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Pentecost 20
15/10/2023

Exodus 32:1-14
Psalm 106
Matthew 22:1-14

Sermon preached by Daniel Broadstock

Friends, God is furious today.

‘Now let me alone,’ he thunders, ‘so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.’

Elohim smoulders with anger at the ungovernable folly of his chosen people. Yahweh, the God of their fathers, has made his covenant with them of old. He has tested the faith of Abraham. He has given Jacob children past the age of hope. He has inspired Joseph with dreams and lifted up Moses as a prophet of liberation. He has subdued the stony pride of Pharoah and delivered his people from slavery. He has shown them wonders to shake the world. They have seen plague and calamity and darkness. They have seen moving fire running through the clouds. They have seen the waters of the Red Sea part and collapse in their wake.

He has left them in no doubt of his power, of his judgement, and of his faithfulness. And now, just as his finger leaves the tablet upon which he has inscribed a new law, a template that will be the foundation of a new kingdom of righteousness; just at the moment that he has set his seal upon a new foundation of justice, his chosen people turn from him again. The old covenant trembles on the edge of failure.

‘Let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.’ How does that instinct of wrath feel to you? Do you relate to it? Do you feel that rage at human failure and fault?

This week we have witnessed a new outbreak of violent horror in Israel and Gaza. Atrocities too awful to contemplate are once again the daily reality of Palestinians and Israelis caught in an ever-tightening knot of pain and injustice and enmity. Many killed and many displaced, in fear, and grieving. How long, O Lord?

Are you frustrated? Are you appalled? I am. I can’t see a way out and I’m angry at political leaders who seem unwilling to compromise, to set aside their pride, to make sacrifices for peace.

Yesterday, we added a 37^th failed referendum to our political history, as the Australian people declined to amend its Constitution to provide for a Voice to Parliament. How do you feel about that? Whatever side you have voted upon, it seemed to me that it was an unedifying and small-minded campaign, in which all the ordinary and pragmatic considerations of political life prevailed over a real wrestling with our national identity, with a real reckoning with the urgent demands of reconciliation.

Australia’s search for a settlement of its colonial past remains agonised in the grip of this reality. ‘YES’ posters gaze pleadingly from windows overlooking stolen land. Cattle chew on native grasses as calloused farmers puzzle over the Constitution. The agile shadows of kangaroo pass like spirits over the hot span of the highway. The Statement from the Heart speaks, though we cannot agree what it says. We cannot erase the past. Colonialism cannot be undone. Yet we cannot seem to find a way through to a truly unifying and healing picture of ourselves. Maybe we never will.

Do you, like God upon the mountain, feel exhausted at the effort? Are you tempted to give up on human beings?

In the heat of his anger, God turns to Moses and makes to him a great and terrible offer: ‘Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them; and of you I will make a great nation.”

‘This covenant has been a mistake. These people are not worthy of the great charge that I lay upon them. I will not dwell with them. But you, Moses, I will make a new covenant with you! I will make you a new Abraham, and your descendants shall be the ones in which I place my trust.’

Down below, at the foot of the mountain, the oblivious Israelites have made their golden calf. This picture of idolism is so enduring that it has passed into the English language as idiom. We all recognise this tendency for faithlessness in ourselves. This blind inclination to turn all too quickly from what we know is right and true and difficult towards what is comforting and gratifying and easy. There is something pitiably sympathetic in what the Israelites have done. It’s not clear that they intend to turn away from their God, from their Yahweh. “Tomorrow shall be a festival to the LORD,” says Aaron. While Moses communes with God upon the mountain, the people have sat wondering below the covering cloud for 40-days and nights. And such is their longing to see their God, to be close to him, to know him, that they give up their treasures. They melt down what little gold that they have carried with them from Egypt, and from it they fashion this pale shadow of their God.

And looking down from the mountain, Moses pities them, despite his own great anger. He cannot accept God’s offer. He cannot become a new Abraham. He cannot let God indulge his wrath. He pleads for them. He pleads for mercy for those that he knows are wrong.

Friends, this is what the Gospel of Christ asks of us, what the Law of love requires. We cannot give up on human beings. We cannot give up on community. The Kingdom of God is not a Kingdom of one. The church can never be a solitary endeavour. So much of our collective failures are born out of the little, pitiable, understandable urges of the golden calf. The desire to be a little richer. The desire to be a little more important. The desire to be a little more noticed, a little more gratified, a little more justified. Even to see God a little more clearly. But we plead for mercy for those we believe are wrong, in the hope that when we are wrong, we will receive mercy. We trust in the redemptive power of God to overcome human evil and apathy.

This unerring commitment to togetherness, to community, is written across all the pages of our tradition.

When Naomi says to Ruth, ‘where you will go, I will go. Your people will be my people and your God will be my God.’

When Adam and Eve are made for each other, flesh from flesh, so that neither should be alone.

When David and Jonathan make their covenant, and Timothy helps Paul carry his burdens.

When Esther risks all for her people, and when the disciples mark their final hours together with the sharing of bread and wine. When Jesus washes their feet.

That is what the Kingdom of God is like. This is what we are called to, even when it feels hopeless. Even when it feels pointless. Even with people who seem unreachable, with whom common understanding feels impossible.

In the end, God hears Moses’ pleading, and he changes his mind. How does an omniscient, unchanging, perfect God change their mind? Perhaps they don’t. But to change your mind, to relent, to give up the right of wrath and judgement, that is the stuff of relationship. And our God is the God of relationship. Relationship that perseveres through error and folly and failure. Relationship that endures beyond death.

May God grant us the humility to plead for those with whom we disagree, to release our grip on our pride, to resist the temptation of wrath, to persist for justice, and to sojourn on in imperfect community, trusting in the God who travels with us.

Amen.

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Pentecost 19
8/10/2023

Philippians 3:4b-14
Psalm 80
Matthew 21:33-46

In a sentence:
Whether seemingly on our side or not, God in Christ is always for us

“They wanted to arrest Jesus, but they feared the crowds, because [the people] regarded him as a prophet.”

The ambiguity of the crowd
Crowds are ambiguous things. Crowds are “averages”, for better or worse. Governments need to know what is the average need of people in a crowd in order to deliver one-size-fits-most social services. Schools need to know the average needs and abilities of students to deliver one-size-fits-some education. Event organisers need to know how many toilet cubicles to order for the average crowd at an average concert weekend. Crowds tend to be predictable.

Crowds can also be pretty stupid. The mob cannot think, so people can be crushed by crowds – one way or another, literally or metaphorically, intentionally or not. The current critique of political populism is as much a critique of the stupidity of crowd as it is of the cynical manipulation of the masses by influential individuals. Crowds tend to operate close to the lowest common denominator and, as such, can be very hard to move when that thing in common is challenged. Democracy, of course, is a politics of the crowd, with elections and referendums being about what is most common to most in the masses.

In and of the crowd
Yet, for all of the ways that crowds reduce us, in truth we need crowds as much as we need to be done with them. The trick to crowds is being “in” the crowd but not “of” the crowd. Indeed, this is the trick to life, for life is crowd‑ed.

In our text today, the Pharisees and the priests are in the crowd, and “of” the crowd. This doesn’t mean they agree with the crowd but that the crowd prevails. Challenged by Jesus, they are forced – they think – to acquiesce, and they slink away to attack again at some later time. They are only able to act with the crowd. Later in the story, another crowd comes into play, with which the religious leaders are again in accord, but now it is “their” crowd. Now, still “in” and “of” the crowd, they are what the crowd allows and they get what they want.

Jesus, on the other hand, is in but is not of the crowd. Certainly, this crowd saves him some grief from the religious leaders, but another crowd will gather to accuse and decry against him. The crowd is Jesus’ context, but not his measure. Jesus is in the crowd, but not of it – not contained by it.  Crowds change, but Jesus does not. For the religious leaders, however, the crowd is their measure, is their containment (or freedom). The Pharisee and the priest caricatured in these conflicts with Jesus change with the crowd.

Note what this means: the Pharisee and the priest can only be themselves in one kind of crowd: the crowd they agree with. The Pharisee, then, changes with the changing context, becoming larger or smaller, freer or more constrained.  Fear might cause us to make ourselves safer but it also makes us smaller.

For Jesus, all the world is open to him, good and bad. He is always in crowds but never of them, never by them. Of course, some crowds are safer and more comfortable. But there is no part of the world which is not his world, given to him, open to him, in which he is not at home.

The difference between Jesus and the Pharisee – the difference, that is, between Jesus and most of us – is that the Pharisee changes as the crowd changes but Jesus does not. The Pharisee is often in the wrong place, in the wrong crowd – as in our reading today. Jesus is never in the wrong crowd, because the crowd is not his measure. His measure is the unity of God and the oneness of the world. God does not wax or wane with location, so that the many locations in the world do not divide the world in any real way. The one God relates to one world, and so Jesus does not change.

And this opens up something else – in fact, the crucial thing. The Pharisee is sometimes for the crowd, and sometimes against – depending on the crowd – changing the Pharisees own purpose. Jesus’ doesn’t change with the change of mood which might sweep across the masses. His stance, his relationship to the crowd, remains unchanged.

In and for the crowd
And what is that stance? Jesus is in the crowd but not of the crowd for the sake of the crowd. I called this the crucial thing – the crux, the cross­­‑­thing – because it is in front of the crowd at Golgotha and the crowd of all human history that Jesus hangs “for” those who put him there. Jesus is always for the crowd, always for those around him, whether he affirms them or opposes them. It is on the cross that Jesus is definitively one for all, surrounded by those who oppose him and those who hoped he was their hope.

This is the basis of Christian talk of justification by grace. God values our good work but loved us before we did anything. God hates our sin but loves us nonetheless. This doesn’t make the good we do (or don’t do) without value. It calls us to re-value our good. Goodness is not only for the crowd in which we feel comfortable. Our goodness should not change with whether we are among friends or foes, whether it is light or dark. For, as with God, so also for us: we are what we do to those who oppose us, we are what we do in the dark.

In the light of day and the darkest night, in solitude and in the throng, in safe places and fearful one, God is for us, in order that we might be in God and for those who love or oppose us. There is no place that God is not, in order that every place can be a place of rich human possibility. There is no place that God is not, in order that love might always be possible.

Let us, then, wherever we find ourselves, commit to the work of love which brings order out of chaos and life out of death.

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Pentecost 18
1/10/2023

Philippians 2:1-11
Psalm 25
Matthew 21:23-27

In a sentence:
We are true to our calling when our words and actions reflect our convictions

The divided self
In our gospel reading today, the elders and the chief priests demand of Jesus, By what authority do you do these things? (“these things” including the overthrowing of the temple marketplace). Rather than answering directly, Jesus poses a counter-question about the perceived authority of John the Baptist, now dead. Fearful of the consequences of answering honestly, the elders and priests are forced into a public and dishonest agnosticism: “…we do not know about John’s authority…”

The public nature of their refusal to know is critical. They know very well, of course, what they think privately but they dare not think this out loud. In this dishonest turn, the elders sever the relationship between their “internal” and “external” selves: what I am in myself and what I am in public are here two different things. My private self is created by my thoughts, experiences, emotions, desires, and so on. My public self is what I think I need to be to protect my private self. The elders and the chief priests defend themselves in their private beliefs by refusing to have a public opinion about John.

Most of us do the same. We can be different in ourselves from what we are in public. I don’t mean here to things that are properly personal and inappropriate for public spaces. I mean rather those circumstances when we find ourselves doing the kinds of calculations the chief priests and the elders do in response to Jesus: knowing what we think but sparing ourselves the grief which would come from speaking it, choosing to divide ourselves into two identities – the self I think I know and the self I show. God gives us each one face, and we divide it into two, each side looking in different directions, each ear listening for different things. Jesus’ challenge to the religious leaders (and to us) leads to a similar affirmation to what we considered a couple of weeks ago – that we are what we do in the dark. When we speak of a person as having integrity, we mean that she is in the light as she is in the dark.

Authority as integrity
The clash in our reading today is not quite about personal integrity but is about authority. The effect of Jesus’ response here is to assert that authority rises from a single voice, from both ears hearing the same thing. Jesus’ opponents – with most of us – know two authorities, while Jesus himself knows only one. Jesus’ authority is founded on the cohesion of his inner life and outer ministry.  In contrast, the priests and the elders – and we with them – are divided in themselves; they are spiritually “schizophrenic” (Greek: “divided mind”), subject to multiple voices. Our authority evaporates in our dissembling and deception, for we are shown to be divided.

Such dishonesty about myself before others arises from fear: I don’t trust the world with my true self. And perhaps this seems to be fair enough: the world is a dangerous place and a self-preserving instinct does not always deny God or our true selves.

Yet, dishonesty like this does not only arise from fear but also gives rise to fear, because no one really knows what’s lurking beneath the visible surface. We are what we do in the dark, and we have reason to fear what that is. This fear breeds dishonesty, duplicity and suspicion, and all this dissolves community.

In contrast, being the same in myself as I am in public gives rise to love and trust. This is not easy and is often dangerous. I have to put myself at risk by revealing who I am so that you can know what to expect from me when the relationship between public and private is pressed.

Now, all of this is very nice, but it’s just not how the world works. And so we suffer and find we cannot trust. The debates about the Voice at the moment, our constant preparation for war, our refusal to act decisively in relation what might be a looming climate catastrophe – these have to do with the absence of authority, the lack integrity.

The cross as authority
The touchstone in Christian confession for understanding this tension in us is the cross of Christ. The cross is Jesus subject to the effect of what is revealed in the debate about authority in today’s Gospel text. The religious leaders, divided as they are in themselves, reject the possibility that what Jesus says and does is integrated with God, and he is crucified. The cross marks the powerlessness of divine authority in the face of worldly power. And the story should simply end here – one more tragic effect of human fear and loathing. And it would, were it not for Easter – for the resurrection.

This is not to say that the resurrection is a happy ending for Jesus which promises us also that, whatever happens, we’ll end up smiling. That might be true but it’s not very interesting, because we have to live here and now, not there and then. The resurrection of Jesus is not a happy ending but the invitation to look again at the cross, now not as failure but as triumph.

The gospel sees the cross as the sign of Jesus’ authority – the sign of his integration of inner call and outer action. On the cross, Jesus remains true to his calling, which is not to be crucified but, in all circumstance, to be true to the God who sent him. This integrity with his calling, however, is not a “power”; it is authority as authentic being. Power, in the sense we usually mean, springs from the kind of division in the leaders as they avoid the truth in responding to Jesus. Our division of ourselves is an act of power – a manipulation – and this kills.

The cross is powerlessness; there are no two ways about it. In terms of worldly power, there is nothing to see in the cross but the tragic crushing – again – of the powerless. But the gospel is not about power but about authority and authenticity; on the cross, Jesus stays true despite the divided self of the world.

This hardly seems like good news. When Jesus calls us, someone said, he bids us, Come and die. Only those who lose their life will save it. Is this good news? It is only good news against the backdrop of two things we don’t often admit. The first is that we are going to die anyway, and the second is that the divided self of an inner heart hiding behind an outer façade is its own kind of premature death. In light of this, the question becomes, Where is true life to be found?

Authored by God
The gospel’s response is that true life is found in integrity. The cross is where Jesus triumphs in the face of evil by being true to the love of God. And so, for Christian confession, the cross is the authoritative event in human history. The resurrection is the evidence that true human being is possible even in a death on a cross (Philippians 2). And so it is here that true human being is authored. Here, God writes (with a “w”) what we are to be, for we are to live as if the world of duplicity and disintegration cannot keep God out.

Authority in Christian confession is anything which declares that God will be near even in death and decay.

God will be near when bombs explode and forests burn and referendums fail.

God will be near when she dies, and when the church doors close for the last time, and when the divorce papers are signed.

God will be near when the diagnosis comes, when the weight of shame threatens to crush, when  the money falls short.

By what authority does Jesus do what he does? Who “authors” him?

Jesus – rejoicing with his friends, clashing with opponents or gasping on the cross – is authored by God.

And so also for us. Our authority – our integrity – springs from being and doing what God calls us to be and to do. Our faith is true when it is matched in our actions.

This is what God honours.

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Pentecost 17
24/9/2023

Exodus 16:2-18
Psalm 105
Matthew 20:1-18

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

What is the point of the Church? The building, the ritual, the symbols, the music, the week in and week out? What are we trying to achieve with all this? And not just the weekly service, the whole apparatus of it all: the theological college, the books in the library, the Bible studies, the agencies, schools, the Synod offices? What is the Church for?

The Church exists in an intermediate space within history. The time between what some theologians call the “already” and “not-yet” of divine salvation. After the “already” of Jesus’ saving work through cross and resurrection; and before the “not-yet” of the final consummation of all things.

This eschatological horizon frames the life of the Church as it plods along through the mundane rhythms of history. By “eschatological” here I mean the grand end towards which history is ultimately aimed: the end and goal which is the reconciliation and renewal of the whole creation; the end and goal which is God’s complete dwelling all in all within and among creation itself — walking in the garden with humanity once again.

The church’s life is sustained in this intermediate space, so the story goes, by the foundation and promise established by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And the Church is carried forward by a future hope: the final enthronement of this same Lord, where every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

In this intermediate space the Church is perhaps a vessel which carries faithful souls from saving promise to final consummation. A vessel which seeks to add as many souls as possible to the voyage. And to make of the passengers a good crew for the journey.

To what end, then, the Church? To be the lifeboat for a world bound for destruction, and an enjoyable cruise for those aboard the ship? All these rituals, and songs, and sermons, a series of onboard entertainment for the cruise?

Our daily lives together mere small, trivial, fleeting fancies awaiting God’s making good on Jesus the divine down payment.

Is that the point of the Church?

Set in the context of grand — eschatological — history, the parables of the Kingdom can help guide the Church’s life between the times. Parables like the one we have heard in today’s Gospel reading, of day labourers working in a vineyard. These parables can be a kind of key for addressing the questions raised by the Church’s place between promise and fulfilment, between the already and the not-yet, between the foundation and future. Like all good parables, the story of the day labourers in the vineyard helps to unsettle and recast our understanding of ourselves, and our place within God’s redemptive project. It can be read as a parable of the long day of the Church’s existence in history.

The parable of the vineyard workers takes place in the context of a long, but single day. The vineyard owner goes out early to the marketplace and hires workers for the day. The practice of day labouring was fairly common in the ancient world, and indeed is fairly common around the world today. A day’s work should guarantee a day’s pay at the price of a day’s provisions.

Labourers intent on ensuring they get the work they need to survive are wise to get to the marketplace early. Ready to accept an offer of work, lest they arrive late and all the work is gone. Labourers who are late to the marketplace risk missing a full day’s work and going without. In the great reversal of this parable even those who are late to the worksite are given the full day’s wages — much to the chagrin of the diligent workers who stood ready and waiting early in the day.

In the context of the early Christian communities who first heard this text we can imagine the kinds of issues which come to mind. The tensions between the Jewish believers who stood ready for the coming Messiah early in the day, as it were; and the Gentiles, who came untimely late.

The Jews, of course, had spent their lives in hopeful anticipation for God’s vindication and arrival: the coming of the Messiah, the outpouring of the Spirit, the liberation of Israel and the wrapping up of history. Their deep devotion, recalling the stories of Exodus and Exile, kept alive the flickering hope of God’s reward. They had been eager to take their place in God’s harvest, keeping alert from the earliest dawn.

Who, then, are these Gentiles, those untimely born, who only recently came into the fold of this Jewish renewal movement — as if only at the end of the day? Not even with a requirement for circumcision, nor food laws, nor seemingly much else beyond the confession of the Risen Jesus.

The point here isn’t so much about the disjunction between law and grace: Torah observant Jews supplanted by Gentile converts — there is enough evidence of Jesus’ own Torah faithfulness throughout Matthew’s Gospel to put that idea to rest. Rather, the point is to pay attention to the basis of inclusion in the workforce. It is the needs of the vineyard and its harvest, and the generosity of its owner; not to the work or the pay of the labourers that really matters.

That new labourers are brought into the vineyard late in the day perhaps suggests that the abundant harvest demands even more work than the labourers can provide. The harvest is plenty but the labourers are few. The vineyard’s harvest has more than enough for everyone.

So too the generosity of the vineyard owner is not tied to the work of the labourers, but to their need. Regardless of whether a worker begins in the morning or at dusk, their need for wages and the provisions those wages pay for does not go away. The generosity of the vineyard owner is not simply in paying everyone what they deserve, but in returning again and again to the marketplace, seeking out new labourers so that none would be without.

The work of the church, like the work of the labourers, does not serve first and foremost our own satisfaction. The church does not exist merely as an elaborate hobby to while away the time before the miraculous return of Christ. Rather, in this parable is a vision for a community which models to the world a proactive concern that all would have enough, and their needs met. The church ought to be the community which seeks to include everyone in the generous harvest of God.

Set between the time of God’s planting the vines, and the great feast of wine and celebration, the great labour of the Church is to harvest the vines of God’s present work in the world. To align our own need as human beings, with the need of God’s kingdom flowering and fruiting in the midst of the world today.

The church’s life, in this sense, exists not simply between the “already” and “not-yet,” but as a labour which stitches together the promise and fulfilment. So that the gap between them might be revealed to be no gap at all. Not to build God’s Kingdom, which is God’s alone to build, but to be ready at the present harvest to gather in and celebrate the fruits of God’s work in the world.

The task of the church, then, is not to be the keeper of safe passage through a world bound for destruction. The task of the church is to be co-workers with God in the fruiting work of reconciliation in the world already. To be witnesses of joy, to be partners in justice, to be doers of mercy. The church’s life is caught between the times, but it is not defined by an absent past and distant future. The church’s life, and all its apparatus, serves the harvest of plenty where God calls all humanity into the present work of new life. Where there is more than enough work to do, and plenty enough to be enjoyed by all.

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Pentecost 15
17/9/2023

Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

History bears witness to the primordial human reactions to being threatened, offended or hurt – aggression, retaliation, vengeance, retribution, saving face. These are the basic instincts of our humanity, and they have terrible consequences for families, communities and nations; terrible consequences that we see throughout our world.

These basic instincts provide a context in which we hear Simon Peter seeking to clarify the leadership responsibilities given to him by Jesus. He asks: ‘Lord, how often should I forgive? Should I forgive even seven times?’ To which Jesus replies: ‘Not seven times, but I tell you seventy-seven times.’ This reflects the tradition of Psalm 130 that, with God, sins are forgotten and forgiveness is unconditional and unlimited: ‘If you, O Lord, should remember sins, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be worshipped.’ Jesus knows that keeping count is not true forgiveness, but merely the postponing of vengeance until an opportunity arises to inflict a more painful retribution.

He tells a parable about a slave who owes his master 10,000 talents. Given that a talent is more than 15 years wages, this is a debt of such magnitude that it could never be repaid. The slave falls on his knees, seeking his master’s patience and claiming that he will repay the debt, which is completely ridiculous. And yet, in an extraordinary act of mercy and forgiveness, the master cancels the slave’s debt and sets him free. The former slave swaggers off, and happens to meet a fellow slave who owes him a much smaller debt. But the forgiven slave is not forgiving. He assaults and imprisons his fellow slave. The forgiven slave has received mercy, yet he doesn’t practise it. He’s been set free, but he ignores the obligations of this unexpected and undeserved liberty. His community is so distressed by this injustice that they tell the king, who summons his former slave, and rebukes him: ‘You wicked slave, when you pleaded with me, you received mercy and forgiveness. Why haven’t you shown mercy and forgiveness to others?’ The king orders that the slave be tortured until he can repay his entire debt.

And just as we imagine that the slave has received his just deserts, we’re interrupted by Jesus offering his commentary on the parable: ‘So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ It may sound like hyperbole, but Jesus knows that the practice of forgiveness offers liberation from the seductive power of vengeance that breeds violence and disfigures all that God has made good.

We recall that, in Matthew chapter 6, Jesus teaches his disciples a prayer that has the practise of forgiveness at its core. At first glance, this prayer seems to imply that forgiveness is transactional – that we are forgiven only if we forgive others, or that forgiveness is proportional – that we are forgiven in equal measure to our forgiveness of others. But the Lord’s Prayer actually proclaims the reign of God, whose heavenly will arrives on earth among those for whom forgiveness is the source and destination of covenant life. Jesus is not merely offering his disciples another spiritual resource; rather, he teaches them a prayer that expresses his own faithful ministry, his own trusting death, his own newness of life. Indeed, it’s a prayer in which he himself is present and active. The will of God being done on earth as in heaven is nothing less than the forgiveness and reconciliation that leads people into the life of Christ, crucified and risen.

This is the point being made by the apostle Paul when he writes to the church at Rome, to challenge disunity in this new Christian community. Paul encourages them in this way: ‘We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.’

I noticed in this week’s order of service some words by a grieving widower expressing his appreciation for the care he’s received and his ‘deep feeling of belonging in a covenant community’. Belonging to Jesus Christ is a privilege and a responsibility’; it offers much and it expects much. Indeed, it invites the surrender of our own basic instincts in order that we might participate in Christ’s disruptive insistence on forgiveness, through which we’re drawn into God’s future for all humanity. A couple of weeks ago, the Rev. Tim Costello, wrote an open letter to church leaders on the Voice, in which he recalls how the gospel is proclaimed through the church’s distinctive lifestyle. He writes: ‘From its earliest days, the church has navigated conflict and inequality. Jewish Christians insisted they would not eat with Christian Gentiles, until the apostles made it clear that transcending those divisions was at the heart of living out the gospel. They had the courage to overcome resistance, and the message of freedom in Christ and one family in Christ soon carried across the world.’ ¹

In the book of Genesis are two stories that I find particularly moving, and both are stories of unexpected forgiveness and reconciliation. Genesis 33 recalls the reunion of Jacob and his bother Esau, who’d parted years before in bitterness because Jacob had stolen his brother’s birthright and their father’s blessing. Believing that the passing years will have done little to diminish his brother’s rage, Jacob anticipates their reunion by sending numerous gifts to Esau as a peace offering. On the eve of their encounter, Jacob wrestles through the night with a shadowy figure, and is blessed by a transformed destiny as he is renamed Israel. As Jacob limps towards his brother, Esau breaks into a run, not to attack Jacob but to embrace him, and Jacob declares: ‘To see your face is like seeing the face of God, since you have received me with such favour.’ And Gensis 45 recalls how Joseph, the son of Jacob sold into slavery by his jealous brothers, is now in a position of enormous power as governor of the Egyptian Pharoah. The brothers arrive in Egypt seeking food to take home to their famine-stricken community. Joseph now has the opportunity and power to make his brothers accountable for their violence towards him, and for a while it seems like he might do precisely that. But he becomes distressed by their suffering, and ultimately embraces them in reconciling grace, later declaring to them: ‘What you intended for evil, God intended for good.’

These ancient stories deeply reflect the purpose of God in Christ, crucified and risen, who forgives without limit, cancels all debts, and offers the life of reconciliation and peace. The psalmist declares: ‘If you, O Lord, should remember sins, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with you, so that you may be worshipped.’ And Charles Wesley explains how this works in the life of community: ‘All praise to our redeeming Lord, who joins us by his grace, and bids us, each to each restored, together seek his face.’ In the midst of all that seeks to divide and conquer, may the Lord of grace give you courage to pursue his peace, as we share in his ministry of reconciliation.

And now to the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, be all glory and praise, dominion and power, now and forever. Amen.

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Pentecost 15
10/9/2023

Romans 13:8-14
Psalm 119:33-40
Matthew 18:15-20

In a sentence
The ministry of Jesus in the world’s dark places is a call to us to be, ourselves, light

As in the day
Though it is night, St Paul declares, live “as in the day”.

Clearly, he doesn’t mean, Sleep less! Rather, he takes the natural division of day and night and uses them metaphorically to develop a subtle account of the human situation after the death and resurrection of Jesus.

The day-night metaphor serves Paul in two principal ways. The most obvious is the suggestion that the night is nearly over, and that it is time for sleepers to wake. Dawn – the expected return of Christ – is about to break; awaken, then, and prepare for it.

But it’s important that Paul’s call here is not built on the threat that God is about to arrive, so you’d better look busy at good works. (Although, more good works is always good! ). The possibility of living day-fully despite the night is found in the ministry of Jesus. For Paul, even Christ on the cross is night inhabited “as if in the day”. This is God in the world’s night. The resurrection of Jesus reveals not only(? ) that heaven is coming but that, in the person of Jesus right through his ministry, heaven was already present, in the world’s night. It is just this Jesus whose future is coming.

Night as day
This means that Paul’s metaphorical night and day are now not a thing which will pass or arrive but are interwoven here, in the moment within which we live. Time now no longer “flows” – second by second, hour by hour – from bad night to good day. Time is now a choice: to continue to sleep is now to acquiesce to the dark, letting it tell us what to do or to be. To awaken is to contradict the night, without wiping it away.

When Paul reminds us, then, “You know what season it is”, it is not to present the threat of the proverbial bus which might run me down tomorrow, so that I might get right with God now. He means rather: though it feels like night, life is possible here and now. The day is not so much “coming” as an addition to night, or its completion. The day is an overlay of the night, with the implication that we are what we do in the night.

Paul’s own account of what constitutes night-like activities is somewhat moralistic, although covering the kinds of things most people would think should be avoided – drunkenness, debauchery, jealousy, and the like. To these, we might add other modern immoralities operating under the cover of darkness: the anonymous internet troll hides in the dark, as does the hidden-in-plain-sight child molester and the online scammer.

But darkness is also active in more subtle ways. Consider our modern denial of death, treating it as a night we would rather pretend is not there. Or consider our next month in politics in terms of a struggle over what is night and what is day in the form of debates over the question of the Parliamentary Voice. What are we to do with the dark colonial history and its continuing effects? We cannot simply declare – as elements of the No campaign do – that the night is overcome with the passage of time, and we are now in a new day. The night continues, but the glimmer of day is possible.

And debates about global warming will themselves doubtless heat up if the coming summer here is like what it has been in the northern hemisphere this year. What does Paul’s “as in the day” look like in the deep night of an intensely carbonised economy?

Being day
Of course, living “as in the day” is not always straightforward. But Paul calls us from any refusal on our part to see, as if we had grounds to claim that we are blinded by the night. Christ on the cross is the presence of God in the dark, God’s kingdom come. It is by this strange light that the church sees. The call to discipleship is the call to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (13. 13), and be such light in darkness. Take up your cross and follow: be day in the night. Be hope calling to despair. Be forgiveness where it is not sought. Be mercy.

None of this is because “God is coming,” and we better be ready. It is because God has already come, light shining in the darkness, revealing the truth and destiny of us and all things. God’s approach in the night of the world is the only thing which will light the darkness in and around us. For God is neither afraid of the dark, nor hides in it, nor simply washes it all away. God is the possibility of day in the night.

And this is what the disciples of Christ are to be as well. We are here today because we suspect that – though it is night – day is more than a rumour.

More than a rumour, it is a revelation – in the ministry of Jesus – and a calling – live “as in the day”.

Let us live, then, as in the day, as light in the midst of darkness.