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Advent 1
29/11/2015

Jeremiah 33:14-16
Psalm 25
Luke 21:25-36

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I hope we have a good turnout for the concert this afternoon.

I hope the fuel lasts until I find a petrol station.

I hope she doesn’t say I’m going to need root canal treatment.

We hope for all sorts of things.

The hopes I’ve just listed are rather weak ones. Their weakness is in that they are about things over which we have no real control. They are more wishes which the powers might perhaps grant us, if we are lucky, or they are the outcomes we would effect if we were God. These are hopes in the face of what is already determined. An outcome is already written; we just don’t know yet what it is. “I hope that the sermon is not too long, and that there’s no more nonsense about Time Lords or zombies.” Alas it is too late, and hoping will make no difference: it is already written!

The nature of hope in the Christian confession is not weak in this sense because Christian hope is not about what we would do if we were God, but about what God will do. The question then becomes, what would God “do”? This is not quite straightforward, and the answer depends on whether we imagine ourselves to live in the realm of myth, or of history.

We begin with myth. Perhaps some of you have watched Mythbusters on TV. It is one of the silliest shows on the box, although I so want to be able to do the stuff they do to test what they test: blowing things up, smashing them into each other, abusing crash-test dummies and blowing more things up! For our purposes this morning, however, the important thing is not their methods or any particular myth they might bust but the very meaning of “myth” itself in “mythbusters”. Within the show, a myth is a story about what might happen under certain circumstances: will a broken drive shaft flip a moving car? Can you ski behind a passenger liner? What they test is whether the rumoured thing is true or not; if true, it ceases to be a “myth”. This is how myth tends to operate for most of us: a myth is something which is not true.

More profoundly, however, myth is not about what is true but why certain things are true. The process of mythologising is one in which what we can see or experience is interpreted as a sign of the divine order of things. We might imagine that because a king has all the power, money and pretty women, this is because the gods have ordered things to be just so. (At least, a lot of kings have presumed this to be the case.)

Myths declare that what is clearly the case is not only the case but is necessarily so. This is how the world is because this is how it is made to be. More than this, how the world is then has consequences for what can happen next. The myths by which we live determine or guarantee our position or our fate. On this understanding, it is both obvious and necessary that all Palestinians are terrorists, that men are superior to women, that the market will find the correct level, that I have to have the latest model of my favourite iThing, that what I have was given as a blessing for me and not for you, that we won the war because God was “mit uns”. (You don’t have to agree that all these things are obvious or necessary, only that many often have agreed just that!)

Myths of this kind interpret how the world is to be part of a deeper ordering. Historically, this ordering has been religiously conceived: what is happening happens because of the activities of the gods. If we see that each year the grain grows, and then dies, and then does the same next year, we might imagine that this reflects the dying and rising of a god; in the case of the Romans, this was accounted for with the goddess Ceres (as in “cereal”). But religion and its gods are not an essential part of the dynamic. The important thing is that the mythologised world is, quite literally, hopelessly static. There is nothing to hope for but the next step in what is already predetermined. We do not drive but are driven.

Now, I said that what we might hope God might do is a matter of whether we think we live in a mythological world or an historical one. For this to make sense we not only have to re-think what “myth” means but also to re-imagine what “historical” means.

For most of us, most of the time, history is the stuff-that-happened. This is how history is taught in schools and features in public discourse. In this simple sense, history is everywhere, because things are happening all the time. The first Australian peoples have a history, the second peoples have histories which intersect; the Russians and the Chinese and the Africans all have their histories.

We tell ourselves that we are interested in our histories because they tell us something about who we are; just think of the enormous interest in family history these days. But when history tells us who we are, it begins to take on the characteristics of myth. If I am merely evolved from scum on the surface of a primeval pond, then what does that say about my freedoms here and now? If I am a person who was treated badly – even abused – in my early years, how does that affect my future? If my people have been terribly persecuted in living memory, what rights and claims does that give me here and now over others? In scenarios like these what happens next is often thought to be implied by what has already happened. And so there is not much to “hope” for here; rather, we read our futures off our past. This is not very different from the idea that there are gods behind every rock and tree who make happen what will happen next.

Distinct from this sense of history is the notion of history which appears for the first time with ancient Israel. Here history occurs for the first time. Of course, this makes no sense in the normal understanding of history: there was plenty happening before Israel appeared on the scene. What I mean is that in Israel, for the first time, human beings were offered a different sense of the relationship between where they had come from and where they were going. This brings us, finally, to our focus text today from Jeremiah as a concrete instance of this different feel for history.

Jeremiah preached before, during and after the fall of Jerusalem in 587BC. For the most part, his preaching described in no uncertain terms the disaster coming upon Jerusalem. Our reading today, however, comes from a small section in the wider collection of Jeremiah’s preaching, known as the Book of Consolation. This is comprised of a series of oracles which speak of a time beyond what was at immediately hand, when a restoration would come.

In this prophecy, two things are declared which contradict the static, hopeless mythologising of world events. First, it is declared that the meaning of the terrifying events unfolding around Jerusalem at that time was ambiguous. When what happens next is predetermined by what has already happened, then it is clear what will happen and why, for only certain things and conclusions can follow. If Jerusalem falls and the Temple is sacked, this becomes proof that the Judeans were wrong about the power of their God, and so can now only hope in vain. But Jeremiah has already preached the fall. His preaching has not been a discovery of a power operating in history of which his people were ignorant, but has been a revelation of the nature of history itself – a revelation of the nature of our lives together and with God. We are not caught up in the inexorable unfolding of some pattern of history, or the interplay of divine powers hidden under the surface of our experiences. We are in fact, potentially, entirely free at any particular moment.

This freedom is not always a freedom to change what might happen next. Having taken the political choices it had to that point, Judea may well still have been overrun, or at least humbled, even if it repented before God but this need not have been experienced as punishment or rejection. A God who takes up the part of “the widow and the orphan” (James 1.27; cf. Isaiah 1.17) will still be God to a people humbled in political defeat, if that defeat is not confounded by its own political pride.

The second thing which Jeremiah’s preaching opens up is hope which is neither a vain wish nor simply knowledge of the next thing which must happen as history unfolds. The name new name for Jerusalem after the restoration will be, “The Lord is our righteousness”. This “righteousness” is not a religious or moral quality but has more the sense of security, surety, defence, vindication, guarantor, or fortress. Jeremiah says of this promised community that it will be vindicated or guaranteed by “the Lord.” But his invocation of “the Lord” here is a polemic, a contrast. It is not merely that it will be “the Lord” who does this but that it will not be something else, some other candidate which guarantees or defends. This is in stark contrast to the situation during the time of Jeremiah’s ministry, in which the guarantors of Judah were thought to be its possession of Solomon’s Temple, its status as the elect of God, its army, its walls, and the intrigues of its political strategy on the international stage. The people had mythologised their existence – made it a necessary thing: We are this, therefore we can expect that; we are God’s people, therefore God will protect us; We have fallen, therefore our God is no real God. Yet What Jeremiah proposes is not a necessary but a chosen thing and, so, potentially quite unexpected: God is not powerless, but punishes; and God will yet honour you who, by most measures, are not worthy of honour.

We make history not when we do some extraordinary thing which will deserve its own chapter in the history books; we make history when the next thing which happens is a free choice, which creates possibilities no-one could have anticipated.

We make history when we turn aside from what has to be done to take up something which doesn’t have to be done but which is more important. We make history when, having all the facts, we find ourselves not compelled but free to decide what to do about them.

Hope for the future is not to be found in strategies which have mapped out where things are likely to go or theories which specify our next step. Such strategies and theories are like a law written on tablets of stone: permanent because carved into stone. Rather, hope for the future is found in the God who chooses us, regardless of what we choose, of how we calculate. This is a law written on hearts – perhaps even law as heart – God’s heart, and ours.

There is only hope where there is freedom. We, for the most part, are not free. We are taught what to expect, and we expect it. We calculate and measure and judge, and generally act accordingly. And we are subject to the same calculations, measurings and judgements.

There is only hope where there is freedom. The God of Jeremiah, and our God, is free in this way. Free to embrace what is unworthy, to lift up again what he has cast down, to fill what become empty and heal what has been broken. This is hope which looks for more than can be seen, hopes against “hope” for a future it has no right to expect, but is learning to expect it anyway.

May the people of God hear that promise and be re-formed by such hope, that they may become more particularly the people of this God, and God be more richly praised. Amen.

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Christ the King
22/11/2015

Revelation 1:4-8b
Psalm 93
John 18:33-37

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If you haven’t noticed that zombies are everywhere these days, then you’ve not been paying enough attention. I don’t mean the zombies who might be your children first thing in the morning, or perhaps your spouse around the same hour, not your colleagues on a Monday morning nor those who are simply going through the motions at the shopping centre or sitting in traffic. I mean real, rampaging, flesh-eating zombies. The Wikipedia List of Zombie Films entry notes 435 zombie films since 1932, of which 262 have been made in the last 15 years, 87 in the last five years, and to which can be added another half dozen or so popular TV series. In fact, had you not chosen to come to church this morning, you could be watching “The Scouts’ Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” right this minute in a cinema not so far, far away from here! My nephew was wearing a T-shirt last week describing the necessary elements of a zombie apocalypse survival plan, and there is a book on my son’s bookshelf relating the exploits of a Very Hungry Zombie, which are not unlike those of a famous caterpillar. Zombies are everywhere.

Yet, for the uninitiated, a quick Zombies‑101: Zombies are dead people, walking. They generally walk with some difficulty because, being dead, they tend to be falling apart. The principle reason zombies walk is to find non-zombies, in order to eat them. If you survive being bitten (or partially eaten) by a zombie, you become a zombie yourself. This process can lead to an exponential growth in the number of zombies which, unchecked, can result in a zombie apocalypse. This is not an apocalypse in the sense we considered last week – the revelation of the peculiar righteousness of God – but the more common, culturally received sense of apocalypse: a zombie Armageddon. Being already dead, zombies cannot be killed although they can be returned to being ordinary corpses. This is typically achieved by a shotgun blast, or baseball bat swing, to the head. Averting a zombie apocalypse, therefore, is usually a very messy business.

Even if you are new to whole the zombie thing, you’ll perhaps not be surprised that there has developed in recent times the notion of Zombie Jesus. This is basically a mockery of the church’s confession of the Resurrection, with Zombie Jesus Day becoming the designation of Easter. God may well be amused, but we can never quite know…

Whatever the case there, this morning I want to use the idea of Zombie Jesus to help us to make some sense of what we are doing when we declare that Jesus is king.

The concept of Zombie Jesus brings two realities into relationship with each other: the historically received confession of the Resurrection, and the contemporary sense for the zombie. In this case, the controlling element is zombie theory; if someone is said no longer to be properly dead, he must be a zombie. In Zombie Jesus, zombieness absorbs the resurrection, and so gives it content beyond a simple declaration that Jesus is no longer dead. The zombie sets the basic condition for understanding who the “resurrected” Jesus now is.

So the argument goes. It actually doesn’t matter whether there are such things as zombies or not. What is important is the logic: one thing being defined in terms of the other, and you need to know about both the resurrection and zombies in order for Zombie Jesus to make any sense.

This is all pretty silly but the point is that speaking of Jesus as king would seem rather silly, if we hadn’t just happened to have been doing it for nearly 2000 years. The language is so natural to us – believers and non-believers alike – that we haven’t noticed that it doesn’t tell us very much these days, or that when it did once say something substantial, it didn’t make much sense.

We can get some sense out of King Jesus today because there are still kings and queens around. Yet, their primary purpose today is as public relations officers and content for supermarket checkout magazine covers. This, of course, is not what we mean when we say that Jesus is king. But then what do we mean?

It is very difficult to say, despite the language of our prayers and hymns (even in today’s worship service), being full of the kingship of Jesus. This is because “king” is a pretty empty concept for us these days. We don’t really know kings. At least “Zombie Jesus” might suggest that there is something dangerous about the risen Jesus; a risen “king” Jesus neither threatens us nor gives us much heart.

But, even under the best of circumstances – when a king was really a king –what does it communicate to speak of King Jesus? When two realities are brought together in the way “Jesus” and “king” might be, one of them tends to “win”. The same applies to Zombie Jesus. As it usually appears about the place, the person of Jesus is swallowed up by the label Zombie Jesus. But theologically it works the other way around: Jesus swallows up zombieness.

What could this possibly mean? Just one illustration: whereas it is the nature of the beast that a zombie seeks victims to consume, Jesus says, “Eat me. Eat my flesh, drink my blood.” This is a turning on its head of what it means to be a zombie. In the most unzombielike way, Zombie Jesus does not consume others, but gives himself to be consumed.

What difference does this make? It averts a zombie apocalypse. There is here no exponential multiplication of victims. Only one is consumed, and those who consume him do so not to spread death but that they might have a share in the bringing of life. We are not consumed, and we are not to consume others.

I suggested at the beginning that if you hadn’t noticed that zombies were everywhere, you’ve not been paying attention. If you have been paying attention since then, you might have noticed that I haven’t gotten to my scriptural text yet, and we’re running out of time!

Our text from Revelation today has been chosen for the lectionary because it is very clearly a “kingship” text concerning Jesus, the king of the kings of the earth who “made us to be a kingdom”. In fact there are also other ascriptions to Jesus in this text: “the faithful witness”, “the firstborn of the dead”, the one “coming on the clouds”. But, apart from our familiarity with these expressions by virtue of their being in the Bible, these are all much like the “king” ascription to Jesus – just a bit too socially and politically unreal to us to mean very much.

But what they were doing for those who first heard them was taking things which mattered and re-working them through the person of Jesus. If you seek the one who tells the truth, it is Jesus. If you want to know what the end looks like, and who brings it, look to Jesus. But, most importantly, this is a surprise because Jesus doesn’t look like these things. “So you are a king?” Pilate asks in astonishment. This is the crucial thing in anything we might dare to say about Jesus – it will not make sense to begin with.

And if we knew zombies well enough it would make no sense to speak of Zombie Jesus. This is not because it is offensive, nor because it gets the Resurrection wrong, nor even because Zombies are make-believe. Rather, it would make no sense because we cannot see how could it be possible to live and at the same time not be consuming others, not taking them for granted, not prioritising our own needs over theirs, not paying them enough, not allowing them to be themselves (different from us). How could it be that human life not be competitive, each of us pursuing selfish needs, trusting in an “invisible hand” to use our consumption to benefit those who are disadvantaged in the contest? So much of our lives are about trying not to be consumed, even if we are unaware that it is actually happening; and eating is a good way of not being eaten.

In the face of this, Jesus stands before Pilate. He is about to be consumed, for this will be expedient for Pilate. But as he stands there he makes present a kingdom “not from here”, a different kind of economy, a different way of evaluating and relating to each other. This making-present is a promise and a calling.

The promise is not merely that the kingdom will come, but that it can – here and now. The Word can become flesh, heaven-as-earth.

The calling is not that we look for this heaven-as-earth, “coming on the clouds”, but that we become it. We do not become this kingdom of our own efforts, but are “made to be a kingdom” by a king who does not merely command but serves and enables – an unkingly king.

What is promised here, and what we are called to become, is not alien to us for it is what we are created to be. And so Christ gives us what we will be so that we can become what he gives: his own Body, a richness of humanity unknown but desired, the secret of all our best efforts at ruling and consuming, and all of our worst.

“I am the bread of life,” declares Jesus, the king who gives us himself: “Those who eat of me shall not hunger, and those who drink of me shall never thirst” (cf. John 6.35,37).

Here is a promise and a call to all consumed by their own and others’ hunger for life.

By the grace of God, may his people respond with joy in the promise and commitment to the call. Amen.

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Sunday 33
15/11/2015

Daniel 12:1-3
Psalm 16
Mark 13:1-13, 24-27

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The Doctor is a time traveller. If you’re wondering, “Doctor who?” – precisely! In a cunningly disguised time machine Doctor Who, the last of the Time Lords, travels in time from the very beginnings of all things to their very end.

Even if you’re not particularly interested in the time-travel/science fiction genre, the apparent paradoxes of time travel are reasonably well known. One of the first questions to which the possibility of time travel generally gives rise is: what would happen if you were to travel back in time and kill your own parents, before you were actually born. That killing one’s parents is often the first question to arise is interesting in itself, but the point here is the contradiction it seems to imply: if I kill my parents and so am not born, who is it that kills them?

Another prospect which quickly comes to mind when thinking about time travel is the possibility of travelling forward in time to know the moment of your own death. The paradox involved here is that, knowing when and how we are likely to die, most of us would take measures not to be in that place or time, to be healthier or stronger or better off. If we managed that, then the future we saw would not in fact be our future; we have not travelled forward to the future but a future, which will now be something different.

Story tellers have sought to think through these paradoxes with varying degrees of success although, in the end, none of it really makes any sense. And, often enough, making sense isn’t really the point – certainly not in the case of Doctor Who, at least, where the point is more enjoying watching a crazy man and his sassy side-kick do their stuff.

What has this got to do with today’s text from Mark’s gospel, the so-called “little apocalypse”? Just this: New Testament apocalyptic thought is a time machine, with its own set of paradoxes.

When we hear of “the apocalypse” these days, our thoughts tend to be filled with images of Armageddon – the scene of a great battle described in the book of Revelation. To borrow a line from one of the great choral pieces of the 20^th century, the whole thing is all thunderbolts and lightning, very, very frightening.

The word apocalypse itself, however, does not mean “destruction” but “uncovering” or “revealing” (it is literally “from hiding” [apo-calypse]). The apocalypse is not the catastrophic turning over of all things; it is not in that sense the “end” of the world – its ending. The apocalypse is, properly, the uncovering of the end of the world, “end” now in the sense of the goal towards which God draws it.

But it is not in this sense that biblical apocalyptic is a paradoxical time machine – at least not the kind of apocalyptic we meet in passages like the one we’ve heard today. Today’s text appears to be a pastiche of number of different sayings of Jesus about the end time, as well as later understandings developed by the church from its reading of the Hebrew Scriptures, all of which are here then gathered into this one block. The effect of this is something of a confusion of images, but it is more important that the chapter overall is less a leaping into the future than an itinerary for the end times, by which we might know where we are up to, when the time comes. This makes it a rather flat portrayal of the future, compared with other apocalyptic dimensions of the New Testament.

This is not do dismiss the passages, but to ask about how to interpret it: what is the key to – the centre of – New Testament apocalyptic? In fact the most apocalyptic thing in the New Testament is not any of various world-overturning itineraries described here and there in the gospels and epistles, and most fully in Revelation. The most apocalyptic thing is the resurrection of Jesus. The apocalyptic itineraries of Mark 13 and other New Testament passages are not a new thing still to come, unknown in the church till that point. They are simply variations on the theme of the passion and resurrection of Jesus himself, within which are contained our present and our future.

Resurrection as a general “idea” was an apocalyptic notion in the religious and political atmosphere of Jesus’ time. At the apocalypse – the revelation of God’s righteousness – a general resurrection of one sort of another was anticipated as part of a great judgement. The details varied in different accounts but the point is this: resurrection wasn’t about a miraculous return to life, which is about all that it is for us moderns today. In late biblical times, if someone were to stop being dead, this would be a sign that the end of the world had come.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to note how different are most modern questions or “issues” with the resurrection from this understanding. Not a few of us want at the very least to lower our voice a little at the creedal affirmation, “on the third day he rose again.” We might want to do this not in awe but lest someone hear us actually confess such “nonsense”. But the point of the affirmation is not merely that Jesus stopped being dead. In itself this is meaningless. These days we’re more likely to consider the dead coming back to life to be nuisance, of which the zombie is the proof. Rather, by affirming Jesus’ resurrection we affirm that we have seen the end of the world – the goal towards which God is drawing us: Jesus himself.

And this is where the time machine of New Testament apocalyptic kicks in with a couple of paradoxes of its own. The first of these is that here we do not see Jesus in the future. Unlike the Doctor and all other time travellers, Jesus doesn’t go anywhere but rather the future is seen in him, here and now. And if his disciples sense that Jesus continues to be present to them long after the events of Easter, then their future is also present to them, here and now.

More than this, the Jesus the disciples see in the resurrection is the same Jesus they knew on the dusty roads of Palestine. Jesus as he was to them prior to the crucifixion and resurrection – preaching, teaching, exhorting and challenging – was the same as the Jesus seen in the resurrection. The resurrection was merely the apocalypse – the uncovering, the revelation – of who Jesus was and how he was related to God. So it was not so much that the future has moved to be located in Jesus in the resurrection; it was always in him, even as he looked like an ordinary itinerant preacher. This would seem to be the point of the Transfiguration of Jesus one ordinary day on a hill top: here, for a moment, the meaning of Jesus’ particular ordinariness is seen.

The paradox of the New Testament apocalyptic time machine is that the now of Jesus, in whatever condition he might be met, is the future. The gospel is that this now‑future might be ours.

Now, if you’re still following this I hope you’re finding it impressive, although I’d admit that it is not yet very useful! What I’ve tried to show is that time is a central notion in the New Testament’s wrestling with the person of Jesus, and that the outcome of that wrestling is a notion of the past, the present and the future which is quite contradictory to ordinary understandings.

The importance of all this – its usefulness – is that, for the New Testament, a Time Lord is not one who controls time – who can wind it forwards or backwards – but one for whom time is no impediment to life. Such a Time Lord has no need to wind forward or backward; now is always good enough.

To bring this home, we need to intensify of our sense of what “time” is.

Time is not the ticking of clocks, as it usually is in sci-fi time travel. It can be that, but it is scarcely a very interesting type of time, socially and politically. We get closer to a biblical sense of time – which is entirely social and political – when we say that time is what passes between persons. The ticking of clocks is a mere medium for that passage, that exchange.

If a Time Lord is properly one for whom time is no impediment to life, then this translates as my set of relationships here and now not only being where I happen to live, but also where I can be truly alive.

It is our failure to live in such a timely fashion which bears in on us from all sides: Paris in the last day; the suicide bomber; concrete walls separating Israel from the West Bank; “sovereign borders”; the insufferable neighbour, or colleague or spouse; the kid in class who seems to deserve to be picked on. In relationships like these – tense and riven – the future is always what comes from the further ticking of a clock. Time – our current relationships – is something from which we are seeking to escape. Fullness of life is always put off till tomorrow, when there might be different people to relate to, people who are more “us”.

And so we see that the paradox of Jesus’ being the future in the present is only an apparent contradiction in terms. It is paradoxical so far as ticking clocks go, but not in terms of time being measured be what passes between people. Jesus controls time by reconfiguring the relationships around him. He reconciles, heals, joins, uncovers new possibilities, overcomes without destroying. The future in him is now because God is able work with our now. It is as Lord over this kind of time that Jesus is Lord over all time.

And us? Unlike the Doctor, Jesus is not the last of the Time Lords, the only one who can pull off life in the midst of death. By God’s grace he is the first among a great family of them, called to live the future in the present, to find life in all its fullness in the midst the all change and decay around us.

If the point watching the Time Lord is to enjoy a crazy man and his sassy sidekick do their thing, then the point of Christian discipleship is be Time Lords. This will often make us seem crazy. For most of the world, if life were the destination, you wouldn’t leave from here.

But this is our calling. And even if crazy, we do our relationship-renewing, time-bending thing anyway, because our sidekick is especially sassy: Jesus the Christ, who is first and last, who is today, yesterday and forever, in whom we will all finally live, and move and have our being.

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Sunday 32
8/11/2015

Ruth 3:1-5, 4:13-17
Psalm 127
Hebrews 9:24-28
Mark 12:38-44

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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Surely, if you were going in search of piety you would look in a church or a convent or a monastery or a temple – somewhere you would expect to find religious people. When Jesus visited the temple in Jerusalem in Mark 12 he was scandalised by the wealth and power that masqueraded as piety and the poverty of widows. In such a place there should be found goodness, not wickedness.

Jesus launched a scathing verbal attack on the scribes

Mark 12:38-40  ³⁸ As he taught, he said, “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, ³⁹ and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! ⁴⁰ They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

This business about devouring widows’ houses is curious. There are two possible explanations for it. One is that women who had no husband or male kin had no one to discharge their property business. The task would be given to those with high standing in the community, notably the scribes. They earned their reputation for piety and trustworthiness by their long prayers. A percentage would be taken for services rendered as property trustees, but the practice was also open to embezzlement and abuse.

Another explanation for Jesus outburst against scribes stems from Jesus’ fierce opposition to exploitation in the temple and the crippling demands made on the people for the upkeep of the institution. The argument goes that the poor had too much pressure placed on them to maintain a place of piety that was actually ripping them off.

All this raises questions about the widow who put her last two mites in the temple treasury. Was Jesus commending her piety and trust in God by not withholding her very last coins, or was he criticising a religious system that allowed such destitution to live beside flamboyant wealth and power?

The story of Ruth is about the plight of widows too. Naomi, Orpah and Ruth were widowed in Moab and Naomi went home to Bethlehem and Ruth went with her. The drought had broken and there was plenty again, but the women could not claim their own land, it must be redeemed by a male family member. Well that’s only part of the problem. In order for the widows in this story to gain benefit from their land one of them needs to marry the man who redeems Naomi’s land. Couched in its quaint biblical language we read the story of Ruth as a beautiful love story, and so it is. But, in our pious innocents we miss some of the shameless feminine strategies that are used to accomplish a love match that will give Naomi what is justly hers anyway. This story has the most blatant account of seduction we can imagine. During the harvest Naomi gets Ruth to go into the fields to glean. This was a lovely law that enabled the poor and landless to get some food. The corners of the fields were to be left ungathered. Olives were harvested by hitting the branches with sticks. Only the poor and landless could pick the stubborn olives. Grape vines were to be gone over only once, no going back for the bunches that had been slow to ripen, they were for the poor. Ruth went gleaning and her beauty caught the attention of Boaz who had a right to redeem Naomi’s land. But this match maker left nothing to chance. Naomi planned an all-out proactive offensive. She advised Ruth that when Boaz lay down to sleep she should uncover his feet and lay beside him. Our innocent response is, well that’s all very cute, until we learn the term ‘feet’ was a euphemism for that which the convention of pulpit language prevents me from telling you. Suffice it to say that Naomi advised Ruth to shamelessly seduce Boaz to ensure a marriage and the benefits of the land that was theirs anyway.

At one level this story is telling us that the grandmother of King David was a foreigner. At another level the story exposes serious gender inequities in the law of Moses. Like Jesus who exposed injustices in the temple system, the story teller of Ruth has woven a yarn that revolves around the legal conventions of Torah with regard to property and the poor and women and exposes their injustice. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

The stories of Ruth and Jesus are both very political. The story of Ruth is most obviously political because it was told at a time when the Jews were returning from exile in Babylon. There was a strong push to purify the race. One political wing advocated that the foreign wives and their children should be sent back to their own land. The storyteller of Ruth was saying, what nonsense is this, the grandmother of King David was from Moab and we don’t like Moabites.

And when Jesus visited the temple in Jerusalem, he roundly condemned the practices of the religious bits of his society for their oppression of those most vulnerable.

We have all heard lessons from these texts that inspire us to be more like Ruth in her faithfulness to Naomi, to imitate that battler spirit and wholesome rural, out in the fields gleaning barley kind of life-style. We have certainly been drawn to the extraordinary generosity of the widow in the temple who gave all she had to the temple treasury, thus placing all her trust in God for survival.

These are good lessons for us to learn, but today I want to ask some different questions of these stories – then we find some other answers that give us a different slant on these old lessons.

There were beautiful laws in the Torah for the widows and landless, but why did the widow Naomi have to enter such a convoluted conspiracy with her daughter-in-law to acquire her own husband’s land. She had to fight against her society’s rules and the power structures in order to achieve what she most needed – the status of a mother of a son, and land to feed her.

The situation in the temple when Jesus watched the treasury being filled was appalling. The question has to be asked – what is going on in a holy place when a woman is allowed to give all she has to support an institution that pays particular honour to wealth and opulence?

These were political debates from ancient times and their parallels are easily found in our own time – debates around tax reform and the sharing of wealth, of gender and racial equality. These stories from Scripture tell our own stories.

The Temple in Jerusalem was not exempt from any of these kinds of questions. Widows in Bethlehem had to work societies systems as best they could to achieve what they needed to survive. Why should the church be any different? Why should our society built so much under the influence of the church be any different? Well we should be different – why?

Because Jesus came and pointed his finger at what was wrong (Mark 12:38 “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces), and he came and pointed his finger at what was right (Mark 12:42 A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins).

So in our own lives, our personal and communal lives, our institutional and global lives we might stop and look and see just where Jesus’ finger might be pointing.

The problem is that we find Jesus points at what is good and what is ungodly so how do you know if the finger is pointing at what is censured or what is commended? The rule of thumb when it comes to Jesus’ pointing finger is that he seems to point in the direction of the little ones when he wants us to know what is commendable. Beware of the finger that points to following procedures and regulations that thwart doing what is faithful and wise. Beware the finger that points to self-importance. Beware the finger that points out our clambering over others to satisfy our own desires, or pushing aside those who threaten our cosy existence.

But, if power is being given to the powerless, if food is being given to the hungry, if love is being given to the lonely, if faith is being given to the fearful – chances are, they shall be reckoned as riches.

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All Saints
1/11/2015

Isaiah 25:6-9
Psalm 24
Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

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A traffic reporter on the radio remarked late last Friday afternoon: “Everyone seems to be taking advantage of the long weekend and, as a result, no one is going anywhere.”

We know what he meant and are probably happy in that respect, at least, that we (who are here) were not taking advantage of the long weekend! And yet, it has likely not occurred to many of us just how important traffic jams are for understanding the nature of the existence implied by Christian faith in “the communion of saints”.

In the book of Revelation we have a seer’s vision of the consummation of all things. Our reading today comes from the climax of that vision: the end, the goal of God’s work in Christ.

“I saw a new heaven and a new earth”. This is fairly straightforward so far as apocalyptic visions go, and something like it is to be expected at this point of the story. While the notion of a new heaven might catch a few by surprise, fundamentally, the vision relates a renewal: out with the old, in with the new.

But then comes the strange thing: there appears a city, of all things: “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”

Why is this strange?

The city is the human way of being. The city is the teeming human mass. It is extraordinary and tragic. The city is coffee shops and crazy people on public transport. The city is sirens through the night streets, and park benches. It is soaring architecture and backstreet graffiti. It is movement and exchange. The city is the traffic jam.

Or, theologically, it would be closer to the truth to say that the traffic jam is the city. The traffic jam is a kind of sacrament of human interconnectedness, although we experience it as a sacrament of that interconnectedness in its fallen state.

A loose definition of a sacrament is that it is something which looks like one thing – such as a meal – but denotes something else – such as the way God saves. In the case of the traffic jam, it looks like a clash, a choking, a knot; yet it denotes the way and the degree to which we are all inextricably interconnected and interdependent.

The traffic jam occurs because my being at work is made more effective by your being at work at the same time. This is, in turn, more effective if our kids are at all at school at the same time. As the city becomes more successful through this greater honing of mutual effectiveness, more opportunities for interconnection occur, making the traffic worse. The distance over which I can provide my services increases (meaning more time on the road), as does the possibility of being able to afford to send the kids somewhere other than the local school (meaning more time on the road).

And so it goes on, becoming more complicated and less manageable with each extra dimension of interrelatedness which takes place in the city, and with each success of that interrelatedness.

Now, of course, not everyone suffers the affliction of the traffic jam. Not to make too fine a point of it, at the risk of offense and possibly even of irresponsibly overstating the case, if the traffic jam is not a dominating feature of your existence then it is probably either because you are wealthy enough to be largely separated from the types of connectedness which sustain a city, or because you don’t really matter.

Those who “don’t really matter” in this sense may matter in themselves, but generally don’t matter so far as the ongoing life of the city is concerned. They are not really participants in the city because they do not engage, are not actively interconnected. They include the sick, the elderly infirm, the shut-in, the disabled, the poor, the drug addict, the asylum seeker. It doesn’t matter whether we might object that they ought to be able to participate in traffic jams. It is simply the case that they generally do not because they don’t really have anywhere to go, don’t have many connections to make.

The “wealthy” here are those whose continued existence does not require direct, active engagement: this includes the retired, the “kept” or those simply rich enough not to have to join the game if they don’t want to. These, too, are generally not found in traffic jams; they can wait until rush hour is passed.

(And, just in case there are any here who smugly think that traffic jams are not an issue in their particular rural paradise or getaway, in fact the size of the city is not the important thing here. For the purposes of government, cities are teeming masses – the numbers matter. Theologically, however, a “city” need only be comprised of two people for John’s vision of the new Jerusalem to be important. How can two people have a traffic jam, you ask? Well, marriage, for instance, which also happens to feature in our reading; we’ll touch on that again in a moment.)

The traffic jam is the sign and the burden of engaged, interactive human life. It is what happens when more than one person has to be in the same place at the same time, when we act upon the fact that we are “made for each other”. Every engaged, interactive life has its own kind of traffic jams.

This being the case, and given that John has a vision of a “new” city descending from heaven to earth, there presses forward an unexpected theological question: are there traffic jams in the new Jerusalem, in “heaven”?

The gospel suggests a surprising answer: Yes.

And No.

Yes, there are traffic jams because this is a real city; heaven is not everyone getting green lights all the way, although that’s probably how we imagine it. Perhaps even stranger than the fact that God sets forth a new city is that it is Jerusalem, the basket case of all cities:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus cried, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

This is to say nothing of what has happened there since then. But the point is not to “pick on” Jerusalem but to understand why it appears here in the vision, and not some brand new, start-it-all-over Utopia. It is necessary that it be Jerusalem here because God is faithful to his promises, and those promises have to do with a people for whom Jerusalem is their heart and sign. It necessary that it is Jerusalem because Jerusalem is the sign of our failure and so of our need to be healed. The new heaven and the new earth and the new city are a wiping away of tears which does not wipe away the eyes which cry them. The new Jerusalem is Jerusalem, as she should be. The vision expresses this in the analogy of marriage: a bride for her husband, the husband the bride needs, complementary and engaged, two parties necessarily in the same place at the same time in order to be their true selves, but now without competition or conflict.

For conflict has been Jerusalem’s history. What else are Jesus’ clashes with the religious authorities but gridlock – a dispute over who has the right to be “here”? What else is the crucifixion but road rage, or perhaps the Great Divorce?

It is this history, identifiable by the name “Jerusalem,” which has been taken up into God and now descends again, cleansed.

Yes, there are traffic jams in heaven because our interconnectedness, our needing to be in the same place at the same time in order to be our true selves does not go away; this connectedness is the very point of heaven.

But No, this gridlock is different. In our normal daily traffic jams, the city’s purpose as making possible our being for each other becomes the city’s burden. Interrelatedness turns out to be more than we want to bear, even as it is the very thing which we need to flourish. This is the communion of sinners, in which the gift of the other person becomes a curse.

In the traffic jams in John’s heavenly city, the new Jerusalem, the burden of our interrelatedness is made into a life-giving thing. This is the truly unbelievable and amazing thing, much more so the mere proposal of a heaven, or even that there is a God who will bring it to pass.

It is not “heaven” as a time or place which is to be believed in but what it is said will happen there. This is the important thing because it is that heavenly happening which connects that time and place to this one, and allows heaven “then” to an impact now.

So how is it in heaven? To be in heaven is to be happy to sit in traffic. And, keeping in mind those we thought about earlier, who don’t really get to enjoy the traffic in this world, or who are free to absent themselves from it, heaven is wanting to be in traffic and being able to participate in it.

The communion of saints is not the collective of those who are “holy”, in the sense of somehow having abstracted themselves from the messiness of the world and the kinds of exchanges it entails. The communion of saints – promised for then and reflected even now – is the community which rejoices that its life is a life together, with all that costs and with all the benefits it brings.

The promise of a new Jerusalem is the promise that the bumper-to-bumper grinding of the communion of sinners will be made a communion of saints: our city, our life, but not as we yet know it.

The communion of sinners is a life which considers being caught in traffic to be the sign of death. Here, other people are hell.

The communion of saints is life “in the thick of it”, made enriching and life-giving by the grace of the God who created us for each other and who makes such a life together possible, even if now only as through a glass, darkly. Here the challenge of the needs of others becomes the possibility of unexpected joy.

This is the vision of faith, the promise, upon which we wait and towards which we point in words and deeds.

And so the prayer of the church is to give thanks for all the saints, and to pray to God that their number may ever increase, that we with all the world, might hear and see the life in all its abundance which was our beginning and will be our end.

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Sunday 30
25/10/2015

1 Corinthians 8:1-16
Psalm 34
Mark 10:46-52

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In the book our study groups have just begun to consider, Stanley Hauerwas remarks that the debate today between believers and atheists has become increasingly culturally irrelevant and marginalised. One of the principle reasons for this is that believers are offering unbelievers less and less not to believe in. This is because of the increasing social and political irrelevance of what believers seem to hold dear – the existence of God, in particular. For the most part, religious belief is simply not particularly interesting to those who don’t believe.

By religious belief being “interesting” I mean here, engaging. Thus, the question of the existence of God is largely academic: non-believers and believers alike sense that the existence of God is finally a “So what?” question. Having, say, proved the existence of God, then what? While believers have tended to assume that a proof God implies something, it is not at all clear what it might imply.

The things it is usually said are implied by the existence of God are various ethical and social principles and activities. Yet these don’t spring from the existence of God per se, but from the existence of a particular God who happens to desire these things of us. Christians already believe in this God, and so hold dear his demands. But this doesn’t work if you are not committed to the God, or to the society this God might expect.

So the Christian apologist has a problem. Having, perhaps, proven the existence of “a” god, how do we prove the god who exists demands of us the things we Christians like to think “he” does, and doesn’t demand some of the ghastly things other gods have demanded? Strictly speaking, a god whose existence we can prove in this way is a god without content. It is not clear what it might then command of us, and so difference it makes. It is, in this sense, quite uninteresting.

In fact, the implications we might think flow from a proof of the existence of God generally precede the proof, rather than flow from it. It is because we believers have a sense for how we – and others – ought to be living that we seek to prove God. The God we seek to prove – if we even bother – corresponds to our sense of an appropriate social, political, and economic order.

This way of putting it opens up another way of approaching the god-question: if there are quite different social, political and economic orders, might there be more than one god?

This might seem to be the opposite of traditional Christian teaching, but in fact it gets us closer to the Scriptural sense for things than does our predominant western philosophical monotheism.

It is this Scriptural sense for God which I want to draw from our Psalm this morning, by noting one aspect of a likely hearing of what the psalmist has to say. Throughout the psalm we encounter the expression “the Lord”. Whether we are believers or not, this expression is so familiar to us culturally that we tend to hear “the Lord” as a synonymous expression for “God”. Thus, “I will bless the Lord at all times” becomes “I will bless God at all times”; “My soul makes its boast in the Lord” becomes “My soul makes its boast in God”, and so on. It seems so obvious that this is appropriate that it hardly seems worth noting, let alone be possible that these substitutions might be misguided.

But it is important that what we see in an English text as “the Lord” (written with small capitals) is in the Hebrew not “God” but the name of a particular god. The Scriptures breathe polytheistic air. Even when a generic word for “God” is used to refer to the God of Israel, it is always with the intention of distinguishing this particular “God” from other Gods. This distinction is made by naming the different gods, and then identifying which one we’re interested in.

In the case of the expression “the Lord” in the psalm, the word “Lord” is not the religious term we hear it to be today but the name of the God David (the psalmist) addresses here. It is the same name Moses received in the burning bush story: “What is your name”, Moses asks, “that I might tell them which god has sent me?” This god’s name, “Yahweh” (Jehovah), is the name of one god among many. The scriptural question, then, is never Does God exist? But always: Which god is yours?

What difference does this make?

If “Does God exist” is not a very interesting question – now or then – “Which god is yours” is potentially very interesting, very engaging. This is because of what we noted earlier. If our proofs of God tend to correspond to our preferred social, political and economic orders, then it also works the other way: how we think the world ought to be ordered implies – a very important word here! – a god.

The gods implied in our political stories might not actually look like gods. They will in fact take the form of social influences, or economic obstacles, or personal histories, fears, needs or desires. They may be the Zeitgeist – the spirit of a time. The gods in our various stories are the givens according to which we think our lives and those of others ought to be ordered. Capitalism implies a certain kind of “god”, as does communism. A politics of “sovereign borders” implies a god, as does a colonial mentality in relation to “undeveloped” lands. “Law and order” politics implies a particular god, as does social libertarianism.

The point of this is to show that the world of the Scriptures with its many lords and many gods is not that different from our own world. The principle difference is that Jewish henotheism (a commitment to one god within a pantheon) was taken up by the church, along with Greek philosophical monotheism, in such a way as to separate the gods from anything in the world, and so to make them ultimately uninteresting – precisely because they are separated from the world.

It’s probably easier to see what this matters by becoming more concrete. What does this mean for the way in which the church engages with any society within which it finds itself? Or, to put the question differently, what does it mean for evangelism?

We ought first to note that “evangelism” is a scary word in churches like the Uniting Church, and probably also in congregations like ours. It is associated with a certain method and set of assumptions which leave us cold as Christians, let alone what they do to most victims of such outreach!

Yet, in terms of what I have been speaking about, evangelism is not about getting God into people; it is about getting people out of the grip of the gods which have already got them. Evangelism does not declare that “there is a God”, but that the gods are already alive and active in our lives; they just don’t look like “gods” anymore.

There is a god or a spirit which lurks in the decisions you make about what to do with your money. There is a spirit active in the thoughts which cross your mind when someone on the street asks you for “spare change”. There are spirits active when you indulge yourself in ways you’d rather others didn’t know about, and spirits active in them when they might object or not approve.

Evangelism – literally, “good-news-ing” – doesn’t inject God into a godless space; it invites a change of gods, and swapping of spirits:

“O taste and see that the Lord is good;
happy are those who take refuge in him.

The evangelist does nothing which is not already being done actively and generally much more effectively in the world around us. Consider our Psalm, with a different god praised:

¹ I will bless capitalism at all times;
it praise shall continually be in my mouth.
² My soul makes its boast in capitalism;
let the humble hear and be glad.
³ O magnify capitalism with me,
and let us exalt its name together.

⁴ I sought capitalism, and it answered me,
and delivered me from all my fears.
⁵ Look to it, and be radiant;
so your faces shall never be ashamed.
^…8 O taste and see that capitalism is good;
happy are those who take refuge in it.

Or perhaps,

⁴ I sought self-fulfilment, and it answered me,
and delivered me from all my fears.
⁵ Look to it, and be radiant;
so your faces shall never be ashamed.
⁶ This poor soul cried, and was heard by self-fulfilment,
and was saved from every trouble.
⁷ The angel of self-fulfilment encamps
around those who fear it, and delivers them.
⁸ O taste and see that self-fulfilment is good;
happy are those who take refuge in it.

Or maybe, in times of uncertain opinion polls:

¹ I will bless Malcolm at all times;
his praise shall continually be in my mouth.
² My soul makes its boast in Malcolm;
let the humble hear and be glad.
³ O magnify Malcolm with me,
and let us exalt his name together.

⁴ I sought Malcolm, and he answered me,
and delivered me from all my fears.
^…8 O taste and see that Malcolm is good;
happy are those who take refuge in him.

Substitute whatever you like; it’s fun, and very revealing!

The point is: we are being “evangelised” all the time!

And the critical question is: what is the thing we can slot into those verses which makes them speak what is true for us, personally and communally? What is the “given” upon which our lives are built, the sense of the world out of which we relate to ourselves and those around us?

To be invited to “taste and see” that the Lord is good is to be invited not to become religious, but to change religions, even if we thought ourselves secularists. To be invited to “taste and see” that the Lord is good is not to be invited to become “spiritual” but to exchange one purportedly enlivening spirit for another which does, truly, enliven.

The Christian evangelist sides with David: “Taste and see that the Lord is good.”

About how the Lord is good, I’ve not said much. The psalm itself says a great deal: the Lord “saves from every trouble”, “delivers from all fears”, “rescues the righteous”. The language needs some qualification – perhaps another time! – but the point is clear. In this one is found what cannot be found elsewhere: that which gives life, pressed down and flowing over.

We are all, constantly, making professions of faith, implying gods and spirits which command our allegiance or have us under their spells.

It is in this context that we are to hear the invitation to “consider Christ”, to “taste and see”. This is God’s word to us today, and to be our word to the world around us.

Let us, then, listen and speak accordingly, to God’s greater glory and our richer humanity. Amen.

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Sunday 29
18/10/2015

James 5:13-20
Psalm 104
Mark 10:35-45

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James writes:

“Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.”

These are hard verses to hear although, unlike with some scripture passages which make us uncomfortable, this is not because we don’t want to hear them. Rather, we do want to hear and believe such promises, and yet find them hard to accept. Can the prayers of the elders heal us?

Our general experience is that this is not usually the case.

We have ways, of course, of accounting for the failure to receive what we pray for. One way of reconciling the conflict between what James promises and what we experience would be to conclude that our elders aren’t any good! Or perhaps someone else in the whole chain of events doesn’t have enough faith – maybe the person who is sick. Or perhaps we conclude that “it is not the will of God” that healing be granted.

In the end, after we have responded as we think the text requires and then find that things don’t go the way we’d hoped, we easily end up either disbelieving the scripture, or God, or doubting ourselves, or all three. Why pray, when it seems to make no difference in terms of what we thought we were praying for? And so, finally, prayer ends up being our action of last resort. Antibiotics and surgery are much more reliable, and prayer to God is left to fill in those gaps which we can’t fill ourselves with all our marvellous technology.

When we pray in this way, even if the desperation makes the prayer most fervent, we actually defeat the purpose we imagine we are fulfilling. Resorting to prayer – prayer as a last resort – is to admit defeat in the matter of prayer. Prayer ought not to be something we “resort” to. Rather, it is a way of experiencing the world in the story of Jesus, whether things seem to be going well or seem to be going badly for us.

It is often said that prayer is “talking-to-God”. More strongly, we could say that in prayer we embody the fact that human life is oriented towards God, whether in praise or thanksgiving, or in confession, petition or intercession. Our prayer should be as fervent on the good days as on the bad. For prayer, properly, reflects the type of relationship which should exist between human beings and God.

Yet, this is not a relationship we are not called to construct, a bridge we are to build from ourselves to God through spiritual discipline – as important as such discipline is. The proper relationship between God and the human being is what we see in the experiences of Jesus himself. Jesus stands before God as the human being ought; or, to put it differently: he prays as we should pray.

The gospel is that Jesus’ prayers are made our own. When we pray, our prayers arise from the desire that the fullness of relationship Jesus experienced with God should indeed become our own – a fullness, we should keep in mind, which was not without troubles and trials of its own. In our petitions and intercessions, we express the desire that Jesus’ experience become increasingly our own – a process we began in our baptism.

This challenges too simplistic a reading of James here, as if he gives us a prayer formula to follow for reliable results. If we assume that the effectiveness of our prayers has something to do with our own holiness, or depends on our using the right kind of words, or the right oil in anointing, or depends on the conviction or ‘faith’ (so-called) we can summon up in ourselves, we forget that the basic truth given in scripture is that God desires that the world be healed. We forget that God has acted in Jesus for that healing, and continues to act in Christ’s Spirit.

Our prayers have their effect in God’s continual working towards the renewal of creation through the activity of the Spirit, and not in our being particularly good pray‑ers. When we pray – whether in thanksgiving or in petition – we are naming a future which God will bring. We begin to reshape our present by living in anticipation of that future restoration. We refuse to allow what we see or experience to be the final word.

James’ promise that prayer will heal the sick is not to be read as a stand-alone promise which is true because it is in the Bible. It is to be understood in the context of what prayer is for Christians who have been baptised in Jesus’ own experience of God, and so who have begun to see the world with different eyes. We have heard the story about Jesus, and we begin to live in anticipation of that story becoming our own. With James we can say that “the prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective”. The righteous one, however, is not yet any of us, but Christ. Christ’s prayers, Christ’s standing before God, are what we depend on. When we pray – in thanks, or praise, or confession, or petition or intercession – we tell the wondrous story of the Christ who died for us, is risen for us, and who prays for us. Within what seems to many to be the clunky old doctrine of the Trinity is the truth of the gospel: the life of the Jesus the Son in the heart of God is a life ever for us.

God offers this “for us” as the final “yes” to our prayers, even before we utter them. Not “the prayer of the elders” so much as the prayer which is Christ himself is what we are to offer up to God, for he is the prayer God offers us to pray. To address God with the word “Jesus” is say all that needs to be said, for it is the heart of all our prayers.

Perhaps all this feels like a side-stepping of the issue – a clever theological avoidance of the problem of prayer and God’s apparent deafening silence. The answer to this would take more time than we have here, but would start with questions like these: Where do we learn to pray? Do we know how to pray? And if not, do not texts like the one we have from James today teach us what needs to be done? It is usually what we “know” about prayer and the apparent unhelpfulness of James (and others) which causes our crisis about prayer in the first place.

I remember the first time it was suggested to me that it is not our prayers but the prayers of Christ which are central to the Christian practice of prayer. It was a passing remark in a preface to the Lord’s Prayer in Queen’s chapel, maybe 25 years ago. You hear that particular teaching from me each week as I preface our praying of the Lord’s Prayer each week with words to the effect of: “…in confidence, we join our prayers to those of Jesus, praying as he taught us…”

Easily said, but not easily embraced, lived. This ought not to surprise us, and it is why we return here each week, why we gather again and again around the table. It is no small thing to become what we eat – the Body of Christ – and so no simple thing to pray as Jesus once prayed, and continues to pray. We are his Body in a passing, fleeting, promissory way. So too are our prayers passingly Christ’s own. Yet we believe that what we now see in this fleeting fashion – “as if through a glass darkly” – we will see established firmly, and that the way our prayers are now indistinct echoes of Christ’s own will be left behind as they are brought into full harmony with his.

In the meantime we have not theological cleverness to set aside difficult work and questions but the call to live a life which anticipates this fulfilment. We are to work as if this fulfilment depended on us – including the work of prayer – and we are to pray, for its fulfilment does not depend on us. This prayer is the one which, so to speak, reminds God of Jesus and his work and prayer, and of the promise that these will be ours.

This is how we are to pray, and what we are learning as we gather here week after week, or in the quiet of the morning in our homes, or in the midst of a hectic day when God catches our attention again. To repeat my almost-conclusion from a few moments ago: to address God with the word “Jesus” is say all that needs to be said, for this word – given by God as our word to him – is the heart of all our prayers.

May God’s people find themselves ever more at peace with this heart, beating for life, through death, to life again – strength and comfort enough in their tribulations and their joys. Amen.

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Sunday 28
11/10/2015

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Psalm 22
Mark 10:17-31

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Like the reading we heard last week in which Jesus was teaching about divorce, our reading this morning is another one of those texts in Mark’s gospel which really makes us sit up and listen!

We take notice of this text for the same reason as we noticed the one on divorce: because we sense that it might be speaking to us, or about someone close to us, and that it might be speaking negatively about us or them. And yet Jesus’ teaching about wealth in this morning’s reading is less clear than what he seemed to be saying about divorce. Whereas we know whether we are divorced or not, or whether we want to be divorced, wealth is a relative thing: Am I rich in the way the man Jesus met was, and so is what was said to him also said to me?

Now, there are a couple ways of overcoming or dismissing the challenge that this text seems to make to us.

The first way is to deny that God would ask us to give up the things we have, because the fact that we have them is itself the proof that we are with God and God is with us. This way of thinking has its supporters today, and was also strong in Jesus’ time. When Jesus remarks how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God, the disciples are astounded and ask, “Who then can be saved?” That question implies that the rich are rich because they are with God. If the rich-and-so-righteous can’t get into heaven how can anyone else? For the fact that others are less rich indicates that they are less righteous before God.

But Jesus clearly does not measure our closeness to God by the amount of possessions we have.

The second way of sidestepping Jesus’ challenge is to assure ourselves that it doesn’t apply to us because we are not, like the man in the story, “very” rich. (“Very rich” is from Luke’s version of the story; Mark and Matthew have “had many possessions”). Not being “very” rich, we don’t have the enormous abundance which many very rich people do have. But the fact that we hear that the man who approached Jesus was very rich distracts us from the central issue, for the disciples did not have many possessions and yet they too had given all up to follow Jesus. It is not the amount the man was instructed to give away which is central but the fact that it was everything. (If there is anything to be said about the fact that the man was very rich it is that the more we have, the less likely we will be able to let it go, perhaps especially if we have accumulated that wealth by our own efforts).

So we can’t simply deny the application to ourselves of what Jesus said to the rich man by citing a different principle – that God wants us to be wealthy and prosperous; and neither can we declare ourselves relatively “un-rich” and so let Jesus’ word be one for somebody else.

What, then, are we to do with what Jesus says here? The first possibility is to take his word to that man as a word to everybody, and to give away all we have. The second possibility is to conclude that the teaching doesn’t apply to us, just as we might have concluded last week that Jesus’ text on divorce and adultery does not apply to us (if we are not divorced, or wanting to be; or just that it is too uncompromising).

But neither approach is satisfactory

The particular call which God makes on the lives of each particular person can’t be turned into some type of legal principle. Just because Jesus called one person to give it all away, we can’t conclude that he expects the same of all. But, on the other hand, that doesn’t mean that some of us will not be subject to just such a call.

How can we know whether it is us or not, and so just what we are to do?

The fact is that we can’t know what we are to do about our money and possessions with any great degree of certainty. It is not just that the will of God for our particular lives is hard to discern, which of course it often is.

It is also that, important as knowing and action are, knowledge of the law and doing it are not the first things in the Christian life. Note the question the rich young man presents to Jesus: “what must I do to inherit eternal life”

We might be tempted to respond to what Jesus says by attempting ourselves both to obey all the commandments and also giving away all about possessions and following Jesus, as if by “doing” these things we were meeting all Jesus’ requirements and so were then able to tick off all the necessary boxes we need filled before we can get into heaven.

But to do something (or not do something) in order to win eternal life is not going to get us very far; our call is not to impress God with our works.

That leaves us in what Jesus names an “impossible” position: how can we know how to act? How can we do what needs to be done if doing is not the point? We can’t know exactly, and so we begin to get a sense of what Jesus means when he says, “how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God”.

But he follows that up directly with the remark that while for human beings it is impossible, it is not for God. It’s not that God will somehow get us into heaven via some obscure loophole, a legal equivalent of Jesus’ grotesque image of forcing a camel through the eye of a needle! We find our way into God’s kingdom not by doing the law, nor by God ignoring the law, but by God’s grace.

Better than the “What must I do?” question is, “What must we be in order to inherit eternal life?” The answer of the New Testament is that we are to be a people whose position in the kingdom concerns what God has done, and not what we ourselves have done…

For human beings it is impossible, but not for God. There is, then, some good news here for the rich – whether the really, really rich or the “little bit” rich which a good many of us are.

Giving away your money will not impress God. We don’t buy our way into heaven by buying meals for hungry people, for our relationship to God is not a matter of how much or how little we have done. But, at the same time, those whose lives have already been touched by God do have work to do, including buying meals for hungry people, clothing them, housing them, and perhaps also discovering for ourselves what it means to be hungry and without adequate clothing or housing or whatever…

The good works Christians are called to do are to be a response to having heard the good news about God’s kingdom, and not the means of getting into the kingdom.

In relation to all this, two specific points of application…

The first has to do with our own personal resources. We don’t much focus on the question of personal stewardship in congregations like ours because they tend to have the luxury of enough resources to manage reasonably without constant attention to levels of personal giving.

And yet the call to give, and to give generously, does not go away on this account. Responsible giving is not about what we perceive is needed to keep afloat a particular institutional form; this is giving as a minimum. Responsible giving is just that – a response: it reflects our having heard the invitation to share in God’s impossible work – the opening up of the kingdom of heaven.

What our personal share in this looks like is for each of us to determine, but it should be actively determined. If the impossible call to give everything away is impossible, it doesn’t mean that what we do actually give is a matter of unreflective indifference. As in relation to every other thing, changes in income and costs and need should be reflected in changes in giving – whether up or down. And the difficulty of what Jesus says here ought not to insulate us from the call to give generously, even sacrificially, for in this gift we say that there is more to fullness of life than what we have. Take an opportunity in the next week or two to consider how this relates to your own giving, whether through the offering plate or through other charitable support you offer.

The second point of application of what Jesus implies here about our resources is Hotham Mission, which is the subject of a session together today after morning tea. We put a lot of resources into the Mission. As a response to the gospel, it is a kind of community version of the personal responses we are each called to make.

It is the case that we run a significant deficit and are in the midst of a large-scale review of our resources – our “Mark the Evangelist Futures Project”. But the deficit itself is not a problem – at least theologically; there is nothing very sustainable about Jesus’ proposal to the rich man! The more important question is why we do what we do – as a congregation resourcing the Mission. Our discussion about the Mission after worship this morning is not to ask the question about its funding but to consider how this is a response to the call to follow, such as we heard in Jesus’ address to the rich man today and, in those terms, what kind of “return” we image the congregation receives.

These are just two ways in which what Jesus says to the rich man might make a claim on us as individuals and as a community.

In making personal and community responses to the declaration that God is to be our “all”, we recognise that we cannot lay a claim on God, without God also laying a claim on us. And each of those claims is absolute. Just as we throw out the plea that God do what we cannot do – accept us and draw us to himself – so also God throws back the challenge that it be all of our self which moves to him.

It is the response to the love of Jesus which the sad man in our story could not make, for it turned out for him – as for us – that there was more at stake than just getting it right with the commandments. The work of our lives is to point to more than to our achievements, moral or otherwise. God gives us all of himself, and asks that we give all of ourselves in return, even if, for the time being, it looks like we are hanging on to something. God knows what we need in order to live; we are in the process of learning what others need, and of sharing with them from what we have. This is the following of Jesus.

By God’s grace, may we ever be growing more fully into such discipleship, to God’s own glory and to the benefit of those around us. Amen.

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Sunday 27
4/10/2015

Ephesians 5:25-33
Psalm 100
Mark 10:2-16

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gallacher

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A few months after we were married, a drowsy Sunday afternoon found me preaching at Tarnagulla. The reading was Ephesians 5. I was very much in love (for the record I still am) and so I launched into a lyrical account of marital bliss. Then I looked at the congregation, all seated in one pew. There were two ladies who had never married, two widows, a mature couple and Harry, the bell ringer who bore an uncanny resemblance to Quasimodo. Then it was that I realised what a minefield it is to preach about marriage, and I haven’t done it since, until today.

Commentaries on these readings all give several pages about first century culture, as the sayings need to be considered in context. I’m going to skip that, and pick out a few salient points to develop.

When Jesus is quizzed about divorce, he goes behind the Law of Moses to God’s purpose in creation. Now this is not an appeal to nature. It is tempting to say that the coming together of the two sexes to produce new life is a principle on which the whole creation is built, and so marriage is the most natural thing in the world. Well, we visited a fish farm and I learned that Barramundi are all born male, and remain so for five years and when most become female and breed. And David Attenborough will happily point you to a proliferation of other variations. An argument from nature is an argument for exceptions and diversity.

Jesus says, “From the beginning of creation, God made them, male and female, the two will become one flesh”. That is, it is God’s will or purpose that couples marry and become one. Now I am cautious about claiming to know God’s will. I prefer to talk about a Biblical understanding, and to put Paul’s teaching beside this saying of Jesus. “Husbands, treat your wives as your own body”. That doesn’t mean treat a woman as if she were a man. Rather, such is the intimate bonding, or uniting, that what a husband does to his wife he does in fact do it to himself. They are one. And I’m glad that both Jesus and Paul make that reciprocal.

Paul quotes “The two will become one flesh” and adds “this is a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the church”. It is not clear if he means that the experience of marriage enables you to understand how Christ loves the church, or if Christ’s love for the church sets the standard for marriage. But it is not lack of clarity that causes him to speak of “mystery”. Mystery means that there is always more to something than you have so far discovered. So it is like running on two legs. The self-giving love experienced in marriage gives you a clue to the way Christ loves the church, especially the way Christ faithfully continues to love the church, even when it disappoints him.    And when you appreciate the way Christ loves the church more deeply, your experience of marriage is broadened, and you become more forgiving. You venture into new territory.   That in turn gives you a new insight into divine love, which in its turn opens new experiences in the human relationship, and so on without end. You are exploring a mystery. Somehow, opening yourself to an “other” expands your own person, and that “other” can be human or divine.

Such is the ideal. But a lot of marriages do not work out like that, and so there is a place in law for divorce. However, be aware that since the bonding is so deep, the breaking of it is extremely hurtful. And if you rub salt into the open wound by taking another partner well Jesus says that’s adultery.

Is this the teaching of the Uniting Church? Start with the marriage service. It says that marriage is a gift of God, a means of grace, a life-long union in which you know the joy of God in whose image you are made. You live in the covenant of love that is made with us in Christ. There are another 10 points made in the statement of purpose, but that’s enough to show we are in the same ball park as the UCA liturgy. A discussion paper of marriage was presented to last Assembly. It is a commentary on the Marriage Service. I quote a couple of sentences from this 20 page document.

“The church believes that marriage is more than a cultural phenomenon or a social construct. Life-long covenantal union reflects God’s loving nature…”

“Divorce is never viewed as a part of God’s intention … But nor is regarded as a sin … It I a tragic consequence of the fallenness of human relationships.”

Then there is the President’s letter, written after Assembly, calling for a “space for grace”. He asks us to respect different views, realising we are an inclusive church reconciling both the Aboriginal Congress and the Gay and Lesbian community. Christ’s command is love one another, so the church will take another 3 years to listen to each other with our heart, and to the Holy Spirit who grants us understanding beyond human wisdom”.

The Assembly and the President are treading cautiously because marriage touches such deep emotions, and there is such a variety of views and experiences. Let me outline a few current trends that impinge on this stance. I have to be brief, so I’ll be blunt. It should give you plenty to talk about over lunch.

1. Marriage is not the only environment for developing a deeper relationship with God. But there are other relationships which can aid that spiritual journey. I was in a group once when a person argued that an individual is not complete without a marriage partner. You should have heard the two nuns in the group explode at that.
2. We live in a culture of generational change. I once conducted a group where I asked people to sketch their lives in the form of a tree. A 70 year old drew a stark black trunk with a single shoot emerging from the top. She explained that the shoot started the day her husband died. She told a story of living with an alcoholic, and cited many dreadful experiences. The three young wives present all said, “Why didn’t you leave?” She said, with dignity, “I married him for better or for worse, and I kept my vow!” They shook their heads.
3. While the Bible presents us with a profound understanding of the possibilities in marriage, it does not turn the ideal into a clear-cut law. For example, having stated God’s will in Genesis 2, chapter 3 presents the first family which is no model. Adam and Eve make a mess of things, and produce a son who is a murderer. Our understanding and practice has to deal with this discrepancy between ideal and reality compassionately.
4. A big struggle today is against individualism – cutting self off from relationship. It is being promoted as liberating and progressive. I wince when abortion is promoted as “a woman’s right to take control of her own body” just as I frown when a billionaire says “It’s my money and I can do with it what I like”.
5. Add to this the power that technology is giving in support of self-centred individualism. Australian Story last Monday told of a woman who shunned partners for career, then, later, wanted a child so badly she paid $30,000 to a clinic in San Diego to have a foetus implanted with which she had no genetic connection.
6. You will have noticed I have not mentioned gay marriage: My only comment is that this issue is big enough to break the relationship between church and state that we have here in Australia. Soon everyone will marry in a Registry Office and those who want their marriage solemnised will come to church as well.

Actually, it was because the debate about so called marriage equality is so superficial that I believe someone should be saying something about the godly nature of relationships and witnessing to what marriage can be. A romantic “We love each other” is not enough.

I leave you with some words plucked from “A Service of Blessing of a Civil Marriage” in Uniting in Worship 2. It says: This is a way of life which God has created and Christ has blessed. (Hence the picture on the cover of the OOS) May the Holy Spirit guide and strengthen you ….. to love each other as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it.

 

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Sunday 26
27/9/2015

James 3:1-12
Psalm 124
Mark 9:38-50

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To raise a child is to become acutely aware that we are made by the world around us. With rewards for certain behaviour and punishments for other behaviour we are taught the rules by which our particular shared world is ordered: how people are to relate to each other, who can relate to whom, and when. We learn where the boundaries are, what we might expect of others and what they might expect of us. For most of us, most of the time, this set of expectations shapes what is “normal”. And, for the most part, these normal expectations form the basis for what we call morals. A moral person observes the social mores of his community – the customary expectations of a society. It is our expectation of the observance of these mores which binds us together.

This is important for understanding what James writes of the power of “the tongue”. Consider how many ways we have of commenting upon how people might misuse their tongue: “mind your tongue”; “button your lip”; suffering from “foot-in-mouth disease”, “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” as well as a few more less polite ones. Our very familiarity with such sayings about our speech indicates how often we note that people’s mouths get in the way of smooth human relations. We recognize, then, quite apart from any religious input, the wisdom of James here: “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire…”

But, at the risk of seeming to be asking a silly question, in what sense is it wrong to speak critically of others? What are we actually doing, apart from the obvious failure to “Do to others as you would have them do to you”? Moral instruction such as James gives here is very often simply a heavy lid we try to place on our natural, if not always desirable, inclinations. Speaking “nicely” to and of each other is just another such lid, and when that lid is thrown off we accuse the speaker of breaking the rules.

But the irony is that criticising others, while it might break rules about being civil, is at the same time an application of social mores. Critique of others is not simply another moral failure but results from a judgement about how we think the world should be ordered, how people ought to behave. To speak ill of another is to measure her against some kind of standard – presumably a standard against which I, of course, measure up well. She is the one who has transgressed, who has failed to do the right thing in my eyes: failed to wear the right clothes, failed to have the right mobile phone, failed to vote correctly, to have the right skin colour, failed to have helped when I thought she should have.

In speaking ill of each other we are not simply being “mean”; we are declaring what is normal and what is to be rightly expected, and we declare who is, therefore, not normal, who has ostracised themselves. The safe ones are the ones who do the “right” thing, whatever we think that is. “Right” will not necessarily be the same in a classroom as it is within a criminal cartel, but in either case the people involved know what is expected of them and know about the tongue-lashing – or bullet in the back of head! – which can arise from transgression.

Schoolyard bitchiness and workplace bullying and even more moderate gossip are, then, not just about victimisation, not just about the strong and the weak, not just simply mean-spiritedness. They are about defining boundaries of behaviour or character and applying those boundaries to punish by exclusion. The critic is the one who knows the rules and sees where there has been a transgression; the critic is the righteous one.

And so “the tongue” of which James writes here is not wild and random; it is precise. It has its destructive effect not because it is wantonly untameable but because the engine behind it is a self-righteous heart which sees and knows exactly what is wrong.

Simply holding your tongue, then, is not going to get to the heart of the matter, for that heart concerns not what we believe about the other person but what we believe about ourselves. It is because we have adjudged ourselves righteous that we can judge others otherwise. The moral injunction to say nothing if you can’t say anything nice may put a heavy lid on destructive talk and, so , give a semblance of peace and harmony, but it will not change that self-righteous centre.

The way of peace begins with peace. And so a gentle tongue requires a gentled heart. A gentled heart springs from a humility taught by God’s mercy.

Mercy is the unexpected willingness to relax the rules which make it possible to be part of human community. A lack of mercy is a trait in those who do not know themselves to be the recipients of mercy. Mercy given, if it truly is mercy and not just a hidden manipulation for our own interests, springs from the experience of mercy received.

Our talk about each other is to be speech which reflects the knowledge that we, too, are under consideration by others: someone else is judging, or has judged us – be it God or the person you’re sitting next to.

Our talk is to be speech which knows that, were we to be held account for our adherence even to our own personal moral code, we too would be found to fall short.

Our talk is to be speech which reflects that we have been given what we could not produce for ourselves: a standing, a righteousness before God, which is not deserved.

And so our tongues cannot to be driven by self-righteousness; for these are tongues onto which are placed the bread and the wine, the signs of a righteousness which comes not from within but from without.

Grace, forgiveness, mercy – for those who are wrong or just different – these are to be the grammar of our speech, if we are to lift each other up rather than keep each other down, if there is to be an “us” which will finally be life-giving and not life-denying.

All of this is because this is the way in which God speaks to us. So, watch your tongue, for Christ’s sake, and for the sake of those around you. Amen.