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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.

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Sunday 25
20/9/2015

James 3:13-4:8
Psalm 1
Mark 9:30-37

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T.S. Eliot once wrote of

…The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust. (The Rock)

…“the wisdom we have lost in knowledge.”

James writes of such wisdom in our reading this morning. Wisdom is often thought to be a supercharged version of knowledge, or the accumulation of knowledge and so something which comes with time and age. On this understanding, wisdom is a natural thing which comes with experience.

There is, of course, some truth in this. Anyone not learning from life is not paying enough attention. And yet Eliot observes in his poem:

…The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

 

Time might yield knowledge, but not necessarily wisdom; it can be that there is “Life we have lost in living.”

For James – and likely also for Eliot – wisdom is not so much the result of having learnt many things or the experience which comes with the passage of a lot of time but the result of having learned only one thing.

“Who is wise and understanding among you? Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom… do not be boastful and false to the truth… the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.” (James 3.13-17)

The “one thing” which is wisdom is living peaceably, with gentleness, mercy and humility. Such wisdom is as much a possibility for those who’ve lived only a short time, as it is for their grandparents.

It is easy to impress with great knowledge, or with rhetorical skill, or with political shrewdness, or with artistic talent, or with technical ability – any one of which might be construed as a kind of wisdom.

But James’ point is that wisdom does not impress so much as quite simply effect healing and wholeness between God and people. Or, to invert this, where healing and wholeness – reconciliation – between people occurs, wisdom is present and active.

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We gather today after worship for the first of perhaps 5 or 6 such meetings over the next year or so to think together about the mission of this congregation, and this in connection with the resources we have. What is the place of wisdom in this adventure?

We are intending to pay quite a lot of money for expertise to assist us – providing perhaps “knowledge” in Eliot’s discrimination between information, knowledge and wisdom. There are, doubtless, also a few “experts” sitting in our pews possessing perhaps knowledge, perhaps even a kind of wisdom, about these things, although not necessarily always as James has described it.

The thing about expertise, however, and the kind of wisdom which comes from experience, is that it is either neutral or risks binding the future with the past. Numbers and graphs tell us how things are but not what to do about them. Wisdom springing from experience can remind us of what happened in the past, but this cannot be allowed to bind our hands for the future. Expertise and experienced opinion will only get us so far in matters of God’s reign: As Eliot puts it,

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death.

But the alternative is not – perhaps is never – to invoke the pious “What Would Jesus Do?” in this situation. For the gospel is not that Jesus was wise, even if by most measures he was. It is not that he was wise in the sense of clever, and so knew how to calm and pacify. Rather, the gospel is that Jesus is the wisdom of God, in James’ terms. Jesus is the means of peace, humility, gentleness. We fall into religious sentimentality if we reduce our understanding of Jesus to adjectives: that he was wise or humble or gentle or merciful, and that we should be too.

The gospel, however, is not sentimental; Jesus – Christ crucified – is wisdom (the noun) and through Jesus God verbs us into humility and mercy. With God, wisdom is not a laudable thing we might have or acquire but the very means of creation. Godly wisdom creates gentleness and humility.

“Who is wise and understanding among you?” James asks. He answers, the one who brings peace, gentleness, mercy.

But how is this actually possible when it comes to real, communal life with its struggles and tussles? How is it possible to engage in this way when extraordinarily important things are at stake in a community? As we discuss what we must over the next year or so, are we not really talking about Truth, and Salvation, and Judgement and Vocation into Mission? What is the place of gentleness and mercy when Everything hangs in the balance? What is the place of humility and peace when it is obvious – at least to me and those who agree with me – that everyone else just doesn’t get it and is running blind and heading for catastrophe?

It is a matter of whether we imagine ourselves to be preparing for mission, or engaged in mission in the very decision-making process itself.

We all know, I suspect, that if we lost it all – our property and our cash reserves – the congregation would still be church. Or we think we know this because it is only theoretical until it happens. But the point is that, for each of us, we are entering now into the possibility that some dimension which has been important to us about Mark the Evangelist and its parent communities might be lost.

And our problem, as we begin to negotiate all of this, is that we have to decide together what that loss will be. This is what threatens to make it difficult.

If the Synod got stroppy and just took it all away, we would have a common enemy and, sitting together in this space, we would be bound together by the logic that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Or, if by an act of God – so called! – the whole plant were wiped from the face of the earth and our insurance policy was found to have lapsed, we would have in common the affliction of circumstance, and be bound by the need to encourage and comfort each other.

But we have to decide – to cut­ (de-caedere: to cut off) – which is very different. In deciding, we take on responsibility. In taking on responsibility, we can be called to account. Common enemies and common affliction bind us together as they change our situation; taking decisions within a community about the future of the community has the potential to divide. (We have seen this this week: there is no such thing as a bloodless coup! In a coup there is no gentleness, no mercy, no peace, even as it seems the “wise” thing to do).

Some of you will be put out because we did decide to retain the tower for the Kingdom, or because we did not. Some because we maintained Hotham Mission in its current form, or did not. Some because we stayed on site, or moved to a rental property. This is how broad our thinking will be.

This is what James’ teaching on gentle wisdom requires of us in relation to what lies ahead: decide now what your response to the congregation’s final decision will be. Not decide what option we should take up, but decide how you will respond to the community’s decision, knowing that it might not be the “wise” one in your view.

How is this possible? How is it possible to decide now before you even know what the outcome will be?

This is only possible if the specific shape of the outcome does not finally matter, if the wisdom which will be active among us is not that in 9 or 12 or 36 months’ time we got the best solution, but that we grew closer together, that different experiences and expectations and desires and needs did not divide us from each other but bound us more closely.

To decide now how you will receive our final decision is only possible if Paul is right: that in all of this there is neither temple nor tent, mission nor worship, justice nor righteousness, for all are one in Christ Jesus (cf. Galatians 3.28).

This is to say, more bluntly, that God probably doesn’t much care what we decide. I imagine God to be very curious about what we will do, but whatever the decision God’s response will be the same: I can work with that. Luther remarked once that this God can shoot a crooked arrow and ride a lame horse. We are the arrow; our balance sheets are the horse.

None of this is to say that there is not hard work to be done, that we should not gather the information, convert it into knowledge and apply the wisdom of experience and insight as part of the whole process. And neither is it the case that the process itself is all that matters; it is only that the process and the goal must cohere. Some future reconciling mission is only achievable by reconciling means.

Which brings me back to something said earlier, now said more directly: we are not entering into a preparation for mission; we will be engaged in mission in the very decision-making process itself. This is our mission as much as anything else – to do the work which just happens to fall us here and now in such a way that gentleness and mercy and peace are both the means and the end.

In fact, we enact this each week as we gather around the table. There can be no sharing there week after week if it all falls apart in the meetings, and at the end. For as we put out our hands for bread and cup we declare that we are bound together because my friend Jesus is also the friend of my enemy.

And so God says to us through James: humble yourselves, that God may lift you up; let go, that you might find yourself held, whatever it seems you might be falling into. Let God’s wise way become your way, as he draws near to you, creating gentleness, humility and mercy.

By God’s grace, may that peaceable wisdom not be found by us to have been in vain, but rather to be bearing good fruit among all God’s people. Amen.

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Sunday 24
13/9/2015

James 2:1-13
Psalm 19
Mark 8:27-38

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James asks: “Do you really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, if you show partiality in your treatment of people, on the basis of their wealth and status?” Clearly he thinks not – as would most of us. But it is important to understand why.

The typical “religious” reason is that, since all religion is “really” about the Golden Rule, we must love one another as ourselves in order to be “religious”. Showing partiality on account of something as trivial as wealth is clearly not the type of thing most of us would enjoy if it happened to us. We cannot, then, be truly religious if we discriminate in this way, and so we clearly cannot believe in Jesus if we show such this kind of partiality.

The religious logic is clear, or the moral logic, if religion is reduced in this way to mere morality. And this would be fine for understanding James here if his logic were merely religious or moral, but it in fact it isn’t. James is thinking out of what he believes God has done in Jesus, and not out of general religious ideas. The link he draws is between good works and believing in Jesus (and not between good works and believing per se). Why should faith in Christ make a difference to how we behave, rather than any other moral motivation we might have?

We see James’ Christian logic becoming clearer when he starts to talk about judgement: to discriminate on the basis of something like wealth, he says, is “to become judges with evil thoughts”. The emphasis falls here on the word “judges”. The problem is not the failure to love or serve, but that this arises from the willingness to judge – the willingness to evaluate another person’s worth. (This is different from the way in which we sometimes have to judge another person’s actions, whether in our legal system or just in our normal relations which each other.) James is concerned with the judgement which presumes, but we will need to backtrack a bit before coming to this.

To show partiality, James says to us, is to fail to love, and this is to sin. This much is clear enough to most of us. Yet he pushes it further than most of us would like to admit: to sin or fail at this one point of the law is quite simply to have failed the whole law.

He illustrates this with the example of murder and adultery. In terms of keeping the law, we have no higher standing before God if we are guilty of judging one another than if we are guilty of murder or adultery. To fail to fulfil the law by judging another as unworthy of our help is the same as failing to fulfil it elsewhere.

We might then rightly cry out, “Who can possibly be righteous?”, if the smaller transgression is as serious as the greatest. And when we religious creatures have to answer our own question with “no-one can be righteous”, the pessimism is really too much to bear: we are forced to self-justification.

And this brings us back to the judgement which presumes. It is this self-justification which is the basis of our presumption to judge of the worth of others, and so the basis of our discrimination and partiality. The basis for judging others as unworthy is that we have judged ourselves, and found ourselves differently worthy – indeed, we have found ourselves close enough to righteous to dare to claim to be just that.

It is here that we fail the test of belief in Jesus. To believe in Jesus is not to have a religious or moral idea which just happens to be Jesus-flavoured. To believe in Jesus is to trust that I am not what I actually look like to those who might try to measure my worthiness – I am not even what I look like to myself. And this is the case whether I look very impressive, or whether I look very plain. There is more to me than I can say or see, and this more is that I am embraced by mercy. The good news of the gospel is that, as one of those who fails to keep the Golden Rule – what James calls the “royal law” – I have nevertheless received mercy, are receiving mercy.

Mercy does not exclude judgement; it just changes the outcome. Mercy recognises that a benefit is not deserved, and yet gives it anyway. James argues that we who have received mercy in Christ are to be merciful to others. While we might judge, while we might seek to determine who deserves what, the act of mercy sets those judgements aside and gives without regard to what is deserved, and who is worthy.

Mercy, then, implies that we are not to love merely according to the Golden Rule – as we would ourselves be loved – but that we are to love as indeed we have been loved, if indeed we claim to have received God’s mercy. As we gather each week around the eucharistic table, we make an enacted prayer for mercy. The table is not merely a fellowship space at which all are welcome but a table for the bringing together of the penitent. The real change which takes place is not that the bread and the wine become body and blood, but that body and blood spilled and broken by us become, by God’s mercy, body and blood for us. “Amen” we say, to the declaration this is the body, the blood – Amen, Yes: what is Christ’s I receive as my own.

To return to James’ ethical expectation: we say, usually too glibly, that we meet Christ (or God) in the person we serve (cf. Matthew 25.31-46): we are serving Christ (how good of us!) But in fact this only occurs when we also experience ourselves in the meeting with the other, for we do not discover God without discovering ourselves. What is important in our knowledge of God is knowing ourselves according to God’s knowledge of us.

And so, perhaps we are not so much to see God in the other as to be as God to them, seeing ourselves in them, as recipients of God’s mercy, just as those others might now be recipients of our mercy. James calls us to speak and act as those who are to be judged by “the law of liberty”. The “law of liberty” is the call to serve others because it is in serving we discover how God has experienced and served us, and so had mercy on us also. In serving others, God’s experience of us becomes more fully our own experience.

This is salvation: not faith “and” work (or without work, as James emphasises!), but faith through work – mercy received and enacted in the same moment.

As they seek to respond to God’s righteous command for mercy and justice without discrimination, may all God’s people discover in that response the mercy that he has had upon us, and find new freedom to walk humbly alongside him. Amen.

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Sunday 23
6/9/2015

James 1:17-27
Psalm 125
Mark 7:24-37

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James is a popular New Testament book among some Christians because it seems much more straightforward and practical than many of the others. On the one hand, for many the instruction of James when he says “care for widows and orphans in their distress” seems much simpler than the more obscure points of formal Christian theology. On the other hand, James himself warns: faith without works is dead; do as the law commands.

If only it were that simple. For the law has a double root – in God and in society. This causes, at least in our society, a significant problem for those whose Christian faith is all action and no words. Society knows that it does not need God in order to have laws – and usually very good laws at that. And so many rightly wonder – why bother with God here? What does God offer us that we could not discover for ourselves? Faith seems to many not only a refuge from the demand to do good which James attacks. Faith becomes quite simply superfluous when it comes to doing the good. The pathos of the modern church – conservative and liberal – is that it so often points to its good works as evidence of the importance of God, which is really no evidence at all for a world quite capable of good works without invoking God. A god who does for us what we could actually do for ourselves is not a god at all, but simply our aspiration: what we want to be when we grow up.

To the extent that James is concerned with doing the good, then, one of the questions he raises for us in our particular day is just this: Is it possible to do good works without God in the picture? Both the world and the uncertain church want to answer “Yes”. But James, at least, despite all of his direct and practical instructions, declares that it is not: Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights (1.17). So James calls his people to good works, and yet locates the source of the good works we do in God himself. If one cares for “widows and orphans”, if one seeks to rid oneself of “sordidness and wickedness”, if we work to control our tongue and our anger, if we run homework clubs and food programs, these efforts, as “generous acts of giving” or “perfect gifts” to those around us, are said to have “come down from the Father of lights”.

James, then, offers us the two things we need to hear if our actions are to be good, if they are truly to be “Christian” and not simply moral works which echo or even challenge the expectations of the society we happen to be living in. On the one hand, there is the direct command: do this. If you have plenty and another does not have enough, give. If you are strong and another is weak, serve. The commandments are plain and straightforward.

On the other hand, we hear the gospel: generosity and perfect giving come not from us but from God. But why is this the gospel? While our giving may be generous – at least in our own estimation – and our works a great aid to those around us, they will always be liable to criticism and questioning. The problem of general moral rules is that they are continually debated – this is the stuff of most of our newspaper reports and radio talk-back. Either the command to do the good creates an anxiety for righteousness in myself, such that I need always to be wondering whether I have done the right thing, or my reading of the right is contradicted by someone else’s. As I act or speak I am under the constant demand that I be able to justify myself – to link my actions to some demand in such a way that I can say not only that I was free to do as I did, but that I had to act in that way: this is what the situation and the command demanded.

And so I am either, on the one hand, reduced to a not-quite-sure “I did the best I could” in defence against my critics or, on the other hand, I declare that I had to act this way and I can prove it before you and before God. In the first case I am not free; in the second, God is not – and neither of these are satisfactory.

In the end the law of love and service makes its demands of us, but it cannot be relied upon to deliver justice. Justice, or rightness, is too slippery a fish for us to net. We fool ourselves if we think we ever really get it right. This is not permission not to try to get it right. If people are hungry, feed them. We must try to get it right, but our trying is no reason to speak too highly of what we achieve. Justice, or rightness – which is a profoundly relational reality – is declared and made effective by God and not by our own actions. God says: I will work with your best efforts, and even your much-less-than-best ones. What else is the meaning of salvation through one we crucified?

Strikingly, then, this God is placed between us and those to whom we relate: we are mediated to each other by God. God, so to speak, translates our words and actions to each other. What is different here from the normal understanding of moral work is that God is not invoked as a motivation for good works but as a reconciler of me to the person in need toward whom my good works were not good enough.

We are called to see and experience the other person not as she might appear in herself and her actions but “in Christ”– made whole not by her own goodness but because God declares her whole. Just as importantly, we are to understand ourselves as truly being good when we are seen in the same way.

Much more might be said about our need actually to move from places of comfort to assist those who are in need; the command to love each other stands, and is not well observed. We cannot let ourselves off the hook here. But the problem is, particularly in denominations like ours in times like these, that we tend to begin with the good works because we have lost confidence in faith. We either assume that the gospel has been heard and that we need now to act or that, in the end, there is nothing but action. And so, I suspect, we usually hear only the law – God’s divine imperative – calling us to good works. The world knows better than the church that this is not a lot of fun, and scarcely liberating. This is because we either know what to do and find it difficult or we are so unsure what to do that we are left anxious.

But James speaks strangely of a liberating law – the “law of liberty” (1.25, 2.12). This is a law which not does simply demand of us but also makes possible that our actions are just – despite our imperfect response. The perfection of our work is in God’s participation, in his declaration that what we have done is good, in his making it good apart from what we have achieved by ourselves. God “steps in”, as it were, to join his perfect work to ours. All that is asked of us is to respond to the commands of the law. This happens not from faith as the first thing which occurs and then leads to action, but in faith: believing not “in God” but that God will make good of what I do. In this way we are both called to act in helping and serving, and helped and served ourselves by God in that moment.

The good news is not that God helps us to act or because we have acted, but that he would be with us in our actions, if we would be willing to let go of self-righteousness and allow God’s righteousness be sufficient for us. The law of liberty is the freedom to do the very best we can, to allow that this “very best” will not be perfect and, in the grace of God, the freedom of being able to stand blameless before him, set free to do better next time.

By the grace of God, may this be the law ever increasingly found to be operating in the hearts, minds and actions of us all. Amen.

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Sunday 22
23/8/2015

2 Samuel 23:1-7
Psalm 132
John 18:33-37

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Some while back we bought for a friend a T-shirt which declared “Jesus loves you” and then, underneath and in slightly smaller text, “but I’m his favourite.” I know the man to whom we gave this well enough almost to be certain that he wears his T-shirt as a joke and for the response it gets, and not as statement of some eternal truth! For we all know that God doesn’t have favourites. Or, we know this, as long as we don’t read the Bible and discover that in fact it seems that God does.

We’ve heard from the second book of Samuel this morning what are purported to be the last words of David, which ran like this:

The oracle of David, son of Jesse,
the oracle of the man whom God exalted,
the anointed of the God of Jacob,
the favourite of the Strong One of Israel:
The spirit of the LORD speaks through me,
his word is upon my tongue.
The God of Israel has spoken,
the Rock of Israel has said to me…

What are we to make of such divine favouritism? For, while we might find ways of explaining away this particular text on account of its antiquity or cultural context or whatever, the theme of God’s favouritism won’t go away. How is it possible – to make the point most starkly – that the man Jesus can have attached to him such an extraordinary list of appellations as we hear, for example, in Revelation: the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth (e.g. Revelation 1.4b-8)? This declares what the rest of the New Testament also preaches: that this Jesus who stood “suffered under Pontius Pilate”, as you or I might also have done, is the particular point at which God touches the world. All that matters comes down to this one. Jesus is, we might say, God’s favourite.

Now this is, of course, patently ridiculous to much modern religious sensibility. If we do take an interest in religion, is it not clearly the case that the “one” which matters is “God”, who favours no particular place but in his omnipresence is also omni- and equi-gracious? Many of us need this to be so because we’ve seen that any hint of divine favouritism is extraordinarily dangerous in the hands of arrogant human beings. It is theories of divine favouritism which have fuelled so much destruction among us; “Gott mit uns”’, “In God we trust”, or that unholy trinity “God, King and Country” are but three slogans which particular peoples have wrapped around their sense that they are the chosen ones. What fuels the diatribe of modern popular atheism is not merely the alleged irrationality of religious belief but the sheer destruction which can spring from those who believe themselves to be God’s favourites. In the hands of the Church, Jesus as “special” has proven no less a danger in this respect. Favourites divide and division brings harm, which is why Grandma knows never to have favourites – or, at least, never to declare them!

It seems a good thing, of course, that we know better than all this these days. We’ve seen how human beings have claimed “God’s” favouritism for themselves, and employed the rhetoric of divine blessing as justification of all kinds of violence and destruction. And so there are, for us, no divine favourites – or, at least, if there are any favourites there is a bunch of them, the number of which happens to correspond to the number of different types of religious systems and affections we recognise. Everyone may have their favourites so long as they don’t impinge upon the favourites of others.

And yet, the language of favourite is implied and used in the Scriptures for Israel-in-David-to-Jesus, without apology. More scandalously, this favouritism is not of the kind which allows us others at least to be left alone in our unfavoured ordinariness. God’s favouritism in David, and finally in Jesus, is something we must take heed of, for it is not only about them but about us on the “outside” also.

A community which confesses the Incarnation ought to know something about how God works in the world. For the point of the doctrine of the Incarnation is not only that God enters into the world but that God can do that thoroughly and still remain God. The “Word becomes flesh” – and is now both Word and flesh. Fleshly, fallen things – even “God-forsaken” things – are all potential means by which God might work in the world. Things marked by human disorder are ready and sufficient instruments for God’s healing works. Human favouritism is a divisive and deadly thing but it is precisely this deathly thing which God uses to heal. For divine favouritism reworks what brings division and death in human favouritism and makes it an enlivening thing.

The test of specifically Christian faith is not whether or not we can convince ourselves that God “exists”; there is nothing particularly Christian about that. The test is whether or not we believe that the instruments of death might yet prove to be useful to God to bring life, quite contrary to the intention or expectations of those of us who are so adept at applying such deathly devices.

None of this is to justify human weakness and failure; it is simply to speak of what might yet be done with us by such a God. For favouritism takes on a different guise in the hands of this God. Just as the church declares that Jesus bears the divine judgement so that nobody else has to; and just as we declare that Jesus bears the loss of God in abandonment to death so that no one else any longer has to bear that loss, so we can also say that Jesus is God’s favourite so that no one else has to be. That is, when this God takes a favourite, it is not in order relegate all others to a lower order. It is to free us from any need to be or, perhaps more importantly, to seek to be, God’s favourites. Jesus is “King” so that no other has to be. This is the character of his kingship: an exaltation which lifts up us all.

With us, favouritism implies division, and what divides only kills; for God what we divide with our favourites also kills – even God himself. But the gospel is that for God there is nothing which cannot be an instrument of healing unto life in his hands. To declare that Jesus is God’s favourite or, in different ways, David, or Israel, or even(God forbid?!) the Church are such favourites – is to declare not that we or anyone else outside those circles are not God’s favourites, but simply that we and they don’t need to be. When it comes to this particular God, I am blessed enough, in that he favours another.

Is there not good news in that for us who labour and are heavy laden by many burdens, whether the burden of our own dreams for our lives, or that of anxiety for the future of the church, or worry about the future of society and world? For these are, at root, worries about whether or not God favours us or, if we are “atheists”, that society or even the universe somehow favours us? Yet, whatever we might choose to do about those things, that Christ is God’s favourite – God’s king – means that we know that we are not responsible for building up a kingdom, for this has already been done. God has chosen a kingdom and a king, and it is not our kingdom or our crown.

This actually frees us to give, to love, to serve, to forgive, simply to be ourselves when that is the best we can manage, or to become something extraordinary when the Spirit falls. For our hope is that, in the end, all that will really matter is what God does with us and for us. In Christ, God’s favourite, God has favoured me. I am blessed in that God has blessed Jesus of Nazareth. And that is enough of a blessing.

For such a hope and the liberated lives it makes possible here and now, all thanks be to God, now and forever. Amen.

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Sunday 21
23/8/2015

2 Samuel 18 Selected verses
Psalm 130
John 1:1-14

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Over the last decade or so most people who like to take photographs have disposed of their old film-based cameras and replaced them with smaller and cheaper digital cameras, or simply with their telephone. These cameras can take thousands of photographs for almost nothing, so that no one needs to worry about waiting for the shot to be just right. All you need to do is just keep taking photographs in expectation that at least a few of them will be okay.

For the most part, however, most people tend to save not just good photographs but all of them. Again, this is because it is cheap and easy to do so. The result is computers loaded with more photographs that anyone is ever likely to want to look at, but this is no problem. For us today information is easy to obtain, to store and to share, and photographs are just a kind of information. We might not necessarily be any better than our predecessors at responding appropriately to all that information, but there is no question that we live in an information age. The detail we can record about the world around us is increasing exponentially, even if our capacity to process that information effectively is not.

By contrast, consider what it took to record information in Babylon in the sixth century before Jesus. This is when the Old Testament as we now know it was being pulled together and the stories of David and his successors were being edited into the form that we now have them. Whereas today I could replicate this sermon 1 million times with a few clicks of a mouse button, then it would have taken days or weeks to write out a scroll containing a single copy of the story of David.

This being the case, the question I want to reflect upon this morning is this: why bother with all the detail we have about the life of David? For the detail abounds.

We have skipped over a lot of the story in the space between our treatment of David and Bathsheba and the story we have heard today of the death of David’s son Absalom. Absalom’s sister Tamar was raped by their half-brother Amnon. Knowing this, David nevertheless refused to act against Amnon. Eventually, Absalom kills Amnon. As a result of this Absalom flees into exile, later to be reconciled to David. Absalom, however, has high political ambitions, and campaigns to replace David as king. David is forced to flee Jerusalem. Absalom pursues David but, despite David’s insistence that he not be hurt, the young man is killed by Joab, as we heard in our reading this morning. In the midst of all this there are defections and spies, emotions and suicide – all the makings of a great TV series.

Whatever judgement we might make about all that, I am more interested in the question, Why even tell the story? Why do we need to know the “days of our lives” of these 10th century BC Israelites? Of course, we can moralise happily about this or that event in the story. But if that was the intention of the writers themselves, then perhaps they might have given us a bit more of their own moralising because there isn’t very much of it.

Why, when it was so difficult to record and reproduce this information, risk leaving it to readers to work out the moral of the story for themselves?

The reason for the detail would seem to have something to do with the very humanity of the story. We might imagine those early editors looking at all the material they have in front of them, ranging from the innocence of David as a young shepherd and his courage in fronting up to Goliath, to his murder of Uriah and his loss of strength and sense in the face of Absalom – looking at all this and simply wondering how it could all be so.

And so they write it all down, or enough of it to make the point. Here is the breadth and length, the height and depth, of the life of any one of us. Even though the story has comparatively little detail compared to a story we might tell about ourselves today, in a context where recording and storing information was so expensive the story displays an extraordinary interest in the details of human relationships and the impact of those details upon those people themselves. That David is the king makes the story all the more compelling because, as we have noted a number of times before, David serves here not simply as one man among the billions of men and women who have lived before and since but as a representative sample. “Here is the human being,” to recall the words of Pilate we heard last week.

When we come then to speak of God’s dealings with us, we must remember that it is with this kind of humanity that God engages. When we declare with John’s gospel that “the Word became flesh” it is precisely this flesh, this complex ethical and political confusion which was the ancient, and is the modern, world.

For the most part, however, we prefer either to oversimplify the complexity of the problems which we are, or to distract from them. Comfort food, shopping till you drop or the extra-marital affair are all distractions from the unbearable heaviness of being – from being and living just where we actually are. “Stop the boats”, a woman’s “right to choose” or imagining that marriage can be whatever we define it to be in this particular moment are unthinking oversimplifications of deep and complex human realties.

In such things, not only do we misrepresent ourselves in whatever fudging of the details might suit us. God is also simplified as we seek to simplify ourselves. It should not surprise us that, if we do not take ourselves as we actually are very seriously then, in the end, we will also not take God very seriously.

But even if oversimplification serves us nicely in distracting us from those less than pleasant details which are our reality, this doesn’t work for God. God will consider us without reduction, without covering over. There are no fig leaves adequate to shielding us from the God who already knows what we look like uncovered.

This is not necessarily good news. We oversimplify and distract ourselves and others from the details of our personal and collective humanity for good reason: we would rather others did not know, often enough even that we ourselves did not know. The complex mess which we are – now right, now wrong, now strong, now weak, now sure, now unsure – makes the world more than we can bear without over-simplifying or letting ourselves be distracted. But we are not in this way brought to heaven. And the result is that we cease to be either properly of the world or of heaven.

Rather, we are strangely suspended, like the unfortunate Absalom: hanging between heaven and earth. This is where we live most of our lives. But if we prefer to simplify and be distracted, the gospel is that this is precisely the place that Jesus himself occupies: our actual place, if not our proper place – hanging on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, apparently devoid of humanity and of God.

Why does he take up this space – our space?

Over the course of these reflections on David’s story we have noticed again and again that David is the blessed one, the anointed one – literally, “the messiah” – and yet he constantly falls short. The blessed one over-reaches and loses himself. This is the story of us all. In contrast to this messiah is another – Jesus himself. Our reflections have looked at what is happening “between the messiahs” – between ourselves and Christ. Because David cannot be the messiah, neither can Jesus; the Christ is “dragged down”, as it where – crucified, forced to occupy the no-man’s land and no-God’s land which is “the between” of the cross.

But in that space, at the between of the cross, is the revelation that the Christ is willingly dragged down because, by the power of God, it will be the means of lifting us up. The Word became flesh – our flesh in all its messy detail – in order that we might finally truly become ourselves. The detail which matters most about us is that we are known better than we know ourselves. The detail which matters most is God’s very knowledge of us, and its purpose: that we be loved as we are.

The details of the stories – David’s and ours – matter first because they are what make us us. This is us, for better or for worse. But the details matter also because they are known by a God who – sometimes in spite of the details, sometimes because of them – loves us and cherishes us in health and in sickness. This is not a simple God for a simple people. God is complex and variable because we are. And God is this, in order that we might simply be his. The scriptural writers invest so much in the detail of David’s life because it is the life of one of us, as we are; and it is a remarkable thing that such a one as this does not simply fall within God’s capacity to love, but is in fact the focus of that love.

This is a love which shines in our darkness and yet is not overcome by it.

For such an all-searching, all comprehending and all-embracing love, all thanks be to God. Amen.

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Sunday 20
16/8/2015

2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a
Psalm 51
John 19:1-7

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The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – our “internal narratives” – are the basis for how we live in the world around us. They place us, give us meaning, set an agenda for us, open up possibilities or close them off. The things we are likely to do or say are rooted in these stories. Because of this, we can also read something of a person’s internal narrative about themselves from the way they behave.

David can take – probably rape – Bathsheba, have her husband killed, and imagine that the matter is dealt with. What story is he telling himself, that he imagines that this all “works”?

David is king, probably at the height of his powers. The palace is established, the ark has come to Jerusalem, and the promise of an eternal throne has been heard. The security of the borders needs to be maintained but this no longer requires David’s oversight and can be entrusted to his generals. His life approaches one of leisure. He is then, on a number of levels, free. And in freedom he acts – an almost absolute freedom from the obligations of moral leadership and observance of custom: freedom with a woman’s chastity, freedom with a man’s life. His is a freedom to act with impunity, he apparently imagines. This is the story he tells himself. David acts as a king can: according to desire, almost without fear of contradiction. Yet, of course, there is some fear here. Uriah dies because David fears discovery; David knows that others will not affirm this degree of freedom. But Uriah does die and so the threat of discovery seems to be dealt with. This would all the more reinforce for David his freedom – not only to transgress against command and convention but seemingly to do so and to get away with it.

David acts as if the only story which matters is the one which he himself tells. And this would seem to be so until Nathan appears. What Nathan does, in effect, is re-story David. This applies both to the method and in its effect. The method is one of distraction. David is invited into another story, seemingly bearing no particular relation to his own. In his focus on the rich man’s theft of the poor man’s ewe David both forgets himself and becomes himself. His own actions are not even in view at the outset, and so he is free to act as a king should in response to Nathan’s tale, “becoming himself” and declaring right judgement on the rich man. The trick, of course, is that having forgotten himself, David has declared judgement on himself. Human judgement and divine judgement are in accord here: David is guilty. To recall our reflection from last week: the blessed one has over-reached, and knows it.

In our gospel reading this morning we heard a kind of echo of Nathan’s “You are the man” accusation in Pilate’s presentation of Jesus to the crowds: “Here is the man” (John 19.5). It doesn’t matter whether there is intended to be a link between the two stories in the mind of the gospel writer; David and Jesus are each playing the role of “the man” or, more helpfully, the human creature of this particular God.

On Pilate’s lips “Here is the man” is both a declaration and a question. For the gospel writer John this is a much stronger statement than “Here he is”. We are rather to hear: “This is the man, the human being”; here is the human story (we might recall here the parallels, or type, we have noted between David, Adam and Jesus here). The implied question in Pilate’s declaration is, then, “Do you agree? What is your judgement on this?” The judgement of the crowds, expressed in the call for crucifixion, is that Jesus is not the human being, and so not the sign of the presence of God in the world, not the “image of God” (Genesis 1.27f). David was judged because he was human – too human, in the negative sense of fallible. Jesus is judged here because if this is what humanity looks like, it is unbearable. The story the crowd tells itself does not include the kind of freedom which Jesus represents. For like David’s, Jesus’ own “internal story”, if we dare to try to reconstruct it from his actions, is also about freedom. But it is a different kind of freedom from that exercised by David. For Jesus freedom is in knowing what he is given to be, called to do, required to say, and what will “justify” what he does. It is the freedom of one who knows himself in relation to the one who commissioned him. It is the freedom of having received in such a way that he remains bound to the giver in order to receive more. By contrast, once David had received, he acted as if his own account of himself was the only one which now mattered: the gift separated him from the giver. Jesus’ story, of course, conflicts with others’ account of him and – more importantly – conflicts with their account of themselves. This is how he comes to be standing before the angry crowd. This conflict renders the judgement, “He is not the man; this is not what God requires”, and the sentence, Crucify.

From the perspective of the resurrection, which returns our attention to the crucified Jesus, in the judgement of Jesus we are at the Uriah level of the story. The crucifixion is out attempt to cover up what Jesus’ own story has exposed: the great gap between the kingdom of God as it was embodied in all that Jesus said and did, and our own orderings of the world. Uriah lies dead and the story is over until Nathan arrives to tell a different version of the story. Jesus lies dead until the resurrection comes. Jesus’ resurrection, then, is a kind of parable like Nathan’s story of the stolen sheep, doing the work of re-storying.

But now the problem is deeper, and so the story much more wide-reaching. In the case of David and Nathan, the re-storying “re-inserts” God. David has ignored God – we might even go so far as to say killed God – but specifically for David’s own sake. This is an important, but relatively low-level “moral” failure – living as if there were no God, knowing that in fact there is. God’s “being there” is a matter of inconvenience and so is conveniently overlooked. In the case of Jesus, however, the problem is much deeper. The crucifixion takes place not in order to deny God, but to honour God. Jesus is executed because he is thought to have misrepresented God; the crucifixion is an act of piety on the part of those who demand it. For their part, God requires the crucifixion. Whereas what was bad in David killed Uriah, what is “good” in his religious opponents requires that Jesus be killed.

And so the pressing question is: is there any hope for those whose attempts at good works even deny the presence and call of God? Here the whole summation of as Christian faith being about doing good is called into question: can we be sure that our assessment of what is good actually gets “Good” right? And is it enough simply to declare, “I did the best I could” when religious piety kills the Lord of life? It is not a brave person who declares his or her works good. It is an arrogant one, for such a judgement is God’s alone.

This is the re-storying done by Jesus’ resurrection. Here the crucifixion of Jesus by wrong-headed piety is not just forgiven but made a good thing, and so it is not forgotten. We remember the body and the blood because the body broken by us becomes the body broken for us. There can be no forgiving and forgetting, because it is the good the pious do which is the problem. The crucifixion of Jesus cannot be forgotten without allowing ourselves to imagine that we might still be “good enough”, that we’ve done well “enough”, that we’ve done “our best”, and that this is all that matters. For all our talk about justification by grace through faith, there are few of us who are not at heart quietly earning our standing before God, resting in a job well done rather than in the gift of God’s love.

We must, of course, “do,” act; only the dead are free of this obligation. And we must, to the best of our ability, do the right, seeking to align our actions with God’s call. But we are not our own judges. We can neither justify our sin, as David wanted to, nor guarantee the righteousness of our good works, as Jesus’ executioners imagined they could. We stand before God only because, in the bad and the good, God stands for us, not simply wanting that we be good, but making it that we are. This is the gospel, the free humanity of Jesus made our very own, no judgement to fear.

For such a story, exposing and re-working the untruths in the stories we tell ourselves, all thanks be to God. Amen.

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Sunday 19
9/8/2015

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Matthew 16:13-23

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The story of David and Bathsheba and that of David and Goliath are perhaps the best known of all the recorded events of David’s life. And, for that reason, we will not dwell on the details of the obvious: that one should not do as David did: adultery (or here, perhaps, even a rape) is contrary to the law of God, and murder is as well. There is not much to be said for harping on this particular point in a sermon because it’s not that hard: if you are contemplating either adultery or murder, stop it. Enough said. There are more interesting things to consider there.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is this: David has been anointed king. This means that he is a “messiah” (from the Hebrew) or a “christ” (from the Greek), for this is what those words mean both mean: “anointed one.” Jesus is not the first christ; he is the last. Our story today, then, presents us with a strange coming-together: unlike another well-known “religious” figure, not only is David a “very naughty boy”, he is also “the Messiah”. How can this be so?

Up until now we have seen a steady building up of blessing upon blessing for David. There is a sense in which, until this point, God has been setting David in place. Now God waits to see what David will do, and the results are underwhelming. David is set over the people for the people. In his being blessed is Israel promised security and peace from its enemies (2 Samuel 7.10). This is his role: to be a god-like enabler of what is true and gives life.

David’s failure, then, is not simply a personal moral offence. Much more, his failure affects the whole community. Rather than being one who brings life, David takes it. First, of course, is Bathsheba, either encouraged or forced out of her life with Uriah; then comes Uriah himself and then, unintended, Bathsheba’s baby.

More generally, however, there is also the matter of the curse which we will hear God speak next week on the house he has just blessed.

Now therefore the sword shall never depart from your house, for you have despised me, and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. Thus says the Lord: I will raise up trouble against you from within your own house; and I will take your wives before your eyes, and give them to your neighbour, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this very sun. For you did it secretly; but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.”

This curse affects not just David and his family but, through them, on the whole community. It cannot be hidden but will spill out into the open for all to see. The sword which will cut through David’s sons, in doing so, cuts through the security and identity of Israel as a whole.

Instead of being the one who preserves life, David becomes now the one who causes blood to flow. In a way, he has always been this – whether it was the blood of those wild animals which threatened his flock, or the blood of Philistines who were a threat to Israel. But, as we have noted in reflecting on the Goliath story, this is the blood of rather one-dimensional characters in the story. They are, in a sense, outside of what really matters for those who tell this story. They represent disorder and chaos, but specifically from without. What David does to repel these threats is done to protect the sphere of Israel, a kind of bringing of order to the disordered void, to recall the creation narrative (Genesis 1.1).

But what happens within the sphere of the chosen and blessed Israel is a different matter for reflection altogether. And this comes now to its sharpest focus in the person of David himself. For here is Israel – represented in the king – secured by God’s hand, blessed, as a son to God as a father, called to faithfulness, called to be a son. And here also is Israel fallen. And the effect is devastating: the loss of the first and beloved son – God’s and David’s – and the loss of many more to come.

When the blessèd one over-reaches, death is what results. But this is not an occasional failure; it goes to the heart of human being. As we have already noticed a number of times: here is repeated the story of Eden:

And the Lord God commanded [Adam], ‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die’ (Genesis 2.16f NRSV)

In effect God says there, “Everything but this”. That story ends with the question to Eve: “What is this that you have done?”, whereupon follows the curse upon the serpent and the man and the woman.

In our story today, Bathsheba is David’s “apple”. The death of Uriah is David’s fig leaf. And the death of the child and the curse of the sword which follow are David’s expulsion from Eden and from all the possibilities of the brotherhood of Cain and Abel. It is a troubled and grey existence David lives from now on – the existence of the children of Adam and Eve.

If the story of Adam and Eve resonates with that of David, the stark scriptural contrast to David’s story is that of Jesus. In response to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am,” (Matthew 16.13) comes Peter’s bold affirmation, “You are the Messiah” or, we might paraphrase, “You are the anointed one, the son of David,.” But then, just because he recognises this link, Peter goes on to reveal that he expects the kind of kingship which David had exercised. As Jesus describes his approaching persecution and death, Peter rebukes him: “This shall never happen to you!” What shall never happen? The kind of exposure which David tried to avoid: being known or seen to have failed in righteousness, to have been unimaginably wrong – David, of all people; Jesus, of all people. David is going to be publically exposed as a sinner – we still read the story even today; Jesus, he says, will be exposed in the same way on the cross.

Or, at least, whereas David is wrong; Jesus looks wrong, to the extent that the cross is interpreted by his executioners as God’s judgement on his proclamation. Peter knows that in every respect Jesus is great David’s greater son, that no prophet Nathan will finger Jesus with the charge, “You are the man” (to anticipate next week’s reading [2 Samuel 12]; consider, however, Pilate’s presentation of Jesus: “Behold the man” [John 19.5]). But the similarities are important.

We have noted many times that David and Adam “refer” to each other, the one (re­)enacting the other’s possibilities and shortcomings. They each embody the story of blessing and over-reaching. Jesus as a figure in the story also “refers” to David and Adam – he invokes them for us and embodies them. This he does, first, in a positive sense as a representative figure who is blessed with life in God’s kingdom. Adam is blessed, David is blessed, Jesus is blessed. But Jesus also invokes and embodies Adam and David in a second, negative sense: as the bearer of the curse of death.

Technically, scholars call Adam and David “types” of each other – and of Jesus. This means that Adam and David lay down a pattern which is seen in Jesus: they are “typical” of each other; it happens to each of them according to the pattern. (The notion comes from Paul, who speaks of Adam as “a type [Greek “tupos” = pattern, model] of one who was to come” (Romans 5. 14).). In this way they are all seen, in their different ways, to be sharing in the same kind of reality, seen to be the same kind of thing.

This way of thinking helps us to see the threads which are woven through the whole of fabric of the biblical story, now above it and visible, now below and hidden, but always the source of its colour and contrast and cohesion.

The crucifixion of Jesus is the rejection of the humanity he embodies, the rejection of his peculiar freedom before God and others. But here is the crucial point: to the extent that Jesus shares in the pattern of blessèd opportunity which is where Adam and David begin, the crucifixion of the innocent Jesus reveals a kind of self-contempt on the part of his executioners – a covering over of what we do not want to see as a possibility for ourselves. The crucifixion is another fig leaf mistaken for the finest of coverings. The humanity of Jesus is a kind of nakedness – an openness before God and those around him – which is found to be unbearable. In a strange kind of way, the murdered Uriah can be reclaimed here as a “type” of Jesus. He dies that the sin of David might be covered – a fig leaf to cover David’s nakedness before the people, if not before God. The days of David happily dancing naked before God and the people are now past (Recalling the under-dressed dancing David of 2 Samuel 6.1-23, especially vv.20ff); a modesty borne of sin is now required.

Jesus dies in order that his remarkable humanity might be covered over – blotted out. But if David’s shame brought modesty, the shame inflicted upon Jesus on the cross becomes by God’s grace the basis of a strange immodesty: the freedom of the forgiven children of God. Now revealed sin brings not the shame of exposure and the darkened existence which comes with that, but rather celebration: God can overcome even this.

I began by suggesting the real question arising from the Bathsheba affair is the question about why David continues to enjoy God’s favour: how the messiah – the anointed one – and the “naughty boy” might be one and the same. There is no good reason for this, so far as most of us are concerned. This is not least because we are, most of us most of the time, interested mainly in ourselves, our mores, our morals. When the failure is of sufficient magnitude the one who failed becomes irredeemable, cast “outside the city gate” (as is said of Jesus: Hebrews 13.12.). These ones cease to matter. Our modern correlates are our fallen idols – celebrities, politicians, sporting heroes – who offend public decency in some way.

But, mercifully, it is not we but God who judges and pronounces sentence where it really matters. God wants this to work – this project we call “life”. This is the point of the promise to David: “Always”; you are mine, always. God so much wants this to work that he sends his Son as the son of one of us, that we might see, and believe, and so have hope, in whatever illicit embrace we might find ourselves, willing or unwilling.

There is no justifying David in his taking of Bathsheba, his murder of Uriah or any other excess we might find in his history, but can be no self-righteous judging of him either. For his story is ours. It is beyond none of us to want more than is given, to cover up what we’ve had to do to get it, and to be in need of being shown that there is a God who sees.

That is the Law. It is the gospel, however, that to know ourselves truly seen by God is to know ourselves forgiven.

Mine. You are mine. Always.

For such a gospel of grace and the love which is its guarantee, all thanks and praise be to God. Amen.

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Sunday 18
2/8/2015

2 Samuel 7:1-17
Psalm 89
John 12:12-19

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A couple of months back I sat in on a short course in the city. It was a philosophy subject: “Free Will and Morality”. I was interested to see what a philosopher would do with those topics, and also whether something constructive could be said (and heard) in such a space from a gospel perspective, which I wanted to bring! I hope that the answer to the latter was found to be “Yes”, because the philosophical treatment of the topic was a little exasperating!

One thing we spent a lot of time on was “determinism” – whether or not our lives and worlds have been determined for us before we make decisions about them. Another key consideration was moral objectivism: whether there are basic moral rules which must be observed, and where these come from. Fundamentally, these are questions about human freedom in relation to “the big picture”: the awareness that some things are not free to be changed, and yet that this awareness is in tension with our thinking ourselves to be free, or thinking that we ought to be free.

Inevitably, God gets invoked in all this. Or, at least, a kind of god is invoked. This god is just enough to serve as a possible basis of an already unsupportable proposition. And because the proposition is already unsupportable, its little god is becomes representative of the uselessness of gods in general when it comes to talking about anything which matters!

An empty idea of god, however, doesn’t make the problem go away. Fundamentally the question remains: are there “set” things about how the world works, which we must observe if we are to prosper in every sense of the word? If there are such set things, are we free to choose them? And what if we don’t? Whenever we wonder What is the “right” thing to do?, whenever we pray for guidance, whenever we encourage each other in one direction and admonish for a choice in the “wrong” direction, we imply that something is set – pre-determined – for us. And happiness is a matter of discovering what that is. In all of this, if we are believers, we imagine God to be a kind of still-point – the thing which does not move or change. God does not change, the Good is fixed, and we are to conform to that changelessness by discovering the Good.

To my mind, the philosophy got us nowhere, and Scripture does it all better.

Our reading this morning is about a “deal” struck between David and God. It is an unexpected deal. David has proposed that he will build for God at a temple. God’s response is No; this will be the responsibility of another. Rather, God proposes that he will build a house for David. David’s name will be made great and the people of Israel will be planted securely in their own place and find peace from their enemies. David is promised that when his days are fulfilled he will lie with his ancestors, having left behind offspring whose own reign will also be established by God. David will be as a son to God as a father, and God’s steadfast love will be never taken from David: his throne “shall be established forever” (v.16). This “deal” or, in biblical language “covenant”, is one of the central turning points of the Old Testament’s account of God’s dealing with the people of Israel. (Strictly speaking, the word “covenant” doesn’t appear in this passage, but later scriptural expositions of it – 2 Samuel 23.5; Psalm 89.35; Psalm 132.12 – see this event as establishment of a covenant with David and his line.)

Deals are generally if-then arrangements: if you do this, I’ll do that. Yet the most striking characteristic of this covenant is that it is unconditional. One commentator likens what God offers here to the writing of a “blank cheque” (W. Brueggemann). God here promises David a future which is not dependent upon what David or his descendants do. It is an extraordinary promise, particularly given the way in which previous covenants between God and the people have been set up in such a way that the fulfilment of the promises are conditional upon what the people do in response to the covenant. We will see as the story unfolds further that the demands of the law of God still cannot be overlooked. But what is now implicit in the relationship between God and his people – the people being signified by the King – is that where failure occurs it becomes the responsibility of God to overcome the failure, if it is truly to be the case that God’s promise to David and his line can be kept.

This is rather a dangerous proposal. It is easy to imagine the onset of a moral complacency in a covenant like this, the abandonment of any moral objectivity. And yet such complacency is not part of what is promised here, nor part of what actually unfolds.

We should also keep in mind that these stories have been pulled together into their current form by religious leaders of Israel during the time of the Babylonian exile. That is, they are written from the perspective of the punishment of Israel and its kings for long-term failure before God. The significance of any punishment, then, is not diminished. But it is the very context of punishment in exile which makes so important the promise to David of an eternal kingship. For this becomes the basis of hope for Israel in exile. The promise of God to the house of David could become the basis of hope for Israel-in-exile in a way in which the covenant from Sinai could not. What David hears is the promise of faithfulness on God’s part regardless of what happens on the part of David and the house of Israel – even that which, in the end, resulted in the loss of the land and the temple.

Unfaithfulness on the part of David and his descendants will meet with the personal or individual loss of the benefits of the kingship, but the long-term promise to the line as a whole, and to Israel through it, will remain in place.

Though they will be punished for extreme failures, they will turn to the promises which are made to David and look towards the fulfilment of those promises in a re-establishment of the line of Davidic Kings. And so, for example, the prophet Isaiah speaks of a “shoot from the stump of Jesse”,[1] or the prophet Jeremiah speaks of God’s raising up for David a righteous Branch, who “shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”[2] The relationship is retained – which is the work of God’s faithfulness – but it will now have a new shape – as a work of forgiveness, the restoration of those who were in exile.

The important thing here is not the risk that we might get it all wrong but the way in which God is, in a sense, intensifying his investment in the world, his association with the world. “Whatever you do, I will stick by you”, is basically what God offers here. There can now be no backing away from the world, if indeed it is the case that God will remain faithful to his promise to David.

This also means, perhaps surprisingly, that there enters here the possibility of “change” in God. For if it is the case that David is trusted by God – by which we mean that he is given his freedom – then there is a sense in which David and the community he represents take the lead in determining what actual shape the relationship will take. That the relationship stays in place is God’s work; what shape it takes, is the work of God’s human creatures.

This dynamic takes final takes definitive form in what happens when, more than 500 years after the exile and 950 years after David, Jesus arrives in an Israel which labours under foreign rule. Here, again – precisely because the world is not as it should be, in that there is no “David” to be seen – the royal language of “Christ” and “son of God” is part of the political and religious atmosphere. Israel continues to look to the promised faithfulness of God expressed in the covenant with David, awaiting the restoration of the throne of David. And so when Jesus begins to look like somebody very special in their midst, he is quite naturally interpreted in those terms, as the words of the people on Palm Sunday show:

‘Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord— the King of Israel!’… ‘Do not be afraid, daughter of Zion. Look, your king is coming…!’ (John 12.13,15)

For indeed, in his own way, Jesus can be interpreted as God’s faithfulness to what was promised to David. Here the identity of Israel is focussed once more in the figure of a “king” although not sufficiently like the kings before, which is why Jesus ends up dying on the cross. The crucifixion is God’s people missing the point, once again. Once more we set an agenda, reshape the basis of the relationship between ourselves and God. And God’s response is both to honour that reshaping – to take seriously our free hand, even if it slays God’s Christ – and at the same time to turn such misguided work into its opposite: the basis not of a reciprocated rejection but of a renewed relationship with God. And so, as we symbolise in our gathering around the communion table today, our disastrous efforts in the world are made the basis of our relationship to God: we have determined the shape of the relationship in the breaking of a body and the spilling of blood, and God makes sure that it remains a relationship.

Last week the readings suggested the metaphor of a dance as a way of speaking about both human existence and divine existence. It is a metaphor which can be extended also to the relationship between God and his human creatures. In the promises to Israel through David God has chosen his partner, and intends to stick with her, for all her left-footedness. For this God, his people’s being unable to dance doesn’t make the relationship impossible. It just changes what the dance actually is, God falling into step with us, always keeping his feet out from under ours, correcting for rhythm and direction, leading as he follows our lead.

The good news of the gospel is that even the disaster of the crucifixion of Jesus cannot stand between God and his people. Here our lead is one of rebellion and rejection. God’s lead is to take our very rejection of his faithfulness to what was promised to David and hoped for ever after, and to make of that rejection the sign of just how far he will go to be faithful.

The shape we give to our relationship to God has its sign in those marks of our rejection of God – the body and blood of Jesus. In his unfathomable faithfulness, God makes of those marks a sign of his inexhaustible grace, returning them to us as that by which we are to be nourished and bound together: here are the signs of your poverty, returned to you as signs of my grace. God can promise to David what he does not because David, his descendants and his people are necessarily capable of getting their part right, but because God intends to set their part right, whatever happens, whatever it takes.

This places us, and God, beyond the simplistic realms of free will and ethics. In the promise to Israel in David, fulfilled in Israel in Jesus, we are promised that we will be his forever, because God is free – free to be God not merely of what we ought to have been but of what we become.

And so the church prays now as it always has:

‘Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord — the King of Israel!’

For to bless this one is, in all times, places and circumstances, to be blessed ourselves.

[1] Isaiah 11.1.

[2] Jeremiah 23:5-6.

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Sunday 17
26/7/2015

2 Samuel 6:1-23
Psalm 24
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

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Our reading from 2 Samuel this morning is a drama in two acts, both revolving around the ark of the covenant, but also having at their centre the theme of humility.

The ark stems from the time of Moses, perhaps 250 years or so prior to David’s reign, and was built to contain the stone tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments, and a few other holy mementos. It had an appearance in story of David in the time of Eli, the mentor of Samuel, when it was captured by the Philistines and carted away. Eli died at hearing the news of its capture, and one of his daughters-in-law gave premature birth to a son whom she named “Ichabod”, meaning “the glory has departed from Israel”. The story goes, however, that presence of the ark among its captors caused such havoc among them that they finally sent it back to Israel with gold offerings to Israel’s God (1 Samuel 4.10-7.1).

It reappears now in the story at the time when David is seeking to consolidate his position as king, and so reappears with somewhat ambiguous purpose. On the one hand, there is clearly what we might call a “religious” motivation in bringing the ark to Jerusalem. This is seen in the elaborate liturgy which surrounds its arrival, with sacrifice, music, and ecstatic dancing even by the king himself. The celebrations surrounding the ark are a celebration of the presence of God to Israel. In this sense, the focus is upon God and his faithfulness.

On the other hand, the presence of the ark in Jerusalem is a very important thing for David politically. In this way he brings the ancient and common religious heritage of the scattered tribes to the place where the now equally common but quite new political unity of the tribes in David as king. Although the division between the religious and the political was not as strong in David’s time as it is in our time, it is still the case that the bringing of the ark to Jerusalem was likely a part of a political strategy for David. Rule over the tribes will be easier when the political centre and the centre of religious devotion coincide. Kings do not need “meddlesome priests” (To recall the conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket) in some distant centre, a kind of second government or court of appeal. It is smarter to symbolise and secure the unity of the religious and the secular orders by having them in the same place.

This double-edged – and so compromised – intention in David’s moving of the ark is, however, met in the fate of the unfortunate Uzzah, who was struck dead when he touched it. (Cf. 1 Sam 6.19 on the fate of the “men of Bethshemeth” who did rejoice at the return of the ark from the Philistines.) It’s a troubling story to modern ears, and not only modern ones: David himself was unimpressed with Uzzah’s death at God’s hand. Yet the important point for the story is not that Uzzah dies but that, as a result, David “was afraid of the Lord that day”. For God is shown here to be dangerous. Whatever David’s actions were intended to achieve, this God will not be a political instrument. “How can the ark of the Lord come into my care?” David asks; and the answer is that it cannot. The ark, or rather the God whose dangerous presence it symbolises, will take care of itself. David’s plans for the ark are challenged; he has been humbled by God.

So the ark is left at the home of one Obed-edom. And things go very well for him, which brings us to the second act. Hearing how Obed-edom has been blessed, David returns to collect the ark again. But now things are different. God has claimed for himself what David’s actions in bringing the ark to Jerusalem might have contradicted: that God is his own “man”, so to speak. God will come to Jerusalem, the “city of David”, and make it God’s own city.

This is grounds for celebration, and celebrate David does. The politics has now receded, and the focus is starkly on the approach of God in the symbol of the ark. And so we see David again as the one whose orientation – at its best – is to and from God. In ecstatic abandon David – apparently not even sufficiently dressed for decent public appearance – dances before God and before the people.

And then enters the unhappy figure of Michal. The daughter of Saul and David’s first wife, she was once deeply in love with David but ended up being tossed around as a political football by both her father and by David. Yet the role she takes here is not that of the unjustly-dealt-with. Here Michal is the accuser of David who has found himself in losing himself before God. She stands, at one level, as representative of the old order – perhaps contrasting David’s exuberance with the more staid character of her father’s kingship. So a contrast between Saul and David might be being drawn again here. But more important is the general moral offence against the propriety of office. She observes sarcastically, “How the king of Israel honoured himself today, uncovering himself today before the eyes of his servants’ maids, as any vulgar fellow might shamelessly uncover himself” (v.20). This is not how things are done.

David’s response, however, is remarkable:

“It was before the Lord, who chose me in place of your father … to appoint me as prince of Israel…that I have danced… I will make myself yet more contemptible than this, and I will be abased in my own eyes; but by the maids of whom you have spoken, by them I shall be held in honour” (v.21f).

First, he sets the voice of the old order in its place – it was God who appointed me in place of Saul. This much is more or less undeniable in the story, and probably recognised by Michal herself even if she’s not actually reconciled to the fact. More importantly, it was before God and not according to anyone else’s requirements that David has danced. But then David goes a step further to borrow Michal’s contempt and make of it a badge of honour:

I will become yet more contemptible, even contemptible in my own eyes, but the lowly maids of the servants will hold me in honour.

Perhaps the most notable thing here is that David does not seek to elevate or justify himself before God or before his accuser. This is because God has already elevated David; David’s self-abandon before the ark and the people is his response to this gift, and apparently one acceptable to God. Rather than justify himself before God, David allows that he might actually be further humbled – even to the extent of his own self-contempt. And the humble themselves – the maids of the servants – will honour David for it.

In our (off RCL) gospel reading today (Matthew 11.16-30.), there is a very suggestive parallel to what has happened here. Jesus gives an account of the charges made against him:

^{Matthew 11.18} ‘For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; ¹⁹the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!” (and, we might add, the maids of the servants).

Here, in the role of Michal, the accuser is “this generation”, which cries out:

¹⁷ “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.”

That is, it is supposed that there is already a rhythm in place according which Jesus ought to be “dancing”, and yet he does not. And because he does not, he seemingly shames himself before God and the people as a “drunkard” and a “glutton”.

But more than this accusation as a correspondence to the story of David there is also present the theme of humility. Reflecting David’s acknowledgement that he might yet be humbled further, Jesus speaks of a revelation not to the wise and the intelligent – not to cultured despisers, the accusing Michals of this world – but to infants. And he issues the invitation:

“Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

This is not an invitation to a life of quietude. The “rest for your souls” Jesus speaks of here is the freedom to dance as David did, or the freedom not to dance. What is spoken here is not a prescription for what to do, but simply – and most crucially – a contradiction of the voice of judgement spoken over those who know themselves as the children of God. That judgement Jesus notes in the comments made over his and the Baptist’s ministries:

‘For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners!”

This is, in effect, to say that it is impossible not to be wrong, it is impossible not to offend someone, it is impossible not to transgress in the eyes of even those we imagine are on our side.

The danger in this kind of talk is that it might be heard as implying that therefore we might just as well claim free reign to do as we wish. The death of Uzzah as a sign to David and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead as a sign to his executioners are enough to show that this is not the case. There is a “too far” which is a true transgression of the limits God sets. This extreme is imagining that we can manipulate God, whether bringing God alongside our plans for the world or excluding God by crucifixion.

But the good news to be heard here is about a freedom to stand before God as we are, to do as we do, to offer what we can – to “dance”, so to speak.

There is an old Shaker song, “Simple Gifts”, which gives us the tune we sing to “The Lord of the Dance”:

When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend – we shan’t be asham’d, [think David dancing!]
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ’round right.

(The Shaker song was most likely a dance piece: “turn, turn… come ‘round right”.)

Simplicity – “rest for your souls”, David’s abandon in God – brings the freedom of humility, to dance through life before God, turning from presumptions to know God and judge each other and, in this turning, coming around right.

By the gift of his liberating Spirit, may God’s people respond once more with joy to the invitation to join with him, the Lord of the dance, fearing not the accusations of those who despise the freedom of God’s children, but presenting before them the fuller humanity to which we are all called.

Amen.