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Lent 1
5/3/2017

Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Psalm 32
Romans 5:12-19
Matthew 4:1-11

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“Lead us not into temptation” we pray together most weeks, or, in the more recent translation of the Lord’s Prayer, “Save us from the time of trial”. There are two great temptation scenes in the Scriptures, both of which we have heard today. Both have about them a strong feel of the mythological, but this should not prevent us from hearing the truths they speak about who we are and how that ought to affect our actions.

The first scene is part of the second creation story, and is the exchange between Adam, Eve and the serpent which finally results in the expulsion of humankind from the Garden. This story sets the scene for what becomes the struggle of God with his human creation throughout the subsequent pages of Scriptures. The second momentous temptation is that of Jesus, referred to in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and described in Luke and Matthew as having three different elements – the temptation to create bread for his and others’ hunger, the temptation to “wow” the people with spectacular proofs of his divine identity, and the temptation simply to turn from God for great reward. These two stories must be read in tandem if we are to understand what it means to be “tempted”, and what resource God gives us in the face of the temptations which will inevitably come our way.

The apple-munching incident is easily read, and often understood, as a simple case of human disobedience, albeit with drastic consequences. Yet there is much more at stake than a simply failure to do as asked. Biting into the apple becomes possible because the First Couple allow themselves to be led into a questioning of the word of God. They have been told that all they need is theirs to take. That they are prohibited from eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is to say that they don’t need this fruit to be the perfected human creatures that they are. God has provided, and they are sustained. God has given and they have received, and all is right with the world.

In the story of the temptation of Jesus, a similar testing takes place, but with a different outcome. In each of his responses to the specific challenges of Satan, Jesus cites Scripture. But we shouldn’t imagine that this is to say that simply having a lot of texts up our sleeves is what is required to deal with temptation. (It might indeed be a great help, but it is not the heart of the matter!) More than simply quoting the words of Scripture in response to each temptation, Jesus stands on the Word – singular and complete – of God. This Word is not a text, but an address which nam1es Jesus as “Son”. This has just been announced at his baptism – “This is my Son, the Beloved” – and Jesus answers by being as a son. This sonship, this foundational identity, is the ground on which Jesus’ stands against these temptations. (Jesus’ situation is not different from Adam’s, not stronger because of our confession about his special relationship to God. Jesus’ divinity springs from the word of the Father, from his confidence as a human being in God. It is because he trusts this word that he is, in the end, the Word [John 1].)

And so it is precisely in relation to Jesus’ identity that the first two temptations begin: “If you are the Son of God, then…” Satan here seeks to reinterpret the meaning of this divine sonship for its consequences: “If you are the Son, could you not…?” In a sense, the challenge is: is it enough simply to be the Son of God; what shall you do about it?

The basic contrast between the two temptation stories, then, is that the first Adam fails to stand upon the sustaining word of God, and this word alone – “you are mine” – whereas the second Adam, clings to that word, overcoming the fundamental temptation to let go of the Word, and is the one who prevails.

This way of characterising these testings is helpful in that it gives us a different way of understanding what is at stake in temptation. In both stories giving in to the temptations is, ultimately, unnecessary. To put it most starkly, it is integral to the Christian understanding of command and obedience that is that sin is unnecessary.

Adam and Eve already have all that is necessary to be Adam and Eve. In their sin, which is a seeking of more than is required, they actually lose themselves because they lose that relationship of giving and receiving, of address and response, of trust between themselves and God by becoming the judges of God: “Did God say?”

By contrast Jesus, in resisting temptation, in refusing to grasp after the divine or to prove or test his identity (Philippians 2), is in the end still completely himself. There was nothing in what he was offered in the wilderness which could add to his identity before God. Bread from stone, swan dives off the Temple and the possession of all worldly power are unnecessary for Jesus to be in right relation to the God who sent him, for him to be his complete self. The address at his baptism has sustained him – “you are my son” – and continues to be true, despite his not having yielded to the testings of the devil.

As we heard in our reading from Paul this morning, he sees in Adam and Jesus two figures who are all-encapsulating of humankind. Paul draws a connection between Adam and Jesus, such that in Eden and then in the wilderness beyond the Jordan we have the First Adam, and the Last Adam, the First Man and the Last Man (cf. 1 Corinthians 15.45). Each is comprehensive of us all: Adam, in his being (with Eve!) the progenitor of all, and in his bequeathing the deathly effects of sin to all; and Jesus in the way in which those effects are stopped in their tracks, first in his own experience and then, by the grace of God, as a gift for all.

Yet the contrast is not simply between an obedient person and a disobedient one. The contrast is between one who is happy to rest in his identity as spoken by God and whose actions reflect such peace with himself and with God, and one who is not at peace with this identity, and acts to re-create himself. For Jesus, tempted at precisely the point of his relationship to God, this identity is sufficient: bread is not enough, but the Word of God; do not tempt God; worship God alone. For Adam having all that he needs is not enough – how much better to become like God.

The bad news in this story is Paul’s observation that we bear a family resemblance with Adam. We are the Adamsons and share his lack of satisfaction in our identity as the image of God.

The good news is that a new image of God is given – a new humanity – which is Jesus the Christ, given as a reality as far-reaching in its effects for us as Adam has been in his sin.

The way to the cross we shall follow over the coming weeks is the kind of path we have to take in a world of Adams and Eves, if we are growing into the conviction that God’s naming of us is more important than our own namings, God’s aspirations for us more important than our own. This, paradoxically, is the path we must take if we are be to free. In the story of Jesus, as distinct from that of Adam, we see that kind of freedom, and we will hear that the declaration of “sonship” to which Jesus clung is also made to us: behold the manner of the Father’s love, that the Adamsons might yet be declared the children of God!

With that declaration – with God’s declaring to us, “You are my daughter, you are my son” – comes the testing of our confidence in that identity. For each of us, personally and as a community, those temptations will take a different specific shape but they will have the content, “If you are the son of God, if you are the daughter of God, do you not need to…?” The If implies the Then, the necessity.

Yet, when the tempting thought comes to mind, the question should be, “Will I be less if I don’t? Will I be more – really more – if I do?” What life and freedoms might be had instead with moderation, or abstinence, or mercy, or chastity, or humility, or generosity, or… whatever other options also lie before me in this particular case? We are free to want many things; temptation begins when we begin to imagine that a want is a need, that selfishness, unchastity, pride or greediness might become necessary.

We will not always be confident whether we are dealing with needs or wants, that one action or another is the “right” response in our situation. But even here we are simply to hear the gospel again. As with Adam, so also again now – everything which matters is already yours, and for Adam’s children now belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God (cf. 1 Corinthians 3.22f).

In this identity, we are already led from the force of temptation, saved in the time of trial, for God – the most fundamental of all needs – is already ours.

For the gospel of the Christ who triumphed in the face of hard testing, and for the grace of God which allows that his triumph might become ours, all thanks be to God, now and forever. Amen.

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Ash Wednesday
1/3/2017

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

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Excerpt from Clement of Alexandria

…as true children of the light, let us raise our eyes and look on the light, lest the Lord discover us to be spurious, as the sun does the eagles. Let us therefore repent, and pass from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to wisdom, from licentiousness to self-restraint, from unrighteousness to righteousness, from godlessness to God.

It is an enterprise of noble daring to take our way to God; and the enjoyment of many other good things is within the reach of the lovers of righteousness, who pursue eternal life, specially those things to which God Himself alludes, speaking by Isaiah: “There is an inheritance for those who serve the LORD.” Noble and desirable is this inheritance: not gold, not silver, not raiment, which the moth assails, and things of earth which are assailed by the robber, whose eye is dazzled by worldly wealth; but it is that treasure of salvation to which we must hasten, by becoming lovers of the Word. Thence praise-worthy works descend to us, and fly with us on the wing of truth.

This is the inheritance with which the eternal covenant of God invests us, conveying the everlasting gift of grace; and thus our loving Father—the true Father—ceases not to exhort, admonish, train, love us. For He ceases not to save, and advises the best course: “Become righteous,” says the Lord. You that thirst, come to the water; and you that have no money, come, and buy and drink without money. He invites to the laver, to salvation, to illumination, all but crying out and saying, The land I give thee, and the sea, my child, and heaven too; and all the living creatures in them I freely bestow upon thee. Only, O child, thirst for your Father; God shall be revealed to you without price; the truth is not made merchandise of. He gives you all creatures that fly and swim, and those on the land. These the Father has created for your thankful enjoyment.

What the bastard, who is a son of perdition, foredoomed to be the slave of mammon, has to buy for money, He assigns to you as your own, even to His own son who loves the Father; for whose sake He still works, and to whom alone He promises, saying, “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity,” for it is not destined to corruption. “For the whole land is mine;” and it is yours too, if you receive God.

Wherefore the Scripture, as might have been expected, proclaims good news to those who have believed. “The saints of the Lord shall inherit the glory of God and His power.” What glory, tell me, O blessed One, which “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man;” and “they shall be glad in the kingdom of their Lord for ever and ever! Amen.”

You have, O [people], the divine promise of grace; you have heard, on the other hand, the threatening of punishment: by these the Lord saves, teaching men by fear and grace. Why do we delay? Why do we not shun the punishment? Why do we not receive the free gift? Why, [in conclusion], do we not choose the better part, God instead of the evil one, and prefer wisdom to idolatry, and take life in exchange for death? “Behold,” He says, “I have set before your face death and life.” The Lord tries you, that “you may choose life.”

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Transfiguration
26/2/2017

Exodus 24:12-18
Psalm 99
Matthew 17:1-9

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“We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made…”

That’s quite a mouthful, is it not? And it is a somewhat contested mouthful. The fact that we actually have that stream of affirmations in our creed springs from controversies which crystalised in the fourth century and which have never really died down.

Today the question as to whether such statements about Jesus can make much sense is still answered in the negative as much in the church as out of it. Those outside the church, and outside any “religious” conviction, reject the notion of God to begin with, so that ascribing divine function to Jesus is simply something which need not be done. For many in the church, however, along with many people of other religious confessions, what is affirmed about Jesus in the creed must not be done. The creed goes too far, reducing God to one time and place; it obscures the truth of God by making God too small and obscures the truth of the world by making parts of it too big.

There is much which should be said about this but, rather than go into the kind of detail which would keep us here for most of next week, let’s come at the question of who Jesus is from the response of the disciples to the voice which is said to have addressed them in the Transfiguration episode in our gospel reading this morning. From a bright cloud a voice says, This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased, listen to him. “When the disciples heard this”, we are told, “they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.”

Taking this as read, a question: Why are they afraid? The obvious answer – always the answer about which to be most suspicious – is the religious experience itself: a bright cloud that speaks to you, presumably in a booming, resounding, Monty Python kind of way, is probably something which would give anyone the shakes. But this is not a very interesting answer, not much more than that loud noises make us jump, and who’s to say that the brightness of the cloud wasn’t lightning and the voice just thunder interpreted with zealous imagination?

An alternative account of the disciples’ fear, and a much more interesting one, is not that the cloud speaks but what it actually says: This is my son, the beloved, listen to him. Again, there is enough in this little snippet to keep us going for quite a while but let’s narrow it down to just one suggestion: that the emphasis in this declaration falls on the first word – “This is my son, the beloved, listen to him”. At least, the confession of the church about Jesus, such as we find in the creed, reads the emphasis on that first word.

This being the case the fear or (another translation) the amazement of the disciples is not that God has addressed them but that God has declared that Jesus is the Beloved, the one in whom the law and the prophets meet, the one who should be heard: this one, listen to him.

What is the amazing thing here? It is that God might be fully present in such a totally unexpected place; from the perspective of Easter, it is that God might be found in one who has been crucified. It is one thing to bump into God on a high hill, which is where God’s are supposed to be; it is another thing altogether to bump into God in something as ordinary as a Jesus who not only looks just to be one of us but who, on the cross, comes to look to be much less than most of us: godless and discarded.

This is a problem not simply for those who do cannot recite the creed, but for many of us who can. There is not usually much fear and trembling in the church along the lines of what those mountaintop disciples felt, rare appreciation of what it means to say that God comes as close to us as he does in the Jesus who will be crucified. Ironically, this is probably because we happen to say so often that such closeness is in fact what the incarnation was all about. It is very easy for the Transfiguration, the incarnation, the cross to become “facts” about Jesus which cease to do to us what they did to those who stood on the mountaintop or watched their flocks by night or met the risen, crucified Lord for the first time.

For this reason, our creeds can sound a bit hollow even to those of us who happily recite them. This ought not to surprise us – it is the way of things that familiarity breeds indifference, even contempt. But it teaches us also the nature of a creed or confession of faith, which is not that (or only) that it is “objectively true”, but that it has about it the character of a prayer. The creeds end with “Amen”. Having, in the recitation, affirmed what the church has always held, we say, “Amen”, “Let it be so”. Let it be, by the power of the Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, that we enter more fully into the reality in which Jesus embodies the fullness of God from God, light from light, that we might know God as he does.

In effect, to recite the creed is to ask that we might come to see God as those few disciples on the mountaintop did, however fleetingly.

To recite the creed as a prayer is to allow what it declares in fact to be strange. It is to allow the strangeness of the Transfiguration to stay strange, and not to seek to explain it away simply as fantasy or post-Easter invention or, what is just as bad, simply to believe out of piety that it happened.

The experience of those few disciples on that mountaintop was as fleeting as it was extraordinary. It was a glimpse of the “extraordinary ordinary” which Jesus embodied, the presence of God in a discard, crucified human life, the promise that nothing can come between us and a God who names even such a one as “my Beloved”.

“My Beloved” is what God sees each one of us to be, through the lens of Jesus. That Jesus participates in the heart of God in the ordinariness of a human life and even in the catastrophe of the cross is the basis of our confidence that we might, too, have a share in that divine heart; and it is the basis of loving those who look like they probably don’t have such a share.

Let us, then, heed that cloudy voice: Listen to him, that we might all know ourselves to be loved by God, and love all those whom God loves.

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Epiphany 7
19/2/2017

Leviticus 19:1, 2, 9-18
Psalm 119:33-40
Matthew 5:38-48

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Most of us are familiar with the trick question about what happens when an irresistible force encounters an immovable object. In our gospel reading today we hear something of the same kind of intrinsic contradiction: do not resist an evil doer but love your enemies.

Though it can also be used in much shallower ways, with the word “love” we a deep gift passing between people; it is within this richer scope that Jesus uses the term here. The word enemy, on the other hand, is such a strong one that we almost seem to avoid using it in our culture; it is more a story-book word, or something which someone else – usually a long way away – might use about us more than we about them. Nevertheless, despite some squeamishness we might have about the word, we feel the clash in Jesus’ injunction, “love your enemies”.

These are the fifth and sixth in a series of “…but I say to you…” intensifications of the legal tradition we have been hearing over the last few weeks. Yet these two seem to have a different character about them. The other intensifications have been about my approach to world around me; these ones are about my very being. Enemies are a threat to me; they challenge my right to be as I am.

Because of this difference, the question which arises in us in response to today’s injunctions is different from that of the previous ones. We have heard in the last couple of weeks that dismissing another person out of hand is a kind of murder, that reducing people in our minds to objects of sexual gratification is a kind of adultery, that swearing oaths is a kind of dishonesty. And the challenge there – noting its virtual impossibility – seems to be that we improve our performance in such things: that we become more moral people. Of course, there is nothing at all wrong with that, attempted in the grace of God.

But this is not the case with the command to love our enemies, because now things are reversed: we are the ones being dismissed out of hand – killed in someone’s heart, who are reduced to an object as an object of another’s lust, who are deceived with half-truths. While Jesus has already said that we are not to do such things, we now are asked to “love” – to bless, to pray for – those who behave in such ways, or worse, towards us.

How does that work?

If we mean by this question, How does this improve our situation?, then we will find no satisfactory answer. Loving our enemies in the way that Jesus describes is not a political strategy. It is not a means to peace or reconciliation, such that if I do this loving thing in a situation of opposition then that beneficial outcome will be the result. Loving our enemies is not a means to a social, political end. Meekness is not a method towards a better world. Paraphrasing the philosopher of Ecclesiastes, someone has observed that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet! Those who love their enemies will often see no benefits; the meek are often crushed. Loving our enemies does not “work” at all. Is this not the meaning of Christ on the cross, that the system cannot be fixed by its own logic?

If there is a logic in loving our enemies it is strictly a theo-logic of this particular God. St Paul writes: while we were weak, Christ died for the ungodly; while we still were sinners, Christ died for us; while we were enemies God reconciled us through the death of his Son (Romans 5). Even here, there is no mechanism by which Jesus’ refusal to resist his enemies brings peace. God’s triumph in Jesus is that Jesus did not let his likely death on the cross define him, but rather was defined by God himself, the source of life. Jesus’ life, his path to the cross and his resurrection are signs which point to where true life is to be found, and signs of how deathly some apparently life-giving things are.

Such a way of life may or may not effect peace in our little time and space, but that is not the point for us as Christian disciples. The point is becoming “children of your Father in heaven”, becoming in our living towards all others as God has been towards us. Learning to love those who oppose us springs from a recognition that any enmity between us and God was also an enmity between us and others. If we have been forgiven our opposition to God, we have been forgiven our opposition to others, and now we are to be towards others as we confess God has been towards us. In this we become more God-like.

The command to love our enemies is not about changing our enemies. It is about being changed ourselves. It is about our not being defined by our enemies’ claim on us or rejection of us but being defined by God’s claim and embrace. It is about not being defined by the threat of death in any of its forms, but being defined by the gift of life in the promise of a love to which death is no barrier.

And, to acknowledge the usual objection here, loving our enemies is not about being voiceless doormats. It is not about refusing to challenge injustice and “alternative facts”. We are to resist all untruth precisely because we refuse to allow that the death with which others might threaten us has a stronger claim than the life that God gives. Love speaks the truth.

In the end, turning the other cheek and praying for our enemies is about knowing ourselves as children of the God who will, in the end, claim as children all people upon whom he sends sun and rain. Our confession is that in the end God will triumph, that all who hunger for righteousness and need for mercy will receive it.

We are not defined by the brokenness of a world which constantly turns hearts away from each other but by the triumph of the God in whom, whichever way we turn, we find ourselves facing him in his perfecting, reconciling love.

Let us then, seek ever to grow in love for all God’s children, reflecting the perfection of our heavenly Father.

Amen.

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Epiphany 6
12/2/2017

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Psalm 119:1-2, 105-6, 110-112
Matthew 5:21-37

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Our reading from Deuteronomy is Moses’ summing up of his presentation of the commandments and statutes of God for the people of Israel, on the eve of their crossing into the Promised Land. With that summary comes the call: choose the life with God which comes with obedience to this instruction.

Presented in this way, it is tempting to imagine that this life is constructed out of sheer observance of these commandments, that such observance creates the foundation upon which we might stand before God, or ties God to us. Perhaps it is possible to live such a life; certainly a great many have attempted it and we have all probably greatly benefited from such attempts.

But, in what looks like a direct parallel with Moses’ delivery of the law and call of God, Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount immeasurably multiplies or intensifies or fills the space between the commandments: “You have heard that it was said… but I say to you…” For all of the appeal which Jesus the Teacher has for modern minds, in contrast to the dogmatised Jesus, in fact Jesus the teacher is a real hard-liner. Murder is not just about the knife but thinking about the knife; adultery is not about keeping your hands to yourself but about actually becoming aware that you probably ought to keep your hands to yourself.

In these examples, and many more which aren’t listed, Jesus effectively makes it impossible to fulfil the law, to do or to be in the right way. But if it is impossible, this does not mean “don’t try”; Jesus is serious here about the nature of murder, adultery, truth telling and whatever else he might have added to the list.

So where do we stand? How can we move, righteously?

The simple, and common, solution, is simply to let ourselves off the hook. This is to imagine that impossible is impossible and that we have done enough identifiable good to impress God or anyone else we think we need to impress.

Yet this does not deliver to us certainty, and the moral life is typically lived with a view to certainty. We will still wonder whether we have been wise enough, or strong enough, whether our “enough” corresponds to God’s “enough”. There is here, finally, really only uncertainty – before God and before each other; I cannot know in advance whether I will have a (moral) leg to stand on.

There is, then, no gospel heard here, only the kind of “have I done enough?” uncertainty which comes with any attempt to live a complex human life according to a moral code, whether that code be simple or complex.

The “…but I say to you…” on Jesus’ lips is not the gospel; it is the signal that we need the gospel. We must keep in mind that those who hear these words – then and now – are told at the very beginning: blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. We are such ones when we learn the extent of the command of God and are stopped short by its impossibility. Then we stand as those Jesus names: the unworthy poor in spirit; those who mourn or are meek – who are unable to effect for themselves the things they need. The blessedness of these ones is not in what they lack, but in that their only hope – the grace of God to provide – is promised them.

The intensity of Jesus’ teaching continues in the passages which follows our text for today until, the end of chapter six, we hear, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry”! After declaring the righteous life to be significantly more difficult than any of us wants it to be, “Do not worry!” Why? Do not worry, for your heavenly Father knows what you need, you poor in spirit, you meek, you who thirst for righteousness, who long for mercy and peace.

Christian discipleship takes very seriously the call to a devout, holy, moral life. Jesus does not intensify the commandments to dismiss them; not one jot or tittle of the law is lost, he declares. Learning not to objectify others for our own ends or gratification, not to deceive or covet or envy – this is part of what it means to be in Christ.

It is just that “to be in Christ” is the starting point from which we enter into that renewed moral life. The first thing to seek is the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, and everything else God calls for is then added to us. The moral life, lived outside of this grace, leads to the crucifixion because it does not know the freedom of the children of God. The moral life which lives out of the resurrection leaves moral fear behind and lives forward out of gratitude for the gift of life we did not think to ask for. In this way our weekly, or daily, prayer begins to be answered: as in Jesus himself, so also in us, God’s kingdom comes, earth begins to look a little more like heaven.

To come to Christian faith is to begin to realise that we already loved and desired by God as his children. This is not something we can earn; we can only have our eyes opened up to it.

This is a comfort, a righteousness, a mercy, a life we cannot rightly expect, and yet it is there for us to take.

Let us, then, choose life: the divinely command life of the free children of God, that we might enter ever more richly into the land, the life, which God promises.

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Epiphany 5
5/2/2017

Isaiah 58:1-12
Psalm 112
1 Corinthians 2:1-5
Matthew 5:13-20

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A little while back, having become more pressingly aware that I’m now more than “half-way” through a reasonable life expectancy and that I really ought to begin to pay more attention to matters of exercise and diet, I decided that I’d try a more protein-rich breakfast of baked beans, with the further refinement that it would beans with no added salt.

Now, the thing about baked beans with no added salt is that they taste like…someone forgot to add the salt.

As it is with baked beans, so it is also with the church: “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt loses its saltiness, what use is it to anyone?

“You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus tells the disciples, “You are the light of the world.” These are extraordinarily high estimations of his disciples – and of us who follow after them.

Precisely what being salt and light is is constantly debated. A quick glance through the letters to the editor in this month’s Crosslight will reveal the Uniting Church’s own utter confusion and thorough-going disagreement about the matter.

A typical reading of what Jesus says here is to moralise his declaration. Here we take his description of his followers and turn it into an imperative: be salty, be illuminating. Perhaps this is unavoidable but a common move here is to imagine that to be salty or illuminating is to set a moral example.

The trouble is that it is well proven that Christians are quite capable of being outshone in the moral stakes. This knowledge can lead us on to what seems like a kind of humility: to deny that the followers of Jesus are salt and light – something we feel we have to do for Jesus’ own sake.

And yet, Jesus is as uncompromising here as elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount. “You are the salt of the earth”, not “you could be a kind of salt of the earth”

By themselves the metaphors of salt and light don’t get us very far, with the result that we have to read into them some other content which “feels” like it might correspond to the characteristics Jesus speaks about here.

Can we be more precise about what it is which makes the followers of Jesus distinctive, such that they might indeed be the salt, the light?

We find a clue in our reading from St Paul this morning: his characterisation of Christian proclamation as a determination to know “only Christ crucified”.

An exegetical principle which the Scriptures sometimes use and which is still useful today is to bring together two texts which touch on the same matter and yet describe it quite differently. Thus, Jesus speaks of the distinctiveness of his disciples in terms of salt and light, and St Paul speaks of the distinctiveness of the Christian as “knowing only Christ crucified”.

What drops out of this is a surprising content of what it means to be salt and light: that to know Christ crucified is to be salt and light.

But how can this work? As Jesus speaks to his disciples in our gospel text, the crucifixion has not yet happened. How can it be that he is telling them that their part as salt and light in the world is that they know him to have been crucified?

This makes no sense historically or chronologically, but the gospels are not historical documents in that way. They are post-Easter documents. The church which writes them and receives them knows that the Jesus who speaks here will be crucified. The consequence of this teaching is already known to them, and to us.

But this is not to say that we can generalise the lesson now, that the people who say and do the kinds of things which Jesus said and did might get themselves killed. This is certainly true, and we see plenty of examples of it all over the place.

At the heart of this matter is a truth much more poignant than that. Those whom Jesus addresses here will participate in the tragedy of the crucifixion, contributing to its tragic character. One of them will betray him, and most of the rest will abandon him in fear and finally, despair. This is not the generic truth that the good will likely get crushed; it is the appalling truth in the instance of Jesus that the good is be crushed by the “good”.

So Jesus is saying to those who will betray him and abandon him: you are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world, you who have seen but not comprehended, you who have looked but not understood.

We are a long way now from a moralistic reading of the text, or the other readings of Christian vocation you’ll find in Crosslight’s letters to the editor.

You, who are likely to betray or abandon God – you are the salt of the earth, the light of the world.

How does that work? It works in that here we meet the truth about ourselves and the truth about God. The church which wrote these texts, which continues to read them and to meet itself and God in them, is the church which knows that it is not in any measurable way the salt or the light of the world. The wisdom and strength of what the church confesses are not recognisable as wisdom and strengths.

To know Christ crucified is to know our part in the crucifixion. It is to confess that we, too, could probably do that or, more to the point, that there are more than a few little crucifixions going on even now, that we might live and be as we are.

But the knowledge of Christ crucified is not a guilt trip. Jesus does name those disciples – and us – as the salt and the light. This is because with the knowledge of failure comes the knowledge that our failures are outflanked by God’s unmeasurable grace. This is what we mark each week as we gather around the table. There we receive the sign of the body of God broken by God’s people but made by God a breaking for us: a revelation of the extent and fullness of forgiveness this God offers.

To borrow from what we heard form Micah last week (Micah 6.8), we live in a world where a little justice is thought to be enough, kindness is thought to be dangerous and humility the way of fools. This is not new, for it was the same sense for right and wrong which imagined crucifying Jesus to be the best outcome all round.

To be salt and light in such a world is to share in its brokenness but, at the same time, to be pointing to, growing into, and embodying for the world the triumph of God over sin and brokenness on behalf of the sinful and the broken.

To be the salt and light of the world, then, is to inhabit the strange place between the fully comprehended cry for mercy and the fully felt song of thanksgiving. This is the habitat of a Christian spirituality, a Christian worldliness, until our comprehension is complete, and our thanksgiving is heart-felt.

By the grace of God, may we grow in such understanding and experience, and so as salt and light, to God’s glory and to our own richer humanity.

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Epiphany 4
29/1/2017

Micah 6:1-8
Psalm 15
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Matthew 5:1-12

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³ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
⁴ ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
⁵ ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
⁶ ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
⁷ ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
⁸ ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
⁹ ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
¹⁰ ‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
¹¹ ‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. ¹²Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (NRSV)              

Really? Are the unworthy, the grief-ridden, the humble “blessed”? Perhaps this depends on what we think “blessed” means but, on the face of it, blessedness scarcely seems to fit those who’ve suffered tragedy, suppression, want – for those, we might say, who live in the midst of death.

Certainly, such a designation of blessedness makes no sense if the link between brokenness and blessing is conditional: “if you are poor, then you will inherit”. This would be to say that comfort is an automatic outcome of grief, and even to imply that grief or poverty might be a means to comfort or riches – a kind of emotional or political “technology” which delivers to us the things which we really need or want.

This is nonsense, both in our normal experience and in relation to God.

The link between the presence of death in the condition of need and its contradiction in the inheritance of all things, or comfort or a vision of the divine (etc.), is not a “natural” one. It is not the way of nature that those who mourn will be comforted, that those who work for peace will in fact see it, that the merciful will receive mercy. Jesus declares, rather, that this is the way of God.

This is to say, then, that the way of God is the overcoming of the many forms of death among us: the way of God is resurrection. The affirmations and anathemas of the Christian faith are as simple as this: we believe in a God who calls order out of chaos, creates out of nothing, brings the dead to life. It is only this which can make sense of the blessedness which Jesus announces here: the kingdom for the unworthy, the world to those powerless to claim it, righteousness for those who hunger and thirst for it.

The only question is: is this simply foolishness? Is there really any reason to step forward again after death strikes?

We do, of course, step forward most of the time, but very often simply because it is the only thing we can do if we don’t want to die ourselves – a kind of defiance of death, if ultimately futile. Yet this is not the blessedness Jesus announces here. The blessed are not the stoic nor the heroic nor the courageous. The blessed are the hopeful. They step forward not because it is the only thing to do apart from dying themselves but because they deny all forms of death their apparent dominion over us.

The blessedness of the unworthy poor in spirit is that God will lift them up. The blessedness of those who mourn is that the day will yet break in their night. The blessedness of those who hunger and thirst for justice is that God will fill them.

This, of course, is not what we usually see, for God is not usually seen in these places. This is why the beatitudes might offend us; they do not seem to tell the truth. But the blessed, the hopeful, are those who, though they cannot see God coming, yet expect that he will and adjust their outlook on the world accordingly. The hopeful see God coming, as if out of nowhere.

That God might come to us in this way is, surely, foolishness and weakness on God’s part. How much better if we knew where God was and how to get to him, or get him to us!

Yet St Paul writes that this is so that none may boast: what God gives is not a matter of our knowledge or power, but of God’s gift. God comes – as if out of nowhere – so that we might know that it is indeed God who has come and not merely some extension of ourselves.

Blessed are they who see more than what is just in front of them, more than what has always been. The blessed are they who expect more than can be rightly expected.

And the blessed are they who, because of what they expect, have begun to reshape their way in the world according to God’s own way: bringing justice where is it not expected, loving the mercy which reconnects, walking in the humility which opens up to all things.

By the grace of God, may we each be found so to be blessed: giving because we have received, comforting because we have been comforted, forgiving because we have been forgiven.

Amen.

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Epiphany 3
22/1/2017

Isaiah 9:1-4
Psalm 27
1 Corinthians 1:10-18
Matthew 4:12-23

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“Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” This is the reason the disciples are called: in order to catch others.

But one of the first things you notice about fishing is that fish don’t like being caught! The fish in the net – even more so the one on the line – is caught up in a life-and-death struggle.

This is often what it feels like to be evangelised – whether it’s the cold call at the front door by two charming and well-dressed young Mormons or the preacher pushing a little too hard at those who’ve already taken the bait. We sense the threat of an end to the kind of life we think is our right.

The assumption here, of course, is that we have not already been caught by some other angler, considerably less conspicuous than the religious nutters we avoid or try not to be.

That assumption, however, is not a very safe one.

In fact, we are all fish in a broad ocean and on the shores there stand myriads of people, institutions and forces casting lines to hook us in. The political upheavals of last year were precisely processes of “fishing for people”, as is every more or less democratic process. Democracy is not a matter of freely thinking people thinking freely about who they want to vote for; it is a matter of casting bait in the form of visions and promises which flash in the water to catch our eye, to land us in this basket and not that one.

In the same way, the engine of our consumer society is advertising with the goal of creating further consumption. This is, again, precisely a “fishing” expedition, whether takes the form of sale leaflets in the letter box, cold calls on the telephone or billboards on the highway featuring pretty young things who seem to need to wear fewer clothes when drinking a particular drink, driving a particular car or holding a particular phone: “bait”

Sometimes we recognise the lures, and swim around them, but the truth is that we are all already caught, each one of us, in things which enslave us, not least the delusion that we are free and that it is our right to be free in this particular way.

Our existence, then, is not threatened by the fact that someone might be fishing for us with the hook of some purportedly good news; to have hooks in front of our noses is simply part of what it means to exist. The question which matters is, Who or what is fishing for us, and is it for our own good?

Evangelism is a struggle of life and death. But if indeed it is “evangelism” – literally the bringing of good news – then the life-and-death struggle is not that of a fish which is being dragged from life to death. Rather, if the gospel is good news, the evangelist drags her catch from death into life. It is against life that we struggle.

What, then, is this life?

It is what we see in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who also wanders the shores of our lives and calls us also to follow, and to fish.

In Jesus we see a person whose life is contained not in the net in which some passing power has caught him, but in the God who sent him, calls him and justifies him. He lives precisely in the midst of us, and wholly for – unto – us, but without the entanglement of the things which have caught us – those things over which he constantly clashed with the religious authorities. Jesus lived freedom for others, a God-mediated life.

But a life lived like that is more than the world can bear, which is precisely why he did clash with the powers. And so, in the end, Jesus is himself hooked: hooked on a cross cast into the river of the water of life, wrenched out of the life of God’s kingdom into the death which comes with every other dominion, and left to end his story gasping on the shore.

And that would be the end of the story but for the power of God which takes the weakness of Jesus’ humility and the foolishness of his trust of God and reasserts him in the resurrection: this is how we are to live before God and before each other.

It is only resurrection – the power of God – which can haul us back into life, for the dead can’t even bite down on a hook which will lift them up. Salvation can be had only through gift – the giving of something which we could not make or earn or buy for ourselves. Perhaps evangelism, then, is more a matter of nets than of hooks.

But however we model it, it becomes imperative that we hear the good news, and speak it.

St Paul asks,

…how are they to call on one in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in one of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him? And how are they to proclaim him unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” (Romans 10)

Our message is one which looks weak and sounds foolish – that God’s claim on us is a gift of life. We really only half-believe it within the churches, if even that. How could be that, for all of our other wisdom and power, for all of our planning and budgeting and strategising, the humility of Jesus and the power of God are the things we need most? This is the question the gospel poses.

“Follow me”, Jesus said, “and I will make you fish for people”.
“And immediately they left their nets and followed him.”

Here we find our light and our salvation (Psalm 27.1).

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Epiphany 2
15/1/2017

Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 40
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
John 1:29-42

Sermon preached by Dr Michael Champion

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‘I came that he might be revealed to Israel’. We are in the glorious season of revelation. But revelation is dangerous. With the coming of Jesus, we were confronted by the massacre of the innocents. Last week we heard of the baptism of Jesus, which threw him into a chaotic world. And today’s revealer, John the Baptist, will soon be brutally beheaded. For revelation offends and threatens.

First, it offends reason because it puts a mere person where reason demands a universal principle. ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ – Jesus, a particular man in a particular time and place, not the pure, eternal Being of natural religion. And historical revelation like this is chancy, contingent, unpredictable, and therefore unreasonable since unjust. Why should God be there and not here, then and not now, with you and not me? Second, divine revelation offends and threatens both the powerful and the reasonable. A Herod or a Hume can only see it as an abusive act of power. A revealed God, in this view, threatens worldly authority and forecloses debate and exploration. So-called revealed truths, then, are mere claims to power, attempts to put religious claims (and religious professionals) beyond rational challenge. And third, revelation offends against individual choice and self-determination. I know myself best, and know best what is good for me. And if I am religiously inclined, then I know best what sort of relationship I have with God. Who are you to tell me who God is, and what that means for me? And John, of course, presumes to reveal Jesus not just to people, but to a people, to Israel, not just to individuals.

One can’t help but think that John would have met as sticky an end today as he did back then, and not only if he brought his proclamation to the churches. Revelation offends. It’s unreasonable, an act of abusive religious power, and a scandal in a world where individuals determine what they believe and who they are, in the absence of authoritative communities, institutions, or traditions.

But today’s gospel, as always, reframes and relativises these modern objections. The first thing to say is that revelation has nothing to do with additional knowledge. John repeatedly insists that he does not know Jesus. ‘I myself did not know him…but I came baptising that he might be revealed’. ‘I saw the spirit descending and abiding in him’; but immediately thereafter ‘I myself did not know him’.

Certainly, John testifies that Jesus is the divine Son because the Father reveals that Jesus is the divine bearer of the Holy Spirit. But that is to say that in lives open to God like John’s, it is possible to recognise, if not to comprehend, the divine presence. Just so, as the Evangelist famously proclaims elsewhere, we receive power to become children of God. Revelation, then, invites us to change the way we live. It is not the pouring of new knowledge into an unwilling subject. Still less is it God setting himself up as another powerful agent in the world, since God is freely beyond such human strife. So it cannot be the forceful deployment of special knowledge battling reason.

What John points to, and what we recognise by grace, is God freely offering himself to the world. So to experience revelation is to experience divine freedom. Revelation is God freely giving himself to us, as far as possible. But even to begin to imagine such unlimited divine freedom and eternal desire for relationship, is to be overwhelmed by the radical gap between finite minds and the reality of divine fullness. (‘He was before me, he ranks ahead of me’, says John, in cosmic understatement). Revelation draws the mind into the presence of God, where it recognises its limitations, its weakness, and its ignorance, in the face of the divine glory in which it nonetheless shares.

For revelation puts the lie to the fiction that we are the best judges of ourselves, and that we can know all there is to know, about ourselves, about others, and about the world. In the light of God, we find ourselves laid bare and placed under an infinitely loving judgement that changes our lives in a way no universal principle ever could. ‘God is more intimate to me than I myself’, as Augustine had it. Our fantasies about ourselves are stripped away and replaced by the vision of God: by the just, forgiving, merciful scrutiny of the God who loves us and takes our sins upon himself. ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’. Beholding God means recognising our sins, and recognising the redemption of our sins by the peaceful Lamb. For the one who identifies sins mercifully forgives them, and compassionately takes them on himself. He will strengthen us to the end, that we may be blameless in the light of his coming. For the one who baptizes by the Holy Spirit thereby draws us into the life of God.

The key is that the revelation of God is just so the revelation of creation. In the revelation of God, the truth of the world – both its radical distance from the transcendent God, and its radical value in God’s eyes – is revealed. In the sight of God, we become our true selves. As Paul has it, ‘those sanctified in Christ Jesus [are] called to be saints’, those in whom the light of God’s glory shines.

So John becomes the baptizer because of the divine self-revelation of Jesus. And we see this dynamic again at work when the first disciples have the Lamb of God revealed to them. ‘Behold the Lamb of God’, proclaims John. And immediately when ‘the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus’. The revelation of God makes us change our lives. More, it gives us a new, renewed identity. Andrew announces to Simon that ‘We have found the Messiah’, and when Simon too comes into the Messiah’s presence, he receives his true identity. ‘You are to be called Cephas’, the rock on which the body of Christ is built.

Revelation, then, entails relationship with God, recognition of sin, wonder at forgiveness, and disrupted and graciously restored identity. In revelation, we come up against the transcendent closeness of the God who can never be comprehended, even as he knows us intimately.

This gulf between us and the God who comes close impels us to follow him. ‘Where are you staying?’ ask the disciples, a perfectly ordinary question with a terrifyingly gracious answer. ‘Come and see’, Jesus commands, again revealing the divine desire to be in personal relationship with his creatures. ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’. But we know too that when the disciples do follow him, they look towards the central revelation of John’s gospel, the glory of the cross. ‘Where I am going you cannot follow now; but you will afterward’.

We began with three offenses: revelation’s irrationality, its lust for power, and its denial of self-determination. But today’s gospel renders these offenses trivial. Self-determination is replaced with the possibility of growing into a vision of our true selves revealed by a loving God who knows us better than we ever could ourselves. Revelation reveals our own destructive lusts of power, but is no more and no less than the invitation to see the world as it truly is, sin redeemed by the merciful Lamb, sparkling with the glory of God. And since revelation is not the addition of new facts, it is not in conflict with reason anyway. In fact, it can readily enough be rejected, and often enough is. Being presented with one’s true identity, and with the manifold ways we lie to ourselves about it, is not exactly comfortable. We know the truth of the Psalmist’s fear of turning away from God towards the desolate pit.

And yet it is certain comfort and delight to behold ourselves in God’s loving gaze. For in all this, we see that Jesus is his own revelation. He is the forgiving, just, merciful, Lamb of God. He reveals himself in loving, compassionate, and equitable relationship with us. Come, taste and see that the Lord is good.

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Epiphany 1
8/1/2017

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Matthew 3:13-17

Sermon preached by Rev. Rod Horsfield

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Introduction:             Remember when going to church meant putting on your best clothes.  Some people even had things in their wardrobe that were classified “Sunday best.” Times have changed and people dress more casually not only for going to church but also for the opera. But while fashions may change, civility and gentility are still the marks of the usual church crowd. “Respectable” might still be the word to describe a congregation of Jesus’ disciples today.

Many of us are so used to church being like that, that we’ve come to expect that’s what the crowd that Jesus mixed with was like. But come with me into Matthew’s world and let me show you a different scenario.

1. The Crowd: There is a prophet out in the desert preaching a fiery message of repentance because the Kingdom of God is about to break in on their tired old world.  Everyone is going out to see him. People from Jerusalem and all over Judea are gathering by the Jordan River to listen to this radical preacher and you wouldn’t believe who was going down into that muddy old river to get their sins washed away!!  Pharisees and Sadducees – who are strictly religious and rigorously keep the law. But look closely and see large numbers of ordinary working people. These groups do not usually associate, but today they march together into the desert along with soldiers and the Temple security guards; mothers and prostitutes, tradies and business men as well as those publicans who work to keep their Roman masters happy.

The pious and the profane are here, blue collar and white – what a sight! This human throng, this motley crew, all coming out to hear the announcement by a wild prophet of the coming of God’s kingdom. And to make sure that they are part of it when it comes, they were baptized by John in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

2. Jesus stands with them: And there in the water, waiting, stands Jesus. He goes along with the crowd. He jostled his way to the Jordan side by side with all the rest of this motley collection of humanity. Jesus did not ask for a private baptism. He did not wait until everyone else had gone, nor did he disdain the crowd. He comes down with them, stands in the mire and the muck, shoulder to shoulder with prostitute and Pharisee, soldier and Sadducee, standing in solidarity with all who confess their sins. With them, he too receives a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

His sins? Jesus confessing his sins?  Has Matthew made a mistake in his story? But right here, at the beginning of his ministry Jesus takes a stand. He stands with the crowd – in solidarity with us sinners.  It surprises us – it shocked John the Baptist. Matthew reports, John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ And would we prevent him as well?   We look around at the people we have to deal with and wonder about the wisdom of Jesus getting too involved with that crowd.

3. A Story: There is an incident in our family story that has almost attained the status of myth. We recall it when we get together on family occasions: “Do you remember the day when we went mud sliding?” And everyone laughs – of course we remember. We were on holidays in May on Westernport Bay and it was one of those grey, mild, autumn days Melbourne sometimes has. It had been raining quite heavily when Andrew, our youngest, came running in from the beach and said he had found a great place for a mud slide. So, being a bit bored with the weather we followed him to the side of a bank on the beach where the water had run down exposing the soil. The two boys went first and began tentatively to slide down the hill. Before long I had joined them and we spent an hour or so becoming ever more daring and inventive in finding ways to slide down the muddy hill.

When we had enough we were, as you could imagine, covered in mud. We couldn’t go back to the house like this, so we ran across the beach and into the water. We frolicked there washing off as much of the mud as we could before taking off our jeans and tops and having a swim, come wash in the sea.

Then we walked back to the house in our underwear with our clothes wrapped around us as best we could. We remember and still laugh at the incredulous looks we got from a couple of people walking the beach wrapped up in parkas.

As I said it was one of those incidents that is firmly locked into our family’s corporate memory. But there is a sequel that I remember and which is the relevant part of the story for this sermon.  One of our sons had his current girl friend with him that day.  I was aware that she was having great difficulty accepting the mad behaviour, not only of her beau, but of his father as well. Her disapproval was as polite as her discomfort was obvious. I remember thinking – she won’t last. She can’t identify with us and our strange ways. She held herself aloof from our muddy madness, and I knew she could never really belong to the likes of us.          And she didn’t.

4. The baptism of Jesus is important because it declares to us that Jesus does not hold himself aloof from us. He does not fear getting dirty in his complete solidarity with us. He takes our humanity upon himself completely. The Apostle Paul said, For our sake, God made him to be sin who knew no sin. (I Cor 5:21).

It is important that we remember this as we trace the ministry of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel this year. The baptism of Jesus shows us that Jesus did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped – to be held on to preserved from the taint of humanity.  His baptism, there in the muddy old Jordan, shows that he who shares in God’s perfection identifies with us and with our sometimes messy lives.

That identification is important for our faith. We do not worship a God who holds himself aloof but one who is with us in our pain, our struggles, our failures and finally, in our dying.

But this identification with us is also important for the church’s mission. Jesus’ baptism sets the tone for the way in which we are witnesses to Jesus in the world. We cannot be involved in the mission of Jesus and hold ourselves aloof from the messiness of the life of the world.  We cannot be the people of this God and not be in the muck with the crowds that desperately want to discover a gracious God too. And we do it with them. Not as those who have all the answers, or have the right to wield power and lord it over people, but only as those who represent the way of Jesus, the way of serving, suffering love.

5. Affirmation of Baptism: In a moment you will be asked to come forward and reaffirm your baptism. The affirmation that “You belong to Christ” will be made. You will be marked with the sign of the cross. Both of these actions declare the truth of Jesus baptism. First, that we belong to Christ by God’s decision and action. The second is the sign that this belonging calls us to an uncommon way of life. We are just beginning to relearn this in the church as we move away from the culture of Christendom and its temptations to the pursuit of success, political power and cultural acceptance. At a time when there is widespread anxiety about the future of the church, we are learning again the way of Jesus. Marked with the sign of the cross we may again become an uncommon people living out Jesus’ way in the life of our world.

Conclusion: All this flows from the action of Jesus in choosing to begin his ministry by being baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordon. Today we align our living with this uncommon way in which God chooses to bring humanity into fellowship with God.

Amen.