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Pentecost 4
12/6/2016

Galatians 2:15-21
Psalm 5
Luke 7:36-8:3

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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On this third Sunday of hearing the text of Paul’s Letter to the churches in Galatia, and which is now coming indirectly to us, we hear this verse:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

With these words, indeed with the whole passage from Galatians before us today, we are at the very centre of the preaching and theology of St Paul. Equally certainly, we are also at what has been the same centre of the history of both Catholic and Protestant churches since the days of the sixteenth century Reformation. Then the controversy was that of how human beings might find themselves “right with God”, or – in more technical language – how one could claim to be “justified” before God. We know of Martin Luther’s anguished question in the monastery: “How can I find a righteous God?” – anguished because he knew only of his failure in experiencing what he was told should be his salvation. And this because of the burden of a religious life lived under the constraints of  a required obedience to ecclesiastical law.

The resolution came for Luther, as indeed it has for countless others before and since, in his discovery of a different gospel of liberation found in the proclamation of the Apostle Paul. And ever since, Protestant proclamation has echoed Luther in endorsing a similar individual preoccupation with justification in the face of human sin and guilt, and their counterpoint in redeeming grace and faith.

Although the mature Luther quickly came to broaden his anxious search into a celebration of its proper foundation in the person of Jesus Christ, what Luther set in train with his anguished question and his revolutionary discovery five hundred years ago has meant that generations of readers of Paul since the time of Luther have understood that to be “saved” one must “have faith in Jesus Christ”, not in any effort, work, or merit of one’s own. Even more, generations have been reminded that it is not enough to give merely mental assent to God’s work in Jesus.  Rather God’s work of justification is completed in the individual only through whole -hearted trust in Christ, and his atoning sacrifice for sin on the cross. This righteousness, found in one’s faith in Jesus Christ alone, is then imputed to the sinner, who is thereby enabled to stand before God without guilt or shame.

Does that sound familiar? At least to those of us over seventy! So we have today’s text as a classical location for such a gospel. Here it is again:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

What is happening here?  We can readily see with such a reading why  “being saved by faith not works” has been so central to Christian understanding. What is not so clear is where the true initiative lies in this relationship. What has happened in practice is that Jesus Christ has become the object of our faith; that is to say, our faith is the way in which Jesus Christ and his benefits are received by us as subjects.

And to make sure that we have got it, this is what has been called “good news”, gospel.

This story’s deep entrenchment in Protestant theology is familiar to all who have had some minimal induction into our Uniting Church traditions, even if this voice has been more than somewhat muted for the last forty years.

So there is surely some irony in the fact that the unchurched culture around us has now learnt, and loves to sing, about “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me” sung presumably in ignorance of the costliness of what it was that its author, the reformed slave trader John Newton, was confessing.  Perhaps what has become a vacuous “amazing grace” is all that is left of what was once a totally encompassing existential celebration of the Church, whether Catholic or Protestant; the celebration encapsulated in the word: justification.

But now comes the tricky part – so here is where I have to encourage you to take a deep breath and try to hold on a bit longer. It was not always so, this picture we have painted. Early editions of the Authorised Version of the Bible of 1611 followed the tradition since the fourth century translation of the Greek text into Latin – known as the Vulgate – rendered the Greek phrase in two preceding verses in the passage we read not as faith in Jesus Christ but as the faith of  Jesus Christ.  So also in the verse before us, the Greek is ἐν πίστει ζῶ τῇ τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ: “in the faith of the Son of God”.  πίστει is the Greek word for “faith”, “τοῦ υἱοῦ τοῦ Θεοῦ is the genitive, or possessive, form “of the Son of God”.  In fact, then, the translation “of” as in “the faith OF the Son of God” is the literal meaning of the Greek words.

More recent editions of the Authorised version, and subsequent translations ever since, went back to Luther’s translation. But if you have a New Revised Standard Version of the Bible and you look up this text you will see in italics at the bottom of the page that “the faith of…”  is offered as an alternative reading to “faith in…”.

The significance of the substitution of the prepositions is monumental.  If we were to make such a substitution, we now have this text in a new and quite different form. Here it is:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith OF the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.” 

See what has happened. Now it is not my faith that takes centre stage – my faith which may be confident, weak or non-existent – but now it is the faith of Christ that we are being invited to appropriate and to live by. The difference is of considerable moment. We have surely all had experience of a parent, a teacher, a mentor, a colleague who has had faith in us when we struggled to have any in ourselves. And with that assurance, the world changed for us. That is what is at stake when “of” becomes the substitute for “in”.

Why does all this matter?  We are forever being told that we live in a post-Christian society, and the accuracy of that acknowledgement is daily being forced on us. Our society and our churches are a long, long, way from Luther’s anguished cry: How can I find a righteous God?  Who asks that question anymore? Now the cry might well be: How can I find God? Or at worst, the assertion uttered either triumphantly by the Ditchkens (the Dawkins and Hitchens ) of this world, or at best as a resigned sad conclusion to life’s ambiguous experiences: There is no God.

The grim truth is that what we have witnessed in the lifetime of most of us has been the fact that Christianity no longer generates a wider culture of an embodied context wherein faith can be lived as more than an act of individual defiance to the prevailing superficialities of the day.  More and more, the place where culture matters most of all – the home, the parish, the community, is frayed and in tatters. Christianity, as it is popularly understood, has for the wider community simply ceased to be life-giving. The mission, the place, the presence of Church which was once at the centre is now ever more marginalised, the ubiquitous coffee shops we pass to get here being the place where “congregations” gather.

But – and here is the good news. While all this is happening we have resources that remain largely untapped. We have tools of which we are largely unaware. The theological advances of the past seventy or so years lie mostly dormant, even to the minds of  vocal retired clergy writing in “Crosslight”: those Christological, Trinitarian, and sacramental resources that could readily provide the ground work for a new springtime of faith. There is a secure path waiting for us to walk beyond a present captivity to secular mantras.  In a society that is not only all about “me”, but also where faith is understood to be believing a whole lot of things that are implausible, the faith of Christ surely trumps my faith in Christ every time.

This is why the reconfiguration of today’s text is of crucial significance in the days to come: crucial remember, comes from the Latin cruxis, cross- bearing.  Such a reconfiguration could achieve a new reformation of equal significance to the old.

We need to be much more aware of all this not least as we wrestle with the legacy of our property, which appears to speak so loudly of a world that has gone.  But in the light of our reconfigured text: what about this?   And here even preachers find themselves surprised by the implications of their texts.  A possible implication is this. The church next door, suitably modified as it has been by the sixteenth century Reformation, was shaped like the ancient cathedrals that preceded it in an age founded on the faith OF Christ, not so much of  OUR faith in Christ. What might that mean for the fate of that building for the future if the case we are making holds up?  Would our reconfigured text help or hinder what we should do with it in a radically secularised society? That, if nothing more, might surely be an interesting question.

Whatever we decide about the future of our property, this much is certainly true. Our text today is a truly foundational resource.  It could once again make faith a lived reality on the ground.

So, with Paul, I offer it to you again in its radically reconfigured form:

“It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me: and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith OF the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”

This is a ground quite other than the fragility of our personal faith.  This is a ground from which a massively revitalised grasp of the mission of all our churches could be launched. And though other foundations might well be shaky, of this foundation the promise is sure: that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

 

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Pentecost 3
5/6/2016

Galatians 1:6-24
Psalm 146
Luke 7:11-17

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“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel!”

Paul has an issue he wants to sort out with the church in Galatia!

And yet, before dealing with this, he feels that he has to defend himself:

“For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

No less than 6 times in the first chapter of the book Paul insists that his apostolic vocation is not something of human origin but is a sending by God through a direct revelation of Jesus Christ. He has to defend himself in part because his proclamation of the gospel itself is challenged, and in part because his status as an apostle was questioned.

In response, Paul reasserts both the content of what he believes and his authority in the matter. But the important point for today is that these are not two separate things, but are inextricably linked. What Paul knows cannot be separated from how he knows it, for both the knowing and the knowledge itself are matters of interruption. In contrast, the “human” method of knowing – the pleasing people of which Paul is accused – is a matter not of interruption but of continuity.

What is at stake here is how we know the things of God.

On the question of how we come to knowledge in general, the theologian-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once drew an instructive distinction between a teacher and a midwife (in Philosophical Fragments). In the learning model of the midwife, we come to knowledge of something by its already being within us, and being skilfully drawn out. As a demonstration of this Kierkegaard recounts a story in which the philosopher Socrates “draws out” from an uneducated slave boy Pythagoras’ theorem about the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. Without telling the boy anything, but only by asking him questions, the boy is able to deduce something akin to our familiar a² + b² = c². In this way, Socrates thinks he establishes that everything we can know is already inside us, and simply needs someone or something to help it out – like the midwife helps out the baby.

Kierkegaard contrasts this midwifery acquisition of knowledge with the teacher. The teacher brings something new to the student which the student could not otherwise have known or discovered. The knowledge is not induced from the student; rather the student is, in a sense, interrupted by what the teacher brings.

Kierkegaard’s distinction is helpful because illuminates the distinction Paul draws between “from humans” and “from God.”  For Paul, what he preaches is not what we might already know, but what only God could bring through what Paul calls “a revelation of Jesus Christ”. This was for Paul himself a profound interruption of his world. It turned him from persecutor of the church to evangelist, from devout Jew to being willing to eat and work with Gentiles as a sign of the gospel.

Belief in Jesus, as a kind of knowing, springs from just such an interruption, just such a revelation.

But it is not enough to say just this. Christian faith is not related to normal knowledge merely as interruption is related to continuity. Were this the case, anything which interrupted our world could be construed as an act of God: a heart attack, the terrorist’s bomb, falling in love, a market crash, an unfaithful partner. These things are rarely true discontinuities; they are much more often just the signs of deeper continuities of which we were unaware.

The relationship between what is continuous, and so natural to us, and what interrupts because it is truly outside the possibilities of our world, is put better for faith in terms of the relationship between law and grace. More specifically, Paul’s struggle with his opponents at Galatia (or in Jerusalem) has to with the order of law and grace. Paul rejects the way these are ordered by his opponents. The specific crisis is the question of the relationship between circumcision and Jewish and Christian identity. For Paul’s opponents, circumcision is a sign to God. Paul sees it as a sign to Israel. The difference here is that, for his opponents, circumcision tells God that this people belongs to him. For Paul, it tells the people that they belong to God. Those who want to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians consider that it amplifies God’s favour whilst, for Paul, circumcision is the sign of God’s favour which comes before the sign.

Because of this different reading of circumcision, Paul is portrayed as weak, as pleasing human beings by allowing the Gentiles to avoid the inconvenience(!) of circumcision. By putting God’s grace before anything we do Paul seems to be let everyone off the hook.

Yet Paul knows his own experience: a zealous persecutor of Christ claimed by God to become Christ’s proclaimer. When he defends himself, then, he defends the gospel, because he himself is a kind of interruption, a sacrament of grace, an apostle born out of place, out of order, so far as his critics are concerned. God made Paul to become, to represent, to embody what he was to speak of.

For it is only the free who are able to set free. This is the closest thing the people of God have to a fundamental law.

Only the free are able to set free. The question then becomes, Who is free?

Paul’s answer to the Galatians is, only God.

What does this mean?

Positively, it is impossible to say because, in our experience, absolute freedom is self-contradictory. And so we place limits on freedom. We write laws which seek to constrain as much as to liberate, which indicate how deep (and no further) freedom can go. But with God freedom goes all the way down. This is what is so hard for the circumcision party to fathom: did God not command the sign of circumcision? How can God be free here? We’ll hear how Paul accounts for this in the weeks to come, but at the heart of the matter is God’s capacity to create new things, truly new things, and God’s not being bound by what is already in place, to have to draw something out of that.

What God’s sovereign freedom means negatively is a little easier to say. It means that God does not owe us anything.

It surprised me when I first wrote that. It surprised me because I realised that I (and probably you too!) tend to imagine that God does owe us something. If we make the right sacrifices the right way or, in modern terms, get the strategic plan right, or the governance oversight, or the budget, or the building, or the location, or the worship music, or the outreach program, and if we are prayerful and faithful enough (or at least, sincere), then…

It is the “then” which limits God’s freedom, which nails God down (or nails him up, as the case may be). The “then” which follows the “if” is our expectation that we can midwife something out of God, some benefit which is already there, just waiting for us to ease it into the bright day. We just have to get the angles and the timing right: Push, God… Breathe…

This is not the God of the gospel. There is nothing we need to ease out of God, for God willingly gives us what we need.

When Paul says, Christ alone, he declares just this: what God gives is enough. What we do in return is just the particular form in which that gift is acknowledged: whether circumcision or uncircumcision, whether we marry or choose to remain celibate for the kingdom, whether we fast or feast, whether we worship under a spire or in hard to find catacombs.

It all begins with the gift, to which any imagined or prescribed obligation must simply point. What we do is an answer to our sense for the gift.

When this truly is the case for us then, as it was for Paul, they will glorify God because of us.

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel!”

Paul has an issue he wants to sort out with the church in Galatia!

And yet, before dealing with this, he feels that he has to defend himself:

“For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.

No less than 6 times in the first chapter of the book Paul insists that his apostolic vocation is not something of human origin but is a sending by God through a direct revelation of Jesus Christ. He has to defend himself in part because his proclamation of the gospel itself is challenged, and in part because his status as an apostle was questioned.

In response, Paul reasserts both the content of what he believes and his authority in the matter. But the important point for today is that these are not two separate things, but are inextricably linked. What Paul knows cannot be separated from how he knows it, for both the knowing and the knowledge itself are matters of interruption. In contrast, the “human” method of knowing – the pleasing people of which Paul is accused – is a matter not of interruption but of continuity.

What is at stake here is how we know the things of God.

On the question of how we come to knowledge in general, the theologian-philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once drew an instructive distinction between a teacher and a midwife (in Philosophical Fragments). In the learning model of the midwife, we come to knowledge of something by its already being within us, and being skilfully drawn out. As a demonstration of this Kierkegaard recounts a story in which the philosopher Socrates “draws out” from an uneducated slave boy Pythagoras’ theorem about the lengths of the sides of a right-angled triangle. Without telling the boy anything, but only by asking him questions, the boy is able to deduce something akin to our familiar a² + b² = c². In this way, Socrates thinks he establishes that everything we can know is already inside us, and simply needs someone or something to help it out – like the midwife helps out the baby.

Kierkegaard contrasts this midwifery acquisition of knowledge with the teacher. The teacher brings something new to the student which the student could not otherwise have known or discovered. The knowledge is not induced from the student; rather the student is, in a sense, interrupted by what the teacher brings.

Kierkegaard’s distinction is helpful because illuminates the distinction Paul draws between “from humans” and “from God.”  For Paul, what he preaches is not what we might already know, but what only God could bring through what Paul calls “a revelation of Jesus Christ”. This was for Paul himself a profound interruption of his world. It turned him from persecutor of the church to evangelist, from devout Jew to being willing to eat and work with Gentiles as a sign of the gospel.

Belief in Jesus, as a kind of knowing, springs from just such an interruption, just such a revelation.

But it is not enough to say just this. Christian faith is not related to normal knowledge merely as interruption is related to continuity. Were this the case, anything which interrupted our world could be construed as an act of God: a heart attack, the terrorist’s bomb, falling in love, a market crash, an unfaithful partner. These things are rarely true discontinuities; they are much more often just the signs of deeper continuities of which we were unaware.

The relationship between what is continuous, and so natural to us, and what interrupts because it is truly outside the possibilities of our world, is put better for faith in terms of the relationship between law and grace. More specifically, Paul’s struggle with his opponents at Galatia (or in Jerusalem) has to with the order of law and grace. Paul rejects the way these are ordered by his opponents. The specific crisis is the question of the relationship between circumcision and Jewish and Christian identity. For Paul’s opponents, circumcision is a sign to God. Paul sees it as a sign to Israel. The difference here is that, for his opponents, circumcision tells God that this people belongs to him. For Paul, it tells the people that they belong to God. Those who want to impose circumcision on Gentile Christians consider that it amplifies God’s favour whilst, for Paul, circumcision is the sign of God’s favour which comes before the sign.

Because of this different reading of circumcision, Paul is portrayed as weak, as pleasing human beings by allowing the Gentiles to avoid the inconvenience(!) of circumcision. By putting God’s grace before anything we do Paul seems to be let everyone off the hook.

Yet Paul knows his own experience: a zealous persecutor of Christ claimed by God to become Christ’s proclaimer. When he defends himself, then, he defends the gospel, because he himself is a kind of interruption, a sacrament of grace, an apostle born out of place, out of order, so far as his critics are concerned. God made Paul to become, to represent, to embody what he was to speak of.

For it is only the free who are able to set free. This is the closest thing the people of God have to a fundamental law.

Only the free are able to set free. The question then becomes, Who is free?

Paul’s answer to the Galatians is, only God.

What does this mean?

Positively, it is impossible to say because, in our experience, absolute freedom is self-contradictory. And so we place limits on freedom. We write laws which seek to constrain as much as to liberate, which indicate how deep (and no further) freedom can go. But with God freedom goes all the way down. This is what is so hard for the circumcision party to fathom: did God not command the sign of circumcision? How can God be free here? We’ll hear how Paul accounts for this in the weeks to come, but at the heart of the matter is God’s capacity to create new things, truly new things, and God’s not being bound by what is already in place, to have to draw something out of that.

What God’s sovereign freedom means negatively is a little easier to say. It means that God does not owe us anything.

It surprised me when I first wrote that. It surprised me because I realised that I (and probably you too!) tend to imagine that God does owe us something. If we make the right sacrifices the right way or, in modern terms, get the strategic plan right, or the governance oversight, or the budget, or the building, or the location, or the worship music, or the outreach program, and if we are prayerful and faithful enough (or at least, sincere), then…

It is the “then” which limits God’s freedom, which nails God down (or nails him up, as the case may be). The “then” which follows the “if” is our expectation that we can midwife something out of God, some benefit which is already there, just waiting for us to ease it into the bright day. We just have to get the angles and the timing right: Push, God… Breathe…

This is not the God of the gospel. There is nothing we need to ease out of God, for God willingly gives us what we need.

When Paul says, Christ alone, he declares just this: what God gives is enough. What we do in return is just the particular form in which that gift is acknowledged: whether circumcision or uncircumcision, whether we marry or choose to remain celibate for the kingdom, whether we fast or feast, whether we worship under a spire or in hard to find catacombs.

It all begins with the gift, to which any imagined or prescribed obligation must simply point. What we do is an answer to our sense for the gift.

When this truly is the case for us then, as it was for Paul, they will glorify God because of us.

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Pentecost 2
29/5/2016

Galatians 1:1-5
Psalm 96
Luke 7:1-10

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When compared to the way in which we might begin a letter today, it would have to be said that Paul’s letter makes an extraordinary beginning.

Paul an apostle—sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead— ² and all the members of God’s family who are with me,

To the churches of Galatia:

³ Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, ⁴ who gave himself for our sins to set us free from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, ⁵ to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

That is how to start a letter!

Grand as it is, it is closely correlated to the way in which letters were begun then and so not really over the top for the time. Even if we are not so grandiloquent today, how we address each other – whether in person or by correspondence – is usually fairly closely prescribed. When you learn a new language, almost the first thing you learn will be how to greet another person, and it is not long before the local rules of letter-writing are also taught.

Even though we are not so full in our customs of greeting today it remains the case that the rules are very well defined, and because of this we are also well attuned to occasions when the rules are broken. And the usual response to the broken rules is at least surprise, and quite often offence – if a greeting is not returned or, more positively, if someone greets us who we didn’t expect would. This applies even in the most reduced forms of communication, such as email. An email which comes without at least a “hi” at the beginning or a “thanks” or something similar at the end feels harsh.

We sometimes dismiss the typical exchange of greetings as a kind of necessary “social noise” which has to happen to send and receive signals that things are OK and likely to go according to the usual pattern. But in fact most greetings have hidden within them not simply custom but a wish.

To say “Good morning” to someone is not to comment on the weather; it is to wish her a good day, or afternoon, or evening. To say “farewell” to someone is not to dismiss them, but to say “go well; travel well”. “Goodbye” is a contraction of an older saying, “God be with you”. The Romans would greet each other with “salv­é”, (meaning “health” whence our English “salve”, “salvation”; cf. French salut), and so expressed a wish for the well-being of the person met. The same can be found in other languages (French bonjour, salut; German Guten Tag, Hebrew shalom [peace], etc.).

The important point about all this is that it changes the meaning of what happens when the customs for greeting are violated. If there is deep in our cultural memory the notion that we are to greet another by expressing a wish for the other’s well-being, then to deprive another person of the right greeting is not simply to be impolite but in fact to deprive them of your good wishes or, to get to the heart of the matter, to deprive them of your prayer.

For “God be with you” – “goodbye” – is not simply a “wish” but is in fact a prayer, as can be understood all the other similar greetings. “A good morning to you” is not addressed to you but to the one “in charge of” good mornings. In the same way when Paul declares “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ…” he is now addressing not the Galatians but God or, perhaps more profoundly, he addresses both God and the Galatians at once.

To break the rules of greeting is to address someone without such a prayer being said or implied, and so is make a demand of them without offering anything in return. It is to overlook that we have a responsibility to wish the well-being of others. In Paul’s case there are very serious matters he wants to raise with the Galatians, and he gets to them in the very next verse following this opening greeting. But there is no getting past the pastoral, human, theological necessity of beginning as he does: declaring himself, identifying those he intends to address, and binding those two parties together in speaking a prayer for blessing for the Galatians. To have done anything else than this would have been to contradict the whole point of the letter, which is that the Galatians are in peril of depriving themselves of just such a blessing.

If we push this thinking, then the failure to greet properly is not simply a matter of impoliteness or lack of civility, at least not in the usual sense. To be uncivil, which comes from the Latin civitas for city, is more profoundly a matter of failing to contribute to the creation of the city as a community of mutually responsible and well-wishing persons. The same applies to being “impolite”, which is linked to the Greek word for city (polis) and can be re-read in the same way: failure to set our relationships in the context of prayer.

All of this is to suggest that how we greet each other, and any unwillingness to wish the best for each other, is not simply a moral failure or a matter of bad manners; it goes to the heart of what we are and where our well-being will come from.

We can draw all this to some kind of conclusion by bringing it into play with two aspects of our expression of faith in worship today – the liturgical act of passing the peace, and that aspect of the creed which speaks of “the communion of saints”.

To say “peace be with you” is not merely to say hello, but is to utter a prayer, so that the passing of the peace in worship is in fact a practising of prayer, and a preparation for the serious work of praying for each other. We might speak, then, of the passing of the peace as a kind of sacrament of intercessory prayer: it looks like we are greeting one another but God is also addressed.

And so this turning to each other brings us to a filling out of what it means to speak of the communion of saints. It is easy, perhaps even natural, to think of the communion of saints as a given, static community of believers – a collective of sanctified persons. But the communion of saints is rather more a dynamic communion, a movement of mutual concern in which we address God for each other as we address each other. To be with each other is to be the means – the source of the prayer – by which God blesses us.

Let us seek to become a community of blessing such that, whether or not our language expresses it directly, our speaking to each other is like a prayer with a view to building up the one we address. Anything less than this falls short of the source of all blessing the Christian knows, as Paul reminds the Galatians: that Jesus has given even himself, and so become a prayer for us – become the prayer for us – that we might be lifted out of the mire, to know peace.

By the grace of God may we too be made such pray-ers, and prayers, unto the healing of all we encounter. Amen.

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Trinity
22/5/2016

Romans 5:1-5
Psalm 8
John 16:12-15

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Most of you have probably had a child try to describe to you the plot of a story she has heard or read, or a film she has seen.

She begins to tell the story, and then stops and says something like, “No, no, no; I forgot, I have to go back, there’s something else…”, as she remembers an important detail she should have told at the start. Only then does she go on, before cutting back again to something else which she also forgot to mention but which you need to know to understand the next bit, and so on.

In the end you may well have no idea what the story was actually about, or at least be in no position to tell someone else what it was about, but you know that you did get all the bits and that it was important to hear her tell it!

It’s kind of like that when the church talks about God; talk of God as Trinity has that kind of jumbled-ness about it.

Listen again to part of today’s very trinitarian-sounding gospel reading:

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come.

He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

Wherever you start to speak about this particular God, there will always be something else you should have said before, something about the Spirit or the Son or the Father which you now say too late, but it has to be said somewhere for everything to be said: “No, no, no; I forgot, I have to go back, there’s something else…”

*

Now, if you’re not already asking the question, let me ask it for you: So what? So what if God is like that, circles within circles? As neat a way as that might be of accounting for the church’s tortuous trinitarian confession, what does it have to do with anything, really?

The “so what” of trinitarian talk of God is in the contrast such a sense for God has with other senses for God or god-like things in our lives.

Most of us, for example, have a very strong desire for simplicity. This is why we don’t tell stories as children do. Simplicity is ground to stand on. It is firm and reliable. Simplicity is (has?) a reference point: a point before which nothing else needs to be said, and after which all that I say and do is justified, so long as it is levered from that reference point, that fulcrum.

Our lives are filled with these reference points. They are philosophical, economic, social and political. They are manifest in those strong sentences which begin with “I am…”, “You are” or “We are…”. I am a man. I am white. We are Muslim. I am, You are, We are Australian. I am free. We are true believers. These are reference points, assumptions, bases, before which nothing else need be said, and after which all that I say or do is justified.

These reference points are the ground we stand on. They simplify the complex world. They are where our sense for the world begins. You – woman, Christian, Muslim, disabled, child, beggar, refugee – you are measured from that simple and sure starting place. You are less than me, because you don’t have the basis I have, are not what I am.

These reference points are very often unrecognised, simply because they are obvious not only to their beneficiaries but also to their victims. Think of the operation of ideas like maleness, whiteness and citizenship in our contemporary social and political life. That concepts like this work in a quasi-divine kind of way indicates that the simplification I am speaking about is not just a “religious” thing. The only difference religion might make here is to propose to stick God under the “I am/we are” statements as a reinforcement: I am, you are, we are, this or that crucial thing because God has made it so (“So there!”).

A simple god, simple economics, simple politics corresponds in Christian thinking to a stark legalism, in contrast to the life of grace.

Law is a secure place, before which nothing needs to be said, and after which what I say and do is justified. “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God” (John 19.7) – no two ways about it.

By contrast, grace always has something more to say. Something new is always being said. The sign of this is the Resurrection. The law has worked through its logic – “he ought to die” – and then it’s as if God says something like, “No, no, no; I forgot, I have to go back, there’s something else…”

Simple gods see people crucified because those people don’t connect to the story told so far. “Woman” does not connect in a Man’s world, or black or yellow in a White world, or muslim or christian in a Secular world, or a foreigner in a Sovereign State, or a prophet drawing attention to the freedom of God among a people who have God all sewn up.

Simple Gods see people crucified because those people don’t connect to the story told so far. But the God of Israel, the God who gives the Christ by the Spirit, the God of the church – this God always makes the missing connections. The exclusions are overcome: the crucified first, and then the crucifiers; the outcast, and then those who rendered him so.

This is what the Holy Spirit speaks in reminding us of the things of Jesus, the things of the Father: What the Father gives the Son, and the Son gives us in the giving Spirit, is a making of connections, a re-visiting of foundations, the adding of another detail which has not yet been spoken but which illuminates everything.

And so the church confesses faith not unlike how a child tells her story: constantly being reminded of something which should have been said before.

Is this good enough for us? This is a crucial question.

‘Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to us, “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever stands before God as a little child does is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (cf. Matthew 18.3f).

Let us, then, tell – and glory in – the story by which God makes us children – his children.

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Pentecost
15/5/2016

Romans 8:14-17
Psalm 104
John 14:8-17, 25-27

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“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”

Are these not very troubling words, considering some of the things Jesus is said to have done: healings, nature miracles, resuscitations from the dead?

Our immediate thought would then be that this is just the kind of thing we too are expected to perform. Yet such things as these we do not do.

The next step is then to accuse ourselves or others because, if Jesus spoke the truth about what his disciples would be able to do, something must have gone badly wrong: we do not have enough faith, are not spiritual enough, are not obedient enough in order to be able to exercise the power which Jesus exercised, the power to do such “greater works”.

Yet, in fact, when Jesus comes actually to talk about the work he came to do, things like the miracles don’t really feature at all. According to Jesus, the work of the Son is to make God the Father known. The opening prologue of the gospel concludes, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known” (1.18). And we hear this kind of thing repeated again and again in John’s gospel. The things of the Father have been entrusted in their entirety to the Son (5.22), who thereby brings the Father to the world: “if you knew me, you would know my Father also” (8.19); “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14.8). Jesus attends not to his own agenda, but to that of the Father (5.19, 8.38; 12.48-50; 14.10; 17.8); he speaks what he has heard from the Father, and his word is the Father’s (8.25-28, 14.24, 15.15). Whereas our focus will usually be on the power to do great works (or our apparent lack of power as a church), Jesus’ focus is on the purpose of the works – the revelation of the Father. This is not to rule out the possibility of such miracles still happening today, but it is to say that miracles aren’t the point. The miracles point to something else. John speaks of Jesus’ miracles as signs – things which point beyond themselves, through Jesus to the Father who sent him.

It may indeed be the case that Christ’s church doesn’t do the works that Jesus did, and certainly not greater works than he did. Yet this is not because we lack miraculous power. It is because we very easily fall into the trap of thinking that miraculous power is what it is all about: power to change things, to “make a difference”, to “have an impact”.

We might not cast it in terms of wanting to be able to perform miracles; in denominations like ours, at least, we imagine ourselves too “mature” and “progressive” to expect miracles! The power we seek might be social, by becoming a welcoming community; or aesthetic, in a certain style of building or music; or cultural, by cleverly manipulating the icons of the age; or political, seeking to make a high profile impact in the surrounding community. We look for the “hook” which will re-catch all those fish which have escaped the net of the church. We must admit that there is not a little of this in our current thinking about what our congregation ought to do with the resources at its disposal.

But the question which arises for the church from this text is not in the first instance, “Why do you not have the power, have the magic?” but “Do you know what magic is?” In terms of our gospel text, the question can be put this way: “are you able to let your work as individuals and a church to be simply to continue with Jesus’ work of making the Father known?” The problem here is not that which we might have with the word “Father”. The question is about whether Jesus’ own task of making known the one who sent him is sufficient also for us today. Are we willing to trust the future of the church to such a seemingly impotent action?

This is a question we must answer, at least if we imagine ourselves somehow to be the church of Christ.

Of course, I haven’t said anything specific about what this might look like in our life as a church. In fact it may not be possible from surface features to distinguish between the church which longs after lost power and the church which simply understands and continues in its true work. The church whose purpose is to continue to work in the Spirit for the revealing of the Father will certainly have social and aesthetic and cultural and political dimensions. Yet it will differ from the power-seeking church in the way that being led differs from being driven. A led church does not quite know where it is heading, other than that it is to the place where God is; a driven church has a specific goal in mind which it must hit, whatever the cost.

A led church differs from a driven church in the way that hope differs from optimism. Christian hope does not know the shape of its future but trusts in the one who has promised; optimism knows what it wants and expects to get it.

A hopeful church differs from an optimistic church in the way that the uncertain differ from the anxious in the face of the same challenges and threats. The uncertain simply do not know what the outcome of any particular situation might be; the anxious are afraid of particular outcomes.

The uncertain but trusting church differs from the anxious and fearful church in the way that getting radical differs from becoming reactionary. The radical church knows its calling, and is happy to step out in response to that call despite what it sees going on around it; the reactionary church is shoved from pillar to post by every change to which it imagines it must react.

It is worth asking ourselves from time to time why it is that certain things dominate our conversation about our churches, or feature so prominently on our meeting agendas and so occupy so much of our time. “You will do even greater things than these”. Not a little of what occupies us is the drivenness, optimism, anxiety and reaction which develops in us if we imagine that Jesus was effective because he had a great bag of tricks, and now, in his absence, if only we knew where that he left that bag!

But the effectiveness of Jesus was in his trust in the one who sent him, in his willingness to be named by the Father’s address to him, and in his being willing simply to point back to the Father.

This is the extraordinary thing about the church – its existence arises out of something so impractical as the relationship between the Father and the Son at God’s heart.

What has all this to do with the gift of the Holy Spirit, which we mark today with the festival of Pentecost? The church has historically understood that the to-ing and fro-ing between the Father and the Son is the work of the Holy Spirit – even is the Holy Spirit. What passes from Father to Son and Son to Father is Spirit.

This is the Spirit God gives us: not “power” to do “works of power”, a kind of divine weapon in our hand, but God’s own heart: the love the Father has for the Son, and the Son for the Father.

This is what makes the church, and is also what our life as church is to be – a sharing in that pointing to and from God, a sharing in the Spirit, a sharing in God. And so Jesus says to us in our anxious reactions to our apparent powerlessness in the world,

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. Do and be as I have done and been. What I am, and what I have done, is the way to the Father, the way to the truth and the life you so earnestly seek. If you know me, you will know the Father also, for the Father will send the Spirit, that you might be where I am, and know the Father as I know the Father.

May the one who promised this indeed send us this Spirit that we may be where he is, do what he does, and share in his peace.

Amen.

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Easter 7
8/5/2016

Revelation 22:12-21
Psalm 97
John 17:20-26

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last week about our meeting last Sunday, and what we have been doing as a community before and since then.

And I feel that I have to say… that You People are Wonderful.

Why does the preacher dare to declare such an unlikely thing?

We have committed to a once in a generation process, and it probably feels to some of you that it seems to be taking a generation to wind up!

Last week’s meeting was kind of clunky. We made a clear decision or two, although not necessarily the decisions some thought we were making. We’ll probably have to backtrack a little, which may become confusing or simply exasperating.

In the weeks leading up to the meeting, and even more so since, there have been some rather “frank” conversations in the working group and church council and other places on questions of procedure, content and interpretation, although no blood spilt.

It is all very time consuming, and there are other things we’d prefer to be doing.

And yet you’re all back here again today, smiling!

In fact, as long as the process has been even to now – and as expensive – and as murky as the future seems at this point, there has been much encouragement and gratitude and understanding of what we are all confronted with. This has meant that there has been a strong sense that it is we who are doing this, working together, seeking a common mind.

And so I’m more than happy to declare that if I had a choice as to who it would be with whom I would be doing something like this, it would be you.

But it is important that that declaration not be heard as sentimentality. I’m not saying that I think that you are particularly nice (although some of you really are). I’m not saying that you are right in what you want to come out of this – some of you are probably quite wrong, if rightness and wrongness can actually be determined here.

Sentimentality sees only what it wants to see, or wishes to be seen only in a particular light. It mistakes the absence of war for peace, the lack of resistance for assent or consent. Sentimentality imagines that you want what I want. Sentimentality white-washes.

The wonder of the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist, for the moment, at least, is not a matter of sentimentality so much as a theological wonder – something of a miracle even.

For we are in the process of choosing a future or perhaps, more strongly, of creating a future, and this has the potential to be very dangerous.

A safe approach to this would be to imagine the future to be much the same as the present. This is the sentimental approach: because it is, it is right; what we have and can carry over, is enough. It is the safest approach, if we can pull it off, because it is the least disruptive.

But I doubt that we can. Too much is up for grabs for sentimentality to win the day in the end, but it may still seriously cloud our vision and thinking if we are not wary of it. Shifting back to UMC will not be the same kind of thing as moving from there to here was. Refitting this place and continuing to worship here will not be the same as what we’ve experienced here in the last 6 or 7 years.

None of this is to predetermine which we should choose. The point is simply that we understand what lurks in the future, behind those choices. And I don’t mean simply that the future is always unpredictable, and therefore potentially dangerous. This is the risk of the future as the proverbial bus, not seen until it is too late. We can’t do anything about that kind of future risk, except decide that we will not fear it simply because it might happen.

The particular risks in the future which confront us as a congregation are we ourselves, the members of the congregation. The scariest thing about tomorrow is always the people we will meet there, or that some will not have come with us to that new time or place. It does not have to be the case that these threats are realised, but only sentimentality would deny their possibility.

If it seems that I’m getting a little overdramatic and pessimistic here, imagine … a Thursday night. It has been a taxing week – more so than usual. But finally you can withdraw to a safe place, out of sight. It’s the Passover again, and you need to focus. Jesus seems to have a little more to say than usual. “Love one another, as I have loved you”. Yes, you think, as you look around the group. We can do that. Something which doesn’t make sense happens between Jesus and Judas, but both Jesus and Judas often don’t make sense. We can sort that out later; maybe Saturday or Sunday. Jesus continues, now praying: As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

It’s a nice prayer, you think, although you wish Jesus would pray in a nice straight line for once, from here to there, and not go on and around in circles like that.

When Jesus’ disciples hear this prayer, the betrayals and denials and doubts – the crucifixion – are yet to happen; there is more than a little reality checking about to kick in. Prior to all these things, the experience of love in the community of disciples, and then the command to love, and then even Jesus’ prayer for a united community, might just be more warm fuzzy sentimentality. The desperate need of Jesus’ love command and love prayer is not felt until “it” all hits the fan.

The Futures Project small groups in April were asked about what they would consider “deal breakers” with respect to any option we might consider for our future. The two things most often identified were maintaining our theological, liturgical and communal integrity, and the preservation of Hotham Mission.

I think that these commitments will be a great guide to us as we think together.

But the question is: are these sentimental commitments? They don’t have to be; but do they reflect a glossing over of what we really do and or really are as a congregation? In fact, we can’t really say until we are confronted with the possibility of cutting Hotham Mission or the possibility of a fracture in the congregation if it seems we can’t find a way forward.

It is one thing to be warmed on a cool spring Thursday evening by good wine, confident that because Jesus is on my side I’m on his. It is another thing, when that confidence is undermined and we have to deal with what has not yet come to the surface.

This is the marvel of what we have done to date.  Minds are changing, visions are shifting, in all directions. We have done well so far, but there is still a long way to go, whichever of the many options before us we choose. Making the choice itself will threaten to consume us, let alone then acting on it.

How then to approach what still lies before us?

We can simply resign ourselves to the hard slog. This is a bad idea. Resignation and sentimentality are basically the same, in that both are without hope: the resigned are sadly hopeless because nothing will change and the sentimental are happily hopeless because nothing needs to.

This is not the outlook of the people of God.

We are seeking to act because we must. This “must” is not the something-must-be-done-about-the-church “must”; that’s just resignation again, brightened up a little with a sense of responsibility.

The “must” which causes us to act is indicated in the snippet of Jesus’ prayer we heard in our gospel reading:

“that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

That is, the “must” is not the buildings question; the buildings are just the material – the object – around which we are gathered.

The “must” of what we are doing concerns the “we” ourselves who are gathered.

When we first began this process I proposed that we are not in the process of preparing for mission by sorting out such mundane things as buildings and budgets, positioning ourselves for some as yet unstarted missional push. We are, rather, in this very process, engaged in mission.

How is this this case? Because in this process we are “proving” the gospel, understanding “prove” here as much in its older sense as in its usual modern sense. To prove something – in its older sense – is to test it; consider how car manufacturers test their new vehicles on their “proving grounds”.

We test: Will the gospel expose to us where we are being more sentimental than truthful in our sense of who we are and what is required of us? And, having so revealed who we are, will the gospel enable in us a step further into the unity for which Jesus prays?

We must prove – test – the gospel in this way, for it is only so that we ourselves are tested, proved.

In this proving of the gospel which is our testing of its capacity to work among us, there opens up the possibility of the second (more familiar) sense of proof, which Jesus also implies in his prayer:

[…may they] become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

We are not “preparing for” mission in our difficult deliberations. If that were what this was about we would be in the realm of sentimentality again, happily bulldozing our way to what is – to me – the “obvious” outcome.

“Love one another” is our mission. That is so difficult that Jesus imagines that it requires even him to pray for it.

The gospel question to us is whether we believe that the unity of believers can communicate to the world that the Father sent the Son. Put differently, the question is whether we believe that gathering around the table each week “remembrances” – makes present to us and the world – Jesus himself, sent from God. These are the miracles God offers his people today.

You have done well so far. You are wonderful. If you won’t take my word for it, ask the God whose Christ thinks you are worth his prayer.

Continue to be such a marvel, that we the church and the world around us may know that the Father sent the Son.

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Easter 6
1/5/2016

Revelation 21:9-22:5
Psalm 67
John 14:23-29

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“I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.”

Did ever a text seem so apt to the occasion on which it was read, considering the business of the meeting to follow worship this morning: “I saw no temple”?

The problem is that whenever what a text seems to be saying is obvious, we are at great risk of not hearing at all what the text is saying, but what the text confirms about what we were hoping it would say. That is, we never read the Scriptures innocently. We come to God with agendas. What joy when God’s agenda seems to be ours!

And so what “obvious” thing does this text say to us about the matters before us? “Obviously”, no temple means no temple. This, “obviously”, means no church building.

Or, perhaps, something else is obvious here. Immediately following this verse we hear: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.” It is obvious that our city – here and now – does have need of a sun and moon. These texts, then, “obviously” cannot be about us in this time and place, which is not yet heaven and so requires still a people “called out”, distinct in politics and presence from the rest of world. (The Greek word for “church” is ek-klesia, “out-called”). It is, then, not at all obvious that there is no place now for temples.

So, given that two potentially diametrically opposed conclusions are “obvious” from John’s declaration about the people of God and their temples, let us set the obvious text for today aside and pick up another which is rather less so.

“They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads”.

What is not immediately obvious, but a moment’s thought makes clear, is that the people and God are looking at each other. This is one of the ways in which John characterises heavenly relationship to God – gaze: God in ours, us in God’s.

From our perspective, there is something new here. At the start of John’s gospel (probably a different John [author] from the seer of Revelation), we hear, “No one has ever seen God…” This echoes the Old Testament understanding that no one can look upon God and live, not even Moses. Here, however, something new takes place. “God’s home is with mortals”, as we heard last week (21.3). Heaven is seeing God – face to face – and seeing by, or via, God: there is no sun or moon.

But why is God’s name on our foreheads? For whose benefit is this? If heaven is about the gaze – ours into God’s, God’s into ours – who is supposed to read this name?

The only candidate is God himself. It is God who reads God’s own name on our foreheads.

Why does this matter? Is it possible that we might get lost, and God might have to rummage through a lost property box to find us, and know that we are his because we have his name on our forehead?

If the divine name merely labels us, then the implication of the text seems to be that God still might forget us or lose us: that there might yet be more death and mourning and crying and pain (contra 21.4), all of which are supposed to have been wiped away.

But the name written on our foreheads does much, much more than this. When God looks at us, he reads not our names but his own. It is as if God sees God when looking at us.

We have to say that it is as if God sees God when looking at us, not merely because we must preserve God’s dignity, but also because we have to preserve our own. It is still we who bear God’s name, we who remind God of himself and his promises, who call God to faithfulness. Whereas believers are accustomed to thinking and proclaiming that our life is inseparable from God’s, the gospel puts it the other way: God’s life is inseparable from ours. God, after a fashion, needs us if heaven is going to be heaven.

“The home of God is among mortals” (21.3) is not a declaration that God might live somewhere else and still be God, yet just happens to live here. It is a “property” of God – something appropriate to God – that God’s life is with ours: with us who mourn what has been lost, who hope in things which cannot be realised, and who cause others to mourn and despair.

It is God himself who writes his name on our foreheads, and so nothing can wipe it away: no choice, no failure, no success.

And so in all things we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor tent nor temple, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In all things, God will “out” – and out as God for us.

This is the gospel, out of which we look to the future, out of which any choice can be a choice for life.

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Easter 5
24/4/2016

Revelation 21:1-6
Psalm 148
John 13:31-35

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Our history has given us a lot of images of what heaven is like, and those images usually have in connection with them certain images of what hell might be like, the one contrasted with the other. Hell is a place of fire and punishment, heaven is a place of sunshine and bliss – so the story typically goes.

In the reading we’ve heard from Revelation this morning we’re given a vision of heaven which has some sense of the blissful existence we might be hoping for, but which also, when we unpack it a little, some might consider to be rather like hell. The beautiful imagery is there: God will dwell with them, he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, death and mourning and crying will be no more. These are things we all long for.

But there’s another aspect of John’s vision which may perhaps be more troubling, if we consider its fuller ramifications. Heaven is not a place where we are alone, but a place where others are. And here we make a connection with something of which a rather sad philosopher once reminded us: “hell is other people”.

Now, we might take some comfort in being in heaven with others if we could choose who else was going to be there: friends, the family members we actually like, perhaps our favourite artists or musicians or celebrities for entertainment. And yet not only they are present in the image which John gives us. The old heaven and the old earth (note: the old heaven also goes!) are replaced by new ones, at the centre of which is a city. As a city, heaven is a communal place, and not a place of isolated individuals.

The problem here, perhaps, is that this will mean that heaven may be a place where there will be people we don’t like or have even learned to hate, and who don’t like us. There doesn’t seem to be very much heavenly about that.

Now, of course, if it’s a heavenly city, then it’s probably something pretty large, and so maybe we could manage to be in the heaven without running into those people who rub us up the wrong way. But given that that’s how we do things already here and now, again there’s nothing very heavenly about this vision is we are going to have to plot when and where we’ll be in order to avoid being annoyed or attacked by others. If heaven is a city full of people, it could turn out to be just plain hard work.

It gets worse. In the gospel reading we heard this morning, Jesus is talking to his friends just before he is about to be handed over to the authorities for trial and execution. He gives them a commandment: love one another. Being told to love someone implies that we don’t or will find it hard, probably because he or she is unlovely, and so love just becomes another thing we have to do. More than this, it’s not just a matter of loving one another, but loving one another in the same way that Jesus has loved us: totally, in self-giving sacrifice.

So, to summarise these readings this morning: after a life-time of being commanded to love people whom it’s hard to love, we’ll go to heaven and meet more of them. Praise the Lord.

This might all seem a bit silly but I think it helps to unpack the ideas of the text in this way if we’re going to understand how they can be misunderstood, and see just what the church’s life is and isn’t about. There are a lot of half-thought wishes and dreams about heaven (and hell) which have little relationship to what we find in the scriptural reflection.

The question is, if city life is how I’ve described it, and heaven involves another city, what would actually have to happen for the dream, the promise, to be realised? Day after day our televisions, newspapers, radios and social media feeds fill the space around us with the cacophonies, the dissonances, of life together. What would it take for life in a city to be a harmonious reality, for heaven as John describes actually to be heaven? The answer is that we cannot imagine.

The good news about all this has its ground at the end of our reading from Revelation: “Behold, I am making all things new.” It is the “I” and the “new” which make all the difference. “I” – God – am the one who brings this about. As much as we can be told to love one another, it is hard work, and some of us just aren’t very good at it. God, however, loves even those who reject him, as the risen Christ returned with forgiveness to those who rejected and abandoned him. It is this kind of love which brings this about and makes all things new. There is not merely another heaven and earth, but a totally new kind of heaven and earth, a place in which it has become possible for us to love each other, a place where life together is life-giving and not life-sapping.

The bad news the church has is that we are unable to save ourselves, to the extent that we would have to be alone in heaven if we were to be there on our own terms and not be hassled by other people – even by those we love and yet who are still quite capable of driving us up the wall. Every dream of a new city, every vision of a new society, every “solution” for some communal problem creates just another problem.

But let’s turn all of this to something a little more concrete and specific.

“Every dream of a new city, every vision of a new society, every ‘solution’ for some communal problem creates just another problem.”

What about us and our search for a solution to the problem of our future – our accommodation and our work?

Will we worship in a re-fitted factory, making the most of the potent ascetic proclamation that enables, among other things? Or will we worship under a spire, with the potent worship aesthetic it makes possible, among other things? Or is there a special measure of righteousness in those who would try to find a balance between those two extremes, simply because it is a compromise, as if – because God reconciles extremes – he necessarily sits somewhere in the middle?

What do we dream of here? What is our vision?

In a marvellous little book called Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remarks:

“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who fashion a visionary ideal of community demand that it be realized by God, by others, and by themselves.

They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge the fellowship and God himself accordingly… They act as if they are the creators of the Christian community, as if their dream binds people together.

When their ideal picture is destroyed, they see the community going to smash. So they become, first accusers of the fellowship, then accusers of God, and finally the despairing accusers of themselves.” (SCM 1954, 17f)

To paraphrase this, in the light of the problem with common ideas of heaven we’ve just noted: it is not so much that we cannot have what we want; it is rather that we are likely to want the wrong thing.

It is not a brave person who declares “this, and only this” for the future of a Christian community. It is not even a fool. It is a blasphemer: one who declares that God’s home is not with mortals (Rev 21.3) – with those whose existence is indelibly marked by death.

We worship a God who justifies sinners. This is not a declaration that there is a safety net somewhere for those times we break the rules. It is the rules. “Who-justifies-sinners” is God’s name, and not merely what God sometimes happens to do. “Home-is-with-mortals” is God’s name.

The shadow-side of this is that if this God is our God, then we are those in need of being justified. Why? In relation to the need to decide our future together, it is because we mistake planning for hope, our work for God’s.

It is necessary that tomorrow have some particular shape in our imagination: it is necessary that we plan. This is so that we have something worth doing today. But we can have no confidence that our planned tomorrow will not amount to a crucifying of the Lord of glory.

I suspect that, instinctively, we know this. It is what causes us so much anxiety in the whole process. There is a great deal at stake here, and the risks are great. We wonder, Will we get it wrong, with particular ideas in our heads of what “wrong” looks like. And we wonder, how will we account for ourselves? Who will accuse us for what we choose and how it works out? Perhaps those who went before us, giving us so much, only to see it lost? Perhaps the Presbytery or Synod, which imagine they could put the resources to better use? Perhaps those sitting in the row in front of, or behind, you, who advised that we go a different way? (And they are thinking the same about you!). Perhaps most powerfully: Does God have a plan in his head, which we are supposed to guess? Do we risk failing God in this?

To put the question differently: what is the relationship between what we have to do and what is said from the throne in John’s magnificent vision: It is done?

What is done? God’s home is revealed to be with mortals. God home is with those who built all this, and then died, leaving it to us to sort out. God’s home is with us who will decide what to do with it all, and will then die. God’s home is with those who will have to live with our decisions before they die.

The point is: what we decide is not the source of our life. God, in life and in death, is the source of life.

We are a baptised people. The only death which matters we died in the baptism; there is no condemnation of those whose lives are hidden with Christ in God. Weekly we are fed with broken body and spilled blood – the signs of death – not because we are a cannibalistic death cult but because with this God death has no power but what God gives it.

The decisions before us cause us so much trouble because we are afraid that something is going to die. But God’s home is with mortals, with those who die. There is nothing to fear.

What is the relationship between the royal declaration, “It is done” and what we are do to?

“It is done” declares that death has no power; it is overcome.

What then are we to do? There is only one option. Choose life.

What kind of life? Life together: God’s will done, on earth as it will be in the impossible, promised heaven.

“Love one another, as I have loved you. By this – alone – will everyone know that you are my disciples”.

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Easter 4
17/4/2016

Revelation 7:9-17
Psalm 23
John 10:22-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Gwen Ince

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In our gospel reading today, the bods who hang about the temple come up to Jesus in a sort of mini ambush and let him know they’re looking for answers: “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

I’m guessing the people here at Mark the Evangelist know something about looking for answers, wondering how long it’s going to take to decide the location and plant questions of their future, longing for an answer. UnitingCare Hotham Mission has been waiting for plain answers about its place in the structures of the Uniting church. St Albans are wondering when they’ll get to meet Daniel’s wife and son. Christ Church wonder most weeks if the Minister will get to church on time.

In comparison with these, questions like ‘What is Hotham Mission?’ or ‘Are you the Messiah?’ seem relatively simple. And of course that’s what Jesus says to his questioners: “What are you asking me that for? I’ve already told you in plain Aramaic… but you don’t believe me. I’ve already done more of God’s works than you can poke a stick at, but you don’t see that that answers your question. You just don’t get it. Worse than that, you never will. You will never cotton on to what I am on about – or more to the point, who I am and where I come from – without a radical change of camp, a seismic shift in your assumptions, a capacity to trust me on my own terms rather than judging me on yours.” Perhaps I exaggerate a little. Actually all John has Jesus saying is, “You do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.”

Naturally, as readers of the text, to say nothing of long-time members of the church, we automatically understand ourselves to be amongst those who do belong. We know Jesus is the Messiah. We know he is, don’t we? We know he lived our life, died our death, was raised to the right hand of God. We hear his voice and follow, more or less, most of the time. See that cottonwool ball I’ve glued to the picture – right there – that’s me, gratefully grazing on the grass with all the other sheep (and even helping fertilize for the next generation).

But the colours change a bit when we jump into the Book of Revelation, and stand with the writer, as the elder points out the innumerable infinitely diverse multitude of white robed praisers of God and the Lamb spread out before us as far as the eye can see. Perhaps then there is that little moment of hesitation, that skipped heartbeat of anxiety as we scan the faces looking for our own. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we are sufficiently sure of what we know and believe that we feel no need to scrutinise our own seeing and believing, though it does make us sound dangerously like the bods in the temple if we are.

The thing is, we are told these, the white robed praisers, are they who have ‘come out of the great ordeal’, they who have ‘washed their robes white in the blood of the Lamb. Definitely squeamish stuff, that last bit, with the colours seriously awry. It is probably at this point that I need to thank Craig for drawing my attention to some of Rowan Williams” thoughts in his little book, Resurrection, which I believe some of you have read and others might well consider reading. In this book, Williams has a go at helping us understand, or at least get some sense of how the resurrection can transform us.

The argument, as I understand it, goes something like this. Jesus, for no crime, no nasty lapse, no fault of his own, except perseverance and endurance in holding to his absolute belief in the love of the God he knew as Father, suffered an unimaginably cruel and brutal death. Definitely bloody literally. Even more so metaphorically. There is blood on the hands of those who put him to suffering, ending his life prematurely and painfully. If that were the end of it, if death were the only outcome, the stain of blood would remain indelibly there. It is, says Williams, only as Jesus’ killers are confronted with the resurrected Christ that they are able truly to see what they have done, and so have the option to turn away from death towards life, to repent, not just seeing what they are capable of, but owning what they have done and who that shows them to be, and daring to look with hope to the one who, precisely as their victim, alone can forgive them. Such forgiveness is transformation indeed, an invitation to reconciliation, to full membership in the white robed multitude, an opportunity to trust Jesus on his terms rather than judging him on their own.

So that’s the blood bit, in terrifying brevity. What about the great ordeal (and no, you’re not allowed to count sitting through this sermon as part of it)? A bit of attention to  the historical context of the writer of Revelation encourages us to think that the great ordeal refers to the terrible suffering inflicted by Rome on its citizens, not least its Christians, along with the terrible devastation this kind of literature pictures as part and parcel of the anticipated bringing down of the enemy, i.e., Rome. To come through this great ordeal is to persevere and endure, holding to absolute faithfulness to God in the face of unimaginable cruelty. Or, to put it conversely, it means not compromising or collaborating with the prevailing culture of opulence and violence for one’s own protection, preservation or even positive benefit.

So what has all this to do with Hotham Mission? We live in a world, a country, where the prevailing culture is not that different from first century Rome. Of course our opulence and violence is more hidden, more subtle, more targeted, and yet all the more insidious because of that. We so easily fall into ‘too cosy a peace with the prevailing culture and political ethos’, as one writer put it. In fact, I would suggest we all have a strongly vested interest in doing just that, finding it pretty much impossible to extract ourselves.

Thus, when we reach out to those in need, we are in no position to  regard ourselves as the strong helping the weak, as the ones who know how to live well guiding those who don’t, or even as the embodiment of Christ saving the lost. Rather, we are reaching out to the victims of our mutually agreed systems of self-care and convenience, as to the suffering Christ whom they embody. As we face those whom our systems brutalise and cast aside, and see the living they strive to do against all the odds, as we see Christ in them, we are miraculously offered the opportunity to see with renewed clarity our own complicity in their disadvantage. Only then, as we face our victims, can we seek forgiveness from Christ in them, be radically transformed, truly know Jesus on his own terms, hear his voice, and follow him.

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Easter 3
10/4/2016

Acts 9:1-6
Psalm 30
Revelation 5:11-14
John 21:1-19

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

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“Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honour and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12)

The Scriptures have many references to the Lamb, and they all have different meanings and nuances. I’m going to reduce them to two.

1. The Lamb as sin bearer, the agent in atonement, as in John 1:29. Jesus is introduced in the words of John the Baptist “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
2. The Lamb upon the throne, the victor over evil, the only one who is worthy, as in our text from Revelation.

These are the two meanings picked up in the liturgical response we know as the Agnus Dei:

1. Jesus, bearer of our sins, have mercy on us
2. Jesus, redeemer of the world, grant us peace.

These two themes are expressed visually in the 11^th century engraving on the cover of the Order of Service:

1. The blood from the wound of the slaughtered Lamb flows into the communion chalice – a direct link between the sacrifice of Christ, and the restoration of our relationship with God through the sacrament. Jesus, bearer of our sins.
2. With its legs, the Lamb opens the scroll. In the imagery of Revelation, only the Lamb is worthy to break the seals on the scroll, for as soon as it is opened the evils of the world rush out, for example, when the first seal is broken a white horse is loosed, with its armed rider coming forth, conquering and to conquer. The Lamb of God can handle this.

When the Lamb is such a powerful image it seems curious that the sixth Ecumenical Council, in 692, should see fit to ban it. The argument seems to have been that the purpose of your devotion is to incorporate you directly into the life and being of God. In Colossians it says that Jesus is the image of the invisible God, so the Lamb is then the image of the image of God. That is, it actually distances you from the being of God, as Father, Son and Spirit.

Distancing ourselves from the holy is something we are good at. I give you an example: Henri Nouwen once described a typical interview with a student wanting to talk about a problem. After a time, Nouwen would say, “Have you prayed about it?” and the reply would be “Well, I’ve thought deeply about it.” “Yes, but have you prayed about it?” “Oh, I have talked about with several people like yourself.” “But have you prayed about it? Have you laid it all out before the Lord Jesus Christ and listened to what He might have to say to you?”

In the icon school it is not unusual for people to paint angels. When I query this, they say, “I can’t bring myself to come so close to Jesus that I could paint his face. I’m more comfortable painting angels.”

The Angus Dei does not offer any avoidance or easy escape: “Jesus, Lamb of God, bearer of our sins, have mercy on us.” It is for this reason that I have trouble with the decision of the 6^th Ecumenical Council. I might say that it is not unusual for me to have trouble with the decisions of the councils of the church. But in this case I am in good company. The Pope at the time, Sergius, didn’t like it either. In 697, 5 years after the Council, he borrowed the Agnus Dei from the Syrian Church and inserted in the liturgy in deliberate defiance of the Council’s ban. And it has stayed there ever since, usually right at the moment when we take the bread and wine.

So the image of the Lamb stays, reminding us that it is the wounded Christ who is raised up to sit on the throne. In icons of the Resurrection, or Christ Pantocrater, I always make sure the wounds are visible. It is the crucified, slaughtered Lamb who is on the throne, not another version of the Emperor, or the rider on the white horse.

While John the Divine uses obscure language in Revelation, he is in no way avoiding the issue. As the seals are broken, war, violence, death, corruption are loosed – all the things that fill our news broadcasts today. For all our human cleverness we still have to overcome a troubled world. So we have an enquiry, do research, pass laws and spend money, but none of these efforts is worthy. Only the Lamb can handle these things. Christians testify to a different way.

John, in the 4^th Gospel, announces Jesus as the Lamb who bears our sin. Then he re-arranges the timing of the crucifixion so that it coincides with the slaying of the lambs for the Passover, all 30,000 of them. The original gospel finished at chapter 20, so the climax is Thomas seeing the wounds and saying “My Lord and my God”. We do fairly well when it comes to allowing the wounded Christ, the Lamb, to bear our sins. We receive forgiveness and take the cup, blood from his wounds, and it is direct and powerful.

But it is more of a challenge to confess the Lamb as the redeemer of the world. When we get involved with the affairs of the world it is difficult to be ruled by the Lamb. For example, if you were to probe the complexities of the world financial system it is likely that some of your superannuation funds are invested in corrupt practices that favour the rich at the expense of the poor. You might even rate a mention in the Panama files. Or if you are going to serve the community you will tangle with Government regulations. And if you enter the sphere of politics you will compromise to survive. There’s bound to be tension between the will of the party and the way of the Lamb.

The Lamb that breaks the seals is a bit like a whistle blower. Exposing the evil that rules usually wounds the one who exposes it. That white horse that comes forth, conquering and to conquer, has very powerful weapons.

Even in the affairs of our own church, with the property decisions before us, I wonder about the power of that green line on the graphs, and wonder what the Lamb of God upon the throne might have to say about it. Is it as predictable as the forecasts presume?

I said John’s gospel finishes at chapter 20 with Thomas, but there is chapter 21 – composed to put Peter in a better light than leaving him in his denial and flight from the cross.
Since it is today’s lectionary reading, I’d better do something with it. I’m going to ask you to use your imagination and listen to it with the Revelation text in mind, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might.” Just try to see a picture, and then you can make of it what you will.

Imagine a boat, and the boat is the church. It is filled with the leaders of the church, the disciples. People who have walked with Jesus, seen the vision, encountered the risen Lord, but retreated under pressure and reverted to their old ways, their professional skills, the ways of the world. They have gone fishing. They work all night, plying their trade, but with no result. Enter Jesus, the wounded risen Lord. He says, “Children, you have no fish, have you?” They answer “No.” So he says, “Try doing it my way. Fish from the other side of the boat, the right side.” They cast their net on the right side, and they are not able to haul it in. The structures they have built are not able to contain the harvest. Peter puts on clothes, like new clothes after baptism, jumps out of the flimsy, inadequate craft, and goes to meet the Lord. Then they all feast together on the shore.