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Pentecost 15
28/8/2016

Jeremiah 31:1-9
Psalm 32
Luke 7:36-50

Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte

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All the Gospels record a story of a woman anointing Jesus, but Luke’s account is unique. In Matthew, Mark and John, the disciples complain about the waste, saying that the money could have been given to the poor. Jesus however commends the woman, who will be remembered as having anointed Jesus for his burial.

Luke, however, has Simon the Pharisee rebuking Jesus for allowing a sinful woman touch him. Jesus responds that the woman in her extravagance has shown how full of love she is, because she knows what it is to be forgiven without reserve.

In the other gospels, the woman seems to be the only one who takes Jesus at his word, preparing his body for the death his disciples cannot understand. This ointment mixed with tears foretells those burial spices that, against all hope, will turn out to be the fragrance of the new creation, the ointments ready to anoint the head of Israel’s Messiah.

In Luke’s gospel, the ointment is a gift for guests, a sign of love. The ointment’s costliness, like her complete, totally unreserved and undignified self-outpouring, is a gift that flows freely from the woman’s love, the love which is created in her by another’s free, unconditioned, costly advance of love.

In the midst of what appears as a strange irrationality and sensuality, it is as though the woman has seen with absolute clarity the events that are about to unfold in Jerusalem. Without being aware of the specific events to come, it is as though she recognises the character of Jesus’ love as the love of the slaughtered lamb. In withholding nothing of herself when she anoints Jesus’ feet, she seems to see that his is the kind of love that withholds nothing in anointing our whole humanity. Here she almost seems to be aware of the kind of love that will undergo with conquering forgiveness the violence and slavery, which, looking back, appeared to be the very thing that defined and constituted us.

If the woman’s actions were disclosing the mystery of Jesus’ Passion, it is not because she was somehow possessed or made into some automaton of revelation. Rather, the Holy Spirit, unconstrained by the linearity of our time, has reached backwards from the day of resurrection. It is precisely in what the woman does that the Spirit celebrates her healing, and makes of her act a living sign of the transformation that will be seen face to face at the empty tomb.

The Spirit, who effected Jesus’ Incarnation, here proclaims his death and resurrection in an absolutely incarnational way. He proclaims it through the woman’s freedom, without displacing it. The Spirit chooses to make his proclamation mediated by the humanity of the woman, just as God chooses in a remarkable way to work out the world’s liberation primarily through contingent human lives and relationships. In fact, in Jesus, God becomes himself completely as subject as we are to the contingencies of human existence, and yet through that very existence and death, proves himself faithful to his irrevocable promise. The Spirit creates unconditional love in the woman, not by undermining her freedom, but in fact in the ordinary way love comes about in human lives – that is, created in us by another, created as a free act of our own will by the prior gift from the other of her or his love.

And if we had any doubt that this is human love at work, enabled by the Spirit to be the holy scripture that makes divine love present and intelligible, then look at how Luke speaks about it. What he describes is immediately recognisable as what humans do actively when they love.

And what has brought this about? Is she responding to an earlier unrecorded meeting with Jesus? No, more likely the woman has heard about Jesus’ unreserved deeds of mercy and power for the poor in Galilee, and, more than most, has immediately been struck with the impression that Jesus has also healed her. Again, it is as though her deeds speak with an authority that we have heard elsewhere. It is as though by her open receiving of the love of Jesus, she has become a prophet, proclaiming the Incarnation. Though she may not fully understand the scope of what she has done, her deliberate act rings with these words:

‘Look, there is the bronze serpent raised in the wilderness that one need only look at to know that God has healed us’
‘Look, there is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’
‘See, the home of God is among mortals!’

Jesus’ merciful love creates in the woman a love that proclaims that creation of love. Her openness to that love turns out to be (and I think it would be to her great surprise) her openness to God’s anointing of her as a prophet. And like the elder prophets of God’s people, her ‘words’ pluck up and destroy and build and plant. She speaks a word of judgment against the self-justification that has enslaved many like Simon – a self-justification which is revealed as yet another of sin’s yawn-worthy disguise acts, merely a whitewashed tomb full of the familiar filth of human violence, merely another form of blindness, merely another form of slavery.

In what the world would call humiliation, the woman turns up at the house uninvited, laying everything at Jesus feet, in serving, selfless love, in agape. And Jesus’ words to Simon reveal this humiliation, this weakness, as the woman’s act of going up to the holy places, unsealing the ark, and unrolling the Torah, to proclaim God’s unfathomable and totally unreasonable love poured out on the her, Simon and all his people, liberating them all from Pharaoh’s taskmasters and gods.

In response to Simon’s indignation, Jesus tells a parable of two people whose debts are both cleared. This is not a moralising tale where the debtors realise they are in the wrong, are sufficiently sorry, and then turn their lives around. Rather the agency, the vivifying force in the parable, is in the sheer gratuity of the creditor. His forgiveness transforms unilaterally a relationship of dishonesty or slavery into one of mutuality. Simon insists on burdening the woman with the task of making herself just, with proving her own justice. But Jesus makes it clear that this is a dead end, because God’s will for both her and Simon is to bring about mutual love in them which will bear the fruits of that justice relationally.

God’s forgiveness is always the primary agent. The faith Jesus describes is the disposition to allow oneself to be exposed to that forgiveness. The love he describes in the one who is forgiven much is the trust that is the capacity to receive forgiveness as a healing judgment, a healing wound.

So Luke does not labour the point about the woman’s self-reproach. Her tears are simply called ‘love’. There is no doubt grief here at the brokenness of her own life, but it is grief that is simply an act of looking backwards from the starting point of having been met by unconditional and transformative love. What the church has sometimes called ‘compunction’ is, through our relationship to another, simply being exposed to what is real, and recognising that one has been living in fantasy.

Simon doubts that Jesus can be a prophet, allowing himself to be touched by the unclean woman. But Jesus’ incarnate love, come to birth in the woman, has not merely ritually cleansed her, but has effected a great exchange, such that the ‘mind of Christ’, the suffering servant, has become manifest in this prophetic woman. Her scandalous sensual ointment will become known as the water of baptism, recapitulating his baptism by John.

It is as though in her strange yet authoritative act, she is proclaiming baptism as a marking with the sign of the cross – an anointing for a life lived carrying the marks of Jesus’ forgiving death, a life lived no longer defined by death and in constant competition with the other to cheat death. The woman seems to point to a life where the presence of Jesus one step ahead of us enables our bodies gradually to learn reflexes of trust that are entirely new and yet more natural to us than we could have imagined beforehand.

And so when Jesus proclaims salvation to the woman, it is not that she has avoided punishment by recognising her sin and showing appropriate repentance. It is rather that her faith in even the mere presence of Jesus, in the mere hem of his garment, her wordless trust which simply knows his unreserved forgiveness and transformation – it is in this faith, this trust, that she has allowed herself to be transferred into the kingdom of the forgiving victim.

Her healing, like ours, is a baptism into Christ, which is a baptism that anoints each of us as a prophet, not to undermine our freedom but to make us who we each uniquely are. This baptism is a gift we could never have anticipated. And so we say, ‘We love because God first loved us.’

And when Jesus says to her, ‘Go in Peace’, it is not as a pleasant conventional turn of phrase, but as an assurance of his ancient promise, hurtling irrevocably towards its fulfillment in ordinary human relationships. Jesus assures her of the promise from Israel’s God of peace with justice, the promise that transfigures our bodies as no longer ‘for ourselves’, but as the oil of gladness, the source of the healing and the crowning of our neighbour’s humanity.

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Pentecost 14
14/7/2016

Galatians 3:6-14
Psalm 71
Luke 13:10-17

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“Abraham believed”. At that point – after the second word – we need to pause because the word “believe” can cause our minds to run in all sorts of directions. “I believe” can be a statement of an opinion levered off certain observations I’ve made. “I believe that North Melbourne will win the premiership”; “I believe that gay marriage will be legalised”; “I believe that Donald Trump will be president” (some such beliefs being scarier than others, obviously!).

The concept of belief (rather than just belief as the result of the yet unproven calculation) brings other sets of associations: faith is set over against reason, with reason being the thing that we know, the thing that we agree to hold in common, as distinct from faith which has become a much more personalised and private thing. And of course we have, in our contemporary context, the contrary way in which belief has reasserted itself in the last 10 or 20 years as a major political consideration, and this after we in the liberal west thought that faith and belief had been safely marginalised to people’s hearts and minds, away from the public sphere.

So when we hear the Abraham “believed”, there are lots of things we might imagine being said.

When Paul talks about belief he relates it very much the person of Jesus Christ. He talks about being saved by believing in Christ. As Bruce explained for us a couple of months ago, this is more than just my generating within myself a subjective feeling of trust. It has to do with Christ’s own faithfulness is well, something which is outside of our individual convictions: I believe in Christ’s own believing. But Paul also talks about belief as being something more akin to participation. To believe in Christ is to participate in Christ himself. So Paul can speak of his belief as his having been crucified with Christ, and now having Christ living within him.

But then we come, a few verses later, to “Abraham believed God”. It is very easy here to forget what Paul has just said about what belief actually is – to cut Christ out of the picture and to drop back into a dynamic of Abraham believing (in a generic way) in God. But Paul is very consistent. When he says that Abraham believed God, he is basically saying that Abraham believed in Christ: Abraham was crucified with Christ and now lives by Christ living in him.

This, of course, makes no sense so far as chronological history goes. Abraham predates Paul by perhaps 1500 or 1600 years. How can Abraham believed in was not actually happened? What Paul is doing here is saying that the whole of God’s dealings with Israel are to be read through God’s engagement with the world in Christ. Christ is a kind of lens through which we can see what faith or faithfulness is, before and after the cross.

Now, that is all very interesting (I hope!). But it doesn’t yet have very much traction with the “real” world. It doesn’t give us a sense of what it might mean for Abraham to believe. To get this sense, we have to read the whole verse: “Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”.

“Righteousness” is our next focal point. This is again, like belief, a religious-sounding word which we don’t use very often in the secular sphere except the expression “self-righteousness”, which is often an accusation directed at the religious anyway. It feels like a religious word. But for the scriptures it is a legal and political word. It has to do with being set right, being justified, being lined up according to some criteria or standard. So it is important to recognise that there are “righteousnesses” all over the place, sets of rules according to which we are expected to perform.

There are economic orthodoxies. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a free-market capitalist or a state-controlled market Communist, each orthodoxy has its set of rules according to which we are expected to line ourselves up. There are social and political orthodoxies everywhere. Patriarchy is one of these, which sets men and women in the right place. To be righteous in such a context is to be in your right place and to be happy with that. Ecological orthodoxies dictate about how we should relate to the world around us. Moral orthodoxies concern themselves with what we should or should not do. Each of these come with their own sense of what righteousness is. And we find righteousness in those various orthodoxies by knowing the rules and lining ourselves up according to them. Now we might not ever actually agree precisely on what those rules are. We constantly debate the economic orthodoxies and the moral orthodoxies and so forth. But that doesn’t deny the dynamic. In those debates what we are looking for are those rules, seeking to establish how I might rightly expect you to relate to me.

What that produces in us is boasting that I know the rules and I am righteous according to them and that you probably aren’t and, correspondingly, accusations: that you do not know or comply with the rules and so you are properly set aside or excluded.

On this understanding, righteousness is pretty difficult work. You have to know the rules and be confident that you have yourself covered. It is also, in the end, isolating work. For the harder you press on what the rules ought to be, the more harshly you define how we ought to relate to each other, the more self-righteous you demonstrate yourself to be, and the less righteous others are. The effect is a kind of self-isolation: those who are righteous in this way are lonely.

But to get back to Abraham: as we read the verse “Abraham believed God and was reckoned him as righteousness”, it is important to get the emphasis right. The emphasis doesn’t really fall upon “righteousness”. This is not what Paul is arguing against. Righteousness is the goal which both he and his opponents have in common; the question is, What is the means toward that end? So Paul says, “Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to him as righteousness”, and not some other thing.

Now we must recall again that here “belief” is not just a generic religious affection. It has to do with taking on Christ. Abraham let himself be crucified; he allowed his life to come from something other than the impression that he can make upon others or upon God.

Belief becomes, now, a way of negotiating the many orthodoxies swelling around us in the world, each with their own corresponding righteousnesses. Belief is not a way of stepping out of the world; it is a way of being in the world with its various demands but engaging in a particular kind of way. The one who believes with Paul, and so with Abraham, the one who is crucified to the world and the world to her or him, this one is freed from the harsh demands of the orthodoxies of nature and society. And, more importantly, the believer is free from the implication that those orthodoxies are themselves God, or that the economics or the politics or the social mores are divinely ordered.

To believe God, as Abraham did, is not to screw up our eyes and posit that there “is” a God, even if unseen. It is not even to do Godly things, in a moral sense. It is to recognise that the gods – the orthodoxies, the righteousnesses which clamour around us – are not God, and bring neither true life nor true freedom. To believe the God who addresses us with the promise of more is to be able to be where we are, and to be complete – right, whole, just – despite the incompleteness of what is going on around us. To believe is to hold that God gives, and does not take, and to grow into an ordering of our words and our actions which declares just that.

By the grace of this giving God, may such belief be held with ever-stronger conviction by each of us, and all God’s people. Amen.

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Pentecost 13
14/7/2016

Amos 5:6-15
Psalm 49
1 Timothy 6:17-19
Luke 12:13-21

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Christiaan Mostert

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‘So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God’         (Luke 12:21)

[A]  Introduction

Today’s reading from the Gospel confronts us with a touchy subject and some very hard-hitting words of Jesus: about wealth, about being rich in assets, like property, bank accounts, investments, superannuation and the like. All of us are challenged by this little episode in Jesus’ ministry.

One way to avoid being challenged is to persuade ourselves that we are not really wealthy; and perhaps most of us – perhaps all of us here – are not really wealthy, compared to the very wealthy, the super-rich. But compared to the poor who own no property, have no car, no job, no money in the bank, no superannuation, I suppose most of us would have to say that we are well-off. Whatever our financial situation, Jesus’ words from Luke 12 are likely to touch a raw nerve.

[B]  Be on your guard against greed!

Jesus has been asked to intervene in a family dispute about the family property; he refuses to do so. Then he launces into his first disarming remark: ‘Be on you guard against greed of every kind! Your possessions don’t give you life!’ We’d probably all agree with this, but who would not like to have a little more (a lot more) than we do?

Regardless of our income and our assets, we are easily tempted to increase our wealth, our possessions, our bank balances, the earnings on our investments. We are easily drawn to promises of making quick money and schemes of ‘wealth-creation’. We are forever bombarded with messages that tell us we need this or that to be happy or that we deserve to treat ourselves to this new possession or that holiday of a life-time. It’s hard to resist these messages because at heart we are all acquisitive. We would all like to have more money so that we can live in a nicer house, or go on more holidays, buy more clothes or more things for our house or our hobbies.

If we were poor – really poor – it would be very understandable if we wanted more. We don’t blame people who live below the poverty line for wanting more! But what Jesus criticises in the little parable he tells – about a rich man who decides to build bigger barns to store his harvest of crops – is that he wants far more than he needs, that his desire to make money is insatiable and involves a disregard for God and the needs of others.

Let me also acknowledge that there are many people who are very well-off, perhaps extremely wealthy, who are correspondingly generous in their support of charitable causes and who in many ways help those who are poor and needy. Money in itself is morally neutral; intrinsically it’s neither good nor bad. How we come to have it and how we spend it are certainly moral questions; and the morality of these can range all the way from morally exemplary to morally deplorable.

[C]  The point of the parable

It’s hard to escape the impression that Jesus regarded wealth, possessions and elite economic status in negative terms. That’s certainly how Luke portrays him. But Jesus is far from alone in this. Amos’s God rages against those who trample on the poor and tax them unjustly, and who ‘push aside the needy in the gate.’ (Amos 5:11-12) And in the 1^st letter to Timothy the Christian community is urged not to set its hopes on riches but on God: to be ‘rich in good works, generous, and ready to share.’ (1 Tim 5:17f.)

Many Christians have felt called to a life of poverty, making their life-style and their income the very least of their concerns. We find that deeply admirable! But it’s not so clear-cut for everyone; and we have to be careful to avoid easy moralising in this whole area of decision-making. Jesus himself seems to have had a somewhat differentiated view on this. He didn’t avoid the company of wealthy people, though he – admittedly in Luke’s version – declared ‘the poor’ blessed, for the kingdom of God was theirs! (6:20) But he also praised the action of a woman who poured expensive oil over his feet for showing great love and declared her many sins forgiven. (Lk 7:36-48)

The parable Jesus tells in Luke 12 is quite specific. The man in the story is not a simple farmer with a small plot of land who is fortunate enough to get a good crop. He is a rich man. He already has barns to store his harvest. But he wants to be able to store more, so that he can make more money from the sale of more produce. He wants a long life of taking things easy, eating, drinking, being merry. He is not satisfied!

The man is greedy! Enough is never enough! He is an example of the danger of wealth if it’s pursued for its own sake, i.e. in order to make more wealth, or acquire more luxuries, or indulge oneself more. His focus is entirely on himself. He piles up treasure for himself and he is ‘not rich toward God.’

[D]  Not rich toward others and not rich toward God

It’s reasonable to infer that the rich farmer is not only not rich in relation to God but also not rich in relation to other people. He is doubly poor. The Bible is unambiguous about the requirement to care for those who are poor and disadvantaged. The man in the parable is ‘so focused on himself that he has forgotten both the God who caused the earth’s bounty and the neighbour without access to that bounty.’ (A. West, Feasting / Word, Yr C, Vol 3,312)

Greed is not having any regard to the needs or rights of others; it’s wanting everything for ourselves. It’s our natural condition, just as it is in the rest of the animal world! When you throw scraps of bread to seagulls or ducks, the dominant ones want everything for themselves. Parents, especially mothers, do share what they have with their young, their children, but we have to be taught to share; and some seem to find it a very hard lesson to learn. Others share very readily: for them it’s a kind of ‘second nature’. But it is a second nature; it’s not our first, not our natural condition.

There is certainly plenty of scope for sharing: with people who live in real poverty, people who live in situations of war and violence, refugees and people who struggle to overcome multiple problems, often including addiction. Australians claim to believe in a fair go, to want an egalitarian society, but (according to Andrew Leigh, in an article called ‘Is the growth of inequality inevitable?’) inequality in Australia is rising. We’ve all heard about the growing number of people, especially young people, who can’t see themselves ever owning a house. Leigh contends that ‘since the mid 1970s, real earnings for the top tenth have risen by 59%, while for the bottom tenth they have risen by just 15%. Today, the three richest Australians have more wealth than the million poorest.’ (The Monthly, June 2014)

 

It goes against the whole tenor of Jesus’ teaching to think only of ourselves and to be blind to the needs of others. Not to be ‘rich toward others’, not to be generous in support of those who really struggle, is sharply at odds with our Christian faith and discipleship.

[E]  Not rich toward God

And so is not being ‘rich toward God’! Here Jesus’ words are very explicit. To build up more and more wealth for ourselves risks being poor toward God. In the end we leave it all behind us, though we comfort ourselves by leaving it to our children, not all of whom actually need it!

What does being ‘rich toward God’ mean? The text does not explicitly answer this question. But Jesus elsewhere teaches his followers to strive for the kingdom (reign) of God and God’s righteousness before all else (Matt 6:33). It is to centre our lives on God, God’s goodness, God’s extraordinary love and faithfulness, God’s on-going work in the world to enlarge and deepen our humanity, our generosity, our altruism, our compassion. It is the very opposite of making ourselves the centre of the world, the chief concern of our lives. To make ourselves the centre of the world – our own interests, our wealth, our posses­sions, our comfort ­– is to fall into the trap of idolatry, which has been the abiding temptation for humankind. It is, if you like, the great failure to be rich toward God.

So where is the centre of our lives? What do we most want in our lives, and why? What do we live for? What do we work for? Is it really just our own well-being and wealth – including, of course, that of our family and close friends? Or do we, in some significant way, embrace in our deepest concerns the plight and needs of multitudes of others?
And can we encompass them and ourselves in a rich love for God that redirects and reorients all our values and priorities?

[F]  Conclusion

Nearly 400 years ago (in 1648) at Westminster (London) a Catechism was drawn up and passed which began with what has become a well-known question: ‘What is the chief end of man?’, perhaps better expressed as ‘what is the over-riding purpose of humankind?’ And the answer was: ‘to glorify God and to enjoy God forever.’ It’s a superb statement!

To store up treasure for ourselves – like the man in the parable – is to be poor toward God; it’s also, incidentally, ultimately futile. To reflect daily, weekly, on our over-riding purpose as human beings, as children of God – namely to glorify God and to enjoy God forever – that is the beginning of being rich toward God. It is the fitting response to the God who, in the gift of Jesus Christ, has been rich toward us.

Thanks be to God.

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Pentecost 12
7/8/2016

Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Psalm 33
Luke 12:32-40

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[This sermon steps for a moment out of our series on Galatians although, as you will read, Paul’s arguments there are important here as well!]

Today’s reading asks us, “What are you waiting for, what are you expecting?”

We spend a lot of time waiting, expecting things. We wait for the birth of a new baby. We wait or look forward to retirement. Perhaps we look forward to our birthday or wait for our health to return to what it should be. And all of this type of waiting is usually pretty active. We get the nursery ready for the baby. We save for our holiday, or plan for retirement, or send out invitations for the party. There is work to be done in connection with this kind of waiting.

We might call this type of expectation “penultimate” – these are “not quite ultimate” things for which we wait. Their penultimacy is linked to their predictability. They are all the little expectations in our life about which we know basically what and when to expect them. A baby might decide that 40 weeks is just too long to spend in so cramped a space, or she might have heard something about what it’s like out here and so puts off the inevitable for a few days longer than expected, but we usually know pretty much when it’s all going to happen. We know when we’re likely to retire – in my case, only 6911 sleeps – or how long it is to whatever special day we might be looking forward to.

But there’s another type of expectation we could call an “ultimate” expectation; in fact there just two of these ultimate expectations. One is that we can expect to die. The evidence to hand is that this is pretty much inevitable. The other ultimate expectation is that God will come.

These ultimate expectations are different from the normal, little penultimate ones we live with. They differ in two ways. In the first case, while we know roughly when a penultimate expectation would be realised, this doesn’t mean that in fact it will be realised. I may, in fact, never retire; I may only have 6910 sleeps left in me. This is not the case with death and God; they will come, regardless. The second way our penultimate and ultimate expectations differ is that we don’t know when to expect the ultimate ones. The effect of this is felt in what we do in relation to them while we wait. We know what to do as we prepare for baby or retirement; how does one prepare for death, or the coming of God?

As a general rule, we tend to prepare either anxiously for these things, or not at all. And, in both cases, the anxiety or the indifference looks pretty much the same. Anxiety in the face of death takes the form of a kind of continually looking over our shoulder: are we safe? Is everything in place? Anxiety in the face of death looks like Brexit and Donald Trump and the need to buy a new car just because it has an extra airbag. This is not often much different from the anxiety we feel in the face of the coming of God: have we done the right thing, got ourselves covered? Anxiety in the face of God is circumcision in St Paul’s churches and the drive to financial sustainability in our own.

So it is perhaps not a surprise that we often imagine that God finally comes with death. It has sometimes been said that the church, when its early expectation of the imminent return of God in Christ within the lifetime of the first disciples was not met, shifted the coming of God – our meeting of God – to our personal deaths, thereby making it less cosmic an event but no less imminent. There may be some truth in this historical account for how the understanding developed, that we meet God in a special and defining way when we die. Yet linking our definitive meeting with God with our deaths has perhaps always been the secret logic of “religion”, linking or interpreting God’s freedom in relation to the unpredictability of our dying. Our preparation for God’s coming goes hand-in-hand with our preparation for our death, if we prepare for either.

Now, perhaps it might seem that we’ve wandered some way from our gospel reading this morning. There we hear of the master of a household who has gone away, and will return. The question is, Will his servants be found to be ready for him, or will they be asleep? Yet, the coming of the master could well be his servants’ death and the parable would still make pretty good sense, at least to our typical way of thinking about God and death.

The point of all this is to suggest that God and death are often “structurally” the same in the way that we think. They share the character of ultimate expectations, in that they are guaranteed to come, unlike our penultimate expectations. They share the character of being “unexpected” expectations, in that we know they are coming but we don’t usually know exactly when. And they are typically bound together, in that they tend to be imagined to be co-incident – to come at the same time: death is the occasion of God’s reckoning.

Now, more to move more intentionally to our text this morning – and the parable of the returning master of the household in particular: The point of this parable is not the same as the point of the threatened proverbial bus which might take you out if you as soon as you leave an evangelistic rally. If God is indicated by the master in the parable, then the point is not that God is absent and then returns, and that you’d better get ready. It is rather that God’s absence is the particular way in which God is present, until God comes “again”.

This is not intended to be a clever confusion of the issue, the statement of a paradox as a dismissal of what is a real question. It is rather what we might call a baptism of the text – a drawing of the text into the dynamic of life before God, in Christ. Jesus portrays the servants living their lives “as if” the master were present, such that whether the master is present or not makes no difference to how they act. This has the effect of indicating that there is really nothing to expect which will radically change things in the way that God’s arrival is usually expected to do; life in God’s apparent absence is lived as if God has already come.

And this has a startling effect with respect to our experience of death. If, in our minds, God and death coincide, then the already-having-come of God is the already-having-come of death. It is here that a baptism of this text becomes especially pressing, and we take our lead here from what we’ve heard from Paul in Galatians over the last few weeks. There Paul writes: I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live but it is Christ who lives in me. “I have been crucified… I died to the law”. For Paul, death – the weight of death and its sting – is behind him, precisely because God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Death is not the moment of God’s reckoning with us or, at least, not our death is not that moment. Death is dealt with in the cross – Christ’s death – which is also God’s coming. And so God reckons with us at the point of faith – as Paul said of Abraham’s faith: the cross is the object of faith, the point at which righteousness is accounted to us.

All this suggests another surprising thing: that my earlier question, How do we prepare for our ultimate expectations – death and God – is in fact a “non–Christian” question. Christians do not prepare for God’s coming, or for their deaths. We declare that these are already decisively determined. Rather than “prepare” for God and death, all that we do is as testimony to God’s having already definitively come, to death’s having already been definitively dealt with.

There might still be a kind of consummation of what is now seen as through a glass darkly. But this consummation is not a threat – “God is coming, death is coming” – which causes us to scurry around like ants whose anthill a little boy has jumped up and down on. It is, rather, a promise: it will only get better. And it is here that the structural similarity of God and death breaks down. The full weight of death is behind us: I have been crucified with Christ; the life I live is Christ alive in me. The full weight of death is behind us because God as already come. But the full weight of God’s presence is still ahead of us. And this is promise to look forward and not threat before which we might cower.

This is the gospel: life opening up a head of us, regardless of how much the life insurance companies might charge us to open up an account at this particular point in our lives. Life is always opening up for the baptised, and no longer narrows down to death.

We began by observing that our reading asks of us, What are you waiting for? If the answer to this question is the God of the gospel, then the question takes on a different feel: What are you waiting for? Death is behind you, only life ahead, so get on with it.

Now is the hour appointed by God,

now is the moment for living and loving,

now is the time when God comes to us and we can leave death behind us.

By the grace of this God – by the power of God’s Spirit – may we be raised to the occasion which is life in Christ, to the glory of God and unto our own fullest humanity. Amen.

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Pentecost 11
31/7/2016

Colossians 3:6-9
Psalm 107
Luke 12:13-21

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Most of you are aware that, in the Uniting Church, our ministers are committed to the discipline of using a three year lectionary cycle for mining the Scriptures for God’s word for us. One of the benefits of that is that ministers or, more to the point, their congregations are saved from a continual return to favourite texts and favourite themes. The point of the discipline is to encourage us to explore the breadth of the Scriptures.

Even so, each Sunday there are usually four or six texts and, within those texts, it is still possible for the minister to find his or her favourite themes again and again. A certain text will leap up and group the minister is the one which “needs” to be preached on this week, and the other texts are perhaps simply heard or even permitted.

You are also aware that, for the last two months and probably for a few months yet, we have been focusing exclusively on the book of Galatians. This is a self-imposed discipline I’ve taken upon myself and, of course, have imposed upon you! The problem with that is we run the risk of striking texts which either made no sense, or seem totally irrelevant. We then have either to skip over them or to sit with them until they yield something. Over the last few weeks that has been somewhat to the fore in my experience with Galatians. We’ve been moving very slowly because Galatians is a very deep ocean. There is a lot to be discovered in here. But it is also a book from a different time and place and so there is a question about how what Paul is doing there for the Galatians in response to the crisis about circumcision – how that relates to us here today. This last week I struggled and struggled with our text along these lines until last night a penny dropped – maybe even a pound, but least a penny! – and on that coin was written this: Faith in Christ has no consequences. That is the gospel for today.

I’m aware that that might seem rather a rhetorical flourish or overstatement, perhaps even an irresponsible thing to say. But you’ve heard me say before that it is more important for a preacher to be interesting than to be right, so that us explore this interesting suggestion, that faith in Christ has no consequences.

We will do this with reference to the very first verse of text this morning, and in fact just taking up the third word of that text: “Abraham”. If you know Paul and especially Galatians and Romans, you will know that Abraham pops up when he is talking about justification through grace and faith. Abraham pops up because he is convenient for Paul’s arguments but, more importantly, Abraham is useful to Paul because the old patriarch forms the heart of his opponents’ arguments. Those who are troubling Paul’s community where Jewish Christians. They have come to faith in Christ through the historic line of the covenant. So for them, to enter into the blessings God might give us through the covenant is to be, in a sense, children of Abraham. The question is, How does one become a child of Abraham? For those Jewish Christians, the answer is tied up with the mark of circumcision as the sign of the covenant. Paul takes Abraham, therefore, because he matters so much to his opponents. And Paul says, Read the text. The text says, Abraham believed – trusted – God and God reckoned it to Abraham as righteousness. What is important for Paul is that this happens before the sign of circumcision is given. So, in fact, what Paul is saying about faith and grace and the relationship of these to religious law is not contradicted by Abraham; it is rather supported by it. So Paul says his opponents: What you think is the strength of the argument is in fact the strength of my argument.

Now, we have noted before that what is going on in Galatia is not exactly our problem. We are past circumcision understood in that way. But we can generalise the dynamic of that debate to make it more clearly applicable to us here today. We can do that in this way: for those Jewish Christians who wanted the Gentile Christians to enter the fully into the covenant with the mark of circumcision, Christ is understood to point us to Abraham. Paul says No: Abraham points us to Christ. This is a summary of the whole debate. For those Jewish Christians what has happened is fantastic: – they have no problem with the Gentiles coming to faith in Christ. But they see this as the first step in the blessings; the blessings are secured or signified by entering the fully into an identification with the historic covenantal people of Israel: your faith in Christ points you to Abraham.

Paul says No, that is not a become children of Abraham in the fullest sense. Abraham, in fact, is pointing to what we see in Christ. Paul even go as far as to say, a little later, that Abraham effectively believes in Christ, even though that makes no sense to us historically, chronologically.: Abraham points to Christ. Which is to say, is set to begin with, Faith in Christ has no consequences.

For the Jewish Christians this faith did have consequences: get circumcised. This was a logical next step which had to take place. Paul says No. There is nothing to add to what you have in Christ that can take you any further. Now, of course, there are all sorts of caveats we want to have running in here about moral responsibility and such things. These are important but are like footnotes to what Paul is talking about here: faith in Christ has no consequences.

Now, to ground that a little more for us here and now. Faith in Christ does not mean that Christians need a big church building on a corner which is easily accessible and visible to the passing parade. You might have that, but it is not a logical next step to being the people of God. At the same time, faith in Christ does not mean that the church ought to go feral and sell everything up and be church in a bohemian kind of way. We might in fact choose to do that as well. Yet neither of these are logical steps which follow from being in Christ. It is entirely possible that the one or the other – the munster or the feral existence – might in, their own strange ways, point to Christ. This is the hope of the people of God: the things we do actually signify who we are in Christ.

In fact, we can say this about pretty much everything the church might values. Faith in Christ does not point to the liturgy we have here Mark the Evangelist, or to the liturgy we would have if the minister didn’t keep mucking around with it. That is, there is no particular step which follows from Christ to the liturgy. The liturgy has to point Christ. It may be that certain liturgies do that better than others for certain peoples in certain places and times but there is no specific liturgical consequence which flows out of our being in Christ. And so also in our personal lives: to be in Christ is not mean that you should get married, or that you ought to remain single, or have children or not have children. Any one of those things God can take on and set right, justify, turn into a sign of what it means to be truly human in relationship to this God.

“Faith in Christ has no consequences”. This is troubling. We like consequences. If we don’t have consequences we are not sure we can be safe because if there are no consequences for me there are none for you and so you might be dangerous to me. We talked last week about the function of law and moral outrage, and how forgiveness and grace differ from that legal way of being.

But, more importantly, if faith in Christ has no obvious consequences, have we know what to do? How do we know what we should do? Again, this is important for our own congregation at this juncture. We have an enormous number of decisions to make about enormous things. What is God’s will here? This is one of those anxious questions which sits underneath our thinking through our property questions. That is, we may well be quite anxious before God in relationship to these things. Will we make the “right” decision? This is a very subtle anxiety. It is shot through our discussions with each other. It is shot through our engagement, particularly, with the Synod.

But the gospel is that there are no specific consequences which flow from our being in Christ. So there is an appropriate “fear and trembling” which springs from the gospel, in that we cannot justify to each other what we have done. And Paul says he cannot justify ourselves before God. So what we have to do is just step forward in trust, as Abraham did: “Go “.

Paul says later in Galatians, For freedom you were set free. The more we dig into that, the scarier it will likely be. This is because we like to know that we are right. Yet Paul says we are only right before God because God wants us to be.

While discipleship might be a matter of seeking to do the best we can so that what we do points to the nature of God in Christ, it is also a matter of trust. For, in fact, only God can make the pointing, the sign, work by taking the things that we do – even crucifying the Lord of glory – and saying I can heal, even with that.

Let us pray… Or

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(Modified transcript from recording)

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Pentecost 10
24/7/2016

Galatians 3:1-9
Psalm 85
Luke 11:1-13

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I’d like to draw two things together this morning for our reflection. The first is what Paul says at the start of our reading this morning from Galatians concerning the gift of the Spirit and the miracles worked in the congregation in Galatia through that gift. The second has to do with a declaration heard in the media earlier this week that Sonia Kruger is not evil. I’ll begin with the second, because not all of you will know what it means!

Sonia Kruger is a presenter on a morning television news program. Earlier this week, as a personal response to some of the horrors being perpetrated around the world, particularly in northern Europe, Kruger made the remark that she thought Muslim immigration to Australia should be stopped. Not surprisingly, this brought forth a particularly strong reaction, especially in social media.

In response to this, Waleed Aly, in another news program a day or so later, surprisingly defended Kruger. She was responding, he said, out of fear. And Aly spoke of some of his own fears and remarked on the way in which many tend to respond to an articulation of fear like Kruger’s with such anger and outrage, pointing to how much more fearful she might feel now on the basis of the response she received. So Aly declared that what she said is not evil; she is just speaking out of what she feels, and many feel the same way. Of course, he said this with particular authority which comes with his own standing in the community and also with the fact that he is himself a Muslim. I don’t want to unpack this morning the righteousness or the wrongness of what Kruger said, or of Aly’s response to her. But there was one thing which caught my attention in what he did say, almost as a throwaway remark:

“I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen outrage go viral. Wouldn’t it be amazing if just once we could send forgiveness viral?”

This is one of those poignant moral ironies we often utter to ourselves or hear uttered by others. It is poignant because we actually desire peace and reconciliation and forgiveness in the way that Aly desires it his remark, but suspect that it won’t come.

But I wondered, Why is it that forgiveness doesn’t go viral in that kind of way? Why is it that we do not seek or cannot realise reconciliation and peace through the same kind of medium, in the same mode, with the same intensity that we express moral outrage?

As with many things, Paul has an answer to this question.

I noted last week, in our consideration of what Paul says about grace and law, how easy it is to abstract grace and law into concepts which bear no relationship to concrete reality, and certainly no concrete relationship to where Paul says they are sourced: grace coming out of the cross. I tried last week to explore how grace, as Paul understands, springs from the crucifixion.

But today, we will focus a bit more upon law. Paul is discussing many things in his engagement with the Galatians. The question of how I stand right before God is central to all those things. But when he talks about law, it is easy to imagine that the law is only about how we stand right before God: the things we have to do in order to be “saved”.

Yet, law is much more than that. In fact, for the most part, law is not about how we relate to God, but to each other. It is law – a sense of expectation about how people are to behave – which makes it possible for us to live together as a community. Violations of those laws are things which constitute a threat to us. Law is about human relationship. Moral outrage is about violation of law, the violation of human relationships. Kruger is seen to violate something fundamental about what it means for us to live together. There would be those, of course, who would agree with her but in this instance they were outnumbered by those who did not. We recognise very easily when the law is broken and we usually respond very strongly in an attempt to suppress the violation.

Forgiveness is quite different. Forgiveness has a different kind of register. It is itself a kind of violation of the law. It is a violation of expectation about how things should unfold. And so forgiveness doesn’t have the same kind of reference point of moral outrage does. That is why forgiveness cannot appear in society in the same way as moral outrage does. Forgiveness is not, in one sense, actually “there”. It is a violation, it is unexpected, it doesn’t have a clear reference points for justification.

And so, in this sense, forgiveness is miraculous. For the miraculous has to do with the setting aside of a set of expectations about how things are going to unfold or operate, whether it is the miracle of a person walking on water or the miracle of a persecuted man who returns to his persecutors with words of peace and forgiveness. In either case there is a setting aside of law.

It is very difficult for us to do that as a community, because what binds us together is not the breaking or setting aside of the law but the keeping of the law. If I forgive someone it is hard for me to justify to you why I have forgiven them or why you should. Justification involves a reference to some kind of common ground – a common reference point or law which indicates why this person might be forgiven. But forgiveness is not like that. It sets aside expectations. Law tells us who deserves something. But no one deserves forgiveness because it springs not from a justification external to me and the other person but in fact from the relationship between the two of us. That can’t go viral in the same way that moral outrage goes viral. Moral outrage doesn’t need any personal mediation; it springs up from the matrix of law and mores – our expectations about how we should relate to each other.

By contrast, forgiveness always passes directly from one person to another. And so forgiveness has its own peculiar virality. It is passed from person to person in the same way that infection passes from person-to-person. It is passed on from individual to individual just as someone might hand us a piece of bread or a cup. What we do in this process of giving and being reconciled and bringing peace is creating companions, literary “those who share bread”. We are creating a community. And the virality of forgiveness adds to that community as we learn about what it means, in fact, to forgive. For forgiveness is actually a rare thing – true forgiveness that doesn’t involve an If and a Then but sets aside the demands of the law simply with a view to being reconciled.

And so Paul reminds the Galatians, Did you receive reconciliation – the gift of peace among yourselves – through works of the law or just through hearing the word of reconciliation: God’s word to us that “I love you and would have you” and what flows from that – the word we are to say to each other: I love you and I would be with you. This is the virality of forgiveness

So we don’t come together here in order to ponder the moral ironies – how easy it is to hate one another en masse as a community and how difficult it is to love one another. We come together to acknowledge that the virality of moral outrage is actually our condition; this springs from how we actually live together. And what God brings is something totally different, which breaks this condition. It doesn’t set the law aside; we continue to require some ongoing basic expectations of each other. But in order for us to be able to look forward to a future which is different from the past; there needs to be some setting aside as well of those things which separate us.

I was struck as they heard again the words of the Psalm this morning, about righteousness and peace, mercy and truth kissing each other. It sounds beautiful but it is a contradiction in terms because, strictly speaking, legal righteousness separates us from each other, and truth is a contradiction of mercy: what somebody really did as distinct from what I am going to do about it. The God who reaches out to us in Jesus Christ is a God who says, I would have you, regardless. That is what Paul is talking about in grace: the miracle which the Spirit of God gives us in Christ – a different kind of being together, holy charity, the gift which passes the power of human telling.

This is what we gather to learn about, to grow into and then be sent to bring into God’s world. By the grace of God may be indeed learn, and grow, and be happily sent. Amen.

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(Slightly edited transcript from recording)

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Pentecost 8
10/7/2016

Colossians 1:1-14
Psalm 25
Luke 10:25-42

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

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The parable of the Good Samaritan is part of a large section in Luke’s gospel we call “The journey to Jerusalem”.    After the Transfiguration Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem (9:51).    10 chapters later he enters Jerusalem on a donkey.    In between are the encounters that happen along the way.   You cannot plot this journey on a map.   Geographically there are many inconsistencies.     It’s about a different kind of journey,   a spiritual adventure.    Jesus is taking people into new territory, confronting them with a mystical world they do not yet comprehend.

Much of the language is strange to our ears.     The 70 returning from their mission say, “The demons submit to us”.    Jesus casts out demons, heals lepers, foretells suffering and pronounces judgement

It is a relief to come to the Good Samaritan.     Here is something down to earth that we can understand,   or we think we can.    “Yes.  I’m a Christian, like the Good Samaritan”.   All too often this parable boils the gospel down to doing a few good works.     There’s nothing wrong with deeds of mercy,   but it is important to see this parable in a wider context.  Jesus is taking the lawyer into new territory.     The lawyer wants a limited definition of neighbour, something he can quantify and manage.      By telling him to be like a hated Samaritan, Jesus is teaches that there is no limit to compassion.   It is not God’s nature to love this one, but not that one.

Mary and Martha follow immediately, to add balance.       It’s another story commonly misinterpreted.   Many people sympathise with Martha,   and not without reason.   First because those travelling with Jesus could well have been 40 or 50 people,    and second, because we all have Martha-type chores to cope with.     But Jesus wants to take Mary on to new Territory, and perhaps Martha too.    Mary’s listening to Jesus is prayer,   and prayer is the context in which actions have significance.

The next words are, “Jesus was praying” and the disciples say, “Teach us to pray.”    Then comes, “Your will be done on earth as in heaven”.    Prayer and work cannot be separated.    It’s new ground for the disciples, and new ground for Zacchaeus, only a little later in this section.    Zacchaeus dines with the Lord,   as we are about to do,   sees the world differently and expresses his new vision for life in a magnanimous act of philanthropy.   “Today salvation has come to this house” says Jesus.    It connects with:   “Mary has chosen the better part”.  “Do this and you will live”   “Demons fall”.    All this links prayer and work and contributes to the spiritual journey to Jerusalem.

I hope you can follow thus far.    The theme is pray and work, as the Benedictines put it.    I now want to make some comments on work and prayer based on this interpretation of Luke.

There are many ways of praying, and the usual advice is to pray as you can and not as you can’t.

The simplest linkage is to pray that God will heal this person or fix that problem.     Intercession has its place,   but it is easy for asking prayers to become glib, or worse, manipulative.       Rather remember that Christ is praying for us all the time.    He knows our need before we ask.   So it is better to listen to what Christ might tell us rather than us tell him what to do.      Listening prayer makes room for the Holy Spirit to move.   We like to manage, control, do it our way,   but when we ask God to conform to our concepts, we only shore up the status quo.     Jesus is always trying to take us into new territory, to give us a vision of what his journey to the cross and subsequent resurrection can bring into being.    He has engaged the evil powers, the demons, overcome them and now makes that stronger power available to us.

Here are some examples:

The Desert Fathers understood.    In their cells they battled temptation until they found peace.   This was not just personal salvation.    If the power of Christ in them was sufficient to conquer the devil on his own territory, other Christians could draw on this victory as they struggled to be the church in the world.    Abba Macarius was asked, “How should one pray?”   The old man said, “There is no need to make long discourses.   It is enough to stretch out one’s hand and say, “Lord, as you will and as you know,  have mercy”,  and if the conflict grows fiercer, say, “Lord, help”.   He knows very well what we need and shows us his mercy.

The Quakers understood the link between this kind of listening prayer and work in the world.    Out of their silence before God came the foundation of chocolate factories to wean vulnerable people off gin.    Their contribution to prison reform was more successful, and their part in the anti-slavery movement was significant.

I have heard that Jesuit communities will approach a decision via an extended time of prayer.

At its best, the congregational meeting of English Puritans, known to us as Congregationalists, was a time of prayer rather than debate.    At Wesleyan Class Meetings people came to pray, but they brought also their penny for the poor.   It was one forerunner of trade unions and the welfare state.       Another way of linking prayer and work occurred to me when we visited the Greek Orthodox monastery of Gregoriou on Mt Athos.  We had a contact with an Australian monk.     As we talked I got this strange sense that somehow his life of prayer was setting the spiritual tone of his supporting congregation in Queensland, enabling them to work in the world in a special way.     It affected my approach to ordained ministry.

The word “vicarious” comes to mind.   A true vicar so embodies Christ’ victory over evil that she/he leads people on the journey to Jerusalem, enabling them to venture on to new territory.

There are two other references today:   Study the cover picture on the Order of Service with the explanation, to see how the Good Samaritan can be interpreted in an even wider context.

Read again Paul’s prayer in Colossians 1:9 ff.   “…that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will…. so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord … bearing fruit in every good work.”

There are many staging posts on the journey to Jerusalem.    When people allow Jesus to take them into new territory, it frees others,   and unexpected things happen.   Salvation, the better part, life, the fall of demons.

So, maintain the unity of the two commandments,   Love God and Love your neighbour,   and maintain the unity of the two natures of Christ.

Here, at Mark the Evangelist   we have a congregation praying and a mission working.     We live a gross heresy if we allow those two to be separated.

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Pentecost 7
3/7/2016

Galatians 2:15-21
Psalm 30
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

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Why did Jesus die?

The mundane answers to that question involve the ways in which Jesus came into conflict with religious and political authorities: he rubs people up the wrong way. The children’s “Important God Thought #3” – that God sometimes gets in the way – is very much what we see in the person of Jesus. He is a great disturbance to the religious authorities and, behind them, there are hints that the broader political opposition is also going to be great.

And so, just like countless thousands – perhaps millions – of other martyrs, Jesus is crushed by the machinery of synagogue or church or mosque, or the political or economic system.

While it is a very natural thing for this kind of account to occur to us in our time, it is not the way the New Testament thinks about the death of Jesus. And so this morning we heard from St Paul of the “Christ who loved me and gave himself for me”. This is a very different account of the “why” of Jesus’ death. Unlike the institutional murder of being crushed by the synagogue or by Rome, here we have an intentional death on Jesus’ part: “loved me and gave himself for me…”.

This way of talking about the death of Jesus invokes the difficult category of sacrifice: Jesus “giving himself up” for me. The modern western mind, and not least the modern Christian mind, has a lot of trouble with the idea of sacrifice. Again at the mundane level, we are pretty squeamish these days when it comes to blood. Most of us would probably be vegetarians if we had to get our own meat from the farm to our tables, rather than buy it already styrofoamed and cling-wrapped. Blood is just not part of our everyday experience, and we are uncomfortable with it.

But there are some deeper objections to the notion of sacrifice as it is used theologically; in particular: the idea that God demands the shedding of blood – particularly the shedding of the blood of one named as God’s own Son. What kind of god is it that requires this kind of exchange to take place? We will even hear from time to time objections about the implied “divine child abuse”. The objection is a natural one, and it is a serious objection.

But the more profound objection, so far as Paul would be concerned, is that this understanding of sacrifice implies a kind of economy outside of us and outside of God which ties everybody’s hands – that somehow even God cannot move until blood is spilt. That is the most serious problem with the notion of sacrifice, whether the sacrifice of a son, or a lamb or even a dove.

The idea of sacrifice is there in the Old Testament because that is how people operated at the time. The children’s Important God Thought #4 is that “God is always somewhere”. For the Hebrews the Somewhere was a context in which sacrifice was used as a means of speaking about how we relate to God. And so it is as if God adopts that and refines it, turning from a means of exchange by which gods might be satisfied into a sacrament. It now looks like a buying of life from God, but the ritual of sacrifice is now given to us as a sign of what is involved in reconciliation – that God is doing the giving.

Paul takes up the Old Testament imagery of sacrifice when he talks about the Christ who gave himself up for me. But he is not saying that You understand about sacrifice, and sacrifice is about an exchange, and that explains Jesus.

It works the other way: that Jesus gives the full and proper meaning to how sacrifice works. There is nothing that ties God’s hands. There is not a Deep Magic which must be performed in order for God to act in love towards God’s people.

And so God is not looking for Jesus’ blood. Jesus’ blood is not a currency for salvation which changes hands.

Jesus is simple gift. He doesn’t give himself because that will affect something else in the way that we give money to get something else. His is not an “economic” sacrifice. What we have here is a sheer giving. Jesus’ whole being is giving. He is, as a previous generation spoke of it, the One for Others. That is the heart of what he is. So there is no economy operating here. That is why Paul says that circumcision, in the way it is insisted upon by the Judaizers, is not an item of on list of things you have to pay God in order for God to accept you.

The cross, then, doesn’t cause something to happen. It is a totally different kind of economy. Jesus doesn’t come in order to die. Jesus comes to live. It just happens that living in that different economy – that gift-economy – in which you know yourself as fundamentally belonging to God and not as having to acquire or prove that belonging – is potentially to come into conflict with those who require that we establish or prove, ourselves, that we get the religion right, or the politics right, or the economics right.

Jesus died because he lived in that way that he did. He lived knowing that his fundamental being comes from the one who loved him and sent him. And so he denies things which limit that fundamental being. This gets him killed.

This is not easy to get our head around. As I said last week, our lives are very much about acquisition, about trading and growing. But Paul says “I have died to all of that”. It has all been crucified to me, and I have been crucified to it. Now I seek to live out of what it that Jesus himself has. And we’ll see a little later in the book how Paul uses the nothing notion of adoption: Jesus is the Son, and I become “son-ified” (so we might translate the Greek) – I become one who exists in the same kind of way that he did, existing not with a view to acquiring God’s love but out of that love.

This is the fundamental word of the gospel: that God’s love comes to us before anything else. (This is our justification for baptising little children who can’t yet Yes or No: God loves us before we can love). And our call is simply to live out of that gift: to stand before each other already justified by God, not demanding of one another but living a life of gift.

I died to those other things. It is no longer I who lives but Christ who lives in me.

By the grace of God, may we ever more fully grow into this gift, and take on its form as our own.

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(Slightly edited transcript from recording)

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Pentecost 6
26/6/2016

Galatians 2:11-20
Psalm 77
Luke 9:51-62

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Paul puts a fairly stark choice to the church in Galatia: it is either hypocrisy or death.

The theme of hypocrisy comes up because Paul has had a problem with Peter (or “Cephas” in our reading morning) in Antioch. After he has recounted the way in which he had gone to Jerusalem and put his proclamation of the gospel before those how preceded him as apostles, to test that he wasn’t “running in vain”, Paul now finds that Peter – while originally being happy as a Christian Jew to join in table fellowship with Gentile Christians – subsequently withdraws from that fellowship when others come from Jerusalem whose expectation is that male Gentile Christians would be circumcised, taking on the mark of the covenant God made with Israel.

When we speak about hypocrisy, we tend to have in mind a very strong moral sense of the term: a person who seems to say one thing and yet acts another way. In the best of cases it is a matter of self-delusion: a person who can’t see that her actions and her words don’t cohere. In the worst case scenarios, it is a matter of deliberate deception: a person saying one thing and doing another, perhaps as an exercise of power over others.

But that moral sense of hypocrisy doesn’t really apply to Peter or to Barnabas, and certainly not to those who came from Jerusalem to Antioch. This kind of hypocrisy is distraction from the heart of the matter.

In the case of the “Judaizers” – those who were trying to make Jewish the Gentile Christians – that distraction from the heart of the matter took the form of treating faith in Christ as an item which has to be added to a list of things we do in order to stand right before God. They had been Jews from birth; they had come to Christian faith and have understood that they have “added” this faith to their Jewishness. And they look at the Gentile church and say, Well, they’ve got Christ, and now they need to add to that the mark of the covenant – treating faith in Christ as a matter of an item on a list. Later on in Galatians Paul adds other items he’s heard the Galatians think matter: the observation of certain days or seasons or celebrations, and so on.

To this kind of hypocrisy – distraction from what is truly the heart of the matter – Paul says a very strong No! He says, theologically, that Jesus is not just one more thing to add to yourself in order to be whole before God. The second thing he says – or implies – is an anthropological or human consequence: you are not the sum of things you have acquired. In this letter and in others Paul gives an account of the things that he himself had acquired. Born of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews; circumcised on the eighth day; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to the law a Pharisee and faultless. He says of these things, I consider them all crap – a very strong word in the Greek! – I consider them all absolute rubbish compared to the value of knowing Jesus.

Our lives as individuals and as a community are very much a matter of acquisition. I acquire language, an education; I develop relationships, I take on a vocation, I have a family, earn money, I gather possessions, reputation and influence. And I do each of these things (assuming that I am free to do them) because I think that they are the right things to do. And so it is very easy then to imagine myself as righteous because of the way I’ve added those things and because of the thing I have added.

As a community we go through the same kind of process. Last week many of us gathered to consider the things we value in our life as Mark the Evangelist – the things we’d like to see carried over into whatever our future might be. We talked about location, aesthetics, worship, theology, mission and evangelism. These are things we imagine we need to retain or acquire in order to be a church – and they’re very important. But we ought not to imagine that our being as a church is the sum of all those things – that our standing before God is now secured because we can tick all the boxes on “the list”.

Paul says, You are not the sum of all the things you have acquired. And he doesn’t mean that therefore you should have less; he doesn’t mean that you should have different things. What he says you have to do to unhook yourself from your acquisitions is, die: “I died to the law” – I died to the lists – “I have been crucified with Christ.” The metaphor of death is perhaps the only one which is really going to work for Paul here. He is talking about grace, and one thing about the dead is that they haven’t got anything – they’re dead. “You can’t take it with you”, conventional wisdom says; it is very important theological wisdom as well. The dead don’t have anything, and you can’t add anything to them either; they cannot acquire anything. You can’t add anything to the dead.

But what Pauls says happens is that, whether we literally or metaphorically dead – God adds us to Christ. “I have died to the lists; I have been crucified with Christ” and so “It is now longer who live but Christ who lives in me”. I haven’t added Christ as one more thing I have to have; I have been added to Christ.

Christian faith is an exercise in death and resurrection, an exercise in dying and being added to the life of Christ.

Our lives are processes of acquisition. This is part of what it means to be an historical being: we accumulate things. But the important thing here is that these acquisitions are merely what give us shape and contour, making us the individuals and communities that we are. The difficult thing is to acquire but not to evaluate ourselves by what we have – to have and, at the same time, not to have. It is extraordinarily difficult, for we choose what we do because we consider them to be the right choices, and we would want to say to God and to those around us, I chose the right things.

But Paul says, you are added to Christ; he is not added to you.

This is difficult, which is why we have the book of Galatians. Distraction from the heart of the matter is difficult to avoid. And because it is difficult we practice it each week. We gather around this table. We come and receive. We eat and we drink. But unlike most other food, we are not adding to ourselves in that eating and drinking. Rather we are being added to Christ. As we eat and drink we are made part of the Body of Christ; we are grafted onto that Body. Around this table we receive (Augustine says) what we are, in order to become what we receive: the Body of Christ. To learn what that means – what it means to be added to Christ – would be to get to the heart of the matter, without hypocrisy.

And so it ought to be our prayer that, as we hear and repent, as we eat and drink, as we are added to the Body and then are sent as food for a hungry world, God might continue to teach us who are as we are added to the Son, and so how we are to be with each other, and before God.           Amen.

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(Slightly edited transcript from recording)

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Pentecost 5
19/6/2016

Galatians 2:1-13
Psalm 43
Luke 8:26-39

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One of the reasons for focussing, in the way on one particular biblical book, and working our way through it, is that it enables to understand what is really going on in the exchange between the writer and those to whom he writes. That is a special benefit in relation to reading the book of Galatians because it is not exaggerating things too much to say that we are gathered here today in the way that we are because of the book of Galatians. The great reformer Martin Luther spoke of having wedded himself to this book. It here that he discovered, for his own desire and needs, the sense of what it means to speak of the grace of God. So we are going to try to understand over the next few months what that grace is all about – how it is different from other ways of relating to God, and what kind of ethic leads out of our experience of being embraced by God through such grace.

Out of that protestant reformation one of the great slogans was, indeed, that we are saved by grace alone. But the problem with slogans is that they get drawn out of particular historical contexts and take on a reality which is sometimes very different from what they meant in that original context. And so, for we protestants 500 years later, we often experience grace as somehow being the “easier” option – easier than the option which is being denied here, “salvation by works”. We might be given the impression that we don’t have to work very hard; God, instead, wants to embrace us. It is easier this way.

Paul himself knew of this reading of grace. He was himself accused of trying to please people rather than please God. His doctrine of grace rather than works was heard as letting people off the hook. The particular point of conflict – the point of conflict really for the New Testament, as the gospel begins to spread from Palestine into the wider Roman and Greek world,  was the question of circumcision: certainly for those Gentile men who were becoming Christians, a difficult “work”! Paul is being heard so say, You don’t need to worry about that, and so is being heard to be saying, There is an easier way.

And yet it is a great struggle. It is not an easy thing for the church to get its head around. Paul is having constantly to defend himself and his apostleship. Whatever grace is, then, it is not about things being easy.

Why not? Why this great struggle? We have this morning how Paul is arguing that he is on the same side as the other apostles and yet I am different. Why this great struggle?

There are probably two things going on. One is that, for those who are bringing the circumcision doctrine to the Gentile Christians, that there is a question of the faithfulness of God. Has God not commanded this? Why are the laws being changed now? It is great for us if the rules are changed in our favour, of course! However, the trouble is that if the rules are changed, and we accept this, what if God changes them again? So the question of the faithfulness – the reliability of God – is the theological dimension of what is going on here. Now, we’ll hear more in a few weeks’ time of how Paul deals with that particular question.

But there is another important dimension to the whole debate. This is not so much the “vertical” one of our relationship with God, but the “horizontal” one of how we relate to each other. Another characteristic of the Reformation – particularly as it came through Luther – is that it tends to reduce the whole question of the relationship to God to my relationship to God: How to I find a righteous God? And Luther (re-)discovers the doctrine of salvation by grace, through faith. The problem is that it is not just I who might be saved in this way; it might also be you. And that is what creates the question. If you are save but you are different from me, how do I know that I am saved? Or do I know that you are saved, or that you are safe. How do I know that you are not somehow contaminating me because you aren’t saved enough?

The question of circumcision, as a mark which distinguishes the people of the covenant with Israel from those previously outside that covenant is just one of those questions: Are we actually standing before God in the same way?

For the doctrine of grace says that God accepts you as you actually are. And we will hear a little later in the book of Galatians about how Paul declares, so far as stance before God goes, there is no Greek or Jew, there is no slave or free, there is no male or female. You have to be some combination of those things in order to be an historical human being, but the doctrine of salvation by grace says that God takes what you are and accepts what you are, and then you move on in some new direction after that.

But that is the difficulty of grace: it doesn’t lift us out of the world. It calls us into a different kind of relationship with those who are not me. We have lots of ways of relating to others: they are part of my family (therefore, they are special); they are part of my community, or my country, or my religion or my faculty or my workplace. These are ways in which, in one sense, we rely upon “law” to relate us to those around us. But the problem being wrestled with in the early church is that grace is that grace is also mediated “horizontally” and not just “vertically”.

The effect of this – the very hard thing with which the church is wrestling in these texts – is the fact that we are called, as those who have received grace, to be gracious. Christian discipleship is about growing – not just in the grace of God, that we might actually receive and realise how rich that gift actually is. It is also about growing in graciousness. It is about being in a God-like way to those who are around us.

This is what we embody week after week as we gather around this table. We embody grace in the sense that we recognise that we are invited. We come forward, recognising that we are not invited because of what we have done. We are invited because what is on the table is a sign of our capacity for violence toward each other – the capacity of the people of God to want to kill God. And so we persist with “body” and “blood” – as icky as that language is – because it reminds us what we are capable of and it shows us what God is capable of overcoming. So there is grace for each one of us, to come forward, to receive that, no longer as an accusation but as God’s embrace of us.

And as we are embraced in our reception of the bread and the wine, we embrace those who gather around the table with us. For we are not invited alone. We are invited to accept graciously the person on our left and our right, and also those on the other end of the line who always sit in a different part of the church. There is not Holy Communion which is not communal. God’s grace to us is always doubly mediated: through Jesus, but Jesus appears among us with the face of another person. “God is always somewhere” concrete and tangible – to recall our children’s address this morning. That is the gift and the call.

Grace is God’s word for those who are heavily laden. It is a word which brings with it a light and easy yoke. We are here to receive that gift, to take on that yoke, that peace and love and hope might have a chance in a world where the righteousness we think we have earned leads too often to judgement and division.

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(Slightly edited transcript from recording)