Base text of a Sermon for Pentecost 10. Year C. Luke 12.49-59

Base text of a Sermon for Pentecost 10. Year C. Luke 12.49-59 

With its powerful imagery, evocative symbols and intense language our Gospel today is disturbing.

Fire is cast upon the earth, Jesus declares he has come to bring division rather than peace, and that division will be experienced within households and families, the very spaces that should be full of harmony and unity.

These messages from Jesus, and there are plenty of them across the Gospels, are apocalyptic. They point to, predict, describe and in some way call forth a coming apocalypse, which simply means revealing or uncovering. This is the uncovering of the divine purpose, where God, in the person of Christ at his second coming will intervene and enter creation. In doing so, the evils and the woes of the world will be set right. Divine rulership and justice will be enacted, and the world will be forever changed.

This was the vision of the apocalypse in later Jewish thought, and there is no doubt Jesus, in some form or other, proclaimed this message.

How we, 2000 years after the Gospels embrace, nuance, redefine or reject these predictions of apocalypse is one of our many struggles of faith, one of our many journeys we undertake as we are formed by holy scripture, church tradition and reason to form our own understanding and meaning.

This struggle can become particularly poignant when we hear Jesus’s proclamation that he comes to bring division as part of our service of holy Eucharist, our service of thanksgiving to God. Because from start to finish our liturgy proclaims unity over division:
When enter as individual members of the Body of Christ, at the west door, as we have described in our liturgy sermon, we give up and surrender our separate selves, and symbolically become One, one Body with One purpose, to worship the One God.

And we bless this single, unified, one holy and living God. We come by the Grace of the same One God. We confess, believe in one God and one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and one baptism.

And theologically, though there are many physically separate celebrations of the Eucharist on any single Sunday, in many different parishes, the consecrated bread and wine are spiritually and theologically one. That is, there is not an individual “Body of Christ” on the Altar at St Cuthberts’ and a different, “Body of Christ” on the altar at the Cathedral. The one, undivided Body of Christ manifests or incarnates in different Eucharists, but in reality is One.  EXPLAIN

Over the millennia, this theme of unity has been one of the core verities, essential divine truths of the church, however the church was manifest, in each and every culture and within each and every country and society. There is only one. Unity is the greatest virtue, reflecting the deepest Jewish mystical and religious innovation that the divine, that God, was one.

… and yet: Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! 

One way of understanding this is that the unified Gospel message, spoken by the One, Christ, who is unified with the Father and the Spirit, causes division because we ourselves are divided.

In bringing the perfect unity of God into the disunity of creation, Christ shows us own our divisions, our own divided hearts, causes us to see clearly who we are, how we are divided. The undivided light of Christ shines into the hiddenness of our divisions and our tendencies to divide.

This is why the Gospel, this is why Christ himself, is sometimes hard to take. This is why even in the household, here most likely referring also to the early gatherings, or churches, there can be division. As Christ, as unity enters our lives, that which is not unified, and that within ourselves that does not wish to be unified is exposed.

Exposed, made real, uncovered, just like an apocalypse – a revelation - uncovered so we can choose to turn again to Christ, turn and choose unity over division.

To do so we must trust the single and undivided unity, trust that we are made for such unity, trust that we can enter and be part of that unity.

But in this world of division – just look at the news, at any level, local, state, national, international, in this world of division, as part of this world of division, this is hard.

And of course, the ultimate division is death, which we will all experience. Here we are divided from our family, from our community, our friends and from life itself. Divided and separated on all levels.

But even in death, Christ as unity is present.

On Friday, I preached for the funeral of a friend, the Reverend Emily Bowser, held in our Cathedral, our Mother Church. In the homily we explored how at funerals we are actually in a divided space and between the worlds – between the world of the living and the world of the gone, the dead. Between the world of those we love and see and the world of those we still love but see no longer. Between the world of life, the liturgy and service we enact, and the world of death, the person who has died and all the faithful departed.

And today, at each and every Eucharist, we too are between the worlds. We too are between death and life, the death and resurrection of Christ, between the death of the individual self, and life of the unified body of Christ. We too are between the life personal and the life eternal given to us in the body and blood.

And while we are in this mysterious in-between space, right now, neither our individual selves nor the perfected unified body of Christ self, while we are in the in-between, we are held by the One, our Saviour Christ, the One who is Ruler of Life and the Ruler of Death, the One who loves the living and the gone, the one who loves perfectly we who are not perfect, the one who exposes our divisions so we may be united in His love. And so, our liturgy which remembers Christ in life, death and resurrection, actually enacts the mystery of his unity exposing our division so we may be united in him as One:

We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.

Because it is our division and tendency to divide that broke the body of Christ. It was division, Judean from Greek, person from person, humanity from God, that led to the Crucifixion which we remember in our eucharist, in our breaking of bread.

But so too do we remember the glorious resurrection –

We who are many are one body.

Because it is only by exposing, accepting and revealing our division, our brokenness and desire to break that we can actually become whole, become One, become real.

Christ coming to divide, actually leads then to his unity,  leads to our unity in him - if we all share in the one bread. Amen.

Base text of a Sermon for Pentecost 9. Year C. Matthew 15.21-28.

Base text of a Sermon for Pentecost 9. Year C. Matthew 15.21-28.

Our Gospel today is both shocking and a perfect experience of how we enter scripture and are formed and changed in our moral and ethical decisions.

It is shocking because it presents a very different Jesus than the compassionate saviour we are used to. Here, Jesus refuses to help a mother in distress, not once, not twice, but three times. And why does he refuse? Because of her race, her ethnicity; because she is not a Jew, one of the lost sheep of Israel.

To rescue this text some preachers tell us Jesus is ‘testing the faith’ of the Canaanite woman.

The woman’s faith, however, that Jesus is the Jewish messiah, is evident in her first unprompted words, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David”. It is further evidenced by the repeated use of ‘Lord’ and kneeling before Jesus, an act of worship. It is only at verse 26 that Jesus finally addresses the woman and so could even begin to ‘test’ her faith.

There is no test of the woman’s faith, and the passage remains shocking.

As confronting as it is today, however, it was even more outrageous to the original hearers of Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew’s audience were mostly Jewish followers living in urban Antioch, part of a culture which traditionally kept itself apart from non-Jews, the Gentiles,  whom they considered unclean and referred to  derogatively as “dogs” - which puts a new slant on the Jesus’s words, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  

To get a sense of the full ‘shock-factor’ of this passage and to bring this inspired and holy text alive, we could render it like this:

Jesus left that place and withdrew to the district of York and Beverley, the place of frontier wars, the place where wheat is grown.

Just then, at that exact time, a Noongar woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is possessed, taken by the white man’s grog.’

But he did not answer her at all.

And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Get rid of her, break up with her, for she keeps shouting after us.’

He answered, ‘I was sent only to the white colonialists of Australia.’

But she came and knelt before him in worship, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’

He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’

She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the puppies eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’

Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was free and sober instantly.

Our changes highlight part of what Matthew is communicating in this extraordinary passage, a key to which is the concept of possession.

The Canaanite woman has a daughter who is tormented, that is possessed, by a demon. God, in the Jewish Scriptures, our Old Testament, gives the land of Canaan to the Jews for an everlasting possession.  The Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures used by Matthew’s community, the Septuagint, uses the same root word for possession of Land and possession of people.

So, the Jews possessed the Land of Canaan, just as the original English settlers possessed this Land we call Western Australia.

Now, the plea of the Canaanite woman appears to be for Jesus to de-possess her daughter alone. But something far more is going on here.

At the time of Jesus, there were no Canaanites. They had all been wiped out. This is why in Mark’s Gospel, written before Matthew, the woman is referred to accurately as Syrophoenician. Matthew in his writing changes her to be a Canaanite.

Why? By making the woman Canaanite, Matthew is able to symbolize the both the ancient enemies of the Jews and the concept of all Gentiles, that is all non-Jews, just as our Noongar mother can represent all First Nations peoples, Yamatji, Wiradjuri and others.

For us today, the daughter is all the daughters, all the progeny, all of the future of our First Nations peoples, the people excluded in their own possessed Land, the people excluded from the Table where bread is served.  

Our Noongar mother, like the Canaanite woman is pleading not for herself, and not only for her daughter – but for the future of her entire people.

And as a nation, in this Land that was possessed, this Land whose sovereignty has never been ceded, we as a nation, also heard a plea, two years ago, a plea to give First Nations Peoples a Voice to Parliament.

That plea, like the first pleas from the Canaanite woman was rejected and ignored.

But thanks to the grace of our loving God, Her scripture, Her gospel is alive today, and we ourselves are in the text, and so we know that we will, at some point hear another plea.

Because are actually in the Gospel; we are with Jesus and his Jewish disciples, being confronted by a Voice that simply wants us to listen, to include the excluded and free this living Land from possession.

We are still being asked to give our Aboriginal sisters, brothers and companions a place at the table, to be heard, nothing more – just as the Gentiles at the time of the writing of our gospel wanted a place at the Lord’s table with the Jewish disciples.

In our Gospel, Jesus’s disciples urge him to send the Canaanite woman away. The original Greek word used here refers to divorce. This is why our “modern” version has the disciples urge Jesus to, ‘Get rid of her, break up with her.’ Referring to a break-up means there is already a pre-established relationship between Jesus and the woman, between the Jews and the Gentiles. We can’t divorce someone we are not married to.

And we – we in the text, we also profess a preestablished intimate connection between First and Second nations people in our country, because all people, all of us, are made in the image of the same God and all of us are nurtured and sustained, every day, by the same Holy and Living Land.

But our possession of the Land, our concept of Terra Nullius, our White Australia Policy, the Stolen Generation and our endemic racism denies this holy relationship between first and second peoples. We, like the disciples, have wanted to break up, having nothing to do with our First Nations sisters, brothers and companions.

But God’s holy relationship, what She has created, cannot be denied, and Her will be done – as Christ himself shows us.

Most importantly, we images of God, we in the text, we are called not to be the disciples, who exclude, but Jesus; Jesus who drawing on the love eternal, hears the pleas of the Noongar mother and changes – who despite initially saying no, no, no, now finally says ‘Yes’, yes to full inclusion and yes to a full voice.

As we can. As we will do In the Name of Christ. Amen. 

Base text of a Sermon for Pentecost 8. Year C. Luke 12.13-21

Base text of a Sermon for Pentecost 8. Year C. Luke 12.13-21

Our Gospel today is sharing some very common, yet still impactful wisdom. Wisdom we often sum up by the phrase ‘you can’t take it with you’.

And if that was all Jesus was trying to convey, we could leave it there, finish the sermon, end the service early and move onto our celebrations.

However, there is something more going on here. Jesus is leading us into a deeper understanding, an understanding that as we grasp and realize it more and more will change our life and our relationships.

In way of context, the Gospel according to Luke clearly depicts God on the side of the poor and wealth as something not to be prized or sought after.

And we, being raised in a culture and a church that has promoted, even if at times promoted with visible hypocrisy, these values, all this seems to make sense. We can’t take it with us, right?

But the ancient Jewish culture valued things differently. Two signs of God’s blessing were plenty of children and plenty of wealth. Being rich and having a large family to carry on your name meant that you had received God’s favour.

It is therefore significant that our passage begins with someone wanting to divide the family inheritance. While this could on occasion happen, it was frowned upon because it split families, it alienated brother from brother and caused dissension in the blessing – children – provided by God.

So, Jesus refuses the request – refuses to be an “arbitrator” – and in the original Greek this is also often translated as ‘divider’. He refuses to be an agent of division, of separation, refuses to participate in an act that may lessen the blessing of God, children, because of inheritance, the acquisition of possessions.

And then we come to the parable, and here we need to quickly look at the Greek. English has only one word for life, but in New Testament Greek there are three. All can refer to life as a whole, but each of the three also has a particular meaning.

There is Bios, from where we get the word biological, referring to the physical, bodily life of a person. 

Another word for both life and soul and, is the word Psyche, from where we get the word psychology, the personal soul or spiritual life.  

The final Greek word is Zoe. This is life which is physical, which is spiritual but also, and most importantly, it is the life eternal.

When Luke writes that “one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions”, he uses the word Zoe. Our regular human life, but more particularly, our eternal life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, anything we may “own”.

At the very heart of our parable are the concepts of possessions, that which can be possessed, possession, the act of possessing, and possessor, the one who possesses.

The rich man assumes he possesses many possessions, assumes what he has belongs to him, is personally owned by him. But our text tells a different story …

“The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 

The land does not ultimately belong to any person, any nation, any society or any people. The land, the beautiful, richly diverse and creative land is created by God, infused by God, shows forth the divine and remains always God’s.

But more than this, the specific Greek word chosen by Luke is not land in the generic sense, like a parcel of land listed on a real estate website. It refers to land, soil, a place, which though uncultivated, grows fruit-bearing bushes.

Uncultivated. The land ‘owned’ by the rich man is not cared for, not tended, not cultivated and nurtured – it simply overflows with the fertility of God. It overspills with abundance – which the rich man claims as his own, claims to possess, claims to have the right to store and sell for his own personal benefit and profit.

We can see reflections of this appropriation, this tendency to assume the right of possession within our economic and social systems. Exploitative capitalism posits the rights of the super-rich to benefit from possession of the Land, possession of the means of production, and more recently attempted possession of even the base level DNA of plants and livestock. Similarly, today worldwide there an estimated 50 million people, all made in the image of god, who are victims of the modern slave trade, 50 million people, including at least 40 000 here in Australia, who are seen as possessions by those who seek to possess.

All this horror and pain stems ultimately from our desire to possess. And in our parable Jesus highlights this desire at its nadir.

“I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years”

To my soul. To MY soul … the man, his own ego identity, who he thinks himself to be is claiming possession of his soul. The Greek word used here is psyche, which can be, and is later in our passage, translated as life … The rich man is claiming to own, to be in charge of, to possess his own life.  He is claiming life, the ultimate gift from God as his own possession.

And we all unthinkingly do this – we all, everyday think of our lives as our own, we all assume our self is our ultimate possession. We all assume our inner life, our true self is the one thing that is really ours. But even this interior sense of who we are, our psyche, our self, our life, even this is not really our personal possession. As God says to the rich man:

“This very night your life is being demanded – required back - of you”

Like the rich man we will all die, we will all lose our self, our psyche, lose our life when God requires it back.

And what awaits is the gift of the life eternal, the Zoe-life made real by the death and resurrection of Christ. But we cannot, we must not, Jesus warns us, assume that we ourselves can possess this Zoe-life, because we ourselves, our psyche must and will die. Our psyche-life, our interior personal spiritual life can never be our Zoe eternal life.

Just over a year ago my mother died with her psyche-self and life, 82 years old suffering from long-term Alzheimer’s. Her Zoe-life eternal identity is not her psyche life when she died, in pain and without full cognition. Nor is her Zoe life identical to her mature and fruitful psyche life at 50, when she was alive and joyous in her care for injured birds. Because this life of hers, which she, like all of us at times, assumed was HER life, was never really possessed by her, but was a gift from God, who one day drew it back.

Our eternal life, our life beyond the world we know, beyond ourselves as we know them, cannot consist of any possession, because in the life eternal there can be no possessions, not even of our own life.

There is only Gift.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Base text of a sermon for Pentecost 6. Year C. Luke 10.38-42. Keeping Mary Magdalene

Base text of a sermon for  Sermon. Pentecost 6. Year C. Luke 10.38-42. Keeping Mary Magdalene

Both our Gospel, and the Saint we recognize today, the incredible Mary Magdalene are surrounded by assumptions and misunderstandings. In the case of the Gospel, they are simple, understandable and wholly innocent. In the case of Mary, they are far more complex, fraught with the exercise of power and misogyny.

In the Gospel we hear of Jesus and his disciples on their way entering “a certain” village and being welcomed by Martha who had a sister called Mary. The similarity of this story with the story recounted in the Gospel according to John, of Mary, her sister Martha, with their brother Lazarus, can easily make us assume that we are hearing the same story. But this is an assumption and, upon reflection, one that is, at the very least, open to speculation.

The account in John takes place in Bethany, not far from Jerusalem. Today, we are still in Galilee, miles away from Bethany, Jesus having set his face towards Jerusalem.  More importantly, in John the house that Jesus enters is identified as the home of Lazarus. Here in Luke, it is Martha’s home.

Now it did, in Jewish society, occasionally happen that a woman owned their own house and was the mistress of the home. But this virtually never occurred when there was a surviving male relative. In our account today, if Lazarus was in the picture, it would be described as his home. So, in Luke, Lazarus, is nowhere present. How does the square with the story in John?

All this to say that even our simplest of bible stories are actually rarely simple, often contradict or nuance other accounts and are always, always worthy of much study and attention, not unexamined assumptions.

When it comes to the sainted Mary Magdalene the common assumptions are far worse. For millennia, the church, popular culture and common knowledge assumed Mary worked as a prostitute. And though there has never been any scriptural or early church tradition evidence for this attempted denigration of Mary, it persisted and still persists. Movies made in the last five years still depict Mary in this way.

As far as damaging myths and attributions go – towards people and groups of people - we can seldom pinpoint a moment in time when the balance of the scales turned and a new, false and damaging story was created. But we can with Mary. It occurred on Easter Sunday in the year 591. As part of his sermon for Easter, Pope Gregory conflated Mary with the unnamed sinner woman who anointed Christ’s feet in chapter 7 of Luke, explaining her sins were sexual in nature. And thus, Mary forever after was seen as being a prostitute.

And we can perhaps, also think of other moments, in our own recent history when the same dynamics occurred.

In early October 2001, senior members of the Australian government, asserted that a group of people seeking asylum had, when attempting to reach Australian, deliberately sunk their boat which put their children into the water, obviously threatening their lives. Dubbed the ‘Children Overboard’ affair, the subsequent findings of an inquiry revealed conscious deception and misinformation on behalf of the government. By the time the report was released though, a year later,  it was too late. Illegals, as people seeking asylum were, and are vilified as, were prepared to sacrifice their own children to flout Australian law and force their way into our country.

Anyone working in the refugee field, heard this trope countlessly in the years ahead. We still hear it sometimes today, just as we still hear that Mary was a prostitute.

Of course, these misattributions do not arise in a vacuum. Children overboard struck and stuck because much of Australia had already deep and existing fears and hostility towards people seeking asylum. Mary was declared a prostitute, partly, because of the misogyny within the early church and the deep fear of sexuality and women’s power by church leaders. The tension concerning women’s place in the church had been there for centuries, today’s reading show us some of the origin of that tension.

As we noticed, the house is Martha’s home. We know the early Jesus movement was financed by wealthy women and met in their homes. These house gatherings were the early Church. And, in Greco-Roman society, the sphere of the home, of the household, was the sphere of the mother and women.

So, while the early church was within the homes of early followers, women’s leadership appears to have been accepted and normal. Once, however, the church became large enough to meet in public spaces, this changed. The public sphere, the public and market space was the sphere of the father and men. Women, it appears, were quickly sidelined and lost their status. And all this contributed to the mistrust of women disciples including Mary who we celebrate today.

Of course, this mistrust and fear of Mary never stopped people praying with her, venerating her, learning from her and entering into relationship with her. Just as, despite the harmful rhetoric of children overboard, people still formed deep relationships with refugees and people seeking asylum.

It is our relationship, walking alongside saints like Mary that allows us to learn from them and to share with them their deep communion with the Divine. And what we can learn from Mary is incredible.

Because Mary stood with many women until the bitter end, witnessing Jesus die on the cross even after all his male companions had fled and scattered, we learn from her how to bear witness to injustice and suffering, staying fully with those we love until they die.

And since Mary went to the tomb and stayed in her grief and from that depth of human grief, encountered risen divinity, we can learn to be in those spaces and times where the absence of those we love becomes a presence in and by itself …and know that the absence of human presence can, and will become divine presence.

Above all, Mary teaches us spiritual friendship. In both our canonical and other Gospels we see Mary and Jesus sharing a deep and transformative spiritual intimacy, showing us how to be with Christ as an intimate friend and companion.

Because the relationship of Mary and Jesus is the deepest of all relationships: that of a dedicated disciple with their beloved divine, creature to creator, human to God, person to perfection.

This intimate friendship  is so beautifully captured in the resurrection narrative of John. There, while at the tomb searching for Jesus’s body, Mary, mistakes Jesus to be the gardener. She asks where Jesus’s body is, wanting to be with him, even in death, just to have his body.

But then Jesus speaks her name, “Mary” –  and by that naming restores their relationship once sundered by his death.

He calls her by name, by the true self who she is, the deepest aspect of her being, to see him again, to see him anew, to see his resurrected body and, therefore the resurrection ahead for all of us.

This intimate calling by name, this open response of Mary – “teacher”, she cries in response to her name – her open response to view the real, this is the gift this saint gives us today. 

Because like her, like Mary, Christ also calls us by name, by our own name, seeing our real self, our deepest self, he calls us intimately and deeply from his deathless body, from his resurrected self and from his glorified soul,  so we too become deathless, and we too are resurrected and we too are glorified more and more – as Mary was. As Mary is.

In his name, Amen

Base text of a sermon for Pentecost 5 Year C. Luke 10.25-37

Base text of a sermon for Pentecost 5 Year C. Luke 10.25-37

Our readings today bring us to the core of our faith: the great commandments, neighbourly love, and eternal life.

We start noticing a change in translation from the NRSV to the NRSVue, and why translations matter. In the NRSV and some older translations, the person who asks Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” is described as a ‘lawyer’.

Here, in the NRSVue he is referred to as an ‘expert in the law’. The distinction is important because law the person is expert in is the Torah, the Jewish religio-cultural law. He is not a lawyer in the modern sense of a university-trained lawyer or a tax lawyer.

Also, since these ‘experts in the law’ are often positioned as one of the groups of people opposed to Jesus, like the scribes and the Pharisees, it is probably better to avoid lumping the good members of our modern legal profession into the same category.

25 An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?

This exact question asked by the expert, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”, is also asked by a ‘certain ruler’ later in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 18. In both cases, the writer of Luke brings the Law into the frame. To the certain ruler, Jesus lists some of the commandments within the law. Here today Jesus leads the expert to summarize the law.

And then we get one of the most famous stories within Christian tradition. We probably know it as the ‘parable of the Good Samaritan’ and would have heard this phrase hundreds of times, in church, in the media, in speeches by politicians, and as a bible heading. The phrase itself is not in our gospel text. And for the Jewish culture of the time using the word ‘good’ as an adjective for a Samaritan would have been deeply shocking. For us it would be something like ‘the parable of the good terrorist’. Good and Samaritan just did not go together … so keep this idea in mind as we ponder the story.

And this story shows a radical development of ancient ethics, a development that changes the course of the western world, a development that  becomes so normalized in our time, we can go onto Facebook, like I did this morning, and see a request to support charities in other countries, charities that support people outside our country, outside our culture, outside our social group and class. This was not the case in the ancient world.

Greco-Roman ethics focused on people of the same ethnos, the same people group or social class. Support and love and compassion were not required to non-Greeks. In the Jewish world, the concept of neighbour was extended to any and all other Israelites and anyone residing in the land of Israel.

Our passage today shows the tension that was developing at the time concerning the question of “who is my neighbour”. The resolution of that question by Jesus is the source of the extension of the concept of neighbour to essentially mean all people, everyone, everywhere. Which is why it is normal, it is expected, and happens that now that people, not only Christians, support other people, all across the globe, at times of natural disasters and other crises.

All this stems from the reframing of neighbour begun with Christ and continued by the early Jesus Followers. This fact is recognized by Dr Bart Ehrman, one of the foremost New Testament scholars today. Bart is an atheist, so he has no Christian bias to push, and yet clearly teaches it was the change initiated by the early Church that led to the broad compassion we have in secular western countries today. He explores this in an upcoming book with a great title I wish I could steal, “Love your stranger…”

Love your stranger … this is what the Samaritan does today, moved with compassion, he loves the half-dead stranger before him, he loves a Jew, a stranger, an enemy. To him, to the Samaritan, this stranger WAS his neighbour.

This of course is the shock aspect of the story, the moment that would have really got to the expert in the law, really affected the first hearers of the Gospel. The robbed, beaten and half-dead Jew was not helped by his fellow Jews, by a priest and a Levite, a temple functionary – but was helped, was brought back to life, was saved by a Samaritan.

As wonderful and as beautiful as this ethic, to love our stranger, is, there are other aspects to this story easily missed. The injured traveller in our text is described as “half dead”, not injured or badly hurt. Half dead, meaning he could die. For the Levite and and the Priest this was a problem – if they went and offered assistance, and the stranger died, they would be in contact with a dead body. Which according to the Law, meant they were polluted and could not attend the temple, could not attend their religious duties.

So, the parable, which began as with a summation of the weighty matters of the Law, to love God and Love neighbour, has another crucial message for us. Because it highlights, it holds up to view and critiques a choice to follow the lesser matters of the law – concerning ritual pollution – over the law to love neighbour. It brings into focus then also our own, and our own churches capacity to hold fast to rules and regulations, to place law over love. When do we, when does our church, place procedures over people?

All we need to do is look at the controversy in our church, in our diocese, over blessing of same sex marriages and the rules regarding ordination of LGBTIQA+ people to get a sad and hurtful answer - akin to the Levite’s choice to cross the road.

Finally, it is SO significant that the expert in the law asks Jesus “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He does not ask what he must do to gain eternal life. Because of course as a mortal person, bounded by finitude, bounded by his own life, he cannot do anything at all to affect eternity. Eternity cannot be traded or purchased or achieved by DOING anything at all.  

Rather, the life eternal is INHERITED. It is his birthright, as it is ours, as it is all peoples, because God has created us in Her image and adopts us as Her children. Eternal life is already ours: how we respond to, accept, live into, or attempt to reject or qualify this eternal gift is up to us.

And as a final answer to the question posed by the expert, Jesus depicts the Samaritan as he inherits and embraces the life eternal – and he does this by fully entering this life now, by caring for and healing in the present, through monetary generosity, by engaging in interdependence with the innkeeper and his own animal who carried the injured traveller; by restoring life now, he inherits eternal life.

And so, we now, inheritors of this radical ethic, we also inherit the life eternal - by loving our stranger. AMEN

Base text of a sermon for Pentecost 4, Year C. Luke 10.1-12; 10.17-24, 2 Kings 5.1-14.

Base text of a sermon for Pentecost 4, Year C. Luke 10.1-12; 10.17-24, 2 Kings 5.1-14.

It is interesting to note where today’s Gospel reading sits as part of the modern structure of the Gospel according to Luke. At the start of the previous chapter, Jesus commissions his 12 apostles, the 12 disciples especially chosen and sent forth, the literal meaning of apostle, into the world.

And, now, in a similar way we hear of the commissioning of the 72, or in some manuscripts, the 70.

There is clearly an expansion here from 12 to 70.

And Jesus, of course, knows what he is doing because the 70 are to proclaim the Kingdom “to every town and place” where he intended to go. This theme of expansion reaches a peak at the start of the following chapter, where we hear the words,

“Father, hallowed be your name.

    Your kingdom come.”

This is the universal act of worship across all Christian churches and denominations, and of course, the hopeful anticipation of the Kingdom itself.  

From the unknowable uncreated God, imaged as the Father, to the visible and incarnate one, the Christ, then expanding to the 12 representing the 12 twelve tribes of Israel, the fullness of the Jewish people, and then expanding to the the 70, who represent the gentiles, all the other nations. And finally, expanding to a prayer for the Kingdom prayed across the world and prayed in nearly every language of the world.

The 72 or 70 refer also to what is known as ‘the Table of Nations’ in Genesis chapter 10, where all the nations, and founders of the nations across the entire earth are listed. These are listed in family groups and a part of the great sacred story of the descendants of Noah after the flood.

This sacred story served for the Jewish readers as an origin story of ALL the people in the world. All people, across the entire world, are in this myth traced back to Noah, back to God’s saving work.

Once we have myth in view then the sending out of the 70 we hear today makes sense. Because this listing of all the peoples who exist, the enemy peoples of the Jews are also included. They too are linked back to Noah and ultimately back to the saving love of God.

So, when the 70 are sent out, matching the table of nations, Jesus is sending them symbolically not only throughout the entire world, but also to Canaanites, Moabites, Edomites and all the alienated and enemy people. Everyone is included, because, as our text states the 70 are sent to “to every town and place” where Jesus intends to go. Every town. Every place. Everyone.

But, the Gospel today not only recounts the sending forth of disciples for the proclamation of the Kingdom, but it also invites – in fact, it demands - us to participate in this proclamation.

Then turning to the disciples, Jesus said to them privately, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see!

Jesus said to them privately – and yet we hear it, we see it in the Gospel. And so, we are drawn into the private and intimate conversation and communion between Jesus and his disciples. The Gospel at this point casts its divine power over us and positions us as Christ’s apostles. And so, it is we who must continue the expansion of the work of proclaiming the Kingdom.

And so, we must name all the rejected and hated peoples of our world, and within our own personal hearts. Even those who we consider as monstrous.  Whoever we name and position as enemy or as not correct, not right, not us – we have to name them today.

Because whoever we name are still made in the image of God; they in their actions may not currently reflect that image, even counter it, but their actions can never destroy or harm that innate image, and so they too are included the promise of the Kingdom.  This is the generosity of inclusion our indigenous brothers and sisters extend to the non aboriginal community as they welcome them to the naidoc celebrations this coming week.

This universal generosity may seem a bit of an ask for us modern disciples, but the key to apostles’ success – and our success – is being under the name of and within the love of Christ. The demons in our sacred Gospel did not submit to the disciples themselves, but to the name of Jesus. In modern parlance, the 70 left their egos at home and let Christ, let the Great Peace of God work through them.

Being with God. Moving away from our ego. The easiest thing – because we know what we should do – and the hardest thing, because we are forever doing the exact opposite. We, out of the best intentions so often act from our own self, trusting our own strength and ideas. Which inevitably means we act from our own assumptions and the also the unconscious assumptions and prejudices  of our own culture, or religious tradition, or church or ingroup or family.

And so, we easily fail.

We hear this today in our story from 1 Kings. Naaman is expecting his healing to come in a certain way – a healer with a  magical and ritual action. Instead, confounding his prejudices and assumptions the healing comes from God through God’s sacred land, God’s sacred river.

Naaman, because of the ideas and prejudices he brought with him to the land of Israel could not initially see what was there, what divinity and healing lay before him. And it took the lowliest, his servants, to remind him.

At the start of NAIDOC week, we can reflect on how many of early colonialists did exactly the same. Expecting culture and civilization to be manifest only in certain forms – churches, synagogues, mosques, castles and buildings, they concluded the aboriginal people were without culture, and ultimately without the fullness of humanity. This helped lead to the terrible and disastrous outcomes we still see today, as we try, and fail, year after year to close the Gap between first and second nations peoples in these lands we now call Australia.

Many, but not all, of our settler ancestors could not see, because of how they were formed, because of their ancestral ideas, could not see who and what was before them.

But as his disciples, Christ blesses our vision and our eyes: “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! He blesses our vision and our hearing so we may share peace and help bring forth the Kingdom, to every place and to everyone.

Because today, continuing the work of the 70 we are called not only to see but also to walk. We are called to walk within our hearts, bringing our blessed eyes to behold clearly our own prejudices and biases, so they may be transformed. We are called to walk with others, as the One Body of Christ, so we may see and know and love all people made in the Image of God.

And the kingdom is brought closer as we walk those few steps to see, really see, and talk with a homeless person in Midland, sharing our common humanity.

The kingdom is brought closer by those steps we make to walk to our neighbour’s door to see them honestly and hold them in their grief or joy. It is brought closer by stepping into a politician’s office to seek first nations justice, demanding our first nations sisters, brothers and companions and their ongoing culture be fully seen.

All we have to do see. All we have to do is walk.

In the Name of Christ.

Amen

Text of a sermon for Sermon Wednesday after Pentecost 3. Year C. Matthew 8.28-34

Matthew 8.28-34

Our Gospel today is the Matthew version of a healing we heard a couple of Sundays ago; the exorcism of a possessed man in a region across from the sea of Galilee. There are significant differences between the account we heard then, and also a similar account in Mark, and the account we hear today. Those differences can tell us a lot about the different early communities of Jesus Followers and, when viewed as holistically, not simply comparing one to another, can help us appreciate the broad power and beauty of the Gospel and of Christ himself.

First though, we need to address the very unmodern concept of possession and exorcism. As mentioned in our previous sermon, modern views of possession as misunderstood physical or psychological ailments completely miss the mark when it comes to understanding the ancient worldview that Jesus lived and moved within. That view however, that we, the world and everyone within it, is surrounded by an invisible but powerful realm of unseen entities that can, through a huge variety of reasons, have a negative and devasting impact on our lives, is really hard to come to terms with in 21st century Australia.

Without in any way countering that traditional view, a view that is still shared by innumerable first nation and traditional cultures across the globe, we can perhaps look at demons and possession in a way that both honours that view and draws from a core Christian proclamation – the Incarnation.

Because the world changing event of the Incarnation collapses the hard boundaries between the personal, the social-political and spiritual spheres, the personal is political is spiritual. Christ as the ultimate spiritual agent, God incarnate in body and flesh, comes to liberate not only our spirituality, but also our personal lives and the political-social conditions that scar and limit those lives.

And so, we can look at demons and possession, in a modern way without resorting to a dismissive, “it’s all illness really”, approach.

A few years back I attended a birthday party for a family member whose name begins with the letter M. One of her presents was a little neon-tube desk light shaped in the letter M. As she unwrapped the present and revealed the ‘M’, her toddler grandson, just learning to read, joyfully declaimed: HAPPY MEAL.

Happy Meal … referring of course to the children’s meal at McDonald’s. While this is an example of clever saturation marketing, it is also something far worse, far more spiritually damaging. This young boy’s cognitive capacity, his tender developing ability to recognize letters and communicate has been affected and, in some way, taken over by a commercial spirit with no regards for his personal wellbeing. The marketing has entered him, has used his own God given cognition and mind against his best interests, which is a parallel to the effects of possession. 

As with McDonalds, so too with all forms of exploitative consumerism which value people and the earth as only resources, which position families and communities as only markets. As with consumerism, so too with any social ideology that is more concerned with converts and adherents than people as people.

For we, all of us, like this boy are constantly under the sway of ideas, trends and cultural norms which function like spirits which seek to use ourselves against ourselves and against God’s creation. It is not just advertising.

But the Good News is that we can change all this, us here, right now through the love and power of Christ, just as we hear in today’s Gospel. And though it is perhaps it is easy to miss, the demons in today’s story also, as they always do, have a social effect, as we hear in our first verse: “They were so fierce that no one could pass that way.”  

The presence of the demons, the physical embodiment of evil and demonic force is impacting this community – no one can travel, trade or connect across the land, as they should be able to do.

Now, we notice immediately that Jesus does not ask or demand the name of the demons.

That does happen in Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, and in Luke, the latest Gospel to have this story.

Matthew chooses to omit this aspect of healing. And this is extremely significant. As we detailed in our previous sermon, discerning, getting possession of the name of an invisible force, be it demon, angel or deity, meant one had power over that force. That was part of the time-tried, universal and ubiquitous method across the ancient near east and ancient world in general. Without the name, the possessing force was unable to be controlled and finally expelled.

Yet here Jesus simply says, “Go!”. 

The emphasis, more than in Mark and Luke, is on Jesus’s power in and as himself. He, as the demons themselves recognize, being Son of God, does not need their name – he himself has all the divine power.

And the title applied to Jesus by the demons is also very significant – “Son of God”. In both Mark and Luke, the title is “Son of the Most High God”. As a title, Son of the Most High God was more often used in Gentile, non-Jewish cultures, cultures that still worshipped many Gods, one of whom was “the most high”. This is why the man healed from possession in Mark and Luke is often seen as Jesus’s first gentile disciple.

Here, Jesus is described as Son of God, God, singular, which is appropriate considering Matthew’s community were largely a Jewish community being transformed and challenged by the enduring stories of the life and resurrection of Jesus.

In the Jewish culture of the time, 30s CE, Son of God did not refer to Christ, did not refer to the Messiah nor the second Person of the trinity. It referred to either angels or humans who had a special relationship with God, like Kings in the line of David.

It is through its reframing in the New Testament that Son of God comes to refer to Jesus, and later as the second person of the trinity. And today we hear one of the very first recorded instances of this reframing, one of the very first recorded moments when the developing community of Jesus followers come to understand Jesus as divine, and full of such divine blessing and power he does not need a name to exorcize, but can exorcize by his own divine power.

And so it is today for us today … we do not need the name of the demonic or socially possessing or repressive forces, forces and powers that oppress us or hinder our connection with life and with God – however we see those forces, as external powers or internal and psychological.

All we need is the one who is both God and human, the one who holds all in his power, who is all power - all we need is Christ. And Christ comes when we call; when we pray, ask and be open, he will simply be with us. He will be with us, and then say, Go! And all the powers are gone, all the social and internal forces that keep us from life - because all the forces and all the powers are subject to him who is Son of God. Amen

Text of a Sermon Pentecost 3 Year C Luke 9.51-62

Text of a Sermon Pentecost 3 Year C Luke 9.51-62

“When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem” .

Jesus, knowing the time is approaching for the fulfilment of his destiny, does not shy away from this knowledge. He embraces it. He sets his face, determinedly and resolutely towards it.

Jerusalem is where it all started with the annunciation to Zechariah in the temple, with the prediction of Simeon on the life of Jesus, and with Jesus’s own teaching in the temple when he was 12.

Jerusalem, is the city of the Messiah, and so Jesus, having been recognized as the Messiah earlier in the Gospel has to visit, has to enter the Holy City – no matter what comes about; Jerusalem is where it will all be resolved. Death or life, Jesus, sets his face towards his fate and calls his disciples, calls us today, to do the same.

Many commentaries on today’s gospel include the same word: ‘difficult’; difficult to follow the unrelenting call that Christ makes to his disciples: leaving the dead to bury the dead, rejecting the love of family and never turning back towards our old lives.

Christ’s call, it is argued, is costly and requires our singular devotion to God. Only then, with this singular devotion, can we overcome the difficulties of discipleship and give our lives fully to God, placing God above even our economic security, our social duty and even above our for love for family and friends. This is difficult. This is hard, almost harsh.

A key that might help resolve the apparent tension and harshness is that God has given us our lives. Our lives are not actually our own, though it seems like they are, because God is the cause of all creation, including our own.

It is probably easier to accept this on a generic rather than a specific level. As we hear in Genesis, God, the divine creator, creates all things. This makes sense on the universal level. But does God also create our specific lives? Our personal, wonderful, messy, glorious lives – and the life of everyone, and the life every creature? Yes, our tradition and faith assert, everyone and everything at every moment.

Mary Oliver in her poem ‘The Summer Day’ makes clear this connection between the universal and the particular:

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand

Every unique grasshopper. Every unique blade of grass. Ever grain of sugar. Every unique person, all exist because God causes them to exist. Theologically, God as the source of all being, not as a discreet entity or a being Herself, but AS BEING ITSELF, God as being donates being to our lives. Through this ever-present donation of being we be, we are, we live and move.

Our entire life is a gift from God, given so that we are able to give our lives completely and unreservedly to Her. This is the purpose of our lives. This is why we are created and why we be.

This is why the singular devotion demanded by Christ, is possible – it is who we were created to be. It’s in the very fabric of our being, because we are, because we receive donated being from God.

And Christ, being fully God, also donates his being to us. He donates to our being the setting of his face to Jerusalem, donates to our being the full and glorious truth of life, death, and resurrection. Through this donated being, we can be as Christ is.

This means we can fully respond to God’s love with singular devotion. So, when God as Christ calls us above all else, he is calling us to do nothing more and nothing less than what we were created to do, what is in our being, because our being is donated to us from him.

And yet … when we contemplate the examples of costly discipleship today – possible homelessness, not burying our parents and disconnection from family – following Jesus can still seem not only very difficult but also very harsh.

But as Christians we have already made the decision to follow Jesus. We have already, through our baptism, surrendered to death and have been reborn to follow Jesus just as he calls us to do in the Gospel today, just as he gives us our being. This is why we are here on a cold Sunday morning following Christ, not at home in bed or by the fire.

The Greek word for ‘follow’, as it often is in the Gospel of Luke, means to follow by accompanying, by come alongside, by coming next to – not following from behind. This is what we have all already committed our lives to doing – to come close to Jesus, to become intimate with him.

We do not, we cannot today, follow Jesus as the three disciples who followed him in today’s Gospel did - by physically walking with him, besides his physical body to Jerusalem. The conclusion of that journey, as the reading today states, is that Jesus is taken up – his body is lifted up to God.

In the absence of his physical body, we follow Jesus as and in the Body of Christ – Jesus reflected in the lives of the people around us, the people we accompany, the people we walk and travel with, our family and friends, our neighbours and the stranger in our midst – all of them being and existing from God.

And we know that the presence of Christ is found in the love we have for each other, for our families, for our beloved dead and for this physical life, for our homes and security, caring for ourselves so we can care for others.

So, we can, if we choose, follow Jesus with the singular devotion and purpose we were created for, by knowing Christ is already in our lives.

And this, is why as our readings from Galatians states we are set free by Christ – to follow him in freedom with others, to grow spiritually in community through love as the Body of Christ – for this reading is also clear “the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

By that love we are following Christ in our midst, and we become who we are to be.

What this following Jesus through our lives means though, is that we are still called to set our faces, like Jesus, to Jerusalem. Our own personal Jerusalem calls us throughout our lives; to enter and die, so we may live again and more fully. Sometimes it will be a personal challenge, or an aspect of ourselves we are called to surrender, to change. Or it may, as our Galatians readings states, be part our unregenerated nature, called the flesh by Paul, that we need to crucify, to bring to death so something greater my live. 

And of course, one day it will be  our own personal and inevitable physical death.

Death comes to us all, to each and every person. Had he not been crucified, Jesus, fully human like us, would have inevitably grown old and would have inevitably died.

Like Christ on the road to Jerusalem we do not know how and when we will die, just that we will. We do know however, that Christ, who donates our being to us, is with us and will be with us and will lift us up with him, as he was lifted up.

And so, we set our faces and we walk.

In the Name of Christ. Amen.

Text of a Sermon for Wednesday after Pentecost 2. Year C. Genesis 15.1-12 15.17-18

Our Genesis reading today is the foundation of it all. It tells of the covenant between Abram, soon to be Abraham, and God, the Lord, the one uncreated creator of all. It is the very beginning of the providential acts of God, out of love, for restoration of humanity following the events of Eden and the Flood. It recounts the first covenant but also alludes to and draws us onward towards the fulfilling of that covenant in the new covenant of our Saviour Christ, and what that means for all humanity, what that means for us.

Now, all this may seem easy enough, even though the grandeur of it is hard to comprehend – but the text itself is deep and mysterious and complex.

The key is to look at how Abram and God interact, how Abram as the future father of Israel and God relate and cooperate. And while clearly Abram is human and God is well, God, there is much here that points to an almost equal partnership than we initially may suspect.

Looking at the first six verses of our glorious text we see God and Abram talking back and forth. God promises to shield Abram and that he will be rewarded. Reward in the ancient Jewish culture was often associated with children, with descendants to continue on one’s name. Abram immediately counters this, protesting that he remains childless. A statement from God; a rebuttal by Abram

Then Abram double downs, repeating that he has no children and stressing the shame and indignity that a slave born in his house will be his heir. God responds in turn stating, ‘no’ Abram’s own issue will be his heir. A statement from Abram, a rebuttal by God.

This conversation appears to be one between equals, back and forth statements, each not convincing the other. So, God now moves from words to actions:

 5 He brought him outside and said, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ 

Actions speak louder than words, and the very act of looking at and trying to count the stars changes Abram – “And he believed the Lord ; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

There are some important points here. The first is the movement and transformation within Abram, from disbelief to belief occurs via the sight of the stars. Belief here, as indicated in the Hebrew, is best understood in the sense of ‘trust’ and ‘confirmation’. Something changed in Abram so that, despite his misgivings in verses 1 to 4, he could now trust God. Perhaps it was the overwhelming majesty and splendour of the stars, their numberless plenitude pointing to the God of fullness, their radiant points of light pointing to the unsupportable source of all light.

In any case, belief occurs, and the stage is now set for the enactment, the physical expression and sealing of the covenant. But what exactly has been promised here, what exactly is this covenant.

God instructs Abram, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’  

It is easy to see, and is the common modern western understanding that God is telling Abram his descendants will be as numerous as the stars. But even in the English, something else can be seen here: ‘So shall your descendants be’ … Abram descendants shall be as numerous as the stars … but also as the stars. Starlike. Radiant. Expansive. Heavenly.

This is certainly how many early church leaders and authorities saw this passage, Philo of Alexandria, the author of Sirach and others: the promise is not only quantitative, number of offspring but also qualitative, the nature of those offspring.

Being like stars had a particular meaning in Ancient Southwest Asia – the stars were divine or semi divine beings, the astral realm, the realm of the Gods and specially blessed, deified human beings. The promise here is that, at some point the descendants, in the Hebrew, literally, the seed of Abram will be transformed, will be become perfect in the sight of the one perfect light of God, will shine with the inner nature they, and we all possess, being made in the image and likeness of God. The promise is that one day, humans will become who they really are, children of God, reflecting the glory of God, just as each star reflects the limitless light beyond all stars.

Now if this promise seems extravagant, overflowing with enthusiastic abundance and faith in humanity, then its physical embodiment is even more ebullient.

We are now witness to what was a common western Semitic treaty or covenant ritual. Animals are sacrificed, divided into two, each half representing one party to the treaty, in this case Abram and God. God is entering the treaty as an equal party to Abram; divinity and humanity are on equal footing, participating together, making a binding agreement as one. How extraordinary is this?

And then a deep sleep falls upon Abram, a deep and terrifying darkness. He loses himself and enters the divine darkness, the unknowing of God. And we remember that a similar deep sleep fell upon the genderless earth creature, ADAM in Genesis chapter 2. On that occasion the deep sleep led to the separation of women and man, the resolving of the One into two, male and female, so that multiplication, reproduction, children, descendants would emerge.  Here, in his deep sleep, Abram is himself changed by God, so that his seed, his descendants will also come forth, but come forth as numerous and as like the stars themselves.

But there is more, so much more: “a smoking fire-pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces of animals”. Again, this is part of the common western semitic treaty ritual, a ceremony to enact a bond between two parties. Significantly however, the symbolism and common understanding of the ceremony was that the party who passed the smoke and fire between the parts of the animals would, if they broke their oath, suffer the fate of the animals themselves. And here, the party placing themselves on the line is God – Abram is asleep.

God takes upon himself the fate of the sacrificial animals to bind himself to the covenant. God commits himself this thoroughly and this completely to humanity. God is so sure of the covenant and the eventual starlike destiny of the human race he enters this ceremony utterly and willingly and without reservation. God commits fully himself to Abram, to the Jewish people.

And of course, this first covenant is taken into and fulfilled in the new Covenant of our Saviour Christ. To quote Paul from Galatians, as we heard on Sunday , if we belong to Christ, then we are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.

So, for us now, belonging to Christ, trusting in God like Abram who trusted God while looking at the stars, for us now, God has also so committed himself. Thoroughly and overwhelmingly and utterly, and completely in love. Amen.

Text of a Sermon for Pentecost 2 Year C Luke 8.26-39

Our Gospel today begins halfway through an action …  “Then they arrived at the region of the Gerasenes”

This is just after Jesus has calmed the sea and rebuked the winds, prompting the disciples to ask, “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds and the water and they obey him?”

That question, left deftly hanging in the narrative by Luke, is answered in our reading today.

We note firstly that we are in non-Jewish land, as indicated by being opposite Galilee. And, like Gailee and Judea, we are in occupied land, possessed land – and we use that word consciously here, because throughout the Jewish scriptures of the day, translated into Greek, the same word is used for both Israel’s possession of the Land of the Canaanites and possession of a person by a spirit or a demon. Possession whether of land or personhood was connected.

So, in a possessed land we hear of a possessed man, living in the tombs, the places of the dead, making him constantly unclean, constantly excluded and constantly alone. Though he has many, legion, within him, outwardly he is on his own.

Until Jesus arrives.

And then we get the answer to the question from the passage before today’s, “Who then is this, that he commands even the winds …”

28 When he, the possessed man, saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?’

By this Luke shows us that Jesus is in some way divine, that he carries with him, like a son in a patriarchal culture, the power and authority of his father, the most high God.

And so, Jesus, the one who is human and who is divine, who is earthy and heavenly, who is from here and from not-here, is recognized by demons, who themselves are both here, in and as the possessed person, and from not here – from the inner, unphysical realms of the spiritual hinterland.

There is so much charge and excitement connected with demons and possession, all stoked by the lurid fantasies of Hollywood, that a sermon is not the right place to sensitively unpack and understand these realities.

A common modern view is to assume that demons in the bible are pre-modern representations of natural phenomena – that demonic possession, for example, is an ancient way of understanding epileptic fits. As easy and as neat as this view is however, it assumes too much and erases the traditionalist spiritual world view, much as European colonizing religions erased the traditional spiritualities of first nations peoples across the globe.

Whatever the traditional Jewish understanding of demonic possession was, we can be sure it was not simple, but was multilayered and nuanced, as this account in Luke shows.

Luke makes clear that this possession has robbed the man of his personhood. Living a half-life in the tombs, with the dead, not only is he ostracized but he is also described as not wearing clothes, a state that in Jewish culture reduced a person to the level of an animal.

Now Jesus commands the demons to leave using traditional exorcism methods – he obtains the name of the possessing forces. Having the name of someone, of some unseen or only half seen force, of a demon, meant the possessor of that name now has power over the demon. So, Jesus, as the Son of the Most High, ‘asks’, and receives the name: legion.

This name is of utmost importance. Jesus and his contemporaries spoke Aramaic and the Gospels were written in Greek. Legion however, is neither Aramaic nor Greek; it is Latin.

It means both ‘many’ and also refers to a Roman garrison of troops, perhaps four to six thousand in number, certainly many. There are several Greek words meaning ‘many’ or ‘multitude’ used throughout the gospels. Luke chooses not to use any of them but introduces the Latin legion deliberately. It is one of only a very few instances in the Gospels that a Latin, a Roman, word is used, borrowed from the Empire that occupied, that possessed the Judean land and people. Again, very conscious and very deliberate.

We cannot be sure what Luke is doing here, but he is certainly making some social comment, some link between the possession of individuals and the possession of Land and people by the Roman empire. That restoration in Christ is restoration not only of a person, but of a people, that God restores life to individuals and to the communal.

We see this restoration of the personal and the potential but unactualized restoration of the communal towards the end of the passage. The once possessed man is now clothed, again a deliberately included detail, showing his restoration to human status, and in his right mind.

Furthermore, he is sitting at the feet of Jesus, the place where disciples sat. Through his healing, through his encounter with Christ, through the expulsion of the possessing spiritual-imperial powers, this man is now an icon of restoration, a sign of God’s saving power and discipleship to Christ.

But the people, his people, cannot enter the invitation offered by his restored body and self: they become frightened, and ask Jesus to leave, “for they were seized with great fear”. They cannot take the next step.

Perhaps they cannot accept God’s healing power so evident in the person of the man in front of them, the man who by his renewed life bears witness to Christ as God. This man however, at the command of Jesus stays with his people as a living testimony. And note these last lines:

38 … Jesus sent him away, saying, 39 “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.

How much Jesus had done for him. Jesus himself commanded he declare how much GOD had done, but he changes this to how much JESUS has done – because being depossessed in body, mind and spirit, he now knows that Jesus is not simply son of the Most High God, but is himself God. Perhaps this is what his people could not abide, perhaps this is what made them so frightened?

In any case, this depossessed disciple of Christ, one whom has been healed of the surrounding forces of empire within and without, is certainly a model for our lives in Christ, and in God.

Because like him, we will all later, return to our homes, our families and our communities. And from there, we are, like him to become an Icon of Christ’s healing love.

We are to declare in our City what Jesus has done – not in any evangelical creed based ‘turn or burn’ way at all – but simply, like this man, being in our right mind, freeing ourselves, with God’s help from the cultural forces that trap us in a half-life, we are to show ourselves as a disciple, as a student of the eternal through our body, through our many individual lives – as a testament to the One life God offers to all people, even those who are alone, or scorned, or isolated and possessed by the imperial and life negating forces of this world.

We are to do this even for those cannot take the next step, even for those who are afraid of the invitation of love and even for those who reject Christ and the divine from their lives. And we are to do this because Christ still loves. Amen.

Sermon. Trinity Year C.

Well, today is Trinity Sunday, which may or may not get us excited. But back in 1998 the theological students at Oxford were excited. The eminent Eastern Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware would be giving a series of weekly lectures on the Trinity. Now, if there was one thing known about Eastern Orthodox theologians, aside from their enthusiastic love of incense, it was their deep thinking on the Trinity.

And so, when the day came, the lecture hall was packed and a hush moved around the crowd as Kallistos got up to speak – and I quote: “The Holy, Blessed and undivided Trinity is a mystery of God impossible for human minds to comprehend or human speech to explain.” And without saying another word, he walked calmly out of the hall.

Because I am not a bishop, and nor do I have a tenured university job like Kallistos, nor rector status, I am not going to sit down, and let the silence, our silence together as the Body of Christ, explain the trinity – though, the silence would do a better job.

Nor will I, in a very laudable and admirable attempt to avoid the trap of words, use common day objects to SHOW the trinity, like a clergyperson of my acquaintance  ANECDOTE

Also, we cannot let images OR even the most profound silence abide today, because it is necessary to try and explain the trinity, even though we know we cannot.

It is necessary to use our language and our minds to conceive God, so that God can be present in our language and in our minds. As incarnate, bodily images of God, we have to try and hold onto god, so God can incarnate within us and through us.

It is necessary to refine our words and concepts of God, so that our words and concepts reflect both what we know of God, and the limitations of our knowledge, what we do not know of God.

So, we do know God as three persons, traditionally imaged as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We do not fully know who these three terms refer to; we do not fully know God.

We do know that the terms “father” “son” and “spirit” refer more to the relationship that exists between the persons rather than three discreet and independent forms of God. We do not, cannot, fully know the nature of that relationship.

And of course, while knowing that the One God is Three Persons, that three are One, we do not know how this really works.

This illogic, this impossibility is the key to the Trinity, the key to the Christian conception of the Divine, because we affirm a truly scandalous  and illogical Gospel – that the uncreated creator incarnated as one of us, as flesh and blood and died so that we may all live – that Christ is both fully human and fully divine and even more crucially offers us, all of us, every person, an eternal share in that divinity.

The impossible, yet Real, trinity affirms the impossible reality that our destiny, each of us, is to unfold and expand forever with the Trinity as part of the intra-divine life.

The Trinity – symbolically and spiritually, not logically – is the why and how of the gospel.

The “why” we remember every week at the Eucharist: God so loved the world that Christ was born and died so we may live, and die no more.

The trinity then points to the greatest love that we can ever know, the greatest love that we can ever tell.

And, as prayed through the profound and beautiful body prayer of Bishop Kallistos as he walked in silence out of the lecture hall, the trinity is the greatest love that we can NEVER tell.

As a person made in the image of the God we know this. When we fall in love – with a child, our partner, our animal companions – we want to tell the whole world. Over and over again – because we know that no matter what we say, whatever words we use, we will never be able to express the love bursting out of our hearts, a love than cannot be told.

With the Trinity, we have these two poles – speech and silence, comprehension and mystery.

In the modern world of emails, texts, books – and yes, sermons – we are very comfortable with speech and comprehension. We are not so familiar with silence and mystery. So, we naturally try and “explain” the trinity with words. And we have to do this – we have to proclaim and witness to the scandal of the Gospel, to the astounding love of God through Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit for all people and all creation.

This is why, after leaving in silence, Bishop Kallistos returned the next week and gave his profound and brilliant series of lectures.

But when we do try to explain the trinity, how three are one and one is three, our minds, as creatures of God, naturally use aspects of creation such as ice, water and steam; salt, flour, water. God, the Trinity, though, is not of creation, and so every explanation can never fully work, as literally anything we can think of is born of our creaturely minds, and while in Creation, infusing Creation, God is also beyond creation.

The beautiful, astounding gift of the trinity then is the failure it brings.

Trying to understand or explain the trinity leads us from comprehension to bafflement – and to the profound, and uncomfortable realization that we do not know and live always in mystery.

As each and every explanation of the trinity is revealed as inadequate, we become more humble, more open to new thoughts and concepts of God, more open to her love and more open to other people who, as images of God offer the mystery of God to us.

But this will not happen if we prematurely accept we cannot understand the Trinity, and do not make the effort to try – if we skip over to the end of the book as it were. It only happens if we question, pray and explore by engaging with God as she engages with us.

It is our engagement, our participation with God, that leads us to the HOW of the Gospel – how we may receive and share the eternal love and life offered by God.

In our Gospel today the Trinity is in action – ALL, everything, God has is given to Christ “All that the Father has is mine” – and then the Holy Spirit takes this divine fullness, this completeness and declares it to us.

The three persons, working in relationship, offer us the fullness of divinity. As our readings from Romans tells us, this occurs because “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” This same Spirit, the Spirit of Truth from the Gospel, leads us into all the truth, revealing to us all that is Christ’s – which is all that is the Father’s. Father, Son, Spirit, and then … us.

The eternal flow of the divine has been gifted to us, through love, and has entered our hearts and our lives. And so, WE become part of the flow and part of the story of the trinity.

What this means though – because this divine outpouring into our hearts has already happened, is always happening – what this means, is our eternal life has already begun.

We already share the life of the Trinity. We are already part of the greatest love ever told, the greatest love story that can never be told. Amen. 

Sermon. Wednesday After Pentecost. Year C. Matthew 5.17-19

As is always the case, our short, though potent and sometimes misunderstood Gospel today needs context. Context drawn from its place in the Gospel according to Matthew, context from the purposes of the Gospel writer himself, and context from the broader Jewish spiritual-religious culture that Matthew is part of, and so keen to preserve as a faithful response to the call of the divine.

Our text, Jesus words, are part of his extended sermon on the mount, the most well-known, most comprehensive and most ethically challenging of Jesus’ teachings in all the Gospels. Our passage today comes not long after Christ’s beautiful beatitudes, the blessings within them showing the way of God, not the way of the world. And it is within this context that we must understand our passage today.

Because the context for our text, uttered by Jesus on the holy mountain, surrounded by his disciples, shows Jesus as the new Moses. He is depicted as the fulfiller of the Law and blessings given by God to Moses for Israel and, eventually, all nations, all the people of the earth. Jesus is the one to take further, to extend, to radically actualize what begins with Moses on the Mountain, what is given to the Jews and will draw all people into loving relationship with God.

In our context we note firstly, and most importantly, that Jesus is speaking to, teaching directly, via words and breath and body, to his disciples who are on the mountain with him. In the Hebrew bible the people, the type of rag tag collection of disciples following Jesus, did not, could not ascend the holy mountain with Moses.

Moses went up, ultimately, on his own, and received the written law, which he then brought down to the people. In Matthew, the people, the students, anyone wishing to learn, are with Jesus as he speaks the fulfillment of the law, as he commands that we need to follow the law to its essence to find the Holy One, not by only fulfilling its outer requirements.

We need to be careful in our responses here. Too many Christian traditions position and present the traditional Jewish Law, often expressed in the 613 mitzvot or commandments for daily Jewish life, as a spirit deprived, rote and empty set of rituals, rituals where outer action is mistakenly seen as winning favour or grace from God.

The actual Jewish worldview is completely different. The Jews, as covenantal people, as people with grace from God, as people who were to bring God to all nations, were already, in Christian terminology, saved. Salvation was already established.

The law was, and is, for Jewish people, a delight, a blessing to undertake as conscious and chosen action in response to God’s love. The various mitzvot concerning diet, cleanliness, social relations, business practices and pretty much all of human life, kept God present and within pretty much all of human life. The practice of the Law kept the Jews bound to God, as God had bound himself to them.

But now Jesus is not only valorising, affirming the Law, but he himself has come to fulfill, he himself is the fulfillment of the law, and the fulfillment of the prophets.

The law, as a way of binding and keeping the bonds between the divine and the human realm, between God and the people, is now in and as Jesus. And the Greek word for fulfilment here is derived from pleroma, the end, the fullness, the fulfillment of an initial impetus, an initial purpose or command or drive.

Jesus is saying he is the end point, the final culmination, initiated at the beginning, before time, of the overwhelming love of God. He, Christ, is God who comes as human to show and share the culmination, of God’s very first calling of humanity, God’s providential design to fill the universe with rational human beings made in his image to reflect his eternal love, back to him and to each other, and to all creation.

All that the law intended, and intends, the binding of the human to the divine, is in Christ since he is human and divine, now and forever.

And Jesus is also the fulfillment, the pleroma, the fullness and culmination of all the prophets. The radical earth-shaking disrupters of injustice, the ones who hold even Kings to account, who accomplish and show the Word of God – Jesus fulfills all these. But whereas the prophets challenged and disrupted mainly the Jewish world, Jesus disrupts the entire world. He shares and makes real God’s justice and demand for justice to all nations and all peoples – since he is the perfect human, sharing in all humanity.

Yet, even though the law and the prophets are completed and fulfilled by and in Christ, still they are not, by his command abolished. And we should note the warning given by Christ – it is not the breaking or keeping of the law that is crucial since, every human is human, and all keepers of the Law will, being imperfect humans, at time, break it. Rather, is the teaching of the breaking or keeping. Teaching that humanity should, or should not, bind and give itself to God, as God gives herself to us.

The law and the prophets, Matthew insists, function and will continue to function – but in Christ. So, all law becomes part of Christ’s new covenant, and all prophets now become prophets of Christ.

So, the law as the means of continuing and enacting the bond between humanity and God, to bring God to all humanity and all the earth, continues to exist and continues to operate. That original intention by god is not, abolished, is not negated; God’s promise to Abram and all the earth continues. And will continue … Until the heavens and the earth are gone, until time itself is redeemed and the age to come is upon us

Nothing can stop or hinder or sway or move God’s promise in the law  … until, as the text states, “until all is accomplished”.

Until all is accomplished. In Greek this is ginomai, hard to express in a single word … until all is accomplished, until all has become, has come into being, has happened  … as it was meant to be, as it was envisioned and lovingly commanded by God.

And this all literally means all, everything and every ONE … until we have happened, until we and everyone who has been and will ever be, have become, until we have unfolded as we are meant to be -  until that time beyond time, the love and law of God is there.

But it is now in and as Christ, as his New Covenant, which includes and makes real the old covenant, a new covenant we will shortly share today, as his body and as his blood. A new covenant that will surely help and make and grow us to be who we, and all people, are meant to be.

In his name, Amen.

Sermon. Pentecost. Year C. Genesis 11.1-9. Acts 2.1-21. John 14.8-17

Our first two glorious readings today, the magnificent narratives from Genesis and the Acts of the Apostles, draw us into the broad sweep of the purposes of God and our relationship with God. The first, the Tower of Babel and the subsequent confusion and multiplication of human languages, is reversed, rectified and redeemed in the second, the account of the coming of the Holy Spirit in Acts.

As our reading from John clearly describes, “This is the Spirit of truth” - this is the other Advocate, the Holy Spirit, only now able to come to the apostles because Christ himself has incarnated, died, resurrected and returned to the divine world, having redeemed the entire world.

And so, this reversal, and redemption of the disaster at the Tower of Babel is only redeemed because of Christ.

Our sacred story from Genesis is set way back when … it is post the primeval flood, where once again, like in the Garden of Eden, God has made a covenant, a relational, loving and ongoing embrace with humanity to guide us so we may help redeem the entire world, the entire earth.

Once more, post flood, humanity is shown clearly our ordered place for communal and personal fulfillment by relationship with God and each other, and once more, like Eden, humanity has been directed to take that human-divine relationship to all the earth, to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”.

And then we hear our story today. Rather than going forward, being made in the image of God, bringing the blessings of God through that image to the whole earth, humanity has gathered itself into once place.

Why? Because in that one place, understanding each other with one language, they work to build a tower whose top will reach into heaven, or the heavens in the original Hebrew.

Humans, creatures of God, are trying by their own efforts to reach the divine realm – by their own efforts and not by the grace and love of God.

Why do they wish to do this?  Our text is clear: “let’s make a name for ourselves”.

What is referred to here, making a name for themselves, is a far cry from, though still related to, the modern understanding of making a name for ourselves, like pop stars, our billionaires or sport stars may do. The concept and theological significance of the Name in ancient cultures was very different.

A Name glorified and brought power to the person who had access to, who possessed the name. It was the Name of someone, of a people, or a King, that lived on after they had physically died, and so the Name was seen as an almost separate identity, force and power. A Name that lived on, in some measure, conferred immortality.

We see this clearly when, in the following chapter, God blesses the very beginning of the people of Israel by calling Abram, who will become Abraham, saying,  “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your NAME great, so that you will be a blessing” – the blessing here, as throughout the Old Testament refers to descendants who will carry on the Name of Abram and so keep his name, his presence, alive.

But this is through God’s personal call to Abram and through God’s blessing. It is unlike the Tower of Babel conspirators who wish to make a name for themselves, by their own actions, usurping the place of God, seeking in fact to become like Gods.

And so, they are dispersed, scattered across the earth, given a chance once more to fulfill their purpose of bringing their image of God, in which they are made, to all the earth. But this time speaking different languages, being confused between each other, unable to collectively attempt to storm heaven again by human effort, waiting, as all the world waited for heaven to come to earth – as it does in the person and life of Christ.

And so, it is only after Christ has incarnated, lived, died, resurrected and ascended that the bridge between earth and heaven, between humanity and divinity, between the Many and the One, can correctly and safely be established by God.  

Christ as fully human and fully divine has forever established this bridge, and so people, the whole earth can come together as one once more, and through HIM as bridge move towards heaven and unity with God.

And so, it is only after Christ has ascended that the Holy Spirit can come, as Christ throughout John makes clear. And then, we here of the remarkable coming together in Acts:

They, the people from many lands and nations, “from every people under heaven “, were all together in one place, as the whole earth were at Babel, – but not this time to storm heaven by their own means, not to become Gods. 

The ‘they’ here refers to the very first Jesus followers in Jerusalem. They are the very first people to trust and accept that Jesus IS the bridge between earth and heaven. And so, they gather to worship and be part of the new covenant that opens heaven to earth and earth to heaven.

And because of this the Holy Spirit comes. And it is through her that unity also comes. Once more people from different lands can understand each other, reversing the Bable effect of confusion.

Once more people can, despite differences of backgrounds and ways of understanding, gather in the spirit to worship God and Christ – exactly as we do today, right now here at St Cuthbert’s.

And it is the spirit of Truth who like Christ, is our Advocate, comforter, consoler, literally in the Greek, ‘the one who stands with us’, it is through the Spirit that our relationship with God and with each other is completed and perfected.

We hear, experience and see this each week in our liturgy. After we have prayed the words that remember, and so make real the bread and the wine as the body and blood of Christ, we invoke the Holy Spirit – praying to the Father:

Accept, we pray, our cries of praise and thanksgiving,

and send your Holy Spirit upon us and our celebration

that all who eat and drink at this table

may be strengthened by Christ's body and blood …

This is known as the epiclesis, literally when we pray upon or over the bread and wine.

There is the Father whom we pray to, the Son, Christ in Body and Blood, and the Spirit – and it is only by the presence of all three, the entire undivided Trinity that the bread and wine are for us the Body and Blood.

Why is the Trinity needed and invoked? Because it is the trinity, as we will explore next week, that is the perfection of and model of true and loving community. Each of the persons of the Trinity give and receive from each other in perfect love and union: father to son, son to father and spirit, the eternal dance of self-giving forming a community for us today to emulate and embody and live and share to the world.

And this is why our Thanksgiving prayer continues:

… to serve you in the world.

As one body and one holy  - one whole and united, self giving people,

may we proclaim – share, give out, live, embody the everlasting gospel to the world

This is gift of Pentecost we share today, and every day …

In Christ’s name, Amen

Sermon. Wednesday. Easter 7. John 17.11-19

Once more we are in the midst of the long, winding, deep and repetitive three chapter long farewell discourse of Jesus.

This section of the discourse is called the High Priestly prayer – because Jesus seems to take on the role of an ancient priest, mediating between deity and humanity, between the sacred and the mundane, the eternal and the mortal.

He does this on behalf of his disciples, the human ones who know and love him, because he knows and loves them.

Though this is called the Highly Priestly prayer, Jesus is unlike any high priest before or after him.

He can mediate perfectly between the One, the Uncreated source of all, his Father, and the disciples, because he is perfectly, and completely one, divine with his father and one, fully human with his disciples.

He therefore stands perfectly as the open gateway between the spiritual and human worlds.  As we hear towards the conclusion of our passage:

18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. 

The pattern, the flow, the spiritual dynamic here is clear. The father to the Son, incarnate as body and flesh, to his first disciples – sent into the world as he was sent into the world. And we know why God, the Father sent the son – because he loves the world so much.

However, this role, as mediator is dynamic and not fixed. Jesus will soon leave the world. Firstly, through his perfect death and then finally via his perfect ascent and return to the divine realm. And once he has left, it is we, his disciples, it is us, his only Body now on earth, who will take his place.

11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world,

So today, right now, it is:

Father, to Son, Son to the body of Christ, the church and then to the world. All of course through the grace of the Holy Spirit, whom we will celebrate and deeply invoke on Sunday at Pentecost.

It is intriguing that Jesus says, “I am no longer in the world”, while of course he is still there, physically talking with his disciples. By the time the Gospel was written though, some 60-80 years after his death, Jesus was, like now, no longer in the world. So, this may have been a way of John, in his literary creation of the Gospel, addressing the current situation of the community he was part of.

But it also harkens back to the betrayal by Judas in chapter 13, just before Jesus begins his farewell discourse. As soon as Judas departed on his mission of betrayal, Jesus declared “Now the Son of Man has been glorified”. The act, the impetus of the betrayal was the beginning of the cascade that would lead to the death, absence and resurrection, and therefore the glorification of Christ. So, when Jesus, in this discourse, really only minutes after Judas had left, says he is no longer in the world, he is already in the in-between space, the liminal space where yes, he is no longer firmly in the world, his death now assured by the absence of Judas and the night that has fallen.

And so, he continues his prayer:

11  and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. 

And as we explored on Sunday, a key aim, a key purpose, of the gracious incarnation of Christ, is the unity of the disciples, of us, with the divine – so they, we may be one, as Christ and the Father are one.

But for this unity to occur we need protection – from what we hear later, but for now we focus on how this protection can be accomplished – “in the name” of the father that has been given to Christ.

In the spiritual cultures of the time and region, ancient south-west Asia, divine names were of utmost importance. Bearing the name, holding the name, uttering and speaking the name of a deity, of God, activated divinity and manifested the presence of that divinity in the physical world.

Jesus has been given the name of the most high. He is the new temple, the place where, at its very centre, the holy of holies, the one true name of God was uttered to manifest God in the temple, to the people and to the world. And now, as God incarnate, Jesus has been given this same name and it is this name, this presence, energy, blessing and power that protects.

So, what do his disciples, what do we need protection from? It is easy to assume spiritual powers and entities and forces like the devil, Satan or demons. But the text is both clearer and less clear.

We need protection from the world.

14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 

Because we have been given the word, because we have been given the logos, the divine creative power of god, through Christ, because he has spoken and speaks this word to us, we are changed. As the word enters us, as the holy word, the holy name of Christ, resides and takes up place within us, we are no longer of the world. Because the logos is not of this world. This is the word of the uncreated, non-worldly father, and it is only through the perfect mediator, who is God and Human, Christ, that this word, this love can reside within us.

So, we are changed, we become different to the world, the world that rejects and hates God. We become, through obeying the commandment to love, almost foreign, alien to the world. We become a body, a people that choose love over transaction, service over self, unity over division.  We become, because of Christ within us, that which the world must reject. And so, the world hates.

As with the physical and the seen, so with the spiritual and the unseen forces: we are hated. So, Jesus, as perfect meditator, knowing our mission as his Body, requires us to be in the world, prays

15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from evil.

When after, through the holy name and his prayers, Jesus has ensured our protection, he gives us his final, incomprehensible, unsupportable blessing. He does not pray to the father, because he is also fully God, he simply acts:

19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

Through his sanctification, by his conscious death and resurrection, we are also sanctified, we are also made holy, one and indivisible in the truth that is the word of God. So, yes, this is Jesus as High Priest, but it is also Jesus as God, loving us, forming us, blessing us into unity so we too may unfold toward divinity.

In his Name, Amen.

Sermon. Easter 7. Year C. John 17.20-26 Helen Keller June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968

As well as being the last Sunday of Easter, today is also the anniversary of the death of the inspiring deaf-blind activist, Helen Keller. This is fortunate, because examining her words can help us understand our convoluted and challenging Gospel.  More on this, and on Helen, later.

Today’s Gospel is at the very end of a three chapter long farewell discourse by Jesus. Today’s verses are the very culmination of this discourse and the culmination of a very long prayer of Jesus for his followers. We can therefore expect conclusion and even summation.

And this is what we get – though it may be hard for us to accept, or hard for us to ever think we can enact or be part of the mystery Jesus is directing us towards.

Straight off we hear:

“I ask not only on behalf of these but also on behalf of those who believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one”

That they, that we, may all be one.

Here we can easily reflect on the socially created differences and barriers we enact in the world. Jesus’s call to oneness can legitimately be interpreted as collapsing the painful and exclusive oppositions we humans so love:

Male or female; rich or poor; gay or straight; Aboriginal or settler; Christian or Muslim; conservative or liberal; sinner or saved.

We could go on … and of course any genuine social reconciliation is wonderful.

But something different is called for here. Our Gospel continues: 

‘that they – the disciples –  who believe through their word – may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.”

The disciples who believe – us, ALL of us here right now, are called to be one, called to unification by being IN both God the Father and being IN Christ – since they, father and son are one in each other.

We are called to unity, to inner, spiritual union with God.

There is no mistaking this, no getting around it. As strange and as mystical as it may seem, this, for John, is the heart of the Gospel. For other Gospel writers it is different – preparing for the age to come for example. But in John, we are being allured and enticed and commanded towards spiritual unity.

But how may this unification occur? Our beautiful and brilliant text is clear. Jesus prays:

“I ask not only on behalf of these – those disciples who are with him at the Last Supper -  but also on behalf of those  - US - who believe in me through their word.”

Believe in me through their word.

Our belief in Christ should be through our word.  This is not referring to keeping promises or being true. Belief for John, is not just moral or principled adherence to the teachings of Christ. It is about the word.

In John the spiritual concept, logos, translated as Word, has a particular and powerful meaning. We hear at the start of the Gospel.

“In the beginning was the Word, [meaning Christ], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, or was divine”.

We are to believe, commit to, give our lives to, Christ through our logos, through our personal divine, rational creative power. The logos is imaged in us, because we are images of God, and therefore images of Christ. We are to believe in Christ through our own inner Christ-nature.

By applying this inner nature, this inner divine capacity, we enter the unity of Christ and God.

But there is more … there is always more.

Verse 23:

I  [Christ] in them – us, the disciples,  and you, the Father, in me, that they, us the disciples, may become completely one,

May become completely one. This could suggest grades of unity – half, three quarters and full or complete unity. But what is ‘completed’ here, what is fulfilled is not unity, but the disciples. A more literal and better translation is ‘that they may be perfected in unity’.

Perfected, completed, in unity.

The Greek for perfected here, telos, refers to the purpose, the end, or goal of someone, of us. It is the "final cause" that guides our existence and actions. Our telos, our purpose, our end is perfection, union with God, having come from her and being destined to return to her.

To achieve union with God is why we exist.

Again, we may find this a bit out there or mystical, or simply impossible, but it is the heart of our faith.

And this brings us to someone who did unite with Christ - the  brilliant author, disability rights advocate and political activist,  Helen Keller, who died on this day in 1968.

All Helen achieved, despite being deaf-blind, by her own report was only possible because of her Christianity, which she described as “the Light in my darkness and the Voice in my silence.” 

But, like our Saviour, Helen transgressed the expected and defied the many because her Christianity was Swedenborgian. This is a mystical-esoteric based form of universalist Christianity which views the Bible as divine instruction for the staged transformation and eventual union of the soul with God - regardless of, and even contrary to, church membership.

Helen once wrote, “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.”

The heart Helen refers to is not the heart of valentine’s day, the heart of emotions. It is a more ancient understanding of the heart as a spiritual mode of perception and action. It is the heart, not the brain, that is the traditional seat of our personal logos, our Inner Christ, the image that when we activate and believe through can lead us to unity.

And it is the heart that is the seat and focus of a range of spiritual practices that we broadly call Christian meditation. We will soon be offering opportunities to explore, and deepen, in meditation. We will talk more about these in the coming weeks – but for now please do not think it’s not for you – because it can help us towards the unity that Jesus, in our Gospel calls us to.

Finally, unless we still think this talk of meditation and perfection in unity in God is all a bit out there or mystical, let’s use an argument by authority – C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, as stolid Anglican as you can get, beloved of evangelicals. In reference to our call to perfection in unity, we quote Lewis from ‘Mere Christianity’:

“The command ‘Be ye perfect’ is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. God will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy  and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine … He meant what he said:  those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect … perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, and immortality.”

Amen.

A Sermon for Easter 5. Year C. John 10.22-30

During the past weeks we explored how the Gospel points to the physical, and yet mysterious resurrected Christ – he who is present bodily, yet not subject to the limitations of the physical world. How ours is a religion of the body and a spirituality of the wound, that the physical world, our physical world, matters.

And today, in our world, it is Mother’s Day. We must, however, not simply celebrate mothers, but also celebrate those mothers who have lost children, those who are estranged from a child, those women who cannot, but desperately wish to, have children and those women who mother animal companions or birth works of love and justice in the world.

So, inspired by Mothering, we will re-read part of today’s Gospel with a slight change:

27 [Jesus said], My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 What my Mother has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Mother’s hand. 30 The Mother and I are one.”

It is amazing the difference one word can make. While we call this change “slight”, we know it is also a huge, a fundamental, change.

It is a slight change because when Jesus speaks of ‘the father’ he is not referring to a biologically gendered old man God in the sky. The ultimate uncreated One, who creates all that is, has no gender, is beyond and before all concepts of gender. We all know this, and so our standard, limited, biologically based image of a loving God – the father – should be able to broadened by use of another limited, biologically based image of a loving God – the Mother.

We know this… and yet …

And yet, it is a fundamental change because our version rubs against a tradition where the divine is only referred to in masculine terms: Father, Son and Holy Spirit (gendered as male) … and tradition matters.

Of course, we are not trying to change Holy Scripture – certainly not as a new parish priest without rector status.

What we are doing is bringing into focus a tension that exists between tradition and the divine, between interpretation of scripture and the Gospel of Christ.

Tradition is always limited, as it is formed from our human response to the divine, and we are limited. Any tradition is a work in progress, part of an ever-expanding exploration of unlimited divinity. This is acknowledged in the Anglican tradition by the principle of semper reformanda, ‘always reforming’, meaning the church and church tradition should always be in a process of reform, growth and renewal.

In our Gospel we hear of the holders of tradition “the Jews” gathering around Jesus. Let’s not skip over the antisemitism here but own it and see it clearly – part of our own bounded and limited Christian tradition. “The Jews” can function as a lazy,  messy and harmful symbol for those – and that within ourselves – which seeks to impede the unlimited love of God.  

In contrast to those bound by tradition and precedence, is Jesus. Being one with the Father, one with the Mystery we label as “father”, he is unlimited.

Our text points out two important things: it is the Festival of the Dedication, commemorating the rededication of the Jewish temple; and that Jesus walks in the Portico of Solomon, who built the first Temple. The temple was really, really important – it was not only the symbol of the Jewish covenant with God, but it was also the physical embodiment of that covenant, the dwelling place of God on earth. John’s text focuses our attention on the sources of the temple, physically and spiritually.

And then there is Jesus – not taking not an innocent stroll, but a walk of declaration. Jesus is showing in body prayer, through physical action, that He will become a new temple, a new focal point of worship, a new way to God. He is showing that a human body, flesh and blood, is greater than the Temple.

And so – because of this, “the Jews gathered around him”. Again, this is not innocent. This is not like a footy team rushing to gather around the captain after she kicks the winning goal. The Greek also has the sense of to ‘encircle’ and ‘besiege’. The gathering is an attempt to contain and limit Jesus, to trap him into blasphemy so they may kill him.

Of course, as our Gospel later recounts, they fail – and as we celebrate every Sunday, even when Jesus is killed, he is not contained. He returned, and he always returns.

Like Christ, we are called to question our traditions, transforming those that limit the love of God or limit the sharing of that love.

We are highlighting one of those, often unquestioned, traditions today – the gendering of the ungendered divine as exclusively masculine. It is fitting then, that we highlight this today, on Mother’s Day, celebrating that we all are here, physically, having life because of our mother. Every mother has given of herself, bodily, physically, and brought forth new life, a new body, just as God gives of herself and brings forth new life.

Mother’s Day then, whether celebrated secularly like today, or within some church calendar’s as Mothering Sunday, is a tradition of deep importance.

Now, it used to be tradition that only men could be priests. That changed in the Perth Anglican Community 33 years ago. The reason it changed was, in some ways, simple. People, regular people like us, could see that the old tradition was harmful and limited women expressing their love and service to God, and also denied the Church the service offered by these women.

It is still tradition within our Church that marriage is only between a woman and a man. It used to be tradition within our country, but that changed eight years ago. The reason it changed was simple. People, regular people like us, could see that the old tradition was harmful to those in love with people of the same gender.

Throughout Australia, back then, love won. Love will always win.

Love wins through us - the Body of Christ. Love wins when we, like Jesus, encircled and besieged by those who would limit the love of God, speak up and declare that God, whether seen as Mother, seen as Father, seen as the eternal One, loves all people.

Love wins when we assert – when we tell others – that all people in our church, regardless of their gender, gender expression or the gender of who they love, should be able to marry or become a priest or a bishop as called by and in the love of God. Love wins when we love,

In the Name of Christ, Amen.

A Sermon for DV Sunday. Easter 3. Year C. John 20.19-31

Today being Domestic Violence Sunday, we need some context.

Many of us would be familiar with research that 1 in 3 Australian women experience physical or sexual violence from the age of 15.

In response, our national Church conducted a rigorous and extensive survey across the whole church. The results provide us with some distressing, though maybe not surprising, news. Some of the key points:

The prevalence of intimate partner violence among Anglicans was the same or higher than in the wider Australian community. Our Christian faith, our commitment to love did not lessen or limit our capacity for violence.

The prevalence of intimate partner violence among church-attending Anglicans was the same or higher than among other Anglicans. It did not matter if we went to Church or not – if we attended weekly or simply ticked ‘Anglican’ on the census form, we were still committing Domestic Violence as much as, or in some places, more than the average in Australia.

There are many forms of domestic violence other than physical, – harm or threat of harm to the body – and we cannot list them here; there will be information available when you leave.

But just a few forms:

Coercive Control – controlling and manipulating behaviours within a relationship;

Financial Abuse – controlling or misusing another a person’s money;

Vexatious Litigation – abuse of legal systems to intentionally cause distress; and

‘Tech Abuse’ – when someone uses technology to control or frighten, such as short abusive messages sent with electronic bank transfers of child support.

Whatever form domestic violence takes, it is always a break in and betrayal of relationship, and at root a spiritual betrayal of a person made in the Image of God.

Significantly, the Anglican survey also found that, although unintended, Christian teachings may contribute to this betrayal of relationship.

And if we are honest, if we critically look at our sacred texts and traditions, we can easily see this.

Sacred story after sacred story in the bible, old and new testaments, show women as not having agency, their consent as irrelevant and their bodies considered as property. This theology has real world implications: it contributed to and fed into the principal that there could be no rape in marriage – made explicit in English Common Law in 1736 – and only definitively repealed by all Australian states in 1992. This is the legacy of our church and tradition.

This legacy means that we have become part of the normalized culture of abuse in our world.

And so, this is why we are here, as part of DV Sunday – to be shocked, to be horrified, to be silent … and to explore, to question, and vision how we can ensure violence is addressed before it begins. This is the hope, a hope to make a new beginning that will contribute to a new world where DV is eventually eliminated.

Our Gospel today also speaks of a new beginning.

At the end of our Gospel last week, at the end of Chapter 20 of John, we heard words of conclusion and summing up: “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book.”

And the consensus of scholars is that yes, indeed, the original text of John did finish at the end of chapter 20.

And yet, here we are today at the start of a new chapter, with another appearance of the resurrected Jesus, a story unlike anything else in John, involving the disciples as fishermen. This story, whatever its origin, was important enough for the compiler of the Gospel to include, even after the original conclusion and final verses. For him it was a story that needed to be told, a story that needed to be part of the Good News.

We all have stories that need to be told, especially DV victim-survivors.

A few years back I was blessed to witness such a story, a story that had to be told.

I was leading regular Morning Prayer with a group of women, many of whom had attended their parish for decades. On one memorable occasion, when we celebrated the life of the incredible Florence Nightingale, women’s advocate, social reformer and lay theologian, the spirit arose and these amazing, beautiful, strong women began to speak.

One woman, that cold July morning, shared her experience decades ago, never shared with anyone before then. When, as a younger woman, she approached the rector of the parish with plans to leave, flee and divorce her violently abusive husband. The rector said that if she did so, he would refuse to give her communion, refuse her the Body of Christ, the Body that is given for her personally.

… After she shared, another woman responded: the same thing happened with her. Neither woman knew each had experienced the exact same abuse by the rector. Neither had shared their hidden DV stories until that morning.

And as these wonderful women talked and cried, what emerged, what erupted, was an alternative history of the parish, a history and a story that refused to be silenced, a story that had to be told. And so, it must be for all victim survivors; so it must be for our church.

Today’s gospel story, a story that refuses to be overlooked, included at the end of the already finished book, is equally important.

In it we hear Jesus ask Peter three times if he, Peter, loves Jesus. Each time, Peter indicates, “yes”. This threefold questioning is an act of utmost love and forgiveness – it corresponds to and counters Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus after Jesus’s arrest, just before the cock crowed. This is Jesus giving Peter a chance to undo that betrayal, to restore and repair the broken relationship. And by his threefold “yes”, Peter does so.

But, and crucially for us today, something deeper is indicated.

Though we hear the single word ‘love’ in our English translation, in the Greek there are two different words: agape, a selfless, unconditional love that seeks the well-being of others and philia, friendship, sisterly and brotherly love, affection between companions.

Jesus asks Peter if he, Peter, agape-loves him, if he loves selflessly and unconditionally.

Peter responds but changes the word: he philia-loves Jesus, he loves Jesus because he is known, because he is a friend, a companion on the way.

By his change of love, from universal to brotherly, Peter is refusing the fullness of Christ. By constraining the freely given love of Christ to that between brothers, to that between members of the new Church, Peter, as symbolic head of the church, is limiting the story, controlling the narrative, wanting to keep this love within the group.

And this is what we, as church have often done ever since. The Church and other institutions have controlled the narrative and

created a normalized view of the world, where abuse is accepted. We, the church, do this by limiting our love.

This is exactly what the rector from the Parish with the morning prayer women did when he threatened refusal of the sacrament. He only offered philia-love, love contingent on the women remaining part of the accepted and official story of the church, a story where domestic violence did not occur.

We know that story far too well.

But the story and the love Christ offers, and calls us to share, even if Peter could not share, is agape-universal love. It is love that always disturbs and changes the group, the closed circle, the church, because it loves beyond the in-group and beyond those who control the narrative.

And so today, our hope is to love beyond the narrative; to listen to real stories, true stories that have to be told. Our hope is to listen and hear, and to let it be known we will listen and hear.

Sermon. Wednesday after Easter 2. Year C. John 3.16-21

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

This line is memorized by millions, spurs countless sermons and reflections, appears on billboards and signs at gatherings and protests, is emblazoned on the shirts of sport stars and makes its way into the speeches of hopeful politicians the world over.

It summarizes some of the essential Christian doctrines: the relationship between the Father, the First Person of the Trinity, the Uncreated Creator, and the Son, the Second person, God who incarnates and comes as one of us – and most importantly, the reason for this Incarnation: an act of unsurpassable love that leads to unsurpassable life, the life eternal.

Being so well known and being used for so many purposes – including as a mainstay of evangelical outreach to try and bring new people to faith, often by the assumed fear of Hell associated with the word ‘perish’ – this phrase  has however, over the centuries, accreted to it many misunderstandings and assumptions. If we are to really enter into, be held within, and transformed by these words, we may need to let some of these go.

We start with context: this is the final section of the response from Jesus to the questions from Nicodemus, a Pharisee, described at the start of chapter three. We may recall Nicodemus misses Jesus’ point when discussing spiritual rebirth. Jesus says one needs to be ‘born from above’; Nicodemus hears this as ‘born again’.

This is because the Greek word used, anōthen, can mean BOTH ‘again’ and ‘from above’. This is important because this confusion between the two possible meanings only works in Greek, not in the Aramaic Jesus would have spoken. This means that this account, which we hear part of today, was not spoken directly by Jesus. It could not have been, because it the double-meaning confusion is not possible in Aramaic.

Rather, today’s gospel is a literary creation, a beautiful theological reflection by John to convey succinctly the radical and world changing Good News of Christ.

And so, both to give due honour and respect to the author and for our own benefit, we need to look deeply at this theological literary creation.

To do this, we go once more to the Greek. “For God so loved the world …” Now, of course the love God has is agape love, universal, self-giving love. Love for all people – and so love for the world.

And, there were several Greek words that John could have used to indicate the “world”. Each of these words, while overlapping a bit in semantic meaning, have their own emphasis.  He could have used a word to express the natural, the physical world, the earth and land and sea that would include all creatures, ourselves also. Or he could have used a word to indicate the world of civilization, the world of known inhabited lands, the Roman world.

Instead, John chose to use the word cosmos. In the context of the day, cosmos referred to the human world of life and commerce and society, the world how we have made it, with all its flaws and all its beauty. This is the world, that in the Gospel of John, rejects, hates, excludes and refuses Jesus, the world that refuses the God incarnate. This is the world that God, somehow, still loves.

Now our passage, our single line, John 3.16, is often assumed and is used with seemingly obvious reference to the cross and the theological principle of substitutionary atonement - Christ dying for us; God giving his only Son to die so we may not.

But this idea of Christ’s sacrificial death in place of our own is not the only reading, and certainly not the most ancient reading, of our text, indeed of the Gospel itself.

Just before our passage today we hear at verse 14:

“And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”

The lifting of the serpent by Moses was a way to bring about God’s healing: it gave the Israelites life. Jesus being lifted up gives not just the Israelites, but the whole world, eternal life. Substitutionary sacrifice, Jesus instead of us, is not  mentioned at all.

In fact, in the line before we hear:

“No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man”.

So, another way of reading this text, as ancient as those better known to us, is that Jesus, as the Son of God, through his death on the cross, being lifted towards heaven, breaks the barriers between the heavens and the earth, forever linking the material and the spiritual, the earthy and the heavenly. And this is exactly what happens at the moment of his death in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke: the veil in the Temple that separated the ordinary people from God is torn asunder forever.

And just as our glorious full and rich tradition offers us a new way to look at the death of Jesus, so too it can bring a new vision to the final clause: “so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

The words, “may not perish” and a bit later, “but those who do not believe are condemned already”, can easily prompt ideas and theologies of Hell, eternal conscious torment.

Again though, this is not in our text.

In fact, none of the three Greek words translated as ‘hell’ in the New Testament appear anywhere in John, who only idles sideways towards the modern concept of hell, preferring instead to talk, as he does here of “perishing”, condemnation and judgement.

Perishing, the judgement and condemnation (the same Greek word for both) are only later linked to any concept of eternity. The ‘perishing’ is once and for all; utterly destroyed but no sense of eternal punishment at all.

And so, the very absolute sense of our passage – belief in Jesus equals eternal life, unbelief equals eternal torment begins not to be so absolute after all.

Indeed, the very particularised Salvation offered only to those who belief in Christ is, later in our reading, balanced by a universal expression of God’s love for all the world and all in the world:

“Those – not just the believers in Christ - who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”

When we do what is true, we are in God and we come to Her Light

And this means all people, all of us, not just we who believe in Christ. This is why C.S. Lewis who struggled honestly with our holy texts concluded:

We know that no one can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.

I will read that again … “We know that no one can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.”

And so, Christ given for the world, Christ lifted up, his death that connects earth and heaven, his death given for many, means that our own little deaths, our sacrifices of our ego today and every day, may also connect earth and heaven, not only for ourselves, not only for the Christians in our lives, not only for our loved ones, but for everyone, for all people. In his Name, Amen.

Text of a sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter. Year C. John 20.19-31

Sermon. Easter 2. Year C. John 20.19-31

Though often descending into a discussion of the stereotypical image of the sceptic, ‘the doubting Thomas’, our Gospel today offers us far more. Its spiritual, and therefore physical, message, revolves around the interplay of belief and body, faith and wounding. And as people who believe, as people who are embodied in faith and wounded before God, this is not just Thomas’s story; it is our own

For today we hear of the first meeting of the Body of Christ, the first meeting of what becomes Church, the very first meeting of OUR church as people made new in the love of God. This meeting though is of a group of fearful men, hiding behind locked doors, refusing to really take in the Good News that Mary Magdalene has revealed to them earlier that day – she who first saw the Risen Lord.

And into this mix of fear and confusion, caution and doubt, comes Jesus.

Jesus visits on the first day of the week – in the Jewish religion of the time, this is symbolically the day of creation. This is the day that God creates all things. In the second account of Creation in the Book of Genesis, God breathed into the nostrils of the first human being, formed from the earth, and made them alive. And of course, Jesus, as God, also breathes in our passage today.

At the time of Christ the Jewish scriptures, including the Book of Genesis, were read mostly in Greek translation. And the same Greek phrase used for God breathing life into the first human is used here for Christ breathing upon the gathered disciples.

Jesus is here beginning the new creation; creation as it should have been, creation that is redeemed through his victory over death. And he makes the budding church the new creation – his gathered disciples, through his holy breath, are made anew and become the new creation in themselves, in their lives, and crucially in their bodies.

We are told Christ’s presence is physical. He is body; he shows his physical wounds and physically breathes on the disciples. He is really, physically, solidly present. Yet we are also told the doors, physical doors, were locked. There were physical barriers to Christ’s physical presence – yet he still was there physically present. He was not there as an appearance, as a ghost, as “spiritual presence”, but as a person embodied in flesh and blood, as we, the gathered Body of Christ, are flesh and blood.

What this impossible conundrum points to is highlighted by Jesus’ physical breathing of the Holy Spirit. The Greek word pneuma means, at the same time, literally, ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’. One is not a symbol or a metaphor for the other – the two meanings exist as one. Breath is spirit; spirit is breath. Holy breath is holy spirit; holy spirit is holy breath.

The physical is spiritual; the spiritual is physical.

This is the central mystery of our faith – that the uncreated, invisible God becomes and IS a human person; that the human form, the human body is the image and fit representation of a divinity that created, and is beyond, the universe. That the body, our bodies matter, that the body, our bodies are spiritual, are holy.

And more than this; that our wounded bodies, our wounded selves are holy.

The disciples do not yet rejoice when Jesus stands among them, showing he is alive where once he was dead. They do not rejoice when he grants them peace, the peace found only after the victory over death. They rejoice only when Jesus shows his hands and his side, when he shows them his wounds. Then, seeing the physical damage of the torture from the Cross, then they know for sure this is the physical Jesus. But in this showing of who he is, the same teacher they knew and loved before the Cross, he is showing them that even the resurrected body, even the body that that will commune with God forever, is wounded, is broken, as we are wounded and broken.

Christ standing before the disciples shows them physically, literally and without a doubt, that wounds are included in the Body of Christ; that no matter how wounded we are, we are included in the Body of Christ.   

Wounds are important too for Thomas. He wants to physically know the Risen Christ through these wounds. He wants to have intimate bodily knowledge of them; sight is not enough. In the end though, the invitation by Christ to touch, to enter into his sacred body is enough and Thomas goes further than the other disciples; ‘My Lord and my God!’ he proclaims. Thomas recognizes the eternal uncreated mystery we name God as this wounded, but whole and holy person before him. Then he believes.

Belief here however and throughout the New Testament is not as we may understand it. It is not an affirmation of faith, like we do every Sunday.

The Greek word translated as faith or ‘believe’ is pistis. Both within the Gospels and the wider world of the time of Christ, the word had a wider sematic range of meaning than we sometimes limit it to by our English word ‘faith’.

It was also understood as a vow, or a pledging of allegiance. This is the word used when someone pledged themselves to the Roman Emperor, or to another binding covenant relationship.

Allegiance to the Roman emperor required allegiance of the body; one could not commit to fight, without actually, physically fighting. And as Christians, we cannot have allegiance, we cannot have faith, without giving our bodies. We are religion of the body, a spirituality of the wound.

As wounded bodies, and as the Wounded Body of Christ, we are sent out by him – just as these disciples were – into the world. Jesus is clear; they cannot stay in that room, huddled close in fear. No matter what wounds they have, no matter what wounds we have, Christ sends us in to the world so loved by God.

We are sent to show Christ in our bodies and in our wounds, just as he showed the disciples his body and his wounds.

What happens when we do this, do nothing more – and nothing less – than being a wounded disciple is so beautifully summed up by Symeon the New Theologian, a Byzantine Christian monk of the 11th century, I will finish by quoting a famous poem of his in full.

We awaken in Christ's body

as Christ awakens our bodies,

and my poor hand is Christ, He enters

my foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully

my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(for God is indivisibly

whole, seamless in His Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once

He appears like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous? -- Then

open your heart to Him

and let yourself receive the one

who is opening to you so deeply.

For if we genuinely love Him,

we wake up inside Christ's body

where all our body, all over,

every most hidden part of it,

is realized in joy as Him,

and He makes us, utterly, real,

and everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed

and recognized as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in His light

he awakens as the Beloved

in every last part of our body.

Sermon for Wednesday after Easter. Year C. Luke 24.13-35

Our Gospel today so beautifully expresses many of the mysteries of the spiritual life it has been the inspiration for artists, poets and writers across the centuries.

We hear of two apostles of Christ, who on the morning of the resurrection are travelling dejected and sad, probably returning home, to a village some miles away. And then, somehow and somewhere along the way the resurrected, the physical, body-Christ, comes and walks with them, becoming a third person in their group – yet they do not recognize him.

It's a powerful, evocative story and it so moved the great mid-20th poet, T.S. Eliot to ask in his remarkable poem, The Waste Land, a deeply disturbing question:

“Who is the third who walks always beside you?”.

Whenever we share our lives, whenever we walk our lives alongside another person, there will always be this mysterious third “person” .

When two people become partners their shared lives quickly become a “couple”; almost a third person. When people of different generations, whether biologically related or not, live together we know them as a “family”. When we come together to worship, pray and share we are “a church”.

Here Eliot is referring to the shared subtle, invisible, assumptions we carry with us, the assumptions and prejudices that walk alongside us when we travel with community, or family or with other people. The group mind or corporate culture.

And  his question, “Who is the third” is very probing. He is asking “What is the character, what are the values, the morals, of the invisible guest at each family meal, at each church morning tea, at each social event. What are the invisible ideas and seemingly natural views we share?”

Who is this third who walks always besides us?

For some families, for some of us, and even for the church, the third who walked beside us may have been a person of exclusion and even fear. Our third person, within our families, within our partnerships may have been a person holding cultural prejudice against people of colour, women in power, disabled people, LGBT people, neurodiverse people and non-Christians.

As Christians, Christ himself will be our third person; where two or three are gathered in the name of Christ, he will be among them … even if we, like the apostles in our Gospel, fail to recognize him, even as he physically travels with them. Perhaps it is best to explore their failure by looking at where our passage sits in the Gospel of Luke itself.

It comes immediately after the resurrection, when the women disciples come to anoint the body of Jesus and find in his place two angels, reminding them about the promised resurrection. Upon returning to the male apostles their encounter is dismissed as “an idle tale”, ‘folly’ or ‘nonsense’ in the Greek. Only Peter checks out the scene for himself, and then returns home, not to the apostles.

And so it is, that our two apostles today, heartbroken at the crucifixion, are sadly fleeing on the road to Emmaus. Despite hearing of eye-witness accounts from Mary, Joanna and the other women, and despite having even more collaboration from other people (most likely men) who saw what the women saw, they refuse to believe. Cleopas explains why at verse 24, “but they did not see him”.

The two apostles today function like Thomas in the Gospel according to John – they require tangible, solid evidence. They refuse to believe the very first sign of the resurrection – the empty tomb. They require not the presence of absence, but the presence of a living, body Christ.

The sad irony, of course, is that the Body-Christ was actually walking among them, the same Christ who is always with us, where 2 or 3 are gathered …

Most likely our Gospel writer today was trying to impart this mystery to his small community who used to gather in house churches, about 50 years after the death of Christ. The promised physical return of Christ had not occurred, and so the obvious question arose, “how then is Christ present to us”.

And in this extraordinarily rich passage Luke explains to his community not only the ongoing presence of Christ – while he is absent - but also how Christ lovingly comes alongside us, and alongside everyone, even those who do not believe.

A key moment in our story in occurs in verses 28 and 29. Jesus appears to be going on ahead, past Emmaus, and the two apostles urge him to join them. But they still do not know him: they are in fact, then welcoming a stranger, a key commandment of their Jewish faith. And it is by welcoming the stranger, we welcome Christ, often unawares.

But Luke here is being very coy. In verse 28, Jesus, “walked ahead as if he were going on”.  The Greek word here “prosepoiēsato” is stronger than the English – it also means ‘pretend’. Jesus was pretending to go ahead. He would never really have left them, even if they did not invite him in, as he will never leave us, invited or not. But, but it is through our invitation – to Christ and to the stranger - that things change.

When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight.

This is an obvious reference to what we now celebrate as the Eucharist. It is by sharing the Eucharist that Christ is made known to us. Though he is not here with us in his biological-bodily form, he is with us as this bread and through our shared thanksgiving, WE become the Body of Christ.

However, this passage and the last part of the resurrection narrative earlier, also blesses us with a profound spiritual truth; that of the interplay of absence and presence.

It is Christ’s bodily absence that leads to the presence of faith in the hearts of Joanna, Mary and the other women.

It is the presence of Christ made real in the breaking of the bread that leads to his absence – he disappears from sight.

And it is this absence which leads the apostles, to finally realise Christ among them and begin their missionary work to share their story with the others in Jerusalem. This in turn, in the next verse, leads to presence of Christ standing amongst them imparting his peace.

In his poem on Emmaus, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, writes that the absence of Christ means that “it is necessary to carry him with us”. It is necessary to carry him with us.

And so, we are left with a question: How do we carry the absence of Christ with us today, so that he becomes a presence in our lives?

How can we make this absence a real presence for those we commune and live with, those we walk alongside, those with whom we eat and share life.

How do we become the breaking of the bread which opens the eyes of others?