View or print as a PDF

Christmas 1
1/1/2017

Isaiah 63:7-9
Psalm 148
Hebrews 2:10-18
Matthew 2:12-23

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

---

One of the more absurd dogmas of the secular society in which we live is the assertion that politics and religion occupy parallel universes. Religion is about the private, so it is said, politics is about the public. We can be quite clear about this. If religion is presumed to be about the private, then neither Jewish nor Christian faith can be called religions. Those mouthing this mantra about religion being private have clearly never opened the Bible.  It is sufficient simply to keep repeating what suits the prejudice.

Today we need nothing more than the first words of this second chapter of Matthew to assert what is the truth about politics and God: “In the time of King Herod”. By the time we get to the end of the chapter we will encounter Herod’s son, Archelaus, who will similarly be allotted his time to be another political player. And everywhere else throughout the New Testament, and certainly the Old, Kings and Emperors and political States and cities abound as the context for religious engagement.  So much for politics and religion being hermetically sealed. In any case, whether we like it or not, and for good or ill, when the chapter of the next four years for both world and Church comes to be written it will be headed: “In the time of President Trump”. Theological time and political time are bound to converge here with a vengeance.

Instructive then is it for us today to hear how theological time intersects the everyday time of King Herod. The story of Jesus’ conception and birth is not some mythological story, but rather a story that shapes the time in which we live. It is a time in which rulers rule, on the manifestly wrong assumption that it will be only their power which determines the story that constitutes time.

Herods, however, and we can only profoundly hope Trumps as well, are seldom as powerful as they imagine. Certainly, in today’s gospel, Herod is king only because it pleases the Romans to have him rule over this province, peopled as it is by a troubling population. Herod is simply a pawn used by Rome to maintain an order useful to Rome. That’s how politics works. And it is here, that Jesus is born; in an occupied land, a small outpost on the edge of a mighty empire. And it is here that he will eventually be killed under Rome’s authority. What’s more, without a shadow of doubt it will be a death that will prove to mean nothing to Rome. For how in Herod’s time could Rome possibly know that this man would prove to be the most decisive political challenge it would have to face?

Rome, of course, knew how to deal with enemies; you either kill them or you co-opt them. But how do you deal with an enemy called the people of God who will come to understand that they have all the time in the world to challenge the world’s impatient violence?

But for now everything looks like being over. The wise men had been duped. Trustingly they tell Herod about the timing of the star, naively believing his assurance that he, too, would also like to travel to pay homage to the one who, when all is said and done, as another king has to have been born as a competitor.

But mercifully the wise men are warned in a dream not to return to Herod, but to go home by another road – that is to say, that already, as Gentiles, they anticipate what will prove to be the major theme as Matthew’s gospel unfolds. The wise men already just here are forerunners of the larger mission to the Gentiles.  Already in the figures of the wise men, the gospel anticipates a day that in due time eventually will come to include us: a day in which the followers of Jesus may well find that they are strangers even when they consider themselves to be at home, as we, too, are now experiencing daily in common with other Western churches. Not surprisingly, then – like the wise men – Joseph soon discovers through yet another dream that he must take Mary and the child on the journey to Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod. So Jesus is taken to Egypt in order in due time to recapitulate the original exodus of the Hebrews, soon to be the new Moses who will lead his people to a new land of faithfulness.

So the wise men do not return to Herod. But Herod is no fool. He trusts what he has been told. The threat to him of a new king is to be found in Bethlehem. Realising that power can never be secure, Herods always know no limit when they sense that their power is being threatened. Power and killing are natural collaborators. So Herod cunningly estimates that two years sets the time boundaries for the wise men to reach Israel. Consequently, to ensure that the infant competitor Jesus will die, all the children of that age born in and around Bethlehem must be exterminated.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Jesus is born into a world in which children are killed. Can there possibly be anything more to scuttle the sentimental depiction of Christmas that we have gone though yet again?  Christmas refuses to let us hide from the fact that children are killed, and continue to be killed, as in the ghastly Syrias of this world to protect the power of tyrants.

To be sure, we are offered the possibility of living a gospel of resurrection, but that does not mean that these and other children down through the ages are any less dead, or that their parents are any less bereaved. Resurrection, rather, makes it possible for future followers of Jesus not to lie about the nature of the world that we believe has been redeemed. If we want to know what mission in our day means, refusing to lie might be mission enough in and for a post-truth world.

Notice how our text is striking in the fact that no attempt is made to explain or justify this horror. Instead Matthew reminds his readers that Jeremiah had prepared us for just such a terror – warning of the loud lamentation that would come from Ramah, where Rachel, lamenting for her children, would rightly refuse to be consoled.

The point in all this is that the Herods of this world begin by hating the child Jesus, but end up hurting and murdering other children. That is the politics, the politics of murder, to which the Church is called to be the alternative.  In other words, those who would follow and worship Jesus are a challenge to those who would kill children.

The fear of the Herods of this world must be resisted, but – take account of this – that we are also told that “all Jerusalem” was equally frightened by the news of this child’s birth. What could this possibly mean? Well, it has to be the case, since thirty years later all of Jerusalem will consent to this child’s death.

What’s more, such a fear is not at all absent from our own lives. It continues to possess cultures that believe that they have no time or energy for children. Unrestricted abortion is just one of the names for the fear of the loss of time that children make real.

But the good news is that Herods die. Kings, Presidents, Prime Ministers come and go. But God’s people endure, difficult though that might be for us today to comprehend.

So two times are being given to us this morning. Both speak of children. The first is the stark reality of the fate of the world’s children predicted in the opening words of the chapter: “In the time of King Herod….”.

The second time is that offered to us in the Epistle today:

“Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death … and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”

Two times: times of death and a time of resurrection. It is just this alternative time to the time of Herod that is the gospel for us today.

View or print as a PDF

Christmas Day
25/12/2016

Isaiah 9:2-7
Psalm 96
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14

---

2016 has been a great year for expressing opinions: Brexit, Trump, the resurgence of nationalism in the liberal West; the tragedies of Nice, Orlando, Aleppo; terrorism; refugees; the ongoing debates about climate change. And, of course, much more. If you read the newspapers or listen to the radio you’ll have seen and heard pretty much every conceivable opinion expressed on all these things.

In all of this opinion-expressing we wrestle with each other in a struggle to name where we are, how we are, what we are. That struggle is the sign of a deep restlessness within and a raging turbulence without, locked together in an endless cyclonic interaction. And in all of this we show that we are not at home in our world. There is not enough. Or there is too much. Or it is of the wrong kind. Or it should be mine and not yours. Or…

Into this struggle is added, around this time of the year, talk of a child about whom it is said that he is peace and joy and wholeness. This creates its own turbulence and, so, yet more restless opinions: the true meaning of Christmas, the cost of Christmas, the irrelevance of Christmas, the myths of Christmas, escaping from Christmas, the pathos of Christmas, the toleration of Christmas, the psychology of Christmas, and so on!

Those of us who choose to gather in this way today do so also because of another opinion or, in the old Greek – a “dogma”. That dogma, or opinion, is that even if – like us – Jesus was born into turmoil and created not a little turbulence himself, there is in him no restlessness and so no opinion.

We have already sung this morning of “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes”.  (Some of us sang that a little more wistfully than others!) In the old carol the line is probably not much more than sentimentality but, theologically, it speaks volumes.

A child who is vital and yet does not cry is a child who is at peace with where he is. He knows no restlessness and needs express no opinion or judgement. For such a one, here and now are enough, whatever turbulence swirls around.

We risk becoming sentimental ourselves here, of course; the point is not the wonder of an infant, the peace she is in her mother’s arms. The dogma – the opinion – of the church is that this peace, this joy, this wholeness is what characterises the whole of Jesus’ life. It is the peace, joy and knowledge of knowing that it’s OK to be in this place – whichever place it is, however it is – because God is present here as well.

Restlessness is the sign of a sense that I need to be somewhere else, doing something else, being something else. It is the notion that I would be more alive if I were not me – here, now – but me (or perhaps someone else) in a different place. Restlessness reflects the sense that my present is the “wrong” present; there is more of me, and more of God, somewhere else. This is the thought which makes possible the suicide bomb, the endless gaze into a phone screen, the facelift, ethnic cleansing, the adulterous liaison, the abortion, “sovereign borders”, euthanasia and comfort chocolate: “not here”, “not this”, “not now”. All such things are the restless opinion that life in all its fullness – even heaven – is to be found somewhere else.

In our reading from the letter of Titus this morning Paul writes of waiting for the “manifestation of the glory of our great God and saviour Jesus Christ.” This is a complicated little text and its meaning varies enormously depending on where we put the commas and which part of the sentence we think is referring to which other part. We could spend 10 or 15 minutes pulling it apart to establish the most likely meaning, but, instead, let’s just jump to the most interesting reading on the grounds that even if the most interesting reading is not strictly the most correct, it ought to be…

The “glory of our great God and saviour Jesus Christ” is not here some vague illuminating brilliance behind which God (or Christ) is hidden. Scripturally, the glory of God takes concrete form in human beings: Adam is the glory of God, as is Christ himself. The glory of God is the human being, fully alive (Irenaeus). And so, to borrow from Paul elsewhere, negatively: to fall short of the glory of God is to cease to be our true, created selves. In the scriptural story human restlessness springs from the turbulence of Adam and Eve’s apple-munching episode: the desire to be something other than what they were – in fact, the desire to have an opinion on what is right and not. Tragically, the first thing they judge and reject is themselves: “we are naked”.

By contrast, Jesus is peace, joy, salvation – is the “glory of God” – because he gets being human right. You can’t tell this by looking at him in the manger, when he expresses no opinion. You can’t tell it by hearing him on the mount or at lakeside, when his way is just one among many, however appealing. And you certainly can’t tell it by looking up at him on the cross, when his way is clearly too dangerous for the sane to follow.

And yet we confess in creed and sacrament that what occurs here is merely – but also extraordinarily – the uncorrupted meeting of God with a particular human life. God does not so much “become” human at Christmas as meet a human being who does not throw him off with a restless shrug. To say that here we have God and human being in one place is to say that God and human being have come together, without confusion, without change, and yet also without division, without separation. This is God making heaven out of the world – what all of our opinionising strives for but always fails to achieve.

At Christmas God reveals himself to be at home with us. And Paul’s “manifestation of the glory of our great God and saviour Jesus Christ” is nothing less than our entering into that extraordinary possibility ourselves: we are the glory we await; we await ourselves, fully alive.

Concretely, this is freedom from opinionated restlessness, whatever the turmoil around us; it is the freedom to be present to our present, to be at home in the world into which we were born; it is discovering where-we-are and how-we-are to be enough. That would peace, joy and wholeness.

This is the one gift we cannot give ourselves. Yet, for Christ’s sake, God promises that it will be ours.

Thanks be to God.

View or print as a PDF

Advent 3
27/11/2016

Isaiah 35:1-10
Psalm 146
Matthew 11:2-11

---

Luke 1.46

In baptism we make human beings human which, of course, doesn’t make very much sense. Grammatically, we are making something into itself – we have a kind of tautology, a redundancy. But, more significantly, it offends against our sensibilities of who and what we are. We understand ourselves to be perfectly human before, or outside of, our being baptised (or not). Yet the church understands that, as human as we are, there is something which is broken or tainted about that humanity. And so, the “making human” of baptism is the overcoming of that brokenness in the bestowal of a renewed humanity.

Now, this might make sense to those of us who are mature enough to reflect upon our lives and see that, Yes, there are things about me personally, and those around me, which are “broken” and need forgiveness or healing.

But how do we speak about that kind of brokenness in relation to such little ones as Hugh or Ambrose? How can it be said that their humanity is broken or tainted?

The only mistake which Hugh and Ambrose might be said to have made is in their particular choice of parents! Now, this is not a personal or moral assessment but a theological one. In fact their parents made exactly the same mistake themselves, and their grandparents made the same mistake, as did their great-grandparents. This erring can be traced right back to the beginning.

The point of giving such an account of our humanity is to say that the thing to which baptism might be conceived to be an answer is an all-enveloping reality. Baptism is not a stage on life’s way, a rite of passage. We don’t baptise simply because a child has been born; we don’t baptise because someone has matured to the point that they can make a “decision for Christ”; we don’t baptise because life’s end is looming and we are made to realise that “mortal” describes also me.

Though we do baptise at any of those stages for particular persons, baptism is as all-encompassing a statement as is the condition which we all share as human beings (and so which we can say is passed on from generation to generation simply by each person being born). And so, for that reason, the church intuited and then embraced the language of death and resurrection to describe what is going on in baptism because the condition in which we find ourselves is all-enveloping. In same way, our death is all-enveloping of who we are – a kind of summarising, a bringing to an end of my particular story. Our birth is also, in the same way, a kind of totalising event – everything I do and am springs from my birth. So, when it comes to baptism we speak of a dying and a rising.

Yet this is not a patterning of death and birth, but a reference to a particular death and rebirth. The death and rebirth we enact in baptism resonates with the death and rebirth of Jesus of Nazareth. Just as a string on my instrument will sound if someone else plucks their instrument, tuned to the same note, so the death and resurrection which we enact in baptism is a resonance with Christ’s own death and resurrection.

It is an embodied echo of the experience of Jesus himself. In Jesus, humanity took on its perfection. In our baptism, this humanity is given to us.

And it is our prayer that the resonance which begins here might become louder and louder, so that we ourselves might begin to do what Mary sang in her song (the Magnificat): becoming a magnification of the Lord as we rejoice in God who has noted our neediness and lifted us up.

This is the gospel word we speak in baptism.

View or print as a PDF

Advent 1
27/11/2016

Isaiah 2:1-5
Romans 13:11-14
Psalm 122
Matthew 24:36-44

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Sandy Yule

---

[Note: This is a close relative of the sermon that was actually preached on Sunday morning. It has been written both before and after that sermon.]

‘But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father’ (Matthew 24:36).

This is the first Sunday in Advent, and so also the first Sunday of the church’s year. I have long been enamoured of Advent as a season, mainly because it begins with such a realistic view of our world. “There will be wars and rumours of wars’ (Matthew 24:6).  Enough said. Does not our pervasive, even global, anxiety rest on the threat of destructive conflict and the reality of it in all too many places?

In preparing for this sermon, I was struck by the oddity of a beginning which features the Second Coming of Christ as its main theme. At least you can say that it does make for a fully circular progression around the year! But how can this be a genuine beginning when it refers to the post-resurrection expectation of the return of Jesus, of whom we have presumably not yet heard? Perhaps we should simply acknowledge that each aspect of the church’s year has a topical place within the story of Jesus and a connection with God’s eternity, so that it is quite different from the secular idea of the New Year.

It is noteworthy that, at least in the Uniting Church, we don’t speak much of the Second Coming of Christ. This is true for me also. Whenever the topic comes up, this is the text that I quote. ‘But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father’ (Matthew 24:36). While the text literally refers only to the timing of the Second Coming, this ignorance is easily seen to be more global, as we have little idea or agreement as to what we are really expecting when we expect the Second Coming of Christ. I think I hope that it absolves me from too much knowledge of the topic, leading to the practical strategy of ignoring it. I do believe that this is preferable to the strategy of those who talk incessantly about the Second Coming and who use this as a reason why they don’t need to worry about present sufferers and the works of love.

Yet the church continues to present the Second Coming as crucial to our faith. This is because it holds out the promise that there will be a genuine judgement of the world and that evil will be definitively overcome. This is unimaginable to us, which is why the belief is couched in these strange and otherworldly terms. Some have tried to interpret the Second Coming as already fulfilled in the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. While it is true that the Holy Spirit makes present to us the things of Christ, regularly bridging the gap between the Risen Christ, seated at the right hand of God and ourselves, this idea only works if the Spirit is other than the person of Christ. Others have tried to interpret the Second Coming as the time when the teachings of Jesus and the real love of God in our hearts become so universal that evil and conflict is overcome. This is also a likely part of the truth, but the inbreaking, judging power of God is more than our human harmonious living. I conclude that we should frankly admit that we don’t have any clear idea of what the Second Coming might be like, nor what it means, apart from the essential reference to the time of the overcoming of evil, the judgement of our world and the public and visible inauguration of the reign of God.

Turning to our actual world, I can’t escape feelings of foreboding when I contemplate the candidacy and eventual election of Donald Trump, which has persistently dominated our media for a full year. Commentators of all stripes have been consistently wrong-footed by candidate Trump, who has shown considerable skill in half-saying dreadfully racist, sexist and misogynist things which the media felt obliged to publish (and which the transfixed interest of the viewing world encouraged them to keep publishing). The mismatch between what media pundits made of it and the support that he got from a significant section of American voters continues to baffle me. The best account of that that I heard was that his critics took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.

It is deeply disturbing to recognize that we have descended into a ‘post-truth’ world in our political culture. This is true here also, though in a less extreme form. Listening to candidate Trump, I was constantly wanting to invoke an ABC fact checker for confirmation that what I was hearing was untrue. When I was in Florida, a week or so before the election, I had a chance encounter with a man in the street who was convinced that Hillary Clinton had done many illegal things and that it was only her high connections that had kept her out of gaol. This man initiated the conversation with me and was at pains to let me know that, as far as he was concerned, it was all about winning politically. I feel that in this man, I encountered the reality of the post-truth world, where my concerns struggled to find a place.

What can we expect from President Trump? He has moved away from much of his campaign rhetoric the day after he was declared the winner of the election. It may be true that he is the one person who might be able to contain the divisive forces that he himself has let loose, though whether he will want to do so is most unclear. In the strange ways of history, conservative leaders can sometimes do good things not available to more progressive or left wing leaders who are also democrats. Yet the signs remain gloomy and many useful international alliances have been unsettled. Much is at stake when we remember the military power of the United States and the constant temptations to use it. Our fears circle back to wars and rumours of wars.

If our fears are not groundless, what should we say about them? The message of the advent season is that God has already acted to establish what is good and that it is God who is the one with whom we ultimately have to deal, in life and in death. Behind all the dark signs of the times, there is the light of hope that we glimpse in the prophetic words of scripture, that we hope for a time when all nations ‘shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; [that] nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’ (Isaiah 2:4). While this will not be good news while individual citizens maintain their arsenals, we can extend our hope to include all who rely on violence for their security, which obviously still includes ourselves. This is not a sensible, human project; it is a visionary hope that can only make sense on the basis of a transformation of the conditions of our lives that we do not comprehend and that we probably cannot comprehend. This is, nevertheless, a part of our faith to which we should remain open. For maintaining the faith, it is enough that we do not reject this vision as impossibly utopian, but recognize that it comes to us from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. True peace, with justice for all, that satisfies the deep desire for fullness of life of the human heart, is contained as promise within God. It is enough for faith that we do not turn away from the promises of God, no matter how distant they seem from our everyday experience. In practice, we are challenged to wake up, to stay alert and to look for the signs of God’s reign which are even now appearing in our world.

View or print as a PDF

All Saints
6/11/2016

Ephesians 1:11-23
Psalm 149
Luke 6:20-31

---

“Blessed are you who are poor… woe to you who are rich”.

Most of us have a pretty good idea that we’re not poor, and this, given the forecasts in the gospel passage, does not bode well for us. But we have a considerable interest in this and we will not go down without a fight! And so we can ask, What exactly do “rich” and “poor” mean? If a simple surface reading is true, then we might conclude with certainly that someone like Gina Rinehart has already received her consolation. And so probably also a Rupert Murdoch, and everyone else on the Rich List 200, and quite a few besides. But perhaps we imagine the fate of those who can afford to live in North Melbourne and environs may not be so clear. We know that there are those who can’t afford to live here, or in Essendon, or in Broadmeadows, or even in any of those isolated country townships where a house goes for a song. If such people as these are poor, does that make us rich? Probably. Perhaps the poor are those who are not much motivated to pray, “Give us today our daily bread”.

The trouble such words of Jesus cause us is that we do see the justice which is hinted at there and yet we are not sure that the justifying or setting right they imply is not something of a threat to us.

Do we, then, have to become poor in order to protect ourselves from God, in the long run? In fact, it’s not really clear what this might mean, or the way in which poverty in things might put us right before God. The word we have heard translated today as “blessed” could also be translated as “congratulations”, or even “happy”. “Congratulations to you poor, yours is the kingdom”; “Good for you, you who are hungry”; “Happy are you who weep…”

The only thing which would make it possible for us to speak of blessings in this way is the thought that all things will be set right in the end:  “you will be filled; you will laugh; you will be hungry; you will mourn and weep”. Even though the blessing upon the poor and the woe upon the rich are cast in the present, the overwhelming sense of the passage is: “Do not worry if you are poor, hungry, grieving, down-trodden or outcast now; God will bless you when heaven comes.

Is this to imply that these blessings and woes – God’s saving and judging work – are only other-worldly, that they do not relate to now, except as promises or warnings of what is coming? This would mean that we who are poor are made to wait for our blessing while we who might be rich are left in our anxious attempts to justify before God what we have.

But we should also note that there is a connection drawn between the fate of those who have and those who don’t. Those who have are implicitly being held accountable for those who have not. This is not to suggest that the rich, the full and the happy are necessarily responsible for the conditions creating poverty and grief, but there is at least a link implied between the fact that they remain well-off while the others remain down-trodden.

And this brings us within range of being able to see the present significance of the woes and the blessings, as distinct from what they might say about our future.

If we hold in our heads the declaration of Luke’s Magnificat – that God brings down the powerful from their thrones, and lifts up the lowly, fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty (Luke 1.52f) – then in fact in the blessings and woes we have another vision of God’s life and work, presented now with the invitation to share in that work.

For our text is cut rather short at the point where it ended this morning. It runs on, however: Love your enemies…Do to others as you would have them do to you…Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

To put it starkly: those who “have” – in whatever sense – are invited to “play God”. They are invited to see what God is doing, or promises to do, and to do the same. As a child might do in her toy kitchen what she sees her mother or father do in their real kitchen, so are we to imitate God, doing as he does, setting right, as God sets right.

To be saved is to share in the life of God. To share in the life of God is to be as God is, to do as God does – and this is precisely what God makes this possible in “saving” us. Coming to be his children – which is God’s gift to us – brings with it the call to come to do as God does.

The real question which should arise in relation to these troubling blessings and woes is not whether we are winners or losers but whether in fact God will bless (or curse) in this way – or has in some sense already done it in our lives. Trying to discover whether we are the rich or the poor, or the sad or the happy, misses the point, because the blessings and woes relate not to what we are in ourselves – whether we are rich or poor and so cursed or blessed – but to what our abundance or poverty are for our relationship to each other, for our common humanity.

To be drawn into the life of God is to be propelled towards each other. Luke presents to us again and again that the Jew does not have God without an embrace of the Gentile, that the inner circle does not have God without the outcast, that the rich does not have God without the poor. God’s saving work is a reconciling work in a fatally divided world; it is not a handing out of rewards and punishments which simply reflect or contrast with the world as it presently is. To speak of having been saved is to speak of having been commissioned to a part in that reconciling work. We may not be responsible for the world as we find it – we may not have “started the fire”. But if we declare that we have known something of that setting-right which is salvation from God, we cannot but be accountable for whether or not we do anything to douse the flames.

Jesus declares the blessings and woes in order to give us an image of what God’s justifying, setting-right action looks like. If we have begun a life in God, then in fact what Jesus says about who is blessed and who is not, is what we will have to say, for this is where our life in God will be found to have begun: in shifts between haves and have-nots, the full and the hungry, the laughing and the weeping.

These blessings and woes suggest that we are to pray that God save us from ourselves, that we might find him – and our true lives – in love and service of those who need us as much as we need God.

May that particular prayer be heard on the lips of all God’s saints, and find favour in the God’s ears.

Amen.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 22
16/10/2016

Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 119:97-104
Luke 18:1-8

---

It is a sad thing that we must admit that the account in our gospel reading this morning of a woman crying out for justice is a thoroughly familiar and contemporary story. It is the same as the cry for acknowledgement and redress from someone who was abused as a child by a person they should have been able to trust. It is the cry of the Palestinian who wants some kind of resolution after decades of deprivation and suffering. It is the cry of any individual who finds that the “one size fits all” of government policy or the expectations of her community in fact does not fit very many, and so she finds herself excluded because of the oversimplification of that kind of approach to needs and rights.

It is a thoroughly familiar story. Perhaps a little less familiar, or a little less comfortable, is what Jesus does with the story. In particular, he draws a comparison between God and the dishonest or lazy or corrupt judge to whom the woman goes for assistance. Jesus is much less squeamish than we are about taking from the good and the bad of the world to give illustration of how God works and so we have to let him do what he does. The lesson which seems to drop out of this, though – in the comparison between God and this judge – something along the lines of the value of persistence in prayer. The woman comes to the judge again and again and again, so that in the end the judge throws up his arms and says “Alright”. This seems to imply that this is how God responds to prayer: we are to pray and to pray and pray until such time as God finally gives us what we want.

This is a very poor understanding of the nature of prayer. It reduces our relationship to God to some kind of equation or formula. If we get the frequency or the persistence or the sincerity or just the sheer need in our prayer just right, God will give us what we want. Prayer becomes then a kind of magical incantation in which we push all the right buttons so that God response to us as we desire.

That is not only a wholly inadequate way of thinking about prayer. Most of us have also discovered that it just doesn’t work. No matter how persistent or faithful or sincere we are, we very rarely, if ever, receive response we seek. Most of us have probably tried this at one stage or another. It doesn’t work. And so we tend to keep prayer on the backburner and pursue justice by other means. We plan a society with just judges and good laws. We set up agencies like Hotham Mission to do the work of justice in the world. But in this process we fall into the same kind of trap as we can with prayer: the assumption that if we just get the formula right we can create a just society, a world in which everyone gets exactly what they deserve and need.

And yet if we reject persistence in prayer in view of evidence that it doesn’t actually seem to work, the evidence about the possibility of creating a just society through working for justice is just as shaky; our efforts at a just society have also not worked. If we were just to mark Jesus’ own words as the beginning of the project of a just society (noting, of course, that it is not since or following from Jesus that such efforts have been made) we would have to say that in 2000 years the very fact that the woman’s story is still familiar and contemporary suggests that, for all of our best efforts, working for justice does not create it. We still haven’t got the formula right. And so still we strive, still we pray.

So what is going on here, or what our text has to say to us this morning about our condition and our situation, and God in relationship to these?

Jesus makes rather a strange remark at the end of this morning’s reading concerning the coming of the Son of Man and whether or not the Son will find faith on earth. What is his point to here? I don’t think he is asking, Will there be people in the churches or synagogues? Will there be people praying, believing in God? “Faith” has, in the scriptures, a variety of meanings. Here I suspect that it means something along the lines of, Will there be people who have seen, who have understood, who have clarity about the nature of the world and our place in it?

Quite apart from the woman’s persistence in the parable is the sheer fact that she cannot generate for herself the justice she desires. As corrupt or lazy or unhelpful as the judge might actually be, she has to go outside her own capacities for the purposes of realising justice. I suspect that it is just this which Jesus indicates in the question about whether the Son of Man will find faith. The apocalyptic world view of the New Testament – the notion that the world is going to come to an end and all things will be set right – was a way of speaking about the incapacity of Israel to set the world right. It had to be God who did it. And, for all of their efforts unto justice – as important as they were – there was a constant looking outside of themselves to God, the just one, the one who would set things right.

Jesus asks, When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on earth? That is, will there be those who have understood, that for all of the prayer and for all of the good works, it is, in the end, God to whom is the kingdom of the power and glory?

None of this is to say that we ought not to be praying. It is to say that our prayers are naming that source of healing – outside of ourselves. We are not trying to twist God’s arm into doing things that God doesn’t want to do. Our prayers are naming that God is the one who will realise in the end the justice we most desperately need and desire.

And it is not to say that we ought not to be working for justice and, in our actions, indicating that the world is actually not right, that there are people who are excluded. But it is to say that, in the end, we are not going to be able to fix it, of which we have 2000 years’ evidence. This is not pessimism; it is just realism about our situation.

So what springs from this parable is that, yes, the question of justice is a pressing one and we have to work as if the answer to that question depended upon us. But at the same time, we ought to be praying because it does not.

So, let us pray, and work.

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 21
9/10/2016

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Psalm 66
Luke 17:11-19

---

Jeremiah preaches to a community which is utterly hopeless. Theirs was an experience which I imagine is beyond the experience of any of us here and probably even beyond our imagining. For those who had been taken into exile in Babylon everything is gone. The kingship of Israel is gone. The nobility is dispersed. The temple has been destroyed and the land has been overrun. The things which have defined God’s relationship to the people of Israel, which have given Israel its identity, are all gone. These people are no mere refugees, as serious a situation as that would be. They are exiles, even captives, in the land of their enemies. Everything is gone and perhaps even God himself: an utterly hopeless situation.

It is into this that Jeremiah speaks with a word of promise. Even though everything has been lost, even though it has come to be marked as the judgement of God, nevertheless a word is spoken which opens up the future once again. God says, I will continue to be with you. To misquote one of Psalms: Yes, you will be able to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land. Settle, find and make a home here; I will still be your God and you will still be my people.

As we read ancient texts like this, one thing we do to understand how the Word then might be a Word to us now is to look for correspondences between that situation and our own. But I have already suggested that the situation of the text is quite beyond our current experience. It is even difficult for us to imagine what would have to happen for us to find ourselves in a situation like that of the Israelites in Jeremiah’s time.

We need to explore a little more over the next couple of weeks what it is that confronts us in our decision-making about our resources and buildings and mission as a congregation into the future. There is no sense in which we are hopeless as we move into this process, certainly not in the way in which those Israelites in Babylon could be said to be hopeless. Even in the unimaginable circumstances that we hear might actually lose everything, we know that there are many nets to catch us were we to fall away from Mark the Evangelist.

But hopelessness has more subtle forms than that experienced by the Israelites in Babylon, and there is a sense in which our process of thinking about our buildings to this date has itself been thoroughly shot through by a kind of hopelessness. What we have done over the last year is calculate and measure and diagramise and reason and debate and argue and then recalculate and re-measure and re-summarise and then sift and refine to get ourselves down to about three or four basic options: “sell everything”, “keep-the-whole-suite” and what is perhaps the medium between these two, retaining this corner with the Hall and the cottage.

I suggest that we have come to this conclusion “hopelessly” in the sense that it has been rather a scientific process, the process of measuring and describing and debating and remeasureing and balancing. We might say that it has almost been an exercise in magic in which we have tried to determine how the world works and to discover what the incantations are we can sing such that we might get the best possible result. Such a process is hopeless in the sense that it is impossible to factor God, and what God might want us to do, into the process of engaging with the facts and the numbers.

This kind of hopelessness is also present in the story of Jeremiah and Judah. It occurs before the exile as the leadership in Jerusalem do their calculations. “We have our temple – that should protect us; we’ve got the kinship, a covenant on the laws; we have our political alliances and we are working very hard playing off one enemy against another”. This is also a fairly hopeless process in the sense that you don’t really need God when you have all these things you own and can do.

What does this mean for us, that we have done all of this work and that is very hard to know where God fits into it all? I think it means that we need to hold very lightly the conclusions which have come out of our process and also our commitment to these conclusions and our sense of what it is which God might actually “want”. One possibility, “Option 1”, involves doing as the Son of Man is said to have done: to go without a place to rest ahead. We could, of course, choose this option and then die of exposure. On the other hand we could go with Options 5 or 6 – restoring the palace only to discover that there is a Sampson in our midst who will bring the whole thing down around our ears and kill us that way.

There is no hope (in a deep theological sense) which we can associate with any of these options. What the people are discovering in Babylon is that, as much as they’ve invested in the kinship of the temple in the land and history and so forth, what it is that God gives them in the end is, in fact, none of those particular shapes of the future but just himself. “I will be your God and you will be my people”, whether in Jerusalem or in Babylon. What is given is a restatement of God’s faithfulness. Have you died, perhaps of exposure? This is a God who raises the dead. Have you been crushed by the temple? This is a God who can build a temple of praise from dumb stones.

So the question is, How do we factor in the hope which is God’s faithfulness as we work through all of calculations and reasonings and projections into the future? We probably have to become God-like as we work through these things. This is to say that we have to enter into a process of promise making, because hope is all about making promises. Hope is about presenting something which is yet to happen as a reality here and now, upon which we can rely and therefore begin to move into the future, not necessarily knowing what shape the future will have other than that the one who promised to be there will, in fact, be there.

Jeremiah said to Israel, For all that has happened, now settle where you are. This God extends beyond the bounds of Palestine. Determine, in a sense even promise, to live among those who have shaped your world in the most undesirable and painful of ways.

For us here and now to hold our determinations a little more lightly than, perhaps, some of us might want to, is to make the same kind of promise, the one to the other. If tomorrow does not take the shape I thought it ought to take because of who I think we are as a church, I will nevertheless settle in that tomorrow and pray for and look for God to cause me and others to flourish out of that tomorrow.

I suspect that our calling here is to promise to live among with those who will decide for the “wrong” thing.

In this way we are seeking to become a sacrament of the mission we actually have in the world around us. For we are given to sit in a world which is very different from us, to engage with that world to discover how God is going to do something with the difference. And if we can’t see how that might work in ourselves as a faith community, it will never work between ourselves and those have not yet joined us along the Way.

In our decision-making over the next few weeks we must also be making promises. If we can make promises like this, and then seek to keep those promises, we will have demonstrated that we have a hope which is beyond the calculations, the imaginings and the reasonings. We’ll have demonstrated that there is a God who can raise the dead and cause dumb stones to sing.

And would that not be a very good thing?

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 20
2/10/2016

Lamentations 1:1-6
Lamentations 3:19-26
2 Timothy 1:1-14
Luke 17:5-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

---

Some of our favourite scripture texts are conveniently quoted out of context. A good one for when not many people turn up for a church event is from Mt 18 – For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them. (Matthew 18:20) It cheers us up enormously. Of course it is perfectly true – whether it be in worship or a meeting or a working bee – Christ is among his faithful, attendance numbers notwithstanding. For our comfort, when numbers are down, may we always be glad to be reminded that Christ is among us.

But the context of this text is discipline. Matthew 18 sets out a program for correcting behaviour in the Christian community. It is only after a step by step program for correcting a wayward member of the church in the name of God is outlined that we hear the text about Christ being among the two or three.

I mention this because this morning’s gospel is a good one for shifting the context a little.

The beginning of this morning’s gospel lesson is not one of the church’s favourites – probably because it rarely sees much need for casting mulberry trees into the sea, and the bits that follow about the slave coming in after working the fields then being expected to cook dinner is puzzling, though probably best appreciated by wives and mothers.

Strangely, the context of this text also has to do with discipline. The request by the disciples to increase their faith follows a stern rebuke by Jesus about the misuse of authority in the church community. The teaching about discipline begins with Jesus saying: “Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to anyone by whom they come!  2 It would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble.” (Luke 17:1-2)

So the disciples have heard Jesus saying that if they, as leaders of the church, jeopardise the salvation of one of the little ones there will be dire consequences. Those consequences are not specified but they do rate at least one point beyond having a mill stone tied to the neck and being thrown into the sea – so, pretty dire. If this isn’t enough to put the wind up the future leaders of the church, Jesus goes on to tell them that when they are disciplining a member of the church and that person repents, they must forgive that person. Not only that, but they have to keep forgiving even if the pattern of bad behaviour does not change and the process of discipline followed by repentance continues up to seven times.

Now it is not clear whether the disciples are overwhelmed by the mill stone throwing prospect or the need to forgive a repeat offender, but their request of Jesus in the next verse – the beginning of our gospel lesson this morning, indicates that they do not feel up to Jesus expectations. So they ask, “Increase our faith.”

Jesus response is the memorable one about having faith the size of a mustard seed. That is all you would need to cast a mulberry tree into the sea. Matthew heard this saying a bit differently. He thought Jesus said you could cast a mountain into the sea. The point is that the faith the disciples have is affirmed. If you had so tiny a measure of faith, and you do have at least that much, that is all that is needed for the exercise of faithfulness in the Kingdom proclaimed in and by Jesus.

Then follows the uncomfortable bit about the relentless service demanded of a slave. This is uncomfortable in our culture – or it should be. We have hard won laws to guard against the kind of exploitation that is depicted here. We can only assume that those hearing and reading this account of what Jesus said understood the analogy and that the message was and is – service in the Kingdom doesn’t have a holiday. Now we know Jesus took time out, that he was wearied by the demands of crowds demanding his attention, that he enjoyed time off – so we can take heart that service in the Kingdom is not a relentless grind. I am encouraged in this thought by the prayer of St Augustine:

Lord, you are the light of the minds who know you, the
life of the souls who love you, and the strength of the
souls who serve you. Help us to know you that we may
truly love you, so to love you that we may fully serve
You, whose service is perfect freedom.

It is perhaps a curious juxtaposition of these two sayings of Jesus – the possibility of different sizes in faith and the servant who does not expect to be served. But it feeds into an issue that is visited a few times in the gospels, that of status in the Kingdom. Remember the disciples who asked for preferred seating arrangements in the Kingdom and arguments over who was greater. In the early church Luke tells of different Christian communities who claimed one or other leader as their authority on matters of faith. See? Nothing new. The message is clear – the Kingdom of God does not have a class structure.

The positioning of the two sayings points up the truth that people do seem to have different measures of faith (whatever that means) but faith the size of a mustard seed or the size of an avocado pip does not translate to time off for good behaviour in the service department.

The thing is that just as it is OK to take the ‘where two or three are gathered in my name’ text out of context, it seems to me OK to take the ‘increase our faith’ text out of context too. The context that Luke sets it in is that there will be difficult discipline issues to deal with to prompt the cry that denotes not coping – I am overwhelmed, I will need more faith. But the lesson that applies to this context may well apply to other dilemmas of life that prompt the same cry – we face difficulties as a congregation, as a denomination, difficulties as a Christian faith living among other faiths, difficulties living as a nation coping with the impact of world events that drive us to despair –  if only I had more faith I could cope with this. With more faith I could do something about these things.

Fortunately, living faithfully does not have to do with the size of my faith. If that were true my life would be very scary. I have to stay reliant on the hope that God is faithful. Does that let me off the hook? The outcome of the difficulties that beset me and the church and the nation are not dependant on the efficacy of my faith, or our faith. Luke writes about faith and its potency and then immediately writes about service that does not take a holiday. Faith is lived out in service and Augustine’s joy was that the in the God’s service is found perfect freedom.

When Jeremiah lamented for his people defeated and sent into exile, still he could say:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end;  ²³ they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22-23)

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 18
18/9/2016

Jeremiah 8.18-9.1
1 Timothy 2.1-7
Luke 16.1-13

---

The gospel reading we’ve just heard presents us, at first, with a troubling parable. The story of the parable itself is fine, and one we could well imagine such a thing happening. The troubling part is that Jesus commends for our consideration the behaviour of the man dismissed for squandering his master’s property, who then continues to do the wrong thing.

There is a fairly straightforward explanation of why Jesus might use such an illustration but, because it is straightforward, I’ll not go into it this morning. Instead, let’s consider a much less straightforward reading which side-steps our concerns about Jesus’ morals and, if less straightforward, is nevertheless much, much more interesting.

Consider this little syllogistic turn of thought: if, according to Jesus, we are to be as the dishonest steward was, and if, according to other New Testament preachers, we are to be as Jesus himself was, then the dishonest steward is, in fact, Jesus himself.

So let’s see whether this interesting thought can be sustained, keeping in mind that here we are dealing with a parable. As a parable it is intended to suggest or evoke, and to break open new thought. It is not a strict allegory, and so not every element in the story can be correlated to some particular thing in the world or in the ministry of Jesus.

Consider again the basic scenario. The relationship between the steward and the master has changed in such a way that the steward is to be sent away. No longer being able to claim the security the master would normally have been for him, the steward is required, so to speak, to make his own way in the world.[1] He does this by becoming a liberating presence for those around him, who are also subject to this master. For the one who owes on 100 pots of oil, the debt is reduced to 50 pots; for the one who owes on 100 baskets of grain the debt is reduced to 80. By lightening the load of those who owe not the steward himself but the master, the dishonest steward earns himself a welcome into the homes of those he relieves, and so earns also the commendation of the master.

Is this not the work of Jesus, humbled and sent into the world in order to serve humankind for the relief their “debt” to the “master”? This is scarcely a perfect fit with the parable, but it will do. And this forced interpretation is warranted by virtue of the purpose of preaching itself – the very act we’re now engaging in as speaker and hearers.

It is our natural tendency when reading such passages as today’s to make them about ourselves. This is quite understandable, for on the surface the parable plainly is about us and what we do with the resources we have. But if that is all we hear then we waste our time in the reading and the preaching. There are no shortage of voices today crying out about what we should and shouldn’t be doing with our money. In an age in which the economy is God and economists the priests, everything is touched by fiscal concern. We don’t need gospel readings to suggest to us to be wary of the dangers of too much or too little attention to our property and wealth.

But to hear the gospel – as distinct from hearing economic and moral law – is to review our actions in the light of the actions of God in Jesus. It is this divine work which informs our work. We might say that it is only if God himself has found a place in our lives by means of so-called “dishonest wealth” that it becomes meaningful to say that we might find ourselves welcomed into the “eternal homes” by means of our dealings with the same “dishonest wealth”: God working “dishonestly”, that we might too. If we hear the parable only as a word about how we ourselves should behave, we will be tempted to imagine that we are to buy our way into God’s life such that, if we give away enough of what we have, we might then be assured that God will reward us. Yet, we will usually think the price too high – or we simply will not know what the price is and so what to bid. We will then experience the word of God as a mere demand on us and the things we have or desire.

But if Jesus is the dishonest steward in the parable, and we are the ones whose burdens are reduced, then the parable is not merely about our buying a way into God’s favour, but about God having greatly, and graciously – even “dishonestly” – lowered the prices.

Whatever the parable itself might seem to be about, then, the point of preaching the parable as gospel is to draw us into the sphere of what God has done. What God has done and what we are to do, then, become one thing. As God opens heaven for us by making it “affordable”, so are we to find a welcome in the “eternal homes” by doing likewise.

And a word about these “eternal homes” will be the last thing we say here.

Heaven is another one of those “most useless words” in the life of the church. I won’t attempt to rank this useless word in relation to the other useless words we’ve noted in the past (including “religion”, “spirit” and “god”), but perhaps we could sharpen the point by noting that “heaven”, as a religious idea, is more misleading or even dangerous than it is useless.

It is misleading because it instantly fills our heads with images of a place and a time which is not here and now. And yet, God’s kingdom comes and God’s will is done in the very worldly location of Jesus of Nazareth. The dishonest steward does all of his work in the world. To see Jesus, making his way in the world, is to see heaven. Here-and-Now is the possibility of the heavenly act, the possibility of catching a glimpse of heaven.

Perhaps even more importantly than that – and to move from the gospel of God’s work with dishonest wealth to our becoming God-like in that way: now is the time to learn to recognize heaven as something which has to do with very worldly realities.

What are we to do with what Jesus calls “dishonest wealth” – which is to use it in “dishonest”, unexpected, uncalled-for, gracious ways – this is begin to learn what heaven is like. This is to begin to practice the removal of debts, the relieving of burdens, the work of forgiveness and reconciliation: the achievement of the impossible in a world which thrives on the law credit and indebtedness, which demands that we earn our way.

The dishonesty of God is not a moral failing, but God’s own refusal to play by the rules, to cut the cost of life with him through gift and call to repentance. It is the “children of light” who receive this gift and call, and are to become themselves light to the world.

By the grace of God may we, with all our dishonest wealth, find in the shrewdness of God’s dealings with the world another, better way with what we have, and so begin to build something worth building on the foundation which God has laid for our eternal homes.

Amen.

 

[1] …“being on the form of God, he did not count equality with God as a thing to be grasped but humbled himself…”

View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 17
11/9/2016

Genesis 22:1-14
Romans 4:1-3, 13-17
Matthew 3:7-10

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

---

A word or two of explanation about what follows is necessary before we begin. You may, or may not, know of the very large painting by Rupert Bunny of the sacrifice of Isaac, which hangs in the narthex of Wesley Church in the city. Three weeks ago, the OT lecturer at the CTM offered a study of this text before the evening service. Alistair McCrae asked me to preach on this text at the service which followed. I happily agreed. In more than fifty years of attempting to write sermons, to the best of my memory I have never had a previous opportunity to do so with this text. Craig suggested that I offer it to you this morning, so with some changes this is what I prepared then.

Without doubt, this story is one of the most confronting we can imagine: the call to Abraham by his God to kill his only son is surely something humanly unimaginable. But that is the least of it. What is far more troubling is its implication about Abraham’s God. For this is the God who had earlier made the epoch making promise that the already aged Abraham would be the father of many generations – a promise heightened by the laughable response to that announcement by his equally aged wife Sarah of the humanly impossible birth of a son called Isaac. Isaac’s life, therefore, would surely appear to be the most not negotiable of any human life at all.

So what are to make of this apparently monstrous affair? Here as is always the case with Biblical texts, we can have confidence in a solution when we know something of its background. We have already referred to the significance of the promise “that in Abraham all the families of the earth will be blessed”, a promise that is the foundation of everything not only for Jews, but just as much for Christians, and Muslims as well for that matter.

The monumental significance of this promise rests in its repeated sentence from 10 chapters earlier, standing as it does at the very beginning of recorded history:

“Now the Lord said to Abraham: Go… so Abraham went”.

These two single syllable words: “go” and “went” are the two most important words in the Bible. With them a revolution was set in motion. They represent the beginning of a new history, not only for the Hebrew people, not only therefore for the Church, but equally for two millennia of Western culture. If Abraham had not gone, our society literally would not be here today in any recognisable form.  Why can I say this with such boldness? Because before the summons “go”, and Abraham’s obedient “going”, the only reality was the fateful immersion of human life in a precarious world: a world of nature that was literally dripping with divinity. In the storm, the mountain, the river, the rock you met the residing god. Since so many gods inhabited the whole of the natural world, you could never know what they might do next. We can readily understand why the Canaanite god of the rain – whom we know as Baal, was the most mercurial. No rain, no life. This was a life of sheer unpredictability – everything human depended on the eternal return of the cycle of the seasons of the natural world: summer, autumn, winter, spring. So the gods had to be cajoled to work if life was to occur at all; even more, they had to be placated so that they would not work to harm human beings. It was a world of a frightening fate for human beings to be immersed in the unpredictable actions of the gods of the natural world.

But then in the face of all this, an absolute miracle occurs: “Abraham went”. And he took us with him. The nearest equivalent of his going might be that of the explorer figure of Christopher Columbus setting out in 1492 to find the new World, very likely with the shouting of the crowd ringing in his ears: “You’ll fall off!”

So it is that these original mutual promises by Abraham and his God at the very beginning of recorded history are sealed once more in the miraculous birth of Isaac. And now Isaac is to be killed by his father’s hand, and therefore, we, in his loins, as it were, are about to expire with him.  And most people are shocked, appalled, disgusted.

But even more affronting, the text is devoid of what at the very least we would want to hear, assuming that we are prepared to give it any hearing at all. It is all so unfeeling. At no point does Abraham’s God give any possible motive for the sacrifice of Isaac. Indeed quite the reverse. He cruelly rubs it in: “Take your son, whom you love…” Is the implication on Yahweh’s part: not me?  Who knows? And what of Abraham? No weeping or wailing in protest. We would surely be looking for even a hint of something like this.  The C19 philosopher/theologian Soren Kierkegaard wrote a monograph on this text which he called “Fear and Trembling”, but there is no sign in the text by either party of any fear and trembling. Any fear and trembling potentially and rightly belong to us the hearers of the story.

Listen again to the cool and clinical unfolding of the narrative: God says to Abraham: “Take your son, whom you love… and go” – there it is again: Go. And since we know that Abraham has a track record of reliability, it is no surprise to be told that, with no trace of protest or anguish: “Abraham rose and went”.

Is there anything being said to us in this absence of any hint of anguish? Perhaps this. That all that matters when the Word of God is heard is obedience. Even here, especially here, human emotion has to recede into the background. That might be part of the price that has to be paid. Certainly the history of the Church demonstrates that countless martyrs have felt the force of Abraham’s unprotesting example. One recalls the voice of the Orthodox priest about to be martyred. “I salute you dead men; I go to the living ones”. Or Dietrich Bonhoeffer calmly and quietly led to the gallows: “This is the end, for me the beginning of life”.

So we journey on with father and son, only to learn that Isaac is carrying his own funeral pyre – just as centuries later we hear that Jesus, too, will carry his own cross. And then the dramatic arrival: ‘on the third day Abraham saw the place of sacrifice’. “The third day” – that phrase should ring some bells. “The third day” appears eleven times in the Old Testament. The crucial thing for us to understand is that “the third day” is not so much a space in time as it is an announcement for a surprising event of salvation that is just about to occur: supremely for Easter day, for example, “on the third day”.

And so it is here. Arriving at the chosen place, on the third day, in all innocence, Isaac understandably asks: “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”, only to receive Abraham’s enigmatic reply: “God will provide”. What was Abraham thinking? Do we know? No, we don’t. He has no apparent warrant for such a last reprieve; nothing is at hand to provide any confident anticipation of a happy outcome for what looks like an immediate tragedy. So the text unfolds itself dispassionately, all coming to us as part of a piece.

But then the dramatic resolution, the cataclysmic revelation: a snared lamb as a potential replacement for Isaac. As we travel with Abraham and Isaac to their third day rendezvous we surely have no need of being reminded of what is here being anticipated: Jesus, as a son of Abraham, was to find no substitute as Abraham did. On the contrary, he became the slaughtered lamb himself.

But now what about this? Look at the picture on the front of the Order of Service, and read the text: a Sumerian nature god from 2600 BC, the ram in the thicket, predating Abraham by at least a thousand years is now the central character in the story.  What is going on here?  Surely this. By virtue of the obedience of Abraham, a substitute sacrifice of the god of the surrounding culture, the ram in the thicket, replaces Isaac: an idol, a god of natural world, is to be consumed by the fire of the God of history – and all because of Abraham’s obedience.

You ask: what does it all mean? This is what it means: that Abraham was prepared to kill the gift of God at the word of God. The question with which the text confronts the Church, and each of us, is this. Are we so prepared?  Whether as Church or individually, are we prepared to crucify for a greater gift, all that has made us? Are we prepared to sell all our religious pearls for the pearl of great price?  The texts are unrelenting.

Are we then surprised to hear in the gospel today the rebuke of John the Baptist to his opponents: ‘Do not say: “we have Abraham as our Father” for I tell you God is able to raise up from these stones children of Abraham’.  It is tempting to imagine that here John might be pointing to the ruins of the temple, the place of worship, now reduced to a heap of stones – heavy, inert, passive, lifeless. But that is impossible – with the Baptist that crisis is still some way off, and in any case we are with this imagery far from Jerusalem. Nevertheless, this metaphor seeks a timely correspondence for us as a congregation – all the crisis about buildings that has been before us last week, and which continues to exercise us, is ultimately about a heap of stones. But then the truth must be that they, too, exist only to raise up children of Abraham. To be Abraham’s child is to know ourselves as being contemporary with him; to require him no longer to be merely some austere distant patriarch of long ago, but instead to permit him to come to us as one in whom we recognise our original: as the faithful one who risked absolutely everything, even a willingness to kill all that he knew to be the certainty of the gift of God, in the greater confidence that “God will provide”. To be a child of Abraham is especially good news for us today as we wrestle with the problem of a future for stones.

The truth is that without the faith of Abraham, without the prospect of a terrifying sacrifice of Isaac, not to speak of that of Jesus, only stones lie in wait to trip us up. But with trust like his, a new creation can be ours; a new gift lying before us at every moment.

I had a dream as I started to prepare for the service at Wesley. Scripture encourages young men to see visions, but it also permits old men to dream.   It was a dream equally appropriate, I like to think, for us too. In my reworked dream, without any authority, I asked Gus, an enthusiastic bike rider, to go to K Mart to buy 50 bicycle helmets. We would put the helmets on a table inside the door, with the name of each member of the congregation on the outside. Each Sunday, after receiving a hymn book, every member would put on their helmet, since it is an accident waiting to happen to fall into the hands of the living God.  For unlike Abraham, we lesser mortals need protection from the Word of God. We need to put on our particular helmet, because one day in Church our sleeping God may wake and take offense. But it gets even better. Like Abraham, “for us and for our salvation”, the waking God may draw us to a new place of which today we have no advance notice. A place from which we can never return.

As I say – it was a dream!