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Mark the Evangelist Uniting Church @ St Mary’s, North Melbourne; 24/8/23

2 Corinthians 4:16-18
Psalm 121
John 10:11-15, 27-30

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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 Jn 10¹¹ [Jesus said,] ‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

And the verse before it, which we didn’t hear:

¹⁰ ‘I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.’

When we read John’s Gospel, we are aware that it has a different scope. As we say on one of our Uniting Church prayers at the Table, ‘In time beyond our dreaming, you brought forth life out of darkness, and in the love of Christ your Son you set man and woman at the heart of your creation.’ So begins the work of the Trinity of love.

And the stories he tells are not so much about events in Jesus’s life as reflections on the meaning of that life, that death, that rising in glory from the cross. They are, as he says, ‘signs… that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name’. (20:31)

One of the signs is Jesus’s testimony, ‘I am the Good Shepherd’.

You may like to have Norma’s ikon on the front of the service booklet where you can see it.

Between the 2^nd and 4^th centuries, it was the main image of God in human form, then it largely disappeared but is now universal. I suppose it was a familiar sight in ancient Palestine; indeed, there are statues from pagan times of a beardless youth with a lamb slung around his neck which might have provided a model. (Sheep in their time were smaller than ours!) I’m not good at dating sheep, but Norma’s one is, I think, still young, and Jesus – the mature Jesus with a beard – is holding it firmly.

The halo forms the shape of a cross around the head, and you can see the marks of the nails in his hands. ‘The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep’.

And since you’re looking, you can see the letters O and N, by which the icon-writers identified the principal figures. The O at the top is for ‘the’, and another O (Ω) hidden under the lamb on the left side, and N on the right, form the Greek word for ‘Being’, Existence Itself, and translates the Hebrew I AM – so there you have our text.

Jesus, after all, was not a shepherd, even when young, and on the whole in the Bible, shepherds get a pretty bad press. They may be wolves who attack the flock.  Ezekiel in particular goes to town, calling them thieves and robbers ‘who do not care for the sheep’.

But the addition of the adjective ‘Good’ to ‘Shepherd’ takes the matter right out of an agricultural context. The Roman and English traditions which paint Jesus cuddling a lamb with little children at his feet in a flowery field have missed the point. It is not meant to convey a family-friendly, sentimental image to make us feel warm inside.

At the centre of this passage is the One ‘who lays his life down for the sheep’. In all the references to shepherds throughout Scripture, none goes this far. This shepherd goes even beyond the mere ‘good’. And it is saying something else: this goodness is not human virtue; it is divine, it is of the essence of God. The combination of ‘shepherd’ and ‘good’ should have been a shock to its first hearers.

The evangelist is saying something important about Jesus. The human divisions and conflicts in the earlier verses are set aside. This shepherd knows his flock, and the word ‘know’ means to know intimately, knows every one of the flock and knows them thoroughly (or in the old use of the word, ‘throughly’, through and through). And the flock knows their shepherd, just as thoughly.

This is exactly how St John speaks of Jesus’s relationship to his Abba, Father. And he goes on to offer the same intimacy to us: ‘I know my own and my own know me, ¹⁵just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.’

And amidst of the babble and noise that surrounds us – more than a shepherd ever knew – we know him by his voice.

^2’7My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.’

I looked at dozens of Good Shepherd ikons in my preparation. They come in all shapes and sizes, all comfortably settled, half-awake, gazing nowhere.

This is where Norma’s ikon has a surprise.

This is a lamb that knows, knows her keeper (Ps 121) and knows she is held. Her eye is unwaveringly intent on the Good Shepherd. I think that is a detail unique to Norma’s ikon.

For he has heard her voice too and has come, picked her up and carried her, he, the holy One, the I AM.

‘I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.’ (John 10: 28)

‘So [as St Paul wrote] we do not lose heart.’ (2 Cor. 4:16).

Into that loving, life-keeping embrace, we entrust our beloved Norma.

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Pentecost 10
6/8/2023

Isaiah 55:1-5
Psalm 145
Matthew 14:13-21

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In a sentence:
In the hands of this God, the one pearl, invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish is enough

Parables versus miracles
Over the last couple of weeks, we have heard – although not looked very closely at – some of the parables of Jesus. Today, by contrast, we hear a miracle story.

We respond differently to the various reports of what Jesus said and did. Mostly, we are happy with the parables, if sometimes a little mystified. Many of us, however, suffer from a nervous twitch when it comes to the miracle stories. We feel an urgent need to get around the miracle, an urgency we don’t feel when it comes to the parables.

The parables and miracles might be contrasted as thoughtful, scratch-your-head texts (“Hmmmm…”) and spectacle texts (“WOW!!) – even if we might be sceptical about the miracle report. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven added to the dough” – “Hmmm… That’s something to think about”; “Jesus broke bread and fed over 5000 people – “Wow! Did you see that?”

Of course, we might wonder about the miracle, but that’s not the real problem. The problem is that we don’t say “Wow!” when we hear that the kingdom is like leaven added to the dough, and we don’t really scratch our heads wondering what it could mean that a hungry mass is satisfied with one bag of groceries.

We touch here upon what someone raised last week in our brief conversation about the readings: why does Jesus justify his use of ambiguous parables with a troubling quote from Isaiah, along these lines?

‘To you [disciples] it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to [the crowd] it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that “seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” (Matthew 13.11ff)

Jesus means here that these parables are not easy. What they relate to is about as easy as it is to perform a miracle. The Kingdom of Heaven in the parables is a very strange thing.  A little later in last week’s collection of parables, Jesus asks the disciples, “Have you understood all this?” (13.51) They answer, “Yes”. For Matthew, it is important that this is a “YES!!” but it was more likely an uncertain “Ummmm…yeahhhhh…could you say all that again?”

On the one hand, the shock to the senses of the miracles illustrates what the parables are about: they have to do with the miraculous. On the other hand, the miracles are mute and meaningless without the parables. A curious thing about today’s account of the feeding of the 5000 is that it doesn’t actually tell us what we are to do with it, which is also the case with just about every other miracle story in the Scriptures. There is no “Believe this” – that I did it. There is no “Do this” – as I have done. There is no “watch for this again” – so you’ll know when I’m around. There is just the story, and the narrative moves on, kind of like how the parables are told, leaving us to scratch our heads.

Here you are, Jesus
With all this in mind, let’s consider today’s particular story. In the middle of the account is an exchange between Jesus and his disciples about who will feed the masses. “You give them something to eat”, Jesus tells them.

The standard reading is that here the disciples are being tested, and fail. And they do fail. But what is the test? Again, the common reading is that they didn’t have “enough faith” – they couldn’t summon the magic – to do what Jesus then had to do in their stead.

But if the feeding has something to do with the Kingdom of Heaven, “not enough faith” doesn’t ring true with the Scriptural understanding of who does what in that Godly kingdom. For a contrast with these disciples here, we might jump gospels and watch what happens in Cana when the wine runs out (John 2.1-12). There Jesus’ mother Mary, the quintessential disciple, nudges Jesus and whispers, “They’re out of wine,” and then tells the servants, “Do whatever he says”. Problem solved.

This suggests that if the disciples fail a test before the hungry masses, it is not that they didn’t have enough “faith” to feed them. The failure is that they didn’t see that the test was whether they would defer to him and respond immediately, “Here you are, Jesus: we can toss in a few loaves and a couple of fish.”

The work of the miracle is to communicate that the world the parables describe can only be realised by God. The Kingdom is God’s work. Put differently, the parables tell of the miraculous nature of God’s reign.

What does this mean for anything?

It means that all of our great efforts at working miracles – our planning, our negotiations, our careful liturgy and our new organ, our food programs, education programs and asylum work – these things are but a few loaves and a couple of fish to be presented with the words, “Here you are, Jesus”.

The miracle – the unbelievable thing – is that this is enough. In the hands of this God, the one pearl, the invisible yeast, the tiny seed, a few loaves and a couple of fish… is enough. And faith, when it comes – the faith that so little is yet enough – this faith is what it looks like for God’s kingdom to come, on earth as in heaven.

“The” parable, and miracle
So little is enough with God because at the heart of our confession is a single, baffling parable: “A person of faith freely walked a path to condemnation on a cross”. “Hmmm…”, we might say, “Not sure I get that”. That one parable is met with a single, spectacular miracle – “The crucified man was raised to life”. “Wow!!”, we might respond, “Although not sure I can believe that”.

But it also applies the other way around: the raising of the condemned man is the parable, and the steady path to the cross is the miracle. We don’t get the parables without the miracles. The easy-to-comprehend cross is only ours with the impossible resurrection. The glorious resurrection is meaningless without the gritty reality of Jesus’ life and death. What we find easy in the parables and hard in the miracles lean in toward each other, fill each other up, and there the Kingdom of Heaven is revealed.

When the kingdom of this God draws near, everything becomes a parable, and everything a miracle – even us with our hesitations, our lack of faith or vision, our fears and our graspings after empty hopes. And the same for our more “positive” experiences – our dreams and visions and joys; the Kingdom of Heaven “makes strange” everything, for the good.

Our life together as Mark the Evangelist in this place, and the quiet hopes and anxieties of our hearts, are the stuff of parable and miracle, where God’s will is done, on earth as in heaven. We will be God’s parable and miracle.

Let this be the light in which we do our next thing.

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Easter 6
14/5/2023

1 Peter 3:13-16
John 14:15-21

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In a sentence:
God gifts us with memory, that we might know we can be different

Faith and politics, yesterday and today
It is a widely-held ‘truism’ within Australian society that ‘religion has no place in politics’.

This assertion seeks to exclude those faith convictions – notably Christian and Muslim – which might make some claim on society as a whole. (More private and internally ‘spiritual’ religion has already absorbed the ‘no faith in public’ requirement of modern liberal societies. This kind of spirituality is already committed to residing just in heads and hearts and not in the broader political sphere).

The rejection of faith convictions in the public sphere looks like the assertion of the public-private distinction which colours our thinking around religion. Our shared idea that politics is public and religion is private is part of the prohibition. But alongside this distinction between public and private realms is our sense of the distance between the present and the past. Faiths like Judaism, Christianity and Islam have deep historical roots. Indeed, they are rooted so far in the past that the question of their continuing relevance is greatly heightened. Are we today not ‘modern’? Are we not people of the present rather than stuck in the past? And so there is no small sense in which the purported irrelevance of faith for modern politics is linked to the distance of faith’s founding events from the present. The further back in time those foundational events are, the less relevant they seem to be for those today who have forgotten them. The historical distance of the crucifixion and resurrection seems to signify Jesus’ modern irrelevance. The past is a private – privy, hidden – thing, and not for present, public exposure.

Put differently, the ejection of faith from politics presumes a politics which does not remember.

Forgetting and remembering
Our gospel text today addresses the question of the impending departure of Jesus and this as a crisis for the disciples. It’s not immediately clear from the text how the crisis is experienced. Clearly, the disciples’ lives have been tightly bound up with Jesus, and his looming departure would create the typical experience of loss and grief at an emotional level.

Yet Jesus speaks not of coping with grief but of ‘reminding’: ‘Though I go’, Jesus says, ‘the Spirit, which the Father will send, will remind you of me’. This answer to the disciples’ worry indicates that what’s at stake here is not the grief around Jesus’ departure but the possibility that everything will be forgotten – first Jesus and then the disciples themselves. I’ve said before, and it needs constantly to be recalled, that when Jesus identifies himself as ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’, the word for truth has the curiously negative sense of ‘not-forgotten’: Jesus is ‘the Way, the Not-Forgotten, the Life’.

The promised gift of the Spirit, then, is no mere ‘There, there, it’ll all be OK’. The Spirit is given because forgetting is bad; remembering matters for true human being – for the continued presence of the humanity of Jesus. It is this remembering which creates the church.

And yet, the point here is not that only the church is a remembering community. This would be to leave us with the modern problem that the church seems – even to itself – to be a people trapped in thoughts about yesterday, and so politically irrelevant. The gift of the Spirit at the departure of Jesus marks the claim that human communities in general (and not merely religious communities) must remember in order to become their true selves. This centrality of memory to identity is the engine of countless ‘amnesia’ plots in films and TV series, with their driving ‘Who am I?’ question resounding in the head of the protagonist. Remembering creates our identity by telling us what we have done and what has been done to us.

Perhaps this is not overly controversial. Yet, even when we remember, we are prone to want to remember only the best and none of the worst. In contrast to this, remembering Jesus involves recalling not only the good stuff but the bad, not only the resurrection but the cross, not only what Jesus said that we liked but also when we suddenly found ourselves the target of his polemic. It is not for nothing that tokens of a broken body and spilt blood are at the centre of what we do at Jesus’ behest, ‘for the remembrance of me’. These gory elements are there lest we forget that the light casts shadows.

So, too, with remembering in any community: the memory is usually pretty selective because it is painful to be reminded of things we have managed to forget.

A nation called to remember
Australian society is presently in the grip of a call to memory: Remember that the Australia we now know was founded as a colony. Remember that colonisation was very often a violent process and, even where it wasn’t, recognise that it was and continues to be radically disruptive of whole peoples. Remember, Australia, and know how we have come to be what we think we are.

The ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ and the corresponding proposal of a First Nations Voice to Parliament are two forms the call to memory has taken among us. Without recognition of the importance of memory for identity, these can make no convincing social or political sense. And so, we must understand the place of memory, and the importance of institutions like the Voice which have precisely the purpose of reminding and bringing a fuller identity.

Remembering can be painful. If the promised Spirit reminds those first disciples and even us today of ‘Jesus’, it reminds not only of the words of peace on the lips of the risen one but also of the desolation of the cross. If the resurrection reveals something about the powers at play in the heart of God, the cross reveals something about the powers in the heart of humanity. Heaven is not the memory only of the good things. The church remembers the crucifixion and the synagogue remembers the exile, and both remember the divine judgement read into these experiences. But to forget such things would not simply be to cease being Christian or Jewish; it would be to cease to be human.

The remembering which could be enabled by the Uluru Statement’s proposal of the Parliamentary Voice, with other history-telling processes, will similarly not be easy or comfortable. It will not be easy because we don’t know what has been forgotten and so what might be recovered. It won’t be comfortable because we cannot see the cost of remembering before we begin. It won’t be simple because, sometimes, we will get the memory or the consequences we draw from it wrong. Memory can be wrong or deceived, but this makes it no less important. Errors should be named, but still we must seek to remember rightly, to know ourselves: to know our inherited way of being human. We are what we have done and what has been done to us. These experiences are voices which speak to us and by which we speak, even if we don’t remember them. To remember is to know why we are like we are, and so to see that we could have been different. To see that we might have been different is to realise that we could still be different. Memory like this makes change possible. And we could do with a few changes.

Jesus’ promised gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples is a promised gift of memory. What is remembered through this Spirit is the human experience of Jesus as a revelation of the rich possibilities of human life. To remember this is to see such richness as a possibility, even for us forgetful people of today.

The call to memory in the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ is no less a gift: reconciliation requires truth, and truth is Not-Forgetting. And so we must heed the call in the Statement and commit to the Voice and to similar institutions for remembering.

This is how we are to become what God creates us to be. It is the one Christ toward whom the Father draws all peoples. And so the humble spirit which calls through the Statement is the Holy, Creating Spirit of God, drawing us down one path which will bring the whole groaning world a little closer to God’s coming reconciliation of all things.

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Easter 4
23/4/2023

1 Peter 2:17-25
Psalm 23
John 10:1-10

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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God may my words be loving and true. And May those who are listening discern what is unloving and untrue in my words, that you may be glorifying. Amen

St. Francis is credited with saying, “preach the gospel, and if necessary use words.” As good Protestants we know it is necessary to use words and gestures and symbols and rituals and candles and textiles and visual images and song and acts of kindness and mercy. It is necessary to use all things in the world to tell the story of God in Christ.

The task of preaching, the task of living a life of witness is to give some shape, some articulation to the story of God’s reconciling work in Jesus Christ: to turn parts of creation to tell that story, to build a sort of symbolic world of new creation that we can inhabit. To this end, we weave together stories, images, practices. We take bits of creation, and we twist them.

The Christian tradition is famed for its use of irony. The core word we use for our central story of Jesus Christ killed by the Roman Empire is this word “Gospel”: good news; which originally meant the triumph of military power. And it becomes for us the story of military death. We name Jesus Christ as “Lord,” to spit in the face of all other lords of this world.

But there is a risk in doing this work of building a symbolic world that tries to give shape to our vision of new creation — that world just behind the veil of this world, the world which Christ, the risen crucified One has established. The risk, of course, of trying to articulate this world beyond us — that has yet arrived — To articulate this world, in language, in metaphor and symbol, in practices and ritual, runs the risk that what we build is not, in fact, this new creation, which is in the hands of God. But instead, we build our own creation. We create a symbolic world that we control, where we set the limit, set the limits of what is true, and what is real.

At the same time, by building these symbolic worlds of faith and religion, we can trick ourselves and delude ourselves and turn our gaze away from a sober reckoning with the reality that is still before us. And so we construct schedules of readings for each week in the Christian calendar, and we omit the difficult parts of the text. In our reading from First Peter the lectionary does not include the lines, “honour the Emperor.” It does not include the verse that begins and says, “slaves obey your masters.” And it has been my experience that not many people preach from First Peter at all.

So when we come to a text like First Peter with all of its challenging words, that seems to shipwreck the symbols we have associated with our tradition, Jesus who is Lord against Caesar, who is Lord. And yet here, we hear the call of Scripture itself to honour the Emperor. The apostle Paul says, “For freedom Christ has set us free.” Paul says, “there is no longer slave nor free.” And here scripture says, “slaves obey your masters, even when they hurt you unjustly for your suffering is a sign of Christ.”

One of the great gifts of scripture is of course, that it shipwrecks our assumptions and claims about God; it forces us to dig deeper to understand where God is acting now.

What first Peter teaches us, I think, is that in our attempts to be faithful to God, we cannot do this by looking away from the real concrete reality that stands before us. I don’t think — I don’t want to think that the writer of First Peter tells slaves to obey their masters because the author thinks that slavery is in itself, an inherently good thing and suffering at the hands of cruel masters is an inherently good thing. And yet, in an early religious renewal movement, a small community spread across Asia Minor, a group with no political power, with no credibility, struck by prejudice, it is difficult to find a way forward that negotiates the experience of suffering and persecution.

What First Peter offers then, is not a guide that says for all time, we must accept inequalities, discrimination, domination, violence and abuse and suffering as if all these things are what God wills for the world. Rather, I think first, Peter points us to this idea that whatever we want to say about new creation, it must be something that we are saying about this creation. New Creation is something that emerges in this creation. It is not the resurrected Christ who was never put on the cross, but always the Resurrected Crucified One. The One who brings new life to a broken world, the one who brings healing to a sick world, the one who brings freedom to a bound world. And so, to be faithful to that message, to be faithful to the declaration of liberation for someone who is literally not metaphorically enslaved means to do the hard work of negotiating with sober and tragic honesty how to be Christian in a world where we suffer.

And for those of us who enjoy the privileges of 2000 years of water under the bridge, of a world that has been radically changed, of a world where we are the beneficiaries of forms of freedom, dispossession of others, and wealth creation. Our faithfulness to these early teachings is not simply to replicate them but to look again, with honesty and sobriety, at our situation in the world. Because there are some churches in the privileged, rich white West, who are talking about how the church is now on the margins as if we don’t hold billions of dollars of property. There are those who say that the criticism that is levied against the church that has hurt and abused people, and continues to, is an act of persecution rather than a prophetic voice of justice calling us back to the good ways of God.

And so we should allow First Peter to disrupt the assumptions we make about what Christianity has to say about following the shepherd who is God in our world today. We should not allow ourselves to say well, we know what Christianity is about.

“Christianity is obviously about caring for those on the margins as we were on the margins.”

“Christianity is obviously about speaking truth to power as if we are not connected to the axes of power.”

The Call of the gospel today is to face up with the complexity of our place in life. To face up to what it means to have a legacy of Christendom that the church still holds on to, but must renegotiate in a new way. The point here is to say that there are no easy answers in scripture or in life or in preaching or in the life of faith.

There is only the hard work of discernment, of placing our stories about ourselves and the world and our place within it. Placing those stories into conversation with our own tradition and history, with the lives of those who are suffering and calling for justice, and acknowledging where we stand in relationship to the guilt and shame of the world.

The point might be to say that we actually do need to construct the symbolic world we inhabit. We need to gather as communities of faith, that worship, that tell the big story of God’s reconciliation. We need to come to the table and be fed. But we should always do this not because we seek to encounter something that comforts us, something that we understand, a story that we are telling. We do this to listen to stories of others, stories in which we are engrafted, stories that shape us and that are not shaped by us.

The story of God’s transformation is always the story of God’s transforming work. We must tell the story over and over and over again. And in doing so, we must discern that God is calling us. We must be willing to confess.

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Easter Day
9/4/2023

Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10

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In a sentence:
We do not know where we are or what we are until God turns our understanding upside down.

Resurrection and magic
The delight in watching a performing magician is seeing something which doesn’t ‘compute’: the white rabbit pulled out of the empty hat or the pretty assistant who, apparently having been sawn in two, can still wriggle her toes.

The conjurer knows the art of surprise by distraction. Crucial for her act is that we are tricked into focussing on something other than the crucial move. This is particularly the case with sleight of hand, by which the magician draws our attention to one hand while the other does the real work. If we have only our eyes to trust, we have to testify that the card ‘magically’ appeared where it could not have been, or the coin we have just seen has disappeared. Of course, we don’t think this is ‘real’ magic, so we immediately wonder, ‘How did she do that?’

Most of us experience the Resurrection stories of the Gospels like this. We ‘see’ the Resurrection by hearing the stories: this is the rabbit out of the hat. And as with the magician’s trick, so with a purported resurrection, we might wonder, ‘How did he do that?’ Is it possible that the dead can be raised?

Asking ‘How?’ at least allows that something special might have happened after Jesus died. But, as far as most of us are concerned, we don’t think too seriously about this: there is really no trick to see here. It’s perhaps a nice story, but it’s ‘only’ a story, somewhere between straight deception or a sincere account from deluded witnesses.

Miracles and distraction
The story of Jesus’ resurrection of Jesus, like the other miracle stories in the Bible, looks to us to be just a magic trick, which is to say that it seems to be nothing at all. We know there is no ‘real’ magic, no control of the world by will. Magic is only skilful manipulation, visible or hidden.

But the miracle stories are not intended to be accepted as magic. A few weeks ago, we considered an account in John’s Gospel of the bringing of sight to a man born blind. We saw that a problem with ‘nature miracles’ is how distracting they are. As that account unfolds, it becomes clear that the story is not about the good luck of one person who happened to have his eyes magically opened. It is about that man coming to see who Jesus was and, at the same time, the failure of others to see the same thing, despite the overwhelming evidence. The miracle story reveals not that there is a God who does magic but the possibilities of the human heart: from the seedling faith of the healed man to the barren ground of those who opposed Jesus despite the evidence.

To see only the miracle is not to see very much at all. This applies even to resurrections, which brings us back to our reflection on Good Friday. There we considered the significance of Easter for Good Friday. Good Friday needs Easter to tell us who Jesus is, making possible language like ‘messiah’, ‘son of God’, and ‘lord of glory’ for the one who dies on the cross. Good Friday matters because this one, revealed by Easter to be Lord and Messiah, dies. This is not any old crucifixion.

Not any old resurrection
But now we might turn things around to consider the importance of Good Friday for Easter. Easter needs the crucified man Jesus for us to see the sleight of hand under the distracting miracle.

In saying, ‘Jesus is risen,’ we naturally let the emphasis fall on the ‘risen’, for this is surely where the magic is: dead people don’t usually stop being dead.

But Easter is not any old resurrection; it is not the resurrection of ‘someone’ in general. In affirming ‘Jesus is risen,’ the emphasis falls most of all on the ‘Jesus’: not ‘Jesus is risen’ but ‘Jesus is risen’. This is because the real surprise is who is raised: as a despised, rejected and crucified man, Jesus is the last person we should expect God to raise.

To get the emphasis wrong is to mishear the gospel’s declaration. At the first hearing – and for many us, at second, fifth and twentieth hearings – the Easter story sounds like Jesus dies as a man but rises as a god. But taking Easter and Good Friday together reveals the gospel’s sleight of hand: the God dies, and the man rises. Easter Day reveals that it was God hanging on that cross, while Good Friday reminds us that it is a despised and rejected human being who is raised from the dead.

There are a lot of footnotes which scream to be inserted at this point, but there’s more devil than God in the details.

The central ‘takeaway’ is that Easter is not concerned with the question of life after death, and so not with the ‘idea’ of our continuation after our hearts stop beating. Easter is concerned with the switch: a god is crucified, and a broken person is raised. This movement is a radical shaking up of expectations, revealing that most thinking about the Cross and Resurrection is like watching the wrong hand and being deceived.

The magic hand in which we are held
God does not seek to deceive us here, of course. It is a self-deception because we hear the story according to our own sense of what matters and is possible, and not God’s.

On Friday we reflected on why, of all the endings of all the lives lived in all of history, we might concern ourselves primarily with the end of Jesus’ life. We might ask the same question now of the resurrection: of all the risings which might perhaps happen, why does this one matter? These are, in fact, the same question: what has the life and death and life of Jesus got to do with any of us?

The answer is given in our short text this morning from Colossians (3.1-4). There Paul speaks of us as having our being not in ourselves, but of our being in Christ: your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ is revealed, so too are you.

This is true magic: our lives filled out, made whole, justified in the life of another.

Up to this point it is as if, in living our lives, we have performed a magic trick on ourselves, misleading even ourselves to look at the wrong hand. And we open that hand and see all the things we have done and all the things which have been done to us, and we think that what we hold there is all we are.

Dying as gods to live as creatures
But there is another hand which holds the secret of the trick we are. Scarred but strong, this hand holds us as we hold all we have been and desire to be. We are hidden in this strong hand, completed and made whole there, enclosed within Christ.

For this to become our reality, the gods we desire to be have to die so that we might emerge again from our tombs as human beings, re-imaged – re-imag-ined – in the humanity of Jesus. God dies on Good Friday so that a true humanity might rise at Easter. This humanity is created not to be divine but to be creaturely, not for fear but for love, not for selfishness but for service, not for self-justification but for grace and gift.

By sleight of hand God catches us, like a falling coin, to reveal in the end that we were looking in the wrong place.

‘He is not here!’ laughs the smiling magician, ‘and you should not be either. You are looking in the wrong place. He is risen and gone head. Run, and catch up to him. And all that is his will be yours’

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Good Friday
7/4/2023

Isaiah 52:13-15
John 18:33-19:16

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In a sentence:
More than life after death, the gift of God is life before death: life which knows the tragic but overcomes it

So long ago

Good Friday – the Good Friday – seems now to be ‘so long ago.’ Why, of all the places we might turn to in this modern age for reflection or insight, should we turn to this place?

This question is not just a matter of time. A few years ago, the broadcaster SBS had a line in its advertisements, “Six billion stories, and counting”, later updated to “Seven billion”, and we’re now at eight billion. Considering on top of this the 100 billion or so other human beings who have lived, the narrowing of our interest to one dismal Friday two thousand years is the strangest of things.

Of all the endings of all the lives in all of history, why consider just this one?

Good Friday is only interesting if Jesus himself is interesting, and a certain kind of interesting. He is arrested and executed because the authorities find him interesting in problematic ways. To these, Jesus’ crucifixion was the death of an enemy. He was interesting to the crowds and the disciples in a different way. For these, his death was the death of a friend or a hope. These experiences are familiar and play out daily in nursing homes, on country roads and in Ukraine’s smashed villages and towns. As the story unfolds, this is ‘all’ Jesus is to those around him, and Good Friday is just plain tragic in the way human life can be.

Who are you?

‘Are you a king?’ asks Pilate of the accused Jesus, standing before him. ‘Where have you come from?’ That is, ‘Who are you’? Pilate can only understand these questions on his own terms – are you a king like Herod or the Emperor? This is fair enough, but any answer on these terms is almost irrelevant to why Jesus’ death might matter. Kings and emperors also die. At this point in the story, the end of Jesus is like the end of the rest of us: a lament, a death notice, a newspaper obituary. This is simple tragedy if, in Jesus’ case, tragedy in one of its nastier realisations.

Easter and the tragedy of tragedies

It is sometimes said on Good Friday that we shouldn’t jump too quickly to Easter, skipping over the pain and suffering of the day to what seems to be the happy ending. But we can’t keep Easter out of the picture here because Easter shifts the story beyond mere tragedy. Easter doesn’t ‘undo’ Good Friday, but it answers Pilate’s question, now on God’s own terms; Easter reveals the identity of this crucified one.

If Easter tells us anything which matters, it tells us who died, and we focus on this death among all deaths today because of this identification. And this is because Easter reveals that the bad news of Good Friday is worse than we first imagined. The bad news is not merely that tragedy continues to unfold, but that good people have crucified the ‘king’, the ‘son of God’, the ‘messiah’, the ‘lord of glory’. The bad news is that this tragedy is the tragedy of all tragedies. It doesn’t get any worse than this.

The God who does not look away

Easter, then, does not exceed or cancel Good Friday but points back to the cross as the true load-bearing event. The weight of Easter is here: today, Friday.

And what is that weight?

At the risk of wandering into the realm of exaggeration – but only just so – Easter faith is the conviction that the God of all things died on Good Friday. To believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to believe this: that this death, among all deaths, is the one which matters. For, here, God dies and all the world with him.

This is, of course, impossible (or, at least, without a good trinitarian theology, which might make it sustainable). To say ‘God died’ feels like an over-reach which is very difficult to allow. The mere saying of it can only be mystifying (which doesn’t hurt, from time to time). But we can wonder what would be the case if it were true, and what light such speculation might see.

If this is the death that matters among all deaths – the tragedy of all tragedies – and yet Easter follows, then we can say that on Good Friday God sees us. God sees us, becomes us, feels us in all our tragedy.

And, on the strength of the peace declared in the risen Jesus, we can also say that God, having seen us, did not look away.

God sees us and does not look away. God sees that we are tragic and does not look away. God sees you and does not look away. To look away would be to cringe before tragedy, finding it too much to bear, and so refusing to see or hear.

We know tragedy. We have been and caused tragedy, and we know the ease of looking away.

But God sees and doesn’t look away. And it is this sustained gaze which brings life. God’s gaze denies the tragic – not denying the suffering but denying its final power.

God looks, to deny that the last word will be death.

God refuses to turn away from seeing the deep and the void of the worldly inevitability of crucifixions and firing squads and genocides, of abuse and neglect and exploitation.

God sees, and this is the beginning of the end of tragedy because, from the perspective of Easter, we begin to see with God’s eyes.

Tragedy’s deathly grip weakens for us when resurrection’s light reveals our part in the dark and broken world and we can see, and repent, and become ourselves a new beginning to the end of tragedy.

‘Who are you?’, Pilate asks, and we ask with him, suspecting that the tragic is all there is to know. We have to listen for a night, and a day, and a night to hear Jesus’ answer:

‘I am the death of death, and hell’s destruction.

Open your eyes, and live’.

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Lent 3
12/3/2023

Romans 5:1-11
Psalm 95
John 4:5-42

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

I recently sat in on a liturgy class. I was there to help facilitate a discussion on contemporary issues in liturgy within the context of the Uniting Church — as often happens in the best classes freewheeling discussion ensued. One of the questions that was posed was what to make of the Uniting Church President’s prayer at the death of the Queen.

I confess I had mixed feelings about the Queen’s death, and so opted to disengage from much of the mourning rituals, and reflections on her life and what she represented (both positive and negative). Nevertheless, when put on the spot, what to say?

The question came from the perspective of someone formed in a non-western context where their country has been shaped by colonisation. And accompanying this colonisation the suffering, oppression, and violence which always accompanies colonisation – and the blind eye turned to unspeakable violence.

I remember their question framed by this comment:

“When I came to Australia I did not join the Anglican Church, because I opened the Prayer Book and there was a prayer that said of the Queen, ‘may her enemies be vanquished.’ … I am her enemy.”

This is not the too often simple rejection of the Western led order of the world offered by some on the political left. This is a visceral, lived insight: some of the greatest tragedies in this person’s country happened during my parents’ lifetime.

When we pray we direct ourselves towards God. We seek after God’s presence alone. A Rabbi I once heard even described communal prayer as being “alone together.” Sat or standing before God to express our deepest selves, to express truths so deep that we must borrow the best words of our tradition, lest we simply offer sighs too deep for words. And yet whenever we pray the whole world is gathered together: we bring ourselves, and we ourselves are a bundle of the histories which have shaped us and shaped our world. The most honest prayers lay bare the world before God.

And so, it is right to ask what social, and political assumptions frame the words we pray.

This sermon is not the answer I gave in class, but perhaps it can be a contribution to taking the concerns of every one of our sisters, brothers, and siblings in the Church seriously. I am only beginning to learn that the questions asked by many in our minority cultural communities are vital for the life of the Church, because they free us from the ways our majority culture can narrow our vision of God.

What does it mean to say “Glory” in the Christian tradition? What does it mean to pray that someone may rest in peace, and rise in glory?

“We are justified by faith, we have peace with God … we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. … we boast in our afflictions … affliction produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint … God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” (Rom. 5.1-5)

In Romans chapter 5 the Apostle Paul gathers up the argument he has been making in the preceding 4 chapters. From tracing how deep the problem of sin truly is — so deep it infects everything, shapes everyone, so deep down it’s in the water table! To the gracious release that only Christ can offer us through faithfulness. All of this is gathered together in the short verses from the beginning of Romans 5, which then point to the next turn in the argument.

Paul’s point seems to be to take seriously the completeness of Jesus Christ’s salvific work, while recognising the gap between the proclamation of salvation and our tangible experience of it. If Jesus’ death has in fact released the world from the bondage of sin, then why is so much in the world still clearly marked by sin and its effects?

We might phrase this question in another way: how do we hold to the hope of resurrection when there are crucified bodies all around us?

For Paul we begin to answer this question when we recognise that the salvation achieved by Jesus Christ is not first and foremost about God’s abandonment of a world marked by suffering. Rather, salvation is our release from being shaped by the forces of sin and death, and so that we are new people in the midst of a suffering world which God is redeeming. What we inhabit is not a magical solution to all the world’s ills, as if every problem can simply be ignored or wiped clean, without the hard work of reconciliation and healing. Rather, we inhabit a new situation in which God is revealed in and through the suffering of the world, as the one who will never abandon the least or the last. We are in a new situation in which we are shaped by the outpouring of the Spirit which is transforming each of us, and the whole world.

What, then, do we boast in? We do not boast in ourselves, marked as each of us are by the painful histories of ourselves as individuals, our families in their complexity, our wider society, and the degradation of the world itself. We boast instead, says Paul, in affliction, in suffering. Not because affliction and suffering are in themselves good: by no means! We boast in affliction because it recalls us to solidarity with each person who suffers, and the whole suffering world. We boast in affliction if and when it recalls the solidarity which Jesus himself lived on behalf of all of humanity, and all of creation.

This is glory. Glory is the cross. Glory is the gathering of the whole wretched world in the afflicted person of Jesus, who represents humanity to God and receives righteousness and justification on our behalf.

So it is that to receive the glory of God means sharing in the suffering of Christ which puts on display God’s love for a wretched world. Let me be clear: when we speak of a wretched world we can never mean a world which is bad and which God seeks to abandon, a world in which we should think of ourselves as worms. When we speak of a wretched world we speak of a world in which everything is marked by a march towards death, where from our first waking moments we enter cycles of trauma, where we live in stolen land, where we are shaped by anxieties, insecurities, abuses, and disregard. What Christ gathers into himself is this world beset by tragedy, and embraces it so thoroughly that the tragedy ceases, and yet we who are formed in and by this tragedy do not cease.

This is the glory of God: who embraces the affliction of the world and forges from it a new humanity, bound together by bonds of love and not animosity. This is the glory of God: who invites us into the afflictions of the world so that we too become agents of transformation and new life. This is the glory of God: that the hard edges of the world might be cast aside, and yet not a single soul can be left out or abandoned.

Glory is being bound to each other, being stitched into the tapestry of love which gathers all of the troubled world into a new beginning. This new beginning, this rising in glory is the ongoing work of living into what is true:

We have been justified by faith, we have peace with God. May we boast in sharing in the afflictions of the world, for this is true glory, and the redemption of the cross.

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Transfiguration
19/2/2023

2 Peter 1:16-21
Psalm 99
Matthew 17:1-9

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In a sentence:
The Transfiguration of Jesus invites a transforming of our sense for – and living of – the lives we have been given to live

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.

(Nicene Creed)

This is rather a mouthful, and a contested one. We don’t recite the Creed each week but we do often enough; and when we don’t say it, it is nevertheless implied in the alternative affirmations of faith, and in other parts of the liturgy.

Where a protest is raised – in the world and often enough in the church – the objection is usually that the confession makes the world too big and God too small. Is God so small as to be identified with Jesus in this way? The objection is not new, which is why the middle bit of this ancient confession of faith is the longest: it’s here that God and the world collide. We have the Creed because of this apparent smallness of God in Christian confession.

Something of this tension between God and the world is reflected in the account of the Transfiguration we’ve heard this morning. By itself, the Transfiguration is not easily accessible. What happens here, why Elijah and Moses are there, why it occurs at this point, its fleeting strangeness – all of this compounds the sense of our distance from the reported experience. Are we simply to ‘believe’ the text and assert that Jesus did glow-up like this for a moment, with heavenly sound effects to complement the light show? What does it all add to our understanding of God? The disciples themselves had no idea what to make of what happened. A hint is given that Easter will make sense of it all, but this doesn’t help if we continue to wrestle to make sense of Easter itself.

Most of you have heard dozens of sermons on the Transfiguration, the last 19 of which here at MtE you can find on our website. I’ll try not to repeat all that this morning! Today we’ll come at it this way: taking as given some mystical experience, let’s consider the divine voice which offers commentary. The voice declares that Jesus is the Son – God’s special one – and that we should take notice of him. What would it mean to say that small and ordinary Jesus is such a presence of the fullness of God?

The first thing we would have to say is that, if Jesus were this presence, we wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at him at any other time. Peter, James and John get a glimpse of something new, but once they get talking they might wonder whether it wasn’t just a dream interrupted by lightning and thunder. Most of the rest of the time, Jesus is just a chap amid a group of men and women, milling about the place, as probably happened from time to time in those days. Perhaps Jesus is wise, and charismatic, and courageous, and committed to his cause, but that describes anyone with their wits about them. Jesus doesn’t look special.

We are told that the disciples’ response at the time was ‘fear’ or, as the Greek word could also be translated, ‘amazement’. This makes sense in terms of the shock at what happens, as a sudden flash of light makes us blink, or a loud noise makes us jump. Yet we are told the story not to know their response but to share it. What if this were true? If Jesus intersects with God in this way, what then for us?

To grasp the extent of this question – the moral extent, we might say, but also what it might mean for our sense of everything – we must keep in mind that it is not merely ‘a’ connection of Jesus to God which flashes forth for a moment. It is the connection of the crucified Jesus to God. The crucifixion (as an event) is still just a possible future at this point of the story, but for the Gospel writer and we who think about Transfiguration on this side of Easter, Jesus is the crucified, discarded one. Listen, the voice from heaven now commands, to the one you abandoned and crucified. This one is my Son, my beloved and my delight. And not so much listen to his ‘words’ – to this or that saying. Listen rather to the Word he is as the collision of the depths of human experience with the whole of God. The Transfiguration is light shining through the cross; (it does not ‘look’ like the resurrection of Jesus but is the meaning of the resurrection itself).

This, then, is not a warm-and-fuzzy, nearer-my-God-to-thee mountaintop experience. Not merely Jesus is transfigured. If it is the crucified Jesus – the sign of the most distant from God parts of the world – if it is this one who is transfigured – then even those things in the world which seem far from God are now pulsing with the possibility of bearing God. The world is now not as we have known it. And not only the world but God also is transfigured. God is shown to be willing to ‘own’, to live into, to die with and to pass through the darkest of human experiences, in the cross.

The Transfiguration, if it happened, says what doctrines of incarnation and atonement and resurrection and consummation would say if they were true: God is the mystery of the world, the hidden beginning, means and end of all that we are. We forget this in the midst of doctor’s appointments and overseas trips, between the birth of grandchildren and reports of wars in faraway places. We forget it when we’re angry that some justice has not been done, and when we’re glad to have received a windfall. We forget, when someone is trying to scam us on the telephone, and when we catch a hint of jasmine on the breeze. To forget God is not to be irreligious but to mistake some part of the world for less than it is – as just a thing which happens. For what it truly is is the possibility of the free and freeing presence of God, making possible the enjoyment – and the suffering – of all that we are and have and can be, without turning those things into God. To say that the big God is met in the small Jesus is to say not merely that this God can be found, but that God wills to be found, in all the small (and big) better-and-worse things of our life.

Jesus is God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made… in order that we might be, too – here and now in our little part of everything.

If we wanted to say why Christians gather like this today, we might say that we gather to be reminded that we have forgotten. We have forgotten that God is the God of small things, even the God of crucified things. We have forgotten, and so we have feared, and we have lashed out, and we have pushed away because we have thought we can’t afford to love or forgive or hope. We have forgotten what life and the world can be. The Transfiguration is not a thing which just ‘happened’. It is a thing which can happen – the discovery of God which transforms the world around us: Here. Now. You. Me. In God.

‘…a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved and my delight. Listen. Comprehend. Believe. Live.”’

‘When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by amazement.’

What else could they do with such news ringing in their ears? Now everything would have to change…

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Epiphany: The Baptism of Jesus
8/1/2023

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 29
Matthew 3:13-17

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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

My Dad had a cousin named Dawn Mount — she has now passed away. Dawn was so named because she was found abandoned at dawn at the base of a mountain. In lieu of family, or birth certificate, she was named by a police officer: Dawn Mount.

Dawn entered our family through my Great Aunt Biddy, one of the living saints of this world. Aunt Biddy has fostered dozens of young people — their photos cover the walls in the living room. Often her home provided respite for young people facing quite significant challenges. Young people the social service system in Aotearoa, New Zealand, has not always known how to cope with.

Dawn entered the house, I imagine, as everyone does: through the front gate, down the path to the door, to be greeted by Biddy’s unending kindness.

On occasion young people were accompanied inside by a social worker, who conveyed to Biddy the backstory, conducting the handover. On these occasions as soon as the social worker left it was back to the front gate, bags under arm, to come in again: through the gate, down the path, to be greeted, properly by Aunt Biddy and her unending kindness.

Biddy met no “cases” at the door, she took on no “problem children,” Biddy met children, young people: those who they were.

And they were all embraced as her own: expected to attend Church on Sundays, sent off to the same school adjacent the Church, and welcomed into a chaotic, and wonderful, and complicated, and generous home.

Dawn entered this home as a teenager. Years later she asked my Aunt, “how many people do you know who were born as teenagers?”
“None,” Biddy replied.
“Yes, you do … Me.”

What my Great Aunt Biddy knows in her bones, shaped by her Christian faith I’m sure, are the lessons of baptism.

Not baptism merely as a ritual avowal of our beliefs. Nor baptism as a routine rite of passage into one among many of the cultural and religious communities of the world. Nor baptism as the commitment of parents to induct and instruct their children in the ways of the tradition.

Aunt Biddy knows that new life must always begin at the beginning. Aunt Biddy knows that baptism is always the welcome home. Always meeting people as themselves, as those who they are.

It is the beginning of new life.
It is the welcome home.
Baptism is for the sake of the quiet, secret work in which love restores the world.

One of the things that’s interesting in the emphasis on baptism on this day of the Christian calendar, is that the text from the Gospel is actually the wrong baptism. Christians take our understanding of baptism not from Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan, but from the baptism Jesus undergoes in his crucifixion.

So it is that The Basis of Union — the founding theological statement of this church — talks of, “[Christ’s] baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial…” (Basis, §7)

Of all the Gospels Matthew seems to recognise this awkwardness in the way Jesus comes to John at the Jordan to be baptised. Matthew — unlike Mark and Luke (the two other Gospels that seem to tell the story in similar ways) — makes a point of including the awkward conversation between Jesus and John. John refuses to baptise Jesus until Jesus argues him into it.

As a historic point, the commissioning at the end of Matthew’s Gospel — for the disciples to go and make disciples, baptising them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit — likely reflects, and in turn reinforce some of the earliest baptismal liturgy and practice of the Church. For this reason one can understand why Matthew makes a point of telling the story of Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan slightly awkward. To make clear that this baptism is not the primary source from which later baptismal liturgy and practice should take its lead.

Nevertheless, although today we have heard the story of the wrong baptism, Jesus’ baptism by John does teach us fundamental lessons about what baptism continues to mean for us.

John, perhaps taking the lead of my Aunt Biddy (although she’d probably resent the suggestion that she was quite that old), understood that baptism is for the healing of the world: turning from captivity to sin, and towards the restoration and freedom offered by God. If this is what baptism means, then what need does the Messiah have for baptism?

Jesus’ decision to be baptised reinforces that he too was on the journey towards the restoration and freedom offered by God. The journey begun at baptism is always a journey with others: the restoration of ourselves is always a restoration in relation with others. It is not first and foremost about what we do, but about the unending kindness we receive ultimately from God.

So it is that The Basis of Union speaks of baptism as being, “united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy.” (Basis §7)

And above all, what Jesus’ baptism signifies is the declaration that Jesus is the beloved child of God. And this is the meaning that baptism must carry with it.

That each of us have become children of God. Not by virtue of the water, but by virtue of the work of love which is renewing the world. By virtue of the Spirit of love which emanates from the true site of baptism: the place where Jesus’ journey with others ends, and where only Christ can go. We have become children of God because of the true baptism of the cross.

In the river we see the glimpse, and at the cross we see in fullness, that God meets us at the front gate on our worst day, and walks us down the path to the doorway home. There we are met with unending kindness.

Baptism is the beginning of new life.
It is the welcome home.

Baptism is not our entryway into an exclusive club, but our witness to the whole world that each of us are embraced as divine children. For all the wrong baptisms, false starts, and fractured beginnings of our lives. Baptism is the renewal, the beginning again, always from the beginning. Baptism is the invitation to be the person who we are: who we truly are, in the love and restoration and freedom of God.

Baptism is good news.
This is good news:

You are a beloved child of the divine
You have a place in the chaotic, and wonderful, and complicated, and generous home of God

No matter the abandonment of your dawn, you are born again on this day
No matter how partial, fragile, or fleeting the love which formed you, you are met with the unending kindness of God

And friends, hear this the Good News:

Christ journeys with us, and before us, going to the cross.
God meets us at the front gate, walks us down the path, and welcomes us with unending kindness again, and again, and again, and again.

Through those we have met in this room, in our lives, as if by chance — and through the baptismal wisdom of the living saints of this world.

May the Spirit who hovered over the waters:
At creation, at your birth, at your baptism
Grant you the gift of the freedom of Christ:
in the name of God,
who created you,
who formed you,
who loves you.
Amen.