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Easter Day
31/3/2024

Genesis 1:1-5
John 20:1-18

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With the resurrection of Jesus, God disturbs the peace which is our uneasy compromise with death.

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Early, on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb.

Early. It’s quiet, the early morning darkness, a quiet for quiet tasks: for thinking, for planning, for remembering, for tending to the dead. No matter how heart-rending it might be, death brings its own quiet and forces us to be still. Requiem in pace, we say to those who’ve died, Rest in peace, and quietness falls also on us who remain.

It had been a chaotic week for Mary and the other disciples, on top of all the movement, surprise, conflict, tension and misunderstanding of their tumultuous time with Jesus before that. The chaos now past, Mary’s quiet morning reflects the clarity and closure of death’s dismal order. Early in the morning, the fever of life is hushed.

But Mary approaches the tomb only to have her sad solitude shattered: “They have taken away my Lord…”. Three times she declares, I don’t know where he is. The tragic but reliable peace of death has been disturbed, and so also Mary’s reconciliation with death. “They have taken him away…”. Tell me where he is, and I’ll gather him back and hold him, and at least I’ll have again death’s calm.

When Jesus died, the dream of a life of peace died with him, but there remained the reliability of the dead.

At least I know where he is.

At least I can remember him in the quiet of the morning.

No one can take that from me.

But he is not there.

Tell me where he is, and I will go and get him so that he can be properly dead again, so that he and I can have at least death’s peace.

Sometimes, our compromise with death is pushed upon us – as for Mary, as for our own bereavements. Sometimes the compromise is the convenience of a death we choose to effect. If Mary had the calm after Jesus’ death forced upon her, death’s peace-by-crucifixion was chosen by Caiaphas and Pilate and the exclusive heavens they envisioned (see the Good Friday sermon!). This is death we seek as the means to some end, to some peace which requires that someone die. The peace we seek with distance and death is the quiet which comes when some onerous or terrible or dangerous thing is now past or put away. It is the dark peace which comes when the divorce papers are signed, when the life support is turned off, when the last of the evening’s lingering guests leaves, when I’ve put my enemy in her grave, when I’ve done what I swore I would never do, or just when I turn off the news bulletins because it seems everything is going insane.

None of this is really peace, of course; it is chaos subdued, suppressed, but still chaotic. This peace is not the reconciliation of enemies but a cutting away of the other, more or less violently.

Into this suppressed chaos, Jesus appears alongside Mary. Her first instinct is to do what any of us would likely do: she reaches for him (“Teacher”, “Lord”, “Love”) to grasp, to hold, never to let him go again: I know again where you are, who you are, what you are.

But his reappearance is no mere return of the one Mary thinks she lost, though she doesn’t understand this yet. The resurrection is going to be the possibility of Mary herself being renewed, but it’s not this yet. At this point, it is only Jesus who is risen; Mary is a mere observer of his dying and rising, and his appearance is outside of her, does not yet envelop her. All she knows is that her dreams were dashed in the death of Jesus, and now they seem to be restored, and she grasps to hold tight the Jesus she thinks she knew.

But Jesus insists, Don’t hold on to me. Let me go. This is not what you think. It is not only that I am returned to you; it is also that you will be returned to God. But for this to happen, you must see me as I am; you must see God as God is. Let me ascend to God so that you can see my cross in God’s own heart. It is not merely death which is overcome. It is your resignation to death which is comprehended, your reconciliation to it, your use of death for your own ends, Mary, Peter, Caiaphas, Pilate. All of this is overcome.

The resurrection shatters death as peace, death as resolution, death as flight or abandonment, death as a means to some end.

This resurrection – the resurrection of the Crucified – is a challenge to our memory, a question to our account of what we did or felt or wanted.

This resurrection is the visitation of the present by the past – the haunting of the present by the past.

This resurrection tells a fuller story, not allowing certain things to be forgotten or hidden away, but bringing them uncomfortably into the light. For there are not a few histories we want to forget, or which have been forgotten for us, or which we would suppress if they again came to light.

This resurrection is revelation not of only God’s power but of the full extent of our need, of our incapacity to speak the truth, to bear it, to know what to do with it.

This resurrection is the dead refusing to take death “lying down” but rather disturbing death’s grim peace with a word of truth: you have come to terms with the empty and void ways of the world, and with the terrible depth of the darkness, and there is no life in this.

But in this resurrection, our victim returns to us, yet not with accusing finger. He speaks our name and brings the urgent, hopeful question: Mary! Peter! Caiaphas! Pilate! Do you see now? Do you see that God has overcome even all this? Do not grasp tightly what you thought you had to be; let yourself rather be grasped by my Father and my God, your Father and your God. Reach for that resurrection into a life which has put death’s power behind it.

God meets us early, in the morning quiet, after our dealings with death, to disturb the uneasy peace death brings.

But God comes not only early, not only in the dark stillness. God comes on the first day of the week.

And God finds the world – finds Mary and each one of us – as if we were dead, entombed in that early, mortal stillness – formless and void, buried deep, deep, deep in darkness.

And God says, let there be light.

Alleluia.

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Good Friday
29/3/2024

Philippians 2:1-11
Luke 9:44-48, 51-56

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If we do not keep hold of the crucifixion, Easter Day becomes mere kitsch which has nothing to say to this broken world.

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It is forty years since the appearance of Milan Kundera’s novel, The unbearable lightness of being. The book is the account of four lives set against the background of the 1968 Soviet suppression of the Czech Spring, although Kundera is less interested in this historical context than in the fact that his protagonists must live somewhere. How can we live in our particular Where? Should we fight for life or do we flee from it?

Kundera begins by asking about the “weight” our actions have, and whether it is better that they be heavy or light. Two possibilities present themselves. First, our actions gain substance by means of eternal return (after Nietzsche): weight and meaning arise from repetition in recurrence or constancy; this is the struggle for life, and holding it tight. The second possibility is that our actions can only be “light”, fleeting, once-and-never-again events which are then lost with the oblivion tomorrow ultimately brings. Kundera proposes that the lightness of our being is that it will soon be as if we and all we love never existed; the unbearability of this is that we must still exist in relation to each other, nonetheless.

The idea of an unbearable lightness has increasingly coloured my reflections on Easter and the thinking any Christian must do around the confession of Jesus’ resurrection. Is there not, for the sceptical but also for believers who are paying attention, an “unbearable lightness” about how Easter is often celebrated and proclaimed? This is not quite Kundera’s unbearable lightness but relates more closely to another concept in his book: “kitsch”. Kitsch is representation which hollows out the substance of the thing represented. Easter is susceptible to kitschification, to the extent that promises of resurrection locate our most authentic existence in a future world beyond this one. Kitschy Easter proclamation leaves this world behind. Whatever such a future might be, it tells us little about how to be in our fractured present.

Against this too familiar reading of Easter, the resurrection might better be taken to point backwards rather than forwards. That is, the true miracle of Easter is Jesus’ life up to and including the crucifixion. The path to the cross is the true miracle because the real shock in the Easter story is not that the dead might one day live again. It is rather that there are worse things than being crucified.

This is perhaps a little surprising, given the horror of death by crucifixion. Yet the lightness of the crucifixion here is not What it entailed but That it happened, despite the What. Contrary to atonement theories which require Jesus to be spent as some kind of salvific coin, dying as he did was not necessary but was the indirect consequence of a decision to live in radical openness to human (and divine) truth, undeterred by the potential lethal cost of such a life in a truth-denying world. Jesus came to live, not to die. On this reading, “worse than being crucified” seems to be, for Jesus, a life without openness God’s truth and its claim on our relationships with each other. When, then, as in our Gospel text this morning, Jesus “sets his face to go to Jerusalem”, it is with an openness to this living future in this world, and not with a commitment to escaping the world through the cross into an easier eternity.

This resonates on one level with Kundera’s interest in lightness of being. Not motivated by the desire to establish weighty institutional legacies or even simply to survive as long as he can, Jesus enacts an openness to truth and a fearlessness in the face of the horrific death which looms because of that freedom. Life is more than surviving. But for Kundera’s protagonist Sabina, who seems to represent what he himself holds to be true, the fleeting nature of our existence translates to life as flight; lightness is finally freedom from the entanglements of relational commitment and responsibility. Sabina’s truth is finally detachment – from others and so from meaning. Such a life has its own harsh authenticity, but it is finally as lonely as the sheer eternity of Easter kitsch is empty.

In contrast, while Jesus lived with a Sabrina-like lightness of being which did not fight for grandeur or survival, neither was his life flight from others into lonely solipsism or by escape to heaven. Precisely the opposite: as Paul described in our reading from Philippians this morning, Jesus takes the form not of a fleeing survivor but of a servant. This is a radical being for others which neither betrays nor abandons them. If it is such a one who is resurrected, so also is resurrected the possibility of a life that neither fights nor flees but proclaims and lives into an uncomfortable one-and-all social and political tension which could lead to a cross. An Easter resurrection which recalls the cross does not promise time with God someplace else; it promises the presence of God here and now in any life lived in openness to bearing the “unbearable” other.

The cross arises from a social and political ethic which does not destroy and does not abandon, and it is just this ethic which is raised on Easter Day, and not merely the individual Jesus, understood to have died a few days earlier. The heaven of Easter day is the heaven which led to Jesus being crucified.

This matters today because – contrary to the gospel of the risen crucified one – the struggles which wrack this world are precisely struggles for some heaven or another, each conceived as an eternity without the requirement that we bear this or that particular human other. Someone is always missing from our preferred heavens. And so those various eternities become visions for which we can justifiably crush and kill or abandon the other who won’t be in our heaven anyway: we want a heaven with no Israel to live with, or no Palestine; a heaven with no gays, or no fascists; with no difficult bodies but only easy souls; with no tangled histories but only tidy logic; a heaven with no appalling chauvinists or uppity feminists; no traffic, no stop lights, no waiting; we want a heaven with no differences to overcome and so, what all this could only finally mean: a heaven with no one else there. The heaven proposed by crossless Easter kitsch – and by every fight or flee social or political program – is finally an unbearably lonely eternity.

We need a better heaven than this. That better heaven will have something to do with a resurrected cross. An Easter which does not forget the cross speaks of the miracle we need: the revelation that our life with each other is bearable, and is not merely bearable but is the possibility of a joy worth dying for, though not killing for.

In our Lenten Studies text this year, Sam Wells writes that the kind of reconciliation we see in Jesus – and so salvation he brings – is one which “[holds] together profound but incompatible loyalties, [straddles] deep but rival relationships, [is] the battleground for terrible and uncontrollable enmities”. The proclamation of Easter cannot exceed this, for this is the nature of the one who is said to be risen, and this is what that risen one continues to do. The risen crucified one spans our incompatibility with each other, our rivalries, our enmities.

To return then to the question of Kundera’s book, “How should we live in our particular Where?” What has the Easter of the Crucified to say to this? Our life is to reflect not other-worldly Easter kitsch. It is to reflect God’s being with us in the midst of our fractured here and now.

We are to live with the understanding that this is the only place given to us to live, with these people and no others.

We are to recognise that life’s promise will only be realised in the form the other human being.

And we are to learn to bear the cross-shaped burden we can each sometimes be to each other, for their sake and so for our own.

This is the reconciliation, salvation and call of the Easter of the crucified Jesus.

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Lent 5
17/3/2024

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51
John 12:20-33

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In our Lenten study book this year, author Sam Wells, remarks that we tend to invoke euphemisms when we find suddenly ourselves out of our depth – not “died” but “passed away”, not “going to the toilet” but “going to the bathroom”, not “a little bit stupid” but “not the full quid”. The euphemism refers to the presence of something that seems both necessary but also inappropriate to acknowledge – it doesn’t seem “proper” to bring that up here.

In our Gospel reading today Jesus speaks once more (cf. last week) of his approaching crucifixion as a “lifting up”: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (v.32; cf. also John 3.14f; 8.28). We know, of course, what he refers to – his impending crucifixion. And we know something of the horror a crucifixion was. So, is Jesus being euphemistic here, softening the blow for those he addressed, throwing a fig leaf over the embarrassing nakedness of God in the crucifixion? In churches which have crucifixes – representations of the figure of Jesus on the cross – there are not many without loincloths.

In fact, the “lifting up” is no euphemism. The evangelist John loves double meanings and the ironies which come with them. The Greek word here can certainly apply to being lifted up on a cross. But, at the same time, it can just as naturally be used for that kind of elevation which is an enthronement. A king’s coronation could be said to be his “lifting up”. The cross, then, becomes a throne, the crown of thorns truly a crown.

Yet the point is not now that Israel unknowingly crucified its king. The ambiguity of “lifted up” allows John to present to us Jesus as being both outcast and enthroned, being both crucified and made king, in the single “lifting up”. Not simply the king mistakenly or unknowingly crucified, Jesus becomes king in his very being crucified.

And so Jesus can also say in our text this morning, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (v.23), and to mean by this that the cross itself is the glorification (cf. also John 12.16; 13.31f; 17.7). The lifting up, the crucifixion, is the glory of Christ. (We might add here that the glory is not the resurrection. In the crucifixion we see something about the nature of God which the resurrection by itself cannot show). John presents a vision of God in which God’s glory – and so God’s very being – is tied up with his relationship to a people which falls short of his covenant call, to the extent that they (we) even crucify the Lord of glory.

When John says, then, that God so loved the world that he sent the Son, he is not speaking about the “size” of God’s love, as if God might have loved less or even more. Rather, the cross is the love: this is God’s presence to and for the world. How God loves is itself God. God is the glorification on the cross, God comes into view here.

This is not an easy thought to think, but it is crucial in a world which thinks God irrelevant because we imagine that God to be “out there” beyond us, or deep, deep within us. In either case, we don’t imagine that God is in the messy time and space in which we live, not in the times and spaces between us.

But against the God who is nowhere useful is the impossible proclamation that the greater the distance we place between ourselves and God – the more strained our relationship with God is – the more God is set free to be God. That is, God’s love for us is shown to be all the more remarkable when he exercises that freedom to overcome the distance, in order to be life and love for us. When St Paul says that where sin abounds, grace abounded even more, he says the same as John’s double reading of the cross: God makes shame into glory. This is not, of course, to justify or even promote sin(!); it is only to declare that God’s grace always outreaches human brokenness. (Children’s talk: God is very stretchy).

The God who is the cross, then, is no “idea” of God which we fill with other ideas like love or judgement, according to our need. God is no euphemism we are forced to invoke to refer to an embarrassing truth we wish we didn’t have to acknowledge or negotiate around. Rather, the God who is the cross is the very revelation of our condition. For, whatever else we might be, such a God as this reveals us to be those who would crucify God. Ours is the crucified God because this is the only God who has come close enough to us to be precisely our God, the God of those who are capable of crucifying each other, even of crucifying God.

The gospel, then, presents us with two possibilities.

The first possibility is the pessimistic conclusion that the cross is only the work of human hands. The story – the story of Jesus and of each of us – ends with the violent rejection of one who deserved better, and that story is simply tragic. The awful truth here is that it doesn’t get any better than this, but it might perhaps get worse. We need a mouth full of euphemisms to speak the truth here because it is more than we can bear.

The second possibility is that the cross is indeed the work of human hands, but that it is also the glory of God, in the terms we’ve described. This is to say that the cross is not tragic, is not the end of the story, but is the sign of how far God is able to reach – how “stretchy” God is – to embrace again those who have rejected God so profoundly. This would also be an aw‑ful – awesome – truth, but now one which must be said as clearly and directly as possible, so that we all might understand.

Faith – or unfaith – is a decision about these two possibilities. Can God reach us or not, regardless of how far away we run? Can God reach us, regardless of how far away we push the possibly that God might be reaching for us, whether in Jesus on the dusty roads of Palestine 2000 years ago, or on those same dusty today in cries of God’s children for justice and mercy, or in the quiet fears and loathings of our hearts?

Can God turn our tragic existence into God’s own glory, and so into our healing? Can our deathly ways with ourselves and each other become the glory of God?

The awful-awesome God of the cross calls for an awe-filled faith:

Yes. Yes. Yes.

God can do this.

And it is by this expectation that we will live.

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Lent 4
10/3/2024

Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

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Friends, I’m so pleased to be with you again at Mark the Evangelist. Thank you for so much for your kind hospitality.

Friends, we are now well into the season of Lent, that period of the church calendar in which we wander spiritually with Jesus in the desert of discernment and reflection. At my home church at Brunswick Uniting we are thinking through Lent in terms of what we are turning towards and what we are turning away from. What parts of our life do we wish to be in greater abundance, filled with greater joy, growing with more vitality, more connected in our relationship to God? More connected in our relationship to the Holy Spirit and to Creation? Walking more closely in our discipleship with Jesus?

And what parts of our life are we aware of hard-heartedness? What are we holding on too tightly to? Where are we missing the mark? Where do our actions fail to match our words? Where are there oversights and unkindnesses and lapses and blindness. Where is the fruit growing, and where do the weeds need to be pulled up?

Human flaws and imperfections have been very much on my mind this week as I have been watching Nemesis, the ABC documentary on the Liberal Party in power. Has anyone else seen Nemesis? What did you think?

It’s a brilliant piece of political reporting as much as it is a compelling examination of human nature.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s filmed in three episodes, one for each of the Prime Ministers who occupied the office during the nine years of the previous Liberal government: Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, and Scott Morrison.

In classical literary theory there is a concept called hamartia, which refers to the fatal flaw of the tragic protagonist that ultimately sows their undoing. Most commonly, the hamartia of the ancient Greeks was pride or hubris, as they tempt the wrath of the gods by their unshakeable confidence in their own indestructability. Achilles is undone by his hamartia as he is shot through with an arrow at the sole point of his vulnerability. Icarus is brought crashing down to earth by his hamartia as the sun melts and sears away his wings of wax. King Midas gives in to his greed and watches as it consumes everything that he loves.

It’s hard not to watch Nemesis and see in the stories of those politicians this classical Greek idea of hamartia. Each of the three, so different in temperament and outlook and disposition, but each of the three ultimately undone by their own personal fatal flaws.

Many politicians past and present participate in the documentary, and almost without exception I was impressed by their honesty, reflectiveness, and willingness to admit error, even if there is plenty of the usual justification and legacy-protecting that always shadows this kind of auditing of the past.

The first of three: Tony Abbott. The ‘Mad Monk’, the convinced Catholic, the right-wing crusader, the ideologue, the boxer. Acknowledged by many of his friends for his personal decency, for his thoughtfulness, his genuine concern for First Nations peoples, his commitment. The most formidable opposition leader, the sharpest nose for blood in the water, the sloganeer, the disciplined one, the day-in-day-in-out on-message warrior. But also unable to hide his discomfort in modern Australia. Inflexible on climate policy. Stubborn in his defence of Australia’s colonial past. Old-fashioned. Seen as a bit too rough around the edges for leadership. A divisive figure.

The second: Malcolm Turnbull. The suave, pragmatic moderate. The favourite of the well-heeled affluent classes. Eloquent, forceful, supremely intelligent, uninterested in the culture wars. The tech entrepreneur, the financier, at home in the velvet world of international diplomacy and big-dollar donors. The great white hope of those who longed for conciliation, unification, for practical solutions to the problems of climate, immigration, and taxation that had dogged Australia for decades. But of the three, the most ill-at-ease in his party. Never one to suffer fools, and in compromising with the right-wing of his party divided himself again and again until there wasn’t much left.

The last: Scott Morrison. The middle-man, the consensus choice. The Stephen Bradbury perhaps. A formidable machine man who expected loyalty from those around him and brought together a party that seemed divided beyond repair. The Pentecostal, the man of faith, the hardline immigration minister and the dedicated family man. The Prime Minister who prayed for his colleagues and won the unwinnable election. But dogged by poor judgement calls and bad perceptions. Perceived as aloof and arrogant, and who never lived down his fatal holiday to Hawai’i.

Three Prime Ministers, three imperfect people. Each of them rising in glory and falling in disaster. Each of them failing to achieve at least in part what they had hoped.

In our reading today, John speaks of Jesus being ‘lifted up’. There is a deep irony in this expression because it describes Jesus’ crucifixion.  For Jesus, in being ‘lifted up’ there is exaltation and nobility, and even a kind of glory, but there is also pain, humiliation, and suffering. It is an unenviable honour that Jesus experiences in the way of discipleship. Perhaps our three Prime Ministers could relate in some way to this complicated ‘lifting up’. This is the pattern of our world. What goes up must come down. Victory is always swallowed up in defeat or death in the end. Our leaders burn brightly before they burn out. Our own achievements lose their sweetness with time and as we naturally turn toward the next thing.

As we’ve heard, John compares the ‘lifting up’ of Jesus to a story from the book of Numbers, in which the Israelites are thirstily enduring their long pilgrimage to the Promised Land of Canaan. Frustrated again by the Israelites hardheartedness and ingratitude, the story tells that God sends snakes among them to bite them, a reproof of their foolishness. But even in his rebuking, God offers them a way back into mercy and relationship. “Make a poisonous serpent,” says the Lord, “and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”

And now John invites us to look upon Jesus and be healed. To look upon Jesus and live. To see him ‘lifted up’ in glory and sacrificing servanthood. To see that he is our way back. He is our sign of restored relationship and peace. He is our way to eternal life – or perhaps it would be better to say – our way to eternity’s life. God’s life. The eternal now that breaks in with God’s presence, that changes everything. That endures forever.

Jesus is lifted up, not for his own fault, but for the fault of the world. For the disordered, disconnected way that we live, in broken relationship with each other and with God. For we have all been bitten by the serpent. We all have our own hamartia, our own fatal flaws that lead us astray. Our world is filled with bleeding snakebites. The rise and fall of our leaders tells us that. The intractability of conflict and poverty tells us that. The failure of world leaders to find a ceasefire in Gaza tells us that. The whispering thoughts of unkindness and violence and idolism in our own hearts tells us that. We all have those things that we must turn further towards and those things that we must turn further from.

But John tells us: the Son of Man does not come into the world to condemn the world, but to save it. To shine the love of God. ‘God so loved the world’. A complete revolution of perspective for the ancient world. The ancient gods did nothing for nothing. The Roman gods might reward you or punish you. They might show you some special favour or put you in your place, but they would never, ever love you.

God loves the world. God loves the world. And this is how God moves toward the world in love. By lifting up the Son of Man. By breaking the patterns of worldly glory in their rising and falling. By leading us into joy that is not temporal. That does not pass away. That does not rise and fall with political fortunes. By offering us today and every day, a way back into loving relationship. Thanks be to God.

Look upon Jesus and be healed. Look upon Jesus and live.

Amen.

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Lent 2
25/2/2024

Genesis 17:1-10,12,15-19
Psalm 22
Mark 8:27-38

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With the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. But the “almost” matters.

Most of us know today’s gospel passage pretty well: from the lips of Peter, Jesus has just heard a declaration of his being the messiah, and now begins to speak of his approaching passion. And Peter rebukes Jesus, only to be rebuked himself.

Our familiarity with the story comes knowledge of how the exchange is to be understood, which runs something like this: the Jews expected the arrival of God’s messiah, but the idea that the messiah would suffer and be rejected as Jesus described was beyond the Pale. On this reading, the lesson is that the church now knows what the Jews then did not: that the messiah must suffer.

And yet this just creates another problem: why must the messiah suffer? No explanation is given in this immediate text, although other parts of the NT testimony and later Christian theological reflection attempt to provide a wide range of explanations – theories of the atonement, theories of how the death of Jesus brings salvation. Most of these involve sacrificial logic, constraints on God’s power to save without blood being spilt or some other price being paid, and so on. Yet all this tends to make the purported Christian understanding of the suffering messiah worse than Peter’s much neater, all-powerful saviour. Now, instead of a mighty God with a powerful messiah who is free to get in there and to set things right, the suffering messiah seems to have created the even greater problem of a God who is tied in knots by human sin and must go through the pain suffering of crucifixion to extract us – and himself – from the burden of sin.

Of course, we don’t actually hear what it is that Peter says to Jesus. Matthew’s account of this exchange gives a little more but doesn’t explain why Peter takes offence. The best indication of what was said, and why, is shown in Jesus’ response. Perhaps surprisingly, Jesus doesn’t reassert his forthcoming suffering and death in contradiction of Peter’s rebuke. Instead, he refers to the death of Peter and those others who would be his disciples: what will happen to Jesus will also happen to Peter himself.

Noticing this opens a new way of thinking about what is at stake here. Jesus effectively tells Peter: “Yes, as you have declared, I am the messiah. But nothing much is going to change. Persecution, suffering and death will continue – for me and for you.”

And so the crisis of the text is not that – or only that – the messiah will suffer and die; it is that Jesus’ disciples will experience just the same thing. Most bluntly, the crisis is that, with the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. (Again – and we’ll get there in a moment – the “almost” is crucial.)

But what kind of messiah is this? What kind of salvation is this, which involves self-denial, taking up a cross, and following the seemingly impossible path Jesus walked? It doesn’t help to invoke resurrections at this point; the gospel is not about what might happen in 10, 25, or 60 years. The gospel is a word for the world as it is, here and now. And, though Jesus mentions that he will be raised, he doesn’t add this to his account of the disciples’ own experience. He simply says, it’s going to be pretty tough for me, and for you too. But there is life in that.

We might consider last week’s reflection here for a moment. There I spoke on the volume – the sound volume – at which divine voice spoke from heaven and of Jesus’ own proclamations. The point there was that God does not shout. But there is a difficult word about the cost of discipleship in our text today. I suspect most of us experience it as a shout, if only because on hearing it, we want to cover our ears with our hands. It is challenging and confronting, and in that sense loud. But if God doesn’t shout, and there is in all this a word from God, then it is not a loud word. It is uttered gently, as an observation on the lives we live and an invitation to reflect on what those lives might be. The heart of the Christian confession is not that Jesus died; it is that he lived. He lived with us, among us, so intimately connected to us that what we are killed him. And yet it is the living which matters and not the dying because, for Jesus, the form of his death just reflected the way he lived. It was fullness of life which resulted in his crucifixion.

And this brings us finally to the “almost”: With the arrival of Jesus the messiah, almost nothing changes. That is, there might be very little change in the form of life. Peter and the wider circle around Jesus already knew persecution and suffering and death. And we’ve seen that while Peter takes offence at the notion of a suffering messiah, this is in no small part because of the prospect of his own suffering continuing: what kind of salvation could this be?

To borrow from our Lenten study book this year, it is a salvation which gives the gift of “with”. Hardship need not but suffered alone. The gospel has Jesus with us: experiencing just what we experience, and yet experiencing it against a different background, in a different key. The gift of the gospel might be described thus (and strangely): we are now able to suffer because Jesus has suffered; we are now able to die because Jesus died.

That is surely a strange thought. Most people most of the time suffer and die without obvious reference to Jesus. The difference it makes that Jesus died – if Jesus is indeed the messiah – is that the suffering and death we endure now becomes resistance against death having the last word. Jesus calls us to refuse to live under death’s shadow, as he did. We are accustomed to saying in funerals something to the effect of , “in the midst of life, death”. This is true enough as a simple observation on the normal order of things. But the gospel is a different thought: in the midst of death, life. In the midst of death, not at the end of death, not as a one-day-overcoming of death, but surrounded by death, life.

Are we not already dying – literally and metaphorically? Because this is the case, the call to self-denial and taking up our cross is not a call to more death. It is a call to begin to live in the midst of death. This is salvation, the gift of Jesus: death put to death.

Let us hear then, his call:

“Lift up your hearts.

The kingdom of God is come near.

Repent, believe, and live”.

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Lent 1
18/2/2024

Genesis 9:8-17
Psalm 25
Mark 1:9-15

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Those things it is most important to say must be said softly.

We live in a noisy world. The wind howls, the waves crash, the thunder trembles, the lorikeets screech. And then, of course, there is the noise of life together: the streets, the alarms, the notifications, the arguments, the wars. The sheer sound volume of life is very often overwhelming, whether that noise is real or metaphorical. In such spaces, it seems that we must get ever louder if we are to be heard.

Given all that, at what volume do we imagine the voices speak in our reading this morning? The voice from heaven: You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased. And Jesus’ own voice: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news.

These are crucial words at the beginning of the Story of Stories. Spoken into a noisy word, they are not to be missed. In this clamouring world, then, does God shout to be heard? Does the voice from heaven thunder? Does Jesus cry out in the marketplace, to be heard over the clamour of store-holders and customers haggling over price and quality?

Speaking loudly, even very loudly, certainly has its place. With a shout we warn or threaten, we grab attention, or we lament or rejoice. And yet, when we hear an expectedly loud noise or voice, our immediate response is, “What? What’s that?” This is because what is said loudly is rarely articulate; it is just loud. The greater the volume at which a conversation is conducted, the less we can say. Nothing subtle can be communicated with a shout. It may be a jubilant Yes or an alienating No, but that’s about as far as yelling can go.

Still the temptation is strong, to raise our voice in order to be heard, to be seen, to be given attention. Within the church, the question is constant: how to attract new members? What is to be done, how are we  to attract attention, as if shouting were ever attractive. Social media is a cacophony of voices seeking be noticed, to commented upon, watched, shared. Look at this, look at me, cry a thousand voices.

And yet perhaps the gospel is proclaimed this way: (whispered) This is my son; listen to him. In him is my kingdom come. If God is love, so that we are properly God’s lovers, we want to keep in mind that lovers don’t shout at each other. The voice which is open and receptive, and which gives and creates, is softly spoken. The world is filled, of course, with its thunderous tempests and its earth-shaking explosions but it is the still, gentle voice which touches and claims us: You are my son, my daughter; believe, turn to me.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a loud word. Of course, it has its own noise – the noise of the demon-possessed, the lament of the ill, the anger of the authorities, a loud cry from a cross. But, ending in just this way – in death – God’s voice is not silenced but set in contrast.

The big thing God does in the world is – so far as the big world can see – a only small thing. The loud clarion call we wish would usher in the age of peace, the leader who will finally set all things right, the idea which is the solution to the equation of life – all of this turns out to be a quiet thing, a small thing, a thing which might be missed: one of us called to live a life of truth in the midst of untruth, to be quiet when the world is loud, to be himself.

This one God says, over here, almost out of sight, this one is my chosen; here I reign.

Come and see.
Come and believe.
Come and be changed.

Come and listen for God’s small, quiet beginning, where there is whispered
a word of peace
for this loud world.

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Epiphany 5
4/2/2024

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147
Mark 1:29-39

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The news the disciples bring to Jesus: “Everyone is searching for you”. In the immediate context of the drama, this is the result of the impressive impact Jesus’ ministry is having on those around him. They want more: Everyone is searching for you.

The gospel as a whole, however, makes a greater claim for this declaration. The “everyone” who seeks Jesus is not just those in the story but those who read the story – and indeed even those who don’t. This Jesus, the gospel declares, is the one you are searching for. The church’s faith is that Jesus is the answer to a question we all ask, the missing thing we seek. We are all on a quest for something, and that something is Jesus.

This is rather a big claim. Between us, we search for a thousand different things in a thousand different ways: the job you want, the book you’re reading, the endless scrolling through TikTok, the lover you hope to find, the chocolate you crave, the country you invade, the country you defend, the holiday you desperately need – these are, in the end, all searches for something, for some one thing. The gospel proposes that Jesus is the secret hidden in any specific thing we seek.

This is scarcely believable, of course. Jesus is surely a “religious” thing, and most of what we do most of the time has little to do with what we call religion. And yet, the concern of the gospel is not one part of us but the whole of us. We are not made up of many parts, and also a religious part; we are a unified whole. The gospel’s concern is either everything – what we call “religious” and not – or it is nothing.

Yet, even if we grant this, to say that Jesus is what we seek remains deeply problematic because the implication seems to be that there are some – Christians in particular – who have found what everyone is looking for, and there are many – everyone else – who haven’t. There is here the possibility of a deep arrogance, and indeed a possibility which has been realised in much violence through the ages: you infidels must become what we are and believe as we believe, if you are to be whole. And we might have to kill you if you don’t.

The claim that Jesus is what we all seek, then, is eminently corruptible and can become deeply inhuman. But this doesn’t falsify the gospel’s own nuanced version of the claim. The full sweep of the gospel story reveals that those around Jesus, though they have “found” him, continue to be quite lost about what they have found. At this early point in the narrative, they are the enthusiastic followers of Jesus, who is the latest pursuit-worthy thing and perhaps even the final thing, the one thing needful. And they watch as others find in Jesus the answer to some quest – “Everyone is looking for you”. But as the story continues, Jesus’ circle of friends discover more about him, such that the more they know, the less found he becomes. “Who do you say that I am”, Jesus will ask half-way through the gospel story, and the confused answer of “Simon and his companions” is that they don’t really know. They have sought him, and found him, but he is not what they thought they were seeking.

And so, seeking Jesus is not like seeking a lost coin or sheep. He is not the answer to a question which might be found and popped into its proper place. To find in Jesus what we most earnestly seek is rather more like looking in a mirror and not recognising myself because this special mirror shows me what I’ve never seen before. What I have never seen before is what I will be, and not what I still am, which I usually see in the mirror. This strange image is both me and not yet me. For it is, finally, a reconciliation to ourselves that we seek, a recognition of ourselves: yes, that’s me, finally. But, strangely, I don’t yet know what I look like – what I should look like. This is, then, a strange seeking. We both know and don’t know what we seek, which make the process endless. What can make this restless search bearable?

“Everyone is searching for you”, announce the disciples. But Jesus responds, “Let us go to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also, for that is what I came out to do”. Our looking for Jesus is met with his seeking us out. It is as if, though we seek Jesus, in the end it is he who finds us. This is to say that our finding ourselves is not limited by our knowing where to look or our capacities to understand. While we search, God actively seeks us.

This means that what we do and what is done to us are the forms in which God will find us, and we will find God. Though our searching might cause us to leave home, or to steal something, or to turn vegan, faith expects from any such thing that God will meet us there. The gospel’s promise is that God longs to find us more than we long to find God, and that God’s finding of us is how we will find ourselves.

We seek Jesus because he is the point at which the many things a person does are found in the one divine heart. This is what I came out to do, Jesus says: to be the one who finds God in all I do. “This is what I came out to do”, Jesus says: I came to reveal all those who seek wholeness, completeness, and reconciliation as found in God.

Our lives – all that we do – are a journey to God. To believe this is to open ourselves to the possibility that in every act, every encounter, and every word, we might meet God and become a bit more ourselves.

Would not such a life be worth living, in which everything we did, enjoyed, and suffered was part of the whole of God, and the means by which we continue our journey into that completeness?

“Everyone is searching for you”, the disciples tell you. “I know”, he responds, and I have come that I might be found, and you might be found too.

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Epiphany 4
28/1/2024

1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Psalm 111
Mark 1:21-28

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New Testament references to demons or evil spirits are something of an embarrassment to many modern Christians. Reading the NT today, it is very difficult to get out of our heads the kinds of images deposited in our cultural memory by movies like the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist: the innocent victim, shaking beds, projectile vomit, and 360-degree head turns. Is this what the Bible means when it speaks of the demonic?

In the movies, demon possession is straightforward and moralistic: human person = goodie, possessing demon = baddie; human person = free agent, demon = enslaving agent. The drama is resolved when the baddie is finally dealt with, with the implication that the exorcised victim can now return to her fundamental, free self.

But the exorcisms in the New Testament are stories of the liberation of people who find themselves not only possessed but inextricably so. And the emphasis must fall on inextricably, because while we typically imagine clear distinctions between the demon and the possessed person, the stories themselves show how the spirit and the person become intertwined and confused, to the extent that it is not really clear where the person and the demon each begin and end, because they are so tightly wrapped up in each other.

Listen again to the first part of today’s reading:

^1.23 Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, ²⁴ and he cried out, “What have you to do with us…I know who you are.”

While it probably sounds straightforward, in fact it’s not at all clear who is speaking here. If it is the man who cries out, “what have you to do with us”, why the “us” which seems to include the man himself with the demon? And who then is the “I” who knows who Jesus? Here, and even more so in another exorcism story later in Mark’s gospel (5.6ff) we see a slippage between the identity of the man and the identity of that which possesses him, such that the one is addressed, but the other answers, but the one answering seems to speak also for the other.

The demons of the New Testament, then, are far more dangerous than those of the horror movie. If all a demon can do is throw you into convulsions and twist your head 360 degrees on your shoulders then, by comparison with what the gospels describe, you’ve really nothing to worry about(!). This can still be treated, at least on the terms of the movie – a magic spell, or the right prayer.

The biblical notion of the demonic allows no neat separation of the powers which possess and the person possessed by them – it is no clear where to punch. To understand what Mark has to say about powers is to see more (and less) clearly than the simplistic demonologies of the movies and of contemporary politics and moral discourse. The powers which possess us also create us. I am not simply extractable from all which has happened to me. Christian faith, then, is about learning hard it is to see clearly here. There is no “me” who exists independently of the things which have formed me or oppress me; we and our demons are not easily prised apart.

For most of us, of course, our identity- and freedom-blurring “possessions” are much less stand-out dramatic than that of the man in the synagogue in Capernaum or of little Regan in The Exorcist. But they are there, and they are powerful. The catastrophe of Palestine is one of the deepest demonic possession – possession by millennia of oppression of the Jews by Christians, leading to both the Nazis’ “Final Solution” and the apparent necessity of the Jews’ own solution – the State of Israel. But history possesses us to a profound depth, and so the solution of a Jewish state has been only a partial solution and led to its own demonic possession: hundreds of thousands of people now living as refugees in their own country, victims of a state which must now make them safe again, for the state’s own safety.

Closer to home, we might think of the increasing tensions around colonisation, recognition and reconciliation. This cannot be “fixed”: we cannot undo the past, cannot exorcise contemporary experience of what has been done, and a political system like ours seems to be particularly ill-equipped to help the nation forward here, not least because we are increasingly that kind of democracy in which contrarianism is thought to be the best political strategy.

And yet closer to home again – on the personal level – we cannot stop being the person to which this or that happened, or who did this or that eternally regrettable thing. We cannot be exorcised of our history, and yet we are called still to live.

This is the realism of the gospel, although perhaps it also seems to be the pessimism of the gospel. Yet this pessimistic realism is a necessary preamble to the good news, and what causes the response of the people to Jesus in the synagogue: here is a teaching with authority, and not what we have been used to. The authority has nothing to do with whether Jesus has a deep voice, penetrating eyes or a convincing argument. Rather, he speaks in such a way as to become “author” of those he addresses. Jesus expresses here a truth which is not merely true but which resonates and defines, which identifies and moves. Here is a surgeon who understands what we are, who can separate flesh and bone, who perceives what matters and inhabits what is wrong, to heal it.

The truth of this is in faith’s conviction that the catastrophe of the crucifixion of Jesus becomes God’s blessing. Here, when most clear-sighted, the people of God are most wrong. To be sure we are so right, and yet to be so wrong, is to be possessed by powers such that we cannot know where we end and the powers begin. This is not to say that the devil made us crucify Jesus – for we did it ourselves – but we could not but do it and cannot now undo it. What can save us in such circumstances? What can undo the disastrous effects of the necessary establishment of a Jewish state, the ongoing impact of unavoidable colonisation, or the big mistakes we might have made in our lives and cannot undo?

There is nothing to fix such things in the simple way we would like, because such a “fixing” imagines that there is an evil spirit which is not properly part of the machine and we just need an exorcist to clear it out and all will be well again.

Only grace can make a real change here. Only grace can both know the truth about what I am and love me, nonetheless. Only grace can take the body of an innocent man and make of it the sign of forgiveness – true forgiveness in the form of the sin forgiven.

There are many things which possess us in the manner of demons – mostly without the thrashing and screaming, but nonetheless falsely assuring us or accusing us. To be called into the kingdom of this God is to be invited into understanding the true nature of the kingdoms within which we already live, the powers to which we are already subject, our com‑plicity – our interweaving – with those powers and our incapacity to extract a pure “us” from all that has happened to us.

But to be called into the kingdom of this God is also to hear a promise that, despite all which seems to envelop us, despite all which makes us less than we hoped to be, despite the seeming impossibility of wholeness, there is one who speaks our name with authority and so authors us: who calls us to be, and makes possible that we might yet be more.

Let us, then, despite the demonic darkness which looms and threatens to crush, listen for the voice of Jesus: come to me, and live.

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Epiphany 3
21/1/2024

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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Satirists use humour to point their fingers at our culture and our strange or misguided behaviour.  An example of this is Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift that pointed the finger at his 18^th century culture exposing its pomposity, the decadence of its political institutions and the brutishness of humankind among the creatures of earth.

The writer of the story of Jonah was a satirist. When we remember this, the story he tells makes a lot more sense. We were probably first told the story as if it were history, so we got all hung up on the problem of Jonah being swallowed by the fish who delivered him back to where he started. Nobody told us the story of Gulliver’s Travels as if it were history, so we never had any problems with the improbably small and large people and the creatures that he met.

Satirists often use humour, certainly that has been an indispensable feature of modern satire. The writer of Jonah may have been using humour – it’s hard for us to tell because humour is so culturally conditioned. In Jesus’ day it looks a bit as if humour was based on exaggeration. Apparently the idea of a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle was hilarious. Maybe Jonah is good for a bit of a laugh, what with there being a fish big enough to swallow a man and it taking three days to walk to the middle of the great city of Ninevah when archaeological evidence shows it was about three miles across. There is an appearance from a fast-growing Bodhi tree that might have been quite funny too.

I think the funniest thing about this story is that a preacher with the worst of all possible attitudes planted himself in the middle of town and delivered the shortest and worst sermon in all of history and the everyone from the king to the kitchen cat repented in sack cloth and ashes. My colleagues and I are obviously doing something very wrong on Sunday mornings.

We don’t really know if or why Jonah was funny, but we do know why it is satirical. We know why some people would have squirmed when they heard this story. The story of Jonah was probably written about the same time as the story of Ruth. Both stories addressed a similar issue. I used to enjoy reading back issues of Punch. Punch, of course, was the source of satire. It had wonderful cartoons, but they only made sense, or were in any way funny if you knew your history.

Jonah makes sense when we know our history. The story was told at a time when Jerusalem was resettled after the Babylonian captivity. Hundreds of people had returned from exile after Persia came to power. They were setting up a new community and they obviously had high hopes for their society, and they wanted to establish it on the highest principles. They looked to the Torah given them by God through Moses where there were places that urged them to be pure and holy just as God is holy. One way to be clean was to refrain from contact with what is unclean. Laws therefore forbade touching dead things and eating certain kinds of food. Special rituals were prescribed for becoming clean again. One way of becoming unclean was by contact with Gentiles – mixing with people for whom Yahweh was not their God. All this was extremely praiseworthy and high minded, but it presented a very serious problem for many of the returned exiles. While they had been in Babylon they had not been so puritanical and had intermarried with the local population. Many of the returned exiles had brought their Gentile wives with them. Because their wives were Gentile their children were also Gentile. One’s Jewishness is determined by one’s mother. This became an issue of debate and contention because there was a strong push from some powerful leaders to purify the race by having the foreign wives and children returned to Babylon – a form of ethnic cleansing.

The story of Jonah is a satire in that it sets out to challenge the prevailing piety, into looking again at what God is like. If you are to be holy as God is holy then look at how God’s holiness differs from the kind of holiness you are trying to live up to.

Jonah was told by God to preach to the evil foreigners of Ninevah. Instead he chose to travel in the opposite direction away from Ninevah and away from God, forgetting Yahweh is God of all creation, of storms and fish. There is no escape from God and God brought him back. So Jonah went and preached his short boring sermon – “in 40 days Ninevah will be overthrown.” Then the whole lot of them repented in the hope that God would turn his wrath from them. This is exactly what Jonah was afraid of and it got right up his nose. Jonah was the kind of puritanical fundamentalist who believed that bad people need to be punished and that the sign of a good person was one who keeps his word. All that is proper on earth has come seriously unstuck when God says he is going to destroy a whole bunch of bad people – well that’s OK, but what isn’t OK is when the bad people become good people and God changes his mind and goes soft on them. As far as Jonah is concerned some of God’s least endearing qualities are his mercy and steadfast love and graciousness.

The story of Jonah is satire because it is told to people who were just like Jonah in their pietistic fundamentalism. The story of Jonah is still satire because there are still pietistic fundamentalists who see the world in black and white, in good and bad, in reward and punishment. It is a pietism that is incapable for being gracious as God is gracious. It can have no mercy.

One of the reasons I think the story of Jonah has won favour in the Christian church is because it rubbishes the same kind of hardline attitudes that Jesus attacked in the pious leadership of his day. Jesus was found most often among the sick and the lost and the rascals and they saw in him the mercy and graciousness of God himself and it made a difference.

Hymn of Frederick Faber

2 There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea, and forgiveness in his justice sealed for us on Calvary.

4 For the love of God is broader than the measures of our mind; and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind

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Epiphany 2
14/1/2024

Genesis 28:10-17
Psalm 139
John 1:43-51

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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The greatest question which confronted the disciples of Jesus, and the first Christians was this: Who is this Jesus? The arguments – for they split the Church – were frequently around whether he was a man, a fully human being – or God. If both, then How? All four Gospels are peppered with the debate but not least John’s and this opening chapter. The initial phase of the discussion came to an interim conclusion in the 5^th Century at the Councils of Nicaea, Chalcedon and Constantinople, all of which are foundational documents of the Uniting Church (!).

I’d love to say more, but instead I will concentrate on today’s reading from John – however, we must not forget that we are only a handful of verses away from that magnificent opening which can be summarised in v. 14 as ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among us … and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth’.  The second part of the chapter is thus a bit of a disappointment.

Jesus comes to Galilee – on his own initiative. He meets Philip and says, ‘Follow me’.  In the next sentence, we listen, with some surprise, as Philip says to Nathanael, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ Now that is quite a rapid learning curve. So far, John has told us that the titles of Rabbi and Messiah (1: 36,38) have been used by John the Baptist and the disciples Peter and John, but not that one, nor ‘Son of God’ or ‘King of Israel’ which Nathanael is about to supply.

But Philip wasn’t there – he was not even a disciple until this moment. He seems to think that being ‘the son of Joseph of Nazareth’ is important, and Nathanael treats that with a scornful ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ So this is a constructed tale to draw us all into that long-debated question. I don’t mean that John is trying to trick us – he is as much without guile as Nathanael! And this is where Jesus gives a really intriguing answer, and it’s what I want to explore. ‘Guile’ in the KJV is translated ‘deceit’ in NRSV, ‘an Israelite without guile’, so Jesus is rather nicely inviting us to share Nathanael’s doubt. And John underlines it in that, only in his Gospel, and 26 times there, is Jesus recorded as saying ‘Amen, Amen’, twice; ‘Truly, truly’. It indicates that what follows is of great importance.

‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ (Jn 1:51)

Which takes the alert bible student to the ancient patriarch perhaps most characterised by guile and deceit, Jacob:

Jacob had just cheated his blind old father to give him the birthright which belonged to his slightly old twin (Esau, the hairy man), and fled from his brother’s rage under the excuse provided by their mother, that he should find a wife. Now he is out in the wilderness, a long way from anywhere, and exhausted by more than travel.  He lays down to sleep with his head on a stone. (In Egypt, I actually saw a camel driver doing just that.) Unsurprisingly, it produced a dream.

He saw (Gen. 28:2) a ladder ‘set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven’ and there was a lot of angelic traffic on it. A wonderful image. The Coptic ikon on our front cover looks more like a (down?) escalator. The next verse has Jacob turn and see ‘the LORD’ (the sacred name, not just any god) standing beside him, at its foot. Jacob had thought he was at a distance from home far enough not to meet his God. And not only was God there, feet on the earth, but God then promised him all this land that he’d slept on it be his own, for ‘the families of the earth’ for flourish in. Then he woke up.

And he memorably declared, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’ And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’

This was a ‘mountain-bottom’ experience and somewhat against normal religious expectations. Was not God on the top of Mount Horeb/Sinai?  But Moses had first met God far away at a burning bush. Did not Elijah seek God on the same mountain, and did he see God in earthquake and fire? And the apostles wanted to build tabernacles for Elijah and Moses on Mount Tabor to keep Jesus with them? And Jesus sent them down to the plain.

Well, Jacob built a cairn of stones and called it a house of God, a Beth-el.

And within a few kilometres there were other such sacred cairns, and shrines. There was one at Dan, another at Shiloh (where Samuel was), until Moses put the broken stones of the Ten Commandments in a box – and God dwelt there under a tent for a long time, until it came to Jerusalem. Then Solomon built the grandaddy of all Temples there.

I sometimes wonder why it is that we don’t remember God’s reaction to Solomon’s ornate designs for the Ark of the Covenant and the Temple’s grand dedication: ‘Who asked you to build me a House?’ said God. That Temple, or what remains of it, is a building still fraught with significance in our time.  The most likely site for Bethel is now in the occupied West Bank, 5 km from Ramullah. (We wish our Foreign Minister, our fellow Uniting Church member, Penny Wong a fruitful outcome of her visit there this week.)

Is it any wonder that the Scripture is full of warnings about sacred places? I know several, and visit them, but they are such places because they have been where generations of the faithful have knelt where, as the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, ‘prayer has been valid.’

Is God at the top or the bottom of the ladder? The biblical view is: Yes and No. All ground is not holy. God is at both ends of the ladder and at neither.

Three quotations to illuminate my point:

From my former Anglican colleague Andrew McGowan:

‘…[in John] the true Israelite, without guile, bears true witness to the king of Israel here. And in time, like Jacob, he will see the “house of God and gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17), but understand these are not a place, but a person.’

That is the basic meaning of the one title Jesus seems to accept: ‘Son of Man’.

Former Presbyterian and Church of South India bishop, Leslie Newbiggin [The Light Has Come, 22-3]:

Jesus is ‘the place of God’s dwelling, the place where God is no longer hidden behind the vault of heaven, but where there is actual revelation, actual traffic between the [human] world and the world of God.’

And Lutheran liturgical scholar, Gordon Lathrop [Holy Ground, 47] has:

‘In him is the gate of heaven, the awesome place, the holy presence beside the poor and the wretched.  What humanity has hoped for in shrines and temples is found in an utterly new way in him.’

And, I promise you, in this place, in this service of Word and Sacrament, Jesus, Child of God and child of Mary (as the Chalcedon Council said), meets us, today.