Love - Congregation of Mark the Evangelist

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13 May – Love, love, love

Posted on 13 May 2018 by Admin

Easter 7
13/5/2018

1 John 2:3-11
Psalm 1
John 17:6-19

In a sentence:

Love creates community from a centre, not from a border

If you’ve taken the time to read through 1 John, you’ll have noticed that it is not a straightforward text. There are circular arguments, contradictions and leaps of logic which make it difficult to follow. We’ve noted already that this is in part because we read here only one side of a conversation. It’s also the case that John simply thinks differently from us. Some scholars even wonder whether the text as we have it is in fact a pastiche of materials from different sources, loosely stitched together into our present ‘letter’.

Whatever the case, the text is complex, and this is certainly the case in our reading today. There is not a lot of point trying to unpack that complexity here; it is pretty clear, in the context of the rest of the letter, that John’s concern here is the operation of love within his community: the ‘old’ and ‘new’ commandments are the same: love one another.

This much is straightforward. Or it is, until we give it half a thought. Why does John insist on this? Again, the answer seems obvious: love is surely a good thing. But let us notice then where the word generally operates for us and, more interestingly, where it doesn’t.

In common usage, ‘love’ pops up almost exclusively in relation to relatively intimate relationships: I love you, she loves him, they love each other. This describes or expresses marriages, families, friendships. To put it grammatically, this is love in the ‘indicative’. It’s love which is already there.

But let’s then notice how love tends not to appear in common use: love rarely pops up in what is labelled grammatically as the ‘imperative.’ That is, love rarely pops up as a command. Our politicians do not tell us to love one another. Teachers to not tell their students to love one another. Doctors are not told to love their patients. So much the better if we do but the imperative is rarely spoken. We could say, broadly, that love is not a ‘political’ category: we recognise its operation within the polis (the community; Greek for ‘city’), but it does not make the polis, the political space.

The word is absent from public space in this way in part because of the connotations it has in more intimate use. But possible replacement words are largely absent as well. We might occasionally be encouraged as a community to care for each other (usually after some catastrophe) but it is occasional – a passing thing and not something we constantly hear.

John, however, will not keep quiet about love. The love of which he speaks is very much a political, social love: love the other as brother or sister. He blurs the easy intimacy of family relationships into a broader social imperative, command.

And the word command is important, with the corresponding expectation of an obedient response. Intimate love makes a response but it is largely an involuntary one. We ‘fall’ into this kind love. The love which John emphasises here involves not a fall but a push, a command: love one another.

Yet, even if this is the case, why does it matter? Why should we hear this command and why, then, is it not regularly heard outside walls like these ones? We don’t hear a command to love in the broader community because love does not define community for us – something else does. At the political level, for example, the community is defined by such things as national identity and the tangible and intangible borders that come with this. Within this identity love may well be present and active, but it is not necessary for political dialogue to take place, for the polis to exist. Our politicians and teachers and shock jocks don’t talk about the need to love one another because such talk is redundant. We are a community by a means other than love, and – as much as love ‘helps’ – all that we then need to do is legislate for tolerance, or provide enough places for haters or the hated to hide themselves from each other.

This is what John contradicts. His position is that we are first and foremost lovers and that society is first and foremost communion – love in its broader political dimension. The to and fro of love – in whatever form – is where we begin and end. All other definitions of who we are – or accounts of how we come to be – are secondary. A flag is but a fig leaf snatched up and wrapped around ourselves at our discomfort at being naked. It is a uniform which makes us bearable to each other without requiring that, in fact, we bear each other.

In John’s own context he speaks against a definition of self which has nothing to do with national identity but with a different sense of who God is and how God can and can’t relate to the world. The principle, however, is the same. That different idea about the source of our self was enough for a split to occur in the community, to create the kind of divisions which borders or race or gender or religion create.

Against all other definitions of who and how we are, the command to love says that it starts here. Who we are has to do with how we relate to each other in immediate relationships.

More than this, the command to love is given because being our true selves depends on it. We heard as much at the very beginning of the letter, where John accounts for the letter itself: ‘We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete’ (1.4). The community of love needs to be loved and to love in return, if it is to be ‘complete’.

So John says, love – do it. Shake the hand, ask the question, make the phone call, offer the assistance, give the money, make the time – pass the peace, for peace is what love brings.

The people of light do the light, that they may see more clearly, and that all others might too.

Let us, then, love one another.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In confessional response:

We offer thanks and praise, O God,
because you have created and sustained us
and all things.
And yet, merciful God, we confess that we have sinned in thought, word and deed.
Forgive us when we reserve
love for the lovely
for the familiar and comfortable.
Forgive us the secondary things we make primary,
the penultimate things we make ultimate,
as we choose whom and how to love.
Forgive us our insensitivity to our own need for love
and our assumption that our love
would not be needed by others.

Almighty God,
to whom all hearts are open,
all loves known,
and from whom no secrets are hidden:
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your holy name;
through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

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6 May – The blood of Jesus and the joy of God

Posted on 7 May 2018 by Admin

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Easter 6
6/5/2018

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

Prelude: Reading a biblical text

It might be helpful to begin this morning by saying something about the way in which we are engaging with the first letter of John. We are not doing is taking a blow by blow, verse by verse account of what John says and why that might matter to us to. This is because a lot of what John says quite simply does not make immediate sense. He often seems to go in circles, makes logical leaps which are not obvious to us, seems even to contradict himself on quite important things. A ‘straight reading’ – a ‘literal’ reading, if you like – can simply lead to confusion or uninformed rejection of what John has to say. This problem with the letter springs in part from the fact that it is a letter (or similar) – that it addresses a known community and known circumstances which we don’t know and in cultural and linguistic ways quite different from our own. We have to infer from what John says why he says it – a process a little like trying to lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your own bootstraps: never straightforward.

But there is another challenge, more important than the historical one. This is the gospel itself. John is not just a cultural or historical ‘other’ to us; his words come to us as ‘scripture’ – as ‘the word of God.’ We listen, then, for where John contravenes what we might have in common with those to whom he wrote: where does he say it ‘wrong’? These are the most interesting, engaging points. Where we find ourselves in agreement with the text (if we can be sure that we are), we simply affirm something we already know. But it’s the apparent cracks in the logic of the Scriptures which let in new light.

– – – –

One such crack appears in our reading from 1 John today, which we’ve heard now for the third time (there’s a lot going on here!):

‘…if we walk in the light as he himself walks in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus washes us from all sin.’

‘If we walk in the light…we have fellowship with one another.’ This is the reverse of how we typically understand fellowship or communion to work. For us – as a political theory, and in our common experience – it is communion which brings light. Dialogue brings understanding and illumination. Get the warring parties around the table, have them share of themselves, encourage understanding and empathy, and peace will follow: fellowship, communion. This is peace conceived in terms of strategy. And we know that it works. Seeking to live in communion can bring light.

But John says it the other way around: light brings communion – if we walk in the light, we have communion with one another. This is not accidental, a passing slip; the logic pops up right through the letter (see, e.g. 1.2; 2.11; the ‘externalising’ of love in the work of God, rather than our own work [3.6, 4.10]).

Communion is possible because of the light. This is not to diminish the importance of whatever light might spring from what relationships we might dare to enter into. We are only ourselves by virtue of our relationships to others; we can expect to grow and be illuminated by those relationships we already enjoy.

But John’s vision is larger than what we know and are comfortable with. This is implicit in what he adds to his remarks about communion and walking in the light:

‘…if we walk in the light as he himself walks in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus washes us from all sin.’

There are two things we note here. The first is the reference to the blood which washes sin away. Here the strangeness of sacrificial logic is invoked, upon which we touched a couple of weeks ago. But we notice this logic first of all to bracket it to one side. Sacrifice is one way of interpreting the cross and not a final explanation for what God does with the cross.

Nevertheless John is saying – and we can’t simply bracket this out – that the cross of Jesus is the light which brings fellowship. The cross overcomes un-fellowship, un-communion – the darkness of sin.

And yet, behind this and at the same time, the cross is precisely the opposite. A crucifixion is a radical excommunication, a rupturing of communion with the executed criminal. So the cross both the sign of un-communion and makes communion possible.

This apparent contradiction is only resolved by the identity of the one on the cross – that Jesus is the Son of the Father who sent him. At the beginning of John’s gospel we hear, ‘He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him’ (John 1.11). If Jesus is the Word, the Son of the Father, then in the crucifixion of Jesus is the relationship of all relationships broken: that of God to God’s people and so of God to God’s world.

This, of course, would be catastrophic on any account except that of the gospel. For the gospel may be put this way: the people of God do not cease to be the people of God for having crucified the Son of God. We do not define our relationship to God; God defines that relationship. That definition is that we are God’s people; this is the ‘essence’ or substance of this relationship.

But, while we do not determine the substance of this relationship, but we do give the relationship its form, its shape. That form is most fundamentally the form of a cross. The substance of our relationship with God – that we belong to God, regardless – takes the form of the cross. And so the love which is the substance of the relationship is now not ‘mere’ love – formless affection or attraction – but a love which has overcome, a love which is forgiveness, a love with a history.

The cross saves because it is the shape we have given to our relationship with God, which God has honoured without changing the essence of God’s own intentions with us: to be our God.

Here we come close to the meaning of another text we’ll meet later in John’s letter: we love because God first loved us (4.19). The ‘first’ here is not so much a chronological priority, that God ‘got in’ first, and our love follows. It more a matter of God ‘out-loving’ us. We give the God-relationship the shape of the cross, and God reveals in response just how seriously he takes us: the cross as a sign of excommunication is made the sign of God’s communing love for the world (John 3.16f).

We noted in our first reflection on this letter another ‘crack’ in his logic which let in gospel light: the surprising rationale John gave for writing the letter: ‘We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.’ John desires the joy of fellowship. But this unexpected thing – that he evangelises as much for himself as for those he addresses – is also not accidental. It has its basis in the gospel itself. For the gospel is that God insists on being the God of these people, even if that relationship takes the shape of a cross. For we are God’s joy, and God refuses to have his own joy denied. The crucified Jesus becomes the love and light of the world, in order that God’s own joy may be complete.

This is to say that, with this God, nothing is insurmountable.

It is also to say that, for a people so loved, nothing is insurmountable. If we walk in this light, then communion comes because nothing can finally keep us from each other; the blood of Jesus washes un-communion away from us (1.7).

Let us then, walk in the light by which God’s own joy is complete, that ours – and everyone’s – might yet be.

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28 January – On the fear of God

Posted on 28 January 2018 by Admin

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Epiphany 4
28/1/2018

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

To endeavour to learn a new language – particularly to speak it – is to wander into dangerous territory. Even when the words are not lacking, nuances of meaning are often hidden from the learner. Great confusion and embarrassment await those brave who risk a strange tongue.

The world of Scripture is a new language, even when translated into the vulgar tongue. It, also, is riddled with nuance and hidden meaning to trip up the presumptuous novice.

Let’s consider the closing thought of our psalmist this morning: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” If a beginning in wisdom is taken to be a good thing, is “the fear of the Lord” the best – or even a good – way to such beginning? Ought we not rather love God? We know fear as a basis of relationship, and we agree that love is a much more desirable way to relate. Or, perhaps, we might try to bridge the gap between fear and love by reading “fear” as “respect.” “Respect” allows that God could be feared but need not be.

Linguistic refinements like this make an apology for how the psalmist portrays God here. If love is good and fear is bad, then relating to God on the basis of fear is unpalatable. We refine the text to do God a favour. We ought, however, to keep in mind that God generally gets along quite well without our help, and that the text generally means what it says: the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This doesn’t yet make the sentiment any more palatable but, like any strange mode of expression, it might give us pause: what could this mean?

The distance between our culture and context of Scripture is often obscured by things we imagine we have in common, like cognates between two languages. The Bible is interested in God, and we are interested in God, thus we presume that when the Bible refers to God it does so in the same way that we do. Yet “God” – as a concept – is for us something quite different from its conceptualisation in the Scriptures. In particular, we tend towards the idea that there is only one God, and “God” is in fact a viable name for God. Strictly speaking, God can only be God’s name if there is one God. In the Scriptures, however, the basic assumption is that there are many gods – as we heard from Paul this morning – and that “God” is not so much a name as a type of thing.

In fact it’s much messier than that, but this much helps us to get inside our psalmist’s thinking. For we can say that, in the Scriptures, a god stands for something the present or absence of which we fear. Do we fear the absence of life or money? Then Death and Mammon become gods. Do you fear the absence of power? Then that which gives power, mythologised as a god, becomes what we fear, lest it withdraw that power. Because there are many who fear such things, and often in contradiction of each other, there are many gods. The important thing is, then, not whether you fear “God” but whether you fear the right one among the many feared gods: the god properly feared if we are going to fear anything.

For us today, “God” means almost nothing like this. Whereas the atmosphere of the Scriptures is polytheism, philosophical pressure has driven us to monotheism. It is this monotheism which makes us squirm – especially in the churches – when it comes to “the fear of the Lord”. Because the gods are no longer a given, we imagine that “mission” is about making the gods – or just “God” – palatable again, and love is more palatable than fear.

But the Scriptures know us. Even if our modern world is emptied of gods, it remains filled with fears. And these fears work on us as they always have. The “‑isms” of our world indicate our new pantheon: racism, sexism, nationalism, fundamentalism, conservatism, progressivism, scientism, Islamism… each invoked out of fear. Knowing the human to be a creature which fears, the scriptural question is simply: What is best feared?

For this reason the psalmist proposes fear not of a generic “God” but of “the Lord.” It is a subtle nuance which the novice in religious language will miss but it is crucial, and is really only evident in the speaking: Not “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” as if we might relate to the Lord in some other way but “the fear of the Lord,” as if there were other things we might fear. This nuance moves the declaration from our concern about the appropriate emotional response to a God who might or might not be there, to the question of which realities in our life are actually worth worrying about.

“The Lord” – Yahweh, Jehovah – is the name of one God among many, one candidate for our allegiance among many. “There are many Lords and many gods”, Paul says, “but for us the one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ.” Do you fear? Fear this one.

But why? Precisely because of the love which we might want prematurely to edit into the psalmist’s thought to make him declare that the love of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. There are as many lords and gods as there are contradictory fears and desires in us; these things we serve and invoke over against each other. In Paul this morning we saw the logic of fear and love set in their proper place in relation to God. Yes, there are real fears – real enough to cause division in the young Christian community about what could be eaten, and so who could eat with whom. A fear of the gods of old and a fear of a loss of freedom clashed to fracture the community; dividing the communal mind and rendering asunder the communal body is what fear does.

The unity of the body, or its division, is the sign of the Spirit active within it, the sign of what is feared. There are many lords and many gods, Paul acknowledges, but for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. All things are from and to the Father; this we might call the “generic” function of a god: the beginning and the purpose of the world. The specifically Christian nuance is in the “through” used with respect to Jesus: “one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”

To live in and through the crucified Jesus is to live in and through the victim of human fear. It is to see where fear takes us – the cross – and what it takes from us, even the God we might think demands the cross.

But, just so, to live through the crucified Jesus is also to see grace in action because our fear and loathing is not met with God’s own. In the world fear begets fear; in heaven, fear is just one more human characteristic God can use to reveal love and bring healing. The fruit of fear is a broken body and blood poured out. Grace is the broken body raised and given to teach that with this God there is nothing to fear.

To learn a new language is to wander into dangerous territory. Even when the words are not lacking, nuances of meaning are often hidden from the learner. But when God speaks our language – takes our words and actions seriously – there is no embarrassment, even when God uses those words and or interprets our actions in the wrong way. God’s creative work with us is to change our grammar, to speak our words and ways in such a manner as to re-make us and, in this, to make possible us a new beginning in wisdom and in love.

The fear of this Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding. His praise endures forever. (Ps 111.10).

[Amen.]

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BasisBits – Paragraph 16: Particular Functions

Posted on 30 June 2016 by Cindy S-F

The Uniting Church recognises the responsibility and freedom which belong to councils to acknowledge gifts among members for the fulfilment of particular functions. The Uniting Church sees in pastoral care exercised personally on behalf of the Church an expression of the fact that God always deals personally with people, would have God’s loving care known among people, and would have individual members take upon themselves the form of a servant.

From Paragraph 16 of the Basis of Union (1992)

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BasisBits are intended particularly for congregations of the Uniting Church in Australia but could be easily adapted for general use by congregations of other denominations. The suggested use of BasisBits is as items in the “news” section of your Sunday pew sheets or regular congregational publications; some would lend themselves to incorporation into your liturgy order itself.

Posted in BasisBits, LitBits, LitBits - Commentary

BasisBits – Paragraph 7: Baptism

Posted on 29 June 2016 by Cindy S-F

The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ incorporates people into his body by Baptism. In this way Christ enables them to participate in his own baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial, and which was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Baptism into Christ’s body initiates people into Christ’s life and mission in the world, so that they are united in one fellowship of love, service, suffering and joy, in one family of the Father of all in heaven and earth, and in the power of the one Spirit. The Uniting Church will baptize those who confess the Christian faith, and children who are presented for baptism and for whose instruction and nourishment in the faith the Church takes responsibility.

From Paragraph 7 of the Basis of Union (1992)

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BasisBits – Paragraph 3: Built Upon the One Lord Jesus Christ B

Posted on 24 June 2016 by Cindy S-F

Jesus of Nazareth announced the sovereign grace of God whereby the poor in spirit could receive God’s love. Jesus himself, in his life and death, made the response of humility, obedience and trust which God had long sought in vain. In raising him to live and reign, God confirmed and completed the witness which Jesus bore to God on earth, reasserted claim over the whole of creation, pardoned sinners, and made in Jesus a representative beginning of a new order of righteousness and love. To God in Christ all people are called to respond in faith. To this end God has sent forth the Spirit that people may trust God as their Father, and acknowledge Jesus as Lord. The whole work of salvation is effected by the sovereign grace of God alone.

From Paragraph 3 of the Basis of Union (1992)

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10 May – “As I have loved you…”

Posted on 11 May 2015 by Admin

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Easter 6
10/5/2015

Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
John 15:9-17

“This is my commandment: that you love one another.”

The rhetoric of “love” is often very vague, non-specific or ambiguous. It easily becomes sentimental on the one hand or, on the other hand, we broaden its meaning and application to things like “tough love” – that kind of love which declares to the one who is being “loved,” “This hurts me more than it hurts you!”

What is the love of which Jesus speaks? “… Love one another as I have loved you”. Okay. But Jesus then almost hopelessly confuses the matter with his next declaration: “No one has greater love than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”. This is unhelpful because Jesus himself literally does just this: he dies, as we have subsequently come to understand, “for his friends”. It is unhelpful because it lends itself to adoption into stories of heroism; we need only think of the way in which this Scripture verse has been taken up as an interpretation of the loss of life by soldiers in war. “Greater love hath no man” is inscribed on the Stone of Remembrance in the Shrine of Remembrance here in Melbourne, and doubtless in many other similar war memorials.

Whatever might be said about Jesus’ own laying down of his life, and the laying down by soldiers of their lives in war, the problem with what Jesus says for us here and now is the way in which it can be heard to over-dramatise the act of love. As a statement by itself it is true enough but it seems to locate the work of love in a place where most of us are never actually going to be: the heroic moment, the moment in which we are called to risk or even lose our life in the act of seeking to save another, as a father might do who swims into out to sea to retrieve the child dragged out by a rip, or a soldier might do to drag her wounded comrade out of enemy fire. Whether or not such moments are in fact real acts of love is not in question. But they are not, for the most part, real life – at least, the real life of most of us. To declare “no one has greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” can suggest that this is about the end of our life, the possibility of the need to die that others might live. In the Scriptures, however, thought about life and death is for the most part not thought about when or whether ours hearts are beating or not. Rather, it is a matter of how one’s heart beats – what rhythm it beats, according to which we then march.

To lay down one’s life for friends, as the Jesus of John’s gospel puts it, is put by the Jesus of the Synoptic gospels as “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me”. The laying down of one’s life is a manner of living and not simply the moment at which we finally die. This is a living which knows not only self but others, and not others as we imagine or want them to be, but others as they actually are, even when in this or that way they seem to be radically wrong and so to require of us more than seems “fair” or “reasonable”. To lay down my life for my friends is to allow where they are to be my problem – and not my problem to fix but the unavoidable cause of my “death”, so-called: the occasion of my cross to bear. This may be a literal death as in those rare “heroic” cases, or a metaphorical one, in the much more common and mundane challenges of everyday life together.

Any talk about self-denial runs the risk of being heard to suggest submission to abuse by others. But this is not the point. We need to acknowledge this danger in such talk, to watch for it in situations where it might arise, and to act where appropriate. But again, for the most part, these are extreme cases which cloud the issue for most of the rest of us most of the time. At the heart of the question of what it means to love is understanding why love is here spoken of in terms of a commandment. Our familiarity with love as sentiment, or even simply as lust in one form or another, also clouds our vision. These emotions and drives come naturally. We cannot be commanded to “fall” in love or even in lust; it just happens, and we generally like it. But the love of which Jesus speaks is not natural or appealing in this way. It must be called forth, commanded, because it contradicts the natural. It contradicts our over-estimation of the other, or our under-estimation, or even the presumption to estimate what another person is. The commandment to love contradicts our desires for them, and so our presumption to know what they think or desire or need.

But the command to love still remains abstract until a specific contradiction enters our lives – until we feel ourselves “contra‑dicted”, hear ourselves literally “spoken against”, have our own sense of the world and how it should fit together challenged. That is, the command to love comes as a command at the very point I feel unloved, when I have not been heard, when I feel disempowered, when I am disoriented by the fact that the world – which means those around me – is not as I imagined or desire. Drawing on an observation from Rowan Williams (Christ on trial): At such points I naturally tend to act out a longing to be somewhere else or, perhaps more precisely in such cases, out of the longing that you be somewhere else. For it is in this moment that the specific shape of what love demands then becomes clear in all of its unpalatableness. The command to love is the command to be where you are, with others who are not where you want them to be.

“No greater love has anyone, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” In this way Jesus describes his own way of being and, of course, the actual playing-out of his ministry in the cross. The logic of what I have said about love has its basis in the ministry of Jesus himself: “…as I have loved you.” We will miss this, however, if we remain with abstracted ideas about the love and death of Jesus – as if it were about Jesus’ love for “everybody”, or that Jesus “had to die” as part of God’s plan, so that he is a special case we don’t have to consider. Against this is the doctrine of the incarnation, which holds not merely that Jesus was God become “human”, but a specific human being in a specific time and place in the midst of specific people. Jesus the human being doesn’t just “die”; Caiaphas and the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees and the scribes contradict him and plot his death. He is not merely “arrested”, but what he taught is contradicted in betrayal by Judas and denial by Peter. If Jesus’ life and death is a thoroughgoing act of love, then it is so within these specific relationships. If Jesus dies for love’s sake, it is for the love of Caiaphas and Annas, of Judas and Peter, of Mary and Martha and Magdalene and so on, all of whom are not just the potential beneficiaries of his death but, in different ways, the cause of his death: “This my body, broken by you…” Jesus dies in the way he does because he insists on being with them, “as they are”.

The cross, then, does not simply effect a divine salvation as if by a holy magic; it gives shape to love. It is Jesus “being where he is”. The shape of love Jesus’ persistence with and for both friend and foe. The Christian life, correspondingly, is cruciform – it is cross-shaped. It involves that kind of dying to ourselves which is necessary if any human community is to survive error and injustice – particularly the error and injustice of “someone else”.

And this brings us to the importance of the church. It does not matter whether other faith communities come to the same conclusion about love as the church, or whether the church generally fails miserably at living what is at the heart of its being. If others can know this truth by other means, we celebrate with them. If the church fails at living the truth, we are simply all the more reminded of how imperative it is that we continue to work at it. The church is a community which is learning not simply how to love, but the difficulty of love.

Love is difficult, and it is difficult for the church. It will be difficult for us to deal with each other when we have to make very concrete, far-reaching and doubtless very disruptive decisions about what to do with our property resources. It is difficult to deal with each other when we begin to express ourselves in relation to things we need to have in common – and we might think here of the conversation we have planned this morning about worship. And yet it is precisely in such potentially conflicted situations that we are called to do something extraordinary. This is not the heroic feat of agreeing to sell up, or agreeing to soldier on on this site, or with a stroke of genius achieving just the balance in worship that pleases everyone. The extraordinary thing is in the manner of engagement – feeling ourselves to be in the right, but not requiring that others recognise it. Or, in more evangelical terms – believing not only that I am justified by grace alone but also that you, who are clearly wrong in what you do or think, are also justified by grace and not condemned for the error I see in you. This is the fruit Jesus appoints us to bear “fruit that will last” (John 15.16) because it reflects that love which overcomes all things. This is the extraordinary thing.

There is not much between how we stand before God and how others stand before us. It is because we do not understand this that we often turn out to be lousy lovers. The command to love comes precisely because we need constantly to be called to love. This call comes again and again in God’s hope that we might see: as we are to God – claimed in grace – so others are to be to us; as God is to us – claiming through grace – so are we to be to others.

“…as I have loved you” is where we begin, and the end towards which we move, if the “love” which at is our heart is to be meaningful, and effective.

Let our prayer be, then, that our hands do not fumble the gift of such extraordinary trust – the gift of each other to love – that the work of our hands might finally be found to match where love began, and never ends. Amen.

Posted in Sermons

22 March – This is how God loves

Posted on 22 March 2015 by Admin

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Lent 5
22/3/2015

Jeremiah 31:31-34
Psalm 51
John 3:16-21

I bought a violin on Friday. Not that I can play the violin – yet. But, for reasons quite obscure to us, Coulton has wanted to learn the violin since he was about 3, and we figure that now is about the right time to start, and I’ve offered to learn with him as some encouragement along the way. Buying violins is not a straightforward thing. You have to talk to people who know something about them, research what is available, and where, and in what condition. You can learn all sorts of things via YouTube reviews of the instruments – what to look for, why it’s better if the instrument if professionally modified from its factory condition, and so on. In the case of my new violin – it came up on Thursday on Gumtree, and looked a pretty good deal. The problem was that it was in Geelong – amounting to probably a three hour return trip, all up. I contacted the chap offering it for sale, and he didn’t want to post it but would be happy if I arranged a courier. So I contacted a courier, and that wasn’t going to cost too much, so got back to the seller to arrange an electronic transfer and the courier pick up. It turned out he then needed to be in Melbourne on Friday, so I upped the offer a bit if he’d deliver it, which he did, and I have my violin. (Coulton doesn’t have his yet!)

Why am I telling you all this? Now that I’m a parent, it is becoming increasingly clear to me just how much parents do for their children, if everything is working the way that it should. Most of the time a child has no idea what is involved to make happen the things which make her life a happy one. But occasionally she’ll hear, especially is ingratitude is present, Mummy and Daddy loves you so much that is this what they have done for you. Of course, it is almost impossible that the child can understand what in fact has been done, but still it is the case: love does “so much”

Which brings us to today’s gospel reading – re-visited from last week – and the first verse in particular: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life”. This is one of the Christian texts: printed on T-shirts and bumper stickers and baseball caps, appearing on placards in crowds at major sporting events: it sits somewhere near the perceived centre of what needs to be said in evangelism.

“For God so loved…” Is the way to salvation the same kind of way as that by which a boy comes to learn the violin – that so much is done, which then has to be “believed” or received?

I want to propose this morning a reading of this verse rather different from the way in which the church has generally heard it, thinking through three crucial parts of the verse: first, the so which seems to carry most of the weight of emphasis (God so loved the world), then the giving of the Son and, finally, the belief we are to have in response to all this.

1. For God “so” loved the world.

It is difficult not to hear this as “so much” – so much, so big, was the love of God, that he gave the Son. In the background here is the love we have for our children and the cost it would be to us to give them up in this way. (Perhaps also, the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac also sits behind this text). And yet even though this is the sense the English suggests, it is not what the Greek implies. In the Greek, the “so” is the first word in the sentence, giving it more the sense of “thus”: Thus, or this, is the love of God: God gave the Son. The difference is subtle, but very important. If I say to Coulton – this is how much we love you, that we did all this that you might have a happy experience with the violin, his response might be, But couldn’t you have got an even better violin with a bit more effort? The “so much” implies the possibility of even more – that God has paid enough – even more – than necessary, but not necessarily everything. Here the love of God is quantified, measured: this is how much God loves you; is it not impressive?

But if we read the clause as “This is the love of God” then we are not dealing with a quantity of love which might have been smaller or even bigger but the very content of love itself: love is the giving of the Son. We’ll come back to this again in a bit.

2. God gave the Son

What then, of the second thing to note in the verse, the giving of the Son? In most Christian thinking, this touches upon the theme of sacrifice: God sacrifices the Son, trades the blood and life of the Son for the salvation of the world. This understanding is both dearly embraced by some Christians and abhorrently rejected by others. On the part of those who embrace it, there is in the background the “so much” understanding we’ve just be considering: God has sacrificed even his Son for us. On the part of those who reject this idea there is, among other things, horror at the idea of sacrifice itself, let alone of sacrificing a child (in this era of heightened sensitivity to the abuse of children). The idea of sacrifice is made all the more difficult in those understandings which insist that God had to sacrifice the Son: that there was some kind of “deep magic” which forced God’s hand in this way (see an earlier sermon on this: here). It is difficult to overstate how thoroughly ingrained this way of thinking is in the way the church speaks about the saving work of Christ. Explaining why the New Testament speaks this way about the cross would take more time than we have now; suffice it to say, the “giving” of the Son is not a sacrifice, if by that we mean that it would necessarily work in the way religious sacrifices are normally thought to work, that somehow we or God met all the requirements and sinners are automatically sprung from judgement.

In what sense, then, does God “give the Son”? We can say that God “presents” the Son. This the love of God for the world: the Son. This is perhaps a little dense to be immediately clear, but it is the heart of the matter. For “the Son” is for us always the crucified one – not the “sacrificed one” – but the crucified one. Again, the difference might seem subtle but it is everything. To understand Jesus’ cross as a sacrifice is to interpret it in terms of first century Jewish understandings of the ritual animal sacrifices in Temple, which makes perfect sense if you are a first century Jew. We today do not have – or rather, we do not acknowledge that we have – a corresponding system of sacrifice securing our religious and secular lives. And so, if we are to interpret the cross as a sacrifice, we have to become first century Jews before we can become Christians. This is what St Paul rejected in a different form when he denied that uncircumcised male Greeks needed to undergo the cut in order to become Christians.

Jesus cannot be for us “the sacrificed one” in the way he could be for those who first heard his story. But he can be for us “the crucified one”, interpreted in a different way. Christians are so accustomed to the theory of an economy of salvation in which something has to be sacrificed that it is difficult to apprehend the story in a different way. But there are other ways. The sacrifice interpretation requires that Jesus came in order to die – that this was what the Father who sent him required. But this is not the sense we get from John’s gospel. Here, Jesus comes precisely to live – to be Word made flesh, to be Life and Truth in all their fullness. Jesus does die, but not because it was somehow demanded by God. If anyone demands his death, it is us: contradicting Jesus’ purpose as the Way, the Truth and the Life. The religious authorities require that Jesus die because he threatens the peace and may invoke the wrath of the Romans (John 11.48-50,18.14). The Roman governor Pilate, who initially tries to get Jesus off, finally also sees the political risk Jesus represents and decides that saving him is not worth the trouble (John 19.12f). And so Jesus is crucified, but not as a “sacrifice”; he dies because the capital-L Life he lived was too confronting, too threatening of human self-righteousness. On this reading, the Son – Jesus – is not given to be crucified; the crucified Son is what we are given. God says: Look at this. God asks, What, Why, How has this come to pass; what shall we say about it?

On the sacrificial reading, the un-crucified Jesus appears as a kind of currency in a sacrificial economy. The cross is a kind of “spending” of that currency: an exchange of Jesus’ life and blood for ours. The fundamental problem here is that we have to believe in this economy of salvation before we can believe in Jesus.

On the “presentation” reading – that God “presents” the crucified Son to us – we are back in the realms of last week’s reflection: that the cross symbolises something about our heart and the heart of God. John’s gospel is concerned with a “Word” – a Word enfleshed. This Word becomes what we are; the question is simply: what, actually, are we? At the end of his gospel John has the Roman governor Pilate present Jesus to an angry crowd with the words: Behold, the man. The sense is more, Behold: the Human Being. Here is the human being – his humanity and ours – and this is what is crucified. Jesus, then, dies not only (or even?) “for” us, but as us; it is us on the cross, our true humanity being broken by broken humanity.

This is too much to think through here, but it is the kind of thinking which springs forth if we allow that God’s love is not a divine Son given for us but a crucified Son given to us: a revelation which effects something rather than something effected which is then revealed.

3. So that everyone who believes

For the sake of finishing within a civil time frame, the third crucial aspect of this central Christian text: “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish.” What is this “belief”?

On the traditional reading, “believe” means here something like assent as the appropriate response, and receiving salvation in return. This is not unlike the case of little boys and their violins, where “believe” looks like taking up the bow and doing whatever it is you call what a little boy does with a violin: the “so much” of the gift received requires this response.

But on the alternative reading we’ve been unpacking, “believe” is quite a different thing altogether. This is the love of God: the Son. The crucified Son, and no other. The crucified humanity of the Word-made-human. Humanity brought to nothing by humanity. Here, “believe” means recognising ourselves in all dimensions of the story. It means seeing ourselves as the cause of the cross, and as the victim of the cross, and as the beneficiaries of the cross. The giving of the Son is not a “buy-back” scheme; it is the revelation of God’s heart for us, and of us as God’s heart.

We noted in passing earlier that it is closer to the dynamic of God’s work through Jesus to say that God’s love is the giving of the Son, rather than is shown by the giving of the Son. This is the love of God: the Son, crucified, restored to life. The cross and the resurrection are God’s story, are God as love, and are given also to be our story.

To believe in this God is to receive this love as our own. It is to grow into a humanity formed after the likeness of Jesus, the Son. It is to become love, as the children of God, and to participate in God’s great work of love in the world.

This is not easy. We begin with this story as we might begin with a violin for the first time – barely possible to hold let alone to get anything like music from it. But the promise is that, in continuing to hear the story and to tell it, it will increasingly become part of us, as the instrument becomes part the musician, the one enabling the other to express, and to be.

Let us, then, open ourselves to become love as God is love, harmony to the song God sings, to our greater humanity and, what is the same thing, to God’s greater glory. By the grace of God. Amen.

Posted in Sermons