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Transfiguration
7/2/2016

Psalm 99
Luke 9:18-36

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I have spent – some might think, “wasted” – a lot of time over the years watching science fiction movies.

There are many pleasurable things about this pursuit, but among the more irritating things about science fiction movies is when they get the science wrong – at least, the science which isn’t part of the fantasy. So, for example, after Luke Skywalker screams away in his X-wing fighter, having just got off the fatal shot, we ought not to hear the massive boom of the explosion of the Death Star in deafening surround sound. In space, exploding imperial ambitions don’t make any sound. Explosions in space are very bright and very pretty, but also silent to any onlookers; there is nothing to carry the sound to our ears.

Rather more subtle, and of relevance for approaching our gospel reading today, is the way in which robots typically engage with other in these kinds of movies. So for example, C3PO and R2D2 actually talk to each other. (For those of you who, even after 39 years of opportunity, remain uninitiated in things Star Wars, you might at least have seen pictures of these two: CP30 is the skinny gold humanoid robot, and R2D2 the little white and blue trashcan on wheels). C3PO is a protocol unit, and so can speak English and many human and non-human languages; R2D2 can only squeak and squeal. There is, then, the need for C3PO to translate what R2D2 is saying for the humans in the story, and for us watching it.

But what I’m interested in here is why C3PO and R2D2 actually need to say anything to each other. What each machine has to do is first have its thought – presumably in some computer code – and then convert it into something which can be expressed audibly, generate the sound, and then wait for the other machine to hear that sound, translate it back into code, and go through the same process to reply. Consequently, communication between robots takes as long as communication between you and me. It would make much more technical sense for any exchange between C3PO and R2D2 to take place digitally and wirelessly, and for the whole exchange to be over in a microsecond.

Of course, if this were how it happened in the movie, we would not know what was going on most of the time, because the robots are central to the whole story and we wouldn’t know why they were doing what they were doing. So, quite apart from the fantasy of the story as a whole, we are also tricked into the fantasy that a civilisation which can build sentient machines prefers to wait around for them to have extended conversations than for them actually to be doing what they were built to do.

What has all this got to do with Transfiguration Sunday?

The Transfiguration story is a striking one – very familiar to most of us, and probably quite problematic for many as well. What is this vision? How could it have happened? What is it supposed to communicate?

There is here clearly something extraordinary being indicated about the person of Jesus.

I want to draw your attention, however, to one particular aspect of the story, and probably not the most striking:

Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

What I’m wondering is: why they are standing around, talking? What exactly is there to discuss? Is there something to debate? Perhaps whether the Law does actually point to the cross? Whether there’s anything in the Prophets which makes that outcome inevitable? Or are there some details to be finalised? Does Jesus need a bit of a gee up?

It’s kind of a silly question, but what are they talking about? Can what is about to happen depend on this conversation?

Traditionally the church has understood the presence of Moses and Elijah to be a sign of the Law and the Prophets as the context for understanding who Jesus is and what he is doing. I’m not going to suggest this morning that there is anything broadly wrong with this understanding.

But there is a problem with this interpretation if it implies that somehow it is clear that the Law and the Prophets point towards Jesus. Indeed, it is often given to us to understand that this is clear, that the Old Testament anticipated the cross, that all the clues were there for anyone who could see them.

And yet, if this was all clear, no one actually saw that it was so.

The fact that no one saw these signs before the cross suggests a different thought about the conversation between Jesus, Moses and Elijah: that it is the Law and the Prophets which have to understand that what is going to happen with Jesus is indeed the secret hidden within them. It is through the cross that everything is to be understood. It is to the cross that everything has been headed. And, so, it is from the cross that everything begins.

If it were the case that the identity of Jesus and the meaning of his ministry were dependent upon the Law and the Prophets, then it would be necessary for us to become first century Jews in order to know who he was – for us to have the Law and the Prophets at the centre of our own being before we could understand Jesus. When Jesus is shown to be conversing with the Law and the Prophets on the mountain top, he is shown to be engaged with the Everything of Israel. For this is what the Law and the Prophets are: where Israel has come from, and where it is going.

But nothing about Israel’s comprehension of that Everything could make sense of the cross. We can say, then, that it is not so much Jesus who is transfigured here. Rather, in the dazzling presence of Jesus, the Law and the Prophets are themselves transfigured – seen in a new light. Jesus “talking” with Moses and Elijah is Jesus engaging with all that has gone before. Everything points to Jesus. More than this, everything points to the cross.

This is largely the traditional interpretation but the problem with it is that, for us today to get to the heart of who Jesus is for us, we have somehow to be transported to A Long Time Ago in a Palestine Far, Far Away. This is because the Everything which the Law and the Prophets were for Jesus is not our everything. The link between Jesus and the Law and the Prophets given to ancient Israel is crucial for an account of the faithfulness of God, but not if we understand it in a way which separates God from our time and place here and now.

The truth of who Jesus is for us is not separated from us in this way. The Transfiguration isn’t just a Light-Spectacular intended to catch our, or the disciples’, attention. It is also Moses and Elijah seen in a new light. It is Jesus and the cross – the crucified Christ – seen to be the mystery of all that is thought to matter. It is the cross as the secret at the heart of what makes us tick, what we fear, what we long for – the Jews then, us now.

What, then, makes us tick? This is the question which precedes any enquiry into the meaning of Jesus and his cross. At the heart of our being might be our sense of moral righteousness, our economic status, our family, reputation, wealth, beauty, desires – any number of things on a personal and social scale.

What is it about us which Jesus might transfigure, cast in a new light, if indeed all that his people held dear resulted in his being crucified? How do our desires in fact crush us, or others? In what ways are we wilfully naïve about what we profess to value, deluding ourselves and denying others what they might need? Our values are different from those things valued in Jesus’ time, but they need transfiguring just as much.

Science fiction is just fantasy, even when it gets the science right. The thing is, most of our stories about ourselves and our future have a degree of fantasy about them and this suits us just fine, even if a few might need to be crucified for the whole thing to stay together.

Our laws and our prophets, then and now, need to be transfigured if we are to glimpse what it is we truly need, the secret at the heart of all we desire.

By the grace of God, may we be so changed in the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Amen.

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Epiphany 4
31/1/2016

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71
Luke 4:21-30

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Does the prayer of our psalmist this morning make any sense?

It is a prayer for protection, that God be a “rock of refuge, a strong fortress”. Yet we might imagine that if God were able to become such a fortress, and if the psalmist has “leaned” on God since he was born and God has been his hope and trust since the days of his youth (vv6f), then the psalmist might not have had a problem in the first place, had God kept up what would seem to be his end of the deal.

And perhaps it’s even a bit worse than this, when we note what kind of suffering it is that the poet is experiencing. For it is not what we might call “general” suffering – illness or infirmity, poverty, a broken heart, or any such thing which even his persecutors might suffer at times. The psalmist’s suffering is specifically that which arises from the life lived according to the call of God. It would seem to be his own very faithfulness which has seen these hard times visited upon him. Later in the psalm (v20), he in fact “blames” God for what has happened, addressing God as, “you who have made me see many troubles and calamities” The prayer we hear in this psalm, then, contradicts the simplistic notion that the faithful always have a good time of it.

Taking seriously the things the psalm sets alongside each other, there emerges what is, perhaps, an unexpected account of what it means to live faithfully, and to pray. Faith here cannot be cast as some kind of protection from the ills of the world – a kind of vaccine which we take in order to ward off evil. Quite to the contrary, the prayer of the psalmist suggests that faith might actually be the thing which causes suffering for the believer – at least the kind of suffering that the poet experiences. For the “troubles and calamities” he experiences would seem to be those which arise from his being a person of faith, and being persecuted for that faith. His faith has marked him in the eyes of others – marked him as different in what he will and will not do, will and will not say, what he looks to as a measure of truth. And this brings conflict in a world where the things of this particular God are rejected.

Belief is often caricatured as a response to a life situation: believing in order that this or that thing might be changed, or a particular outcome might be effected. But for the psalmist belief is shown in the effect it has on his life and not the other way around. His belief is not a response to what he thinks is happening in his life, whether good or bad. Rather, what happens in his life is a matter determined by his belief. His faith comes before his experience.

And so faith has also been a source of heartache for him, as it has become a focus for mockery (vv13,11). This mockery is not for the poet a sign of the absence of God, for it is the very presence of God in the poet’s life which has caused the problem. And so there is in fact no contradiction when the poet calls out to God for help. It is not that faith knows the presence, and the absence of God. It is that God’s presence is as much a problem as a solution.

And so the psalmist’s faith is constant whether things are going well, or not. We have heard also this morning the call of the prophet Jeremiah, another whose faith caused him great suffering. It was Jeremiah’s experience also that believing God set him off over against his fellow Israelites, a very unhappy and uncomfortable situation for him, and yet an unavoidable one, as he could not but believe and respond to the God who called him. It was God who placed him in the uncomfortable place, and only God could carry him through it.

Faith, then, turns to God not simply because something has gone wrong, but because it has first known the “going right” which relationship to God has brought before. Faith begins with God’s presence in our lives – not his absence – and looks for the fulfilment of promise heard in that presence. Faith, then, is not the caricatured grasping after something when all else has failed: a negative thing which reflects a sense of the absence of God. Such a “faith” – so-called – does not know the God it longs for; it longs really only for a change of circumstances and hopes that there might be a God who can bring this about.

Our psalmist longs also, of course, for a change of circumstances; such a longing we all have in common. But what distinguishes the hopeful longing of faith from the simple wish for relief is the thing which will mark its arrival. Those who simply wish for change long only for a change of circumstance; if it comes it is really only a matter of fortune. It brings about in them no real change but the relief itself. And that is the end of the matter, until the next crisis arises.

But for faith which hopes for change – and so looks to a God it already knows as the agent of change – the outcome is marked not only by the relief but by praise and thanksgiving which reflects a renewed experience of God’s faithfulness.

And so the psalmist is able to finish his prayer in the surprising way he does – not actually praising God – yet – but looking forward to the time of praising God:

²² I will also praise you with the harp
for your faithfulness, O my God;
I will sing praises to you with the lyre,
O Holy One of Israel.
²³ My lips will shout for joy
when I sing praises to you;
my soul also, which you have rescued.

The psalmist looks forward not only to his deliverance, but to the praise which will spring from his lips. For this deliverance will be something which marks a constancy in his life – a constancy which is God himself. The psalmist’s life is structured not by the ups and downs, the ins and outs of human existence, but by God’s company along the way. His life is not simply a story of what happened to him, but a story within the story of God – a story within the call to trust God who is faithful. In the bright times, and in the dark ones – which are those parts of our stories which tend to catch most of our attention – God’s love and faithfulness frames the psalmist’s experience.

And so he does not simply suffer or celebrate according to the circumstances; he finds the call of God to be the way of understanding where he is, and what he is to be. In the good times, then, and in the bad, he continues to learn what it is to be a creature of this God, trusting in God’s promise to make peace of him and his circumstances.

And this is God’s promise also to us: that though our experience of the world can feel harder because we believe, our faith itself is that God, and not anything other thing in the world, is finally to be trusted. And so we pray in confidence, trusting that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And we give thanks and praise, that this is indeed the case.

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Epiphany 3
24/1/2016

1 Corinthians 12:13-31a
Psalm 19
Luke 4:14-21

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One effect of the acids of modernity for thinking about ourselves in relation to God has been to render religious belief largely irrelevant to public life.

This might seem rather an odd thing to say given the wars and terrorist actions around the world at the moment, many of which are greatly energised by religious convictions. Yet, even as this is the case, it is not the case that nation-states or even the churches are engaged with these struggles as religious struggles.

There is a remarkable absence of critique of terrorist actions and sectarian wars in terms of their religious content or motivation. No critic denies that this motivation is there but the response to it, because of the avowedly secular nature of most western societies, is necessarily non-religious. In relation to Islamic terrorism appeal can be made, say, to other Muslims who seem not to be fostering war or terror, but this is not a religious engagement. It is simply a strategy by which a state or a society seeks to broaden responsibility for keeping things more or less in control by appealing to “good” religionists to keep the dangerous religionists in control.

A more cynical assessment of the hesitation of media and politics to be critical of Islam is that that is a dangerous pursuit, as distinct from the safe fun of mocking Christianity. There is doubtless something in this, but I’m not sure that it gets to the heart of the matter. It is more that we have in the west so separated “religion” out of having a right in the public square that it is thoroughly confusing when it appears again with such vigour. As a society, we are not religiously aware enough to make sense of the oddity of such religious passion, and so we have to tackle it with non-religious means.

This insensitivity to religion has its source many generations ago, but it matured – if an insensitivity can “mature” – only one or two generations back. It is a peculiarly Christian phenomenon, in that it is something which has developed in those parts of the world which have been most affected by the presence and then decline of the church. Perhaps it ought not to surprise us, then, that even the church has not been much able to engage Islam on specifically religious terms.

But engagement with Islam, or any other religion or non-religion is not my particular interest this morning. I’m more interested in what has caused us as a society and, in particular, as a church, to be somewhat blind-sided by the sudden resurgence of passionate religious expression, and rather powerless to deal with it as a religious expression.

And this brings me to our reading this morning from 1 Corinthians. This is perhaps “the” church text of the Uniting Church. We are a church of many parts. Councils relate to councils, each (more or less) open to the other, calling the other to account, sharing oversight of the whole church. We are a largely de-clericalised church, with a strong emphasis on the many gifts of our many members. We are a composite church made up of ecumenical efforts which sought to take the best of each of its parent churches, and are constantly involved in ecumenical conversation. Every voice matters. In such ways of ordering our common life we reflect the notion that it is many parts which make up the one body.

This is, of itself, not a uniquely Christian notion. The metaphor of the body for a society of interrelated members dates back at least 600 years prior to Paul, appearing in one of Aesop’s fables (The belly and the members). But it is a particularly potent metaphor, and one which is still very much present to us today in contemporary notions of multiculturalism and social tolerance.

Because of the power of the metaphor and its continuing appeal, it comes to seem that what the church is “on about” and what western multiculturalist societies are on about are pretty much the same: a bit of everyone is good for everyone.

Just so, because church and the liberal state are on the same side on this central political tenet, the church is rendered largely irrelevant to the wider social project – a mere helper in an action which is already underway. To link this back to where we started, the church ceases to be a “religious” presence in society and is itself now one member of the larger body politic.

But if we look back to what Paul is doing in this passage, we find something rather different going on. Listen again to the first verse we heard this morning – all but the last word:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with… ”

What is that last word? Keeping in mind that Paul is writing to a community divided by competitiveness and economic difference and general moral confusion, the “obvious” word would seem to be “you”:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with you.”

“You behave as if you are many, and different, and as if the difference overrides the commonness. But as the membered body is one, so you who are many are also one.”

This makes perfect sense to us, familiar as we are with the metaphor of the body for society. But Paul does not have “you” here; he has “Christ”:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”

Paul writes here not of the way of being of any general community, but the way of being of Christ. He draws the closest possible link between the person of Jesus and the community of those who trust on him. As we were reminded last week, at the beginning of this chapter, Paul remarked that “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit – with the historical name “Jesus” here being the important thing which is affirmed, and not the general notion of a “Christ”. For the Corinthians the body was a problem, and so it was a problem that the idea of the Christ was linked to the historical body of Jesus. For them this seemed to tie God down too tightly to the world. Can it be that here, in this one place – Jesus of Nazareth – all that matters actually took place?

But Paul pushes this further. In this chapter he argues not so much that the particular human being Jesus is the Christ, but that this Christ takes the form of the historical church.

Even within the faithful church today this is almost a horrifying thing to hear. Within the church we know even better than those without how we are not Christ-like. How can it be that here, in this place, all that really matters takes place?

But the shock here is important. It is the possibility of a new thought – and one which accords more closely with the logic of the gospel than with modern optimistic liberal politics.

We dare not say that the church is “Christ,” and Paul does not either. But it is the body of Christ he describes here (12.27). Elsewhere he speaks of our being “in” Christ – enveloped, as it were, by Christ; or of the church as the bride of Christ, related in the “two-become-one” way of marriage.

The church, as much out of embarrassment before the wider world as out of piety, prefers rather to be the community of “believers”, or “followers” of Christ, with the reality which is Christ safely distant from our broken way of being. And we are believers and followers. But if in understanding ourselves in this way we imagine that we are somehow protecting God from an embarrassing relationship to the church, then we sell God short, as well as everything that we do as a church.

The tangibility of God’s presence in the world did not end with the death and resurrection of Jesus. God’s righteousness did not begin and end with Christmas and Easter. The Spirit which, in the Nazareth synagogue, Jesus declared was upon him, is the same Spirit which we have been given, which joins the members of this particular body.

The question of the presence of God in the world is not, then, a merely religious one which has been pushed out of the public square with the modern irrelevance of religion and its theological disputes. If the world – or at least our particular society – is no longer interested in religion or theology, it remains very interested in politics, and just here the gospel re-asserts itself: the church is the presence of a different kind of political reality.

This is not a perfected political reality; we don’t have to go far to find evidence of this. But it is a reality with a particular and distinct end, or goal. That goal is the peculiar humanity of Jesus himself. This is the one thing the church celebrates, and for which it exists: to point to this way of being human as the way to which all humankind is being drawn.

And so we pray in Jesus’ name. We hear the Word which is Christ himself. We are fed and watered with the body and the blood of Jesus. And all of this by the power of same the Spirit which made his humanity the presence of God.

Christian life is not concerned with a God whose distance is the sign of his greatness. We are concerned with a God who is as close to us as we are to each other. Our is a God who can make of the most unlikely of things his presence place – even us – that the world might know God has sent the Son.

Let us, then, pray and love, that we might become ever more fully what God has created us to be: Christ’s own body, by the power of God’s own Spirit, to the glory of the Father. Amen.

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Epiphany 2
17/1/2016

1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Psalm 36
John 2: 1-11

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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Epiphany for a second Sunday – Epiphany, literally a ‘shining around’, or – as the visit of the Magi suggests – a truly ‘magi-cal’ time: the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

Fifty years have passed since I first attempted a sermon on the Cana text.

Then and now could hardly be more of contrast. Then I was a temporary replacement for a senior minister for a three month period on leave in a flourishing eastern suburban congregation – three services a Sunday in the same place, a total assembly perhaps of 500 souls – and bodies.

This disclosure is not intended to be a nostalgic indulgence – well it is actually! But more seriously, 50 years ago it appeared that the mission to the Gentiles had wondrously, indeed we might say, ‘magi-cally’ succeeded. Epiphany could be taken for granted as an accomplished reality in our day.

The question is now much more sharply focussed – what does epiphany mean for a culture rejoicing in its newly discovered buzz word: ‘secularity’, as it fun runs its way to the charity of its choice?

But epiphany should never have been taken for granted – if our two texts today are allowed to inform us. There has never been a time when the gospel has not been contested. In this respect, Cana and Corinth, Gospel and Epistle are two of a kind. As “A Tale of Two Cities”, they come to us freighted with significance; rich venues indeed for an epiphany.

One of our sad legacies of a century or so of serious biblical neglect is the insufficient attention given to its topography. As if the texts’ naming of cities was of no real consequence, this neglect accompanied a resolute determination to read Scripture as having no complex cultural and religious setting, that is, as if it could simply be plumbed for its “face value” as a book of precedents more, or usually less, of contemporary relevance.

So, this morning, first Corinth – then as multicultural as is today’s Melbourne, a veritable playground for excess of body, mind and spirit. We take this apparently throw away line of Paul’s, for example:

“No-one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says: “Let Jesus be cursed’… Two millennia later when Christian faith is increasingly under attack, we might readily assume that here is where it begins: the same story as ours – culture against Christ. But no – this is vintage Corinth – the radical separation of spirit from body. For note: the cry was ‘Jesus be cursed’ not ‘Jesus Christ be cursed’. That is, the Corinthian Christians were so intoxicated by their spiritual pursuits, that they assumed that they no longer needed the enfleshed, incarnate, bodily Jesus. They had kicked that ladder away in their ascent to spiritual heights – they had the risen Christ as either their attainment or their goal. So with the cry: ‘Jesus be cursed’ we are in truth being inducted into the very mindset not only of Corinthian culture, but of the Corinthian congregation itself. Here religious self-centredness abounded – every soul pursuing its own path to enlightenment. This is why the whole of Chapter 12 of Paul’s letter is given over to an exposition of spiritual gifts – over and over again he insists given not by “human spirit”, but by Holy Spirit; not self-generated, but given by the Spirit of God for the sake of the Church; not for individual self-absorption, but for the building up of the bodily life of the congregation.

So much for Corinth – or indeed contemporary Melbourne. Whenever spirit and body are separated disaster looms. So today: ‘I’m not religious, I’m into spirituality’. But now, consider the irony of a present obverse separation much closer to home. Those who call themselves ‘progressive’, or recently and perhaps even more alarmingly, ’evolving’ Christians have no time for the post-crucified Christ pursued by the Corinthians. Rather, refusing to acknowledge that if Christian belief is not tied to the truth that the life and death of Jesus is an event in God or it is nothing worth bothering with, that only a ‘teaching’ Jesus is permitted – then we have a refusal to climb any ladder at all. To adopt Paul’s language, what we have here is effectively not only “Jesus hooray”, but the much more shocking: “Christ be cursed”.

And so to Cana where the news is much the same. To get there, we need to underline yet again a basic fact, which Christmas invariably suppresses, and of which our culture is totally ignorant – that the letters of Paul chronologically precede the Gospels. In this case, with the gospel of John before us, we are looking at a period of 60 years between the time of the life of Jesus and the composition of our text. Some of us were not born sixty years ago – many of us were barely out of our teens. Imagine trying to remember a word for word conversation so long ago.

A few facts then. Like Corinth, Cana of Galilee entertained many popular cults. Some towns like Capernaum were primarily Jewish, others like Sepphoris were primarily Gentile, hosting shrines to numerous deities. In this complex society, the purpose of the gospel was essentially to force a decision on Jewish Christians in Galilee who were concealing their faith in order to avoid expulsion from the synagogue. Hence the purpose of the gospel is to demonstrate Christ’s coming into the world to bring about a genuine crisis – a fundamental choice between light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death. In a word, the old order is to be replaced by the new. This is what the conversion of water into wine symbolises. In this, the real, final, epiphany for John – as for Paul – is the scandal of the cross, the cost of discipleship, the time when “my hour has not yet come” now properly arrives.

In essence then, this gospel is designed as a missionary tract to convert Greek speaking Jews to Christianity in a day when Christians had been expelled from the Jewish synagogue. This why all the controversies reported in this Galilean setting of the Gospel revolve around the true observance of the law, illustrating the pivotal text of the first chapter of the Gospel, namely, that ‘the law was given by Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ’.

So a moment or two on the Cana text – the first and fundamental of the six signs of the gospel culminating in the seventh, Easter day. The primacy given to Cana is driven home throughout by playing with numbers. Seven is the biblical number for completion, and three for the number of God. This is why we are told that it all happens at a wedding at Cana ‘on the third day’, that is, a matrimonial celebration of a new beginning here ,retrospectively, foreshadows a much more primary new beginning of life – that soon to be inaugurated by the Cross.

But one more number is of equal significance, the six stone water jars. Just as for the opening chapter of Genesis, where God moves and rules over the waters, so here it is no accident that John portrays the first sign of Jesus as power over water in the six jars, remembering that six is the biblical number for humanity, coming into existence as we do on the sixth day. The meaning is clear: God and the world, that is, secular creation and new creation, must never be separated.

But there is yet more, layer upon layer. We are explicitly told first up that ‘The mother of Jesus was there’. We need to be told this because Mary is the representative of the old order as the one who literally gives birth to the new. Hence the significance of her words ‘they have no wine’, after, as it were, the poorer Dan Murphy special gives out. Only now is it clear what otherwise looks like a pretty rude son: “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? Rude, because, as Jesus must say: ‘My hour has not yet come’. Immediately Mary gets the point. She instructs the servants: ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ In other words, the new best wine, kept to the last, can only be given legitimacy by the ‘old’ order.

There is so much more, but our time has gone. This morning we have before us epiphany for Corinth and Cana when ‘religion’ was everywhere.

How is that epiphany to be appreciated by us after two thousand years of an enculturated gospel, now transmuted into a world of no law, no taboos, no restraints? Our texts will not permit us to go back, only forward to appropriate the mature freedom of the wine of the gospel. We need no convincing that the world, as always, is in turmoil, but always expressing its predicament in new forms. Our primary question today surely is this: What are the pressures on an eroded departed Christendom, except the law masquerading as freedom, water we are everywhere being coerced into believing that is really wine.

Whatever be our response, this much is at least true. That we are called to drink for ourselves the new wine of the life of God with the sensitivity of the connoisseur, in a lively hope that others may discover in our day that the best wine has indeed been kept till last. To this tasting, and its energising renewal around this table, we now give ourselves once again.

 

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Epiphany 1, Baptism of Jesus
10/1/2016

Acts 8:14-17
Psalm 29
Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Robert Gribben

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Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened… Luke 3:21

You don’t learn much about today’s theme by reading Luke. Our biblical ancestors did not have the privilege of the media nearby, no paparazzi on Jordan’s bank. Liturgists have no idea whether John baptized Jesus standing up (one or both of them), by immersion or submersion, and whether he used any words. As a matter of fact, reading Luke, you will not even discover that it was John who baptized him. Before the first sentence is finished, the subject matter has shifted to something which could not have been photographed.

It is difficult for us to imagine how 1st century Jews felt about heaven opening. The heaven was not supposed to open because divine power was kept on its upside, and that secured mortals from its danger. But such barriers are not important for the communicating God of the Scriptures.

The heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

In John’s Gospel there is no description of the baptism at all, but the whole ministry of John the Baptizer turns on that divine revelation. The evangelist John wrote,

The One who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God’ [Jn 1: 32-4, my italics]

An epiphany indeed. The curtain has risen on all that is to follow of the Good News of God in Christ, revealed in history, in the life, passion and death of Jesus, and in his rising, through the witness of the Spirit. It is Matthew who summarizes its importance at the end of his Gospel, indicating that all who wish to follow Christ, must, like him, step down into the waters of baptism. Jesus’s commission to the waiting disciples after the resurrection is, Go and make disciples, baptizing and teaching them all that he had taught them.

Our reading today from the Acts of the Apostles tells us that the apostles indeed acted on the commandment, but not all got either the baptizing or the teaching right. So we heard that the apostles Peter and John found a group of Samaritan followers of Jesus, who had been baptized ‘in the name of Jesus’ but without any declaration by or of the Spirit. Well, the apostles by prayer and the laying-on of hands bestowed on them the gift of the Holy Spirit, completing their initiation into the church. The Acts tells of other such untidiness in the earliest church, and of the apostles’ ministry of correcting and completing what had happened in the first raw days of evangelism. And without such apostolic tidying up, the Christian church may not have survived a generation. That is still the task of theologians, but we need to know that the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church which has survived to our day did get a number of things wrong, even then; and it has continued to do so spectacularly through its long history, and it is a considerable mess now – including our own effort at being a faithful Church.

An American Baptist friend of mine, with an interest in church history, sent me a meditation for this season in which he noted that the winter solstice (where he is) is now a ‘blow-out, over-the-top, month-long party… a neo-pagan exultation of the rhythms of the earth… about lots of good food, good cheer, and the feel-good sentimentality of “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world”‘. This cheerfulness, everywhere enforced by the blaring of Christmas carol tunes (the words indecipherable), seems intended to block out for a few weeks, the violence, mayhem, and chaos that are part of what it means to be a human being in this kind of world. He uses the expression ‘tinselled out’.

Then he reminds us of the church’s traditions at Christmastide, traditions unfamiliar to him, and to many of us, but good to be reminded of. The season lasts a mere twelve days. He takes us to the holy days which fall within that brief season, usually marked in daily prayer. After the 25th December, we would come to the 26th and its shocking theme of martyrdom – the feast of Stephen. That tends to be imprisoned in a silly song (at least a silly tune) about a king, in reality a Bohemian (Czech) Duke. But Wenceslas was known for placing his body where his theology was; he was known to get out of bed in the night, and tramp through the snow in his slippers to give alms to his poor citizens, and he is remembered as a martyr. Perhaps we ought also to say more of that other remodelled Christmas saint, Nicholas: he was one of the bishops at the first Council of Nicaea, and there is a nice story that he was so angry with the heretic Arius (about whom you heard last week) that he slapped him on the face. A thoroughly apostolic thing to do.

If you were still saying your canonical prayers on 28th December, you would be right back with King Herod, on a feast the Church has called the ‘Holy Innocents’, (though I note in the Uniting Church calendar, they have lost the title ‘holy’). Of them St Augustine wrote,

These whom Herod’s cruelty tore as sucklings from their mothers’ bosom are justly hailed as the infant martyr flowers, the first buds of the church killed by the frost of persecution. They died not only for Christ but in his stead.

Even as we rejoice in the Christmas gospel of the Incarnation, every day we should solemnly remember in our prayers, in our giving, our time and talents, the un-named children who were and are pointlessly massacred, the weeping of the mothers, the refugees driven from their native land, the savage use of power (and what do our Allied bombers do over Syria but this?).

So this is what Jesus was doing when he stepped down into the murky Jordan with the milling crowds of hopeful people. It was part of his ‘enfleshment’, his part with the common crowd, the Jordan river’s water flowing over his living body, closing over his head. I hope you have enjoyed the spectacular cataracts of the Iguaçu Falls on the service order’s cover – the Jordan is somewhat sluggish by comparison, but you don’t need much water to drown in. One of the former pastors of this congregation (the College Church part), Dr Harold Leatherland, used to say that when Jesus burst out of the waters, he took in the deepest breath of his life – of Holy Spirit! Or, as the evangelists put it, the heaven opened, and the voice of God spoke of incarnate Love, while a dove hovered above as a sign. For those gazing on, and for us, an epiphany of the divine Mystery, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God-with-us, in all our weakness, our uncleanness, our thirstiness (symbols always bring a flood of images), the God who cares for us, seeks us, and sustains the whole world.

Which is also the message of the psalm:

The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the Lord, over mighty waters.
The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;
the Lord sits enthroned as king for ever.
May the Lord give strength to his people!
May the Lord bless his people with peace!

Christmas icons sometimes have Jesus enthroned, but as a infant sitting regally on his Mother’s knee, even with crowned head and sceptre in hand. But having escaped King Herod, this Son of Mary, this King, with the wounds of his crown still visible, will stand before Another on behalf of all the innocents, and all the guilty ones as well. It was for this he was born, for this he embraced his baptism, for this that he came into the world.

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Christmas 2
3/1/2016

Ephesians 1:3-14
Psalm 147
John 1:10-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

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“And the Word became flesh”

With these five words we are at the centre of reality. Of course, this has been an increasingly contested claim right at the beginning of anything that could be called Christian faith, not only in the culture, but at the centre of the life of the Church – from the beginning, right down to today.

It is salutary that we should have such a text before us at Christmas with its proclamation that God has a human face. For Christmas obviously tells the life story of a human being. Jesus was born. He lived in subjection to his parents, grew up, learned a trade, made friends and enemies, climbed mountains, sailed boats, wept at a grave, lamented over the state of his church, cut he bled, crucified he died.

Nobody realistically disputes this except so predictably and erroneously the likes of Andrew Masterton in a leading article in The Age on Christmas eve.

But nobody gets really fussed about the catalogue of a biography. Only with a text like: “And the word became flesh”, does the adrenalin start pumping. For the question that rocked the early Church was whether the gospels record the human life of GOD. An influential theologian to be reckoned with was one Arius who said emphatically: No. Whoever it was who was born, hungered, wept, suffered and died it couldn’t be the Creator. God was too dignified to go through a birth canal or to shriek in agony from a Roman cross. Jesus must be a creature, albeit one so great that he deserves the honorific title “Son of God”.

Arius was not being unreasonable – indeed, in the light of the fundamental axioms of ancient theology which understood God to be utterly other than the world there could be no other conclusion.

But by the end of the fourth century, the Church rejected it. Still, discomfort with the gospel insistence that the word became flesh remained even among those who confessed the Creed. It reappeared in the early fifth century controversy that broke out when Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, objected to calling Mary “the bearer of GOD”. All that could be said of her was that she was “the bearer of Christ”, because, like Arius, the followers of Nestorius insisted that God isn’t the kind of being who could be borne (with an e) or born (without an e).

It was all very subtle as reputable controversies always are. Jesus could be confessed to be true God and true man, but his followers maintained that the gospels were really the record of a double life. Jesus’ humanity was born of Mary, true enough, but none of his human experiences could happen to his divine nature which has no beginning or need, cannot grow up and cannot be acted upon. But on the other hand recorded Godlike actions such as healing the sick or driving out demons or being transfigured on a mountain are really speaking of his divinity.

All this sound familiar? Sounds reasonable too. But the Church drew the unreasonable conclusion that GOD was conceived and born of Mary, effectively closing the gap between the claim to a human as well as divine nature.

History has proved that what we might call the Nestorian shuffle is hard to break. The point is that still today, followers of Arius and the Nestorians think that they can understand an abstract term like divine nature without reference to the gospel, and who then try to retrofit the Gospel into what they already know. Thus it ever was. The orthodox – the word means right praise, not right belief! – did the opposite. They discerned that, however strange and disreputable, the Gospel reveals the only God who is. If that meant revising all they thought they knew about God, so be it.

Retrofit the Gospel or allow orthodoxy to retrofit the claim to “reality”, that most abstract of words! This has always been the issue, and it is well and truly alive in our day. Is Jesus an exemplary man who deserves the honorific title “Son of God”. Is he merely a divine emissary from God whose mission was a prophetic call to try harder at being human. Or is he the eternal Word that was at the beginning of Creation, now made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, the very incarnation of the always creative Word, and thus is “of one substance with the Father”? If so, then before any other part of our anatomy, we have to “repent” with our brains, and so revise our understanding of reality?

The fact is that if the Church had not decided for the latter we would be living in a very different world. For example, we cannot live today without encountering Islam and its degenerate heresies. But this is an illustration of a religion that agrees with Arius. For Islam, Jesus is an honourable prophet, but certainly not God. This is why, though popular and a claim to peaceful co-existence, the claim that Christianity and Islam believe in the one God is simply an empty formula, apparent rather than real. Because for Islam there is no divine human incarnation (only the Book, the Koran) degenerate heretics can ultimately sit lightly to life, others and certainly their own. Killing bodies for a supposed greater good is not really a problem. The word becoming flesh, on the other hand, is the guarantee that bodies are everything. Mary “bears” God, of which the so-called Virgin birth is sign. Here, by the way, is where we must really think theologically not gynaecologically, if this really rather marginal witness of Jesus birth is a problem for you. That is to say, the Holy Spirit is not a sexual deputy. Rather the virginal conception by the Holy Spirit affirms that bodies and God inextricably belong together, which is why, too, the Church, the body of Christ, is not negotiable – if you had any thought of leaving! Indeed, to roll the dice for six, there is no life outside the body even in heaven, which the creed beautifully encapsulates in the confession of the resurrection of the body, not the immortality of the soul.

But enough. If the Church is to have any cutting edge in the future, those of us who are left must enter much more energetically into the vocation of practical theology, for in essence most of the problems of the present state of the world are deeply theological. Good will and try harder are now not good enough.

That is why any future for the planet, not to speak of Christian existence, will be nothing more than knowing why “and the Word became flesh” is absolutely everything.

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Christmas 1
27/12/2015

Colossians 3:12-17
Psalm 148
Luke 2:41-52

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And so we come almost to the end of another year!!

Of course, the passage from one year to the next is largely artificial, but we’re sufficiently formed by our culture’s counting of time to see something significant indicated in the fact that the planet has circled the sun one more time. Part of what is signified by that progress is the felt need to reflect on the year which has gone by, and that which is to come. The year which is past has been filled with joys and happiness, and frustration and sadness. The year which comes will bring opportunities and challenges known, and unknown: things about which we’re greatly anxious and things we eagerly anticipate. Nothing which has happened, and much of what awaits us, can’t be changed. All we can really do is determine how we’ll deal with those memories, and face the forthcoming opportunities and challenges.

It is in the meeting our recent past with various possible futures that the time-honoured tradition of “New Year’s Resolutions” comes into its own. We resolve at this point in time to be different in the coming year (or, much more rarely, to remain the same). We all know how it works, and we know how many New Year’s resolutions have come crashing down by the end of January: more exercise, less chocolate, more generous, earlier nights, less clutter, more time with the kids, less alcohol, taking a trip, keeping a diary, learning a language, paying off the credit card… The intention is the very best, and the motivation might even be reasonably high, but for many of us neither the intention nor the motivation create enough momentum to carry us more than a month or two. In all of this there is the desire to become different from what we have been. And it is this at which we so often fail.

In our reading from Colossians this morning, an imperative towards being different is also heard: clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other… Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly…

This is not the kind of thing you write to a group of people who’ve already got it down pat. Here Paul writes to a group of people on the way and in need of encouragement and exhortation to live in peace together: clothe yourselves with love … And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts. But these are not resolutions, in the sense that those to whom Paul writes are sitting around wondering how they might improve themselves and their ability to cope with the challenges of the coming year. They are rather directions or imperatives which come from outside those who hear them.

And this “outsideness” reflects the reason the changes in behaviour are called for. Whereas our own resolutions reflect what has not yet happened but we would like to see happen, Paul calls for a change on account of what has happened and which requires a response. We promise ourselves that we’ll drink less or exercise more because we see a feast of the one and a famine of the other to be bad news for our well-being. We promise ourselves that we’ll take a couple of short courses in the coming year because it will expand our horizons by introducing us to new people or ideas.

But Paul calls for change out of a different motivation. We are to forgive, for example, because this is how God has dealt with us. What operates here is not that desire for self-improvement which drives us in our resolutions but a response to an improvement in us God has already made in his forgiveness. The starting point is not what we desire to become but what God has made of us.

Paul, then, calls us not to be good, but to be godly. The two may sound similar, and perhaps even look similar when acted out, but goodness begins with us, whereas godliness comes to us.

And so three times we hear in our passage today: be thankful, sing to God with gratitude, give[ing] thanks to God the Father. This thanksgiving reflects what has been given, but is not just another task added to the task of living peaceably, as if being thankful were another thing we must resolve to do. Thanksgiving is, in fact, the meaning of our work towards peaceful relations. A spoken thanksgiving is just the counterpart to that enacted thanksgiving which is our effort to be godly – to be “as” God – towards those around us. The word of thanksgiving for love and forgiveness becomes our true word to God when we’ve been working on love and forgiveness towards those around us who need it.

Our reading this morning concludes with the exhortation to “do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus”. This is to see our lives not as what we might make of them, but as what God has made of them and will continue to make of them. Of course, we remain active agents, resolving to do this or that thing. But that action is to be in the light of the humanity which shines forth from the manger in Bethlehem, and which is offered to us: a humanity which dwells in the heart of God, the place where – by the will and work of God – it belongs.

So, as we look ahead to the year which is about to open up before us, let us pursue not only our own imagination as to what we might be like in it, but God’s re-imagining of us in his forgiving and peace-making work in Jesus.

Let us, then, resolve to live in thanksgiving for the peace God has made between him and us, and live and work with each other in the hope that that peace will come to stand ever more richly between us, his human creatures, as God intends.

By the grace of God may this be so. Amen.

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Christmas Day
25/12/2015

Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 98
John 1:1-14

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Something akin to “Bah Humbug” is muttered a fair bit around our house each year as Christmas draws near, and it is not by the person to whom I am married, nor by the little people who live with us and for whom Christmas is the probably most marvellous thing they can think of.

These utterances begin in connection with the complication of normal life which begins to develop from the beginning of December and continues for most of the rest of the month – you know the kind of thing I’m talking about!

But more than such complications, old Scrooge’s avatar is provoked by the developing struggle to say something about Christmas which won’t already have been said every week in the lead up to the day and which moves us past obvious remarks about the reason for the season. This is the struggle to find a way through the great tangle of associations we have with Christmas, in order to make some sense of the stories at the source of the whole Christmas project.

For it is hard to get “inside” Christmas, helpfully. It’s not just that it’s been corrupted into a dozen lesser things. It’s more the strangeness of the whole story, its lack of clear meaning.

To illustrate the point: most of you have probably seen the type of sign some churches set up out the front, which usually proclaim a short message intended to make people think as they drive by. The cringe factor of these things is generally pretty high. One from a few years ago which has stuck in my mind ran something like, “Newsflash: kid born in shed saves world”. What it had going for it is that if you know anything about the Christmas story then you’ll appreciate the humour. Yet, like most public Christian reflection upon Christmas, what it has going against it is that very few are likely to be stirred by it. As a bald statement – as an assertion about who we are and what matters – either you already agree with it or you don’t, and that’s about as far it will move us.

We live in a time when each of us effectively has to make Christmas our own, as best we can. One result of this situation is that, year after year, Christians lament the diminishing foothold Christ seems to have on Christmas. Year after year the church tries to inject some understanding of the “true” meaning of Christmas into the midst of the annual rush. This is perhaps most of all to be expected in the Christmas sermon!

But the problem is that there is really no “true meaning” of Christmas which can be spoken in that way. Perhaps the most difficult thing to hear and to communicate is why the story matters. “Kid born in shed saves world” is clear enough as a sentence, but what it means or the difference it makes is far from clear for most people, and the same must also be said of stories about angels, shepherds, surprised virgins and sceptical fiancés. The stories of Christmas rarely deliver gripping meaning to first-time hearers, and often enough not to 100^th-time hearers, either.

If we think about it for a moment, this should not surprise us. For the stories of Christmas, and certainly the opening verses of the Gospel of John (which we have heard this morning) – though they come at the beginning of the stories about Jesus – are in fact the writers’ conclusions about Jesus and not their starting points. This is the strangeness of the Christmas story: it starts somewhere other than its apparent beginning.

In reading something like John’s gospel we naturally begin with the passage we have heard this morning – the first verses of his gospel. Yet those few words are, in a sense, actually the last thing he added to his account of Jesus’ ministry. (This is not an historical observation, but a theological one. Even if, when John first sat down at his desk to write his gospel, the first thing he wrote was the first 18 verses of chapter 1, they would still represent the conclusion to which he had come and which motivated him to write in the first place). The gospel writers do not simply begin their accounts with what has been “revealed” to them as the first thing which happened. Where they begin results from their having thought backwards from their own prior encounter with Jesus-as-the-Christ, and his impact on them. The experience with which they begin is that of the death and resurrection of Jesus. And each writer, in his own peculiar way, relates the significance of that death and resurrection by choosing which stories from the life of Jesus will be told, where the emphases will lie, and perhaps even what will need to be invented in the story in order to communicate clearly the significance of the end and new beginning which is found in Jesus.

John had come to understand that Jesus had revealed to him the very heart of God. As such, Jesus must have had the closest possible relationship to that Heart, so close that Jesus must always have had this relationship. And so John declares with confidence of Jesus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This is not a mere assertion. John is promising: the Jesus you are going to meet in the story I will tell you can bring you to the heart of all things, and to your own heart.

We newcomers to the Christian faith – including its less thoughtful critics – quite naturally begin at the start of the Gospels and read to the end. But, to say it again: the beginnings of the Gospels are in fact their conclusions. Knowing who they believed Jesus to be, John and the others effectively wrote their accounts of his life backwards. As much as John declares to us that “In the beginning was the Word…” he also asks us: how could it have been otherwise, given who I have come to see Jesus to be?

While we may have to take the Christmas stories up as a place to begin, they can only be tentatively received as the beginning. In fact we must, in the end, come to be able to write our own “Christmas” stories, our own conclusions in faith. This doesn’t mean that we need to “Australianise” the stories, replacing the biblical characters with swagmen, surf life-savers, and joeys. That’s good fun, but it doesn’t help. And writing our own Christmas stories doesn’t mean that we should try to pull together our strongest desires and greatest needs in order to create a job description for a prospective god. That’s what we already do most of the time, and so far it hasn’t helped us very much.

To write our own Christmas stories, in a way comparable to what the gospel writers did, would be to begin with a thought, an experience: that in Jesus we meet the one who really matters. In particular, it would be to begin with the thought that the most important thing in the world is this particular person dead on a cross, and then to measure against that other things we previously thought important, or unimportant. It is this re-shuffling of what it is important which gives us our familiar Christmas stories and readings: kings ought not to be born in stables or greeted first by shepherds or forced to flee in fear of those who are supposed to welcome them.

We can know the Christmas stories and yet be completely untouched by them simply because they are still someone else’s story, someone else’s conclusions and not yet our own. In the absence of the background story, we might even dare to make one up, which accounts for the kind of silliness we read in “Christmas” opinion pieces in our newspapers around this time of year. This is the “tragedy” of Christmas as we know it – both in the church and outside of it: mistaking someone else’s conclusions for our beginning.

But should Jesus grab hold of us and we begin with him properly, then we’ll be in a position to write our own Christmas stories, our own stories of his beginning. These stories would speak about the origins of Jesus as the “must have been” which makes sense of what he has become for us. And this would be, more significantly, to re-write our own stories, for it will take what is most familiar to us, and most important to us, and throw it into a new light.

We desperately need such illuminating stories, both in the church and outside of it: new and enlivening ways of viewing ourselves.

Of course, we can’t contrive a meaning of Christmas for ourselves; we can’t convert ourselves. But neither do we have to. We are not required to fill ourselves with wonder at Christmas time, but simply to wonder: to wonder whether in fact there might something in all of this which we’ve missed, even after all these years, or because of them. We might marvel that these stories continue to wrestle with us as we wrestle with them and, if the blessing be given, we might begin to discover in our own entanglement with Jesus just where he begins with us, and what sort of story we would tell of his beginning, from our experience of the new end he has given us.

“Kid born in shed saves world” – “in the beginning was the Word” – this is where the Gospel writers end up, and they throw out an invitation to us to discover whether we can come to agree with them, though we might say it very differently. The conclusions of those who have gone before us are the invitation to us to follow them on a similar journey.

This Christmas, may all who hear that invitation respond, wondering; and may God in his grace bless them with wonder.

Amen.

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Advent 3
13/12/2015

Zephaniah 3:14-20
Isaiah 12:2-6
Luke 3:7-18

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With John the Baptist we have the return of the prophet. John’s preaching is striking in its focus on the coming judgement. We hear of the “the wrath to come”, that “the axe is lying at the root of the trees”, and that “what doesn’t bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.” We hear of one who is yet to come, who also carries a “winnowing fork” to clear the threshing floor and toss the chaff into unquenchable fire” – not quite gentle Jesus, meek and mild! John’s baptism is a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins”. “Get ready” is his message. The nervous “brood of vipers” who’ve come out to hear him are left to ask, “What then should we do?” The response is profoundly social and ethical: share, be fair, do not abuse your power.

Finally, we hear that, “with many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people.” This is strange good news: the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train! The only good we might find in this is that we’ve been warned to back on out of the tunnel, if indeed it is possible to outrun God.

With his preaching of his social ethic, John stands directly in line with the prophets of old. Yet, in the midst of all that, almost hidden and easily skipped over, we hear a contrast which John draws between himself and Jesus (who is to follow him): “I baptise with water; he will baptise you with the Holy Spirit [and fire].” Preaching the pouring out of God’s Spirit is also in line with the preaching of the prophets (cf. Joel 2.2). And it is, in fact, here that we are met with the good news John proclaims: not the calls for repentance and the exhortations, but that one is coming who will pour out the Spirit.

Yet, in the midst of the approaching doom in John’s preaching the proclaimed coming of the Spirit scarcely draws our attention. This partly because we’re distracted by the fire and smoke of the apocalypse, but also because it is not quite clear what talk about the outpouring of the Spirit refers to or will bring about.

There is something very appealing, direct and tangible about the ethic John preaches: share, be fair, do not abuse your power. We understand this, and we understand it without reference to any spirituality or outpoured Spirit.

Here we are on the edge of the familiar reduction of Christian faith to ethics. If I criticise that reduction here, it is not to diminish the importance of the kind of behaviour John calls for. But the fact is that we don’t need any a particular spirituality to understand him; the sense of justice in what John preaches has a social and political universality about it, even if it is not applied. To shift the force of Christian confession to ethics is largely to render the specific character of Christian faith redundant.

We really have only ourselves to thank – or to blame – for this. And, perhaps surprisingly, the seeds for the problem are in the way we try to be Christian in our talk about God. Central to Christian-speak is the relationship, “Jesus and God”. This is usually considered without much reference to the Holy Spirit, although we do know to toss the Spirit in somewhere for completeness.

The problem here is that God as an idea is already spirit, so that “Jesus and God” is already “Jesus and the Spirit” The result of this is that we end up talking about Jesus’ relationship to “Spirit” in a general sense. We can than quickly make the move to conclude that Jesus had a relationship to (the) Spirit, and we can too; Jesus is the one who shows us how. Christmas becomes the advent of the great spiritual teacher. (Those who read Marcus Borg’s book with the discussion groups earlier in the year will recall that this is the approach that he takes).

But, scripturally, it’s a bit odd to speak of Jesus having a “relationship” to the Holy Spirit. Rather, Jesus relates to the Spirit in the same kind of way as we relate to our breathing. If there is no breathing, there is no us; but we don’t “relate” to our breathing. In the same way: no Spirit, no Jesus; yet Jesus does not so much relate to the Spirit as live by it. Luke sees this from the very beginning, and so Mary hears: “the Holy Spirit will come upon you…”, and she will conceive. Taking the lead from Mark’s gospel, Luke marks the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry with the descent of the Spirit on Jesus at his baptism, making him what Jesus is called to be. (Even more clearly in Mark is it implied that the good thing in the approach of Jesus is that he baptises with the Spirit). And, again and again, we hear in Luke (and Acts) that it is “filled with the Spirit” that Jesus (or the church) does this or that remarkable thing.

It is the Spirit who “makes” the Son the Son of the Father; in the same way, it is the Spirit which makes the Son Jesus, one of us. Yet this is not the good news John proclaims. He announces that Jesus gives the Spirit. This opens the door to an odd thought. If, by the Spirit, the Son is made “one of us” then, by the gift of the Spirit Jesus then delivers to us, we become “one of God”.

The grammar is clumsy but the point is important. It might seem neater to declare that God becomes one with us and so we one with God; but this doesn’t take us as far as our being one “of” God. When God’s gift of the Spirit is given, the Body of Christ is founded – in the first instance the body of Jesus himself. “Christ’s body” first takes form as Jesus of Nazareth, completely human and completely the presence of God through Jesus’ presence in the Spirit. But the body of Christ is subsequently that communal Body which is created when Jesus sends this same Spirit upon his followers. The baptism of the Spirit is the gift of God which makes of this human reality here and now, the Body of Christ – humanity in the same mould as Jesus himself. The effect of the Spirit is the creation of a human community in which the relationship the Son enjoys with the Father is known among and between human beings, and between us and God. For Jesus to be incarnate is not for God to become different, but for the world to become different. We are demonstrated – revealed, we might even say “apocalypsed” – to be destined to be drawn into God’s own life even as we are made more human.

That Jesus baptises with the Holy Spirit is the good news in John’s preaching because this makes possible our knowing ourselves destined to become more than we yet are – indeed to become our true selves. Such perfection in us is only ever momentary, for the Spirit never becomes our possession; the wind blows where it will, and so also the Spirit. Indeed, we should say that true humanity is a very rare event. For the most part the church is, like everyone else, far from perfect. It is distinct from the world only in that it acts out a drama which points forward to a coming fulfilment of God’s promise. This action takes place in the liturgy of our worship and in those kinds of ethical actions which John throws before us – to share, to be fair, not to abuse. The gift of the Spirit is God’s answer to God’s own call to take up that kind of work. We are to answer John call to live for others with the same enthusiasm as we await the gift of God’s Spirit.

While it might seem totally out of season for the church today to be crying out “Come, holy Spirit” this is the word for Advent, for the Christ who came is what we shall be because he gives us this Spirit, that we might be transformed to bear his likeness, his humanity.

In this way do God’s people, in the words of Isaiah, draw up water from the springs of salvation (Isaiah 12.3), leaping up to life in all its fullness.

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Advent 2
6/12/2015

Malachi 3:1-4
Luke 1:68-79 (Song of Zechariah)
Luke 3:1-6

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Our canticle reading this morning from Luke is the song of a soul set free. But, as such, it is in fact a strange song. Listen again to some of what sings, noting especially the force of what he says:

Blessed be the Lord…
he has come to his people and set them free.
He has raised up for us a mighty saviour…
…[to] save us from our enemies,
from the hands of all who hate us.
…to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
…[freeing us] to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight
all the days of our life.

The song is rich in its language and imagery. But, in that very richness, it reaches beyond what is “normal” in the experience of most of us today. We read this text because it is Advent and because it is set for us to read, and not because there is necessarily any sense in which it reflects our own experience. These words, then, are likely to catch us unprepared; it will usually be that they come to us at the wrong time.

How then might we best respond, authentically? By this I mean, how can Zechariah’s song be both ours – as valued Scripture – and yet also not ours, because it may have come to us at the wrong time, given where we find ourselves to be right now? Out of a sense of Christian duty, we may try to try to make this language ours by responding accordingly. Where the text laments, we lament; where the text is jubilant, we too will leap for joy. The only problem is that it won’t be for joy that we leap so much as that we feel that now must be the time for leaping because the text says so. There’s nothing authentic about a response like that. It is as if we are standing outside a window, looking in on the jubilation of someone else, perhaps hungry for the same but not able actually to partake.

If the jubilation of Zechariah’s song is beyond the sense of many of us, it’s quite possible that this is because we also don’t identify with the depths from which he speaks. While he exults in what God has done, God’s work has been to address things we might not identify as pressing issues in our own lives: God has “set [us] free”, saved “us from our enemies [and] from the hands of all who hate us”, set us free “to worship without fear”, we who “dwell in darkness and the shadow of death”.

It’s tempting to soften this language into metaphor, but people tend not to get too worked up about being set free from “metaphorical” oppressions. Enemies, hate, fear, darkness and the shadow of death all here seem to mean what they say. Or, at least, these indicate things felt sharply to be threats or real presences which limit life.

Yet enemies, hate and fear are things which don’t much mark our lives these days. Of course there are the “rumours of wars” which distant terrorist activity is to us here, concerns about local economic vitality, environmental concerns and the personal challenges which each of us face. But among all this we might struggle to identify anything from which we might want God to free us, or expect him to free us, along the lines of what Zechariah sings in his song. Once again, it is as if Zechariah’s song comes to us at the wrong time, and so it is strange.

The fact that not only the heights of the song might feel strange, but also the depths they imply, is very important for our getting to grips with the text. Zechariah’s song tells us a story, and it seeks to be our story. It is clear enough that it is a story of liberation but for it to be a story of our liberation we have to come to understand ourselves as true captives. This can be very difficult because it may well be that we have grown used to, and even value, the things which hold us captive. Captivity of the “soul” can come to suit us.

The old story of Adam and Eve with their fig leaves summarises this situation well for us. We know the story well enough. Having been warned not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, they still do, and suddenly find their nakedness a cause for shame. (It doesn’t matter here why nakedness might bring shame). They stitch together a few leaves and hide in the bushes, until they are found out by God who ultimately expels them from the Garden, although not before giving them much more substantial coverings in place of the fig leaves.

My interest here is in this clothing – what it represents and how it is valued. In the story the clothing both symbolises the fall from grace and becomes indispensable. It’s a subtle point the text makes: If our birthday suit is an adequate sign of our innocence, then our clothing is a sign of the loss of innocence. For the Eden story, clothing is not simply something practical we have gained but becomes a sacrament of something that has been lost, and which we cannot regain simply by stripping off. There is no returning to childlike innocence for, if we do have the front to uncover (a front worth uncovering?) for a while, we will nevertheless dress again. It may be the case, or not, that nakedness is inherently shameful – but this isn’t the point in the Eden story. Nudist philosophy and aesthetic appreciations of the human body have nothing to do with the point of the Garden narrative. The point there is that Adam and Eve, uncovered, pre-apple, assume that it must be OK to be bare, simply because God doesn’t object. It is the same for the toddler on the beach who doesn’t wonder about whether or not clothes should be worn, but knows only that Mum doesn’t seem to mind how he is at the moment. This is life lived in grace – not knowing whether I’m right or wrong, but knowing only that God’s OK with me as I am. What God finally does object to is Adam and Eve’s awareness of their condition, and that they now make a judgement about it and foist that judgement on God.

Now all this talk of getting our gear off (or not) might seem to have led us far from the modestly attired Zechariah, but the reason for visiting Eden was to see how hard it is to be free of the things which hold us captive, for these now seem to be means of life for us.

As another illustration of the point, we might consider an odd little detail in the resurrection narrative of John’s gospel (John 21). After the crucifixion, the disciples have returned to fishing on Lake Galilee. After they take the advice shouted from a stranger on the beach, they haul up a miraculous catch of fish, and Peter recognises the stranger on the shore as Jesus. We then hear the strange detail: Peter “put on some clothes, for he was naked, and jumped into the sea”. The odd thing is that normally you’d undress to go swimming. But, quite apart from the practical point, why does John even bother to tell us this at all? If we didn’t hear about the nakedness and the dressing the point would seem to be that Peter is again being his impulsive self and leaping into the sea while the rest of his friends have enough sense to sail back to shore.

Or, this would be the point unless there’s an allusion here to the Genesis story. Peter, at the sight of the risen Lord, now knows his shame, his “nakedness”, and his first, very human response, is to cover it over and to hide it. For how could God-in-Christ not also see that his was naked, and turn away in embarrassment?

(To make the same point with another story from Genesis without the complications of our squeamishness about nudity, after Cain kills his brother Abel (Genesis 4) the murderer is given “the mark of Cain”. The important point is that this is given not in order to identify him as a killer but for his protection, as a warning from God that no one should kill Cain for what he has done, under threat of a sevenfold vengeance from God. The thing which marks Cain as fallen is also what he now needs to continue living.)

We can only stand before God and others now bearing the sign or mark of our failure. Our need for the things which are signs of our loss and failure is indicative of the depth of our captivity. To be able to sing with Zechariah the song of a soul set free, we need to be brought to feel the pathos of that captivity.

But salvation is not then a return to Eden’s blessed nakedness or any other sign of some former innocence. When St Paul talks about salvation, he does not use the image of casting off the signs of sin – our God-given “garments of leather” – but of putting on something else: the person of Christ (Galatians 3.27, Romans 13.14, Ephesians 4.22-24). The “garments of leather” are replaced (or covered over) by Christ himself. Christ becomes our garment. The sign of our former innocence are gone; a new kind of innocence, wholeness, is given to us.

The song of a soul set free, then – truly set free – is a miracle not only in that we are set free, but in that it is a freedom which is peculiar to each one of us, as we actually are. As we are broken in our own personal or communal ways, so will the shape of our healing be. Things which are no longer even evidence to us that we are broken are revealed as such, but then made a sign no longer of our distance from our true selves but the sign of God’s power to heal and restore according to what we are now.

People set free are very different from people “created” free. Those who are set free have something to celebrate, something for which to give thanks: I was lost but now am found, blind but now I see. A soul set free has seen its captivity even to things it thought a blessing, and has found freedom by God’s grace in blessing upon blessing. And so such a soul sings, as did Zechariah.

This is we all need, and so we do well to pray that God indeed come, that, by his “tender mercy” “the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death”. Amen.