word “again” could also be translated “from above”. Nicodemus hears one of the possible meanings, and so doesn’t get it – he has to hear both. John uses this device not just to emphasise that Jesus’ hearers don’t get it; the problem is more that they only get half of it: Nicodemus needs to hear that it is a matter of being born “from above” but this a re-birth of the order of the birth which first brought you forth.

In our text this morning, the double meaning might be something like this: the power which Pilate receives can be said to come to him “from above” in the ultimate sense, in that God is the source of all power. And yet the power which he receives is also passed down to him in a progression from Judas to Annas to Caiaphas to Pilate. God is “above” Pilate but so also are those historical players. Jesus is apparently subject to two powers here – the good which is given to Pilate, the bad which is exercised by his enemies; and yet they are one power, which is the force of the “therefore”: you have power over me, therefore they are guilty.

This is not easy, but neither is the gospel, for we ourselves are very complicated. What is happening here is that, in the space of two sentences, John has compressed and summarised the dynamic of human power within its divine source and goal: sourced in God, realised in us. Corrupted in us, perhaps, but still power from God, even in its corrupt form: you have been given power, therefore you are guilty.

This gives rise to a question about what power actually is, about how we can know what true or appropriate power is if power can be corrupt and still be God’s power. In one form or another we confess here most weeks that “We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty…” What does this mean? The seemingly obvious meaning is what gives rise to the heartfelt questions which follow on from the confession: God could do anything, so why then does God not exercise that power? Why do such things as this or that happen if God is both Good and Almighty?

An answer to that question which takes seriously the centrality of the cross to the Christian understanding of the power of God would be that the goodness of God is not that God is all powerful, in the sense of being able to do anything if he wanted to but, rather, that God is the source and the goal of all power. We might want to rage against this proposal because of what takes place between the source and its goal, but it seems to be the truth of the gospel.

God is the source and the goal of all power. It is that second part – the goal – which is missing in most of our thinking about God’s power. That God is the source of all power has already been acknowledged in our text: “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above”. That God is the goal of all power is the basis of the accusation against Jesus’ opponents, who have used their power to secure the death of the beloved Son. God’s goal is not the Son’s death, despite our rich history of atonement theories which see the crucifixion as something God planned. God’s goal is that the Son be glorified, that Jesus be seen to be the Son of the Father, and the Father – the one who sent him – seen to be the Father of the Jesus. The goal of God’s power is always the establishment and manifestation of the appropriate relationship of God and creation.

But our story reveals that power has been corrupted and the goal of that power seems to be thwarted, for Jesus is crucified and so apparently demonstrated to be outside of a right relation to God. And yet the power of God is precisely the power of creation, the power to establish a relationship which was not there before. It is power to call into existence what is not yet there or, what is the same thing for us who are already “there”, creation is the power to raise the dead. In God’s perspective, creation looks like making something from nothing; in ours, it looks like resurrection.

If the glorification of the Son – the manifestation of the Son’s relation to the Father and Father’s to the Son – is blocked by the deathly nothingness of the cross, then to such a creative God the cross itself becomes the glorification. And this is precisely what John’s Jesus declares to us: the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified (John 12.23); Jesus will be glorified by being “lifted up” on the cross (12.32); the cross becomes a throne. The God from whom all power comes, even corrupt power, is all-powerful in that whatever comes of that power in the world, it always returns to its primary work: the glorification of God, the re-creation of the world.

Jesus knows the whence and the whither of power, whatever shape it takes. Pilate’s reading of power, then, and his religious enemies’ attempt to manipulate it, simply determine the shape God’s goal of manifesting his relation to the world will take as that power returns to him; they do not determine whether it will return to God. This is a given for the gospel. There is a sense in which Jesus is already dead as he stands before Pilate – dead to the dead end of Pilate’s understanding of power. The cross is a triumph, a glorification, because on it Jesus declares where all power comes from and where all power goes: only from and to the God who sent him.

What does this mean for anything? It means that the death of Jesus is no mere illustration of what bad people can do to good people. We don’t need a holiday to mark that; it’s in our news bulletins every day. Today is not a tragic day. It is a triumphant day – Good Friday, even Great Friday. The greatness of this day is that the goal of all power – the glorification of God in a right relationship to him is shown to be possible even in such a dark and deathly place as a cross. All power flows from God, all power returns to God, whatever dark and deathly vale it might force us to walk in the meantime.

What this “means for anything” is that there is nothing in this world to be feared. In all things we are more than conquerors through him who has revealed in this way the source and goal of all power. Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth – not presidents nor global warming nor interest rates nor sovereign borders nor failing health nor broken hearts nor anything else in our power-confused creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (cf. Romans 8.37-39).

Jesus, standing before all the power in the world, sees what it cannot: God started this and God will finish it. God has brought us here, and here God meets us and leads us on.

We need only confess in what deathly ways we have gotten power wrong and look to see in what astonishing way God will make it right. Resurrection from the dead, perhaps.

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Lent 5
2/4/2017

Psalm 130
John 11:1-45

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At the heart of our gospel reading this morning we hear Martha’s gentle rebuke of Jesus: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” It is, at the same time, in its own limited and back-handed way, a confession of faith which declares that when Jesus – God – is present such things as this will not happen to those whom he loves.

If we are already persuaded that God is somewhere, then we quickly find ourselves pressed to account for God apparently being absent at such crisis moments. Perhaps most common among believers is the thought that God’s absence is a matter of punishment. This is implied in the pitiful cry, What have I done to deserve this? Here I have made God go away; God’s absence is my fault. This is quite problematic in itself, yet there’s no suggestion of punishment being applied in our text this morning and so we’ll leave it alone for today.

To do justice to what we’ve heard this morning we have to take seriously the possibility that God is absent simply because he chooses to be. Yet this is offensive to piety. For if God exercises his sovereign will in a choice to be absent – even in our time of need – the result seems to be that we, with Lazarus, die.

The offence we might take at this reason for the absence of God is compounded by what Jesus says and does in the story.

“This illness is not unto death… Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I go to awake him out of sleep… Lazarus is dead;  and for your sake I am glad that I was not there, so that you may believe.”

There is no sense of urgency, no sense of lost time, no sense that his absence from his friend’s side at the hour of need is a matter of concern.

This attitude – perhaps even this coldness to what is happening – seems to change when Jesus meets with the grieving family and friends. Our translation this morning read,

When Jesus saw [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. … Jesus began to weep. … Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb.

It’s been usual in the church to sentimentalise this response of Jesus as an emotional one which resonates with the grief of those around him. And yet, the language is actually much stronger than this. Some scholars and non-English translations have translated the Greek very differently from the familiar English translations:

“Jesus was angry in the spirit, and distressed” (Luther); “Jesus became angry in the spirit and was disgusted” (Zürich Bible) ; “he was inwardly angry and became enraged” (Heitmüller).

The sense here is not sentiment but wrath. Jesus has taken offence at something. And most likely the explanation is this: Whereas the grieving friends and family are distressed and in tears on account of Lazarus, Jesus himself is distressed on account of the friends and family themselves. He is not feeling sorry for them but is angry at them.

So, first Jesus does not answer the sisters’ prayer that he come and tend to Lazarus and then he’s angered by their very understandable response to the consequence of his inaction! What are we going to do with that?!

At the heart of the matter is the revelation of God’s sovereign freedom in the face of all that would seem to overshadow it and us. Jesus’ anger with the mourners, his disturbed response to the situation at the tomb, reflects a frustration that, at the end of an intense ministry those closest to him still do not recognise that in him all things have their redefinition and so have to be re-thought: I am the bread of life; I am the light of the world; I am the good shepherd.

The raising of Lazarus, then, is neither a favour for a friend nor a sorrowful correction of a wrong done to his grieving sisters, but simply the sign that in this Jesus we encounter a sovereign indifference to the powers that threaten us, and a sovereign desire and capacity to confront those powers on our behalf: I am the resurrection and the life.

In last week’s reading we saw that the focus was not so much the healing of the blind man as it was identifying who truly is blind. So also, in today’s reading, the question is not death and life as they are dealt with by our hospitals but about what is true life and what is true death, and the ways in which God is absent and present to such death and life. If the story of the blind man put to us the question, Are you seeing clearly?, the story of Lazarus puts to us, How are you dying? [Would it not be an interesting twist on our casual greetings to each other to ask not, How are you going? but How are you dying?]

Someone has characterised Christian discipleship as “the art of dying well”. This is not a case of growing old gracefully, or dying with dignity, or being stoically indifferent to death, or any other way we might learn how to die from all the advice available on the subject these days. “Dying well”, in this Christian sense, has to do with our approach to death in the light of God’s sovereignty – God’s sovereign absence and God’s sovereign choice to be for us, over against the world which threatens us with death. It is God’s choice to be for us which colours his apparent absence, not the other way around; faith says No to the darkness, because dawn is coming.

In the story, the free and sovereign choice of Jesus to be absent from Lazarus in his illness his hour is the same sovereignty he then exercises over death in raising Lazarus: he is life, whether present or absent. This is to say, the demonstrated presence of God is not as important for the people of God as is the confidence that when God does come, he comes to reverse the effects of decay and death which have been active in our lives. The proof of this in Jesus’ response to the news of Lazarus’ illness; it is just that proof which is lacking in Lazarus’ friends and family, and Jesus is angry.

We could say, then, that God is unhurried by the threat of death which hangs over our head, not because he doesn’t care, but because he is the God who raises from the dead and so the God whose coming to us is always the promise of life in or out of death. Jesus says to Martha,

“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.

The reality of death – our physical “stopping” – is not denied: “those who believe in me even though they die, yet shall they live”, for God is sovereign over death; but then also “they who live and believe will never die”, for God is sovereign over death, so death will not ultimately be death for those in Christ. Those who die and yet live, and those who live and will never die, are the same people.

What is promised is that when God comes, death will not be death for us. And so all that is offered to us – and it is rather a lot! – is the possibility of living life without the shadow of death darkening the way.

Such a view of the power of the threat of death is to reduce it, in the end, to nothing – not because it disappears or ceases to hurt, but because it is penultimate – secondary to the greater power of the God who is coming to us because he loves us.

[To finish up!:] At the beginning of today’s reading there’s a little exchange between Jesus and the disciples which we’ve not yet acknowledged.

Then after [two days] Jesus said to the disciples, “Let us go to Judea again.” The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.”

The freedom by which Jesus overcomes death for Lazarus is reflected in his own ability to move regardless of where death might be lurking in his own life. Like Lazarus, Jesus is himself “ill”, in the sense of being confronted at least with persecution and possibly with death. Yet unlike the mourners at the tomb, Jesus lives and walks by a light which they do not see. And so, as real as the threat to his life apparently is, he is nevertheless able to do what needs to be done, because the light by which he sees reveals to him that what threatens him – real and painful enough though it might become – is less than the one who will appear to be absent and yet who is coming with his light and life.

The question the text puts to us, “Are you dying well?” is then also the question, “Are you living well? What are the shadows which cause you to jump back in fear and yet which the light of the gospel would wash away? In fact, our lives are filled with such things: deathly claims on our time, relationships, money, ambitions, our very being. And we seek to ward off the encroaching darkness of such things with mere candles which do little other than cast yet more looming shadows, only now that they also flicker and jump and are all the more frightening.

Dying badly is dying of fear, which is living in fear, hands cupped around that little candle lest the wind blow it out.

Dying well is living and walking by the light of the one who is himself the life which is light for all (John 1.4).

Let us seek so to live.

By the grace of God, Amen.

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Lent 4
26/3/2017

Ephesians 5:8-14
Psalm 23
John 9:1-16

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The most immediately distracting thing in our gospel story this morning is the healing of the man born blind. The people in the text – Jesus, the disciples, the religious leaders, the blind man and his family – know as well as we do that this doesn’t happen; the blind man himself will declare later in the story (what we didn’t hear this morning): “Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind.” They were not more credulous than we are about such things. The religious leaders do not believe the healing has occurred until their own substantial criterion is met: that they have two witnesses – the testimony of his parents that he had been blind from birth; he was blind but now he sees.

There is nothing to get in the way of our hearing this story, then, as the account of a genuine miracle. That we might imagine ourselves to be more “scientific” about such things, or more thorough in our investigations today, does not matter for our hearing of the story because it is not really about what might have happened one fine day in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. It is about what would have happened, had indeed such a miracle occurred: it is about our response to the presence of something which doesn’t fit.

The initial question is, naturally, Did it happen?, but then the more pressing question makes itself felt: What are we to make of it? For in the story, the miracle is not merely a marvellous thing. The story is really about the trouble the miracle creates. This is what a mere surface reading of the story will normally miss. We easily, unthinkingly, imagine that a miracle like this would be an unequivocally good thing yet it is not in the story – this is the real “miracle”, the really unexpected thing: that Jesus is accused of godlessness because he has done this. It is this accusation we really need to wrestle with, and whether or not such things could happen.

The problem of the miracle is that Jesus performs it on a Sabbath, which makes the healing what we might call a “contra-indicator”. Again, we are at risk of dismissing the significance of this because the Christianised West has long since “dealt with” – dismissed – the Sabbath, precisely because of stories like this. But we have to take seriously that it was tricks like this – his marvellous miracles – which got Jesus killed; this is even more striking following the events we’ll hear in next week’s reading: the raising of Lazarus. The religious leaders do not fall about, lost in wonder, love and praise when Lazarus is called forth from the tomb; they plot to kill Jesus. While we might sometimes long to feel the miraculous touch which that blind man felt back then, or that Lazarus felt, if we lack any sense of how that touch might be offensive to us or others, then we have not understood yet what such a wonder-work would mean.

The contra-indication of the miracle is that it is clearly from God – who else could pull this off? – yet it seems to contradict the requirement to do no work on the Sabbath. This requirement was clearly very strictly observed by the Pharisees and others. It does not matter that it might seem trivial to us; it would be more useful to us to try imagine what sacredness in our experience of the world Jesus might contravene, to our great offence but as an act by which Jesus demonstrates himself entirely free of our fears and anxieties and, in so being, able to bring freedom to others.

[The early church experienced something of the same dynamic when, because of its opinion (“dogma”) about who God was, believers ceased sacrificing at the pagan temples. To us, in our “everyone to his/her own” world, there is no offence here; they were simply expressing their free will. Yet, they were put to death for this: for not “going to temple”, we might say. The stories of such martyrdoms often offend us because we wonder, Why didn’t they just sacrifice and, perhaps, cross their fingers? We don’t often ask, Why was this something which the authorities thought constituted a death penalty? In an age and society in which there is very little we can imagine that we would die for, we are poorly equipped to understand what it means for the Pharisees to be confronted with the terrifying freedom of Jesus, or the Romans to be confronted with the fabric of society and order being white-anted by Christian resistance at crucial expectations.]

Could Jesus offend us – us, the people of God – in the same way as he did in today’s story?

Perhaps. There are many things we hold dear which God-in-Christ could shake to their foundations. But the problem is, if we take today’s story seriously: how would we know that it was indeed “Jesus” – true God of true God in our very midst – who was being so offensive? This is the dispute of the Pharisees among themselves: How could this not be of God? while, at the same time, they wonder, how could it be God who has done this in this way?

This is to say: our story today doesn’t give us much of a clue as to where God will appear next or any means by which we might know that, indeed, it is God who has popped up. We have to say that this is, in fact, very unhelpful of God.

But what, then, flows from this? The story tells us that the Pharisees did not see what was going on. Does that mean that we, who hear this account, do now see what they did not?

In fact, at the end of the whole saga is an exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees which seems to undercut any confidence we might presume about our ability to discern the presence of God:

³⁹Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’ ⁴⁰Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ ⁴¹Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see”, your sin remains.

Having heard this story, can the church – you and I – now say that we see? Surely this is a very dangerous confession, given the judgement Jesus casts here. If we would have no sin – surely the point of praying “forgive us sins” each week! – Jesus suggests that our confession ought rather to be, We are blind.

Even as we read these stories, as we confess the creeds, as we pray the prescribed prayers, as we take and eat and drink we confess, We are blind, we are deaf, we are dead.

This is not to say that these things do not matter, that we can simply include or exclude or change them because, after all, what does colour matter to a blind person, or a different musical key matter to the deaf, or food and drink to the dead? It is to say that our creeds, prayers, liturgies, ethics are not the things we are to see. Rather, we are to come to see through these things, via them, like lenses or icons. The religious eye sees the Sabbath, the miracle, the tradition, and is distracted by them. Yet these things are, rather, “dark glass” (1 Corinthians 13) through which we are to discern some other, refracted thing – lenses through which, by the grace of God, we might see some crucial aspect of our lives brought into focus, if only at the fleeting speed of light.

Put differently, our traditions – creeds, liturgies, law – are a kind of prayer which declares: We are blind; Lord, open our eyes.

Those who cling tightly to the form of the tradition must needs relax their grip; the tradition is not God and does not contain God but is the sign of God’s grace.

Those who reject the form of the tradition must hear that, in doing this, they claim no less than their allegedly dogmatic sisters and brothers to have seen clearly, just to have seen somewhere else. Blindness is called for here, also.

All that we have and are is God-given, that there might be something through which God might meet us. Why was he born blind?, Jesus’ disciples ask him. Jesus answered for that man and also for us: we are blind, that God’s works – as God’s – might be revealed in us.

Let it, then, be our prayer, that God might open our eyes to the light of the world – God himself in his Son – that we ourselves might become one of God’s uncomfortable miracles.

Amen.

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Lent 3
19/3/2017

Romans 5:1-11
Psalm 95
John 4:5-26

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At the centre of this morning’s gospel story is a woman with a sad record when it comes to her relationships. If her history with husbands has not simply been dumb, tragic luck – 5 times a widow! – the story tends to invite all kinds of moral judgements, whether of the woman herself, or of the men who have perhaps used and abused her, or of the culture and society in which such things could happen.

I want this morning to focus on what we are told is the woman’s relationship history but, in doing so, to shift our focus from the typical literal reading of her experience to a more allegorical reading. The advantage of this way of treating the text is that it allows us to let the woman have her own issues – whatever they may have been – but also allows her experiences become something which might still be ours, even if six husbands or wives has not been quite the shape of our particular problems.

Marriage appears a number of times in the Old Testament as a metaphor for the relationship between Israel and its God. You might recall the story of the prophet Hosea, who is told by God,

Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord. (Hosea 1.2)

This is not comfortable language for us today, as we’re aware that terms like “whore” tend to lay rather more blame for sexual immorality at the feet of the woman than the man (cf. John 8.1-11, from which the man is absent). This is not a sensitivity the Scriptures display (although cf. the story of Susanna and the elders in Daniel 13 [OT Apocrypha]). Even then, the point of the instruction to Hosea was not to make a judgement about Gomer, whom he marries, but to make a judgement about Israel. God’s charge is that the relationship between God and Israel is like that between a husband and a wife, and that Israel has been unfaithful, seeking other “husbands”. It helps greatly here to know the Hebrew word for “husband” and some of the nuances of its meaning. The word for husband is “baal”, which many of you will recognise as the name of one (or a number) of the gods in the Old Testament who stands as a tantalising option for the Israelites. Elijah, for example, has a great context with 450 of the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18) – a test of which was really the most powerful God, Baal or Yahweh.

In fact,  the word “baal” has a range of meanings including husband, keeper, master, lord. There is, then, an extended pun being run in the Old Testament as the word for “husband” or “lord” is now applied to a marital partner, now to a god or lord. For Israel to have turned its back on the God of the Exodus is for it to have taken another baal, another lord, or another husband. This background makes it possible to read the Samaritan woman’s marital history in terms much deeper than focussing on her personal tragedy or relationship failures would suggest. The woman comes to be representative of anyone who seeks after false baals, false husbands, false keepers, false saviours.

The fact that in her case these false baals were actually husbands – real, tangible men – opens up for us the range of possible things which might function for us in this way. For the baals and the gods are not simply “spiritual” things, of concern only to those who believe in the gods or have some kind of religious bent. Religious or secular, believer or atheist, we are all prone to build our lives on false foundations, to seek meaning, peace, wholeness, in things which cannot actually provide them. Reading the story allegorically, the woman has had six husbands not simply because a run of bad luck saw 5 good men die on her or six scoundrels offer themselves as the answer, or not simply because she was of too weak character to sustain the relationship through difficult times (or whatever), but because such baals are not the answer to the deeper thirsts that she, and each of us, has. These are false baals, false gods, inadequate responses to the questions and needs which ache in her heart, and in ours also.

The question put to us by Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman is,  What are the baals – the five-plus-one husbands – in our lives? What have we joined ourselves to, and broken away from or had taken away from us, only to join ourselves again to something else? The options are many and various, and few of the baals which tempt us look anything like the Samaritan woman’s own testing. Yet their name is legion: Education, intellect, good looks, reputation, money, children, family, partners, health, youth, tradition and heritage, culture, nation or race or religion – these are among the things which offer themselves as guarantors of life, and so which fill us with some meaning, and so on which we spend enormous time and energy.

There might be nothing wrong in any of these things themselves, except for the nature of their hold on us, and what we therefore invest (or over-invest) in them, and the effects those investments actually have on us and on others. For each such thing will be found to be fickle, unreliable, unfaithful, if we invest it with some kind of ultimate meaning. And so we will thirst, long, partner-up again.

The marriage metaphor for the relationship between God and his people is a powerful one because it encapsulates matters of faithfulness and unfaithfulness, it evokes intimacy and also the pain of distance and separation. But most important in the Scriptures’ use of the metaphor is that the point is not, in the end, to emphasise the failings of the wife – of Israel, or Gomer, or the church (cf. Ephesians 5.32), or the woman by the well. The point is to emphasise the faithfulness of the true baal, the true Lord. For as much as God makes the accusations of unfaithfulness against his people, these accusations are made in order to call us back to the one who waits, who will receive us back, whose own faithfulness to the covenant will see the relationship restored:

“If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

To push the metaphor of marriage and the pun on baal one step further, we could say that in this story Jesus offers himself as a seventh “husband” for the woman, seven being a number which in scriptures is associated with fullness, richness, completion. To one such as her, coming to a well on a hot and dry day, and to each one of us in our own likeness to her, there is offered a different kind of water, such that should we drink it, we will not thirst again, we will never need to turn to another baal, another lord: I am that for which you thirst, for whom you thirst.

We gather here today, and each Sunday, to hear a call away from all the bad couplings we are prone to make to one which will really bring us peace and freedom. In Jesus we are joined to a different kind of baal, a different kind of Lord. In him we see the contours of the life a human creature might joyfully live in relation to her creator. And by the grace of that same creator, we find ourselves not accused of our bad partnerships but simply called to the better one: a spring of water gushing up to life in all its fullness.

However much we might be prone to lose the way, to chase after things which will not bring us the life we really desire, we profess a faithful God who, though saddened or angered by our poor choices, nevertheless calls us back, again and again and again and again and again and again to himself.

And, in hearing and responding to that call, we find not only a faithful God, but ourselves, thirst quenched and souls revived in his life-giving stream.

For this gift of God, in which is found the spirit and truth we all long for, all thanks be to God, now and always. Amen.

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Lent 2
12/3/2017

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 121
John 3:1-17

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Robert Gribben

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Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life’.   John 3:14-15.

Num. 21: 4-9; Ps 121; John 3: 1-17 For Mark the Evangelist, Melbourne, Lent 2(A)

The encounter of Nicodemus with Jesus would be painful if it were not so beautifully constructed.  Out of the shadows (‘by night’), quite suddenly, ‘a leader of the Jews’ has stepped on to John’s stage, himself a teacher, and in the tradition of Israel, has some questions to discuss with his man whose name is now known in Jerusalem. ‘Rabbi’, he says, ‘we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no-one can do these signs you do, apart from the presence of God’. This is a good start, and thus prepared, he asks his first question: ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’

Things get worse from here on in, because at each of his three questions, Nicodemus fails to understand the answers Jesus gives him. Wise in the Law of Israel though he is, he is also bound by it. He cannot unlock Jesus’ double meaning in declaring that those who enter the kingdom of heaven must be born both ‘again’, and ‘from above’, the two sides of the Greek word anothen.^[1] He tries to understand being born again, but is constrained by what he knows of human birth, and he does not see how that flesh-and-blood birth process can help one to achieve a new spiritual status. Since Jesus goes on, in John’s narrative, doubling the double meaning: the New Birth is of both water and the Spirit –  it seems a little unfair that at the end Jesus asks his questioner, ‘Are you a teacher in Israel, and yet do not understand these things?’

We have known for a long time, or should, that John’s Gospel has fanned the flames of anti-semitism. He wrote at a time when the church was emerging from the synagogue, actually and theologically, and was needing to defend itself. We should not assume that because he is a Jew, Nicodemus is blind; nevertheless, he does not understand. And he has come to Jesus, and John’s constant theme is that Jesus is the one who reveals God to the all world.

Continuing his double definitions, that we must be born both ‘again’ and ‘from above’, of water and the Spirit, Jesus twice more reaches for a metaphor.

First, he invokes the wind, mysterious, changeable, unpredictable, of unknown origin yet of observable power. This Spirit breathes life into us who are born in water, creation and Creator working together, in birth and new birth.

Now, John has a readership, and thus Jesus has an audience. That  first readership, those hearers, knew more, or should have, than Nicodemus. That audience, probably John’s  congregation, are already within the kingdom through such a process – by the waters of baptism,  through the Spirit, both. This was part of their experience as church.

The second image is from a story his hearers will have known well: the serpents in the wilderness.

This is a most curious story in a most curious book, the Book of Numbers. It describes Moses and Aaron are leading their grumbling flock through the desert, serially upsetting every tribe near whose land the wanderers came. Here’s the shock: the LORD reacts to their recalcitrance by sending poisonous serpents among His people – or at least the Israelites took the snakes to have such a meaning – and many who were bitten died. So they repented and were given a sign: Moses, I note, whose feelings about snakes I share, did not do as the LORD commanded: instead of a live one, he put a nice safe bronze serpent on a stake and held it up for the healing of all who gazed at it. It worked.

This is the strange incident John uses as a sign of the Gospel. The ‘lifting up’ has another double meaning: physically, as Moses did with the bronze serpent, and physically, as the Son of Man was on the Cross.

I want you to note this physicality, this materiality of God in all we have been considering in that most spiritual of Gospels (they say), John’s. Actual water, and Holy Spirit, together, to bring people under Christ’s gentle rule; lifting up a serpent, even a symbolic one, as a parallel to that only-too-real lifting up of the body of Jesus on the Roman executioner’s cross-beam – with the promise of eternal life is given to those who lift up the dying Son of Man. It is important to notice that the next verse in the famous John 3:16: ‘For God so loved the world that…’ That is the context of that sign-act, the key to how we interpret the death of Jesus.

How do we ‘lift up the Son of Man’, Christ crucified? Our Reformed ancestors apparently allowed us a single interpretation: do it by preaching. That is being challenged by recent scholarship. I am not suggesting it be given up. A generation later, our forebears did it also by singing – e.g. Isaac Watts (When I survey the wondrous cross), though I notice that Watt’s striking third verse still makes few hymnbooks:

His dying crimson, like a robe,
Spreads o’er His body on the tree;
Then I am dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.

The Puritan tradition has often painted the cross of Christ in such terms. Among the Passion hymns in Together in Song, you will find a few modern composers who have tried to portray the cross meaningfully, but it definitely not a popular idea. There is plenty of evidence that modern church people shy away from the crucifixion, despite brutal death being portrayed daily in the media. In the face of all that the other apostle, Paul, has written, have we ceased to preach and sing Christ crucified?

Perhaps we have simply domesticated it. In terms of a cross worn as jewellery, there seems to be an inverse relationship between its size and the faith held by the wearer (I exclude bishops!). In terms of personal devotion, when the late George Yule decided that Protestants may make the sign of the cross on their bodies in prayer, it was typical of him that he always made a huge one.

What of architectural forms? In the 1960s, my father got into deep trouble at Wesley Church, Shepparton, when he accepted the undertaker’s gift of two small wooden plaques with a carved cross on them to cover the holes made when the pulpit rail was removed. The crosses were less than 5 cm long. You would have thought Armageddon had come. By the end of that decade, we were erecting quasi-real crosses, old and rugged, or plain and smooth, and hanging them centre-stage.  No-one would comment now. We justify them on the grounds that the Gospel is about the Risen Christ. That is exactly half true. He was first crucified – and that is what we are avoiding. If a worship leader dared to display a crucifix, say, on Good Friday, many of us still would take offence.

This touches us all deeply because of what we have been taught about Christianity as our forebears received it.  In so many other ways, we have changed, at least in terms of things visible and tangible in worship over the last century. I have come to accept that the human family seems to be divided into those whose religion is expressed in plain forms, and those who respond to enrichment in ritual, art and music. But our Uniting Church is something of a mixture, uniting two former traditions and drawing on a new century and especially on its ecumenical and liturgical movements.

In a posthumous book soon to be published,^[2] the Sydney Uniting Church theologian, Graham Hughes, has challenged the idea that faithful Protestants were restricted by the Reformers to perceiving God only through their ears. Even that plain Baptist John Bunyan insisted that there was equally what he called the ‘Eye-Gate’. Dr Hughes argues that the exclusive emphasis on the word has lost a fundamental Christian belief: that in Christ, the eternal One became incarnate, took our flesh and died in it, as we will. He points out that the two Gospel sacraments which Jesus bid us do, both involve material elements – water, bread and wine – and an invocation of the Spirit (which we have reclaimed). He calls for a reform in the very ways we celebrate the sacraments.

Spirituality involves physicality. As C.S. Lewis wrote somewhere, ‘God loves matter: He invented it’. In their passion to reform the church whose worship was cluttered with things that obscured the Gospel, the Reformers – in varying degrees – purged worship of its materiality.  I believe that for our contemporary needs in worship and mission, we precisely need to recover it. The modern secular seekers after what they call ‘spirituality’ have missed what Christians know: it also involves the body, in fact, its involves everything we are. It involves human beings in their fullness. Humanity fully alive, as the ancient Fathers said.

So there are two challenges for the Uniting Church.  One is again to claim our role as a true Reformed Church, that is, reformed yet always needing to be reformed.  We seem to be quite good at change in the Uniting Church, but that is not the same thing as reform – and the principle of reform is ‘according to the Scriptures’. ^[3] The other comes from our much-vaunted claim to be ecumenical. The buzz word is ‘receptive ecumenism’ – a willingness to ask what gifts we recognize in other churches, which our tradition has rejected or ignored, which, by receiving, would contribute to our wholeness.  Which gifts are we actually willing to receive – from Orthodox, Roman Catholic, historic Protestant (16th C), Radical Protestant (Baptist, Mennonite, Quaker) and the new churches, pentecostal and evangelical?

Nicodemus had to learn that logic and speech have their limitations. He had to engage his imagination to comprehend Jesus’ Good News. We need to address more than the minds of our contemporaries if we are to be true to the apostolic faith. When the seekers come to church (which they will do mostly because someone invited them), let them find a whole Gospel set before them by whole people in the face of a fragmented, wounded and disillusioned world. Let them feel and touch and see the triune God who is Creator and Redeemer. Let them apprehend the truth of the Crucified One, in whose lifting up we see the Man who gave up his life ‘so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but have eternal life’.

[1] This is the most Greek (Hellenistic) of the Gospels, and John is exercising his own linguistic skills to preach the Gospel. Did Jesus pun in Aramaic? Did the pun come from the Aramaic?

[2]  Its title is Reformed Sacramentality, and the publisher is The Liturgical Press (Collegeville, MN). It was edited by Steffen Lösel and includes an interview at the end of Graham’s life by William Emilsen.

[3] As the Basis of Union defines it at paragraph 1.