MAD-e-Lena

Here and Now!

2012-01-21T15:35:00.000+11:00

Now after John was arrested, Jesuscame to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time isfulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in thegood news.” (Mark 1:14-15)

This is the place and this is thetime! Here and now God waits to break into our experience… (Adapted from Be Our Freedom, Lord, ed. by TerryFalla, p. 20.)

Nowis the time!

Afterhis baptism, Jesus begins his ministry in proclamation and the message issimple: “Now is the time! God is here! Turn around. Commit yourself to the goodnews!

Itis meant to be like one of those big signs on the entrances to freeways whichwarn motorists that they may have erred: “Wrong way! Go back!” “Stop now andthink about what you’re doing!”

It’san ancient proclamation—one uttered by many prophets before—great prophets likeIsaiah, weird prophets like Ezekiel, minor prophets like Zephaniah, andreluctant prophets like Jonah.

Andit is a proclamation for all people everywhere, not just for the people of Israel—Jonahfound that out!

Thebook of Jonah ends with a question, a question posed by God to Jonah: “Shouldn’tI be concerned about Nineveh too? Isn’t Nineveh part of my Creation too?Shouldn’t this message, this gift of insight be offered to all my peopleeverywhere?”

Thatsign on the highway is there for everyone. “Wrong way! Go back!” “Stop! Turnaround! Go back!” “Stop now and think about what you’re doing!”

It’sa strange message. It’s a very different message from most of the messages thatsurround us: “Bigger. Better. Best” “Faster. Higher. Stronger.” “More, more,more.”

“Stop!Turn around! Go back!” “Stop now and think about what you’re doing!”

Wehumans are very stupid creatures. We are always looking for the next big thing,the really great hope, the ultimate salvation; and all the time what we arelooking for is right beside us, right among us, right between us. “Stop! Turnaround! Go back!” “Stop now and think about what you’re doing!”

Goback to who you are and what you need to remember. Go back to first principles,back to basics, back to the foundations of the faith. You belong to God andnothing can change that. Hear this good news! Don’t go looking for fantasticdreams! God is in your midst, now! Stop! Turn around! And look at what isalready here! “Stop now and think about what you’re doing!”

Butit is not just the people of God who are called to repent, to turn around, tochange their minds. In the prophetic books of the Hebrew Scripture, God alsorepents. God also changes God’s mind. Confronted by the reality of a people whorecognise their God, God recognises them. The dance of recognition comes fullcircle. God recognises us. We recognise God. God recognises us. Here and now!Right now! “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near;repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

Hereand now, God invites us into relationship, asking us to stop and think aboutwhat we’re doing, stop and know who we are, stop and recognise who God is; andunderstand that the future is now! Whatever we hope for, whatever we dream ofis right here beside us, among us, around us. God is in our midst, inviting usto be in God.

Itall seems too easy, doesn’t it?! Like Jonah thought God was being too easy onthe Ninevites. There must be something we have to do; something we need to strivefor; something that is required to earn this gift.

Butthat is precisely God’s point to Jonah: “Who are you to say who belongs to meor not? I am Creator, Redeemer and Give of Life. These people are my people;and I am their God.”

Whoare we to question whether we are good enough for God; or whether the journeyis too easy or too hard? God is God and we belong to God. We need to stop nowand think about what we’re doing. We need to recognise God who is in our midst,not over the next horizon, or caught up in the next great plan. And maybe, justmaybe in heeding the message, we will accept its hold on our lives. The time isfulfilled. God’s realm is here. All we asked to do is to stop, turn around andaccept the good news.

We, the Baptised Ones

2012-01-07T13:35:00.000+11:00

Baptism—it’s the word we use for the rite thatsets new members of the church off on their journey in the Christian life. Itis one of the church’s jargon words, but jargon words are actually important inhelping us to understand who we are and what we are on about. Jargon words tellus about ourselves. They tell our story. Every community of people have theirown jargon words, their own “in-words”, their own particular and peculiar waysof communicating big ideas with one another.

Think about your family conversations. Whenyou were reminiscing with everyone at family gatherings over the Christmas/NewYear period weren’t there occasions when someone just had to say a few wordsand everyone knew what you meant (and knew far more than what the wordsliterally meant)?

In my extended family, we have a particular setof code words for family gatherings. That set of words is “the Grand-pa speech”.When someone says those words, we know that they are conveying the sentimentthat my mother’s father always conveyed in a speech when we gathered as anextended family. The sentiment went something like this: “Isn’t it great for usas family all to be here and isn’t great to have each other as family!” Oh, theGrand-pa speech definitely went much longer than that, but these days, and nowthat Grand-pa isn’t around we usually get away with just saying “the Grand-paspeech”. Oh, it’s not that it’s not important to let other people in on themeaning of those words sometimes—children as they grow up; friends who might bevisiting with us; new partners who might come into the family—but theexplanation is not quite the same as just saying “the Grand-pa speech”. Thosefew brief words hold a lifetimes of family experiences.

Baptism is like that for the church, thepeople of the God, the communion of the Spirit, the body of Christ. Baptismtells us something about ourselves that we could try to explain in lots ofwords but still we would never quite explain enough. You have to be a part ofthe action to experience it and to understand it; and we have to keep remindingourselves of that action and what that really means for us as God’s people.

In today’s readings, we have two references toBaptism. In the reading from Acts, the storyteller is distinguishing betweenthe baptism of John the Baptist and the baptism into Jesus Christ. In theGospel reading, we have the story of Jesus’ baptism by John in the Jordan.

The word ‘baptism’ comes from the Greek word baptizo which means ‘to dip’ into water orliquid. A related word form, bapto,is used for dipping something into dye, and for drawing water. Baptizo may also mean ‘to cause to perishby drowning’. The imagery is vivid. It is about being immersed, about changingcolour, about life and death. But, for the Christian church, Baptism is notabout human life and death. It’s about Christian life! It’s about being borninto the life of the body of Christ, the church.

Going under water and coming up signifies thata newly baptised person is incorporated into the life, death and resurrectionof Jesus Christ. The person may be immersed in water or have water poured overthem. The meaning is still the same. From this time forward, the person is amember of the one, holy, catholic (universal) and apostolic church, the body ofChrist, the communion of the Holy Spirit, people of God.

The Uniting Church’s baptismal service puts itthis way:

Baptism is Christ’s gift.
It is the sign by which the Spirit of God
joins people to Jesus Christ
and incorporates them into his body, the Church.

In his own baptism in the Jordan by John,
Jesus identified himself with humanity
in its brokenness and sin;
that baptism was completed in his death and resurrection.

By God’s grace,
baptism plunges us into the faith of Jesus Christ,
so that whatever is his may be called ours.

By water and the Spirit we are claimed asGod’s own
and set free from the power of sin and death.

Thus, claimed by God
we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit
that we may live as witnesses to Jesus Christ,
share his ministry in the world and grow to maturity,
awaiting with hope the day of our Lord Jesus.
(‘The Meaning ofBaptism’ from ‘The Sacrament of Baptism and the Reaffirmation of Baptism calledConfirmation’ in Uniting in Worship 2, © 2005 The Uniting Church in Australia,p. 74)

But evenbefore Jesus and the Christian church, baptism (immersion in water) was used asa religious sign to indicate a major spiritual life change, a religiousconversion, a dying to a former way of life and understanding and a rising to anew beginning. That’s why, in the Gospel reading for today we encounter thestory of Jesus being baptised by John in the Jordan.
The storyof Jesus’ baptism in the Gospel of Mark signifies a very important beginning—notjust for Jesus, but for the people who follow him, as his body, the church.Jesus’ baptism signifies the beginning of Jesus’ intentional ministry for thesake of the world.

It is theministry of Christ that we are incorporated into in our baptisms: the verylife, death and resurrection of Jesus. Baptismenfolds us into what God in Jesus, has accomplished and continuallyaccomplishes for us. God in Jesus came into our world to overcome the power ofsin and death in our lives and that that overcoming was accomplished in Jesus’life, death and resurrection. In a special way, the sign of baptism makespresent the reality of God’s love and God’s gracious gift to us.

In the actof his baptism, Jesus is identified as the one into whom we are baptised, God’schosen one. In our baptisms, God graciously calls us not just to new life, butalso to new work in Jesus.

A request for baptism is a big thing for us. Baptismis a covenant made between God and the person being baptised. Baptism isn’tabout our relationship with the human community; it’s about our relationshipwith God and God’s community. For this reason, we call Baptism a “sacrament”.It is one of two sacraments that we believe are God’s gifts to the church; theother is Eucharist or Holy Communion. Sacraments are about how the church, thepeople of God, is formed and shaped by God.

Being baptised is about being called to livean intentional Christian life, as part of a Christian community. Giving yourallegiance to the Christian faith is about seeking to order your life accordingto Christian practice. That life and practice is one of worship, witness andservice. Christians are called to meet regularly together to worship God. Theyare called to witness to their faith through their worship and in their dailylives. They are also called to serve people in the name and the way of Christ. Baptismis the beginning of our participation in the ministry of Christ… as Jesus’ baptismsignified the beginning of his intentional ministry on our behalf. AustralianAnglican priest, Janet Gaden, talks about baptism as the breaking of thewaters, signifying that the “labour of giving birth has begun in earnest” (“The Waters of Birth”, Initiation in Australian Churches ed. ByWilliam Tabbernee, Victorian Council of Church, p. xiii).

Christian Educator, Debra Dean Murphy puts itthis way:

Baptism… confers an identity at odds with theways we are named and claimed by family, nation and ideology. Baptism is theconstitution of a new people whose prior loyalties and allegiances are exposed,named, and radically reconfigured. (TeachingThat Transforms: Worship as the Heart of Christian Education, Grand Rapids:Brazos Press, 2004)

Through Baptism, God claims us as God’s ownfor God’s mission in the world. Baptism is about beginnings—new beginnings inGod as the people of God engaged in God’s work. This is who we are. This iswhat we’re on about. And the act of Baptism tells us about the depth of whatour new relationship with God means far better than any long explanation mightdo. But in order to understand, you have to be involved, you have to experienceit, you have to live out your Baptism as God’s people, the communion of theHoly Spirit, the body of Christ.

On Being Children of God

2011-12-31T12:25:00.007+11:00

An excerpt from “Anna’s Song” from An Outback Christmas (Words by Norman Habel):

Lift this child to the sun, raise this child to the sky;
God has come from above, come to earth from on high.

Lay this child on the ground, one with us, one with earth;
let God know in his Son, human clay, human birth.

Place this child in the shade, hang this child ‘neath the tree;
with his hand on the wood, may this child set us free.

Give this child to the world, let him be common folk;
God has come to be born as an ordin’ry bloke.

Lift this child to the night, to the silence of God;
let this child cry for us, and the silence be heard.

Well, it’s time to present Jesus to the world in the Gospel of Luke. The baby is taken to the temple, circumcised, named and heralded by two old prophets who are also there that day. As Kim Jong-un was paraded before the North Korean public and declared "supreme leader of party and army and people", heir to his father’s, Kim Jong-il’s authority; so Jesus is, in a sense, paraded before the people and especially the religious establishment as the heir—the heir of God’s promises of redemption to the people; the inheritor of God’s pledge to the people of Israel for them to be a light to the nations; the beneficiary of the hope in which Israel has lived for so long. Luke metaphorically lifts the baby Jesus up and presents him to his hearers: “Here he is. This is the One! The heir, the promised one of Israel! Jeshuah-Joshua-Jesus—Yahweh is our salvation! The one God is our redeemer! And this is God’s Son!”

But this son is a poor one—not rich and powerful or carefully groomed over a lifetime. This heir has doubts about his legitimacy hanging over his head; and his parents can only afford the offering for his presentation allowed of the poor. They offer birds rather than a sheep. “Here he is. This is the One! The heir, the promised one of Israel?!”

The moment is bitter sweet, as are the songs of Anna and Simeon—a child destined for great things; a child given for salvation—but a salvation which will expose all that needs saving to the open. Give this child… to the world!

Most inheritances of any value don’t come cheap. I wonder what the 28-year old Kim Jong-un thinks about his inheritance. Would he prefer to be focussing on finding his own niche in his society; or having the freedom to travel the world; or simply being another anonymous citizen? What regrets might a Lachlan Murdoch have about the legacy which is his?

I’ve managed to watch several episodes of Country House Rescued on the ABC recently. The children who stand to inherit those large English country estates have huge expectations, debts, problems and dilemmas facing them. Most inheritances of any value don’t come cheap.

And the inheritance for which Jesus is proclaimed as heir is an even more ambiguous one. The promises of this legacy are the fulfilment of hopes unrequited; the culmination of the final salvation of the people; the intangible, immaterial things for which we humans yearn so strongly and fail to know how to achieve so dramatically. And as we all know, where there are grand hopes, there are grand and competing expectations; and where there are grand and competing expectations, there is so much room for misunderstanding, miscalculation, misinterpretation and outright disappointment. Most inheritances of any value don’t come cheap.

“Here he is. This is the One! The heir, the promised one of Israel! Jeshuah-Joshua-Jesus—Yahweh is our salvation! The one God is our redeemer! And this is God’s Son!”

Here is God’s sacrificial lamb paraded before the people. The family cannot afford a sheep for his presentation; but there is no need for one—the sacrifice is the child himself! Give this child to the world!

The moment is bitter-sweet; and yet in this moment, we are meant to find our salvation, our redemption, our liberation. In this moment, we are urged to submit our hopes, our yearnings, our desires to the possibility that we might be set free. Here in this moment, way before we get to the cross—way before we know just what it means for God to submit himself to his Creation, we are asked to understand what the value of this inheritance really means. Give this child to the world!

And that brings us to our text from Galatians, where Paul is trying to unpack what Christ’s inheritance means for us. Paul writes:

My point is this: heirs, as long as they are minors, are no better than slaves, though they are the owners of all the property; 2but they remain under guardians and trustees until the date set by the father. 3So with us; while we were minors, we were enslaved to the elemental spirits of the world. 4But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. 6And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ 7So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God. (NRSV)

Paul is begging us to let the baby Jesus grow up—to let God’s heir be God’s heir; and as a consequence to grow up as the heirs of God ourselves—co-heirs with God’s son, Jesus. This is our freedom. This is our salvation. This is our liberation. And this is our sacrifice. That we will allow ourselves to be utterly enfolded in God’s will.

According to Paul, God submits himself to his Creation. God’s Son submits himself to the religious Law in order that we, the people, might be freed from the Law—not because the Law has not been important or because we are not called to live ethical lives; but because really inheriting what God promises us means that the Law will be unnecessary because we will know and love and do the will of God without it.

New Testament scholar, Bill Loader puts it this way:

Paul [is] … convinced that the implications of God's action in Christ is that [the] … requirements [of the Law] are set aside and that now what matters is faith in Christ and living out that faith and only that… the Spirit [working within us] will … more than fulfil any legitimate demands contained in the law...

Paul assumes that when people enter into a relationship such as he describes, that of a grown up son to a father, then there is a oneness which generates continuity between what the father wants and what the son wants. It is a first century ideal of family life. [The heir inherits everything that is the ancestor’s in all its fullness.] Applied as an image to Christian living, Paul [argues] … that the Spirit generates God's life in and through the believer and it will show. By contrast, to perpetuate submission to the Law, even though it was given by God and is in the Bible, is to perpetuate a form of slavery which—and here he is quite daring—is not much better than serving other gods! [http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/BEpChristmas1.htm]

For Paul, the life, death and resurrection of Christ offers a relationship with God that was hitherto impossible—the relationship of fully adult heirs, co-heirs with Christ.

For Robert Hamerton-Kelly (Sacred Violence pp. 77-81 as interpreted in http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/xmas1b.htm), the passage from Galatians is saying that:

Christ came to redeem us, to win us back from Satan's power that we might come to live under God's grace as children. Christ redeems us to become children of God. To do so Christ submits to the curse of living under the law, thus becoming a willing victim to its sacrificial mechanisms. Rather than the idea of taking the punishment of God's wrath for us, Christ reveals to us our own wrath and its violence, that we might live by God's true power, which is love, not wrath.

Here, there are echoes of Simeon’s words: “the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” (Luke 2:35). God’s submission to the world God created exposes our lack of submission to God.

This truly is a great Christmas season text… it … express[es] all the basics of the incarnation, of why it is that "God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law." … because Jesus could fulfill his mission as Son of God, that same Spirit of Sonship is given to our hearts that we might also truly become children of God, freed from the slavery of sin. http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/xmas1b.htm

“Here we are. We are the Ones! The heirs, the promised ones of God! Fully redeemed, fully alive, fully liberated—Yahweh is our salvation! The one God is our redeemer! And we are God’s children!”

Go then to take up your inheritance!

Giving Birth to Jesus!

2011-12-24T09:24:00.004+11:00

There’s always expectation around the birth of a baby: When will it come? Who will it look like? Will it be healthy? A boy or a girl? And just as there are expectations about the baby, there are also expectations about the mother: Will she be a good mother? Will she cope with the baby? Does she know what she’s in for?

There are all sorts of myths about motherhood and babies: motherhood comes naturally; if you’re a proper woman, you don’t have to work at being a mother; good mothers do this, that or the other; if you don’t do this, that or the other, you’re not a good mother; if you’re not a mother, you’re not a proper woman; whatever problems the child may have, it’s all the mother’s fault. You could probably add some of your own.

All kinds of messages are played in our heads about what motherhood should or shouldn’t be, is or isn’t, especially for those of us who are women.

Most of these myths are simply untrue: images created by the idealisation of both babies and mothers. Motherhood isn’t any easier than any other parts of women’s lives; neither for that matter is fatherhood for men; nor is being a parent a compulsory act. Just as marriages and all our relationships require decision, commitment and hard work so too does parenthood—even a very part time stepmother (and grandmother) like me knows that.

Yet in our world, we are swamped by pictures of perfection in parenthood. Gaily smiling, very together women swan platters of elegantly prepared food onto tables surrounded by perfect families to the strains of the margarine jingle “You oughta be congratulated, Mum.” Whiter than white clothes are produced immaculately ironed straight from the washing machine so that Joan and John can make the next sporting fixture just in time. Again you can probably fill in some more examples for yourself.

Even our images of Mary, the mother of Jesus, have been tainted by our unrealistic, ethereal mythical pictures of motherhood. The pristinely clean Mary sits immaculately dressed in blue and white in the middle of a stable full of contentedly lowing animals: no dirt or manure to be seen, the straw is fresh and clean. Can you think of any more unlikely scene than that? This woman, the legitimacy of whose child was seriously in doubt, having just arrived in Bethlehem after travelling along unsealed roads and borne her child in a stable, sitting immaculately and serenely? She is pictured as bearing her pregnancy and the birth of Jesus almost without a hair out of place and, of course, how could she have ever had trouble with such an angelic child who apparently never cried (well, at least according to the Christmas carol if nothing else).

But the biblical picture of Mary as the mother of Jesus is not that type of frivolous, froth and bubble falsity of our modern media nor of the immaculate and pristine woman of sixteenth century Italian painters, from whom most of our popular images of Mary come. The biblical picture of Mary is far more down to earth.

She is a Jew living in a land ruled by Romans. She is a woman living in a time in which women were not considered to be as important as men. Her status in the society is somewhat ambivalent. She is betrothed but not married, in transition from the “protection” of one man to another, her father or other significant male in her family of origin to her future husband. She becomes pregnant without the complete legitimacy of marriage. She endures the birth of her first child in a difficult set of circumstances denied the usual support of her family.

It’s certainly not the stuff of margarine advertisements and yet it is a picture of beauty and of strength, but not because Mary is a carbon copy of a supermodel or because she endures everything while remaining sparklingly clean; but because in this simple yet profound everyday experience of the bearing and birthing of a child, Mary participates in a deeply prophetic action. She expects and brings to fruition the coming of Jesus in all the pain and joy, mess and disorder, that a birth can bring.

Mercy Amba Oduyoye, an African woman theologian, writes about such a birth:

At the age of sixteen I watched an eighteen year old woman having her first baby. From that time I understood why an Akan woman was said to have returned safely from the battle front when she had successfully pulled through that whole experience and returned with herself and her baby.

In this culture into which I was born, if news gets to a woman that another woman has not returned from this battle, she is expected to shake the words off her ears. They are not words that a woman should allow herself to hear—defeat at child birth spells the presence of evil. Birth pangs should result in joy, not sorrow.

For the biblical Mary, the pregnancy and birth are joyful experiences, but not because there is no pain, discomfort or difficulties. For Mary, the new life in which she is involved in bringing to birth, is a sign of life not just for one family but for a whole community, in fulfilment of a prophecy given a long time ago. And that new life was indeed birthed in pain as well as in joy, in the earthiness and ambivalence of human life itself.

When we place our ideas about Mary in the biblical context of the story of Jesus as expected, anticipated, joyful, painful birth and trial, then the words which are recorded as Mary’s song of praise in the Gospel of Luke (the song known as the Magnificat), those words become a powerful and prophetic affirmation. They do not come from the mouth of a television representation of a mother whose only concern is that of the appropriate margarine to serve her family. Nor from the mouth of a woman who seems unaffected by the realities of human life. They come from the mouth of a woman who is involved in the struggle of the reality of life.

The words of the Magnificat are not the platitudes of Christmas carols praying “God rest you merry people all, let nothing you dismay.” They are precisely the opposite: disturbing words announcing something new and different, heralding God’s new action in the world for God’s people, and echoing the words of the prophets uttered many years before:

My soul rejoices in God who is doing many wonderful deeds. God feeds the hungry and sends the rich away to fend for themselves. God scatters the proud and remembers the humble. God remembers those whom nobody thinks are important in fulfilment of the covenant promises.

It is the song of someone with great joy in her heart, joy from deep within, a profound sense of wonder and awe at the graciousness of God being brought to fruition and a profound understanding of the pain that is involved in that action: God becoming present through an ordinary woman and the dangerous, precarious act of the birth of a child.

Mercy Amba Oduyoye writes of the uncertainty of the birth of the child in Akan society:

The new life is waited for with prayers, sacrifices and medicaments. But no material preparations are made for the expected child. No amount of that will ensure safe delivery of mother and child from this encounter between life and death. The mystery surrounding the arrival of life cannot be resolved or even minimized with busy buying of pink, blue and white ribbons. It is awaited with fascination and wonder and, above all, with prayer and right living. The birth itself is in the hand of God. The woman, the bringer of new life, is at this point severely alone with her God and the hope of the new life. Others, especially the leaders of the family, are expected to be at prayer, calling all the relations in the other world to join in interceding for her. Others will stay by to encourage and guide but the parting is between mother and child alone.

The labouring mother, as Jesus observed, is at her most vulnerable and miserable, but her suffering is the prelude to the birth of a new life, a new beginning.

As the people of God, we are called to bear the Christ child into the world again and again (and not just at Christmas) but every day. If we were to imagine that we could do this with froth and bubble, or without getting our hands dirty, we would be mistaken. The birth of the Christ child in the hearts of God’s people again and again is exactly like the birth of Jesus two thousand years ago, and exactly like that of the birth of any child. It is painful, it is filled with expectations, it is joyful, it is worrying. God enters the world in vulnerability: a mother bearing a child; a child needing the protection of its mother; a follower of Christ coming to grips with the vulnerability and ambiguity of human life.

It is a story and an event which demands wonder and awe, and a deep sense of joy from within which is only possible from the other side of pain. But it is not quite the sort of entrance that most people envisage for God. Many people will still ask for the froth and bubble. Many people will still search for the immaculate Mary. They will be disappointed.

When the baby finally arrived, Mercy Amba Oduyoye was disappointed:

Is that all? She was neither beautiful nor cuddly; in fact, I did say that she was ugly. That is birth. But what potential! The mother smiles. “The ugly bundle” will be nursed into a beauty, with a pair of hands that may one day design cathedrals or perform experiments that will result in health for all [or become the saviour of the world].

This is the miracle of the birth of the Christ child, that God came and comes in pain and with joy, that God came and comes in the vulnerability and ambiguity of human life, that God came and comes to each one of us again and again in the earthy, messy, painful, joyful reality of our lives in Jesus. Is it any wonder that Mary sings with such courage and strength and joy in the midst of Luke’s story of the birth of Jesus in ambiguity and vulnerability? This is a real birth, and in that birth, new life has surely been stirred. Mercy Amba Oduyoye concludes her account of the birth of the Akan baby:

For the present at any rate, the labour pains vanish. God who mysteriously breathed the breath of life into her will supervise and direct that life. The chaos and darkness of the labour ward, the screams, sweat, swearing and the piercing cries are given a new quality. A new Adam has been stirred into life.

And the last word goes to the writer of our Gospel for today: “But Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19).

Teach Us Where the Bucket Is

2011-12-10T17:10:00.002+11:00

O God, we gather at your waters, as a hot and bothered crowd
gathers on the beach on a sweltering, summer day.
O God, we drink at your fountain,
as a parched dog laps at the fresh,
running water of a bush creek.
O God, we await your refreshment,
as a tired worker watches for the change of shift.
Quench our thirst, satisfy our longings.
May we be refreshed and restored in you.

It’s one of the Calls to Worship from Uniting in Worship 2, the Uniting Church’s book of model orders of service. I wrote it about 15 years ago when Russell and I were in Stanthorpe in the middle of a drought. We were yearning as people, as a community, as a nation for relief from that drought.

It’s not quite like that here in Armidale today and yet, we yearn too. We yearn for relief—from the continual overcast skies and above average rainfall; from the demands of the lead-up to Christmas and our busy lives; from the uncertainty of a world economy in turmoil and the threatening results of climate change. We want things to change. We want some relief.

The people to whom the passage in Isaiah we read today is aimed were also yearning for relief; and they were yearning for the fulfilment of a promise. Isaiah describes a regime of justice promised to the people of Israel in the Torah, the first 5 books of our Old Testament, the so-called books of Moses. Isaiah describes a community who engages in the practice of Jubilee—a just economic situation where the poor were never to be left bereft for generation after generation.

This passage comes to us from the part of the book of Isaiah that scholars call “Third Isaiah”. The people of Israel are back in Judah again; but the hope of the justice and peace of the promised land has once again been dashed. Stan Duncan, the chair of the Jubilee Justice Network of the United Church of Christ Massuchusetts Conference in the US writes:

The immediate occasion of the writing of this particular poem is an economic crisis brought about by the financial dealings of the wealthy returnees who used their status and wealth to grab more land and income from both their deported brothers and sisters and from those who had been left behind. They used their economic and class power to influence the application of tax and finance laws of the emerging nation to their advantage, causing huge increases in their own incomes, but also tremendous poverty in others. For example, they would make agricultural start-up loans during times of drought at exorbitant rates, which violated the Jubilee laws of Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15, but which was allowed because they could buy off courts and lawmakers in case anyone complained. If the poor borrower was not able to pay the entire amount in one year, the next year the unpaid portion would be rolled over into a second loan, thus doubling the interest rate. After two or three years of doubling and quadrupling the interests, the poor farmer was effectively bankrupt and had to give up his farm and often his freedom to the loaner. (http://jubileejusticetaskforce.blogspot.com/)

You would have thought that the people would have learnt after their period of captivity in Babylon which Second Isaiah interpreted as punishment from God for the sins of the people. (Remember last week’s passage and God’s promise of comfort because the people had been punished enough!) But no! The hope of God’s realm has been violated again by those who are greedy and ruthless.

In a week when we have seen the nations of the European union trying to work out how they stand together or apart in the face of the economic crisis of nations like Greece, Italy and Spain; in a week when we have seen the 4 major banks in Australia have to be challenged to pass on an official interest rate cut to ordinary borrowers; in a year where we have seen the haggling over a resources tax be dominated by the voices of large multinational companies—what does this passage have to say about where we’re at now? Where is our dream of God’s realm in our world now? What is it that we can hope for; or have our hopes been dashed too?

And yet, this passage in Isaiah is not one of despair, it is one of hope. The prophet still proclaims the hope of a just world in the face of the injustice that engulfs a re-emerging nation: “The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me… The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me… [God] has sent me to bring good news” (Isaiah 61:1).

And this good news is for those in need of it most—those who are despairing; those who are prisoners; those who have lost their land; those who mourn for what has been lost. The “year of the Lord’s favour” is the Jubilee year when justice will be done; the land of the people restored to its rightful holders; and a time for the earth to rest. That is the vision not just of Isaiah but of the Law, the Torah, and the book of Leviticus—but as far as we can tell, it has never ever been celebrated—at least not by a whole nation or community—it is just a promise; it is still a dream; it is only or at best or at least, a hope—the hope of justice, peace and freedom for the whole Creation.

The people in Judah are being asked not to expect that they should have already found liberation—not to regret what hasn’t been done by the original returnees. They are being asked to expect that they are the ones being called to work for the promise now.

“So, you expected a land of milk and honey; but that doesn’t come without work. It doesn’t come without attention to that which God has called us. It doesn’t happen simply because we yearn for it to happen. You have to be the ones to do the right thing and to make sure the right things are done.”

Now those with good memories will recall that the words of Isaiah are not just found in Isaiah, they are also placed in the mouth of Jesus reading the scriptures in the synagogue in Nazareth in the Gospel of Luke: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me… [God] has sent me to bring good news.” (Luke 4:18) For at the time of Jesus, the people are still waiting for that just world; and probably still looking for others to bring it about too.

So is that what we are doing today also? Waiting for that just world and for others to bring it about; hoping that governments and nations and communities and companies and people will do the right thing when we already know that human beings have never been very good at acting in and for the common good or working for the dream of justice, especially when that means “just us” might miss out on something that we understand to be our right, or our deserving, or at least what we want very, very much.

Isaiah challenges us again to look around at our world; and not just simply to yearn for justice; but to work for it—never, ever giving up the hope of the promise of God’s realm.

O God, we gather at your waters, as a hot and bothered crowd
gathers on the beach on a sweltering, summer day.
O God, we drink at your fountain,
as a parched dog laps at the fresh,
running water of a bush creek.
O God, we await your refreshment,
as a tired worker watches for the change of shift.
Quench our thirst, satisfy our longings.
May we be refreshed and restored in you;
and teach us where to find the bucket and how to carry it
so that we might draw that water for those who most need it.

Advent Prayer

2011-12-01T18:19:00.000+11:00

Beneath the evening sky, weary pilgrims wait for the stars
to give them light and show them the way.
In this season of Advent, we dead-beat disciples
wait to be refreshed in Christ’s presence.
Under these southern skies, we exhausted envoys of God
look for the fullness of the reign of Christ.
Come, Lord Jesus, come.
Come, Lord Jesus, come soon!

Looking for a Cataclysm!

2011-11-22T12:44:00.001+11:00

Hey God! What do you think you are doing? Where are you? Why aren’t you here helping us out? Can’t you see what’s happening? The western world is in financial crisis. There are acts of terrorism everywhere. And we can’t even control domestic violence in this country, let alone the civil, religious and political violence elsewhere on the planet.

We thought we were doing so well. Didn’t everyone want to be like us? We had dreams: everyone can own a house and build a future and be somebody and be left alone. Everybody can have their 15 minutes of fame. We can all be on Big Brother or Australia’s Got Talent or Australian Idol. We can all have what we want. Sure we overlooked those that couldn’t, but please they didn’t really want it, did they?

Then all of a sudden, the rug is pulled out from under us. And we don’t know about our futures anymore and we worry about the futures of our children and our grandchildren. What are we going to live on in our retirements? What jobs are going to be available? How will we maintain our lifestyles, our security, our society? How do we even know that we’re going to be around tomorrow to enjoy what we have? How do we know that we’re safe?

So God, what do you think you’re doing? And just where are you? After all, it’s not as if you haven’t shown your face previously? It’s not as though you haven’t pulled out a miracle or two for the sake of your chosen people before. Remember the Exodus: what a show!

Come and sing unto the Lord for we have triumphed gloriously:
the horses and the riders are thrown into the sea!

Aren’t we half as good as them? Aren’t you just as interested in us as you were in them? Think about the stories of you meeting with people like Hagar and Moses and Elijah, Jacob and Mary and Joseph.

You know it’s all your fault that we’re in the state we’re in, don’t you? We wouldn’t have done any of it, if you’d been around. That’s why we’re in the hole we’re in. Don’t you know that our churches would be full and our communities would be vibrant, if only you would make yourself clearly known? But you, you hide, and we suffer. When you’re not there, we easily fall away and do everything but we should do. It’s all your fault. So, what are you going to do about it?

We’d like to see a cataclysm: a great outpouring of wrath where all the bad guys get their comeuppance. And, of course, we know who the bad guys are: everyone but us! It’s those people who gambled too much on the stock market; and those others who can see how wealthy the West is and who will do anything to be like us; and if they can’t be like us, they’ll pull us down. It’s those people who don’t like other people; it’s people who aren’t like us. So what are you going to do about?

We want a cataclysm. We were promised a cataclysm. The Gospel of Mark has you talking about a cataclysm; well at least your Child, Jesus, talking about a cataclysm, but if in seeing Jesus, we see you, it’s as good as you promising one (even after all that guff with Noah). Yes, you promised us a cataclysm; and we expected one; and we expected to be the onlookers to that glorious event, the ones saved from your wrath, watching the entertainment as you routed your enemies.

The communities behind the Gospel of Mark, of course, would have known about cataclysm. The power of Rome depended upon the might of its armies. The Markan collection is gathered together just about the time of the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. It was a cataclysm; and they so much wanted the end of the world and the beginning of the new one. Can we blame them? The hope was that, in the midst of such cataclysm, despite such cataclysm, even because of such cataclysm, the purposes of God would be revealed, more than be revealed, would be achieved; that God’s reign would finally come to fruition – the reign that had been glimpsed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Yes, that was it, the Christ event. That event was so cataclysmic that the people just knew that God was near: any threat to an imminent triumph must surely be a sign that God would be acting soon.

But, the Gospel of Mark is more circumspect. It isn’t about preparing for the end or predicting the future. It isn’t about watching for the unleashing of the wrath of God. It’s about preparing for God’s reign; it’s about living God’s reign; and that is entirely different.

The reign of God glimpsed, begun, inaugurated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is about anything but the wrath of God. This cataclysmic event which we now describe as incarnation, as embodiment, as being made flesh, is cataclysmic, but it’s not about the wrath of God destroying God’s enemies, nor is it about the destruction of the world in order to bring about a new one, rather it is about God entering the world which we already have, which has already been gifted to us by God. It is about the Creator entering the created order. And that is cataclysmic: the God who is above and beyond and around us is with us, becomes one of us – knows what it is to strive for something worthwhile in a state of limitation and to be defeated; knows what it is to give of oneself to something important to the point of the loss of self; knows what it is to know the depths of being human, of being created, of being mortal, frail, fragile, broken...

And in the process, asks us, not to expect God to be any different from who God is, and not to expect to watch the cataclysmic outcome of the wrath of God destroying God’s enemies (because there’s a fair chance we’d be among them if that happened), but to be about our living as the people of God in the hope that all things will work together for good because of this God who wants to be in relationship with us so much that nothing, nothing, not one thing will prevent God from doing just that.

And yet still we wait for the cataclysm. Surely, the financial world will realise its folly in the face of the current situation, and review its practices. Surely the great powers of this world will see what the problem is in the face of successive waves of terrorism and wipe it out. Surely, whatever we want can happen; and whatever we dream about can be.

But that is not the promise: it is not the promise given in and through Christ… no matter how hard we lament or confess or plead, no matter who we blame or what we look for. The promise to us in Christ is that God is the one who reigns, that God’s reign is both our gift and our calling, and that the God who gifts and calls us is primarily a God of love. In Christ, God has decisively acted to demonstrate utter acceptance of us, utter care for our wellbeing, utter willingness to be in relationship with us – the type of relationship that is not coersive, or abusive, or violent; the type of relationship that is offered, and not forced upon us; the type of relationship that invites our response and accepts whatever that response may be. That action is cataclysmic. It is cataclysmic because it everything (past, present and future) in its embrace as we discover that it is in and through the Christ event that we are who we are in relationship with God: accepted, loved and free.

Why would we look for more? In Christ, God became human. Not to erase our experience; not to obliterate our experience; nor even to over-write our experience; but to enter into it, to know us, to know it and still to be in relationship with us, still offering us relationship despite what we do, what we’ve done, who we are.

So we find ourselves in Advent, still waiting for the “consummation of all things which Christ will bring” to quote the Basis of Union; and still called both to prepare for that coming and to live in the reign already begun in Christ.

Come thou long-expected Jesus!
… Now thy gracious kingdom bring!

Shooting the Messenger?!

2011-11-22T09:34:00.004+11:00

“Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” (Matthew 25:21)

It sounds wonderful doesn’t it? And we can all imagine ourselves in this role: the good and trustworthy servant. Well done! After all haven’t we been faithful, haven’t we followed even when the going got tough! Haven’t we worshipped regularly, served diligently, lived our lives well as witnesses to Jesus?

Or perhaps we hear the alternate words more loudly: “As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 25:30)

And we beat our chests and cry mea culpa, “my fault, all my fault”—we are unworthy. Even though we have tried we have failed—God have mercy on us; God save us from what we imagine might be our reward.

The parable from Matthew’s Gospel which we’ve heard today (25:14-30) is generally read in one of those two ways. Either, we hear it as an ethical instruction (“Use your talents”) and we feel affirmed either in what we are doing or what we might do; or we hear it as an eschatological warning (“Be prepared for the end times!”) and we quake in our boots wondering whether we have been good enough.

But parables are enigmatic stories! They are meant to confront our comfort and our complacency, our well-worn ruts and usual patterns. They are meant to open our hearts, expand our vision, and loosen our limbs in the face of the unexpected nature of God’s realm.

So, noted New Testament and historical Jesus scholar, William Herzog invites us to hear this parable from a different perspective in his book, Parables as Subversive Speech (1994), and in the Seasons of the Spirit material for this week. He asks us to read it from the perspective of the oppressed; and he asks us to read it with a critical eye to the accepted capitalistic assumptions that underlie those two traditional interpretations. He asks us not to assume that the one “going on a journey” is God or Jesus. He asks us to explore the story a little more in the context of its time; and in the context of what we understand now about who God is and who we are before God. He asks us to find the confrontation for us now in this parable.

And I don’t know about you, but I simply want to jump at this chance, because I know that God who is shown to us in Jesus is not a harsh master, reaping where God did not sow or gathering where God did scatter seed. I know that God who is revealed to us in Jesus is not a master who expects us to be afraid, who keeps us quaking in our boots. I know that the God who entered our world in Jesus wants to be in relationship with us.

So let’s follow Herzog’s invitation for a while by beginning with the servants. Herzog argues that:

The head of an elite household could not stay home if he intended to protect his interests and expand his influence. Not only would he travel to his estates but he would travel abroad in hopes of increasing his investments, initiating new business schemes, building patron-client networks, currying favor with imperial overlords, or perhaps representing his city in some official capacity. For the accumulation of his wealth, the basis of his power and prestige, to continue in his absence, he needed to entrust important portions of it to his household retainers. These powerful figures were not household slaves (oiketeria), although they may have very well have been called [servants], (douloi) to emphasize their dependence on their patron-master.

…the phrase… “to each according to his ability” …[may also] be translated “to each according to his power,” where power indicates rank or status.

So, we have a group of three household retainers, who have different ranks or statuses in the household. The most important one is given the most money; and the least important, the least for which to be responsible.

So, just how did the master (and therefore his retainers) make their money? What was the business in which they were engaged? Herzog continues:

The elites used their wealth to make loans to peasant farmers so that the farmers could plant the crops. Interest rates were high; estimates range to 60 percent and perhaps as high as 200 percent for loans on crops. The purpose of making such loans was not so much to make a large profit, at least by the standards of the ancient world, but to accept land as collateral so that the elites could foreclose on their loans in years when the crops could not cover the incurred indebtedness. Had the servants sought a more lucrative return, they might have contracted with a small manufacturing operation specializing in luxury items, because the only “markets” in the ancient world were the urban elites; to make money meant pandering to their lust for luxury. By combining the talents they had received with the raw goods extracted from the peasants who were controlled by their household, the servants had the means necessary to increase wealth. But to do so, they had to exploit the peasant or village base of the household, the merchants with whom they entered into a common venture, or the peasants to whom they made loans.

That sounds like these servant-retainers were placed in a very difficult position—not really of the elite; neither were they of the village because they had to do the master’s business with the people of the village in an exploitative system. The parable does not dispute that this is a master who reaps where he has not ploughed and gathers where he has not sown. But we all have to make a living, right?!

The first two servants got to work “at once” and doubled their investment even though the master is gone for “a long time.” Their industry reveals the zeal with which they work the system to make a handsome turn for the master, but it also reflects their desire to use some portion of that endowment to feather their own nests. First things first: the owner’s initial investment must be secured, then doubled; after that, the retainers can make their profit.

The first two servants were sucked into the system; and probably they didn’t have much choice—they needed to feed and clothe themselves and their families; but the system was exploitative; and just because one is a victim of a system doesn’t mean that one might not also be a perpetrator, or at least a perpetuator.

The third servant is different; and clearly the third servant is the “focus of the parable”. Obviously, the third servant “enjoys [something of] the master’s trust”. He is given some responsibility thought not nearly so much as the other two. Perhaps it is a test of whether he can bear the weight of further responsibility. It is certainly a test of what he values; and where his loyalties lie.

Herzog suggests that there was “a repertoire of scenarios available to Jesus” for the work of the third servant. Jesus could have had the servant entering “into partnership with the poor”, an act “greater than… charity” “according to the rabbis” of which Jesus was one. Instead Jesus depicts the third servant burying “the talent in the ground”. By doing this, according to Herzog, the third servant “takes the best available precaution against theft and liability”. He makes sure the money is safe because he knows he has a hard taskmaster; and he does not enter into business which might exploit others.

And yet, even though the third servant takes the safe option with the master’s money (and the non-exploitative one), he does not take the safe option when the master confronts him. The third servant does not use the fancy language of the formal exchanges that have just happened between the master and the first two servants. The third servant tells it like it is. The actions of the third servant would have astonished Jesus hearers, just as they are astonishing to us now—doing nothing with the money entrusted; and then speaking forthrightly with the master. Herzog puts it this way:

The third retainer cuts through the mystifying rhetoric that has dominated the exchange between the elite and his first two retainers, and he identifies the aristocrat for what he is, strict, cruel, harsh, and merciless… he shames his master through his unexpected attack...

In his wrathful retort, the aristocrat [master does not deny]… the truth of the servant’s description, [perhaps] because he understands [this way of business as acceptable]… But the third servant has named the master and his occupation from another point of view. He [has] exposed the sham of what has transpired and places it under the unobstructed light of … prophetic judgment…

The master’s judgment is immediate. Having spoken the truth, the servant must be vilified, shamed, and humiliated so that his words will carry no weight.

“You wicked and lazy slave! You knew…”

For Herzog,

The hero of the parable is the third servant. By digging a hole and burying the aristocrat’s talent in the ground, he has taken it out of circulation. It cannot be used to dispossess more peasants from their lands through its dispersion in the form of usurious loans. By his actions, the third retainer dissociates himself from the system he has so cleverly exploited to attain his position of power and influence. No motivation is given or needs to be; a figure is known by his actions, not by his internal ruminations. When the hero speaks, he utters in the full light of day what he has learned in the dark; he reveals what has been covered beneath the public rhetoric of praise and promise, made known what has been hidden beneath the mystifications of the elites, proclaims clearly what has only been whispered among the elites and their retainers. The whistle-blower is no fool. He realizes that he will pay a price, but he has decided to accept the cost rather than continue to pursue his exploitive path.

“You wicked and lazy slave! You knew…”

The hero of the story is the third servant—the one who stands up to the domineering master who expected them to exploit their friends and neighbours for monetary gain. The parable becomes a story of the prophet who stands up to power and is punished for it; of a servant who shows to the truth to power and is destroyed for it.

In this reading of the story, the third servant is the Christ figure.

This reading of the story carries a different sort of warning—not an eschatological one, but a warning about expecting to be rewarded for following the way of Christ. Doing God’s will doesn’t mean riches and prosperity. It means standing against the corrupting influences of powerful people and the lure of money or prestige; and copping the results of that audacity.

So what does that mean for how we understand mission—God’s mission in the world and our part in it.

It doesn’t paint a picture of the grand success of wealth, popularity and status. It doesn’t affirm that if we do the right things we will get want we want. There is no prosperity gospel in this reading of the parable. Instead, it cautions us that the result of speaking the truth to power is destruction, but that is what we are called to do.

God’s mission in our world is not about the people of God being wealthy or popular or adulated. God’s mission in the world is about the reconciliation of Creation—all Creation. And that means the powerful need to be called to account; and the powerless given their status as the beloved children of God.

Through God’s graciousness, we are enfolded into God’s work in our world—it’s not our work, it’s God’s—but it’s not God’s if it’s not God’s—if it does not demonstrate the values of God’s realm—justice, peace, reconciliation.

How then do we assess our role in the mission of God? It’s got nothing to do with how many we are, how much we own, how popular we are, how much money we raise… It’s all about how we act in and for God’s world… and for that, we can never have any expectation of reward!

You wicked and lazy slaves! You know that there are those who reap where they do not plough, and gather where they do not sew; and you dare as God’s people to challenge that?

Reign of Christ Sunday

2011-11-22T09:32:00.002+11:00

This is the last “feast day” of the Western liturgical (worship) calendar in the Revised Common Lectionary which the Uniting Church follows. It’s a fairly recent addition to Christian celebrations. Pope Pius XI instituted it in 1925 in the face of the rise of nationalism and secularism. It was included in Pope John XXIII’s revision of the church calendar in 1960; and in 1969, Pope Paul VI placed it on the last Sunday of the liturgical year—just before the beginning of the new year and Advent.

Through the liturgical renewal movement, spawned by the ecumenism of Vatican II, Protestant churches took it up and so it forms part of our lectionary (bible reading) cycle which is used by many mainline Protestant churches around the world.

It’s a radical feast that makes a definite political statement. Christ is the ruler of the cosmos; and the realm to which we owe our loyalty is God’s. Think of what is happening in Europe between the World Wars when the Pope instituted this feast. Think of what this feast was saying to would-be Kaisers, Kings and Presidents. This feast is a provocative one; and it should still be provocative to us. Where do our allegiances lie? What claims on our lives try to compete with the claims of God? Where are we being challenged to proclaim the reign of Christ?

In the Roman Catholic calendar, this feast is ranked with days like Pentecost and Trinity Sunday—days which make statements about important things that we believe: the work of the Spirit and the nature of God. So too, the Reign of Christ reminds us that the most important claim on our allegiance is that of the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ who claims us as the body of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit.

White (or gold) is the colour for this important day in keeping with its focus on honouring the work of Christ. It’s the same colour that we use on Easter Sunday and Christmas Day!

I’m not sure what an appropriate greeting on this significant day might be; but perhaps part of the acclamations of praise from the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper might be suitable: “Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!”

What Does Mission Mean?

2011-11-10T09:10:00.001+11:00

The parable from Matthew’s Gospel today (25:14-30) is generally read as either an eschatological warning (“Be prepared for the end times!”) or ethical instruction (“Use your talents”). William Herzog (Parables as Subversive Speech 1994) asks us to read it from the perspective of the poor.

In this reading, the hero of the story is the third servant—the one who stands up to the domineering master who expected them to exploit their friends and neighbours for monetary gain. The parable becomes a story of the prophet who stands up to power and is punished for it; of a servant who shows to the truth to power and is destroyed for it.

This reading of the story carries a different sort of warning—a warning about expecting to be rewarded for following the way of Christ. Doing God’s will means standing against the corrupting influences of powerful people and the lure of money or prestige; and copping the results of that audacity.

So what does that mean for how we understand mission?

It doesn’t paint a picture of the grand success of wealth, popularity and status. Instead, the result of speaking the truth to power is destruction.

God’s mission in our world is not about the people of God being wealthy or popular or adulated. God’s mission in the world is about the reconciliation of Creation—all Creation. And that means the powerful need to be called to account; and the powerless given their status as the beloved children of God.

Through God’s graciousness, we are enfolded into God’s work in our world—it’s not our work, it’s God’s—but it’s not God’s if it’s not God’s—if it does not demonstrate the values of God’s realm—justice, peace, reconciliation.

How then do we assess our role in the mission of God? It’s got nothing to do with how many we are, how much we own, how popular we are, how much money we raise… It’s all about how we act in and for God’s world… and for that, we can never have any expectation of reward!

You Have Made Us Your Friends!

2011-11-10T09:07:00.001+11:00

We lift our eyes to you, O God:
it’s what seems natural to worship the great Creator,
the faraway God of our beginnings
and so that is true, but it is not all of you.

This tendency to look up searching for you
means that we miss a lot of who you are.
What would happen if we just looked a little sideways,
or perhaps down—would you become more real then?

Have mercy on us, God, we cry as your servants,
and so we are, but that is not all of us either;
and it is certainly not all that you would have us be.

In Jesus, you have called us friends.
In Jesus, you have made us look sideways to our neighbours
and to our enemies.
In Jesus, you have made us see you in humility
and even squalor.
Nothing is too depraved; no-one is too despised
to be your dwelling-place.

And when we look up, because of Jesus, we see,
not an arrogant god on a ridiculously majestic throne,
but a life given for our sake,
and the healing of your whole Creation.

Forgive us when we fail to speak truth to power
and miss out on authentic relationship with you.

Forgive us when we bemoan our own predicaments
while neglecting the plight of the oppressed.

Forgive us when we spend so much time congratulating ourselves that we are your servants,
that we completely miss your invitation to companionship.

When arrogance masks itself as humility,
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

When self-pity blinds us to real poverty,
Christ, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.

When fear pretends to be prudence,
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

Expand our vision of you to a 360⁰ view
that we might find ourselves in the sort of relationship with you
that you envisaged at our creation, right there in the beginning,
when you dared to make creatures who would speak with you.
Through the influence of your Spirit,
help us to be friends and partners, not slaves or crazed fans.
Work through us as your colleagues in creativity and compassion
for you have gifted us with your image,
and in Jesus, you have made us your friends. Amen.

Lift Your Eyes to God!

2011-11-10T09:05:00.001+11:00

Lift your eyes to God:
in the highest heavens, we see your glory, Great Creator.
Reach out your hands to Jesus:
in the compassion of an enemy, we know your love, O Christ.
Feel the breathe of the Spirit:
in our sinews and in our souls, the Spirit whispers hope.
Let us worship the God who reigns,
by entering the depths of our humanity
and setting the humble soaring on the wings of the Spirit
for the sake of eternity.

What does it mean to be Christian?

2011-11-02T16:29:00.003+11:00

Christians are people who have accepted God’s unconditional love for themselves and for the whole Creation; and, in response to God’s graciousness, have responded to Jesus’ call to costly discipleship. Through the sacrament of Baptism, they have been incorporated into Christ’s body, the Church; and seek to follow in the way of Christ every day of their lives.

Christians are not perfect. We have received the message of the Good News (gospel) in Jesus Christ that God loves us despite ourselves and God forgives us no matter what. All we need to do is to acknowledge our dependence on God, Holy Trinity, Creator, Christ and Spirit; and, in the power of the Holy Spirit seek to live out our new life in Christ everyday.

Christian discipleship calls us to love God with our whole hearts, minds, bodies and souls; and to love our neighbours (whether friends or strangers, allies or enemies) as we love ourselves.

The Christian Life is one of worship, witness and service. As the body of Christ, we worship God together and, through that worship, are formed as God’s people. In the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, we are fed as God’s people on the way.

In the whole of our lives, we are called to live out our identity as the people of God. Being Christian has implications for how we live in our families; the way we do our work; the issues that are important to us; our hopes for our children, our friends, our communities… Christians seek to live out the values of God’s realm—justice, peace, reconciliation and the integrity of Creation. The Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12 NRSV) have long been understood as a powerful and poetic statement of what that might mean:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you
and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven,
for in the same way they persecuted the prophets
who were before you.

Servants Not Slaves

2011-10-29T19:33:00.002+11:00

Alan Joyce, the CEO of Qantas, has announced that the company is grounding its entire fleet and locking out its employees in the face of union demands for pay increases and better working conditions, and workers’ fears about the threat of jobs being outsourced to overseas labourers at lower rates of pay. Wasn’t this the same Alan Joyce who was granted a 71% pay increase earlier this week, putting his annual earnings over $5 million? Who is Alan Joyce serving—the company, their clients, their employees or himself? And what does it all mean for a society increasingly influenced by a corporate culture where profit is everything, people are nothing, and everybody seems to be in it for themselves, particularly if you’re a CEO earning an obscene amount of money per annum?

In the meantime, other parts of the media have been in a bit of a frenzy around the royal visit with the big news for at least a while being Julia Gillards’ failure to curtsey when, in fact, contemporary royal protocols do not require that particular act of deference to the sovereign anymore.

And let’s not even mention the hoo-haa around the Melbourne Cup, fashions of the field, and which celebrities will be attending the cup and why.
Our society seems to have some funny ideas about what is important and who matters, as do the religious leaders of whom Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel reading. Despite being important teachers and significant mentors in the faith, as Jesus acknowledges, even they too get what’s important wrong in their actions. They are concerned with knowing the things of God; but miss the incredible irony of those things when they seek to show just how godly they apparently are.

Jesus describes religious leaders who are trying very hard to live out their ideas of what being faithful to God is all about; but who, in the process, only tie themselves up in knots—taking on themselves unnecessarily heavy burdens. They wear extra long fringes on their prayer shawls, and large phylacteries (small leather cases holding passages of scripture) during prayer times. They seek places of honour at banquets and in synagogues, and signs of respect in market places. They want people to know and to acknowledge their godliness.

But according to Jesus all this play-acting is futile. It means nothing in the values of God’s realm for “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

“All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.” The message is a disturbing one.

Partly, the message is disturbing because we know we can’t live up to it. Partly, it is disturbing because it is a message that has tended to be distorted in various ways. The message of the humility of discipleship in Christ is a familiar one, but I don’t think it’s really an easy one for us to understand.

Sometimes people have claimed humility for themselves while furthering their own interests at the expense of others. Sometimes people have heard the message of humility as an order to humiliate themselves--to treat themselves as less than the valued children of God whom we all are. And probably we all do a little of each of those things most of the time, because we are the frail, fragile, fallible human creatures we are.

But when we interpret the message about humility and exaltation in these kinds of ways, we’re pretty much heading in the direction of the scribes and the Pharisees ourselves—we think we know, but our actions belie our claims.

Of course, in our contemporary world, we know that people who like to make a show are generally looking for support and encouragement, for affirmation. They don’t need to be noticed because they are successful. They need to be noticed to prove that they are successful. Their problem is usually not pride. More often, it’s lack of self-esteem. When you don’t value yourself, you have to keep proving to others how significant you are by wearing and having the right things, and by doing the proper things, or the daring things, or the trendy things, in the biggest and best possible way.

The religious leaders about whom Jesus speaks are really a very sad bunch indeed. They are a sad bunch because they don’t know that they are important to God as themselves not for what they do or who they are in their society. They are special to God because they are God’s children, unique yet fallible and frail human creatures.
When you don’t feel very good about yourself, it’s hard to get your priorities right. When you don’t feel very good about yourself, it’s hard to remember that it’s okay not to know everything, not have everything, not to be everything that you think you should know, have or be. But Christian discipleship has never been about knowing or having or being more than you are. It’s never been about being honoured or respected or showy. It’s always been about being the beloved children of God—God’s frail, fragile, fallible human creatures.

In 1960, Valerie Saiving wrote what is now regarded as a ground-breaking article. In it, she suggested that the reason there was so much emphasis on sin as pride, and love as selflessness in Christianity was probably due to the fact that much of Christian theology had been written and devised by men. She suggested that for women, in their tendency to give up themselves completely to the needs of others, it was probably necessary to regard sin as self-effacement, and love as the need to value one’s self. She also suggested that as our society was becoming more feminised, it was likely that the issues of self-effacement, or lack of self-esteem would not simply be a female concern, rather it was a concern for the whole of contemporary society. Further comments on Saiving’s work have been made since that time, and it seems that she was probably right, that in emphasising sin as pride in the Christian church, we have failed to recognise the underlying impetus for what presents as pride, and that is not the overvaluing of self, but the undervaluing—perhaps those male theologians just got it wrong for themselves as well rather than actually being guilty of being proud. When people have no internal sense of self-worth, they seek it from external sources, making bigger and bigger displays of who they are and how important they can be.

That kind of information puts a different slant on our Gospel reading for today. If when we talk about people who exalt themselves, we are really talking about people who don’t feel very good about themselves, who do not know their worth as children of God, then of course, it is likely that they will be humbled, because it is impossible to receive the kind of external affirmation required to keep them feeling good. If when we talk about people who humble themselves, we are talking about people who do not need to prove their place as beloved children of God because they have accepted it—they have accepted God’s love for them, then of course they will be more comfortable with themselves, and more ready to try new things, and to take new steps in discipleship with Christ. It’s common sense really. If you feel secure in your identity, then you feel able to try new things, to learn new things, to risk being laughed at or ridiculed or considered a fool. Wasn’t Jesus just such a person? Ridiculed and derided and considered a fool, because he didn’t have to prove his worth before God.

Humility is not humiliation or neglect of either self or others, rather it is learning to value ourselves and each other as the beloved children of God and frail, fragile, fallible human creatures. In Christ, we are called to confident but not overconfident discipleship, to humility but not self-effacement.

Self-esteem and the way we see our world are BIG issues for our time. They are integrally involved in the suicides of young men in rural communities (perhaps because they see themselves as failing to attain the right way of being male in our society). They are involved in issues of domestic violence where women, and sometimes men, allow themselves to be abused because they are unable to accept themselves as the people whom they are and to make different decisions in order to protect themselves; and where men, and sometimes women, abuse others as a way of taking out their frustrations about their own apparent inadequacies. The issues of self-esteem and the way we see our world are probably even involved in the kind of corporate culture that has developed in our society—a culture where bigger salaries, greater profits, less costs are somehow a marker of the worth of the CEO or the Board or the Senior Management etc.

Attempts at grand displays of worth are not confined to religion. They are present in every aspect of human life: government, business, community, social and sporting organisations. People are people. Wherever we are, we like to be noticed, acknowledged, and recognised. Unfortunately, a lot of our fussing comes from the fact that we really do not think a lot of ourselves, and have to keep proving ourselves to ourselves and to other people.

The text in Matthew seems to be talking about pride, but when you know that some people’s attempts at getting attention are really cries to be loved and cared for and needed, then this passage is also about knowing our value in God.

In Christ we are called to recognise our value to God. As children of God we are called to be servants not abused slaves; and that cannot be achieved through self-abasement. You have to value what you have to offer in order to serve. Nor can it be achieved through self-aggrandisement even when that comes from a poor sense of self-esteem. You have to recognise your limitations in order to offer the service that you can offer and not something other than that. In Christ we are called to know how God sees us—yes, frail, fragile, fallible and sinful; but the very much beloved children of God.

And when we are able to accept our worth before God, then we just might understand what it means to be humble and yet be exalted, what it means to be the greatest and yet a servant. And we will no longer need to seek others’ acknowledgement that we are of worth.

The Labour is God's!

2011-10-27T16:43:00.001+11:00

God remembers your labour, brothers and sisters;
you work night and day, so that you might not be a burden
as you proclaim the Word of God.
God is our witness:
we have sought to be upright and blameless.
You urge and encourage the leading of a life worthy of God.
Like a father with his children,
we call each other to God’s glorious realm.
You have received the Word of God,
not as a human word but as what it really is, God's Word,
which is also at work in you as believers.
We pray that God remains at work in us
for it is not we, but God who labours
and brings God’s realm to birth.
It is indeed God who gives birth to new life within us.
Let us proclaim our God!

Your Coming Is Not In Vain!

2011-10-27T16:32:00.002+11:00

Sisters and brothers, you’re coming here is not in vain!
Though our faith is ignored and rejected by others,
with courage, we worship God!
You do not come with deceit or impure motives.
With God as our witness, we come to worship God!
So deeply do you care for each other
that you come to share the Gospel again and again.
God calls us to gentle witness as apostles of Christ.
So, let us worship God!

Theology is Not a Dirty Word!

2011-10-27T16:12:00.001+11:00

Lots of people in the church are uncomfortable with the word “theology”. Perhaps that’s because theology has often been seen as something that the big names do: Karl Barth, Thomas Aquinas, Pope Benedict VI, John Calvin, John Wesley… But theology is actually how we as the people of God are called to think through who we are, what we are on about and where God is calling us.

The word “theology” can be very simply broken down into 2 Greek roots—theos meaning “God”; and logos meaning “study” or “words about”. In simple terms, theology is God-talk. But good theology is not just any talk about God. It is talk about God that understands the Christian story and thinks about the nature of God within what has already been discerned by the church over 2 millenia.

Did you notice that the Greek root logos meaning study or words about is also one of the key titles for Jesus in the Scriptures? In the first chapter of the Gospel of John, we read: “In the beginning was the Word…” The Greek word here is logos. Now one of the significant features of the early Christian idea of logos and the Hebrew idea of words is that words are never just words, they are always active. In the first chapter of the book of Genesis, we read: “In the beginning, God said… and it was…” When God speaks, things happen. Words are not just words. They shape who we are and what we are becoming. Notice how the first chapter of John connects with the first chapter of Genesis and the idea of God’s creative action in the world continuing in Jesus.

Thinking about who we are as the people of God and working as the body of Christ is not simply about our emotional intuitions or even about our grand visions. It is about trying to understand who we are as the community of the Spirit, God’s called out, called forth, called together people in the light of a continuing understanding of the nature of God and God’s action in the world.

Yes, it means we need to use our brains as well as our bodies; but then aren’t our brains part of our bodies; and isn’t all that we have been created to be a gift from God.

Yes, it does mean that we need to listen to the tradition and learn from it as well as seeking to discover what the good news of Jesus Christ has to say in our time. Both are important!

Just like the connection between the first chapter of Genesis and the first chapter of John, we need to be looking for the continuity of God’s creative action in our world; and we can only do that by recognising where God has been at work in our past.
Theology is not a dirty word. It helps us understand who we are in God, who God calls us to be and how God is still working creatively in and through us and the world around us.

Hidden Potential!

2011-07-16T15:03:00.003+10:00

[Jesus] told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened." (Matthew 13:33)

Yeast—it’s an ingredient only used in small quantities compared to the whole mixture in which it is placed. Just a little bit has quite an effect. And once it is mixed in, it’s completely hidden—for all intents and purposes, it is gone; but it’s effect is not. Yeast is a hidden talent—something small, barely noticeable; but very evident if it is missing; and very potent, very powerful in its effect.
"The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."

In the parable, the yeast is mixed with quite a large amount of flour—three measures—probably enough flour to make as much dough as any one person was able to knead at a time; probably enough flour to make enough bread to feed quite an extended family, perhaps up to a 100 people.

The yeast is hidden in the flour. Its presence is known only by the rising of the dough.

In other biblical passages, yeast is a symbol of evil or corruption. We need only look as far as the 16th chapter of Matthew to find Jesus warning about the yeast of the Pharisees and the Sadducees and in Corinthians. Paul exhorts his readers not to celebrate with the old yeast of malice but with new unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Think about the Passover story. In this most significant feast of the people of Israel, the bread was to be unleavened, a sign of the haste required in preparation for the departure of the Hebrews from Israel. But because of its significance in this significant feast, unleavened bread became a more important sacrifice than leavened bread and yeast, therefore, was seen in some way to "taint" the dough.

And in some ways, yeast does work as an irritant, a catalyst to the rising of the dough, a prod to provoke the chemical reaction that produces not flat, but risen bread. Yet, according to the parable, Jesus says that the realm of heaven is like yeast in flour rising to make the dough which, when baked, will be bread.

The yeast is mixed with one of the staples of our diets, flour or meal, the carbohydrate base for a filling meal. The yeast is mixed with an ordinary ingredient, something that would have been used every day and the effect of that yeast is to add something extra to the ordinary to make it the staple food that it needs to be. But the reaction doesn’t occur immediately, it occurs over time. Breadmakers know that the dough needs to put aside, to be allowed to rise before it is kneaded (and perhaps allowed to rise again), before it is finally shaped and baked.

So what is the yeast doing in this parable? The parable of the yeast is a parable about the unexpectedness of the form of the realm of heaven. We know neither the day nor the hour and we may not even recognise it for what it is. We may see it as an irritant. We may discount its presence. We may simply not notice that it is there in the mix. But it is there and it does have an effect. The realm of heaven is not easy to discover or to discern. It is not easily recognised and it may even be misrecognised. We humans don’t always know what we are looking for.

But this promise of the extraordinary power and presence of God in our lives often seems just a small presence in our ordinary lives; and we wonder what effect it will have; what effect it does have. Yeast has a huge effect on an ordinary mixture of dough. And as the people of God, we are called to watch out for the extraordinary presence of God in those the life that we take for granted. And more than that, we are called to take the gift of that yeast and to place it in the abundance of the life that is ours, and to watch it have the effect that it will have because it is the very presence of God.

"The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened."

Discussion Starters
1. In what ways was yeast described?
2. Where have you caught glimpses of God’s presence in the ordinary?
3. What does it mean for the people of God to place God at the centre of our life?
4. In what ways is the body of Christ like yeast in our everyday world?

No Condemnation!

2011-07-16T14:54:00.004+10:00

If you were to ask me what my favourite book in the Bible is, I’d say Romans. Then, if you were to ask me what my favourite chapter in that book is, I’d say chapter 8. In this one chapter, there is such a wealth of theological truth, that you could spend your whole life just studying this one chapter. Indeed, in reading this chapter, it’s not very hard to simply become preoccupied with verse 1. Verse 1 of chapter 8 of Romans holds so much hope: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (v. 1).

As you know, Paul has been talking a lot about the Law—about the way in which the Law makes us slaves to sin and death. It makes us slaves to sin and death, because when we try to follow God’s Law in our own strength, we are doomed to failure. You and I can never be good enough, never be whole enough, never be humble enough to fulfil everything that God calls us to be. And if we think we have a hope, we’re kidding ourselves. And if we think we might actually do it, we’re stark raving mad!

But I guess most of us are a bit mad, at least just a bit. I am. I made a commitment to Jesus when I was 8. I was certain I was going to be good after that; but of course I wasn’t; so I felt guilty and the more I tried to be good, the more I failed, the more I felt guilty. So, at the same camp, the following year, I made another commitment. And this time I just knew I was going to be good; but of course I wasn’t; and I felt guilty and the more I tried to be good, the more I failed and the more I felt guilty. And so on… I’m not sure when the message sank in; but eventually it did. It wasn’t that trying to be good was wrong. It was just that I’d missed the point completely: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (v. 1).

It’s not that trying to follow God’s Law is wrong; it’s just that trying to do it ourselves is futile; and, as it turns out, completely unnecessary. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (v. 1).

God’s gift is that we are not required to prove ourselves, not required to justify ourselves, not required to get it all right, because we can’t. No, God’s gift is that in Christ, through Christ and because of Christ, we are never, ever pronounced guilty in the first place. In Jesus, God sets us free—not free to do anything; but free to rest in God’s love and God’s grace and to trust God to work in us and through us, despite us. And in that handing of everything over to God, that submission to God, we just may discover that God’s Law of justice, mercy and grace has been fulfilled in us because it was fulfilled in Jesus.

Jesus fulfilled God’s Law and that meant death on a cross. Because any way you look at it, fulfilling God’s Law or rather trying to fulfil God’s Law means death to self—death to our sense of wholeness and wellbeing because we are consumed by getting things right; death because God’s Law has never and can never be embraced fully by humans on their own; and death because we don’t like it when someone seems to be coming close to making it on their own and we like to make sure that they know that and know that they can’t. But we don’t have to be neurotic, and we don’t have to be guilty, and we don’t have to be jealous, and we don’t have to fulfil God’s Law on our own because… “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (v. 1).

What a gift—to be set free of guilt, and sin and death—to really fulfil God’s Law because we have been incorporated into the resurrection life of Christ through the power of God’s Spirit. Charles Wesley was just one hymn writer who got pretty excited about that one powerfully brief message at the beginning of chapter 8 of the letter to the Romans:

No condemnation now I dread:
Jesus, and all in him, is mine!
Alive in him, my living Head,
and clothed in righteousness divine…
(Charles Wesley 1707–88 alt.)

Accepting God’s gracious, loving embrace of us as the very human creatures which we are is, I think, what the parable of the sower is on about, too. We can hear the message that we are called to love God and love others; but if we do not comprehend that loving God means accepting that God loves us, God’s Word has not taken very deep roots in our hearts. We are hearing the good news only as seed spread on rocky ground—very superficially.

We can hear the message that we are loved by God, but when we keep getting caught up in the competitive, individualistic and consumerist priorities of the very human culture in which we are immersed, we have not really understood the good news that God really does love us, and that that means we are really released from the unhealthy systems in which we find ourselves. We are like seed choked by the thorns.

No, we are called to drink deeply, breathe fully, and understand completely, to let the roots of the good news that God loves us grow deep—nothing else matters; and when we open our hands and our hearts to accept that love, we may just find that loving God and loving others is much, much easy than we ever thought it could be. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (v. 1).

[T]here is … no condemnation when we enter the sphere of Christ's influence and power ([When we are] "in Christ"). Why? Not just because there is forgiveness; nor just because we have someone else to reinforce the authority of the Law in telling us how to be good—[in fact] not at all the latter! Paul explains immediately what achieves the difference: "For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has liberated you from the law of sin and death" (8:2). (Bill Loader)

In Christ, God doesn’t just provide a marvellous example of idyllic servanthood; nor does God only provide a substitute sacrifice for the sin which binds us. No, in Christ, God says, more powerfully than words… in God becoming human, in incarnation, God communicates that God utterly loves us.

God takes “the initiative to bring about liberation” (Loader). God enters right into the middle of the human predicament in order to restore the broken relationship between humanity and God; in order to disempower the effect of sin in our lives; in order to set us free.

And that freedom—if we choose to accept it—will bear fruit:

…by opening ourselves to God's Spirit which brings transforming love we are transformed to become loving people. When that process starts happening we more than fulfil what the Law intended. Its goals are achieved [not through slavish observance], but on the basis of a loving relationship. Love … reproduce[s] love. Human experience tells us that this really does work. While there is a role for behaviour modification and rules, nothing changes a person so much as the experience of being loved. (Loader)

That is what Paul is on about. And that is what sets the agenda for Christian life. If we truly believe that God loves us, we cannot help but love others, even our enemies.

When we operate out of sin and fear, we reproduce sin and fear. When we operate out of love and hope, we reproduce love and hope. In both cases this is more than living by ideals. (Loader)

It is about a choice of systems: one that highlights sin and failure; and another that embraces love and gives life. Love and life are our hope. Love and life are our calling. Love and life are our inheritance in Christ.

Paul holds out the hope of us all one day being free “from the negative aspects … [that are] instilled into our human condition”, our slavery to sin and death. For Paul, that hope “means a resurrection body”, a new embodiment, a new incarnation of God’s love and God’s grace.

Until then we need to face the reality that we carry about with us both systems and can easily lose focus and surrender ourselves again to the sin syndrome. The ruts and routines don't magically disappear! (Loader)

Our fear and guilty and jealousy and neuroticism have deeper roots for us as humans than the victory of God’s love over all that would bind us to sin and death. For Paul, there is:

no liberation in people with plagued consciences. Paul's gospel lifts people beyond such self preoccupation so that they are now free to "get on with the job" of living. Death does not reign. Life does. There is now no condemnation. There is the Spirit of life. As we allow ourselves to enter this powerful new way of being set free, we ourselves have some chance of also embodying such good news and being good news for others. (Loader)

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free …” (vv. 1-2). Or as Jesus says in other places, “Go now and sin no more.”

God Welcomes!

2011-07-16T14:24:00.005+10:00

So what does it mean to be Christian? In the letter to the Romans, Paul is wrestling with issues that he either knows or suspects other Christians are wrestling with too. What does our Baptism mean? How do we cope with the reality of our lives where, despite our best intentions, we still do wrong? What does the graciousness of God really mean for us now? It is perhaps the most influential book in the Christian scriptures. Some of our most important Christian theologians have found the core impetus for their understandings of who God is and who we are before God in this letter.

But these days, we often hear these profound passages through the lens of a kind of Enlightenment individualistic moralism: “Sin is bad.” “Don’t sin.” “Sinners are bad.” “You are all sinners.” The blame is on us. The guilt is on us. The onus is on us to do something about it. It’s all about us!

And that’s precisely the opposite of where the focus lies for Paul. For Paul, it is always about what God has done; not what we have done or what we do: “ For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” (Romans 6:14)

As New Testament scholar, Bill Loader, points out, we need to make sure we read everything in its proper context: “the wages of sin [may be] death, but the free gift of God is eternal life” (Romans 6:23). If we focus only on the first half of the verse, we focus on the system that God has not only called us from, but the very life from God has released us—the system from which God has set us free.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul has been talking about the reality of Baptism. He is challenging believers to take the promises of Baptism seriously—not the people’s promises which he probably thinks the people are taking too seriously by putting the onus on themselves; not the people’s promises, but God’s promise, God’s promise of liberation in Christ. “[W]hen we accept God’s generosity, celebrated in baptism, we enter a new way of life.” (Loader) “Ritual life [is] not virtual life; it [is] real life in its most basic form expressed ritually.” (GBoD) Baptism means something. In fact, Baptism means everything.

Our problem is not that we need to keep turning over new leaves and trying harder (Loader), but rather that we need to accept the new reality into which we have been enfolded. Our problem is that we do not live out of the reality that our Baptism declares and embodies (GBoD).

In Baptism, we enter a new way of being, a new dynamic, “a new set of possibilities”, “a new relationship with God where… by opening ourselves to God's goodness we not only experience forgiveness and hope but also begin a journey where [God’s] love produces love in and through us. God's goodness and generosity reproduces itself [in and through us].” (Loader)

[I]n the light of entering this new life with its dynamic generation of love and goodness … Paul declares [that we should not let ourselves] be ruled by the competing system which generates sin. (Loader)

Sin is the result of alienation from God; of the failure to live out of God’s free gift of mercy and love. Sin is the expectation that it’s still all up to us to get it right.

When we enter the new life with its new possibilities the old patterns and systems do not shut down. The destructive ruts and routines are still there, [but we do not] have to surrender to them [we do not have to live out of them] because [God’s] new life [lifts us] beyond them.

In [verse] 12, [Paul] identifies [sin] as having [its] roots in our human bodies, in particular in our appetites. In this he shares the views of many of his time [and perhaps of our own time too]. [Though] For Paul the body is not evil; nor are its desires, but when we allow our lives to be determined by satisfying our cravings without any thought for the consequences for ourselves or others—whether that is as unsophisticated as [violence and] … abuse or as sophisticated as ripping off the developing world through hogging wealth and resources—then we are caught up into a power network which produces destructive behaviour. Paul is thinking about two different systems: sin and death on the one side and goodness and love [and generosity] on the other. (Loader)

And Paul is reminding us to live out of the new system, not the old, the new dynamic into which we have been baptised. He is calling us to accept the freedom that God gives.

[Verse] 13 is about integration [in] and orientation [to the new life we have been given]. When openness to love becomes a possibility for [us], then [our] journey has just begun. That journey includes the process of bringing all parts of [our] being into the sway of this liberating power [by simply allowing ourselves] to be taken up into the dynamic goodness and generosity of God [by simply allowing ourselves to be open to God’s action]. That is what resurrection life is about. Baptism [means] death to the old system. Christian life means living that reality out so that it affects everything. As [verse] 14 puts it, [the new reality is that] sin no longer rules.

[That same verse] goes on to say that we are no longer under the Law but under grace. [You can almost hear] the hackles of [Paul’s] opponents rise. No longer under the Law, the [Scriptures] (as [they] knew [them])! What does Paul possibly mean? You can just hear them reiterating their argument: "all this talk about love is not enough; you have to have the commandments! That's the trouble with Paul." [But] Paul is being [very] courageous here. [He even seems to court] opposition. [For in verse] 15 he restates [his opponents’] … question for them: doesn't all this mean we should keep on sinning? It echoes the question with which he began [right back at the beginning of chapter 6]. Paul is not, of course, suggesting they dispense with scripture. But he is saying: when you live on the basis that you try to observe the commandments and keep on failing, then you are caught in a system which does not work. The Law treated in this way is bad news. [The next chapter of Romans continues this theme.]
… [God’s promise is freedom] from the old system, so it makes no sense to [keep] surrendering to it. To develop [t]his idea… [Paul] uses the image of slavery (6:16). [H]e refuses to reduce the discussion to rules about doing good. He is [much] more interested in the processes and what they do to people. So he repeats: the sin system produces destructive behaviour; the grace system, … the system based on God's goodness and generosity produces goodness and generosity. Here Paul plays with the [slavery] image: [in Christ] we undergo a transferral of ownership from sin to God and goodness (6:18). Some slavery! But Paul is wanting people to think in systems and the dynamics that they produce.

Ultimately the fruit of living a life which feeds on God's goodness and generosity or grace is not just goodness and grace in our lives (and surely that is even more than the Law demands and more than [what] fulfils it!); [ultimately, the fruit of God’s promise] … is … holiness or "sanctification" … not … withdrawal [from the world] or even [some puritanical perfection, but love].

For Paul God's being is not preoccupied with being untarnished and pure, but with being generous and self-giving, making something out of nothing, raising the dead, helping people from the sin-death syndrome into the goodness-life processes which love generates.

[Verse] 23 then is not primarily about sins leading people to hell, and about the gift of life as escape from hell into heaven… Paul is talking about something much more encompassing and [he’s] doing so with his back to the wall. He is contrasting two fundamental dynamics at work in human beings and their behaviour which had also become the stuff of conflict among Christians [and indeed still is today]. The way of sin and death shows itself in actions, but it is much deeper and stems from powerful forces within our own being which are generated through our alienation from God, from others and from ourselves. They are so destructive they can even take good commandments and subvert them to send us sinking further into the mire [by getting us caught in an impossible cycle of our failure to follow them exactly]. That [cycle] is … death - here and now and forever.

Against it Paul argues the liberating effects generated by the relationship of generous love which God's goodness offers people. [God’s grace transforms us for the sake of extending that] same goodness and generosity [to] the world. That is "eternal life" - beginning in the here and now [and extending beyond…] That is the good news of which Paul is not ashamed (1:16) because it is powerful and is rooted in God's goodness (1:17) [God’s graciousness, God’s generosity]. (Loader)

Baptism happens to us and changes us. We have been buried with Christ in baptism, and raised with Christ to walk in newness of life… If indeed we have been buried with Christ, we are actually dead to and freed from sin. If indeed we have been raised with Christ in baptism, we are actually freed from the power of death.
The key word here is "freed." Just as a captive is set free from bondage, so we have been set free from sin and death. …What former captive in his or her right mind would attempt to live lawlessly after being freed from captivity, unless the condition of captivity has become "home"? Likewise, given that we have been freed in baptism from sin and death, why would we give ourselves to the ways of sin and death again, rather than [opening ourselves to the graciousness ] … of God in which we now stand?

If we have been given grace and power to renounce the forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, repent from sin, resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves, why do we seem so timid and powerless in the face of these things around us? Is not our timidity a sign that we have resubmitted ourselves to sin and death, rather than, as our [Baptismal] vows [affirm, given our allegiance] to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour in union with his living body, the church?

Put another way, if [in our Baptism, we renounced evil and claimed Christ, what is our calling now?] … Paul understood Baptism [to declare and enact] the very reality into which we have been initiated. (GBoD)

God’s free gift is already begun in us through Christ; and all we have to do is live out of God’s gracious promise.

An Invitation to the Table

2011-07-07T11:49:00.000+10:00

This is the table of Christ, and of Christ’s body, the church.
Here we are formed as God’s people.
Here we are named as God’s heirs.
Here we are grafted to the vine of Christ.
Here we are empowered by the Spirit for service.

Come, not because you’ve made it
in our world or God’s realm.
Come, not because you’ve failed
yesterday or forever.
Come, because you have been enfolded into Christ,
and are God’s creative work in progress.
Come, because in Christ, there is no condemnation
and all are free as Christ is free.
Keep your eyes on Christ and your heart will follow.
Keep your face towards Christ
and your actions will proceed in the right direction.

Come share this meal in thanksgiving and honour and praise
for the God who needs no justification
to lavish unfathomable love and grace upon us
through Jesus Christ, our Redeemer,
and the Spirit who makes us holy.

Setting the Table

2011-07-07T11:45:00.000+10:00

Grain is gathered from the field;
threshed and milled for flour.
We are formed from the grain of God’s harvest.
Flour is mixed with water to produce basic dough.
The water of baptism unites us.
Yeast is added to transform the mixture.
The vision of God’s realm draws us onwards.
Oil softens the dough and makes a new texture.
The Holy Spirit anoints us as the body of Christ.
A little salt improves the taste.
Jesus calls us to be the salt of the earth.
The bread is kneaded and shaped, moulded and baked.
It is God who makes us a holy communion.
Grapes are harvested and crushed for juice.
You are the vine, we are the branches, O Christ.
Juice and skins are mixed with yeast for fermentation.
God’s reign is coming. God’s hope is here.
There is a time of waiting; then a time of pressing.
God’s new life presses forth through the sediment of our lives.
And finally, the feast is here!
Let us celebrate the feast of our life in God.

Based on an idea by Simei Monteiro & Lindsey Sanderson, “A Communion Meditation” in What Does the Lord Require? Compiled by Francis Brienen, Canterbury Press, 2000.

God's Easy Yoke!

2011-07-06T13:08:00.002+10:00

Have you ever watched a toddler who has just learnt about the idea of not being allowed to do some things, and of having the capacity to do exactly what she or he is aware that he or she should not be doing (or at least what Mum or Dad says that she or he should not be doing). Sometimes it can be a game, as the child reaches towards the heater or the stove saying, “Burnie”, with a glint in her eye, and as soon as she knows she has Dad’s attention, the hand is withdrawn, and maybe there’s a scuttle away. Sometimes it’s a pure act of defiance: “You tell me I can’t do that Mum, but I am going to do just that!” And poor Mum ends up having rescue little Tommy from imminent danger. Paul is taking about neither of those situations.

In this section of Romans, Paul is taking about the situation where we have an idea of what God is calling us to, and want with all our hearts to achieve that goal, but simply because of ourselves, our human frailty, our completely human misunderstanding of what it takes to get it right, we are not able to achieve that illusive goal of the life to which God calls us: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

Human life is like that. We want to do good. We want to do the best. We want to do what is right. We may even want to perfect. But we cannot, we are not, and do not do what we really want to do. Because life is full of unexpected consequences; and we are not free. We are not free from the vagaries of mortal existence. We are not free from the realities of being physical beings. We are not free from our contexts. We are not free from the complexities of being beings who are not just alive, but who think and feel and want what we cannot achieve by ourselves because of precisely who we are—mortal beings.

As New Testament Scholar, Bill Loader, notes, Paul’s hearers were probably familiar with this idea: “It was alive in the intellectual traditions of the Greco-Roman world as an analysis of the human predicament and how people are not free.” The idea reached back as far as the ancient Greek playwrights. (http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/AEpPentecost3.htm) Think of the story of Oedipus Rex. His parents, warned by an oracle that he will kill his father and marry his mother, leave him to die on a hillside—an act that precipitates the very tragedy which they are afraid will happen. Human beings are not free. We think we know what we are doing. We think we are conscious of what we are doing; and we think we are in control of our lives, but we really aren’t. We do the best we can; and that’s all we can do. And that’s what Paul is on about: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

For Paul, the Law, God’s Law, plays a complex role for us as God’s creatures, as God’s people. It reminds us of the life to which God calls us; and it reminds us of how far short we fall in achieving that life on our own. As quickly as the Law tries to free us from ourselves, it binds us to our frailties. It is tragic; and maybe just a little bit comic too—the ultimate double-bind or Catch 22 situation.

And here, surely, we are hearing part of Paul’s very own story: “I tried so hard to live up to the Law, but it wasn’t until I discovered that that was futile, that I discovered the freedom I have been given in Christ. It wasn’t until I realised that I couldn’t do it, that I discovered I didn’t need to.” For Paul, God’s graciousness in Christ is freedom from this double-bind, this impossible puzzle. And this is the good news, this is the Gospel!

As we open ourselves in faith up to the story and promises of God, God’s gift of grace and mercy, God’s love and God’s utter forgiveness, as we simply make ourselves available to God, we move from the cycle of death and failure to the wonder of life and growth and freedom—freedom from sin and guilt and death; freedom to live hopefully and love freely, freedom from the effort of an impossible struggle for perfection grounded in fear. God’s love for us, when we accept it, reproduces in us, love for others; and that is the fulfilment of the Law. The acceptance of God’s love for us is the pathway to life in God, not trying harder and harder to obey a set of commandments.

In verse 24, Paul voices the profound question of human existence, of human hopelessness: “Who will rescue us from this roundabout of death? Who will help us get off this never-ending treadmill of guilt?” And in verse 25, he answers is own question: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

“I may have tried to serve God when I was busting a gut to follow the Law; and intellectually I might have understood what was required, but I was thoroughly incapable of achieving what I thought I understood. And that made me not a slave to the Law, but a slave to sin, a slave to guilt. And the Law becomes not an instrument of freedom, but a tool which enslaves me to the profound internal conflict of hopelessness and despair.”

These days, psychologically we know that it is not prohibition but positive reinforcement that changes people’s behaviour, changes people’s lives. We need someone to believe in us in order to be the people we are meant to be. And Paul’s profound insight is that God believes in us—God made us, God loves us and God believes in us! Shame and guilt and fear are banished in the face of this utterly unconditional love. God’s radical love offers us new life, new birth—all we have to do is trust God’s love, accept God’s forgiveness, live out of God’s graciousness. And God’s additional promise is that through that acceptance God’s love will be reproduced in us.

“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15) Who will rescue us from this roundabout of death? (v. 24) “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25) This is God’s easy yoke! And it is much, much lighter than the burden of our sin, shame, guilt and fear! Thanks be to God.

Embracing the Unknown God

2011-05-28T14:37:00.002+10:00

Who are we? What are we on about? Where are we going? We humans love these questions; and often we fill our lives with all kinds of activity trying to help us answer them. Who are we? What are we on about? Where are we going?

In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles today, Paul confronts these questions as he confronts a new culture—an influential culture; but one not wholly compatible with Paul’s Jewish roots or his profound Christian conversion; and also a culture not completely alien to the deep insights which Paul has come to Athens to share from his experience and understanding of the risen Christ.

Who are we? What are we on about? Where are we going? These were questions that very much interested the people of ancient Athens: a people who prized learning; a people much engaged in exploring big questions in science and mathematics, philosophy and literature, arts and physical culture. They were a people who continually asked why, exploring themselves and their surroundings, searching for greater knowledge of humanity and our environment. Even in their religious beliefs, they were not content that they knew everything that there was to know. Who are we? What are we on about? Where are we going?

So, Paul is depicted as entering into this enquiring culture: a Jew among Greeks, a Christian among worshippers of gods with other names, a public speaker amongst a city of thinkers. His Jewish rabbinical background serves him well. He is intent upon arguing his case, on discussing not just the finer points of theology, but the big picture. He is asking his listeners to dig deep into the big questions and not just skate across the service.

He argued with the Jews. He argued with the Greeks. He argued with the philosophers and the people in the market place. Not that that made him many enemies for the Athenians were a people used to that sort of behaviour and, in fact, quite encouraging of it. The Athenians prized new ideas and thoughts, discussion and debate. They were concerned with exploring the big questions: Who are we? What are we on about? Where are we going?

Indeed, Paul is received well by the Athenian community. The picture of his reception is very favourable indeed, because, as the story goes, he is taken to the Areopagus to speak, to explain the strange, new teaching that he is offering.
The Areopagus is a small, barren, limestone hill, northwest of the Acropolis in Athens. Historically, the Areopagus was the place where the Athenian council had met to pronounce justice. The council, the most respected of Athenian institutions, had at one time performed the function of a senate. At the time of Paul’s visit and following the growth of democracy, the earlier powers of the council were greatly reduced. They did, however, still retain responsibility for the areas of religion, morals and homicide. Whether it was to this council which Paul spoke or not, we do not know. In the time of Paul, it was unlikely that the council actually met at the Areopagus, having moved to a place in the Agora, the marketplace. Nevertheless, the significance of the site to the story should not be missed. Paul is depicted addressing the Athenians on the site of their most respected council’s original home. This discussion is significant; and it is held in a very significant place.

Because of its use, the Areopagus was also renowned for the many incidents relating to the responsibilities of the Athenian council which had occurred over many hundreds of years. Perhaps it was historically true, perhaps just a legend or more likely a mixture of both, but one of the most famous stories about the Areopagus related to the shrines to “the unknown god” or “gods”.

There were a number of altars to the unknown god or gods in Athens. The story went that six hundred years before Paul ventured there, a terrible pestilence had fallen on the city which nothing seemed able to stop. A Cretan poet, Epimenides, had come forward with a plan. A flock of black and white sheep were let loose to run through the city from the Areopagus. Wherever each lay down it was sacrificed to the god whose shrine was nearest. If a sheep lay down without being in close vicinity to the shrine of a god, it was sacrificed to “the unknown god” or “gods”.

That story not only tells us a bit about the shrine “to the unknown god” but also about the importance which the Athenians placed upon their educated people, those who explored those big questions: Who are we? What are we on about? Where are we going? It was Epimenides, the poet, who had been credited with the plan for saving the city and it is Epimenides, to whom Paul appeals, when arguing that “the unknown god” was in fact the God of Christ.

For Paul, like any good preacher, begins his address with something which he thinks is important to the gathered assembly and appeals to the authority of people whom he knows his congregation respects. Since he is speaking to people who prized education and cultural achievements, Paul presents the claims of Christianity in an intellectual and cultural way in a reasoned manner.

Tactfully, he compliments the Athenians on being ‘very religious’. Then he refers to their own poets in making his main point. He notes a nearby altar with the inscription, “to an unknown god” and tells them that this God can be known, that this God is not far from each of them. He uses the words of Epimenides, the poet who brought those shrines into being:

This God whom you call the unknown god is, in fact, “the one in whom we live and move and have our being”. This is the God whose children we are.

Knowing who we are, knowing whose we are, knowing where we come from has a huge influence on our self-understandings, and not just on what we think about ourselves, but what we do arising out of who we are. But sometimes we get it the wrong way round. Sometimes we do a lot just trying to find out who we are; and in the process, we engage in a lot of activity and risk losing whose we were meant to be.

The God whom Paul proclaims, the God whom Paul understands to have come to us in Jesus is “the God in whom we live and move and have our being”. This God is the source of our identity and purpose. This God is the God whose children we are.

The importance of knowing who we are is particularly well-demonstrated for us in Australia by the struggles of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Europeans moving into this land stripped them of their land, their culture and their identity. We still witness helplessly the effects of that stripping, of that loss of a sense of who they were as a people; and that’s why things like an official apology to the stolen generations, and a re-writing of the preamble to the Constitution of the Uniting Church to include a recognition of First Peoples are so important. They address the question of identity, of who the people are and where they belong.

Christian people especially must understand the importance of these thing, because who we are has never been about what we do. It’s always been about what God has done in Jesus—about whose we are. In the disconnection of people and land, indigenous Australians lost that to which they belonged.

At the Areopagus, Paul is calling the Athenians to the God in whom they can discover themselves, not because of what they do or have done, but because of what God has done and who God is. This is “the God in whom we live and move and have our being”. This is the God who is the source of our identity and purpose. This is the God whose children we are.

Since arriving in Armidale, that is the message that I have been trying to share with you as a Congregation in order to ground our identity as the people of God in this place, not in what we do, but in whose we are and what God has done for us. I have tried to invite you to rest in God’s gift to us in order that together we might discover the freedom that our identity in Christ gives us. So, there have been many times when we have affirmed our baptismal identity—affirmed that we are incorporated into the body of Christ, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, by God’s grace. In our Elders’ meetings, we have made worship the important focus that it needs to be for the community of the Spirit. Worship is where we are formed as the people of God; and Elders sharing together in worship as key leaders in this Congregation is the most important thing we can do to remember, to remind ourselves whose we are and what God has done for us, in order that we might help this community to rest in our identity as the people of God. Worship here together is the most important thing we do together as the people of God in this place—as we turn our faces towards the God in whom, we live and move and have our being; as we orient ourselves, or rather as we allow God to orient us towards God, we are continually invited to discover the beloved children of God that we are; and out of that continual discovery to be enfolded into God’s mission in our world, not just through our activities as a church, but in our active participation as members of the body of Christ in the society around us. It is the freedom of knowing whose we are, of knowing who we are in God, of knowing what God has done, of remembering that God’s mission is God’s and accomplished in Christ, not ours and done by our own deeds, that will embody our identity in the God whose we are.

Activity is important, but not because of the activity, because of where it comes from. The work of the people of God must come from our acknowledgement of whose we are, of who we are in God; and that acknowledgement begins here, as we open ourselves to the God in whom we live and move and have our being, and invite that God to embrace us as beloved children; and as we hear the gracious words of that God again and again: “Your sins are forgiven.” “You are my people.” “I will not leave you alone.” “I have prepared a place for you.” “You are my beloved children.” “In me, you live and move and have your very being.”

Stone Upon Stone

2011-05-21T20:49:00.003+10:00

A stone… to hurt… to shelter… to throw… to gather…
to wound… to sculpt… a weapon… a blessing… a stone…
A stone… to control… to protect… to divide… to gather…
a barrier… a bridge… a weapon… a foundation… a stone…
A stone… to build a dividing wall… to lay a roadway…
to shape an obstruction… to smooth a connection…
a weapon… a faith… a stone.
(Adapted from Seasons of the Spirit, Year A Easter 5, 22 May 2011.)

Stones… Human beings have done an awful lot with them: an awful lot for good and an awful lot for harm. So today in our readings, we have a mixture of stone imagery… Stephen, the first Christian martyr is stoned to death in the 7th chapter of Acts. In Psalm 31, God is our rock and refuge. In the first letter of Peter, the disciples of Christ are identified as “living stones” to be placed on the great living cornerstone, Jesus Christ, in order to build the people of God. And though the stones are not mentioned in the reading from the Gospel of John, the house of God is—and in that imagery stones are not far away. Stones to build… and stones that kill…

My father’s [house] has many rooms,
with room for all God’s children,
as long as we do share his love,
and see that all are free.
(Words & music by Pete Seeger. © 1966 Stormking Music Inc.)

But we are a menagerie of a people… and we are very human… stones that build up… and stones that tear down…

When I was a child, my image of God’s house was something like one of those cartoon houses with the small front door and entry at the bottom and rooms which kept popping out all over the place on the floors above. It never toppled over although it always looked like it would. And there was always more room for more rooms. They could just pop out anyway, anytime, whenever one was needed for a new member of God’s family. I don’t remember ever believing that God actually lived in a real house just like that, but it seemed a good picture to have in my mind for the type of house God would have if God needed a real house like the one I lived in. God’s house wasn’t made of weatherboard or bricks obviously, but there was always room for all God’s children, whomever, whatever, and however they presented themselves.

God’s house, God’s oikia, God’s household, is made of stones… living stones… very human living stones and we are a ragtag collection of odd-shaped rocks… stones that fit easily… and stones that stick out in odd ways…

Have you ever built a stone wall? Or perhaps you’ve visited one of the great historical stone walls like Hadrian’s Wall in the UK. Stones are not bricks… They are not neatly shaped and ready to put into an orderly pattern. They come in all different shapes and sizes; and, if they need to be put together, the act of fitting them into one another is truly and art… stones that fit… and stones that need a bit of a trim to fit… stones that need a bit of shaping in order to contribute to the stability of the wall… or the house.

My father’s [house] has many rooms,
with room for all God’s children,
as long as we do share his love,
and see that all are free.
(Words & music by Pete Seeger. © 1966 Stormking Music Inc.)

When I was fourteen, three friends and I decided that we would write a musical to be performed for our Sunday School Anniversary. The Anniversary was scheduled for October. We began our enterprise on a day late in the Christmas holidays, sometime in the previous January. It wasn’t long before we had decided that the musical would be about Stephen, the first Christian martyr. That story is contained in just two chapters in the book of Acts; and it is conveniently arranged into several short episodes which made it the perfect storyline for a musical of about 45 minutes. It was at our second meeting that we decided on a theme that began as our working title and eventually became the performance title for the musical: “In His Image”.

This title originally came out of our recognition that the story of Stephen’s death, the passage that is one of our lectionary readings for today, was very much a parallel story to the death of Jesus. In the story of Stephen’s stoning, he cries out in two very similar utterances to those which Luke also records Jesus crying out on the cross. In Luke 23, Jesus says, “Forgive them, Father! They don’t know what they are doing.” In Acts 7, Stephen cries out in a loud voice, “Lord! Do not remember this sin against them!” In Luke 23, Jesus commits his spirit into the hands of God. In Acts 7, Stephen asks Jesus to receive his spirit. Stephen, the first Christian martyr is depicted by Luke as being in Jesus’ image—a living stone in the shape of the great cornerstone. Stephen is well and truly a chip off the old block.

As we read and re-read the Biblical text of the story of Stephen and consulted commentaries and other resources, we came to see just how closely the life of Stephen recorded in Acts did reflect the life of Jesus: even more closely than we had first realised.

In Acts 6, Stephen is described as one “richly blessed by God and full of power” who “performed great miracles and wonders among the people”. Stephen is opposed by some Jews and ultimately brought before the High Priest’s Council where he delivers a long speech rehearsing the faithfulness of the ancestors of the Jews and finally accusing his inquisitors of failing to live up to this great tradition of faithfulness to God. It is this meeting which leads to Stephen’s condemnation to death: a death by one of the more horrible ancient means of the taking of life, stoning. There are very close parallels between the story of the life of Jesus and that of Stephen. Stephen is truly depicted as being in the image of Christ, a chip off the old block.

There was one more connection, however, which needed to be made before our title “In His Image” achieved its full potential as a succinct way of describing our approach to the story of Stephen. That connection is very aptly described in our Gospel reading for today, although for us it began in the text from which the original phrase “in the image” had been gleaned.

In the first creation story, in Genesis 1, the story of the creation of humanity is recorded thus:

Then God said, “Let us make humanity in our image, after our likeness... So God created humanity in God’s own image, in the image of God, God created them; male and female God created them.” (Gen. 1:26a, 27)

It is our belief as Christians that Jesus fulfilled this vision of humanity in the image of God, being both perfectly human and perfectly God at one and the same time. It is a difficult concept to grasp. In fact, it defied the rationality of the Greek philosophy which the early Church attempted to employ in order to describe such a miraculous and mysterious event and it continues to defy our understandings of scientific rationality today. Yet this is what we believe: that in Jesus, God was so truly present for humanity that in recognising Jesus, we recognise God. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is recorded as saying “Whoever has seen me has seen God” (John 14:9).

Even more miraculous is the promise that we too can be reflections of the image of God; living stones being built on the one great cornerstone; chips off the original block; stones in the house of God. The Gospel of John records Jesus as saying, “I am telling you the truth: whoever believes in me will do what I do - yes, they will do even greater things, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12). One of very early theologians put it this way: God became human in order that we might become divine.

But we are a ragtag collection of odd-shaped rocks—a real menagerie of members of the household of God. We are rocks that need shaping and fitting together. And that is God’s wonderful promise to us:

My father’s [house] has many rooms,
with room for all God’s children,
as long as we do share his love,
and see that all are free.
(Words & music by Pete Seeger. © 1966 Stormking Music Inc.)

A stone… to hurt… to shelter… to throw… to gather…
to wound… to sculpt… a weapon… a blessing… a stone…
A stone… to control… to protect… to divide… to gather…
a barrier… a bridge… a weapon… a foundation… a stone…
A stone… to build a dividing wall… to lay a roadway…
to shape an obstruction… to smooth a connection…
a weapon… a faith… a stone.
(Adapted from Seasons of the Spirit, Year A Easter 5, 22 May 2011.)

“Father forgive us for we know not what we do…”

“Lord Jesus, receive our spirits…:”

Life is a Gift

2011-04-30T13:55:00.002+10:00

Life is a gift from God—from beginning to end; from highs to lows; from downs to ups; through the rollercoaster and along the highways. Life is a gift from God. That’s what the writer of the poem from Ecclesiastes 3 is trying to say. Everything, absolutely everything about life, is a gift—whether you find it so or not; whether it feels like it sometimes or never; whether you feel that you’re prepared for it all, or not prepared for anything. Life is still a gift from God. And that includes death.

Death is a part of the gift of life given to us, given to us as creatures, as the glorious creation of God. We are human, we are mortal. We are born, we live and we die. All of it is gift. “There is a season… for every matter under heaven (v. 1)”.

And yet there are some things in life that are not as easy to accept, not as easy to confront than others; and death is one of those things, because death reminds us that the gift of life that we’ve been given is a fragile one. The gift of life is a fragile, fleeting, even fickle one. It doesn’t run smoothly. We don’t get to choose how everything turns out for us. We don’t get to choose when we are born and when we die; and we don’t get to choose what struggles we may face or avoid, what pleasures we may enjoy or miss out on. All of it, all of life, the good, the bad, and the ugly comes to us as gift—a wonderful, bewildering, confusing gift from God.

And in the midst of this bewilderment, in the midst of this confusion, in the midst of this wonderment, we are called to live out our lives in the best way we can. The writer of Ecclesiastes continues after the poem:

9 What gain have the workers from their toil? 10I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. 11He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. 12I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; 13moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. 14I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. 15That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.

Of course, living out the life that has been given to us is not easy. It is challenging and it is demanding. But it is what we are called to as the glorious creation of God that we are.

So today, we honour one of us who lived the life she was gifted by God. She was human like us with foibles like us; with dreams and hopes, fulfilled and unfulfilled—just like us; with achievements and failures—just like us. And all of this was gift—gift to her; and gift to us—for she was one of us.

We remember her as one of us. We celebrate her life. We mourn her death. And we honour the God who gifted her to us and created this wonderful, bewildering life for us all.

Called to Believe!

2011-04-30T13:52:00.003+10:00

Poor old Thomas! Poor old Thomas! Poor old doubting Thomas! He really is set up. He’s the foil in this story. He’s the character without which the story would not be the story it is. Poor old Thomas!

He’s the thorn in the side; the pain in the neck (or a little lower down); the wet blanket. He’s the party-pooper; the stick-in-the-mud; the doubting Thomas; and that’s bad, right? Well, maybe, just maybe not!

You see, Thomas plays a very important role in this story. He is the one who offers the appropriate objection to the commissioning of the disciples by Jesus. It would be nice to think that Jesus appeared, issued a command and the disciples went on their merry way. But that’s not very human; it’s not very realistic; it’s not very biblical; and it’s probably not even very safe.

“God says it. I believe it. That settles it.” was a popular bumper sticker among evangelical Christians when I was a teenager. It all seemed so simple. The question of discernment never even entered the equation. The will of God was expected to be so unequivocally recognisable that there would never ever be any doubt. That’s not very human; not very realistic; it’s not very biblical; and it’s probably not even very safe.

Our parents didn’t accept the excuse for poor behaviour that somebody told us to do it. The legendary retort, “If they said to jump off a bridge, would you do that?” or something similar fills many childhood memories. We are taught very early that we don’t just need to hear and obey, we also need to think and discern before we take action.

Calls to action, calls to mission, calls to vocation need testing. They need analysis. And Thomas is the one who offers the test, the means of analysis, in the Gospel reading for today. “Okay, you say Jesus appeared, and you say he said to forgive sins. If he said to stand in the pathway of a runaway Roman chariot would you also do that?”

Thomas is the one who raises the possibility that the call is not how things should be; that the role being discussed does not belong to those of whom it is being requested; that those called are inadequate to the task; and Thomas is in good company in this respect. In the tradition of Sarah who said she was too old to bear children, or Moses who said he could not speak, or Jeremiah who said he was too young to prophesy, Thomas offers the best objection yet: I do not believe. I do not believe. And you’ve got to admit that’s a good one: I do not believe.

According to John Pilch, the author of The Cultural World of Jesus, in every good call story, there is a confrontation, a reaction, a reassurance, a commission, an objection, a further reassurance and a sign—a confrontation, a reaction, a reassurance, a commission, an objection, a further reassurance and a sign. Thomas is the one who offers the objection, who receives the further reassurance and the sign. Thomas is the one who stands for all Christ’s disciples down through the ages who dare to doubt, who dare to wonder, who dare to question whether this initial word is really God’s leading. And he’s got what seems like a good excuse, “I don’t believe!”

I hear it all the time. Why do we say the Apostle’s Creed?—I can’t believe in that! It doesn’t matter what Christians thought in the past—we can’t believe in that now! The Church has been the source of much abuse, dishonesty, corruption and other nefarious activities—how can I believe in that? I’m pretty sure I’ve said something or other like that myself at least a few times in my life. Christianity is so patriarchal—how can you believe in that?—just, for example.

But it’s not just intellectual dissension that dares not to believe; it’s the spiritual wildernesses that each of us experience at some point in our journey. Where is God? How can God exist if…? God sometimes just seems so far away. Where is justice? Where is freedom? Where is hope? Where is peace? If God is so good and so loving, why is everything going wrong? Why do I feel so empty?

And then there is the social despair that dares not to believe. When it looks like there are just a few of us who care; a few of us who love; a few of us who want to orient our lives towards God; a few of us who are willing to act, why bother at all? What right have we to believe? How can we possibly believe?

‘Unless we see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put our fingers in the marks of the nails and ours hands in his side, we will not believe.’ We object. We are not the people you think us to be.

Thomas dares to offer the objection so significant to the discernment process. And because he dares to doubt, he receives the second reassurance in the call narrative. He receives the sign.

‘Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.’

The story does not say that Thomas did so. But this is not simply an invitation to touch a real body, and not just a real body, but a real wounded body, it is an invitation to enter into the real wounds of the risen Christ. The sign that Thomas receives is not the bouncing baby Isaac born by Sarah, or the Exodus of the people of God led by Moses, or the prophetic ministry of Jeremiah; it is the woundedness of the compassionate God who enters into the very life of humanity in all its frailty, and brokenness, its fragility and its need for healing. It is not a light invitation and not an invitation to be taken lightly.

And Thomas answers, “My Lord and my God!” In the face of such a momentous invitation, awe, admiration and evocation are the only response. And in this moment, although it does not say that he touches Jesus in the text, we are assured that he has entered the woundedness of the risen Christ and, despite his doubts, because of his daring objection, he has received the sign that he needs to believe.

Thomas is the one who receives the appropriate reassurance, the necessary sign, the confirmation of the commissioning. He is the one who is the confirmation of the commissioning and who is the one who is commissioned. Thomas is both a sign and a promise to us that despite our doubts, despite our daring objections, we too may believe, we too may accept the invitation to enter the woundedness of the risen Christ, we too may believe despite our unbelief; that belief is not a matter of seeing, but of entering into the life of the risen Christ.

And this then becomes the call on our lives.

29Jesus said to Thomas, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’

We are called to enter the risen life of Christ: the suffering-triumph death-glory of God: to reach out our hands for bread and wine; to stretch out our hands to a neighbour or an enemy; to feed the hungry and hold the hurting; to place a finger on the lists of the dead in war; to stroke the cheek of a child in a detention centre; to offer a hand to a refugee; to feel the gaping wounds of the world; to dare to doubt; to dare to believe; and to dare to act in the audacity of that belief; to dare to touch the risen Christ; dare to doubt; and dare to pray with Thomas and all Christ’s faithful followers, “Help our unbelief.”

Called to Rise with Christ!

2011-04-23T12:05:00.002+10:00

Sebastian was very creative. He had a wonderful imagination and, for a boy of his age, he also had a great love for reading.

Now as things go, Sebastian's wonderful imagination, great creativity and love for reading also made him the target for the local school bullies. They said he was a sissy and they wondered why on earth he would want to spend his life reading books and dreaming dreams.

Real life, for these bullies, was being macho and lording it over other people. Bravery was dumping on people to prove just how courageous they were or at least how courageous they would have liked to think that they were.

Like most bullies, they weren't brave at all. In fact, they really had no idea what courage was all about. Deep down inside they were scared of finding out who they really were and facing themselves alone.

Sebastian suffered the brunt of their fear. But that wasn't Sebastian's biggest problem. Sebastian's biggest problem was that his mother had just died.
Sebastian had been unable to come to terms with the intense grief which he felt over the death of this person who was so important, so central to his life, and someone whom he loved so very much.

His dad was trying to cope with his own grief and that meant that Sebastian was inevitably on his own in this major crisis in his life. It was hard enough for his dad to work through his feelings over such a loss let alone for him to be able to cope with the trauma which his son was also experiencing.

Sebastian and his dad were both trying to get on with their lives but somehow the reality of Sebastian's mother's death had never quite been dealt with by other of them and they both carried within them intense feelings which had never been let out.
Then one day, when Sebastian was running away from the school bullies, he found himself in an old bookstore. An old man was seated behind a huge pile of old books at a desk in the corner.

Now this bookstore was not a store for new books. It was full of old and antiquarian books. These were not just used books. They were very special used books: books that had significance far beyond the words which were formed on their pages and the time which had been take for each of them to be written. They were very special books indeed.

The old man in the shop was used to young boys not appreciating books especially old ones and at first he was on the defensive.

"Get out of my shop. These are books. They don't go beep and they don't have pictures that move. They're obviously not the sort of thing that you're interested in at all." When Sebastian had caught his breath and begun listing off the books which he had read, the old man concedes that he was wrong and recognises that it is truly an accomplished reader which stands before him.

After learning a little of Sebastian's story, the old man convinces Sebastian that the book which he is reading is really the one that Sebastian should read. But this crafty old man does it in an especially devious way, by using the line that no living person can resist, "This book is not for you."

While the old man is out of the room, Sebastian takes the book, leaving a hastily scribbled note telling the old man not to worry, he will return it. The old man has no intention of worrying. He knows about young boys who love books.

Hiding in the school attic, Sebastian begins to read the book. He becomes involved in the world of Fantasia. This world is in crisis just as Sebastian is going through his own personal crisis. The empress is ill and the Nothing is destroying Fantasia. A young boy is chosen as the one to set out on the quest to prevent the empress from dying and Fantasia from being reduced to nothing.

As Sebastian becomes involved in the story, he lives through all the emotions which have been bottled up inside him since the death of his mother—intense sadness and despair, the sense of failure at being unable to prevent her death, the desire for things to be as they were, and finally the realisation that life and death are all part of the never-ending story of living; that even in the midst of despair there is hope; that endings can also be beginnings, and that what is a part of your life can never really be lost, although you cannot experience it in quite the same way anymore.

The disciples of Jesus were going through their own crisis after Jesus' death. The dreams which they had had, the vision which they had shared, all seemed now to be so empty and hopeless. What would they do without Jesus? Where would they go? Nothing in their lives could ever be the same after the time they had spent with Jesus and now nothing could ever be the same now that he had been taken from them and killed. Worse still, he was killed as a traitor and a blasphemer to their nation and their God, betrayed by a fanatic and condemned by the institution which claimed to uphold God's law. They were desolate. For them, it was the end.

It was the women who were coping the best with the situation. Years of caring for the dying and the dead meant that they knew what rituals to perform, what actions to carry out, and somehow these helped them to deal with the reality of the death of the one whom they had loved so much.

The women knew that Jesus was dead. They had watched him die up on the ridge when the men were too afraid to be seen around. They had watched his burial and the hasty preparations made by Joseph of Arimathea. Now they have returned to the tomb to finish the preparations for Jesus' entombment. They know that Jesus is dead.
Perhaps, they, of all the disciples, had really listened to Jesus' words about his suffering and death. Perhaps, too, they knew from their own experiences of suffering, of life and of death, that Jesus' death was inevitable. Perhaps through their rituals of preparing for burial, they had been enabled to grasp the reality of the event which they had witnessed. For whatever reason, they are the ones who are most prepared for the outstanding message that Jesus is alive and it is they who bring the first news of this to the others who huddle together in the disbelief of grief, unable to comprehend the reality of the tragedy and to move onwards in their lives.

The disciples thought that it was the end. They had broken promises, betrayed and denied Jesus. Yet the women receive the good news that it is not the end; that Jesus is alive. They have let go of Jesus in death and because of that, they are now able to receive the news that Jesus is alive.

Imagine the scene: the women have been to the tomb, they have remembered Jesus' words and they have been mulling them over in their minds as they return. The significance of the past few days becomes real and their eyes are opened. Will the others believe them? The news is exciting. It's hard to explain, difficult to understand and almost impossible to believe. But like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, the truth can be contained no longer and the story is relayed to the other disciples.

Their message is the message of the Gospel: a message of hope in the midst of despair; life in the midst of death; truth in the midst of confusion; that Jesus' life and death and new life are all part of the never-ending story of God's love and God's mercy for the people of God.

It is hard to believe, hard to believe that as respected as Jesus was, his life meant so much more than they had ever imagined—a reality which only his death could reveal and only the news of the resurrection could proclaim.

It seemed like the end and yet it was only a beginning. The first shoot from a buried seed has begun to push through to the surface of the ground; the butterfly is emerging from its cocoon and the new growth on the tree is being fed by the nourishment of the leaves which have fallen the previous year.

Jesus is alive! Jesus is alive! It's not an end but a beginning and nothing will ever be the same again! Jesus is alive! Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed.
So today we celebrate Jesus' resurrection…

Loss and grief have shattered our world this year—cyclones and floods in Australia; earthquakes in New Zealand; earthquakes, a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown in Japan; political change and military conflict across northern Africa… And that’s without thinking about our own personal griefs and losses—the deaths of loved ones; changes in jobs or health situations; moving homes…

We too have been forced to confront our own inner thoughts and feelings. What is there left in a world where our climate and environment seem out of control; when we do not know from one day to the next what fresh challenge we may face?

The message that the women receive at the empty tomb, and proclaim to the disciples is one of hope in the midst of despair; life in the midst of death; truth in the midst of confusion. It is the message of the Gospel! And this is God’s message to us now… no matter what you face, there is hope! There is hope because in and through it all, God is with us, God has been there in Jesus, and God offers us new life and new hope in Jesus. That doesn’t take away our grief, or our responsibility to help and work for others. Rather, it encourages us to face the challenges that life throws us, and to proclaim that life and hope will prevail even in the midst of grief and despair.

The challenge to us too is to face ourselves, to respond to the message of resurrection, to face down our thoughts and our feelings even our fears for the bullies which they are. Then, despite ourselves, we will know Christ's freedom to be free. We will know too that the end is just the beginning, new life does emerge from the buried seed and Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed! And the people of God are called to rise with Christ

A Welling Up of Life!

2011-03-26T12:37:00.004+11:00

Tiddalik, the largest frog ever known, awoke one morning with an unquenchable thirst. He started to drink, and he drank until there was no fresh water left in the world. The creatures everywhere were soon dying and the trees were shedding their leaves because of the lack of moisture. It seemed that very soon Tiddalik the frog would be the only one alive. The animals could not think of a way out of their terrible plight, until a wise old wombat suggested that if Tiddalik could be made to laugh, all the imprisoned water would flow out of his mouth.

So everyone gathered by the giant frog's resting place. For a long time they tried to make him laugh, but in vain. The kookaburra told his funniest stories, so good that he could not help laughing at them himself; the kangaroo jumped over the emu; and the blanket lizard waddled up and down on two legs making his stomach protrude; but the frog's face remained blank and indifferent.

Then, when the animals were in despair, the eel, Nabunum, driven from his favourite creek by the drought, slithered up to the unresponsive frog, and began to dance. He started with slow, graceful movements, but as the dance became faster he wriggled and twisted himself into the most grotesque and comical shapes, until suddenly Tiddalik's eyes lit up and he burst out laughing. And as he laughed, the water gushed from his mouth and flowed away to replenish the lakes, the swamps, and the rivers. (“Tiddalik the Flood-Maker” from The Dreamtime Book: Australian Aboriginal Myths, Rigby, 1973, Text by Charles P. Mountford, p. 24).

The Aboriginal dreaming story of Tiddalik is a story about seasons: about the dry season when there seems not enough water for anything to live; and about the coming of the wet season in a bursting deluge. People who live in the north of Australia talk about the dry and the wet and the tension that builds in the environment and the human community before the rains come to break the spell of waiting and watching in heat and humidity.

Our Gospel story is also a story about seasons, about building tensions and about the release of that tension is flood of awareness of the promises of God.

In the Gospel of John, “Prior to this story of Jesus’ visit to Samaria, Jesus’ activity has centered on the people and places of official Judaism”: Jerusalem and the temple, Nicodemus the Pharisee. Now we find him in Samaria and away from the official people and places of Judaism, away from his tradition and its important institutional symbols. “At the time of Jesus, the Jews and the Samaritans were bitter enemies”, and the source of that enmity was religion. Specifically, it “was a dispute about the correct location of the [rightful] ... place of worship”. About 300years before the coming of Christ, the Samaritans had built a shrine on Mount Gerizim. The shrine stood in competition with the temple at Jerusalem: a second holy place for the worship of God. The shrine was destroyed by Jewish troops in 128 BCE. And the bitterness of religious difference had continued as only bitter religious divisions can.

So, “when Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well ... he meets someone who provides a striking contrast to all that has preceded” this story in the Gospel of John. “When Jesus speaks with Nicodemus in John 3, he speaks with a male member of the Jewish religious establishment. In John 4, he speaks with a female member of an enemy people.” Their conversation is a scandal and the woman knows it: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

Now the more popular recent interpretations of this story have generally emphasised both that the woman was from Samaria—a foreigner and an enemy of the Jews—and that she was a great sinner. The first emphasis is significant although not perhaps as significant as some have made it to be, the second emphasis is a misinterpretation of the story, and, in the process of that misinterpretation, the fact that she was a woman has not been made important enough. For while Nicodemus has name and a social position; the woman is unnamed and has no social position; and both can be accounted for by the customs of the time.

“The popular portrait of the woman in John 4” is of “a woman of dubious morals” who is “guilty of aberrant behaviour”. However, everything that is reported of her can be explained by the religious traditions of her people: traditions shared by both Jews and Samaritans. “There are many possible reasons for the woman’s marital history”. We should be wary of choosing the most popular and “dominant explanation of moral laxity”. “The text does not say, as most interpreters automatically assume, that the woman has been divorced five times but that she has had five husbands.” We are given no more explanation than that, but there are many more plausible for her time than sexual promiscuity. “Perhaps ... like Tamar in Genesis ... [she] is trapped in the custom of levirate marriage.” A woman was passed on to successive male relatives after the death of her husbands in the hope that she would eventually bear the first husband an heir by a male relative who gave up entitlement to his firstborn male child in favour of the dead previous husband. If she was indeed divorced, she would have been divorced by her husbands and the prime reason for divorce of a woman by a man at the time was on the grounds of the woman’s barrenness. The text is more about how the woman has been thrown on the scrap heap by the customs of her society—the customs of both the Jews and the Samaritans—than it is about the way in which she has wandered into some kind of fictitious moral degradation.

“Significantly, the reasons for the woman’s marital history intrigue commentators, but do not seem to concern Jesus.” Nowhere in the story is there an exchange about sinful behaviour. Instead, the discussion is about the truth and meaning of life and the worship of God. It is a theological conversation entered into by a foreign woman with the one who identifies himself as the Christ, the Messiah. And their discussion is about the transcendence of the customs of both the Jews and the Samaritans. It is about a religion of “spirit and truth”, not of institutional rigidity. The Samaritan woman “is the first character in the Gospel to engage in serious theological conversation with Jesus” and when she does so, she shows that she is up with the issues: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob?” “Where is the proper place to worship God?”
“Many commentators have dismissed the woman’s words to Jesus as a psychological ploy, as a classical act of evasion to change the subject from the [supposedly] embarrassing truth about her morals. Commentators have doubted whether this woman would have been able to understand the substance of Jesus’ words to her.” But “the text presents the woman as ... unafraid to stay in conversation with Jesus [as competent in contributing to that conversation and as recognising] Jesus as [at least] a prophet [and] ... the perfect person of whom to ask her question about worship.

It is in the asking of the question and the receiving of the gift of the revelation of Jesus’ messiahship that the floodgates are opened and the woman is restored to a position of significance in her community as the one who brings her community to Jesus. It is in the asking of the question and the receiving of the gift of living water the boundaries of convention are broken and the message of Jesus that the grace of God is for all people everywhere is given. The seasons have changed and it is her time to laugh. (Quotations come from Gail R. O’Day “John” in The Women’s Bible Commentary pp. 295-296)

The gift of baptism draws us into God’s season of grace—God’s promise and present of reconciliation between us and God, God and the whole created order. Today we celebrate the gift of baptism—the season of the overflowing grace of God; and we are reminded of our baptism—our incorporation into the mission of God and the ministry of Christ in the world. We are invited to open our mouths and our lives to allow the outpouring of God’s love through those same mouths and those same lives.

Some of us want to hold God’s graciousness to ourselves; and some of us haven’t yet fully grasped that that gift of grace is fully ours. All of us are called to hear again the promises and purpose of God that

By God’s grace, baptism plunges us into the faith of Jesus Christ, so that whatever is his may be called ours. By water and the Spirit we are claimed as God’s own and set free from the power of sin and death. Thus, claimed by God we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit that we may live as witnesses to Jesus Christ, share his ministry in the world and grow to maturity, awaiting with hope the day of our Lord Jesus. (“The Meaning of Baptism” from “The Service of Baptism”, Uniting in Worship 2).

As the baptised people of God, we are called to celebrate the welling up of God’s life not just for us, but for all.

On the Mountain-Top!

2011-03-05T13:16:00.002+11:00

There is a famous painting of the Transfiguration by Raphael. The painting depicts Jesus floating idyllically in the air above a mountain with light shining all around him. Beneath the mountain is a valley. The valley is filled with people fighting and scuffling.

Mountains and mountain top experiences have been considered to be important from very ancient times. In the Bible, many significant experiences are depicted as occurring on mountains: the receiving of the law by Moses, Moses’ call from the burning bush, Elijah’s defeat of Baal’s prophets. In ancient times as well as in not so ancient times, it was the mountains which offered protection for defenders and a vantage point for the offense; it was the mountains in which the Hebrews were forced to live while they fought the people of the plains for the promised land; it was the mountains which were seen as reaching up to God who was depicted as living in the sky. The people on the plains were vulnerable and open to attack; the people on the plains were open to the temptations offered by prosperity; the people on the plains were seen as being farther away from God in a spacial sense. Mountains were considered to be important and mountain top experiences were coveted and desired.

But when Jesus comes the message is turned on its head. When Jesus comes, the experiences of the plain and the valley are recognised as the stuff of real life. Mountain top experiences are to be enjoyed and learnt from but not lived out of because there is a danger that if you try to live out of the mountain you will miss the view all together.

In one of the most famous of his addresses, Martin Luther King Jr. talked of going to the mountain top. He spoke of having a vision of a changed world. He spoke of the effect which this had had on his perspective on life and in particular on the Civil Rights’ struggle with which he was involved. For Martin Luther King, that mountain top experience had been a reassurance of his understanding of God’s will for the world. It was a reassurance that meant that in the midst of the continuing struggle for the rights of Black Americans, Martin Luther King was able to affirm: “I’ve been to the mountain top and I don’t mind.”

At the time of his speech, there was still much change in American society to take place before black and white people could truly stand together as equals. (I guess that that is still true.) But Martin Luther King had received a glimpse of that possibility, in the community of those who were working towards that vision and this led him to say the day before his assassination: “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain top. And I don’t mind.”

Martin Luther King believed that he had seen a glimpse of God’s realm in the lives of the people who were working for justice in American society in the 1960's. This glimpse of God’s community of justice and peace had given him a renewed hope, a renewed vitality, a renewed strength with which to continue in the path to which he believed that God had called him. He could continue to walk through the valley of racial hatred forging a new path for the people of God to walk along because he had seen from the mountain top a glimpse of the God’s vision for God’s people.

In the Gospel reading for today, we hear about another mountain top experience. We hear about Jesus going up a mountain together with Peter, James and John. For Jesus, it was a mountain top experience. He is depicted as communing with two of the great leaders of the Israelite people and afterwards we hear that powerful and wonderful affirmation “This is my son, my chosen; listen to him!” “This is my son, my chosen; listen to him!” Whatever happened, it must have been a mountain top experience.

For Peter and James and John, the three disciples depicted, the experience seems a little frightening, somewhat disarming and ultimately embarrassing. I mean, here Jesus is having this wonderful spiritual experience and here the disciples are, asleep. Then when they wake up, they think that they had better get in on the act so Peter rushes in with his usual foot in mouth caution and says, “Hey Jesus, let’s set up three tents—one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah. We’ll stay here awhile. This is really great! Haven’t done anything this exciting in months.” But according to the story, he might as well have been talking gibberish because he really had no idea of what was going on. He wasn’t really in the action at all. He was just looking on.

Then, as the story goes, a cloud comes over and a voice speaks and by this stage in the story, the disciples who at first wanted to stay there, now just can’t wait to get down because this is all a little weird. Sure, they’ve been on the mountain but they really don’t understand their mountain top experience. This isn’t going to help when they go back. This mountain top experience hasn’t helped them one bit. For the disciples, this mountain top experience only leads to confusion and fear. They have no idea what to do, how to react, what the vision on the mountain top really means for them and for their lives with Jesus. Jesus, recognising their confusion, asks them not to mention the vision to anyone until “after the Son of Man has been raised from death”.

Mountain top experiences are only useful if they help us to walk through the valleys and live on the plain. If all mountain top experiences do is make you want to retreat to the safety of the hill or to pretend that you can always live on the mountain, then what use are they? The reality is down here on the plain.
When I read the story of the transfiguration of Jesus and especially about the disciples who are mentioned, I am always tempted to ask about the others—those disciples who were not depicted as experiencing this vision on the mountain. And of those people, mostly women, who are never depicted as participating in the mountain top experiences of Jesus’ life.

These ones must and do deal with the realities of day to day living without the glimpse beyond the mountain. They are the ones who are constantly there subtly and often imperceptibly woven into the tapestry of Jesus’ life. They are the ones who participate in the mundane and the distasteful. They are the ones who prepare Jesus’ meals and they are the ones who wait at the foot of the cross. They have not been to the mountain top, they are not described as seeing God’s vision in the same way that Peter, James and John are. They have not seen the vision yet they are the ones who are faithful to God’s realm. They are the ones who participate in the struggle without the glory, the mundane without the extraordinary. They too are the heirs of the God’s community of justice and peace, the children of God.

And it is not just in the story of Jesus, that we find important characters who do not experience the mountain top but who remain faithful. Moses was met by God on the mountain but pulled out of the bull-rushes by women; Elijah was champion of God on the mountain but sustained through drought on the plain by a widow.
Jesus, too, knew about mountain top experiences but he was not afraid to walk through the valley and the plain and finally to another hill where we discover that the mountain top experience and the valley road are all one in a true pilgrimage with God.

Yes, we need mountain top experiences but we cannot live on the mountain.
And for many of us, mountain top experiences are few and far between. For many of us, the valleys seem like bottomless pits and the plains like neverending steppes. For most of us, the mundane seems to be our lot. But it is here in the valleys and the plains, in the mundane that we truly encounter Christ.

On the mountain the disciples see Jesus but they cannot be with him. On the mountain, the disciples see the vision but they cannot participate in it. On the mountain, the disciples hear God’s words about Jesus but they are unable to respond to them. It is only when they return down the mountain that the disciples are again able to begin to participate in the struggle for life and to work towards the coming of God’s realm.

Mountain top experiences are useful only insofar as they equip us for our continuing journey on the plain and in the valley. Mountain top experiences are important only insofar as they give us the hope, the strength and the vitality to endure the valley path. Mountain top experiences are significant only insofar as they confirm for us God’s plan and God’s will for our lives. It is in the valley and on the plain that much of the stuff of life is worked out.

We need mountain top experiences but we also need people who are willing to translate those experiences into the valley and the plain, who can truly say that their experiences have equipped them to be effective disciples away from the wonder and awe and glory in the ordinary and even in the distasteful, who can say with Martin Luther King, “I’ve been to the mountain top and I don’t mind” because they see the stuff of eternity in the fragile world around them.

Hold fast to the mountain for what it is but remember there is much work that remains on the plain. On the mountains we may see visions, but on the plain we participate in the work of God.

Working from the Whole Plan

2011-02-12T13:50:00.003+11:00

So, I’m sure you’ve heard the story about the men who can’t see and the elephant. It comes in various versions from a variety of religious traditions: Hinduism, Jainism, Islamic Sufism, Buddhism… I’ve heard it often enough in Christian contexts and it’s even been used in scientific contexts to talk about the way in which different perspectives on the same phenomenon produce different theoretical tools, such as the need to understand light as both waves and particles.

The story isn’t exactly the same in every version. The versions differ as to whether the men are blind or simply in the dark; the way in which the body parts of the elephant are described; how aggressive the conversation between the mean becomes; and whether the problem of their varying experiences is resolved or not.
Perhaps the most famous version of the story in the Western world is the poem by 19th century American poet, John Godfrey Saxe:

I.
It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

II.
The First approached the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me!-but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

III.
The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried: "Ho!-what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me't is mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

IV.
The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

V.
The Fourth reached out his eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he;
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

VI.
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

VII.
The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Than, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

VIII.
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Moral.
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Jesus is in the middle of a dispute with the religious people of his day about just such an elephant. This particular elephant is God’s Law—God’s plan for the people of God; and in our Gospel reading for today, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is talking to the disciples about his approach to that elephant. And it’s a very particular approach.

It’s not about coming up upon the elephant groping in the dark from one side or another and making judgments from a limited perspective; it’s about getting a whole picture—working off a whole plan—to understand what God’s requirements are all about.

Now it’s easy even today to get bogged down in one part of God’s plan just as Jesus was observing that the religious people of his day were doing. We pick and choose which bits we like and which bits we don’t. Maybe when we were listening to the Gospel reading today, we were feeling particularly uncomfortable when anger seemed to be equated with murder, looking at another person was likened to adultery, and oaths of any kind were compared with making false declarations. And if we were to pick any of the interpretations of the Law that Jesus is offering and not look at the big picture of what he is doing with his interpretations, we would be just as in the dark as those 6 men trying to work what it is that they have discovered.

Jesus uses a familiar rabbinic pattern: “You have heard it said…, but I say…” These are interpretations that have been offered of God’s Law; and my considered reflection is… And in each and every case, Jesus’ interpretation does not discuss mitigating circumstances or generous loopholes, rather it points to a stricter and more rigorous interpretation than what has been offered previously. Is this the same Jesus that defies the Sabbath laws to heal wounded people?

Well, of course, it is—because in both situations, Jesus is trying to raise people’s visions, broaden their outlooks, open up the whole plan for them; rather than allowing them to stay stuck in one particular rule or regulation, law or precept. It’s not about the laws; it’s about the Law. It’s not about the individual, practical guidelines that have been provided for us; or that we have written ourselves to help us understand what being part of the people of God is all about—it’s about understanding the big picture, the whole plan—catching a glimpse of who God is and what God wills for the whole of God’s creation.

It’s never been about following rules because the rules have been laid down. It’s always been about searching for, seeking after, aiming for the justice, love and compassion of God—the justice, love and compassion that God gives us and that we are called to offer to others. And if we ever think that working from the whole plan is easier than following the rules, then maybe we don’t understand just what an extraordinary hope that it is that God calls us towards.

We can’t rest on our laurels just because we know we’ve never physically killed or injured someone, we have to think about the injuries that we cause each other each and every day simply by being the people we are in the families and communities that we try to build. We can’t pretend we are perfect, simply because we’ve apparently lived in a faithful relationship for a long time, we have to remember that the going hasn’t always been easy, that sometimes we probably could have cheerfully killed each other for some minor hurt or another. We can’t think that because we’ve never made a false declaration, we are completely upright, we have to remember the times when we have made promises that we have been unable to keep, for any number of different reasons. We have to remember that we are no better than anyone else; that all of us are under the judgment of God’s Law which calls us to a world of ultimate justice, perfect love and unfailing compassion.

And that bring us to the other side of the whole plan that we cannot forget. God’s judgment is heavy; and the more that we are confronted by the heaviness of God’s judgment, the more we will understand the amazing depth of God’s love, God’s mercy, God’s grace.

God’s Law calls us to not to a world of human ideals and standards but to God’s world—a world that only God builds, only God plans, only God brings to fruition. Confronting God’s judgment forces us to confront God’s love. And maybe, because of that, we catch just a glimpse, unfold just a little more of the whole plan, we understand just a little better what God’s Law is really all about.

VIII.
And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

Moral.
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

Jesus is daring us to unfold the whole plan, to see the big picture, to capture an impression of the elephant, not in its parts, but in its totality. And that whole plan is both far more demanding, and far more freeing than we might ever imagine, especially if we become obsessed with just one small part.

Today, we are going to say together the Nicene Creed. It is one of the 2 ecumenical creeds shared by the whole church. It is traditionally recited when the Eucharist or Holy Communion is celebrated because it recounts the story of our faith—the big picture of who God is and who we are. It is our agreed understanding of what the faith is all about. And yet I know that for some of you, it is an uncomfortable statement of faith.

At various times in our faith journeys, each of us can get bogged down in part of that faith story. Perhaps we are concerned about the historical reliability of the story, or the scientific possibility of it. Perhaps we find some of the language archaic. We certainly don’t want to buy into left-handed discrimination by interpreting the “right-hand” where Jesus sits too literally. Nevertheless, whether we want to read the story literally or metaphorically, historically or symbolically, this story is the big picture for us; and yet it is only a vague impression of the whole story that is who God is and what God wants. It is only part of the whole story, and it is written in the limited language and concepts that humanity has at its disposal; and had at its disposal at a particular time in history.

It is more a narrative than an historical treatise. It is about theology and not about science. It is about trying to catch something of the big picture of who God is and who we are before God. It asks us not to give 21st century intellectual assent to a set of scientific principles; but to enter the story of a God who is always far more demanding, and far more gracious than we can ever fully grasp.
Sometimes the most complex things can only be shared in the simplest of language forms – that of story – because from a story there is always more to be drawn, more to be shared, more to be interpreted, more to be explored. And if we only ever relied on our own explanations of what the story itself means, we would lose the story all together.

That is what Jesus is warning against in a very roundabout way in the Sermon on the Mount and our Gospel reading for today. Don’t get lost in the outworkings; don’t get lost in the interpretations; don’t lose your way in trying to be perfect or get things perfectly right and in order in your head. Rather, remember that the whole plan, the big picture is always about the justice, and love, and mercy, and compassion of God—a justice, a love, a mercy, a compassion that we can never hope to emulate fully; and that we would gravely misrepresent if we thought it was only about following a few rules.

Let us affirm our faith in our God who is just, loving, merciful and compassionate beyond our ability to describe and our capacity to be.

You have heard it said... but we say...

2011-02-10T10:58:00.002+11:00

You have heard it said,
“There is no god; existence is a matter of chance”;
but the people of God say,
“Praise our God, the Great Creator!”
You have heard it said, “God is dead or never was!”,
but the body of Christ says,
“God is with us—Emmanuel!”
You have heard it said, “God is a figment of the human mind!”,
but the community of the Spirit says,
“Come Holy Spirit. Great is the faithfulness of God!”

A Different Country?!

2011-01-22T16:15:00.002+11:00

They came in to the little town
A semi-naked band subdued and silent.
All that remained of their tribe.
They came here to the place of their old bora ground
Where now the many white men hurry about like ants.
Notice of estate agent reads: “Rubbish May Be Tipped Here”.
Now it half covers the traces of the old bora ring.
They sit and are confused, they cannot say their thoughts:
“We are strangers here now,
but the white tribe are the strangers.
We belong here, we are of the old ways.
We are the corroborree and the bora ground.
We are the old sacred ceremonies, the laws of the elders.
We are the wonder tales of Dreamtime, the tribal legends told.
We are the past, the hunts and the laughing games,
the wandering camp fire.
We are the lightning-bolt over Gaphembah Hill
Quick and terrible,
And the Thunderer after him, that loud fellow.
We are the quiet daybreak paling the dark lagoon.
We are the shadow-ghosts creeping back
as the camp fires burn low.
We are the nature and the past, all the old ways
Gone now and scattered.
The scrubs are gone, the hunting and the laughter.
The eagle is gone, the emu and the kangaroo are gone
from this place.
The bora ring is gone.
The corroboree is gone.
And we are going.”
(“We are going (For Grannie Coolwell)” by Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal)

The Matthean community, the community to which the Gospel of Matthew speaks and out of which the Gospel of Matthew arises, was a community on the edge of their society. They were being pushed out by the religious leaders, by their social groups, but most of all they were being pushed out by their families.

Kinship was everything in Mediterranean societies at the beginning of the first millenium. It wasn’t what you knew or who you knew, it was whose family you belonged to that counted. If you didn’t have a family support structure you were out on your own. There was no social security, no medicare, no superannuation, no welfare state. If you wanted to defy your family, turn your back on your tradition, or simply not do the right thing, you could find yourself in a pretty tough position without family support.

But it was probably never the intention of the Matthean community to put themselves in that position. They were so sure that they were part of the continuing tradition of the keeping and carrying of God’s law. They were so sure that they were part of the continuing movement towards the promised realm of God. That’s why it’s nearly four chapters or 82 verses into the Gospel of Matthew before we actually hear about the proclaimed message of Jesus. The first 81 verses have been establishing who Jesus is, how much he fits the tradition, and how well he fits into the spirit of the law of God—81 verses establishing Jesus’ credentials.

Now it’s always encumbent on a speaker to establish a rapport with their hearers before the meat of their speech is delivered, but 81 verses seems a little excessive even in Gospel terms. Mark has a very cursory introduction of 14 verses before we get to the all important message; John’s not so much interested in words as signs so in the very first chapter we get a run down on the signs which point to Jesus’ significance. Only Luke takes as much time on the introduction as Matthew, and you have to wonder whether it’s an historian’s love of story that’s playing a bit of a role there, or perhaps like Matthew, Luke is also speaking to an audience that needs to be wooed first. Yes, Matthew has very clearly and carefully set up the character of Jesus before his first real proclamation is made: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

And significantly, immediately following this one sentence account of Jesus’ message, we are greeted by stories that assure the hearer that Jesus was not alone. He was not a lone messenger of this proclamation from God. He was part of a larger community, part of a greater family, surrounded by appropriate social support structures, albeit not necessarily by blood relatives. He was not alone. The collator of the stories of Matthew’s Gospel is very careful to show that the new community of Christ, like the Matthean community as part of that wider community, was a good family social support structure. They had what it took to belong to each other and, therefore, to their world.

Nevertheless, the Matthean community was fast becoming labelled by their surrounding culture as “deviant”. And in every culture, in every time and place, people who are labelled as deviant are always the target for attack. No wonder they are so concerned with arguing the case for Jesus and the community of Christ being in line with the truth of the tradition. This issue was a life and death matter in terms of identity, in terms of acceptance in their society, in terms of social and economic support, and perhaps even in terms of specifically targeted attacks against their presence in their region.

We may go home, but we cannot relive our childhoods. We may reunite with our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunties, uncles, communities, but we cannot relive the 20, 30, 40 years that we spent without their love and care, and they cannot undo the grief and mourning they felt when we were separated from them. We can go home to ourselves as Aboriginals, but this does not erase the attacks inflicted on our hearts, minds, bodies and souls, by caretakers who thought their mission was to eliminate us as Aboriginals. (Link-Up NSW).

That’s part of the submission to the National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by Link-Up NSW, an organisation which assists separated and displaced people in finding their families again.

Separation from community is not a matter to be taken lightly, even though many of us treat it as such in our increasingly mobile society. More and more people move house, job and community through choice and compulsion with very little thought for the actual disruption which that that creates in people’s lives. Even when we move from one similar community to another with all our family ties intact, the move can cause considerable stress and strain on individuals. Moving communities is right up on the stress scale just below the death of a spouse, because moving involves the loss of key support structures and entails the need to re-build them. People forcibly removed physically, politically, economically or socially and those who move between communities which are quite different, and may even speak different languages are confronted by yet greater loss of support.

So when we hear the story of the disciples who left their boats to follow Jesus, we are not hearing about an individual choice, we are hearing about a shift in communities and social support structures. Take their boats, that was never an option, they belonged to the family. For whatever reasons people left their familial situations to become part of the emerging Christian community, they were taking an enormous social step. And to leave a father, that was tantamount to blasphemy itself. You have to wonder what really was going on in that society at that time, and in Matthew’s Gospel we can only read between the lines.

Those who came to form part of the emerging Christian community would more than likely not have come alone. While they may have left more important or powerful connections, they would have brought with them those family members that had more connection with the leavers than the stayers. That’s part of the significance of the stories of the baptism of whole households in Acts. Households, extended families, which included servants as well in richer establishments, stuck together. The group was more important than the individual. There was no sense that someone should do what’s right for them. It was always about family obligations and family ties.

So what happens when those family ties are severed or damaged? You have to re-build. You have to create a new support structure for yourself and those for whom you have responsibility. The early Christian communities were not only building a new community for themselves, they were re-building their lives, re-making social networks, re-structuring family supports. This time those supports were not necessarily based on blood relationships. This time those supports were connected to the desire to follow what they believed was the authentic law of God, revealed in Jesus.

What made them leave their original support base? Perhaps they were already outcasts for a variety of reasons. Certainly, it is in Matthew that we hear about the acceptance of the kinds of people that might have faced ostracism in their society simply because they were who they were: Gentiles, women, the ill and diseased. Perhaps in their ostracism, they discovered the acceptance of Jesus, and perhaps when they heard the message of Jesus “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near”, they heard the promise of a new beginning and a new community.

When each person is reunited with their family, it’s the beginning of a slow process of getting to know their family and learning about their community. Support and counselling of the many underlying issues is normally required as an ongoing process for many years. (Link-Up Qld)

That’s part of the submission from Link-Up in Qld to the National Inquiry on the stolen generations.

Somehow, the early Christian communities were able to re-build themselves, to re-create the social support they needed to survive. For them, the message of repentance was a message of acceptance. It proclaimed the need to re-evaluate their lives, to see them in connection with a new community rather than the support structures which they had been denied.

The Greek word for “repentance” literally means a change of mind. Centuries of overlay has made us hear that word only in terms of personal guilt, but perhaps in its early context it meant something more like, “Don’t despair, change your attitude, change your understanding, the community of God is always with you. You are always part of it. It’s okay to leave your boats behind because there is safety with the people of God.” And perhaps it was also a call to the wider society to re-evaluate their tendency to ostracise those who did not fit certain criteria, to see the community of humanity as a community which could encompass all, and to understand the eternal law of God as a call to that kind of inclusive community.

Our story is in the land...
It is written in those sacred places.
My children will look after those places,
that’s the law.
Dreaming place...
you can’t change it,
no matter who you are.
No matter you rich man,
no matter you king.
You can’t change it.
My children go to hang onto this story.
This important story.
I hang onto this story all my life.
My father tell me this story.
My children can’t lose it.
When that law started?
I don’t know how many thousand years.
European say 40,000 years,
but I reckon myself probably was more because it is sacred.
(“Australia’s Kakaduman” by Bill Neidjie)

The community of Matthew is carving out a new country for itself, spinning a new story of identity—a country born out of the margins; a country steeped in the law and the tradition; a country that offered new hope, a new society, a new family; a country that the Matthean community understood to belong to God: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This new country is God’s sacred realm and Jesus is at its heart.

Call to Worship for Year A Ordinary Sunday 3

2011-01-22T16:13:00.001+11:00

The Lord is our light and our salvation:
whom then shall we fear?
God is the stronghold of our life:
of whom then shall we be afraid?
God gives us shelter:
a place to honour God and seek God’s way.
Just one thing we ask:
to live in God’s house forever.
In God’s house, we celebrate God’s beauty:
safe to ask questions and sing God’s praise!
Adapted from Psalm 27: 1,4-6 NRSV.

To Fulfill All Righteousness

2011-01-06T16:06:00.002+11:00

“To fulfil all righteousness.” My mother used to say that when there seemed to be no other plausible reason for having to do something. “To fulfil all righteousness.” It’s the letter of the law not the spirit. We have to do it because there is some rule or other that says we have to do it, even if we don’t know why we have to do it. “To fulfil all righteousness.” But I don’t think that’s what we’re meant to hear when we hear those words in the story of the baptism of Jesus. I don’t think that that is what “to fulfil all righteousness” quite means here.

Because “righteousness” is really just another word for justice in the Gospel stories. The righteousness of God is about God’s justness. So the story of Jesus’ baptism is not about Jesus undertaking something that he had to do for no apparent reason. And the fact that the story is included in 3 gospels and alluded to in the fourth means that the early Christian communities and the gospel editors didn’t think that it was that kind of story either: a story about nothing, if you like.

No, the story is included in the early church’s memories of Jesus because it had significance for the early church. The fact that Jesus was baptised had significance for them: so much significance that baptism becomes a very important ritual in the early Christian community—the rite of initiation into the community itself.

But baptism was around long before Christianity. Water is such an important symbol for human beings. It lends itself so well to symbolic gestures. It is an ambiguous sign. Water has the power for life and the power for death. The power to cleanse and the power to sweep entirely away. Long before Christianity, baptism, the act of going under and coming up from the waters was used as a sign for conversion or new directions in religious faith. The word “baptism” comes from a Greek word meaning “to dip” or “to plunge”. The new convert is dipped or plunged into water to signify a cleansing, renewing, rebirthing into a new faith direction.

That’s why one of the suggestions for the reason why the story of Jesus’ baptism has been so significant has been to argue that Jesus’ baptism is the point at which he receives his call to ministry. This story is said to recall the moment when Jesus’ destiny was fully revealed. It’s a good suggestion, but not my personal choice.

The story itself, particularly in Matthew, doesn’t seem to see things that way. It’s a pretty definite Jesus that says “it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness”. And according to the preceding piece about John the Baptist, Jesus stands out from the crowd long before the act of baptism. No, the story of Jesus’ baptism is the Gospel of Matthew is not presented as the moment of the truth, the moment of his call.

No, for me, it’s the water to which I return in the story of Jesus’ baptism, and in Matthew’s Gospel, the Jewish-Christian Gospel, I think that it’s the water that’s quite significant: the going down and the coming up.

You have to remember that, at the time that the gospels are being put together, the early Christian communities are still in the process of becoming separated from their Jewish beginnings. The Jewish faith story still runs through their attempts to understand who Jesus was and why he was significant. And the defining story for the people of the Jewish faith is the story of the Exodus: the rescue of the oppressed people of Israel from the tyrannical Egyptian pharoah—the story of the Prince of Egypt as DreamWorks would like to tell us.

This story of going down and coming up, of descent and ascent, has already appeared as an echo in the Gospel of Matthew in the tale of the escape of Jesus’ family to Egypt after the warning from the wise visitors. And we are still meant to hear its echoes in the story of Jesus’ baptism. Because this story is yet another story about establishing Jesus credentials.

In chapter 1 we hear about his genealogy in the line of Abraham and David. We hear of his birth in fulfilment of the prophets. In chapter 2 we hear of his recognition by nations beyond Israel, and his appearance in fulfilment of the wisdom from the East. We also hear of the journey to and from Egypt, just like the ancestors of the Jewish people. And in the baptismal story we are meant to keep hearing these echoes of faith and tradition, placing Jesus in the line of the faithful and prophetic people of God.

To be a person of the Jewish faith means being able to recount the ancestral story as your story:

“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor who went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Deut 26:5b-9)

This is the tradition to which Jesus is linked because this is a tradition of depth. In this tradition, there is a sense in which faith in God is discovered in the trials of life, in the moments of despair when even God seems far away—in the goings down before the comings out which only God can do. “To fulfil all righteousness.” To bring about all justice.

We don’t really know anything much about the life of Jesus. We don’t really know what his childhood, adolescence and early adulthood was like. We don’t know what prompted his ministry. We have only the records of the gospel writers, memories and re-tellings of a very short period in Jesus’ life. But they all include or allude to the baptism of Jesus, and for Matthew in particular, the image is attached to the powerful stories of the Jewish faith.

Jesus is the one who went down to Egypt and who came up again not to be saved, but to save. Jesus is the one who went down in the waters, not to be saved but to save. Jesus is the one who endured the pain of degradation and humiliation to continue his message of justice and peace. Jesus is the archetypal child of God—the one who discovers relationship in God in the depths of life, and who emerges from those depths to point others towards God’s love, to bring others into the realm of God’s love.

This is God’s righteousness. This is God’s justice. Jesus participates in the tradition, identifies with the tradition of the righteousness and justice of God “to fulfil all righteousness”, to fulfil all justice, to expand the community of the people of God.

And now we are the baptised people of God. Jesus’ story is our story. For we have participated symbolically and in reality as human beings in the goings down and the comings up of the human story. Our God is the God we have discovered in the depths, who is the one who brings us up out of the water into the light. Our God is the God who demands the fulfilment of all righteousness, not because there is no apparent reason for doing it, but because it is the will and the justice of God.

And as God’s baptised people we are called to bring others into the community of God: to help others stand in the tradition where God never leaves the people even in their deepest despair; to proclaim that the work of God happens in the goings down and comings up of a people of faith as they seek to fulfil all righteousness; to bring about God’s community of justice and peace; to allow ourselves to be baptised in the tradition, the continuing life of the people of God, and the continuing life of humanity as it cries out for justice and peace; to be prepared for our own goings down and comings up in our own journeys of life and faith towards the justice of God.

Playing With Light

2011-01-01T15:32:00.001+11:00

So it’s the 9th day of the Christmas season, the second Sunday of that season and the day we may also commemorate as Epiphany, the celebration of the revealing of Christ, the “unfolding vision of wholeness that God has made manifest for all people in Jesus the Christ” (Seasons of the Spirit). Epiphany means “revelation” or “manifestation” or “display”. The day of Epiphany, 6 January, is the day after the Christmas season. It marks the unleashing of the impact of the incarnation upon the world.

At Epiphany, we hear and tell the story of the wise visitors to the infant Jesus, not in a manger, but in a house. And as we do, we disentangle a piece of Matthew’s story about Jesus from the trappings of the stable and the shepherds at the birth of Jesus.

We hear the story of the visit of the Magi, the wise ones, to the infant Jesus, not as part of the prettiness and wonder of the Christmas story, but as part of the ongoing storying in which the early Christian communities were involved in about the life of Jesus. This story is not a lovely story about some strange visitors. It is a strange story about knife-edge politics—a story about the challenging and confronting of traditions, about the way in which the emerging Christian story was being read back into the life of the infant Jesus.

We hear about the interplay of the light and the depth of the Jesus experience on the unfolding understanding of the early Christian community, and the way that that interplay was being enfolded into their own story.

Have you ever sat somewhere and watched the play of light on water? Perhaps you were at the ocean, or by a waterfall, or near a river. Maybe the sun was high and the glare was intense, so that you almost had to turn away. Perhaps the light was diffused by some rainforest trees so that the light jumped like the water constantly changing pattern and form. Perhaps there were clouds in the sky that cast intricate shadows of varying shades. Light illuminates and light obfuscates; light makes it impossible to see. We don’t see the light. We see that which the light shines upon.

Water is a symbol of the Christian community—the baptised ones; those immersed in the depths of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And light is a sign of the revelation of God in Christ. And in this interplay of the light of Christ on the depths of the Christian community, the story of the sages who recognise what is right before the eyes of Israel, the light to the nations, emerges.

It is through our stories that we make sense of our world. It is by our stories that we describe who we are. And it is in the re-telling of those stories, the re-storying of our traditions, our histories, our identities that we learn to cope with our ever-changing world and ourselves within it.

The communities out of which the Gospel of Matthew arose were discovering who they were—as a reformist Jewish movement, as Jewish Christians, and then as Christians distinct from their Jewish counterparts. They valued the depths of Judaisim, the insights of their faith, the Jewish faith, and they understood that that faith had sustained the people for a long, long time. Within their tradition, there were various elements that were particularly important: respect for the law of God; interest in the idea of God’s wisdom and how that wisdom interacted with the wisdom of other peoples around the Jewish faith community; the challenging story of the people’s descent into Egypt, their liberation by God and the journey to the promised land. But they were also experiencing something new—something that stemmed from their faith, and extended it.

Now on top of the deep traditions of the Jewish faith, the people of the communities which Matthew addresses have the depth of the Jesus experience. The light is playing on their water and producing new understandings of who God is and who they are before God. The depth of the traditions which they embody are being illuminated anew to produce different patterns and different ways of seeing; and their storytelling reflects those new experiences and understandings. So they tell a new old story about a visit of some wise folk from the East who recognise the light when they see it.

In the telling of this tale, they confront the depths of their traditions with the light of the new, and in that process some of the old has to go, some of the new has to be re-interpreted and some of the old definitely has to stay. Because you cannot watch light play on water if there is no water, and none of us begin our stories from nothing. We all build from what we have storied before.

So a story is told which involves confronting a dubious part of the tradition. A bad king, Herod, takes the role of that which must be defied. The story includes a newer part of the tradition: an emphasis on wisdom in the persons of the visitors from the East. The wisdom tradition was barely centuries old at the time of Jesus. And the new light—the infant Jesus—more than a baby, not still in the manger, but residing with parents to protect and care for him—takes centre stage.

The old story is quoted to back up the plot. Bethlehem is cited as the place most likely to sporn a new ruler to defy the might of kings like Herod, no longer loyal to the tradition, but operated like puppets behind the scenes by Roman rulers. Last week you heard more of that story. The fear of Herod, the attempt to kill the infant, the journey to Egypt and out again: an upside down version of the earlier tale of the Exodus. This week we heard that story’s beginning: the alerting of Herod to a possible rival by the Magi from the East.

And when the old traditions have been subsumed into the new, the wise visitors and Herod the king depart the story, and the light falls fully on the new light and the teaching of Jesus, but that’s where our story continues next week.

The story is alarming, more like a crime novel, or a movie thriller than a cute fairy story for children. Because in this story there is confrontation and intrigue, violence and elusive escape. And it’s not just in the plot. It’s in the very story itself. For as the story unfolds, we are drawn into a re-storying of tradition; a playing of the light on the water that can at first dazzle, sometimes transfix and maybe even confuse. When we confront a new story, when we are confronted by a light that startles and overwhelms us, it is our traditions that we fall back upon, the things with which we are familiar. And it is from these old stories that we draw the stuff of the explanation for the new. In a way, that is a kind of violence too, because as we make the new story, we destroy the old. And while we always hope that our continuing story will help us to understand our living better and better we can never be sure. We trust in the play of water on light. Like the infant Jesus, we journey to Egypt in vulnerability uncertain whether the traditioning process will help us to re-make our stories again.

Re-making our stories is something we do every day of our lives, but it is particularly something that we do in times of immense change and challenge. The ability to re-make our stories is part of being resilient, part of being able to cope with life’s highs and lows.

The emerging Christian communities whose stories only Matthew records find comfort and resilience in the story of infant Jesus, visited by the wise, foretold by the prophets, bringer of light and keeper of the depths of old traditions. And in that delicate balance, they re-make their story and the story of the world.

So where does that leave this Christian community today. We continue that re-storing process. The light of Christ continues to play in our lives and to produce new patterns and experiences. And we are called to proclaim them.

Let All Creation Praise God!

2010-12-29T12:13:00.003+11:00

Let all creation praise God! Let all creation praise God! It’s such a strong message in the Christmas season. The angels sing it. We sing it. And we want so much for the whole world to join in. Let all creation praise God!

The Psalms frequently testify to creation singing God’s praises. The Psalm for today (148) does just that... This Psalm calls on Earth, sea and sky to be filled with celebration and singing… [T]he psalmist calls on all the components of creation to praise God because all creation has the creative impulse of the Word of God as their source [In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.] The psalmist calls on Earth, the elements of Earth and the creatures of Earth to praise God. This colourful list includes sea monsters, fire, wild animals, humans, and birds. Everything from ants to atoms seems to be included. [Excerpted from Kinship with Creation by Norman C. Habel as found on the Season of Creation website. Seasons of the Spirit Year A Advent/Christmas/Epiphany 2010-2011]

But tragedy is never far from the Christmas scene; just as it is never far from the scene of creation, the very scene of our life. The cross looms over the horizon of our celebration of the birth of Jesus. The real world of pain and hunger, sickness and need is barely hidden below the surface of our celebrations; and the very day after we celebrate the joyful birth, we hear the story of the slaughter of the innocents. Let all creation praise God! But in Ramah, there is “wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel [is] weeping for her children; [and] she refuse[s] to be consoled, because they are no more." (Matthew 2:18)

How can we sing the Lord’s sing in this foreign land?

And yet that is what we are called to do: to sing God’s praise, to honour God in the midst of life whatever that is. Perhaps it is not easy for us in our comfortable setting to understand this calling, this vocation as it is for those who have less, who know their need more closely.

Taizé is a village in southern France that is home to an ecumenical Christian community. The community began in 1940 by Roger Louis Schütz-Marsauche (Brother Roger), a Swiss born theological student studying in France. When it first began, the Taizé community offered a safe haven to refugees during the Nazi occupation of France. After World War II, the community slowly established a mission to promote peace across Western Europe and eventually around the world. This mission is most evident in the international, ecumenical gathering of thousands of youth each week in the summer. Daily worship includes short, musical selections that are sung repetitively and often use a variety of languages. [Indeed, many of the songs are sung in Latin, a language that belongs to nobody now.] It is said the meaning of the songs transcends any particular people represented by the language, furthering the evidence of peace within all creation. Many congregations use Taizé prayers and songs in their worship, some offering a monthly service of Taizé prayer. The minister of one church tells how people ask him why the church continues to offer such a prayer service, as the attendance is low. [After all, why do we bother to continue to praise God when our numbers are small or when the world is in need of such proactivity?]

“Two of the brothers took part in prayers in many cities in Germany throughout nearly the whole of November. After the prayer in Hanover, a woman doctor shared this story: ‘I’ve just arrived today from Faluja, Iraq. I accompanied a seriously wounded American soldier. After these very difficult weeks in Iraq, I wanted to see something beautiful: a concert, a theatre performance, or something in a church. During the flight I asked the pilots what was on in the city this evening. They told me there would be a prayer with songs from Taizé. ‘I have never been to Taizé. These last weeks I have been working as a doctor in the emergency service in Faluja. One day during the fighting I had to operate on a man who would probably need to have both legs amputated. During that difficult operation I heard a melody with words in Latin. I didn’t understand, for I had to concentrate on the operation. The song became louder and louder; it sounded like a chorale; my colleagues – French, British, American, German, and Iraqi – were singing together. ‘Carried by the melody, I calmed down, and could even see a chance of saving the man’s legs. And finally, we succeeded. After the operation was over, I heard the French doctors saying that it was a song from Taizé. I had never heard of Taizé until then. From then on, the Taizé songs often accompanied me during operations and I felt protected by God in very dangerous circumstances. This evening, I discovered that the song I heard for the first time in Faluja was Laudate omnes gentes. [Let all the people praise God!] And there were others that we sang back there too. I am so grateful.’” [Fraser MacNaughton has been minister of St. Magnus Cathedral,Kirkwall, Orkney, Scotland since 2002. He also has served as minister in Ayrshire, University of Dundee, and Glasgow. Seasons of the Spirit Year A Advent/Christmas/Epiphany 2010-2011]

The prayer and praise of God’s people sustains them in hope. It forms them in love and it upholds them in the most extreme of difficult times when in Ramah, there is “wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel [is] weeping for her children; [and] she refuse[s] to be consoled, because they are no more." (Matthew 2:18)

Even in the midst of life, let all Creation praise God! Because as we turn to God and recognise that we are created and sustained by God, we may catch a glimpse of the reconciliation that God desires for the whole of creation—wherever there is need; wherever there is conflict; wherever there is illness; wherever there is pain, it is in recognising the God who calls us to something beyond the immediacy of our own situations towards God’s promised realm of justice, love and peace, begun in Jesus and being brought up through us the people of God as part of God’s mission in God’s world. Truly, may all creation praise God!

God Has Sandy Feet!

2010-12-23T16:38:00.002+11:00

“From a distance, God is watching us,” Julie Gold wrote (1985) and Bette Midler (among others) sang. The song described the way in which a beneficent, a good, a caring God envisioned the world that God had created—a world of peace and harmon and environmental sustainability. It hinted at the disappointment that the real world may have become for God, with its litany of conflict and pain.

From a distance we all have enough, and no one is in need.
And there are no guns, no bombs, and no disease,
no hungry mouths to feed.
From a distance we are instruments
marching in a common band.
Playing songs of hope, playing songs of peace.
They're the songs of every [one].
God is watching us. God is watching us.
God is watching us from a distance.

Even at Christmastime, God can seem somewhat distant from our lives, hoping for something grand and being disappointed with what God has ended up with. Sometimes, this picture of God seems the only possible one when we claim God’s goodness and look around us at the mess of God’s creation; or experience something particularly traumatic and difficult at a time when we’re supposed to be celebrating.

Have you watched children on a beach playing from a distance? It can all look so idyllic, so pleasurable, so inviting… and then you walk over and get involved… and the scene is not nearly so serene. There’s a need for give and take—whose road goes way and which tower gets built and how? From a distance, the castle rises from the beach; but up close the builders are not just working with their hands, but also with their hearts and their hopes and their dreams; and different designers clash, and sometimes there’s tears, and maybe even a temper tantrum or too. Watching from a distance is not where the real action is, although it can sometimes be somewhat more serene.

But watching from a distance can also be lonely and boring. If you don’t get down on your hands and knees on the sand, you can’t discover the feel of the building material; and the way that you can gently drip mixtures of sand and sea water to make walls and towers of astonishing complexity and beauty. And you can get so much more done before the tide comes in when you have helpers—a small sand castle can mushroom into a medieval city in no time at all when a few people get together to work the sand.

Another song-writer, Eric Bazilian (1995), and another singer, Joan Osborne asked a slightly different question from Gold and Midler. Not “What is it like watching from a distance?”, but “What would it be like for God to be in the sand with us?”

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Tryin' to make his way home?

This is a God in the midst of the construction of sand castles with the kids—in the joy, in the tears, in the tantrums, in the sense of achievement, in the disappointment when the waves wash it all away, and in the anticipation of the next sand castling building expedition tomorrow. This God is with us! This God is in the midst of it all, getting hands and feet sandy and messy, windblown and sun-tanned, in the fun and the learning to share, and the discovering of injustice and the trying to get along with each other.

In reflecting on the lyrics of the song “One of Us”, liturgical theologian, Brian Wren writes:

What if God was one of us? Not watching from a distance, but taking the risks and having the inside knowledge of being born, being human, living and facing death? This is the good news of Christmas… Every one of us, and everyone on earth, is born into a particular time, a particular place, a particular language and tradition. It is the only way of being human... In the song refrain… the line “just a slob like one of us” seems to have a slightly self-mocking tone. It suggests that the singer and her peers, or human beings in general, are average, ordinary, and unappealing. More often the word “slob” is an insult, a term of abuse for someone who is coarse, lazy, dirty, or rude... the adult Jesus was a controversial prophet, loved by many but also insulted and abused, treated as worse than a slob… (Advent/Christmas/Epiphany, pp. 126, 127, 130-131).

But even as a child, the story isn’t such an idyllic one.

God, fully human, fully with us, fully within God’s own created order—as a vulnerable child, at the mercy of authorities who take censuses and kill potential rivals, in inadequate housing and facing an uncertain childhood—the incarnation (God becoming human) is the great doctrine (teaching) of the church that we celebrate in the Christmas season.

This doctrine is one to blow our minds—God becomes human—the Creator enters the creation—the all-powerful becomes all vulnerable to the vagaries of creaturely existence. God just doesn’t watch us from a distance; God lives our life. God just doesn’t empathise with us, God knows what it is to live as a mortal being.

When I was a small child, on holiday with my family at the beach, one evening as we were walking along the beach, we were writing with sticks in the sand. I wrote in the sand what nearly everyone writes at some time in their lives, "I was here". It was a celebration of the great event in time of which I was a part, walking along the beach with my family without a care in the world.

A man came up to me. He was smartly dressed. He even had shoes on his feet as he walked along the beach. I don't think he really saw me or really understood what my sign was saying. For he gravely bent over to read the words and jauntly said, "Ah, but where are you going?" Politely, I responded, "I don't know" but I felt terrible inside. Didn't this man see this wonderful place we were in? Why did it seem not to matter to him?

The man smiled smugly and without another word he continued his walk along the beach. As he walked away, I wondered to myself, how differently he might have reacted if he had bothered to take his shoes off to walk along the beach so he could feel the sand and the water on his toes.

In Jesus, God has taken off his shoes to experience our life. Everything we experience, Jesus experienced. God was prepared to give up all the perks of divinity in order to show us just how much we are loved—in order to stand in utter solidarity with us, God’s creatures, God’s beloved children. God knows the frailty and the fragility, the vulnerability and the suffering, the wonder and the joy of being human just like us.

Julia Esquivel from Guatemala puts it this way (Bread of Tomorrow, pp. 46-48):

The Word, for our sake, became poverty clothed as the poor who live off the refuse heap. The Word, for our sake, became a sob a thousand times stifled in the immovable mouth of the child who died from hunger. The Word, for our sake, became danger in the anguish of the mother who worries about her son growing into manhood. The Word cut us deeply in that place of shame: the painful reality of the poor. The Word blew its spirit over the dried bones of the churches, guardians of silence. The Word awoke us from the lethargy which had robbed us of our hope. The Word became a path in the jungle, a decision on the farm, love in women, unity among workers, and a Star for those few who can inspire dreams. The Word became Light. The Word became History. The Word became Conflict. The Word became indomitable Spirit, and sowed its seeds upon the mountain, near the river and in the valley, and those of good will heard the angels sing. Tired knees were strengthened, trembling hands were stilled, and the people who wandered in darkness saw the light… The Word became the seed of justice and we conceived peace… The Word made justice to rain and peace came forth from the furrows in the land. And we saw its glory in the eyes of the poor transformed into real men and women. And those who saw the Star opened up for us the path we now follow.

For God indeed is one of us! Our God has sandy feet... and hands... and there's quite a bit of sand in God's hair too!

Glory in the Wilderness!

2010-12-11T16:09:00.003+11:00

In the midst of a Venetian orphanage for poor and illegitimate children, Antonio Vivaldi and his choristers (all female) produce the dramatic and weighty proclamation of God’s greatness, “Gloria”—a version of the great doxology of Christian tradition. Modelled on the song of the angels to the shepherds in the Gospel of Luke, the song proclaims;

Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to people of good will. (ICEL 2007)

The proclamation of the children and the “red priest” from this place of exile from their families and polite society—a veritable wilderness—declares the significance of the God who comes into the midst of God’s own people, God’s own creation. It announces and celebrates weighty matters indeed.

Isaiah, too, is intent on celebrating the weightiness of a God who brings new life to landscapes apparently barren; new hope to people afflicted and infirm; and a God who dares, not to wait for people to travel God’s way, to come in search of them in order to save, to liberate.

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom… They shall see the glory of the LORD, the majesty of our God… He will come and save you (Isaiah 35:1-2, 4c).

This glory is a weighty matter indeed—the Hebrew word, kebod, refers to its heaviness. These are matters of significance. God is a God who matters. God is a God who acts.

From the Babylonian Exile, Isaiah proclaims the significance of God in the wilderness of a people without a place; and the proclamation asserts that God is well and truly aware of the heaviness of the burden born by the chosen people; and of the weighty promise made generations before to Abraham and Sarah and the descendants—the promise of a great land and a great people. And God will do something about it!

The people have been in the wilderness before; and even then magnificent songs proclaiming God’s greatness held God’s promises before them. Miriam and Moses sang in the wilderness: “Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously” (Exodus 15:21). They celebrated God’s significant delivery of the people from Egypt; but the people still had a long way to go. The wilderness stretched before them. God’s glory, God’s weightiness, wasn’t just about the previous triumph but the journey ahead. It would accompany the people on a pilgrimage that would test their spirits, their faith, their lives. God deals in weighty matters indeed.

From another kind of wilderness, Mary sings her song, proclaiming the significance of God’s action even in the midst of her own intolerable predicament—an unmarried women with child:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant... He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever." (Luke 1:46-55)

These are weighty matters. God will bring new life to dry land; new hope to desperate people; and God will not stand back waiting for all this to happen. God will come to bring it about. God will enter God’s own creation. God’s glory, God’s substance, God’s significance will be made known.

The poetry of Isaiah’s proclamation draws attention to its central claim: “Here is your God… God will come and save you.” God is with the people in creation. God is among the people in their despair. God is coming to the people to save them. God is a God of substance who concerns God’s self with substantial matters—the plight of God’s creation and the welfare of God’s people.

Such weighty actions of God deserve a weighty response. Don’t just stand there—start travelling—out of exile back to the land; out of despair into hope; out of waiting for someone else to do something and into taking responsibility for being part of God’s mission in the world now! Take the road made for God’s people through the wilderness towards the promise. This is a journey of significance; a expedition of substance.

I’ve been enjoying the local wetlands coming back to life in the midst of the lovely rain we’ve been experiencing. You can’t actually get into the bird hide at Dangar’s Lagoon because the entrance is under water. I didn’t think I’d get to see that!

The ebb and flow of the waters we share are weighty matters indeed—they are matters of life or death. They affect what birdlife will prevail; what food we can produce; what parts of this country will continue to be habitable. The things of God are equally as weighty. Indeed the ebb and flow of the very creation is a thing of God.

The ebb and flow of God’s living water is also a matter of substance—a matter of abundant life out of desperate death. It affects who we are and what we do; and where we stand before God.

Here in the midst of our own wilderness—the wilderness of living—there will be times when we are tempted to give up the hope of God’s promises. But it is precisely in those times when it is even more important to hold them before us; to remember God’s weightiness, God’s significance, God’s glory; to give God, God’s due; and to be prepared to sing “Glory to God in the highest!” Our God has significance. Our God has substance. Our God is present. And our God is coming to save us! Gloria in excelsis! Glory to God in the highest and peace to people of good will!

Waiting Patiently

2010-11-27T17:02:00.003+11:00

Year A Advent 1—Matthew 24:36-44

I’m not a very patient person really. I like things to be done in good order and on time; and I’m not averse to getting annoyed with myself or with other people when they’re not. Yes, patience is definitely a virtue that I’m still working on.

So, I’m not all that patient about the promises of God either. I want God’s realm of justice and peace right now! Why are we waiting and what are we waiting for? It’s all very well to talk about “the final consummation of all things which Christ will bring”, which the Basis of Union does, and about the “promised goal”; but just when is this promised end going to materialise—after all we Christians have been waiting for 2000 years already and the Jewish people have been waiting for a lot longer than that. Why are we waiting and what are we waiting for?

Of course, I’m not much interested in the end of the world as the movies have it—lots of chaos, havoc and destruction; nor am I much looking forward to the kind of scenarios that appear to be described in our Gospel reading for today—two people working together and one disappears; and I’m definitely not interested in the that rather dubious theological concept popularly known as the “rapture”. I really have no idea what some of our Christian brothers and sisters think that has to do with our shared Christian theology and the wonderful promises of God’s reign. Who on earth would think that that was worth waiting for?

In our shared Christian story, we wait with expectation the coming of the day of the Lord Jesus, i.e. we wait for the fullness of the relationship between God and Creation that Christ embodies, inaugurates and prefigures. But we do not agree on how that will happen, what it will be like, and the means by which it will come about.

The scenarios in today’s Gospel reading have tended to be popular around significant dates like turns of the millennia. Those stories were made very popular in the 1970s by a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson and by songs like Larry Norman’s “I wish we’d all been ready”. More recently, in the 1990s, the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins resurrected them again for popular conception, with the same distortions of meaning that have plague this text for a very long time (but especially during the 19th century and a particular kind of what’s called “dispensationalist” doctrine).

The scenarios from Matthew are put together by “rapture” devotees with equally and even more gruesome tales from other apocalyptic literature in the Bible, i.e. with stories that predicted great disasters and even total destruction in the face of the coming reign of God. And this rather indiscriminate matching of biblical texts with its highly judgemental interpretative approach produced a rather dubious understanding of the Christian expectation that Christ will come again. The return of Christ was envisaged as a three-stage process: a time when “true believers” are caught up into God; a waiting period “in which the rest of humanity struggles to comprehend its situation and find faith”; before Christ’s final return (Vicky Balabanski, “A Surprise Ending!”, Seasons of the Spirit 28 Nov 2010).

New Testament scholar, Vicky Balabanski points out that, in this text from Matthew, we aren’t even told whether being taken is good or bad. Are the people taken rescued or are they taken away for judgement?

What is important is not the what will happen, but its relative predictability. Jesus is saying to the disciples in his “farewell discourse”, and Matthew is saying to his readers after the destruction of the second Temple that, if they think they know what is going to happen, they’d better think again. If they think they know what is going to happen, they’d better think again.

The disciples and the early Christians are warned against speculation. They are warned against thinking that they can control or even understand the future. In fact, probably the most important verse of the passage today is the first one, v. 36: no-one knows the day or the hour… except God. No-one knows the day or the hour except God. No-one knows the future. No-one can control events. No-one can predict—no-one except God. And we’re kidding ourselves if we think we can.

But if you think that’s about scaring us into submission, about frightening us into being good, so that we won’t be found wanting, then you’d also better think again. Any visions of the end times, any notions of what the fulfilment of all things in Christ will mean that are intended to instil belief in God through fear miss the point entirely. Waiting is not about doing good because we’ve been scared into it; or don’t want to end up eternally damned. Waiting is about taking the time to explore our relationship with God, about learning to love God and to love God’s creation. That’s what we’re called to do in this time of waiting—to explore our relationship with God; to get to know God. Not in order to win a place in some far off paradise; but because that is the very best that is offered to us right now.

The kind of scenarios envisioned by the “rapture” crowd shift the attention off God onto us; and even more than that they create a God-shaped image that is nothing like the God-shaped revelation we have in Jesus. Bill Loader, another New Testament scholar, reminds us that “it is a Jesus-shaped God who is our hope”: a God who empties God’s self for the sake of the Creation; a God who loves sacrificially; and stands in solidarity with the world God has made (Bill Loader, Advent 1 www.staff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/MtAdvent1.htm).

As the people of God, we are called to wait attentively and patiently—not in an empty space, but in a God-given time for relationship with God and with one another. It isn’t about twiddling our thumbs, but being engaged. It isn’t about always looking for the next thing, but being present in the world in which we find ourselves, the world that God has given us.

It’s about being aware of what the God of future promises is saying and doing right here, right now, today. It’s about seeking God’s “perspective on the issues of today”—personally, environmentally, communally, nationally, internationally. It’s about making ourselves open to the vision of God now. That’s the patience God asks for in our anticipation of the fulfilment of all God’s promises already begun and accomplished in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Now is God’s time—our time to wait in anticipation of the fulfilment of all God’s promises; not by trying to predict the future, but by seeking relationship with God know—by proclaiming justice, feeding the hungry, comforting the sick and bereaved, and announcing God’s reign in God’s world. Our left-behindness is not to be found in some future apocalypse but in the opportunities which exist now right before our very eyes—the opportunities to explore relationship with God and the whole of God’s creation. And that sort of patience is a virtue, I'm going to need to do a lot more work on.

Great Faithfulness!

2010-10-03T13:22:00.002+11:00

Increase our faith Jesus! Make life easier for us! Don’t make it such a leap for us to believe, to act, to live in the hope you have given us. Increase our faith! Make it easier for us to pray, to focus on you, to give our lives in your service. Surely following you wasn’t meant to be such an effort of the will. We understand about it being difficult, but surely you could at least give us some more motivation; a greater sense of purpose; a clearer drive to get involved and keep going.

So you disciples think it’s all about being highly motivated and generally keyed up—like a rock concert or a political pep rally—everyone raring to go with no doubts or second thoughts—when actually it’s really more like cooking. It’s a very ordinary, everyday thing. You don’t expect to be thrown parties just for doing your everyday jobs, do you? You have to put the effort into it, to get the benefit out of it. But just like in cooking, you don’t need much spice to rev up a dish. You know if you put a little bit of pepper, just a little bit of mustard, in a casserole, it will add a whole lot of zing. And even if you only have the faith of a mustard seed, you will be faithful servants.

The faith of a mustard seed—now that’s a familiar phrase and we’ve been told often enough that that means that you just need a tiny thing to produce a huge tree; but mustard seeds are pretty ordinary and they’re certainly not the smallest seed, nor are they the tallest tree. Mustard seeds and mustard bushes are fairly ordinary in the world of the Middle East, more like prolific weeds than the cedars of Lebanon which were so easily logged out. Mustard is a very ordinary plant; but when you put it into a cooking pot, even just one seed, the stew is livened up. And overdoing it can ruin everything.

Faith wouldn’t be faith if it came without a second thought. Asking the questions and living with them gives a strength that a naïve gung-ho approach can’t touch.

It’s not in great achievements that the people of God show their faithfulness, but in the ordinary, everyday sharing, caring, persisting and enduring that God’s enduring mercy is embraced, demonstrated and discovered by others.

The covenant relationship of marriage is such a good metaphor for the covenant in which we find ourselves with God. We want it to be all champagne and roses, but really it’s more about tea and toast—it’s about the ordinary, everyday stuff of continuing to learn to listen to and work with one another.

God’s faithfulness to us, as extraordinary as it is, is all about God being with us in the everyday, the ordinary. And God’s call to us to faithfulness is the same—a call to listening to and working with God in the everyday ordinariness of our lives, whether we feel like it or not, whether we are motivated or not, whether we feel the buzz or not. Faith wouldn’t be faith if it came easy.

And yet it’s a miracle that God believes that we can believe; that God expects that we will be faithful servants, being and acting for God, just as our employers and our families expect us to be the people that we are to them—parent, child, grandparent, uncle or aunt, niece or nephew, sister or brother—and to do the work that we are employed to do. And if that’s all we do, surely we have done something as miraculous as saying to a mulberry tree, “Move and be planted in the sea.”

Faith, just takes a modicum of ordinary, everyday living, to demonstrate its truth, its effectiveness, its reality.

Increase our faith! Surely we have already enough to achieve what it is that God asks of us; because after all, all that we need has already been achieved by God. Faith, like an ordinary mustard seed, spreads like wildfire, like weeds and extends God’s realm to the ends of the earth.

Just Peace!

2010-10-03T13:17:00.002+11:00

So Jeremiah goes out to buy a field, and you’d have to wonder why. As King Zedekiah points out, Jeremiah has prophesied, in the name of God, that the land of Judah will fall to the Babylonians, and, as we know, it did. But Jeremiah goes out to buy a field.

And it’s not just any field that Jeremiah buys. It’s a family field—the field of a cousin. And that’s significant for not only does Jeremiah have a right to buy the field to keep it in the family, he also has something of an obligation. He is a possible redeemer—a member of the family who is able to bail another member out in order that all members and all the property of the family stay in the family.

But still, why buy the field if the whole community is about to be uprooted—if there is little hope of avoiding the Babylonian captivity, and little chance that the land will not be taken over by others?

King Zedekiah may be at a loss in the story, but Jeremiah knows God’s plan, for God also is a redeemer and will not let the people of God be taken away completely, nor the land which God has given them be lost to them entirely. Well at least that’s the hope that is embodied in Jeremiah’s action. Jeremiah redeems a field ensuring that the title deeds will be safe for a long time—whatever the length of time there is for the people of God to be redeemed by God. Jeremiah is acting out his hope in the promises of God in an ordinary commercial transaction, and a common family practice.

The Babylonians may be besieging Jerusalem, but Jeremiah is acting out his hope in God’s peace, God’s restoration, beyond the battle raging and the captivity expected. In the midst of this chaos, Jeremiah buys a field.

I imagine that Jeremiah was not the only person doing ordinary things in the middle of the siege. People needed feeding; babies needed tending; water needed fetching; clothing and tools needed mending. Undoubtedly, anxiety and fear and insecurity were in abundance. But still the ordinary things needed doing.

It is the ordinary practices of everyday living that show where we place our hope. And Jeremiah buys a field expecting that God’s promises will be fulfilled beyond the chaos of the siege and a captivity. That’s the story of Jeremiah’s prophesy and hope—through chaos to peace.

The everyday practices of the rich man in Jesus’ story also revealed a hope; but this hope is not in a future beyond conflict and captivity. This hope is in the good things of life: fine food and fancy clothes—purple was the most expensive dye. This hope is not in sharing in community or helping out your neighbour. This hope is in status and power.

You would have thought that he might get it—Lazarus was just outside the gate with his sores and his hunger. Surely, this everyday sight was a powerful sign. And if that wasn’t enough, wasn’t the whole society based on the traditions of the Law and the Prophets, and didn’t these also speak of mercy to the widow, the orphan and the stranger—those in need of sustenance and support because they were disconnected from their families and communities.

The rich man has missed these everyday signs. He had been looking in the extraordinariness of the good life.

It’s easy to think that the signs of important things come with loud fanfares, glossy covers and rich clothing. It’s easy to look for cataclysms and Sydney Harbour fireworks displays to tell us where things are at and what’s important in life. But the real stuff of who we are and where we place our hope is in the ordinary, everydayness of routine family, community and business interactions.

Leo Tolstoy told the story of a cobbler, Martin Avdyeeich, who, having lost both his wife and child, was left in despair of life until someone pointed him to the stories of Jesus. Martin was engaged by the stories of the hospitality given to Jesus by Simon the Pharisee and the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet. He wished for the opportunity to afford such hospitality to Christ; and dreamed that he would be given it.

The next day, he avidly watched out for the coming of Christ, but there was only the old soldier Stepanuich, and Martin made him a cup of tea.

After Stepanuich left, Martin continued to look out for Christ, but there was only a woman and a child dressed too thinly for the cold, and Martin offered them some hot food.

When they left, Martin continued to look out for Christ, but there was only a widow and a young scoundrel trying to steal her apples, and Martin intervened, buying an apple for the boy and watching the boy assist the widow with her burden.

And still Martin watched for Christ until the end of the day. But he dreamt that night that Christ had come in the old soldier, Stepanuich, the woman and child dressed too thinly for the cold, and the widow and the young scoundrel.

So many times we look in the wrong places for the signs we seek when the hope we are promised is found in the routine everyday actions of an ordinary life. Jeremiah bought a field, but the rich man missed the poor man sitting at his gates.

This year’s Social Justice Sunday Statement from the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference asks Christians to ask themselves a series of questions about their everyday practices in order to counteract violence and promote peace.
1. How do we acknowledge the dignity of others?
2. How can we respond positively to anger?
3. How attentive are we to prayer and our spiritual development?
4. Are we prepared to seek help when we are not coping?
5. How can we foster strong families?
6. What can we contribute to the life of the community?
7. How does the community meet the needs of all its members?
8. How do we support and celebrate our cultural diversity?
9. Does our community reject violence?
10. Can we provide a meeting place [for reconciliation]?
11. Are we engaged in the life of our nation?
12. Are we aware of the most vulnerable?
13. Are we prepared to question assumptions and misinformation?
14. Will we defend the rights of others?

If we wait for a big sign to tell us what to do, we will wait in vain and miss out on it all together, but if every routine everyday interaction is an opportunity for living out our hope, we may just have peace, and a peace that is just!

God's Grief!

2010-09-11T21:49:00.003+10:00

So the God of Jeremiah is still grieving in today’s reading. And this grieving has all the hallmarks of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief: there’s denial—this God looks everywhere to see if there are any signs that the people have not simply abandoned their faith; there’s anger—this God threatens devastation and desolation in the face of intense grief over the betrayal of the people; there’s bargaining—this God threatens to lay waste, but not completely to make a “full end”; and there’s depression—this God is desolate in the face of the people’s foolishness. This God is heart-broken before a people who do not know God, who do not understand, who do not know how to do good. This God is in a very sorry way. This God is grieving. And this God is looking for some recognition that the people of God have not forgotten what is means to be the wonderful creation of God, the beloved children of God, the chosen people of God. This God is aching in and for relationship with God’s own people.

“I think it really pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” I think it really annoys God when we don’t see the wonder that is in front of our faces. It think it grieves God when the people of God fail to understand who God is and what God does. That’s the sentiment that Shug Avery shares with Celie in the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker. “I think it really pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” (p. 167)

Shug is an African American jazz singer alienated from her family and the community of faith, largely because of her exuberance for life. But Shug still knows who God is. Celie is a woman beaten down by her stepfather’s incest, her husband’s harsh treatment and the loss of the 2 children she has borne. She is still part of the community of faith, but she is struggling to know who God is. We listen in on the way in which Celie relates conversation (pp. 167-168). Shug says:

Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration.
You saying God vain? I ast.
Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
What it do when it pissed off? I ast.
Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about, But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
Yeah? I say.
Yeah, she say. It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect.
You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say.
Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved.

Everything wants to be loved; and God wants to be loved most of all; because God wants to be in relationship with us; to be loved as God loves us. God is aching in and for relationship with God’s own people.

That’s why God is so intent to go to such lengths to pursue us, to seek us, to find us—even when we try so hard not to be found. We are worth everything to God: “I think it really pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” (The Color Purple, p. 167)

And that pursuit, that search for even, or more significantly, especially, the littlest, the lowest and the least is not a habit, or a formality, or even just something to do. It is God’s very nature—God’s very nature is to seek us and to want so badly for us to seek God—just as it is the shepherd’s very nature to care for the sheep with the corresponding result that losing a sheep is a loss of something of the shepherd’s being, a loss which must be avoided at all costs, and remedied if at all possible. It is God’s very nature to seek us and to want so much for us to seek God—just as the marriage dowry which a woman wore in the form of coins was part of that woman’s very personhood; and the loss of even just one coin, a loss to be avoided at all costs and remedied if at all possible. It is God’s very nature to seek us and to want so intensively for us to seek God—that when we turn our back on God, God grieves. “I think it really pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” (The Color Purple, p. 167)

Many years ago, three students were walking in the French countryside. As they walked they spoke boldly to each other of their passionate atheism. How foolish the idea of God was! How much harm was caused in the name of religion!
When they came upon a small country church, two of the students turned upon their friend, daring him to test his courage of conviction by entering the church and telling the priest about their conversation. And the third student did.
“Well,” said the priest, “you have been bold enough to accept the dare of your friends? Would you accept another challenge from an old priest?” And the student did.
“What I want you to do,” said the priest, “is to go to the sanctuary of the church, look at the crucifix, and say 3 times ‘Jesus Christ died for me and I don’t give a damn’.”
Reluctantly now, the student did as the priest challenged. Looking upon the crucifix, twice, the brash, young atheist repeated the words: “Jesus Christ died for me and I don’t give a damn. Jesus Christ died for me and I don’t give a damn.” But he was unable to continue, unable to make the bold proclamation a third time as he faced the effigy of God’s search for him. He returned to the priest, asking him to hear his confession. [An adapted story]

That young, brash atheist student was the soon-to-become famous Sri Lankan evangelist, D.T. Niles, the author of the hymn “The great love of God”:

The great love of God is revealed in the Son,
who came to this earth to redeem every one.
It’s yours, it is ours, O how lavishly giv’n!
the pearl of great price, and the treasure of heav’n.
Daniel Thambyrajah Niles 1908–70

Listen, God loves everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God loves admiration. Is God vain? Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

I think God grieves for us to pursue God as much as God pursues us; and that when God finds us and we find God, when even just one of us is found by God and finds God, “there is joy in the presence of the angels” for God aches in and for relationship with God’s own people, us.

Jeremiah's God

2010-09-04T18:05:00.002+10:00

So Jeremiah goes down to the house of a potter to listen to God; and snatches of the chorus “Have thine own way” fill our imaginations.

Have thine own way Lord, have thine own way.
Thou art the potter; I am the clay.
Mould me and make me, till all shall see
Christ only always living in me.

It’s such a beautiful little melody that lulls you into a sense of safety and security about being in the hands of God. But safety and security are not what Jeremiah finds at the potter’s house!

Jeremiah hears the words of a God prepared to wreak destruction upon a disobedient people; as well as to build and encourage a people who orient themselves towards God. This is a God whose rule is absolute; and to whom absolute obedience is required. It’s the sort of God that we’re not very comfortable with in the twenty-first century with our emphasis on God’s love and maybe even our bland sense of who God is. But the God that Jeremiah confronts is a jealous God; a demanding God; a God who will brook no turning back.

I have decided to follow Jesus (3 times).
No turning back (2 times).

All of the commitments we make to love and serve God, and the people of God, and God’s good creation; all the promises we make about doing what God wills and ignoring our own; all the covenants we make about being put to God’s use without any thought for ourselves—all these words sound hollow in the face of the words of a God who promises retribution if we do not fulfil the oaths we make.

Thus says the LORD: Look I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings. (Jeremiah 18:11)

Have thine own way, Lord (not if we can help it). This God sounds far too terrifying and for our modern and postmodern sensibilities. We want a God who is meek and mild—a gentle Jesus who wouldn’t hurt a lamb. But the God that Jeremiah confronts is a tough-minded and tough-acting God. Have thine own way, Lord? O God, what have we let ourselves in for? Did we really sign up to this?

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.

The familiar words roll off our tongues; but it’s not Jeremiah’s God that we’re usually envisaging as we pray them. We want a cuddly God, a SNAG God, a sensitive new age God, a God who knows the way around the kitchen, and is emotionally attentive. We don’t want Jeremiah’s God. We’re afraid of Jeremiah’s God. We’re maybe even angry at Jeremiah’s God. And with good reason!

Jeremiah’s God is a patriarchal God. There is only one authority—God; and all else quakes in God’s wake. There is only one rule, one regime with this God; and that is God’s rule, God’s regime. There’s little opportunity for complaint, or is there…? Or is there?

Because Jeremiah’s God is also the God who hears the people’s lament and who acts. Jeremiah’s God is a God who is determined to protect God’s people in the face of a hostile environment. Jeremiah’s God is a God prepared to make some tough decisions in order to shepherd the people of God in the right way.

There are some things that we are no longer comfortable with about this patriarchal God. We are suspicious of the type of authority that apparently brooks no dialogue. We are rightly concerned about the type of human authorities that will claim power for themselves on the basis of such a God.

But there are also some things about this patriarchal God that we need to bear in mind. The world which depicted God in this way was a very different world from our own. Family and community were everything; and family and community leaders carried great responsibilities for the welfare of those groups. There was no choice involved in that. If the patriarch did not protect the people, who would? If the patriarch would not make the difficult decisions to lead the people to safety, who would? And sometimes getting to safety meant crossing deserts, and meeting hostile peoples and fighting for survival in a harsh environment.

The family, the community, relied on staying together in order to survive. There was only one rule, the rule of the patriarch, the regime of the family, the cohesiveness of the community. Without the family or the community, you were literally on your own—on your own for food, on your own for shelter, on your own for comfort, on your own for protection.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.

O God, we acknowledge your rule, your oversight, your guidance. We want your way to be the way that we do things here. We want to align ourselves with you. We want to give your allegiance to your rule, your regime, your pattern of family organisation, for we know that you are the one who can protect us.

It is “patriarchal” in the sense that it is modelled on the traditional Jewish family structure where the patriarch provided the guidance and oversight for an extended family group. But for us, it cannot be patriarchal in the sense that it sets up hierarchies where men have authority over everyone else; or where power is concentrated in the hands of unquestioned authority figures.

God’s rule is one of justice, peace and the integrity of creation. God’s nature is love. And God’s hope and call is for the whole creation to be in relationship with their Creator, and thereby with each other. We are uncomfortable with a God who will apparently destroy for nothing; or is it for nothing…? Or is it for nothing?

Because Jeremiah’s God promises destruction upon those who will not live within God’s rule, will not live within God’s regime, will not acknowledge God’s way of being and doing.

This a God who will lead the people through difficult terrain in order for them to reach the promised land. This is a God who will prod and push a wilful people in the right paths. This is a God who will not let us turn back for our own sakes.

The commitment has been made and the allegiance has been given. This is a God who knows what it is to carry a commitment through. This is a God who knows what it is to carry the cross; who will see the project through to the end. This is a God who will not let us go—from before we were born until after we die. This is a God who knows us utterly as a potter knows the clay that is worked and the pot that is made from it.

Have thine own way Lord, have thine own way.
Thou art the potter; I am the clay.
Mould me and make me, till all shall see
Christ only always living in me.

This is the God who provides guidance and oversight, love and care. This is the God who longs for relationship with the whole creation; and this is the God from whom, through Jesus, we receive our inheritance as children of God.

Facing God's Judgement

2010-09-04T17:06:00.002+10:00

These days we don’t like the image of a wrathful God—and with some reason. The wrath of God has been called down by the people of God on all sorts of people who very likely didn’t deserve it. It’s been used to make us quake in our boots; and to scare us into believing. It’s been used to justify military action against peoples who are seen to be other than ourselves.

But if we ignore the God who is angry in the scriptures, we miss a lot of the story. In particular, we miss the God of justice, the God who demands justice, the God who will not let humanity rest in apathy, but who propels us into just action, if not for the sake of God’s love, then in the face of God’s righteous indignation.

Yet, we must be very careful when we interpret this imagery. The stories which we have handed down to us are complex and situated. They come from particular times and particular places; and they come from very human hands—human hands attached to human hearts and human minds with their own particular perspectives, and biases, and prejudices, and outright hatreds.

It’s been easy for the people of God to take hold of God’s wrath when we believe it to be directed at others. We have often missed the point of God’s righteous laments when they have been proclaimed over us and our unjust behaviours.

Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the LORD, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:12-13)

“O people, you have turned your back on the water of life which I offer and looked for alternate sources in places that are barren,” proclaims Jeremiah in the name of God. “You have deceived yourselves and neglected your calling.”

“Who us? Surely, not us? We’re good people. We’re righteous people. We’re the people of God.”

And yet certainly, it is us! It is us who looks upon the devastation of our world, apparently powerless in the face of natural disaster, and economic folly, and global warming. It is us who try as we might still manage to identify enemies and threats, and chase after shadows. It is us who pick the best places; and leave the worst to the littlest and the least. It is us!

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us… If we say that we have not sinned, we make [God] a liar, and [God’s] word is not in us. (1 John 1: 8, 10 NRSV)

O God, we are not the people we pretend to be. We say, “I do not lie, I do not cheat, I do not steal.” Yet, this cannot be true, for we hide our real selves from others, we compete with our friends for position and prestige, we take praise and honour that is not ours. In human frailty, we confess to you that our sin is so deep that we cannot even recognise it.

O God, we are not the people we want to be. We say, “I am not racist, I am not sexist, I do not offend anyone.” Yet, this cannot be true, for all around us people are in pain. Unintended, unrecognised injustices stem from our sin as individuals, as a community and as a nation. As the letter to the Romans reminds us:

I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Romans 7:18b – 19)

If God is angry, and God’s anger is righteous, then we must face the very real possibility that it is direct at us. It is directed at us who say we know God. It is directed at us who claim to follow God’s will. It is directed at us who dare to think that we might know or understand or recognise that which is of God and that which is not.

God’s anger is not directed against the stranger. It is not directed at those who have no inkling that there is a greater call on our lives. God’s anger is directed at those whom God has called—at us!

And perhaps that doesn’t sound much like good news to us! But it is to those who know they have nothing, who have no idea where the next meal or the next coat will be coming from. It is good news for those who are the poor and the humble, the littlest and the least. It is good news for the homeless, and the landless, for the destitute and the weak.

In the scriptures, God is depicted as being angry when the people of God turn away from God; and when the justice of God is transgressed by ill-treatment of those in need—those without the necessary social support required for survival and for thriving. In the scriptures, the classic picture of those most in need is “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger”—the ones who do not have any family or community to support them; the ones who rely on the kindness and goodwill of others; the ones who know their need and must throw themselves of the mercy of others.

God’s call to the people of God is to provide hospitality to the stranger, having received hospitality from the God who is strange to us. God’s anger is not directed towards the people with whom we feel uncomfortable, or whom we find different. God’s anger is not directed at those who do not know any better or who are at their wits’ end. God’s anger is directed at the people who should know better—the very people of God; and it is directed at the people of God when we turn away from God’s call to hospitality, and God’s offer of hospitality in our own wretched states.

In our readings for today, we have 2 pictures of God’s judgement. In Jeremiah, God is lamenting a people who left the God who loves them behind. And in the Gospel reading, Jesus warns about thinking too highly of ourselves and too little of others:

For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. (Luke 14: 11)

To be sure, God is always merciful, but merciful has never meant wishy-washy. God is concerned about what happens in God’s creation. God is concerned with our world. And God has every reason to be angry.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8b)

But we do know the state of our predicament. We do know that we don’t always see what is wrong and what is right. We do know that even when we try to get it right, we can get it wrong because we don’t see the big picture. And we can choose for ourselves the place of humility rather than exaltation. We can recognise who we are and humbly offer ourselves to God, for…

If we confess our sins, [God] who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1: 9)

O God, in the depth of our sin, we ask you to grant us forgiveness for the wrongs we have done and the good we have failed to do. Help us to recognise and receive your mercy that we might help others to do the same. And hold us as a loving parent holds a wayward children until we have found again the love and security we have within your will.

The God of Jesus is an exceptional parent. Love and mercy do not overlook the need for justice and reconciliation. Acceptance is not given without direction and boundaries. God loves us; and we know it. Therefore we have a responsibility to the people who need God most. So…

When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you… (Luke 14:12-13)

But God will see and God will know, because this is exactly what God has done for us!

Our Father

2010-09-04T17:02:00.000+10:00

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.

The familiar words roll off our tongues; but they are words of great significance. When we pray “Our Father” we are indicating our allegiance to living within God’s rule, God’s regime, God’s pattern of family organisation.

It is “patriarchal” in the sense that it is modelled on the traditional Jewish family structure where the patriarch provided the guidance and oversight for an extended family group.

But for us, it cannot be patriarchal in the sense that it sets up hierarchies where men have authority over everyone else; or where power is concentrated in the hands of unquestioned authority figures.

God’s rule is one of justice, peace and the integrity of creation. God’s nature is love. And God’s hope and call is for the whole creation to be in relationship with their Creator, and thereby with each other.

The imagery of God as Father places heavy responsibility on human fathers. The ultimate picture of God sets an impossible standard for ordinary, human beings. And that sometimes is not very helpful either. But God’s call to live and work within God’s rule is a call to everyone, not just fathers.

On this Father’s Day, we remember that human fathers are just that--human: that they love and care; worry and get angry and frustrated; get it right and get it wrong. And that together, as the people of God, we are travelling with each other, learning and encouraging one another to live and work within God’s family where everyone is important and all are called to authentic relationship with one another.

We also remember that we are called to acknowledge the God who provides guidance and oversight, love and care, longing for relationship with the whole creation; and who, through Jesus, we receive our inheritance as children of God.

Turning to God

2010-08-27T11:31:00.002+10:00

Human pride begins with turning our backs on God.
Wisdom begins with facing God in humility.
Those who hate God cringe before God’s judgement.
Those who receive God’s love with openness
are fed with the finest wheat
and, from the rock, honey which satisfies.
God overthrows the powerful abusers
and sets the humble in their place.
For all who exalt themselves will be humbled
and everyone who humbles themselves will be exalted.
(Cf Psalm 81:10-16; Sirach 10:12-18)

Facing God's Wrath

2010-08-27T11:02:00.002+10:00

These days we don’t like the image of a wrathful God—and with some reason. The wrath of God has been called down by the people of God on all sorts of people who very likely didn’t deserve it. But if we ignore the God who is angry in the scriptures, we miss a lot of the story. Yet, we must be very careful when we interpret this imagery.

God’s anger is not directed against the stranger. God’s call to the people of God is to provide hospitality to the stranger. God’s anger is not directed towards the people with whom we feel uncomfortable, for they are strangers too.
Rather, God’s anger is directed at the people who should know better—the very people of God; and it is directed at the people of God when we turn away from God’s call to hospitality, and God’s offer of hospitality.

In the scriptures, God is depicted as being angry when the people of God turn away from God; and when the justice of God is transgressed by ill-treatment of those in need—those without the necessary social support required for survival and for thriving. In the scriptures, the classic picture of such people is often given in terms of “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger”.

In our readings for today, we have 2 interesting pictures of God’s judgement. In Jeremiah, God is lamenting a people who left the God who loves them behind:

Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the LORD, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:12-13)

And in the Gospel reading, Jesus warns about thinking too highly of ourselves and too little of others:

For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. (Luke 14: 11)

To be sure, God is always merciful, but like a good parent, mercy is not given without direction and boundaries. God loves us; and we know it. Therefore we have a responsibility to the people who need God most.

Witness to Grace

2010-08-19T09:47:00.003+10:00

Each week, whether we celebrate Holy Communion or not, we gather around Christ’s table, the table of the reconciliation of all creation. As we focus on Stewardship from Thanksgiving, I invite you to remember both the promise of this gift of reconciliation and the vocation that we have within it—to worship, witness and serve as God’s people for the sake of God’s world. The following litany from Brian Wren captures that promise and vocation. It is a meditation on 1 Corinthians 11:17-29 which includes the Narrative of Institution, the telling of the story of the beginning of Christ’s thanksgiving meal.

What do you bring to Christ’s table?
We bring bread,
made by many people’s work,
from an unjust world
where some have plenty
and most go hungry.

At this table all are fed and no-one turned away.
Thanks be to God.

What do you bring to Christ’s table?
We bring wine,
made by many people’s work,
from an unjust world
where some have leisure
and most struggle to survive.

At this table all share the cup
of pain and celebration
and no-one is denied.
Thanks be to God.

These gifts shall be for us
the body and blood of Christ.
Our witness against hunger,
our cry against injustice,
and our hope for a world
where God is fully known
and every child is fed.
Thanks be to God.
(From Wendy Robins, ed., Let All the World, USPG, 1990)

Where Your Treasure Is

2010-08-19T09:26:00.002+10:00

In Luke 12:32-40, we are again confronted with questions about our priorities, our orientation, our focus. Are we oriented towards God, or towards the pursuit of things that are not of God? “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (v. 34).

A couple of weeks ago, in the sharing about Emmaus, Armidale Congregation was reminded of the importance of facing up to our real priorities: where our money, time and energy actually goes, not where we think it goes, or want it to go, but where they are actually directed, and what that means for what is our real focus in life? On Sunday 22 August, we’re going to focus on Stewardship from Thanksgiving. We’ll share lunch, give thanks for God’s work in the life of our congregation, and re-consider our own priorities.

In creation, God calls us to be stewards of the resources of creation. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, God invites us to be partners in healing and reconciliation, stewards of God’s grace. The Spirit works within the people of God as God’s stewards for the benefit of all creation.

If we experience stewardship as acting out of guilt or fear, then we may as well not bother: guilt and fear are not our calling in God. If stewardship is an act of thanksgiving for God’s gracious gifts to us in creating, reconciling and sustaining us as God’s people, then we just might be part of God’s building of a new commonwealth of justice and peace in our world.

So what is it that you are thankful for in your life, the life of the people of God, the life of the world? And do your real priorities reflect your thankfulness; or are they directed towards the “musts” and “shoulds” of other people’s “priorities” and preoccupations?

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (v. 32). Focus then on the things that are of God: the good creation; reconciliation in Christ; and the gift of the Holy Spirit enfolding us into very life of God. Your priorities, your real priorities will follow this focus as you celebrate the life we have in God.

Signs of the Times

2010-08-19T09:22:00.002+10:00

In Luke 12:49-56, Jesus exhorts his disciples to interpret the signs of the times. Would that it were so easy? It’s hard to know what are the significant social, cultural and economic movements in our time. In this election season, we are presented with many claims and counter-claims about what’s important and what will make things better (or worse).

As Christian people, we begin from a particular perspective in our analysis. We begin with our understandings of who God is, who we are before God, and what is God’s will and purpose, not just for us, but for the whole of creation.

The Twelfth Assembly of The Uniting Church in Australia (July 2009) adopted the statement An Economy of Life: Re-Imagining Human Progress in a Flourishing World. This statement describes how the Church understands God’s will for the reconciliation and renewal of all creation and what this means for how we understand human progress. It considers the values and goals of the current global economic agenda and suggests that a Christian economic perspective would be based on different values and aim to achieve the wellbeing and flourishing of all people and the planet. Pre-election materials have been prepared based on this statement by UnitingJustice (http://assembly.uca.org.au). That resource reminds us:

Like all citizens in a democratic state, Christians have a responsibility to actively engage in the political processes of their country. As Christians, however, we have a particular responsibility to think about how we do this in a way that answers the call to be good news in the world: to bring justice, peace and hope to those processes and to seek justice, peace and hope as outcomes.

Let us pray that we may faithfully interpret the signs of the times in God’s terms and act within God’s will for the whole creation. Happy voting!

On Building Bigger Barns... Or Not!

2010-07-31T12:00:00.001+10:00

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”

It seems a fair enough request to a Rabbi who might just know the law of inheritance or might just be willing to argue a different perspective for the rights of a younger son or a disinherited child. But we don’t know where the speaker comes in the family order, so we really can’t tell what he wants.
Still, it seems a fair enough request to a Rabbi who was interested in justice and fairness, who had told a story not so long ago in the text about a Good Samaritan who flouted the conventions of the time and the danger of a lonely road to care for a destitute stranger.

Yes, it seems a fair enough request…

Yet like a good Rabbi, frustratingly like a good Rabbi, the Rabbi does not answer with an answer but rather, another question, “Who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” “Who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”
What kind of question is this? Perhaps, it is a rhetorical one that really means “Get away with you. Why are you bothering me with this?” Maybe it is another invitation to identify the identity of this Rabbi like no other: “Well God, of course, gave you the right to judgement or arbitration!” Or perhaps, just perhaps, it is an invitation to think a little differently about the dilemma in which the person in the crowd seems to find himself. And yes, according to the text, it is a he; but then women didn’t get much of a look in in the inheritance stakes in first century societies.

But then, there is a diatribe about the pitfalls of greed. Surely this is the judgement that the Rabbi questions his competence or right or responsibility to give. What’s really going on here?

If it is an invitation to think about the dilemma a little differently, then the Rabbi goes on to provide a judgement anyway. What is really going on here?
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”

It is the someone in the crowd who comes seeking a judgement but not upon himself, upon his brother. And the Rabbi produces a judgement upon the someone.
But it would be too easy to preach a sermon against the extravagances and injustices of greed. And you probably know all about that. I certainly do. After all, Australia comes about 12th in the worldwide prosperity stakes, and we’re pretty good consumers.
But morality barely touches the surface of the depth of this intriguing passage. And moralism would be far too easy.

No, the key to this passage doesn’t lie in the injunction against greed or the warning about bigger barns, although such a warning may certainly be warranted. No, the key to this passage lies in the tag, the sting in the tail, the reference to the superiority of being rich toward God—being rich toward God. But what does this really mean?

You’d think once we’d located the key, we’d be well and truly on track, wouldn’t you? But it seems that this key just raises more questions than it answers too. This key is more like another puzzle which needs another key, another solution, another answer, another response. But I bet if we asked this Rabbi, we’d receive another enigmatic response again.

What would we ask anyway? What must I do to be rich toward God? It sounds an awful lot like a question asked not so long ago in the text: What must I do to inherit eternal life? It was asked by a lawyer who, for his trouble, got an admonition about loving God and loving neighbour. Although, he wasn’t particularly satisfied with that, so he kept on asking and received a story about a man whom the lawyer might not have recognised as being a neighbour but yet was a neighbour to someone who needed a friend, indeed a rescuer, a saviour. Perhaps things are becoming a little clearer—or not.

The Rabbi is asked for a judgement: a judgement upon a brother; a judgement upon a neighbour. And the seeker receives a judgement upon himself; upon his seeking. And the judgement seems to be pointing back to something a little earlier about loving God and loving neighbour; and a strange story about a strange rescuer.

Judgement upon another was not a part of the parable of the Good Samaritan; mercy was. And this diatribe about greed too is not so much a judgement upon the someone in the crowd, but an act of mercy pointing to the “better part” chosen by Mary of Bethany while Martha is distracted. That wasn’t so long ago in the text either.
These better barns and this question about inheritance, are they distractions too? Or perhaps detours up wrong paths. The Rabbi seems to be saying that, even if we could achieve what this someone in the crowd might want to achieve: the laying up of ample goods, allowing a life of relaxation, eating, drinking and merry-making, it would be for nothing. Judgement may come before we have achieved what we want to achieve. Or it may come after we have achieved what we want to achieve. More likely, it will come while we are trying to achieve what we want to achieve. But whenever it comes, what won’t be significant is what we have achieved or not, or how relaxed and comfortable we are. It will be where we are at with God. And where we are at with God depends on us seeking the riches of God… or does it?

The riches of God have nothing to do with what we can or want to achieve. The riches of God have nothing to do with what we seek or what we find. The riches of God have already been achieved for us in the person of the Rabbi himself, judge and arbitrator, redeemer and saviour.

And then, what is required of us is not a striving for riches but a response to the riches already received and that response consists in the love of God and the love of neighbour. This response is not one that can be achieved or accomplished. It does not have a beginning or an ending. It is not all that complicated. It hardly seems possible that we might have missed it. Rather, it is just what it means to be overwhelmed by the gift of freedom that we find in Christ, by the gift of re-creation that we have been given in Christ, by the gift of renewal that comes to us through Christ.

Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.”

The Rabbi just might have said, “You already have what’s coming to you. Sit back and enjoy it which is to say, respond to this gracious gift by honouring the one from whom it comes and nurturing one another in the riches of this grace.” And that my friends, is now and always has been the guts of the Gospel, and the inheritance of eternal life.

On Taking Responsiblity

2010-07-29T08:57:00.001+10:00

Someone comes to Jesus asking him to settle a dispute in the family. That is, after all, one of the things that rabbis could be called upon to do. And yet, in the tradition of the wise judges, a dispute settlement is never just that. It’s also a teaching moment. So, as is quite common in rabbinic discussion, the teacher turns the question back on the seeker, the student—“Friend, who set me to be judge or arbitrator over you?”

“Friend, who sets me as judge? Perhaps it is you. You are the one who seeks. But what is it that you seek? Do you come seeking wealth? Be careful of your greed. You might spend a lifetime seeking wealth, only to discover that you have never enjoyed life. What is it that you seek in this request for judgement? Is it worth more than your relationship with your brother?”

As humans, we are often tempted to appeal to external authorities for gain. And yet, what is the gain that we seek? Jesus asks the seeker to really examine the priorities in life; and to consider the request that is made—“Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?”

This passage reminds us to be careful in our appeals to divine judgement and arbitration because we just may find that that judgement falls on ourselves because our priorities are skewed. It asks us to take seriously God’s call to relationship in the entirety of our lives—even in situations of the seeking of judgement and justice.

This passage also reminds us of God’s mercy, because surely if judgement was truly made, none of us would be found innocent in our actions and in our motives.
This passage invites us to focus on the things that are important in a life centred on God; and to set aside those things that don’t fit.

This passage invites us to take responsibility for God’s judgement, which is God’s mercy, in our interactions with others.

“Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you? It is better that you take responsibility for your own decisions, because those decisions are what makes your life the life that it is—one centred on God; or one dedicated to building bigger barns.”

Persistence in Prayer

2010-07-29T08:34:00.001+10:00

The Gospel reading (Luke 11:1-13) reminds us to be persistent in discipleship: persistent in prayer; persistent in bringing our case and the needs of the world before God. The model of what we know as the Lord’s Prayer is provided. So does God need our persistence, or is this something about the need to us to continually be enfolded in the persistence of God?

Prayer can so often be understood as our asking God to do something for us or others; but does God really need us to tell God what to do?

My absolute favourite chapter in the scriptures is Romans 8. That chapter reminds us that it is the Spirit who prays through us, and that the act of prayer is God’s action of joining our wills to God’s purpose. It is God’s activity of forming us as God’s people and enfolding us into God’s mission in the world.

26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

In the face of God’s persistent, we are called to persistence in opening ourselves to God in prayer for God to work in and through us.

Seeking One, you are the beginning and the end of our search.
Finding One, you are the alpha and omega of all discovery.
Asking One, you are the voice and the silence of our exploration.
Giving One, you are the fullness and the emptiness of all yearning.
Persistent One, you never abandon your search for us,
nor tire of our repetitive toings and froings.
Receiving One, you endlessly welcome us home,
and spread before us a feast
in the face of our constant requests for mere morsels of bread.

Search us, O God, and find within us the secrets we hide.
Ask us, O God, and receive from within us the pain we bear.
Keep knocking at the door of our lives
until we open our wills to your purpose,
our lives to your life, and our yearning to your hope. Amen.

A Prayer of Adoration & Confession

2010-07-27T18:53:00.002+10:00

Seeking One, you are the beginning and the end of our search.
Finding One, you are the alpha and omega of all discovery.
Asking One, you are the voice and the silence of our exploration.
Giving One, you are the fullness and the emptiness of all yearning.
Persistent One, you never abandon your search for us,
nor tire of our repetitive toings and froings.
Receiving One, you endlessly welcome us home,
and spread before us a feast
in the face of our constant requests for mere morsels of bread.

Search us, O God, and find within us the secrets we hide.
Ask us, O God, and receive from within us the pain we bear.
Keep knocking at the door of our lives
until we open our wills to your purpose,
our lives to your life, and our yearning to your hope.

When we forget to seek you and discover that we have lost our place:
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

When we ask once and leave it at that:
Christ, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.

When we draw back from knocking, lest we disturb you:
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.

Strengthen our courage; bolster our endurance;
spur us onward in your way in our world
through the power of the Holy Spirit
and the name of Christ.
Amen.

Discipleship

2010-07-15T09:54:00.001+10:00

The story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42) is an extraordinary one; not least for the ways that it has been used extraordinarily to suggest that busy people (especially women) are somehow less the servants that they appear to be. In this way, the story has often created a double bind for people who take responsibility for many tasks, only to discover that their sense of responsibility is not really appreciated, and may in fact be denigrated as “less holy” than the activity of another.

But in its context, this story was never meant to be another weapon to bludgeon busy people (especially women) over the head with. Rather, it was a story about the freedom of the service of Christ.

Mary is permitted to sit in the place of a disciple of a rabbi—“at his feet”, i.e. learning in dialogue with him. She is allowed a freedom not normally given to women. She is treated and accepted as a disciple of a rabbi.

Martha is offered the opportunity to try something different—not to be burdened by the responsibilities that fell to her because of her gender and her position in the household; but to accept the new responsibility of the disciple of Jesus.

This story is not a juxtaposition of the active and contemplative life. The responsibility of the disciple of a rabbi was the responsibility of engagement also. Rabbinic teaching and learning occurs in dialogue between teacher and student; and sometimes it may be that the student offers a new thought or insight to the teacher as well as vice versa.

Rather this story is an invitation to everybody to be Jesus’ disciples. Whether it’s a fishing net or the washing up that you have to leave behind to travel as a disciple; whether you are female or male; whether you are the eldest or the youngest; whether you are Jew or Gentile (as Paul reminds us in Colossians 1:15-28), you are called to be a disciple of the one who has reconciled all things in his very life, death and resurrection.

Who is My Neighbour?

2010-07-07T16:46:00.001+10:00

Year C Ordinary Sunday 15—9.30 am, 11 July 2010—Armidale Uniting Church—Luke 10:25-37

The story of the Good Samaritan is a very familiar one. In fact, it’s so familiar that it’s a bit of a problem. It’s a problem because it’s a parable that has almost totally been reduced to a good moral story. So, it doesn’t quite have the impact of its original telling. It doesn’t quite have the impact of a story which challenges and turns upside down our understandings about life and about God. It’s a bit of a problem really.

But it’s not quite so much of a problem if we put the story back into its context. If we remember to read it in the context in which Luke puts this parable.
Someone well versed in the law of the Jews comes to Jesus to put him to the test. The lawyer’s intent is to check Jesus out. Perhaps he wants to catch Jesus out. Perhaps he wants to decide whether Jesus is someone who can be talked to and trusted, who can be regarded as really knowing the truth about life. For whatever reason, the lawyer is said to have asked of Jesus, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Now maybe the lawyer has come searching and the question is an honest one and maybe the lawyer is just trying to make a point about the orthodoxy, the rightness, of Jesus’ views. But for whatever reason, the question is asked and an answer is given but it’s a cautious one. In fact, it’s not an answer at all, it’s another question, “Well what does the law say about it?” And before the lawyer can blink, he is providing the answer to his question himself.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.”

And Jesus responds, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
Now it looks just a little bit stupid to have turned up asking a question of Jesus, giving him the respect due a Rabbi if you provide the answer to the question yourself. The lawyer wants to engage Jesus in a rabbinic discussion. This exchange is too short. So to save face, to prove that his question is legitimate or to show that he is honestly seeking the way of God, the lawyer asks, “Well then, who is my neighbour?” And before we can blink, Jesus has told the story of a man who was going from Jerusalem to Jericho.

Now I guess that you know that it was a rough road. And I know you remember that the story says the man was robbed, beaten and left for dead, that a Levite passed by and a priest but neither stopped to see what was going on. And I know that you know that in Jesus’ story it was a Samaritan who offered assistance to the man, who took him to an inn and who paid the man’s keep until the Samaritan could return.
But the story isn’t really an answer, so far as answers go. Rather, it is another question, a challenge to the assumptions which are behind the lawyer’s approach to Jesus. Thus the story concludes, “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?” “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?”

And the lawyer jumps in quickly and says, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”

Now the question that the lawyer asks is “who is my neighbour?” and the question which Jesus asks is “who was neighbour to the man?” And it would be easy to say that Jesus is making a point to the lawyer about the fact that rather than determining who are the neighbours who should be loved, he should be making neighbours by loving those around him and especially those in great need. That would make the story of the Good Samaritan a nice little moral tale with a good and reasonable message—a reasonable exegesis.

Or we could listen more carefully to the question that the lawyer asks is “who is my neighbour?” and the question which Jesus asks is “who was neighbour to the man?” and think about the lawyer being cast not as Levite or priest or even Samaritan but as the beaten and half dead man on the road. And then our story just might become a parable which challenges and turns upside down the presuppositions which the lawyer has brought to this conversation with Jesus.

You see, the lawyer has come as one who thinks that he knows or that he can know truth, that he can obtain eternal life, on his own, by himself, by doing certain things. Love of God and of neighbour are works which will unlock the door to eternal life as soon as he can understand how to do them perfectly.

But Jesus says, “Uh uh, see yourself for a moment not as the one who brings all the resources, all the knowledge, all the ability. See yourself as the one who has been beaten and nearly destroyed, who needs love and friendship, especially the love of a neighbour. See yourself as one in a position not to be able to choose who is your neighbour. See yourself as one who is chosen as neighbour by another. And not by someone in your own class, but by someone whom you would consider not to be orthodox, not to be right, not to be worthy, not to be able to receive eternal life, a Samaritan.”

“Then, see your neighbour as the unexpected one who offers you life without strings attached. See neighbourliness as being founded in grace and not in pedantics or legalism. Now tell me this, which one of those three was the man’s neighbour?” Of course, it is obvious and the lawyer replies, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.”

“Now that you know that being a neighbour is a precious gift, a gift of grace, not something to be argued and defined or clarified with a hundred minor rules. Now you know this, go and be a true neighbour. Now you know that being a neighbour is not patronisingly offering the crumbs from your table but truly loving and caring unconditionally and without thought of reward, go and do the same. Now that you know that being a neighbour is recognising the worth of those whom you would reject, go and do likewise.” And we can only presume that the lawyer did because that is where our story ends.

But the story doesn’t really end there because that story is our story too. And we could easily ask the question that the lawyer asked “Who is my neighbour?” and look for the same easy answers, instead of hearing the question that Jesus asks “Who was neighbour to that man?” and seeing ourselves as the ones in need of neighbourliness, and seeing those others whom we had thought to be neighbourly towards as the ones who just might offer themselves to us. And perhaps in turning our assumptions upside down, we might discover something about real neighbourliness.

In our world, those neighbours who offer us something of themselves are not always the people we would wish them to be. They come from different cultural backgrounds. They have different beliefs. They have different ideas about the world and how we should live in it. They have different ways of living. They come from far away like the many asylum seekers in our world. They may be as close as our children and grandchildren who live different lives in different ways from the lives we have lived. They may be the people we pass each day in the street or those we only see on the television or read about in the newspapers.

All of these people have lives of their own, unique gifts of their own, unique contributions to make to us. All of those people are our neighbours—not because they need us, but because we need them to make our lives whole. We need them to share with us their insights, their ideas, their hopes, their dreams, their visions. Because together, not alone, we are called to be neighbours, part of the promised realm of Christ which is already being fulfilled in our midst.

“Who is your neighbour?”

“Who has been neighbour to you?”

“Go then and do the same.”

Prevenient Grace

2010-07-07T10:17:00.004+10:00

Emmaus Walk--Northern Inland--July 2010

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long way from home, a long way from home.

I vividly remember the time when I first became aware that God loved me, God loved me just for who I was, not for who I could be or I should be.

I was a fairly anxious child, always trying to get things right and to do the right thing. In hindsight, I know now that perhaps just a little of that came from my parents being very busy and very worried about the world; and I caught that worry well and truly. I would cry myself to sleep most night worrying about all sorts of the things—the end of the world, whether I would be a better person tomorrow; and I didn’t really have a sense of being loved and feeling secure.

It was at an Easter Camp that somehow the message was given and I finally received it, that God loved me, not for the future and for my potential, but just because, just because I was me, a creature of God’s good creation.

It is the very nature of God to have grace, to be gracious, to offer God’s self generously and without reserve to the creation that God has so lovingly made. The very act of creation is an act of God’s grace.

Before we know anything about God, God has already been at work in our lives—creating us, forming us, shaping us.

In Psalm 139 (NRSV), we read:

13For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. 15My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 16Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

All things come from God; and everything we know has its origin in God.

The Psalmist is Psalm 8 (NRSV) wonders at God’s interest in human beings in the context of the wonder of creation:

1 You have set your glory above the heavens… 3When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; 4what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? 5Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. 6You have given them dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under their feet…

The word “grace” comes from the Greek word charis meaning gift. Grace is not simply carrying yourself with style; nor is it overlooking something that might otherwise have bothered you. Grace is the absolute, unprovoked, unconditional generosity of God. God creates us, God reconciles us and God makes us holy through absolutely no effort of our own. God is above all things, and beyond all things and precedes all things in God’s great works of creation, redemption and sanctification—making us, liberating us and sustaining us as God’s people.

Now just as we understand there to be only one God—in 3 persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer), so we also understand grace as one thing—the very nature of God—but we also think about it having 3 forms.

We think about God’s grace as being:
1. Prevenient (i.e. making and preparing the creation including us);
2. Justifying (i.e. accepting and saving God’s wandering creatures, us,); and
3. Sanctifying (i.e. sustaining and continuing to form us as the people of God for God’s mission in the world).

In this talk, we’re focussing on “prevenient grace”, but remember there’s only one grace, the very nature of God—we just like separating out the different ways in which that grace is at work in our lives.

The word “prevenient” comes from the Latin praevenire meaning “to come before”. God made us in God’s image for relationships. Just as the very nature of God is relational—to be in communion in 3 persons; so it is part of our very created nature to long and yearn for relationship. And the only satisfactory, fulfilling relationship is the one that we have with our Creator, with God. In this respect, we can talk about human beings as being “the glory of God’s creation” because we understand ourselves to be made particularly for relationship with God. And in that, we are also the hope of God’s creation—the hope of God being in relationship with the creation. God’s utter desire is to be in relationship with God’s creation and particularly with humankind, with us.

God’s grace comes before everything because grace is the very nature of God. Before we know God, God knew us. Before we fail God, God loved us. Before we honour God, God creates and awakens us for relationship. Everything we have comes from God; and everything we know has its origin in God. We have been gifted with all this through the graciousness of God—God’s utter, unprovoked, unconditional desire to share God’s self with us.

I remember when I was perhaps most fully able to accept just that—to accept that everything we have is God’s gift. I’d been working with a distance theological education college for nearly 7 years and the last 2 had been absolutely horrific in terms of workload—first as I oversaw the establishment of the postgraduate programs and then as I took on the role of Acting Principal. I was offered a preferential interview for the role of Principal and just before I was due to get on the plane to go to it, I realised that I could simply not sustain the intensity any longer. Taking on the role of Principal would be detrimental to my health. So I got on the plane to tell the interview panel that I couldn’t take on the role even if they decided they’d like me to continue. Of course, that left me with no place to go—I was looking at no job. I knew that I was too burnt out to even think about a congregational placement at that time; and I wasn’t really sure that anyone outside the church would want me in the state I was in. During the middle of that year, I had put in an application for the position of Lecturer in Liturgy & Theology at United Theological College in Sydney, more for my own sense of thinking about future possibilities than any real intuition that this was the job for me. I had already been knocked back on positions from the theological college in my own Synod. And then the position was offered, and Russell said to me, “This is the perfect role for you.” It was pure gift; and it helped me to understand those difficult final years at in my previous position as pure gift because of what they gave me; and it helped me to look back on so many parts of my life and say, “Even though I did not know it, God was there in my life and in the life God’s people.” Everything I have comes from God; and everything I enjoy or not, love or not, appreciate or not, has its origin in God.

Grace is utter good news for us. God created us. God loves us. God wants us to be in relationship so much that God is prepared to even enter God’s own creation in the person of Jesus (but that’s for another talk and someone else to tell you about). As creatures made in God’s image by God, we too are literally programmed for relationship—it’s in our “DNA” as human beings. And we are particularly created for relationship with God who will do all that God can to enable that relationship—all that God can except taking away our free will, our free decision to be in relationship with God. God will never force God’s self on us, because coerced or forced relationship is not relationship at all. God treats us with utter respect as unique and independent beings, despite the fact that God created us especially for God.

And this is God’s covenant with us. God created us for relationship. God promises us to always be open for and indeed enabling our relationship with God.

We are not alone,
we live in God’s world.
We believe in God:
who has created and is creating,
who has come in Jesus,
the Word made flesh,
to reconcile and make new,
who works in us and others
by the Spirit.
We trust in God.
We are called to be the Church:
to celebrate God’s presence,
to live with respect in Creation,
to love and serve others,
to seek justice and resist evil,
to proclaim Jesus,
crucified and risen,
our judge and our hope.
In life, in death, in life beyond death,
God is with us. We are not alone.
Thanks be to God.
(The United Church of Canada, General Council 1968, alt. 1998)

God’s covenant with us begins in creation; is present throughout human history, fully revealed in Jesus Christ; and present with us now through the work of the Holy Spirit. It is utter, unprovoked, unconditional gift—the eternal nature of God—God’s grace.

So, where do we get this wonderful gift? It’s not ours to buy or solicit, to beg or bargain for. God’s grace is fully revealed in the unique revelation of Jesus Christ, but it’s always with us; it’s encoded in our nature as God’s created beings, God’s creatures. And there are times when we just might catch a glimpse of just a slice of it as we confront the wonder of God’s good creation in the cycle of the seasons, of planting and growing and harvesting. And there are other times when we just might catch a glimpse of just a bit of it as we participate in Christian community, in the body of Christ, caring with and for each other. And there also may be those times when we are comforted, or challenged, or changed and we will know that it is God at work in our lives through the power of the Holy Spirit, working personally in us and interpersonally through others.

But it will never be something that we think we have brought about. It will never be something that we think we’ve earned or deserve. It will never be because of something that we could or should be. It will always be because of who we are and whose we are: God’s much loved, much sought, fragile, frail, glorious creatures—the ones that God wants so much to be in relationship with.

But mostly, of course, we will only recognise this truth in hindsight, as we look back on our lives and discover that God was there all along, even though we did not know it.

An anonymous writer in the Methodist tradition in the late 19th century expressed it this way:

I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me.
It was not I that found, O Saviour true;
no I was found of thee.

Thou didst reach forth they hand and mine enfold;
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea.
‘Twas not so much that I on thee took hold,
as thou, dear Lord, on me.

I find, I walk, I love, but oh, the whole
Of love is but my answer, Lord, to thee!
For thou wert long beforehand with my soul;
Always thou lovedst me.

The only question left is “What is your response?” to this previous, gracious gift.

Boast Only of Christ

2010-07-03T17:56:00.001+10:00

Year C Ordinary Sunday 14 Sermon--2 Kings 5:1-14; Galatians 6:1-16; Luke 10:1-20

So Jesus sends disciples out—70 of them; and as they go, he warns them, “You won’t find the going easy, so you have to have some strategies in place. If people listen and respond, work with them. If they don’t get it, don’t waste your time. Move on. If they don’t get it, don’t waste your time. Move on.” Is this the Jesus we’re used to hearing, or at least thinking about? Is this really what Jesus said, what Jesus meant, what we’re supposed to do in Jesus’ name? “If they don’t get it, don’t waste your time. Move on.”

We want to believe that everyone can get it; that everyone will understand; but what if they don’t? We want to believe that we live in a Christian society, or at least one based on the Judaeo-Christian tradition; we want to feel secure that we share Christian values or values compatible with Christianity with our neighbours; but what if we don’t? And what do we do if we find ourselves in such a situation? What do we do if we realise that that’s the situation that we’ve been in all along? “If they don’t get it, don’t waste your time. Move on.”

We are living in a time when it is clear that not everyone does share the values that we would want to uphold. We certainly know that not everyone understands God in the way that we do. But where is the compassion with such an injunction: “If they don’t get it don’t waste your time. Move on.”?

If nothing else, Jesus’ words force us to confront the truth that we will not always find the message of Christ welcome in the places we inhabit. And to some extent, Jesus’ words let us off the hook: “If they don’t get it, don’t waste your time. Move on.” If you know the message is not getting through, then don’t waste your time, don’t waste your energy, don’t risk despair, ridicule and disheartenment. Move on.

But why? Why doesn’t Jesus say, “Persist”? “Never give up. Never give in. Never believe that all is lost. Always believe that you just might get my message across.”

As Galatians reminds us, other barriers don’t seem to get in the way of sharing the good news. Both Jews and Gentiles, both circumcised and uncircumcised may be part of God’s new creation in Christ Jesus. Why is the line in the sand, or rather the dust, drawn by Jesus here?

And then, the conclusion of the story in Luke indicates that the 70 received an amazing reception—that they rejoiced at the authority with which they’d been received. None of Jesus’ fears were realised apparently. And still Jesus cautions, although the caution is slightly different: “It’s not about what authority others give you. It’s about who you are in God.” “It’s not about what authority other give you. It’s about who you are in God.”

Whether people like you or don’t, whether people receive the message or not, it’s never about that. It’s always about who you are in God. You don’t need to save the world—God does that. You just need to be true to the good news. You don’t need to save the world. You just need to be true to the good news.

We can get so wrapped up in what we do, how we behave, what we achieve that it’s sometimes very easy to forget what we were doing it for, why we were behaving that way, or in whose name we were seeking to achieve. Jesus’ words remind us that it’s never about us in that sense. It’s always about us as the people whom we are in God.
For God requires very little of us. God doesn’t expect us to be God. God expects us to be us.

Naaman didn’t quite understand it either. He thought that something momentous should be required of him in order for him to be healed. He couldn’t believe that the prophet, by way of messenger, only asked him to bathe in the Jordan River.

He thought that it should have been the king who made the proclamation, but it was just a prophet and not even a prophet, but a prophet’s servant.

Naaman thought that the things of God needed to be bigger and grander and more difficult; but it was just a simple request from a servant that God demanded of Naaman. And this is all that God asks of us too—just something simple.

We humans want our lives to be grand, to be wonderful, to be larger than life, but that is not what God asks of us. God asks of us only that we honour God; only that we tell God’s story; only that we share the good news in word and deed. God doesn’t ask us to save the world, because that, friends, is God’s work. God just asks us to respond to that marvellous act of salvation.

“If they don’t get it, don’t waste your time. Move on.” Not because God does not care for them; not because things can’t change, but because God does not ask us to change them. We are not the source of such miraculous power. We are not the centre of such momentous action. We are just servants at the door of a prophet, and more than a prophet, of the reconciling one Jesus Christ. And God asks of us only this: that we deliver the message and move on.

And surely, in delivering the message, we will discover unexpectedly and joyfully, that God has used us in God’s work.

On Irenaeus

2010-06-29T10:44:00.002+10:00

There are many unresolved questions in Christianity as those of you doing “Living the Questions” have been exploring. Perhaps one of the greatest of those unresolved issues is the question of “theodicy” (literally the “righteousness of God”). Essentially this dilemma asks:

If God is all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful, then where does evil come from?

In more recent times, the dilemma has been asked in more human terms: “Why do bad things happen to good people?” There is no definitive Christian response to this question, although many theologians have wrestled with it.

One theologian who wrestled with it and posed a possible solution was Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons at the end of the 2nd century AD. The Christian calendar commemorates Irenaeus on 28 June each year.

In the face of people who tended towards thinking about having 2 gods (a good one and an evil one), Irenaeus affirmed both the goodness of the one God and God’s unity. A corollary of this affirmation was the emphasis on the goodness and purposefulness of God’s creation.

These affirmations led Irenaeus to understand humans as being on a journey from immaturity to maturity towards God. Part of that journey involved suffering or encounter with evil, in order to learn to persist faithfully on the journey. Of course, this approach isn’t enough in the face of momentous human tragedy such as the Holocaust, but it does remind us that part of being created is living in a world that is constantly changing. Change around us forces change within us; and, if we understand ourselves as creatures of God, then we must also expect that God will be working in and through those changes.

Process theology is a contemporary heir of Irenaeus and his emphasis on humanity’s journey towards God. Some process theologians even go so far as to suggest that God is also in the process of “becoming” from the limited perspective of our lineal view of time. If we believe that God is all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful, then surely we will expect that God is travelling the journey with us, in all its changes, and vagaries, and difficulties; and that God is the ultimate goal and purpose of all that we are and do by the very grace of God.

Sermon at a Blessing of an Inter-faith Marriage

2010-06-29T10:35:00.002+10:00

All that we have comes from God. All that we have comes from God. This profound belief is shared by the peoples of the book, the great Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All that we have comes from God.

This is the place from where we begin when we want to understand what it means to be human, what it means to be created, what it means to be gifted with the world in which we live and the life that we have. All that we have comes from God.
This is the place from where we begin when we want to understand our proper response to God, what it is that we owe God, what it is that God wants of us. All that we have comes from God.

And all that we are asked to do in return is to honour God, is to love God, is to return thanks to God. All that we have comes from God.

The reading from the Qu’ran read today reminds us to “give glory to Allah” and bids us to offer praise at every time of day. The reading from the epistle to the Colossians reminds us that “whatever we do, in word or deed”, we should “do everything … giving thanks to God”. This is the place from where we begin in all that we do, in everything that we have, in all that we are. All that we have comes from God.

And this is the place from which our covenants with one another begin.

The gift of relationship is a gift from God; and good relationships are founded in God—a God who is relational and who longs to be in relationship with us; a God who created us, who loves us and who gifts us with every good thing. This is the place from where we begin as we covenant with one another—as we covenant with one another to live together in society, in community, in family, in marriage. All that we have comes from God.

Relationships founded in God exhibit important characteristics. The Qu’ran speaks of dwelling in tranquillity with love and mercy in our hearts. The Colossians reading speaks of clothing ourselves “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience”, “with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony”, and of the “peace of Christ” ruling our hearts. All these qualities are fruits of a love grounded in recognition that all that we have comes from God.

Hesam and Maria come today seeking God’s blessing on their marriage. They share the gift of faith in the tradition of the peoples of the book. They do not share exactly the same faith; but they do share the desire to ensure that their relationship is grounded in the God from whom all that we have comes. They come desiring to love God, and honour God, and return thanks to God for the gift they have been given.
None of us come to our relationships exactly the same as the other people with whom we covenant. Each one of us is a unique person, a unique creature of God. Each one of us comes to the life we have with different skills, different abilities, different gifts. Each one of us comes to our relationships with our own struggles, our own baggage, our own foibles. All that we have comes from God.

When we know that what we have comes from God, we learn to understand life as gift. We discover that life is present. And we desire to live that life in all its fullness as the gift from God that it is. We meet difference with compassion and understanding. We meet variation with wonder and awe. We meet challenge with commitment and endurance.

And so today, Maria and Hesam come promising to be compassionate with one another, to live in the wonder of each other’s differences and variations and to meet the challenges that their relationship will bring with commitment and endurance. And they come seeking God’s blessing on their intention. Surely, this too is gift indeed. All that we have comes from God; and all that we owe God, all that God requires of us, all that is necessary for us is to honour God, to love God, and to return our thanks to God for these gifts.

Addressing the Powers (Expanded)

2010-06-19T20:49:00.002+10:00

The Gerasene demoniac—this unfortunate character has assumed legendary proportions, and the legend begins right here in the story, a story recounted in both the Gospels of Mark and Luke. And it’s exactly the kind of story that a tale written for a Roman or a Gentile or a Jewish or indeed a postmodern audience would include because this tale has it all—horror and pathos, comedy and humour, politics and double entendres (double or hidden or secret meanings). This story is all that it seems and more. It is a story of intrigue—social and political intrigue—and larger than life characters and events.

The demoniac himself is unbelievable—“he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds”. This character is unrestrainable and unbelievable. As Walter Wink puts it, “it really is possible to fashion chains too powerful for anyone to break” (Unmasking the Powers p. 45).

For Rene Girard, the demoniac is a scapegoat—someone who bears the brunt of the community’s social and political dysfunction in the face any real alternatives to change their particular lot. The townsfolk allow his “escape” in order to vicariously pursue and subdue the real demons that beset their community. This outcast has survived and escaped. Somebody must be arranging and permitting it.

They must be deliberately keeping him alive, and they chain him in such a way that he can break free. This must have been acted out as a ritual many times before. “The Gerasenes and their demons have for some time settled into some sort of cyclical pathology”… In a sense they must have enjoyed and even needed this drama since [at least in the story in Mark] they beg Jesus to leave immediately and not meddle further in their affairs.

Whether the demoniac is scapegoat or not, he is metaphor—metaphor or symbol for that which cannot be talked about directly, the domination of the Roman conquerors and the suppression of the peoples over whom they reign. The person with unclean spirits, the Gerasene demoniac, calls himself “Legion”. The text glosses the name with “for many demons had entered him”. However, “legion” isn’t just about many. It’s also about kind. Legion speaks of troops of invaders and conquerors, suppressing and repressing not just individuals, but whole populations. This story is not simply a story about one person’s possession. It resonates against the background of the whole political situation, not just of the Middle East, but of the “known world” at the time. Roman legions conquered and suppressed peoples creating a “Roman peace” which was not a peace at all for those who were conquered. The Decapolis, the regions of the 10 cities, the region of Gerasa or Gadara or Gergesa depending on which ancient authorities you use, the “Decapolis knew the legions. They were not ‘mobs’… but one of the most disciplined military formations the world has ever known” (Wink p. 46). The Gerasene demoniac was symbol of the community’s oppression and scapegoat for it.

He does what they would like to do: tear apart the chains and shatter the fetters of Roman authority… “No one had the strength to subdue him.” But he had also internalised their captivity and the utter futility of resistance… Here was the perfect scapegoat, a holy fool, an escape valve, a living parable of [the community’s] discontent. Tradition rightly calls him the Gerasen demoniac, for that is precisely his function—to be the demoniac of the Gerasenes. That is why he [or the demons plead, depending on the version of the story] that his demons not be sent “out of the country” [or into the abyss]. They “belong” there. They are the spirits of the region, and the demoniac is their incarnation… He is “occupied”, just as they are… the demons “speak Latin, present themselves as a ‘legion’, and like the Romans have only one wish: to be allowed to stay in the country [or not to be sent into the abyss] (Wink pp. 46-47).

But what does Jesus do? He does precisely what the demoniac does not want, precisely what the demons do not want, precisely what the community does not want, because all of them are complicit in this pathology, this unhealthy cycle, this dysfunction. Jesus addresses the oppressive powers and evicts them.

This is not simply the story of a personal healing; it is a much bigger story than that. This is the story of the way in which the way of Christ challenges dysfunctional communities, political powers, oppressive regimes and the various pathologies which perpetuate and replicate such dysfunctional and repressive situations.

This story asks us to take seriously the socio-political implications of the Gospel; of the gift of Jesus for the world. And it asks us to take those implications seriously not simply for the first century, but for the twenty-first century—for our socio-political situation now.

Who are the powerful people or groups in our society? What do they invade and conquer? And whom do they suppress? Who are the scapegoats who stand in for the oppressions that are really at the heart of our dysfunction; and what unhealthy cycles are we drawn into and refuse to be released from? The answers will be different from those of the time of Jesus and of the writer of the Gospel of Luke; but they will be no less important for us and for our awareness of the impact of salvation or liberation in Christ for our time.

In the face of the aftermath (and perhaps the ongoing nature) of the Global Financial Crisis, as we confront human-made disasters of the proportion of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, and aware of the powerful forces at work in transnational commercial and financial dealings, we must ask questions about how the “powers that be” in our time are working—for whom, with whom and against whom? And we must ask those questions against the background of the Gospel message of God’s love and Jesus’ compassion for the afflicted.

As we prepare for this year’s federal election, we must ask questions about how the “powers that be” in our time are working—for whom, with whom and against whom? And we must ask those questions against the background of the Gospel message of God’s love and Jesus’ compassion for the afflicted.

This is because the demonic is not merely a cluster of pathological symptoms, but a radical rejection of God and a state of estrangement from God, from one’s own higher self (the imago Dei [the image of God]), and from full social being (Wink p. 59).

At the inauguration of The Uniting Church in Australia, a Statement to the Nation was issued. In part, it said:

…we affirm that the first allegiance of Christians is God, under whose judgment the policies and actions of all nations must pass. We realise that sometimes this allegiance may bring us into conflict with the rulers of our day. But our Uniting Church, as an institution within the nation, must constantly stress the universal values which must find expression in national policies if humanity is to survive.

We pledge ourselves to hope and work for a nation whose goals are not guided by self-interest alone, but by concern for the welfare of all persons everywhere — the family of the One God — the God made known in Jesus of Nazareth the One who gave His life for others.

This is the power to whom we owe our only allegiance. It is a power that does not produce dysfunction or facilitate pathological or unhealthy cycles of behaviour. It is a power that works for liberation, for salvation, for justice, for peace and for God’s good creation.

In [Jesus’] encounters with the demonic there was no protracted struggle, no violence aimed at the exorcist, no magical words, crucifixes, holy water—not even the invocation of the divine name. Jesus is totally calm, totally in control. There is no question… whether Jesus will prevail. The demons are depicted as weak fractions of power unable to tolerate the presence of divine authority. The demonic attempts to make a part the whole, and cannot withstand the power of anyone who is related to that Whole in and through and for which all things exist… What made his exorcisms so distinct, and so frightening to those in authority, was their integration into his proclamation, in word and act, of the inbreaking of “the new order” (Wink p. 58).

For if it is because of the power of God that the powers are addressed and the demons cast out, then God’s realm is surely here.

…the early church freed people from the fear of demons, not so much by grim combat… but be a triumphant satire of their impotence in the face of the risen Christ...(Wink p. 64)

The demons flee from the scapegoat into scape-pigs and rush into the chaos of the abyss, the sea, leaving Jesus to move on to the next confrontation, and the community free to face the new reality of God’s liberation in Christ.

Addressing the Powers

2010-06-19T19:07:00.002+10:00

The person with unclean spirits in today’s Gospel reading (Luke 8:26-39) calls himself “Legion”. The text glosses the name with “for many demons had entered him”. However, “legion” isn’t just about many. It’s also about kind. Legion speaks of troops of invaders and conquerors, suppressing and repressing not just individuals, but whole populations. This story is not simply a story about one person’s possession. It resonates against the background of the whole political situation, not just of the Middle East, but of the “known world” at the time. Roman legions conquered and suppressed peoples creating a “Roman peace” which was not a peace at all for those who were conquered.

The Gospel reading then asks us to consider not simply the personal healing of individual lives in the presence of Jesus; but also the political situation. Who are the powerful people or groups in our society? What do they invade and conquer? And whom do they suppress? The answers will be different from those of the time of Jesus and of the writer of the Gospel of Luke; but they will be no less important.

In the face of the aftermath (and perhaps the ongoing nature) of the Global Financial Crisis, as we confront human-made disasters of the proportion of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster, and aware of the powerful forces at work in transnational commercial and financial dealings, we must ask questions about how the “powers that be” in our time are working—for whom, with whom and against whom? And we must ask those questions against the background of the Gospel message of God’s love and Jesus’ compassion for the afflicted.

At the inauguration of The Uniting Church in Australia, a Statement to the Nation was issued. In part, it said:

…we affirm that the first allegiance of Christians is God, under whose judgment the policies and actions of all nations must pass. We realise that sometimes this allegiance may bring us into conflict with the rulers of our day. But our Uniting Church, as an institution within the nation, must constantly stress the universal values which must find expression in national policies if humanity is to survive.
We pledge ourselves to hope and work for a nation whose goals are not guided by self-interest alone, but by concern for the welfare of all persons everywhere — the family of the One God — the God made known in Jesus of Nazareth the One who gave His life for others.

Ordination of Women

2010-06-12T16:31:00.001+10:00

The Gospel reading for this week reminds us that there were a number of key women in the group of Jesus’ followers—Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna are three that are named (Luke 8:2-3). Women were members and leaders of the Jesus’ movement from the very beginning.

The Uniting Church in Australia has ordained women since its inauguration. All three denominations which came into union had ordained women. The Congregational Church was the first to ordain women. They voted to ordain women in 1908 and ordained Winifred Kiek in 1926. The first woman ordained in the Methodist Church was Margaret Sanders in 1969; and in the Presbyterian Church, M.J. Thalheimer in 1974.

The Uniting Church remains committed to the ordination of women on the following grounds:

1. We ordain both women and men to the Ministry of the Word because we believe ordination without discrimination on grounds of gender is a fundamental implication of the gospel of God’s love in Christ for all human beings, without distinction. For this our understanding we appeal to Scripture as testimony to the living Word, which is Christ.
2. We remind the members of the Uniting Church, ministers, candidates for the ordained ministries and, in particular, Presbyteries — which have responsibility for the act of ordination — that the Basis of Union affirms the ordination of women.
3. We affirm that the Holy Spirit has called and continues to call women as well as men to the ministry of the Word.
4. We recognise that in ordaining women as well as men to the ministry of the Word we, in company with other Churches, have departed from an almost universal practice of the Church throughout most of its history. We believe we do so in obedience to the gospel.
(Why Does the Uniting Church in Australia Ordain Women to the Ministry of the Word? 1990)

The Way

2010-06-03T11:42:00.001+10:00

The church has turned green! And it’s not just about ecology, although thinking about our environment is an important part of it. We have entered “Ordinary Time” or the season after Pentecost in the church year. The Uniting Church’s lectionary card describes it this way:

A period of time that varies in length depending on whether Easter is early or late. In this period, the church recalls its faith in the Holy Trinity. It seeks to relate its faith as a people of God to Christ’s mission in the world. It commences with Trinity Sunday and concludes with the feast of Christ the King.

The season after Pentecost is all about discipleship. Discipleship is about following the way of Christ. At the first session of the Living the Questions series on Wednesday, we were reminded that that is how the early followers of Jesus referred to the journey that they were on: the Way. They drew the imagery from the strong thread of journeying stories in their Jewish religious traditions, and phrasing such as that used in Deuteronomy:

You must therefore be careful to do as the LORD your God has commanded you; you shall not turn to the right or to the left. You must follow exactly the path that the LORD your God has commanded you, so that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you are to possess. (Deuteronomy 5:32-33 NRSV)

In Acts, “the Way” is used to refer to the path that the followers of Jesus continued to journey after his death and resurrection:

Neither can they prove to you the charge that they now bring against me. But this I admit to you, that according to the Way, which they call a sect, I worship the God of our ancestors, believing everything laid down according to the law or written in the prophets. I have a hope in God—a hope that they themselves also accept—that there will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous. (Acts 24:13-15 NRSV)

During this season after Pentecost, we explore life in “the Way”.

Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

2010-05-29T21:18:00.003+10:00

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: ‘To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to all that live. O simple ones, learn prudence… (Proverbs 8:1-5 NRSV)

The book of Proverbs depicts Wisdom as a street-seller crying out at the crossroads, hawking her wares. It’s all there, it’s all on display, and you can have some if you really want it.

People live! People learn! People be who you were called to be! People have wisdom; receive understanding; learn to live and be free.

But we don’t! We don’t see God’s good creation when it’s right in front of our faces. We don’t hear God’s good news when it’s being shouted in our ears. We don’t smell the aroma of God’s presence when surely God is in all and above all and around all and beyond all we know and have and experience.

Yet still, we persist in our own cries out to God, out to the world, inwardly to ourselves: “Where shall wisdom be found? Where can we get wisdom? Where is the place of understanding? O God, make us wise!”

One of the classic Australian novels, The Getting of Wisdom, by Henry Handel Richardson explores the pursuit of wisdom in the life of a young woman who has dreams apparently beyond her station. In her pursuit of wisdom, Miss Laura Tweedle Rambotham does some very silly things—pretending that she is someone she is not and that she has the attention of someone who has barely noticed her. And yet, at the end of the story, despite its title, there is no great enlightenment. At the moment when Laura leaves school after facing up to the futility of her exploits and suffering humiliation for them, there is no sudden realisation of the meaning of life, merely the next step, the next episode in her life. There is simply life ongoing: learning, making mistakes, relating in community again and again and again, within the ordinary constraints and freedoms of a human life. Where is wisdom in all that? Where shall wisdom be found?

Paul has some thoughts about that. And the book of Romans has been identified as the place where those thoughts are most focussed. Where shall wisdom be found? Only in the unique relationship we have with God through Jesus Christ; and it is unique.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:1-5 NRSV)

Wisdom personified in the Hebrew scriptures informs the early church’s understanding of Jesus and his relationship to God. Wisdom is right in our faces; right in our midst; right before our eyes. And wisdom is all about life, real life, human life, mortal life, created life.

The great preacher and theologian William Willimon puts it this way:

Wisdom is practical… Wisdom is about how you make your way in the world, something that you do in the home, a way of everyday life. Here is a faith that is not content to be relegated to Sunday glimpses of eternity (Kierkegaard’s phrase). It’s a faith that comes out to where we live and affects how we live.

True wisdom is about how we make our way in the world.

And that’s where Jesus and Wisdom collide. For in Jesus, Christian people acknowledge that we have a God who has made our way in the world—a God who has got dirty in the midst of creation; and ensured that we might participate in that practical wisdom of Christ.

We don’t make our own way in the world very well. We get side-tracked. We think we have to pretend to be something other than we are. We pretend to have the attention of others who barely notice us. We want to be important. But wisdom is about making our way in the world; and in order to do this, we have been given the gift of a God who makes our way for us—a God who has journeyed in God’s own creation as one of us.
In this God, our very existence is justified, our very striving is validated, our very creaturely existence is blessed. Through this God, we may know peace—peace, not because we do not need to continue to make our way; but because even as we do we know we are accompanied by one who knows what it is to make that way in a very mortal world—a God who has got dirty in God’s own creation.

And it precisely out of this understanding of a transcendent God, who has made a way in our world, that we also receive the understanding of the Trinity—of a God who is completely at home in relationship, of a God whose very nature is relational.
This is Wisdom--a God who loves us because that is God’s nature; a God who makes our way in the world; and a God who continues to journey with us as we seek to honour this precious, practical gift we have been given—the very justification of our own existence by a God who rejoices in the inhabited world and delights in us, the human race.

Christian Conference of Asia & Thailand

2010-05-20T09:13:00.001+10:00

We welcome James Ellis back after being an intern with the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA). James was part of the Uniting Church’s contribution to the preparation for the 13th Assembly of the CCA held in Kuala Lumpur in April. CCA began in 1959. The Uniting Church is one of 4 churches in Australia who are members. The others are the Churches of Christ, the Anglican and the Armenian Churches.

The theme for this Assembly was “Called to Prophesy, Reconcile and Heal”:

God’s call to people to prophesy, reconcile and to be a healing community is a tremendous challenge and a call to costly discipleship. The theme is a reminder as well as a call to the churches in Asia to respond to God’s call and engage in prophetic, reconciling and healing ministries without counting the cost.

This theme has been particularly underlined for the CCA this year by the current situation in Thailand where the CCA has its offices (although those offices are in Chiang Mai not Bangkok where the confrontations between government authorities and protesters have been occurring).

The Church of Christ is the only member church of the CCA in Thailand. On 15 May, their General Secretary wrote:

Our society is presently marked by divisions and mistrust of one group against another... At the moment the government and the red-shirts have reached an impasse and the tension is escalating. Please pray for us—that people will remain calm and a peaceful and just solution will be found to the present conflict. Pray also for a long term reconciliation, that our nation once again will be united for the common good.

Just 2 days later, the CCA reported:

As of yesterday, Sunday, about 29 people died and over 200 injured. The situation has yet under control. The Government has announced a public holiday for today (Monday) and tomorrow (Tuesday). The government also declared announced a state of emergency in 20 provinces including Chiang Mai… Please keep Thailand in your daily prayer.

Ascension

2010-05-20T09:12:00.001+10:00

So, at the end of the season of Easter, we hear the story of Jesus’ ascension and wait for the celebration of Pentecost.

We’ve been hearing promises of the “coming” of the Holy Spirit in some of the readings we’ve had. But the Spirit, who is God, has always been present, so what are we waiting for?

The emerging church remembered the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and tried to make sense of what was happening from there. Was God still with them? What would become of them? What was the way ahead?

The story of the ascension reminds us that Jesus too is God. The journey “upwards” makes more sense in a world where heaven is understood as being above and the world of the dead as below; but the intention is clear: Jesus no longer lives in our world with us in the same way as he had. Yet we are not alone; nor are we left without direction and purpose.

The story reminds us that we have a role to play in God’s mission also. If Jesus was God incarnate, then we are called to be the body of Christ—to witness to Christ, to the message of Christ, and to live as Christ in the world. We don’t do that on our own, but in the power of the Holy Spirit who connects us with Jesus and with the one who sent Jesus, his “heavenly father”. The story of the ascension reminds us that we are enfolded into God’s mission in the world; into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus; and into the work of the Holy Spirit.

So, we remember and we celebrate that Jesus is God; and that God is with us in and through the work of the Spirit. We also hear our commissioning as the people of God who bear the mark of Christ for the sake of the whole of God’s creation.

Peace in the Spirit

2010-05-08T20:37:00.002+10:00

“Not as the world gives do I give to you.” Of course, the peace that the world gave at the time of Jesus and while the Gospel of John was being collated and recorded was the Pax Augusta, or as we now know it, the Pax Romana (the Roman peace). It was a period of “relative peace and minimal expansion by military force” which lasted for about 200 years from about 25 BC to 180 AD. This peace was not simply the “absence of war”; it was the effective suppression of any real resistance to the Roman Empire. It was an imperial, colonialist act—one perpetrated upon many peoples and cultures (most of the then “known world”). And it was a propaganda coup. A society that has existed on continual armed conflict and ongoing political expansion found it difficult to live without constant military pushes and conquests. Roman citizens themselves needed to be persuaded that prosperity was possible without continual military expansion. And naturally, conquered societies must be convinced of the futility or lack of necessity for resistance. But somehow, it was basically achieved and peace was declared by the closure of the gates of the temple of Janus in Rome in at least 3 grand ceremonies to which ancient historians refer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana). This Pax Romana was the world’s peace: a political, colonial and imperial peace. It was not the peace that Jesus was invoking upon the disciples.

Jesus was calling down a peace that did not involve suppression, that was not simply the absence of conflict; a peace in which the disciples would be accompanied by an advocate and guide rather than an occupying force.

14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.

Jesus was talking about a different kind of peace and with it, a different kind of hope—a hope not for the absence of social and political upheaval; but the hope of being continually in God’s presence. Of course, this is the hope and peace that was promised from the beginning of creation—a life in God’s presence. And yet it was and is a hope and peace, that humanity has failed to understand, failed to appreciate, and failed to live for. It is a hope and peace for which a Pax Romana is a cheap and tawdry substitute; and, more than that, a horrible and fraudulent approximation. The peace that Jesus was talking about was the peace of being in utter and continuous relationship with God, of living in God’s economy of shalom, of dwelling in God’s city.

That vision of hope and peace is picked up in the book of Revelation with its vision of the city that needs no temple because God is so apparent that those that dwell within the city need no other tangible reminders to love, honour and serve God. This is a city where the gates are not closed proclaiming a peace of imperial suppression; but the gates are wide open welcoming the world and offering divine hospitality.

And yet even the vision of Revelation has its own imperialist overtones: “nothing unclean will enter it”. Bill Loader writes that “Ultimately a vision that is satisfied to permanently exclude the immoral carries a conflict within itself and threatens to unravel the good news or relegate it to something of temporary relevance” (http://wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/CEpEaster6.htm). The world’s peace is always close to us, tempting us with its illusory nature—telling us that it is possible to suppress and exclude all that we find “unclean”, not to our taste, not acceptable to us, so that we might be clean and perfect and pure on our own. But that is not God’s peace, that is an imperial, colonialist peace—albeit a tempting one.

So, what then does God’s peace involve? Jesus says, “Those who love me will keep my word.” And you better be sure that “keeping my word” isn’t just about keeping a secret or saying the right things in the right places, it’s about living out a lifestyle—a lifestyle of love for God and love for one another arising from being in utter relationship with God; coming out of being the very dwelling place of God.

14:27 Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.

Not a Pax Romana, but a Pax Christi, the peace of Christ that does not suppress but frees for relationship with God and with one another; a peace that is concerned with hospitality and justice; a peace that is about a full life, a life lived in God.