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Pentecost 14
25/8/2024

Ephesians 6:10-20
Psalm 34
John 6:56-69

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“…for our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers,
against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”
(Ephesians 6.10)

Paul’s talk of spiritual principalities and the powers strikes most today as quite alien. Even for many believers, it is embarrassing language, the residue of an earlier time we are keen to leave behind.

Yet, any embarrassment we might feel here about Paul’s language is in strange tension with what doesn’t embarrass faith – the very belief in God. There is a tension here because, recalling what we said last week about the God of Israel and Jesus Christ as one God among many, this God is a kind of principality or power. We find ourselves, then, in the strange situation that we can believe in God as a “spiritual” goodie, but not in Paul’s spiritual baddies – the principalities and powers. The spiritual realities Paul refers to in the first couple of verses of today’s reading are not something we now consider to be “real”, but God as spirit is.

And yet we know that there is real evil – at least in the “historical” world, if not in any sensible way in the “spiritual” world. This suggests that in much common religious belief, Good is fundamentally a “spiritual” thing insofar as it springs from God, but Evil is a secular or historical thing – something which springs from human activity and not from outside. Paul’s distinction between good and evil – between God and the “principalities and powers” – becomes for us a distinction between spirit and world.

This is much of the malaise of Christian faith today, for what has the spirit to do with the world? To throw away the principalities and powers as “spiritual” realities is to throw away any connection between God and the world, if God is “just” spirit.

Now, the point here is not that faith in God as spirit requires that we believe in evil spirits, as Paul seems to believe in them. Rather, the point is that our belief in God floats off and away from the world if what we will or won’t believe leaves us with an idea that the things of God are “spiritual” and so outside the world, and that whatever evil is it is something which resides in the world as only a historical, secular or human reality. If we really can’t believe in evil spirits – and I doubt that many of us actually can – then we must also dispense with the idea that God is a “spiritual” reality if the idea of “spirit” separates God from the world. We need to think the tangible world as the realm of spirit, or spirit as the worldly realm.

It’s not overstating the issue to say that the future of the church hangs on an understanding of what this means – not only the future of our congregation but of Christian faith itself.

The critical point has been that God deals with us as we are, here and now – not with a view to changing us into some perfect ideal of a human being, but to bring life to the kinds of people our particular history has made us. It is as we are – formed by our particular culture and history – that God addresses us. It is through the ideas and expectations of our particular world that we are called to faithfulness and trust.

This means that if, as is largely the case in our society today, there is really no other intangible “heavenly” world where powers for good and evil reside, then it’s in this very tangible and real world that we will meet God, in and through what we touch and do.

If God has no other heaven than the world in which we now live and move and have our being, then that world becomes the means of God’s work with us. If, as our modern society has come to understand, evil can only be believed to exist in the ins and outs of the historical world – and not in some spiritual realm floating above us – then this is also the place where God is found. God is found nowhere else but in the wo rld we can touch and see, because there is nowhere “else” for God to be. The battlefields of heaven and hell are the battlefields of our lives here and now. It is in the very midst of our lives that Paul’s “spiritual” battles take place. Or, to put it more clearly, our struggles in the world are precisely spiritual struggles.

In view of the struggle of faith Paul describes, he calls us to  “tool up” – to be equipped with the armour and the weapons which God provides for the purpose of standing firm in the promise of the full humanity of Jesus Christ becoming ours: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, as shoes whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

But just as the forces for good and the forces for evil are not wafty spiritual entities doing their thing in some invisible space, so also the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness and the shield faith and so on are not just nice Christian ideas to nod our heads at. They are not “spiritual” things in heads and hearts. These are disciplines – practices – which will necessarily mark every believer who is seriously engaged in the struggle for an authentic human and Christian existence.  If God’s place is in the world, so also are God’s ways with us “worldly”. We find a firm footing in life by attention to God’s calling, through practice and discipline, through study and prayer and fellowship and lives lived in accordance with God’s patterns for how we ought to relate to each other. As we can learn and be influenced and trained by negative influences, so also we must continually be learning and training ourselves in faith.

Paul’s claim is that it is hard work being a Christian because, the forces arrayed against human freedom are they are powerful in a very worldly sense. There is much to hold us back, much to limit us, much to tempt us into less than the fullness of life for which we were created.

We are called, then, to stand firm in all that God has given as resources for growing in faith and understanding, for defending what God has already made of us, and for working with God in making further inroads into the realms of darkness and captivity, that the world might take hope in the promise of light and freedom.

Paul ends his letter to the Ephesians with a call to them, and to us: Stand firm. Grow. Do not look back. Look only forward to the life to which we are all called, secured by what God has given us for the purpose.

This doesn’t happen as if by magic. One Christian commentator has remarked that one of the reasons our Christian faith often doesn’t make sense to us is that we lack practices which reflect it and make it real. If God is only a matter of head and heart – and in this sense only “spiritual” – then the things of God will make little sense in a world less about spirit than it is about what we actually do, touch and manipulate. Christian faith rests on habits and patterns which will strengthen us in lives of love and righteousness.

God is faithful.

If God will meet us with grace when we fail in our discipleship, how much more will God meet and strengthen us if we seek earnestly to be shaped by growing in knowledge and understanding, in the practice of prayer, in love and service, and in active commitment to peace in the world which God is healing.

Stand firm, Paul says to us. Continue not only to “believe” but to look like people who believe – people whose faith is not realised elsewhere but in the shape of the lives they live.

It is by God’s own grace that we might do this; let us, then, claim that grace, and give it form in lives which claim this world as God’s own.

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Pentecost 12
11/8/2024

2 Samuel 18:5-15
Psalm 34
John 6:35, 41-51

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Most of you here this morning probably have in your pocket or bag a device which is capable of recording and storing thousands of photographs and tens of thousands of books.

These days, information is cheap – recording the details of our lives is cheap, and easy. We can click a picture of every meal we eat and upload it to share for others (for reasons not entirely clear), or write posts on all sorts of platforms, sharing instantly and perhaps forever what thought has just arced from one place to another in our minds.

We know that it wasn’t like this in the “olden days”, of course. But what is less obvious is what this meant for recording information back then. In the times that the Scriptures were written, materials were expensive, and the labour required to transmit a written story was enormous.

One effect of this was that you would keep the details down to just what needed to be said. While we – at a whim – can afford to store high resolution images and detailed texts we might never look at or read – the writers of what are now our Scriptures had to be sure that what was recorded actually mattered.

This being the case, what do we make of all the detail we have about the life of David in the scriptural narrative – for the detail abounds?

Today’s reading from 2 Samuel skips over a lot of the Absalom affair, precisely to be brief. But, to fill in some of that detail: Absalom’s sister Tamar was raped by their half-brother Amnon. Knowing this, David nevertheless refused to act against Amnon. Eventually, Absalom kills Amnon and flees into exile, later to be reconciled to David. Absalom, however, has high political ambitions, and campaigns to replace David as king, forcing David to flee Jerusalem. Absalom pursues David but, despite David’s insistence that he not be hurt, the young man is killed, as we heard in today’s reading. In the midst of all this, there are defections and spies, passion and suicide – all the makings of a great TV series.

Whatever judgement we might make about all that, we might wonder, 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 that in the text. Mostly, we hear what happened but not what it means or what judgement we should make 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 has 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 abuse of Bathsheba and 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.  How could God’s favourite be all this?

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 what 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 before, David serves here not simply as one person among the many billions of us who have lived before and since but as a representative figure.

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. We are brave and beautiful, we kill and steal, we plant and build, we are neglected and raped. We are no mere “stars” which descend from heaven for a time before returning, as is sometimes sentimentally said, as if our core reality were the simplicity of a single light. We are – each of us – whole galaxies of hopes, experiences, achievements and failures.

Yet, for the most part, we prefer either to oversimplify the complexity of the good and the bad which we are. Such oversimplification is akin to the sentimentality we considered last week. It speaks a partial truth: “stop the boats”, “a woman’s right to choose”, “from the river to the sea”, “God gave us this land”, “but Absalom is my son” are partial truths, wishful oversimplifications of deep and complex human realities. Sentimentality omits inconvenient details about what we are.

But even if oversimplification serves us nicely in distracting us from unpleasant details of our reality, this doesn’t work for God. God will consider us without reduction, without covering over. There are no fig leaves adequate for 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. We don’t what this, not here, not now. 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. We simplify to survive.

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, like the unfortunate Absalom hanging in the fork of a tree, we are strangely suspended: hanging between heaven and earth. This is where we live most of our lives.

And so anything worth hearing of God and gospel must acknowledge this. The Old Testament narratives don’t just tell us “what happened”. They show David – and everyone else – now ascending a little, now descending a little, neither properly divine nor properly human. For whatever other reasons we might value the Old Testament, we have to love its realism.

And it’s because of this that the place Jesus himself occupies is our actual place: hanging on the cross, suspended between heaven and earth, seeming to be neither human nor divine. God know us here, as we are.

To say with John that the Word became flesh is to say God becomes our flesh in all its messy, suspended detail. And now 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, caught between what we wish we were and what we see ourselves to be.

The details of the stories – David’s and ours – matter first because they are what make us us. This is us. But the details also matter because they are known by a God who – sometimes in spite of the details, sometimes because of them – loves us and cherishes us: for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.

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 he does not simply fall within God’s capacity to love, but is in fact the focus of that love.

And so also for us. 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.

And let our thanksgiving take the form of turning to the messy, suspended world, and loving it as God does.

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Pentecost 7
7/7/2024

2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Psalm 48
Mark 6:1-13

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God, may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

As I begin this sermon two things give me some encouragement:

Following the Gospel reading, I am very glad to be preaching in Melbourne. I was born in Ōtautahi Christchurch. This is not my hometown, so there is some hope!

Second, my focus today will be on our reading from 2 Corinthians. As I prepared for this sermon I went back over some of my notes from the class I took on this epistle. I found a quote I wrote in a reflective piece we were asked to write about our major exegetical essay:

“The sense of the Bible’s distance can be surmised from the immense struggle I had with the major exegetical essay – submitting work I was unhappy with. My sustained engagement with the text revealed it to be far more complex and foreign than I had hitherto appreciated. It stood against me…”

I have been in the depths with this text before. So at the very least the thorniness of today’s reading isn’t new!

The challenge in engaging scripture is that the text always pulls us in two opposite directions.

On the one hand, the closer we look at the text, the more we wrestle with its language, the historical context, the sweep of its ancient rhetoric, the subtle references to other texts within and beyond scripture, the more and more we appreciate its complexity. So far as I can tell all of scripture was written by aliens. People whose lives and understandings of the world are so remote from me that I can scarcely imagine what their world was like. The texts which we have received are utterly distant and strange.

On the other hand, because what we have received in these texts is, “prophetic and apostolic testimony, in which [we] hear the Word of God and by which [our] faith and obedience are nourished and regulated.” (Basis, 5) Because these texts are a witness to our living faith in a living God, they are the most intimate of texts. Not alien, but deeply, deeply personal. Not distant, but close.

This is the mystery of what it means to encounter the Word of God in the scriptures. To interweave the intimacies of our relationship with God with the stories of alien, yet fellow, believers long ago. There is a sense in which the way we understand the world itself needs to be pierced through by the light of our experience of faith.

Part of what makes the Apostle Paul quite difficult to read is that he is often reconfiguring our understanding of the world itself. In part this is because of his own transformative encounter with the Risen Christ. In light of this encounter Paul was forced to reevaluate everything he knew about himself and the world. Such a radical transformation led him to reinterpret his personal, as well as cultural and religious, identity and history. In this way many of us can identify with Paul: knowing for ourselves the indelible mark our encounter with Christ has left on who we are and how we make sense of ourselves and the world.

And yet, the more alien dimension of Paul’s reconfiguration of history arises out of his place within the particular historical, cultural, and religious moment in which he lived. While Paul, in today’s reading, offers a parody of mystical experiences of the heavens, Paul very much lived in a world in which journeys through the heavens were a live option. Part of what makes the parody work is the assumption of a multilayered heaven – with estimates ranging from 3 to over 300 layers … And the place of paradise among these heavens.

Our challenge as those listening for the Word of God in the Scriptures is to understand just how Paul’s reconfiguration of the world helps us to do the same.

Paul adopts the posture of a mystic trying to argue for the validity of his ministry. Arguing that he has seen through the veil of the world, and ascended to the third heaven. We might never really know which schema of heaven Paul had in his head: 3 layers of heaven? 7? 10? Much of this text is still too alien to really know so.

But it is fairly clear that Paul is using a fair bit of irony here. This mystical experience has not, in the end, filled Paul with mystical insight: he declares only that he is a fool. Whatever he learnt was unutterable anyway. So too, this experience has not made Paul the strong decisive leader who peers through the veil to the truth of the matter. Paul is weak, and has a thorn in his flesh.

We might imagine that when Paul says this mystical journey ended up in Paradise that he arrived late to an empty Eden. Elsewhere Paul uses the interplay of Adam and Jesus to talk about the way the world has become captive to sin. Perhaps in this story Paul arrives to find Paradise already lost. Paul is whisked up to see the mysteries of all of time and space, and returns with nothing.

In the end the best Paul could hope for is a t-shirt that reads: “I got whisked up to heaven and all I got was this lousy thorn in my flesh.”

The whole point of Paul’s story about traversing the heavens seems to be how irrelevant that whole journey is. How little it matters supposedly understanding all the mysteries of the world.

What ultimately matters is the piercing of the thorn in his flesh. Again, we’ll never really know what this thorn was. But we might make something of the fact that thorns pierce the flesh. At least rhetorically for Paul, the thorn draws him back to the experience of Christ. Pierced flesh, suffering in the flesh, weakness which holds a hidden power.

Ultimately the great mysteries of the world are not to be found or solved by some insight into the riddle beneath all things. Rather, it is always back to the cross which we must return. The power of that weakness, the strength in that pierced flesh.

So what, then, as we move from this quite alien story to our own lives of faith?

Perhaps we can be so bold as to imagine our own journey through the heavens.

“I once knew a Church which was so enamoured by its own moral clarity … that was able to see that protecting its place and influence in the world was like recreating Paradise … that had left a large legacy in society …”

But all of this, in the end, counts for very little. What the Church needs is a thorn in its flesh. A piercing which reminds us of the crucifixion, which is the true axis of history. A thorn which — and we should be a little bit bold here — helps us to hold lightly the idea that, “the moral arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice.” Not because God is not sovereign over the world, but because no one uses this quote as a word of repentance. We must allow the thorn of the cross to pierce the flesh of the Church, and remind us that we do not see through the veil of the world when we are convinced of the Church’s self-importance. We see through the veil when we are reminded that it is the cross which pierces the veil.

The cross which transforms our lives, and leads us to the kinds of service which are for their own sake — not merely to secure the success of our various political projects. It is the cross of a living God: the Risen Crucified One, who ultimately transforms the stories of our lives. So that We do not seem to protect or sustain the institutions of the Church, but the resurrection life in the crucified bodies of the world.

This is the secret behind the veil. Not a glimpse into paradise. But the vision of the cross in this world, with all its chaos and confusion. This is the world which needs the piercing, saving power of God. No other world and no other salvation. Not an institution sustained for its own sake, but a people formed by the transforming power of God. People who know hope, and live love, and seek fresh mercy every day.

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Pentecost 5
23/6/2024

Job 38:1-11
Psalm 20
Mark 4:35-41

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The opposite of faith is not unbelief but fearing the wrong thing.

‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing’?

Until this week, the assumption of perhaps every thought I have ever had about this question – and probably every sermon I have heard on it – is, Yes, Jesus does care – of course, Jesus cares. The evidence for this is that he stills the storm. Is this not what care would look like: noticing and acting?

Let’s affirm that Jesus does care, while allowing that closer attention to the story undermines confidence in too easy a ‘Yes’ in response to the desperate question, Do you not care? Or, perhaps more to the point for those in that boat and us in ours, we might enquire more deeply of this story just what the care of Jesus looks like.

Crucial to all this is that Jesus has to be woken up in order to be made aware of a storm which has scared the b’Jesus into all his friends. The disciples presume, not unreasonably, that one has to be conscious to care. And so, pun (w)holy intended, they effectively ask, For Christ’s sake, Jesus; how can you sleep at a time like this?

The gospel’s answer to this is that it is precisely for the Christ’s sake that he sleeps – not because the Christ is tired and needs to catch up on his rest but because there is nothing present of sufficient moment to warrant him waking; there is nothing to worry about.

This is too much, of course, if the story were about a few blokes in the wrong place at the wrong time. If that were all that the story told, then there is plenty to worry about and plenty to do, and the disciples are right to be holding on very tight with one hand and bailing frantically with the other. But this is not the point of the story – the point of telling the story.

The storm is not stilled to demonstrate that Jesus cares and will meet our sense of what we need. The wind and the waves are stilled in order that Jesus might be heard – a still, small voice cutting through the wild night. He needs to be heard, not to deny or do away with the wild and frightening things, but that those things be relegated – be put in their right place – in the hearts and minds of the disciples.

And what is it we are to hear? What is it for which the storm is stilled?

‘Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?’

By this Jesus does not mean, “Can’t you fix this yourself?” Of course they can’t. ‘Have you no faith?’ means, “These are only wind and waves.     Fear. Only. God.”

The care Jesus demonstrates here is not that he will still the storms about us. There is no promise in the story that the storm will be stilled. Jesus will himself soon succumb to a perfect storm of fear and suspicion, and a few of those in the boat will perish in other religious and political storms over the next 20 or 30 years. Many interpreters of this passage see this story, in fact, as written specifically for those later situations, as an answer to their pressing question: Does God care what is now happening to the church?

God does care what is happening to the church, but in the sense of, “Why is my church timid? Why does it cower?” Does it imagine that hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword will separate it from me (Romans 8.35)? We are again in the space we have visited the last couple of weeks – Adam and Eve, suddenly afraid when they notice their vulnerability (a vulnerability which was always there), and then our own disorientations and sense of vulnerability as a few reliable foundations have shaken and buildings fallen, and we’ve had to take wing until we find somewhere else to nestle into again.

Have you no faith? Why the so timid, fearful?

The stance Jesus takes before the wind and the waves is the same stance he takes in the face of the cross: there is, finally, nothing to fear here. It is scarcely pleasant – it will sometimes even be hell – but if God was indeed crucified on that ancient Friday, then hell is not beyond God’s attention, and hell doesn’t change that, finally, we belong not to the devil but to God. All this is true all of the time – as the funeral service puts it – in strength and in weakness, in achievement and in failure, in the brightness of joy and in the darkness of despair.

We. Belong. To God.

The ‘climate’ – what is going on in the world around us – is not a indicator of where God is or is not.

Notice that, in this way of thinking about the story, it matters not one jot whether Jesus could actually command the wind and the waves. For all that we have said, the story is irrelevant if we seek evidence about whether Jesus was a miracle-worker or not. We notice most of all the calming of the waters and the wind, and much less the word which the calming makes it possible to hear: Do not cower here; have you no faith?

This is the hard part of the story, and not the miracle. And so at the end the disciples fall back in terror, now at Jesus and no longer at the storm. The shock is not merely that Jesus commands the storm, but that he has no fear of it. For the story, these two things are the same.

And so Jesus says not to us, You could have done this yourself, had you the faith. He declares rather, If the god I am is God, your life is not to be a fearful one. Faith is knowing what or whom to fear, and what not to fear. The opposite of faith is not unbelief but fearing the wrong thing. Faith is knowing what does, and does not, own us.

We will likely be afraid on high seas, for all the obvious reasons. The storm might be a threatening diagnosis; the unbearably quiet house brought by bereavement; the loss of a job; missiles lobbed from over the border; public embarrassment; the impending divorce (or even the impending marriage!).

We will likely be afraid in such situations for all the obvious reasons. Yet, in such storms – wild or still – Jesus asks, And what is it about this place you know but is not obvious? I am with you always. You are mine. You are mine.

In all such things, you are – together in the boat, as a community of love and mutual support – more than conquerors through the one who loves you. There is nothing to fear but that we might fear what is unworthy of fear.

Do not be afraid. There are more important things to do.

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Pentecost 2
2/6/2024

1 Samuel 3:1-20
Psalm 139
Mark 2:23-3:6

Sermon preached by Andrew Gador-Whyte

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Why do we come to church? Well, one of the reasons is to listen in order to learn to speak. To learn to speak in imitation of Christ. To learn to speak for, even on behalf of, Jesus Christ in the world. In other words, we come to church to learn how to blaspheme.

More on whatever that is supposed to mean in a moment. But first, let’s consider our passage from 1 Samuel. We often recall this as a cute story about the childlike openness of the young Samuel’s faith. And of course, this passage is very much about childlike openness to God’s calling. Jesus has a lot to say about that. Faith is always a gradual learning to listen with simplicity. Faith is the habitual opening of ourselves to hear God’s voice – in the ordinary ways God speaks to us, and with a willingness to be surprised by the miraculous.

And in fact, each of us is in Samuel’s position. All the vivid appearances of God like this in the Old Testament point us towards God’s coming in Jesus of Nazareth. And the baptism that we share is a baptism into a shared prophetic ministry.

But clearly this passage is also about God’s judgement against the blasphemy that has become established in the holy place. ‘The word of the Lord was rare and visions were not widespread.’ There is something seriously awry in the life of the nation. The temple at Shiloh has become a place of exploitation and immorality because of the actions of the sons of Eli. The sons are presented as hardened criminals. God will judge them, and will also judge Eli who said the right things but did not act to restrain them.

What’s clear here and throughout the Bible is that there is a close connection between blasphemy in the strict sense and injustice in national life. Blasphemy in the most basic sense is the misuse of the Name of God, it’s the subject of the Third Commandment. It’s irreverence or untruthfulness in speech and worship, and like the sin of idolatry it has far-reaching implications when it has become established in the life of God’s people. What is done in speech about God, is done to our sisters and brothers. Think of Isaiah’s railing against fraudulent weights and measures. Or James exposing the blasphemy of sympathetic words with no intention to act for the other’s good. Or Jesus’ anger at those standing in the way of their neighbour’s healing on the sabbath.

Blasphemy is not a ‘religious’ sin. Misuse of the name of God and disobedience of the law relating to worship are a sign of disordered priorities, of abuses allowed to take root in a society. God’s indignation against blasphemous practices at the temple is not a petulant taking of offense by God. It’s a judgement against those given authority to serve at the heart of national life, but who are abusing and misleading the people. It’s a judgement against the refusal of the gift of God, a gift we must acknowledge our complete dependence on.

In the one baptism we have been adopted into, we share in one prophetic, priestly, and kingly ministry. That is, of course, Jesus’ ministry, which we have been made members of. In baptism, we have been met, like Samuel, by God speaking to us face to face. Jesus has given us an authority we did not choose for ourselves, an authority which we will have to grow into and live out of our own integrity and adult exercise of conscience.

What we are all baptised into is a shared life of learning truthful and reverent speech: of holding one another to account for truthfulness and reverence. Reverence in speech has often been conflated with politeness, but, actually, the Bible is never polite. And likewise, reverence can be confused with deference to an unjust social order. But true reverence in speech is the confidence that our speech is not ultimately our own. Our words are ours to use in the worship of God in the marketplace, the workplace, the law court, the home, the Lord’s house. And reverence is the confidence that, by the grace of God, our ordinary words can be God’s gift for our neighbour’s healing and growing into maturity.

There is no part of our lives where God cannot be trusted to be at work, revealing himself, redeeming the time, standing in judgement over and against our untruthfulness. For much of our lives, the way we hear God is not from God coming and standing before us, as he appears to Samuel. We ordinarily hear God speaking in and through our neighbour. God wills that we encounter Christ, scripture, sacrament not through the Self-Serve, but as a gift given through our sisters and brothers. Here we train one another up in the grammar of truthful speech.

What Jesus tells us is that our culture needs us to maintain an absolute respect for the truth. Think of his words about simplicity and truthfulness in speech: ‘let your yes be yes and your no be no: anything else comes from the evil one.’ Our world needs us to maintain a profound reverence for the world not as a final end in itself, but as the fragile and complicated place God claimed to be his cradle.

Our world is, we continue to discover, a blasphemous world – a world needing to be redeemed by reverence for the truth. It’s a world in which hospitals and refugee camps have been treated as targets. Where euphemisms for killing are piled upon euphemisms. Where freedom of speech is asserted as a licence to abuse and spread lies. Where there is no proper respect for secrets and the sanctity of the interior life.

It’s a world in which anti-vaxers or pro-vaxers, or more tragically, pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli voices, have been taken to be blasphemers and treated as though they had forfeited a claim to the basic generosity that structures society. We are part of a world where blasphemy is taken for right speech. We are people of unclean lips, and we live among a people of unclean lips. This is the world to which we have been yoked as apprentices in a prophetic vocation. This is a world that needs us to keep learning the grammar of reverence for life.

So then – what then do we make of Jesus the Blasphemer? Jesus repeatedly transgresses the law. He heals on the sabbath. He touches the infected, he socialises with people who are not in a state of grace. He overturns the tables of the temple traders changing secular money into sacred. We read the Gospels in a serious voice, but Jesus’ parables are often funny, ironic, irreverent in exposing our hypocrisy and hardness of heart. Jesus is held to be a blasphemer in claiming to be greater than Moses, the Son of the Blessed One, I Am. And it is precisely as a blasphemer that Jesus is condemned to death.

The New Testament does not give us an easy formula for reconciling the givenness of the law and the cavalier way Jesus transgresses it. We can only witness Jesus’ freedom here as authoritative reverence and truthfulness, bringing to light our darkness. Jesus’ blasphemy reveals that much that is held as sacred in the world is idolatry, lies, self-projection, or simply violence.

As with Samuel, the risen Jesus meets us face to face, speaking our name. And seeing the risen Christ, we recognise that we had been so profoundly enmeshed in the worship of our own security, that we refused the gift of God that is the blasphemy of Jesus of Nazareth.

But God will not allow our refusal of the gift to have the last word. Because, we can trust that, most often through our sisters and brothers, Christ will call us by name as he called Samuel, confronting us and calling us into service.

Visions are not widespread in our blasphemous times. But we may open ourselves to the grace of God, who trains us through our life together to speak with truth and reverence. Which may, of course, be to speak with laughter, with irony, with irreverence in a culture where euphemisms and lies justify the buildup of weapons. Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening, and teach us your holy blasphemy.

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Trinity Sunday
26/5/2024

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
John 3:1-17

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“Whom shall I send? ”, cries the God of Isaiah’s vision. And the wannabe prophet responds, “Here am I Lord. Send me. ”

This is often read as a text for missionaries, even for the mission of the church as a whole. God seeks voices to testify to God’s truth, and Isaiah’s enthusiasm serves as the perfect motivational text for the individual wondering whether she is called into the ordained ministries or for a church wondering whether it needs to be jolted into action. God’s “Whom shall I send?” seeks the willing response, “Here am I, Lord. Send me. ”

So far, so comfortably pious. But Isaiah’s vision continues in the verses which follow those we’ve heard this morning but to which our reading rarely extends. “Go then”, said the Lord, “and say to the people”… What?

• That they should be a diverse community?
• That it’s time for a restructure?
• That God will wipe away every tear from their eyes?

Nah. Go then, said the Lord, and say to the people:

“Keep listening, but do not comprehend;
keep looking, but do not understand. ”

Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes,

so that they may not look with their eyes, and [not] listen with their ears,

and [not] comprehend with their minds, [so that they may not] turn and be healed.

“I send you to them”, says the Lord, “so that they may not see, may not listen, may not understand. ” This is not what we expect…

And it gets worse. Then Isaiah said, “How long, O Lord? ”

¹¹ …And [the Lord] said:
‘Until cities lie waste
without inhabitant,

and houses without people,
and the land is utterly desolate;

¹² until the Lord sends everyone far away,
and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land.

¹³ Even if a tenth part remains in it,
it will be burned again,

like a terebinth or an oak
whose stump remains standing
when it is felled. ’

In view of all this, there comes to mind the question of Nicodemus in our Gospel reading this morning: How can these things be?

How can it be that we must be born again?

How can it be that God is not tame?

How can it be that our part in the mission of God might just be to proclaim and enact until the land is utterly desolate?

It’s not for nothing that these verses are rarely included when Isaiah’s vision pops up in the lectionary. The lectionary sometimes seems to want to protect us from the more difficult biblical judgements. Or, perhaps, the lectionary wants to protect God. If we leave a few verses out, we can stitch a couple of fig leaves over God’s confronting nakedness, because a God whose proclamation doesn’t improve things would seem to be a useless God; better to cover that uselessness up by not reading a few things.

How can such things be? Is ministry not about trying to help the people to hear, to see, and to understand? Is mission not about making a discernable difference – an improvement? Do we not seek to avert the encroaching desolation and emptiness?

It is in the thick of the choking incense, ears filled with the shrieks of the burning seraphim, and dripping with perspiration from the scorching heat of the altar, that Isaiah cries out, “Send me, Lord”. But this is not to say that the smoke lifts or the noise or heat subsides. The powerful Assyrians are coming, and Isaiah’s ministry will be to ride the wave of the Assyrian onslaught to its very bitter end.

If we claim Isaiah’s “Send me” for the mission of the church itself, is the call on us to ride out some coming desolation? To put it more pointedly, who would be a minister of the gospel or a member of a congregation in a mainstream liberal Western denomination here and now, in what looks very much like the twilight of the church, quite apart from what’s happening in the wider world?

“How long, O Lord?”, cries Isaiah. And the Lord replies, Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and churches without people.

What kind of mission is this? Can we bear it?

We must do “something”, of course. The Uniting Church Assembly’s final report of its Act2 process has just been released with its recommendations for a reorganisation of the church. It is “something” and a response to a real problem. But there is not a lot of preaching into the desolation to be found on all those pages – not a lot of what we might call a theological realism which recognises the grim possibilities as much as those which enthusiasm can see.

– – – – – – – – – –

Negotiating all this hinges very much on what we think desolation means and, more importantly, whose desolation it is.

Consider the following Christian hijacking of Isaiah’s vocation:

I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; …and one called to another and said. “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory. ” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? ”

And a voice responded, “Here am I, Father, send me. ”

Go, then, said the Father, and become a parable. Let them listen but not understand, see but not perceive, hear but not respond. Become the sacrament of their dullness and deafness and blindness.

And then the Son asked, “How long, Father? ” And the Father said, until you are made an emptiness in the midst of the land, burned and burned again like a tree which has been cut down – until you have taken the vast, vast, vast emptiness of the godforsaken and made it our very own desolation.

And so, as love for the world, God sent the only Son to become a desolation, that all who believe in him might have fullness of life.

– – – – – – –

We fear desolation, for it is the loss of ourselves and the loss of God. And so we wince at the thought of it, and even more so at the suggestion that there is nothing we can do about it – nothing even which God will do about it. We look rather for a way out, a solution to whatever crisis threatens emptiness, and we expect of ourselves a capacity to rise to meet the threat and turn it aside.

This is the “fix-it” mentality which treats the world as a problem and our technological ingenuity – our strategies, our negotiations – as the answer.

But the world is not a problem which can be fixed; it is a mystery within which to live. Here and there, of course, we can do “something” to make a difference, and we should where we can. But what was bearing down on Isaiah’s people was not their doing (though the prophets make a causal link), just as their prosperity in other times was not God’s blessing. The mission of prophet, of evangelist and of church, is not to bring solutions to problems. It is to name mysteries. It is to bring into the mix an account of God, the world and ourselves which calls hearers to a different seeing and a different being.

The preaching of Isaiah into the desolation is not God’s condemnation of the people, and neither is it the offering of a solution to the crisis bearing down on them. Isaiah’s word is the sign of God’s faithfulness. It is God seeing us, comprehending us to the very end. The word of truth, the wisdom at the heart of creation, the secret – the mystery – of all things, this doesn’t change as those things themselves change. God is faithful: the Word of life is still spoken.

And so, in Jesus, God himself rides the desolating wave to its very bitter end in the cross, in order that we might know something other than bitterness. Because now, when we arrive at the end, we find that God is already there, in the wormwood and the gall. Our lives – our joys and our desolations – are not problems to solve but mysteries to be lived. Should we be consigned to desolation, it is already God’s own desolation. The where-it-wills freedom of the Spirit is not divine unpredictability but our confidence that nothing can be outside God.

We worry about how much we see and hear and comprehend, and so we plan, and report, and budget. And all this is OK – it is a form of prayer. But this is less important than knowing ourselves to have been seen, to have been heard, and to have been comprehended. Send me, says the Son, and we will know their desolation, so that they will know that nowhere they go is finally godless.

We’ve read the headlines and heard the dark foreshadowings of today’s prophets. If they are right, it matters not. As we pray through our many efforts to avert the next threatened disaster, we do so in the knowledge God has already been where we are going. God has been to us.

Step into tomorrow, cries the voice from the throne. Go where I have gone, and I will meet you there.

This is the God in whom we live and move and will have our being, our end and our beginning, wherever we find ourselves.

“Who will go with us, and live into whatever comes next?”, asks Isaiah’s God, and ours.

Here are we, Lord. Take us.

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Pentecost
19/5/2024

Ezekiel 37:1-14
Psalm 102
Acts 2:1-21
John 15:26-27, 16:4-15

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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There are some things that are just too hard to talk about. Some things defy description. Take God for example. How can you talk about God? Our basic senses of sight and hearing and smell and so forth, they can’t perceive God, so how can we put language to the divine and how can we tell what God is like?

In the face of this great difficulty many have concluded that there is no God. Millions have come to another conclusion and their conviction has demanded that they find words to tell of their experience of the God they cannot see or hear or taste or smell or feel but who unmistakably is revealed to them, by what means, again, language struggles to make clear.

One form of language that is helpful for explaining the inexplicable is story telling. Philosophers and theologians can give us tightly packed arguments that help us understand who God is but the story teller philosopher and the theologian who spins a yarn is also the purveyor of truth.

St Luke was such a theologian. When he told the story of God coming among the friends of Jesus as a rushing wind and as tongues of fire the story teller preacher was at his best. But is that what really happened, those things Luke said about 3,000 converts in one hit? Maybe they did. John’s gospel describes the giving of the Spirit differently so one or both of them could be wrong in the details, but each is describing a truth through a story. What is the truth about God that Luke is saying in his dramatic and energetic story?

Well, Luke is starting by saying that God is dramatic and energetic. He also deals with the delicate issue of how God seems to be revealed to some people and not to others, or that some people perceive God and others make fun of those who do. So Luke tells of a house filled with wind and flames alighting on the disciples.

In this scene there is the inner group of Jesus followers who are the ones who receive the Spirit of God and there are all the others. The idea of ‘them and us’ is a very uncomfortable one for Luke who understands that in Jesus Christ God intends that all people come within God’s rescue plan. He cannot get away from the fact that some people know God and others don’t so those who do go all out to make God, who was known to them in Jesus, and who is alive in them through this gift of the Spirit, – to make God known to all other people. Luke is very particular about who this means. He includes in his story of drama and energy the strange phenomenon of people understanding speech across all the linguistic barriers. People from all nations and tongues can receive this gift. This is not a ‘them and us’ situation. This is a for everyone event. Bringing different national groups together was a vital issue for Luke. His understanding of who God is includes the idea that God made all people and desires all people to be reconciled to God and to each other. He understood that part of the task of the followers of Jesus is to make this known to all people and that God would be in that task breaking down the barriers.

So why would Luke have been so interested in God and race relations? Was it just a disembodied theological concept, that because God made all people, all people should be reconciled to one another. Why should that follow? Why not allow that different races have their different places where God put them? Let them get on with each other in their own places? No! In our experience and in Luke’s experience it simply does not work that way. Race relations were as much an issue and a threat to world peace for Luke and his world as it is for us and our world. He saw minority groups oppressed by occupying forces. He saw attempts at ethnic cleansing. He and his church experienced separation from family roots and alienation from their spiritual homelands.

Luke was convinced that reconciliation between all people was God’s will and the Spirit’s power to achieve and that God called men and women into that ministry of reconciliation.

Over the years Rob Gallacher and I have had requests to provide photos of icons for the front cover of the devotional aid With Love to the World. A few years ago I was asked for a photo for the Pentecost edition. The result is on the front of today’s order of service. With Love to the World is a publication of the Uniting Church. One of the characteristics of the Uniting Church is that it is made up congregations of different ethnicities. On a festival occasion when the church hears again the story of the power of the Holy Spirit enabling people of all languages to hear Peter’s sermon I wanted to find a way to celebrate our church’s diversity and a unity found by the pouring of the Spirit. In the icon Peter stands holding words from Joel 2:18, ‘God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh’. Peter stands on a kind of pavement made up of translations of that text in some of the languages of ethnic congregations of the Uniting Church – Tongan, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean and Tamil and Garrwa, spoken by First Peoples of Australia living near the Gulf of Carpentaria’s coastline.

Back when the icon was painted I offered it as a prayer of thanks for a unity found in diversity. Today it is offered in a world tearing itself apart because of its diversity, where nations head towards Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones. Can current conflicts end in any other way than death? Ezekiel’s vision poses our questions; ‘[God] said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.”’ (Ezekiel 37:3)

As I use this word of Scripture to offer a word of hope from God, I am conflicted. Ezekiel offered his word to Israel in Babylon’s captivity. If the icon of Peter at Pentecost is a prayer as proclaimed by Joel declaring that God’s Spirit will be poured out on ALL flesh, then Ezekiel’s vision must address today’s world rather then an ancient time. The context for this Scripture needs translation to our time. Also, it is word that needs to be addressed to people rather than to nations and their governments. In answer to the question, ‘Can these bones live?’ God says, ‘you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live …’ (Ezekiel 37:13f). My prayer is that this be a word of hope – for Israelis and Palestinians, for Ukrainians and Russians, for all victims of aggression and their perpetrators. To them, and to us, God says, ‘you shall live.’

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Easter 7
12/5/2024

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
John 17:6-19

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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It is Mothers’ Day, and so long as we know who our mothers are, we can be pretty sure how we belong in our families. Because we know who mum is we know we don’t belong to the family next door. Because we know who mum is we know a lot of things about ourselves – why our skin is the colour it is, why our language and accent is the way it is – all sorts of things.

But we don’t just belong to a mother. We are not just members of our families. We are members of all kinds of groups. We are keenly aware of some of our groups when the national anthem plays or the football siren sounds. I remember an American preacher, James Glasse, explaining how he knew who he was by knowing who he wasn’t. He and his friends told stories about the black people. That’s how he knew he was white. They told stories about the Catholics. That’s how he knew he was Protestant, and so on.

One of the strong messages I have received through my formative years and beyond is that we are all members of the human race, all equal in the sight of God, all destined under his mercy and good favour. It was pretty easy to be convinced of this, living in an upper middle class suburb of a city equal in wealth and sophistication to any of the great cities of the modern world – pretty easy living during a post war migration scheme under a white Australia policy – pretty easy living under a policy for Aborigines that advocated assimilation, a policy that my church went along with. Under that policy I joined church work parties to build houses for Aboriginal families in country towns through NSW.

Then things became confused for me. People my age were going to university and were seeing Australia’s involvement in Vietnam differently from how the government saw the conflict. A petition did the rounds of my church objecting to the visit by the rugby union Springbok team from South Africa. I was confused. I didn’t know what apartheid was. Suddenly it was not as easy as it had all seemed. Brotherly love was not going to sweep through the world and make us all God’s loving children. (I hadn’t heard about sisterly love yet.)

But at least the church was on the right track, surely. There was talk of church union. Of three denominations coming together in Australia. This must surely be an irresistibly good thing to do. To my dismay the church was divided over the issue. I was a member of the NSW Assembly, and to my horror the vote went ‘no’ and the moderator could scarcely contain his joy and I saw the sorrow on the faces of the ministers and elders who had voted for union as they lined up at the table to record their dissent from the majority decision.

It wasn’t easy any more to hope for peace and goodwill in the world or in the church. The church and the world is departmentalised.

Now, as I read the scriptures I discover it was ever thus. In Jesus’ prayer for his disciples in John’s gospel there is a distinct them and usness about it. Jesus is praying for his disciples and not for the world. The disciples are in the world but they have been given into Jesus charge and he has not lost one of them. Jesus is in the world too but he is soon to be removed from the world. The disciples will remain in the world but they will not be of the world because the world hates them, so Jesus prays that the evil one, who is of the world will not bring them to harm.

Why couldn’t John say that Jesus prayed for the world too? What was going on in John’s church that prompts the recording of this prayer? In John’s church as in any group of people, there are those people who do not live up to the group’s ideals. When some of these people aspire to leadership in the group then you get political conflict. This causes uncertainty in the group. In the church, when there is uncertainty over ideals, it calls in question our certainty of our place within God’s loving care. John’s gospel is at pains to assure the faithful that they are in God’s loving care. The problem is that within the community of God’s care there are those who don’t really belong. Among the disciples there was one – Judas Iscariot. There he was in the community of the faithful, but until his betrayal, the faithful did not know that he did not really belong.

In John’s church there were people who left the community during time of persecution. How could this be that the community of faith could have members that were not true to their membership? It was as if the true church was invisible, known only to God, for only God can read the heart. These are conclusions that a church under persecution came to so they could understand the apparent inconstancies of life around them. The church is the safe place where God’s love and care is known. The world is hostile to the church so how are we to understand God’s presence in the world? And how are we to understand signs of the world in the church? Answer: the true church is invisible except to God. The sign of the faithful will be those who love Jesus and you can tell those as the ones who keep his commandments, and his commandment is to love one another. So the church is visible in as much as we can see love in the church, but its edges may be very blurry.

Is that the only way to think about these things? Well, no. Paul saw the church as being perfectly visible. He saw sinners in the church, all they needed was a good talking to by his good self, they would change and all would be well. The church is full of saints and sinners and they all belong within God’s good grace.

The world is different today, and so is the church. The world and the church are still pretty blurry around the edges. The signs of the church are still the same. Jesus’ followers can still be told apart from the ones who love enough to obey his commandments of love. But if ever we thought that love would be restricted to within the community of the faithful, that time is not now. John taught his church that Jesus prayed for the church, and so he does, but the loving work of an inclusive church is to pray for the world.

Families will gather today to honour their mothers. They will have a sense of a particular belonging. Churches gather to honour Jesus. They have a sense of a particular belonging as they gather around the Lord’s table. They are mindful of their love for Jesus and Jesus’ love for them, and of God’s love for all creation.

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Easter 6
5/5/2024

1 John 1:5-9
Psalm 98
John 15:9-17

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

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‘Love one another as I have loved you.’

Today in our lectionary reading, Jesus recalls, or perhaps better to say, foreshadows, last week’s reading from the first letter of John. In that letter, John says:

‘Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.’

This reading forms part of what is called Jesus’ Farewell Discourse. The final series of solemn words that Jesus imparts to his disciples as they gather together in apprehensive and furtive communion with Jesus for the last time. As they begin to face the cold new possibility of going on without Jesus. As they wrestle with the prospect of being left alone in a hostile world. I can only imagine how they must have drunk in these words, memorising them, meditating on them, arguing over their meaning, parsing over them again and again for crumbs of guidance and comfort in the days ahead.

We might think of this sequence as a kind of spoken Last Will and Testament. I think it is important to see it that way because it is generally at the end of our lives that we clarify, amongst all the tumult and distraction and day-to-day ordinariness, what is really important. We distil what our lives have meant and what we hope for the future. We seek the company of those we love. We express with a decisive finality who we are. What Jesus chooses to say now, we should regard as of supreme importance. It is a final summation of who he is and what he teaches. He reveals to the disciples what previously has been concealed, and he names them as his equals. No longer servants, but friends.

And this is his final summation:

God is love. Love one another as I have loved you.

How often have we heard these phrases? If you had to distil Christianity down to its barest elements, you could do worse than those. God is love. Love one another.

How good are you at loving, friends?

I wonder if familiarity dulls us to these words and their radicalness. How can we hear them today as though for the first time? How can we access their urgency, their insistence, their revolutionary character, as they must have been for the disciples who hear them firsthand?

One way, I think, is to remind ourselves of the context in which they are spoken.

We know that the world of the first century was a universe teeming with gods. It was an intensely polytheistic place. For the ordinary Roman, or the Greek, or the Egyptian, the gods were an inherent reality of what you did and what you experienced. It was expected that they would play a role, either in favour, curse, or indifference, the small affairs of your day-to-day living, and the great affairs of your kingdom. To the gods who presided over every aspect of life, you would appeal for the success of your business, for the safe passage of your ships, for the health of your household, for advantageous and harmonious marriage, for victory in war and stability in peace.

But what were the gods like?

The most influential of the ancient gods has always been the Greek. It is they who preceded the development of the Roman gods, and whose mythology has shaped divine stories throughout history and its many cultures.

The foremost of the Greek gods was Zeus. Presiding over the pantheon of Olympus, Zeus reigned, having overthrown the Titans and their primordial parents. Zeus was the god of sky and thunder, honoured above all, and deserving of sacrifice and worship befitting his station. But Zeus was also married to the goddess Hera, and was serially unfaithful to her. Zeus was a god driven by his lust. Again and again, he would see a mortal woman and desire her. He would couple with her, and his children became the demigods. But very often these couplings were violent and brutal. Sometimes he would disguise himself to get what he wanted. Sometimes he used force. Zeus was, in blunt terms, a serial rapist.

Perhaps you have heard of Prometheus, the god who, taking pity on humanity, gave them the gift of fire. And Zeus, furious at this unsanctioned act of initiative, punished Prometheus by chaining him to a mountain and condemning him that every day an eagle should come and peck out his liver.

Or Poseidon, the god of the sea. He too was as power-hungry and rapacious as his brother Zeus, and on one occasion forced himself upon a woman named Medusa, or was then transformed by Athena into a snake-haired monster.

These were the gods of the ancient world. They were not always so brutally callous. And the mythological stories are, in part, moral tales that serve an instructive, ethical purpose as well as a religious one.

But the gods of the Greek pantheon could never be accused of being characterised by ‘love’. Certainly not in the way that we understand it, and the way that Jesus or John means it. All the love of the ancient gods was directly inwardly. They loved themselves. They loved their pride and their vanity and their desire. They loved power and they loved to exercise it.

That’s why the historian Tom Holland in his excellent book ‘Dominion’ asserts so strongly the impact that the Christian gospel of love has exercised on the Western view of ourselves and our place in the world. What a transformation it must have been for those who had spent their lives making sacrifices to the capricious and self-loving gods of the old Pantheon, to think that God might love them. Not just favour them, but to enfold Godself, by God’s very nature, into loving relationship with them through God’s given son.

It changed the world.

And it must continue to change the world, through us.

The most important thing to say about this love that changes the world, is that it is not a feeling. It is not a chemical reaction that occurs in the brain and is exhausted. Not sentimentality. Not a temporary feeling of passion or nostalgia. It is not affection. Affection and passion may accompany love, but love in this theological sense encompasses so much more than the heart that beats harder.

Love is the greatest of all the gifts of the spirit. Love is our law. It is our constitution. It is our judge and our government. It is our yardstick and our scale. It speaks in our heart in no uncertain terms, to tell us what it requires. Love longs for reconciliation and forgiveness. It insists on mercy. It is patient and it is kind. Love is not proud, but it will fight for what is right. It is not jealous, but will make sacrifices for justice. Love is revealed in Jesus, God incarnate, who shares our life in the world. It is in love that the world is made, and toward love that all things bend.

Love is relationship. It is the obligation of being created things. We love because God first loved us. So it cannot rise and fall with our mood or our sentiment. It is for that reason that it is possible to love strangers, or our enemy. It makes it possible, above all, to die for what is right, as Jesus does.

It is for the law of love that we must be known for our staunch opposition to violence against women. It is for the law of love that we must be known as enemies of violence against children. It is for the law of love that we must be squarely against colonisation and unjust war and capricious injustice. We haven’t always been good at that, but we must become better. That is how we redeem the Gospel in the eyes of the world. The law of love places us in opposition to all those things that the old gods were. It places us in opposition to all the things that the gods of our day represent. The god of money, the god of power, the god of sex, the god of profit, the god of consumption, the god of novelty. The god of self-love is like a still pond, stagnant and unclean, and rotten. Nothing grows there. But the love of relationship, love that is given and received, is a river. It has movement, it gives life. It is clear and clean. You can drink from that water.

There is no fault in the law of love. It can never lose its power. It can never lose its revolutionary character. Only we, who can fail to live up to it. We don’t need a new story. The old story is still strong. It is ever young. We just have to keep telling it, keep holding on to it, keep making it real in our lives, and it will vindicate us. It cannot fail to vindicate us. The law of love will live on after us. No institutional failing of our making can diminish it. We can only diminish ourselves as its representatives and its disciples. But through it, we may abide in the great love of Jesus Christ. That for which there is no better thing to live for.

May the spirit strengthen and renew us as we seek to live out this final will and testament of Jesus Christ the lover:

Love one another as I have loved you.

Amen

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Easter 5
28/4/2024

1 John 4:7-21
Psalm 32
John 15:1-8

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“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love” (1 John 4).

John speaks here of the fear we carry because we do not believe that we are loved. But we need to unpack John’s logic a bit to see this.

“There is no fear in love”, he writes, “but perfect love casts out fear”. By itself, this can’t be true. Love fears losing what it loves: our children, perhaps, or our health, our identity, our independence, our beautiful and meaningful things. Our newspapers are filled with the loss – or the fear of losing – things we love, and so also our lives are filled with insurances, locks, seat belts and child safety policies. These things are not the absence of love but the presence of love’s fear. We secure ourselves in such ways in the hope that they will keep us safe.

But John continues: “…for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love”. John is interested not in the fear of loss but in our fear of God’s judgement (and our judgement of each other). The fear of such judgement arises from our freedom. Our capacity to make decisions – to choose one thing or another – carries the possibility of error and the reality of responsibility, and that responsibility brings with it the likelihood of judgement: an affirmation or rejection of what we have chosen. What if I make the wrong decision? What will God – or you – make of that?

There are certain kinds of decisions in which this hardly matters. Being wrong in daily decisions may simply cost us a bit of extra time, or maybe even thousands of dollars, but for many of us neither of these would be a particularly significant loss. We might cop a bit of flak, but being wrong on the small scale is something with which we’re quite accustomed and is often not much more than inconvenient.

But there are other kinds of decisions where it does matter and so where we do worry. Do I risk giving up my day job for something much less reliable but seemingly more faithful? Do I stay in or leave a shaky marriage? Do we close the congregation down, turn off the life support, or send the troops to war? Decisions like this give rise not only to the fear that I might lose something I love. If I make what is judged to be the wrong decision, I might also now stand exposed, accused and shamed, and so lose even more. What does John’s “perfected in love” mean here? What has love to do with such fear? How does one “get” such love, generate such love?

This is rather the wrong question; love is not a moral possibility, something we can generate to secure ourselves within that risky venture we call life. John does not say that if you love “enough”, you will have nothing to fear, so just love more. This merely restates the problem. If we fear we might do the wrong thing, we fear that we have not loved properly. The problem is that we don’t know what love is in this or that specific situation. Love has been turned into “doing the right thing”, but we can’t ever know just what the right thing is.

What, then, is it to be made perfect in love? What will break fear’s grip on us?

To be perfected in love doesn’t mean we have been made perfect lovers – that we now always do the right thing. It means rather that we have been perfected by a lover. The love which matters here is not, in the first moment, the love we generate. The love which matters has already been given: “Behold the manner of love the Father has given to us”, says John. And what is this “manner of love”? It is that we are called the children of God (1 John 3.1). There is no punishment to fear because, while our righteousness can be denied, our status as children cannot. This is love: not that we love God, but that God loves us. The love which really matters is the love that this one has for us. Perfection in love is knowing that, no matter what, this love will not let us go.

Three consequences flow from this, or perhaps just one in three modes.

First, John says to us: You are loved in this way. You are called the children of God. And nothing can change that. You do not stop being children by virtue of mistakes you make, and neither are you more God’s children by virtue of any good you might do. There is nothing to fear because you cannot be lost.

Second, John says to us: you are then, deeply, deeply free in all things. This is not a consumerist freedom of choice, not freedom to choose. It is freedom in choosing. In fear and trembling, we must say that, so far as our relationship with God is concerned, we cannot make the wrong choice. Love without fear springs from the confidence that nothing we can do can separate us from the love of God. This is the moral horror of the gospel, and our only hope.

But third, John says to us: we can only know ourselves to be free in this way by becoming God-like lovers ourselves. We can only know the freedom God’s love brings by loving in the way God loves. This is the meaning of grace, mercy and forgiveness. These are not merely nice things to do. They set aside punishment which might rightly have been imposed, and so set aside the fear of punishment.

Love like this is radically disruptive. Grace and mercy set just punishment aside. Forgiveness breaks the cycle of violence which generates the fear which makes us violent in the first place.

If Christian talk about grace means anything, it means just such a rupture of the tragic cycles within which we are all caught and by which we are tempted.

There is no fear in love; the love which perfects casts out our fear because, despite everything, it brings us to our completion as children God will not let go.

Love, then, as you have been loved, Jesus says. Become lovers with the height and depth and breadth of the love of God.

This is faith.

This is life.

This is hope.