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?

Sermon for Easter Day. Year C. 2025. John 20. 1-18

Today we are assured that not only did Christ rise, breaking the power of death, but in that rising he rose for us all, churched and unchurched people alike. We are assured that Christ’s victory over death means that we too, through the grace of God, may also rise from the grave. That we too are the centre, the focal point of God’s love to such an extent that She will bring us, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit into eternal life.

This is the cornerstone of our faith. And today, this faith in the risen Christ, the one who died within time so that all may eternally live beyond time, will be proclaimed by millions across the world.

And yet, our Gospel reading today causes us to pause, since it both affirms this faith and offers us a challenge or an invitation to enter deeper into the mystery, into the unknown and therefore into God. It asks us to examine belief and faith themselves.

Attending to the reading, we notice that the two disciples, upon entering the tomb of Jesus, see the absence of his body. This may, as Mary thinks, be the work of other people, perhaps grave robbers. The disciples however also see the head cloth neatly rolled, or in the original Greek “folded up”, by itself, apart from the other wrappings. This care and consideration is something a grave robber would never do.

Some other, some divine power has been at work. And so, as the text states the disciple “saw and believed”.

But, the text goes on in a somewhat confusing fashion, “for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

And here is the crucial bit. What do Peter and the other male disciple, having believed do? They go home.

The wording here is interesting. By context the Greek does mean return to their own homes, their own separate homes, or return to where they were staying. The literal translation is something like “return to their …” the homes or places are added only by context.

This is clearly a return in the sense that at the end of the action, there is nothing new. Nothing has changed. The beloved disciple has seen, has believed, and returns home.

And this is the way it can be with faith, our faith. We can believe, we can affirm the faith of the church, we can accept the propositions and the doctrine – and we can go home, go home to ourselves, without anything, without our lives, changing very much at all.

Our scripture today offers a different way, a way taken by Mary not the male disciples.

“For as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

Belief is one thing but understanding is another. And the Greek word used here for “understanding” also means to be aware, to behold, to perceive, and to know. We can believe or we can believe and know. This is knowledge of, not knowledge about.

We can read book after book about Iceland, we can study courses on Icelandic history and culture and we may know a lot about Iceland. But we will not know Iceland, we will not understand Iceland until we encounter and experience the country personally.

And so it is with faith. We can know of the Risen Christ … or we can know the Risen Christ.

Our Gospel today, invites us to a faith that is based on understanding, on knowing – a faith that means we stay at the empty tomb, not return home to ourselves with nothing changed.

This faith is not simply affirming a set of statements or a doctrine. It is not simply confidence that we somehow know what would have been recorded on video if there had been a drone with a camera flying over the head of Jesus two thousand years ago.

Faith is far more than asserted knowledge.

It is informed by our scripture, our traditions, our reason and the personal touch of the divine, through prayer and other means of encounter.

Our faith is strengthened through years of struggle and pain, connection and joy – attending to the sacrament, responding to liturgy and hymns, sitting next to and joining with people we may not particularly like, but are commanded to love.

Our faith is formed through church fetes, study programs, innumerable charity drives, holding the hands of the sick, getting up early on a cold winter’s morning because we are rostered to make the tea. It is formed through countless acts of selfless service, the majority of which appear to be unseen and unacknowledged.

And this formation creates a faith that understands and knows God, because God is found in and as the people we sit next to, the people we make the tea for and the people we hold as they are sick and as they die.

This formation creates a faith that is more solid and sturdier than anything on earth, a faith that is stronger than death, because it is formed in Christ, who once was dead but now lives forever. 

This is a faith that, when sighting Christ’s empty tomb, would not lead us home, this is a faith that prepares us for the divine encounter, as it did with Mary.

This is the faith we are called to live.

Mary embodies this faith and what may bring us to this faith. Having gone to the tomb alone, she announces to Peter and the other disciple, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

By the use of “we”, even though she is alone, Mary vocalizes communal concern. Her identity is interconnected with the other disciples, with the people. This interconnection, this concern, this love is exactly that which forms the deep and lived faith we are called to. A faith of the “we” not the “I”.

And yet, Mary is is not self-less, some sort of group-think robot: when she is questioned by the angels, she replies:  ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ Her personal grief is palpable.

Mary is both herself and the community, the individual and the group.

And what does she do when the disciples leave, back to their homes, back to themselves? She remains there weeping, she stays with her grief.

She does not, unlike the disciples, enter the tomb, but remains respectfully outside in her grief and looks inside. There she sees the two angels, one at the head and one at the foot of where the body of Jesus had been lying. They are enclosing the empty space, the shape, the absence, of where Jesus once was.

Mary’s grief is the type of grief we all know. When the absence of a loved one, the aching loss of them, becomes a presence in and by itself. Though they are no longer with us, their absence is. Though we cannot see their body any longer, we are keenly aware of the space they would have once taken up within our lives and homes.

Mary has fully accepted the loss of Jesus, she is fully with her grief and her pain, her vision full of the absence of the Lord. She has nothing, for there is nothing to have, not even a body.

And yet … out of that nothing, from within that absence there appears Jesus – for our God is a living God who creates from nothing, who brings into existence that which does not exist and that which once existed.

And we too like Mary, if we attend fully, if we stay with the grief in our life, will find at some point the nothing becomes something, the absence becomes a presence, the dead weight grief giving way to the light of life - and the living God comes to us.

But we may not recognize the divine one; we may think they are the Gardener, or the person on the pew next to us, or the people we make tea for, or the member of the church who kind of gets on our nerves. But again, like Mary if we engage with them honestly, bringing to them our real selves, they will see us, they will recognize us and will call us by name.

And so this is how we may have faith in the resurrection – through a restored life now, not at some future time, through the divinity of human grief, holding and contact, through encounter with those who call us by name.

And in that way, like Mary who stayed and grieved and was healed, restored to her own life, may we also be able to announce, be able to proclaim boldly this Easter and every day “I have seen the Lord!”

Amen.

Sermon Easter Vigil. John 20.1-18

Christ is risen. Alleluia! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

How wonderful it is to bear witness to the ongoing redeeming love of God in human history. A redeeming love that culminated on the first Easter morning, that culminates at this Easter Vigil as we celebrate the resurrection of Christ, a resurrection that promises that we too have a share in his eternal kingdom, that we too are part of the life everlasting.

And as always, our Gospel helps us enter the life of Christ; and, also helps Christ to enter our lives.

Though she is actively looking for him, when Mary Magdalen encounters Jesus at the empty tomb, she does not recognize him.  She mistakes him for the Gardener, because as we are told previously in John, in the Gospel we heard on Good Friday, that the place where Jesus was laid had a garden in it.

And we too, our church here, is surrounded by a garden, a genuine community garden, a garden that has been and is tended by many different people, a garden for all people, just as Christ is for all people.

The symbol of a Garden is highly charged in the bible. It was to tend a Garden, that humanity was created by God in Genesis 2. It was in a garden that humanity first sinned, and it was in a Garden that Jesus was betrayed. And now he has been resurrected in a garden.

Garden’s are places of life and the complexities of life. Plants, flowers and fungi are seeded, fruit, blossom, wither and die, and in their decay, they become food and nutrients for the next generation of life. Every plant in some ways interacts with the rest of the garden. Some plants do better in the presence of other plants, some thrive in the shade of taller plants, some benefit from the insects that live on neighbouring plants.

This web of interdependence also exists throughout all of Creation, including our human world, between you, me and every other person. This was clearly understood by the great civil rights leader, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, who was assassinated just over 57 years ago.

While in prison for non-violent protests against racial segregation, Dr King wrote:

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can ever be what you ought to be, until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured.”

“I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can ever be what you ought to be, until I am what I ought to be.” What powerful, what amazing words.

We are all created by God, in the image of God, so that we may serve her and enter with her into eternal life, united with all her saints and angels. This is our birthright, this is our destiny, this is who we ought to be. This is who we all ought to be, including those people we cannot ever imagine being in heaven with us – whatever heaven means to us.

But if Dr King is right, we may never become who we ought to be, until we all fulfil the purpose of our lives.

And this is what the earliest icon of the resurrection depicts: Christ is shown returning from hell, having ensnared death forever, and with him, one in each hand he is pulling, he is dragging upwards Adam and Eve – the spiritual ancestors of every human and symbolic of every human. The resurrection to eternal life is a corporate resurrection, everyone is included, because everyone needs to become who they ought to be, before a single human being is who they ought to be.

But Dr King was also Reverend King – and central to his life and this powerful statement is the understanding that this is “God’s universe”. God has structured it this way, because as well as interdependence between all creation, all of creation is radically dependent on God. At every second, at every moment, God brings all of creation including our own beings, into existence. Everything is dependant on her.

This means the Garden of the redeemed creation, is not a garden by itself, it has a Gardener – Jesus. And we live, and will eternally live, in his garden not as individuals but as an interdependent and a dependant family. Again, as we heard on Good Friday, this is the new family of disciples, instituted by Jesus while he hung on the cross, declaring to Mary, his mother that his beloved disciple was her son, and to the disciple, that she was his mother. This is the family we continue here today.

As any gardener knows, for a rose to become what a rose ought to be – beautiful, fragrant and lush, requires intervention from the gardener. The interdependence of the garden may keep the rose alive, but it will never bloom as deeply as it does under the love of a skilled gardener. The rose will be pruned, fed with foul compost, maybe transplanted; whatever is needed for it to become what it ought to be.

And so it is with our lives. God, like a gardener, is actively involved and loves the world. She may feed us with food that does not seem like food to us. She may move us away from our familiar lives. And when they are no longer needed, when they are actually dead and holding us back, she may remove, may prune aspects of our lives and ourselves.

All this comes about through the resurrection, when the barrier between the spiritual and the material, the heavenly and the human, the barrier of death, was forever destroyed.

And so, what we do now, with our physical, earthly lives, today, now on this cool Djeran-Autumn morning, affects our souls.

Soon, we will physically say the words that reaffirms our baptism, a baptism into Christ’s resurrection, and our souls will stir. In that stirring, we pray then, that we are open to the fruit of the resurrection of Christ in our hearts, as he leads us, like a loving and tender gardener, towards who we ought to be. Amen.

Sermon. Good Friday. Year C.

Though today we enter the most solemn time of the Christian year, I thought a little dark humour might be appropriate, especially as it leans into the profound mystery we encounter today. So … please imagine these images as I describe a cartoon I saw again recently.

Landed flying saucer

Two aliens (on their own)

Looking at the crucifixion

One says to the other: “You know what we need to do? We need to get the heck out of here, that’s what we need to do!”.

And of course, we can quite easily understand the aliens’ motivations – ‘to get the heck out of there’, to remove ourselves from the stark and violent reality that is the Cross, to escape from the world that could, did and does crucify those who come in peace, those who come in and as the Divine One.

But this is where we are. This is where we live.

We are here, with the Cross, because we are of the world and in the world, and the world makes the Cross.

Denys Turner, a Catholic theologian, author of ‘the Darkness of God’, once said:

“The Cross is what the Trinity looks like within the pain and violence of the human world”.

This is incredibly profound. We note that Denys did not say the Cross was the image of simply ‘God in the pain and violence of the human world, but rather he used the words ‘the Trinity’.

The Trinity, traditionally imaged as the father and the son and the holy spirit, the One who gives, the One who is Given and the One who is Gift – the Trinity is the icon of God’s personhood and God’s community. The Trinity is the divine community of self-emptying, self-giving love in relationship. Each of the three persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, Spirit, completely and freely gives and receives of the others in an eternal and mutual community of loving inter-relationship.

And it is this relationship, this mutual self-giving one to the other, each to all, that the world of pain and violence cannot accept. It is the call of God to be in true and self-giving relationship with Her and with each other that is violently rejected.

This rejection most often occurs in this world of pain through the rejection of personhood. Throughout history, and throughout the history of the church, those who are shunned, persecuted and killed are not seen as full persons or as equal persons: people of colour, Jewish people, first nations people, LGBT people.

People in power, the people benefitting from unequal power and exploitation, people who control the narrative and the story of a culture, position and degrade certain other people and refuse to enter relationship with them. And we know relationship is the key. We all know or have heard the stories: people holding racist or anti-refugee points of view refusing to change no matter what data, what information, is presented to them. But once they get to know, once they form a relationship with a first nations person or with a refugee, once the see the person, then they change.

Personhood and relationship are the keys. And throughout the horror of our Gospel today we see this starkly enacted. The Judeans, trying to maintain their identity and culture in the face of brutal Roman occupation and oppression, cannot enter full relationship with Jesus, cannot see his Personhood as the Holy One of God. They cannot move into a new relationship with God, a relationship where God has come among them as body and flesh, warmth and blood, not as they expected, a conquering Messiah but as an arrested and powerless rebel. And so, they repel him, deny the divine among them: “Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!”.

Rejection, and then, the cross. Refusal, and then torture. Denial and then, elimination.

The Cross though is also God, is also the Trinity.

The Cross is both HOW the Trinity comes into the pain and violence of this world, and WHY The trinity comes. 

The cross is both the ultimate symbol of all the possible, all the many and varied ways of violence and pain the world can afflict, the worse we can do – and it is also the way through, the way through all pain, all violence, all erasure, all death.

Christ as second person of the Trinity in conscious, self-giving love for all, offering relationship to all, seeing all as equal and divine persons, walks the way to, walks his way with, and is raised up on the Cross. He goes through the cross, becomes the cross and thereby defeats the cross, having taken on and absorbed all the violence, fear and pain of the world.

The cross, and Christ, shows us the only way out is through. The only way out of the seemingly natural violence of the world, in our countries, in our society, in our hearts, is, like Christ, to consciously walk towards it. Like Christ, with his love and with his mind, we can see the violence and choose not to become violent, we can experience the rejection and not reject, we can be conscious of the forces of erasure, and choose not to erase.

This is the gift of the Cross, and the one who set his face and walked toward it.

And yet, even on the Cross, the one who is the Cross, continues his work, continues his new creation, continues to change the world, in and through forming new self-giving relationships.

26 When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” 27 Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

It is only after this new relationship, after this new family is created, a family that we continue here today, it is only after this, that Jesus knows it is finished. And dies.

But his divine and perfect body, his broken and tortured body, is also life giving. When his side is pierced, there flows blood and water, just as blood and water flows from the Mother when a person is born. The Greek word for ‘side’, is the same as the ‘side’ of the earth-creature, Adam, from where new life, Eve emerged. Christ, his very body, is birthing the new creation and the new gathering, the church. Tradition also tells us that at that moment, angels collected his birthing waters and blood in a chalice, which we and world continue to spiritually share in the holy Eucharist, as part of the new Creation within the new Church.

And as his church we, have the gift here, right now of the Cross, the Gift of the Trinity within the pain and violence of the world, to transform and defeat this pain and violence, by transforming it within ourselves, by walking the Way of the Cross, which we will do shortly.

But finally, after we have walked the Cross with Christ, we are told, his broken and perfect, his life-giving and pierced body is laid in a tomb, a new tomb, a new empty space, like a womb … ready …

Text of a Sermon for Palm Sunday-Passion Sunday. Year C. Luke 23.1-49

We began our holy time, our sacred celebrations this morning at the Lychgate. This is highly significant. The gate is an example of theological architecture, the embodiment of sacred and theological principles in wood and stone and mortar.  It shows us, points to, incarnates for us the divine and how the divine unfolds in life and creation.

During the Middle Ages, Lychgates were traditionally known as ‘Corpse-Gates’. The bodies of the beloved dead were taken, placed under the pent-house roof of the gate, protected from the elements, rain and wind and sun, to await burial in the days ahead. The beloved dead’s body was often watched over by their family or the poor of the parish, paid for the task. The funeral service would then begin at the Lychgate, before processing to the church, just as we began there and processed here today.

Lychgates were also part of traditional wedding customs, and were the spot the newlywed couple would leave the church grounds after the ceremony. The gates, however, were tied together and the couple’s first public act as a wife and husband was to untie the knots together, before leaving the church to the road beyond and their ‘new normal’ of life together as one.

The Gate then functions as an in-between place, a boundary marker, a liminal space, between the church, consecrated ground, and the outside, unconsecrated ground, between the living and the dead. It is neither one, consecrated, nor the other, unconsecrated, but a transition space between the two.

Starting our Holy commemorations, plural, today at this space of sacred liminality, is very appropriate. Because today, although we started singing joyfully and deeply these acclamations of Christ:

The company of angels
are praising you on high,
while we and all creation
exultant make reply

We quickly hear the words:

“but they kept shouting, “Crucify, crucify him!”

Our sacred story changes, darkens, becomes ominous and takes the utmost turn for the worse. This is the point in the movie that the music changes to the most sombre tones.

Today, as we celebrate with fronds and sing, we also hear and remember the passion, the death and suffering of our saviour. And so, we are caught between the two poles of Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday, between proclamation and despair, between acceptance of the incarnate God and rejection by the utmost cruelty imaginable.

We then, we ourselves, we as people, we as the Body of Christ, we as the church have become, and are right now, the liminal space. We are the transition, the not-this, not-that, the uncertain no-thing between what should be, God on earth, and what is, God rejected.

And of course, we all know these strange, disturbing, unsettling times of the in-between in our personal lives. Times when we ourselves are in-between, perhaps caught between, the old and the new, times of maturation, when we are neither child nor adult, neither student nor expert, neither in a failing relationship, nor outside it.

This is a human, universal experience.

And so, we turn to, we look for what it is that can get us through, what it is that will both hold us as the in-between, hold us in that mysterious liminal space when we are neither one nor the other, and also unfold us unto the new.

For Christians, and for others of some other faiths, this “what” is a “who” – a person, a person who is fully human like we are, but is also fully divine, fully God.

As our passion story tells us that this person, Jesus, dies. But he dies as God.

He dies willingly. He dies in power, having chosen to be powerless.

He dies consciously to know the unconsciousness of death.

He dies in the fullness of himself, God and human, mortal and immortal, to know the emptiness of the grave.

And so, through his death Jesus is the one who spans both sides of the liminal divide, both aspects of the transition space: life and death, light and dark, seen and unseen, here and gone. He is both the start and the finish, the beginning and the end, and he is also the path between. He is the Way.

He is the way for all liminal journeys, he is the archetype, the template, the secret hidden knowledge within each of us that we find at our darkness moments, that which gets us through, that which holds us and moves us and unfolds us from one space, our former life, our past self, to our new life, our future self.

He is the way, he is our way, because he has traversed the greatest of ways, death – and has returned.

And being the way, having traversed the way, Jesus changes the world forever, backward and forward in time, the entire universe blessed and being blessed. We hear:

“It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed and the curtain of the temple was torn in two”.

This was the heavy, solid curtain that veiled and guarded the holy of holies in the temple, the centre of all, the place where the presence of God was, the place where the people, people like you and I, could not enter. And now by the way of Jesus this barrier is torn forever asunder, the walls between the divine and the human, the sacred and the mundane, are gone.

And what this means is that we, and the entire world, are now caught between the two poles of earth and heaven, creation and uncreation, the life temporal and the life everlasting.  We are now, as followers of the Way of Christ, constantly in the liminal space, constantly unfolding, forever becoming, eternally moving towards God. She has called us into existence, into being, from non-being. She has given us this in-between life and shows us the way to Life Eternal in Christ our saviour.

This is the way of Holy Week, where we accompany Christ to Jerusalem and all that entails; acclamation, feasting, betrayal, arrest and death before his glorious resurrection. This is the way we, as his Body, imitate Christ, bridging the barriers between heaven and earth through our service and love, making, like Him, the invisible God present to this visible and struggling world.

So, may we, this Holy Week and Easter, by following Christ on the Way, through prayer and practice, by meditation and compassion, know ourselves more and more as the Lychgate, the space between heaven and earth, to serve both heaven and earth. In the Name of Christ. Amen.

Sermon for Maundy Thursday. John 13.1-17 13.31b-35

Our reading today has several very important tensions and nuances that bring to us the heart of the Gospel itself, the heart of the Christian message and the heart of the teachings of our saviour, Christ.

It is good to start though, by reviewing some fundamentals of our faith, our tradition and our holy scripture.

As briefly mentioned in our service booklet, the name for our celebration today, our ritual re-enactment and entering into the foot washing offered by Christ at the last supper, is ‘Maundy Thursday’. This comes from the Latin mandatum or ‘’command’ and refers to the commandment we hear today:

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

Love one another.

As we may know, in ancient Greek, in which the New Testament was written, there were several distinct and different words all translated as the same English word, “love”. In English, every day, we use the same word, “love” when we describe our love for God, our love for our children or animal companions, and the love for our favourite food, or a cold beer after a long hot day.

In Greek though it was different, and though there was some overlap in meaning, to distinguish between forms of love, four words were used.

There was eros, which refers mostly to romantic or passionate love, often seen as a love between partners. The English word "erotic" is derived from eros.

Then there was storge, a word centred on the naturally arising affection or love within a family, such as love for parents, siblings, or children.

There was also philia, part of the name of the city ‘Philadelphia’. This the love of friendship, sisterly and brotherly love, or affection between companions on the way or partners in a mutual endeavour.

None of these forms of love though is part of the new commandment. The love we are being commanded to is a special kind of love, in fact the highest and deepest kind: agape

This form of love is central to the Gospel. It is a selfless, unconditional love that seeks the well-being of others, regardless of their response to our love. Agape contrasts all the other forms of love by not being based on personal inclination or family loyalties or communal-social relationships. Agape love loves without distinction, agape love loves all people without distinction.

And tonight, with our bodies and hearts and minds, we enact this agape love, we enact this lack of distinction between people when we wash each other’s feet.

There is no prearranged order of people here tonight; we are washed and then we wash whoever is next. We will not necessarily wash our partner’s feet, those we eros love. We may not wash the feet of those we share life and home with, those we storge love or even the feet of those we feel sisterly or brotherly philia love for. But we wash whoever comes to us to be washed, just as Christ loved all, and loves all who come to him.

As he taught in the ‘Sermon of Mount’, though, Agape love in Christ is also to be extended to the very worse of us, the very worse of humanity, even people we know as enemies and traitors. And here we come to a tension, a tension within our Gospel, our understanding of faith and the purposes of God. This tension is centred on Judas.

Right at the start, verse two, of our Gospel today we hear:

The devil had already decided that Judas son of Simon Iscariot would betray Jesus.

The devil had already decided.

Many other English translations reflect better the literalness of the Greek here: “the devil having already put into the heart” of Judas. Our text gives the agency here to the devil, not to Judas. The devil had already decided.

And our reading today skips from verse 17 of chapter 13 to verse 31. The verses we do not hear, verses we DID hear yesterday on ‘Spy Wednesday’, are of immense importance. In response to a question of who would betray him, Jesus responds:

26 Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish.” So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot. 27 After he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him.

Satan enters Judas by the bread that Jesus gives. The devil, here equated at least in part with Satan, decides. Jesus gives the bread and then, only then, Satan enters the one who betrays, Judas, the one whom the devil had already decided would betray Jesus.

As we said, this is a tension, a tension that can upend certainty, a tension that can shake our faith, a tension that we, as a church often pretends does not exist.

It is a tension, however, that cannot and should not be resolved tonight, or indeed fully any night, because it speaks to fundamental questions of God’s sovereignty, human will, and the powers which seek to thwart God’s unfoldment and love.

But it is of immense importance, and it is no accident, that this tension of human and divine agency is within the exact same Gospel passage we hear our new commandment, that we should love one another.

We are told at verse 11, that Jesus knew that Judas would betray him, and yet his washed his feet anyway.

And so maybe this washing of feet is a clue, a way forward. Not to resolve the tension of Judas, the question of his agency and culpability, but maybe a way of living with the tension, of holding in uncertainty within and as the Body of Christ.

In the Gospel according to John, even at this the Last Supper, there is no description of the Eucharist, the breaking of bread and drinking of wine, the sharing of the body and the blood. There is only the washing of feet, and there are indications that for some early John based Christian communities, foot washing was their sacrament, their equivalent of the Lord’s Supper.

So, for us tonight when we wash and are washed we are participating in a sacrament, an outer action with water and basin and towel that brings forth the inner blessings of God, in and as the Body of Christ.

So, for us, today, tonight, when we wash whoever we are near, when we wash not in eros-love, not out of storge family allegiance, or philia sisterly love, when we wash with agape, we imitate Christ. Because Christ washed his betrayer, washed Judas with his agape love.

So, tonight, through our simple bodily action of washing and drying, caring and nurturing, we imitate and become like the One who includes Judas, whatever his role and agency in the betrayal actually was.

When we wash and are washed, we participate in the God of flesh and blood who includes all who betray and who includes us when WE betray. This is the agape love to which he calls us, this is the love to which we belong, this is the love to which we unfold tonight, with only water and basin and towel.

In his name, Amen.

Text of a sermon for the Fifth Sunday in Lent. Year C. John 12.1-8

Our beautiful Gospel today is in stark contrast with the equally beautiful gospel from last week. As we explored then, last week’s Gospel is generally known in a very limited fashion, as ‘the Parable of the Prodigal Son’. In that reading the women and girls of the community are invisible and forgotten – not one is mentioned or referred to.

In today’s Gospel it is the actions by the visible women, Mary and Martha of Bethany, and the ones hinted at – Mary the Mother of Christ and Mary Magdalene – that bring us to the very heart of our Christian faith, showing the importance of the hidden feminine force of the Gospel.

Up to this point in the Gospel according to John, Mary, Martha and Lazarus are the only people Jesus has declared his love for. And so, he has a final meal with his closest, most intimate friends.

At the dinner, Martha, whose name means ‘mistress’, the feminized form of the title ‘master’, serves. The Greek word chosen for ‘served’ is the same as the word for deacon, a deacon of the growing church at the time of the writing of the Gospel.

What is being referred to here is not a woman serving dinner or tea and biscuits, but Martha, beloved of Christ, who professes her recognition of Jesus as Messiah, taking her role as leader of the house church where the dinner was held.

What is here, is a Gospel testament to the equality of women in the early church, a testament that still speaks to us today.

Eating with Mary, Martha and Jesus is Lazarus – whose name means ‘God has helped’, who is recently risen from the dead. We are told Jesus loved Lazarus – we are not given a reason, he just loved him; Lazarus did not do anything, he did not act, he did not profess Jesus as Messiah. He just was, and was loved, as all are loved today. 

Lazarus is a living icon of Christ’s victory and power over death and he is there in body and flesh, breaking bread and drinking wine with all in that house, right next to them, as close as those we who we share our homes with, as close as our animal companions or the friends we visit, or the people in the pews next to us right now.

And now as part of this ceremonial meal, Mary acts.

Often, we focus on her extravagance, her abundant and lavish gift. But there is so much more here, things we might miss, not being part of the culture of the day.

Feet washing, here done with oil not water, was strictly the act of a servant. And yet Mary, mistress of the house, does this herself. She kneels before Jesus, giving up what status she as a woman has, lowering herself. Her body shows her worship, trust and abandonment to God in Christ. Jesus of course will imitate her example before Passover, washing the feet of his disciples, which is the sacrament within John’s Last Supper, a sacrament we will remember and relive on Maundy Thursday.

And Mary is intimate with Christ – a woman would never, in the culture of the day, touch a man other than her husband. Her intimacy, her breaking of social rules in the presence of the incarnate God is further shown by unbinding her hair, something only ever done in private. Seeing a women’s hair was equivalent to seeing them naked – Mary is opening, revealing and giving herself completely. 

So, what is happening here, what does this embodied, worshipful intimate embrace between Mary and Jesus mean?

Well, Mary anoints Jesus with nard meant for embalming, for the day of his burial. But she does this while he is still alive. She is anointing Jesus for service through death, just as the old Kings of Israel were anointed for service through life.

And it is by this anointing, from a woman, not a male prophet, that Jesus becomes who we know him to be – Messiah – the Anointed One, Christ – the deliverer from death. This anointing for death, with the oil of death, while alive, is a sign by Mary that Jesus will become the ruler of both life and death, both the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen.

Mary is also completing the work of Mary, the Mother of Jesus and foreshadowing the work of Mary Magdalene.

It was the Virgin Mary’s heartfelt, soul affirming “yes” to God at the annunciation, that allowed Christ to incarnate, to become body and flesh within her womb. Her “yes”, gave Jesus life.

And now, Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus’s own heartfelt, soul affirming “yes” – this time, a “yes” to his death, not his life.

The Virgin Mary was the gate of life, the feminine power that allowed the Invisible, Uncreated One to become visible and human, and Mary of Bethany stands as the Gate of Death, anointing Jesus’s feet, for his willing walk to Jerusalem, the Cross and all that entails.

And of course, we know that Jesus will rise and will come again, breaking forever the barrier between the living and the dead.

And the first to see him will be another Mary – Mary Magdalene. Three Mary’s – one allowing the incarnation, one preparing the death and one at the resurrection of our saviour.  

All this in just a hundred words!

But these hundred words also speak to us now, bringing us, if we allow them, closer and closer to God. For we too, every Sunday, share a meal, in a house, the house of God.

When John writes that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” the word he uses for ‘house’ can also refer to the church – and yes, our church is filled with the fragrance of the perfume of Christ as ruler of life and death, our church is filled with the living and the gone, our beloved dead, as they too share the Eucharist we offer.

At our meal, each Sunday, if we look carefully, we will see Mary, we will see Martha, and of course, Lazarus, right next to us on the pews.

We break bread with those who serve the church and the world that the church serves. We are next to those who are so in love with Christ, they fall at his feet, give themselves to him and offer him all they have. And we have all, like Lazarus been raised from death to life through our baptism. We are all living icons of the resurrection, and we have all, in our personal lives been through times of living death, when the darkness overtakes and the stars fade and there is nothing – only, finally, to be made alive again by the Love of God Herself.

And this is the transformation our story offers us; not through any moral injunction or persuasion to any outer action, but through entering the story and simply eating. Eating, again and again, a last intimate meal with Christ, because as Lent reminds us, one Sunday will be our last meal with Christ, our last meal with the One who calls us to transform more and more towards His likeness.

We transform when we serve, when we use the power God Herself has given us. We transform when we give ourselves to God in intimate worship and love. We transform when we, like Lazarus, know ourselves as beloved of God, for no reason at all, and know that by Her love we enter life eternal, now and forever,

In the Name of Christ. Amen.

Text of a Sermon for Wednesday after the Fourth Sunday in Lent 4. Year C. John 5.17-30

Our gospel today is complex and even confusing, almost convoluted. However, not simply allowing it to wash over us, but rather trying to attend to it can bring us into deeper relationship with the One God from which the text, and all our lives depend.

Our text is classic John – both in its complexity and movement back and forth on itself, but also with statements where Jesus identifies himself, implicitly and explicitly, as equal to God. This of course is why “the Jews” are seeking to kill him. Two thousand years later, raised in a church where we know Jesus, Christ as God robs us from the absolute horror and blasphemy this idea represented to “the Jews”.

But we need to be careful here, because whomever, whatever social grouping the author of John is referring to when he writes, “the Jews”, he is not referring to, cannot be referring to, the culturally and religiously identified Jewish people today.

Judaism as we know it today, developed slowly within the first two centuries of the common era, just as Christianity did. John did not know this future Jewish community.

As well as being careful in our identification, to really enter the mystery of our Gospel we need some context.

At the beginning of the chapter, Jesus goes up to Jerusalem to attend one of the festivals, one of the Jewish festivals, a festival of his native and family culture. So, all we hear today comes from this – Jesus has situated himself at the heart of Jewish land, at the heart of Jewish religious-cultural practice and life. He chooses to operate from there, to bring his message to the heart of the establishment of the day – not to attack from outside, but, in modern terms, to bring about change from within.

How he enters the city is really significant, and shows his mission of change, his mission of sharing the love of the One God, through and as his person. He enters the city through the Sheep Gate, the gate through which lambs were led, led up to the temple for sacrifice – Christ, the Lamb of God entering Jerusalem for his own sacrifice.

Near this gate was a pool famous for its healing properties. Naturally then, it attracted those who were sick, lame, paralysed – the ‘unclean’, the abused, the neglected and the shunned of society. People looking for any ray of hope in their suffering.

Ordinary people, sensible people, automatically avoided the pool and the unclean outcasts it attracted. Jesus, of course, goes directly to the pool and there encounters a man, who has been unwell his whole life, some 38 years. Hearing this, Jesus is moved by compassion and heals him.

This healing, however, this transgressing of social conventions, this entry of the son of God through the Gate of Sheep, this all occurs on the Sabbath. This is the Jewish day of rest, the day where no work is to be performed, when all is to be dedicated to God. So, in the verse just before where we start today, we hear:

 “16 Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the Sabbath.” 

And then we start with our text: “17 But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” ”

Sabbath and work, rest and action, stillness and activity – this is the binary set-up, these are the seemingly irreconcilable pair of opposites that the religion of the day sought to uphold. This was the spiritual reality of the Jerusalem Temple, the established understanding of God and God’s universe of the day. And Jesus, the one who collapses all binaries, heaven and earth, outsider and insider, clean and unclean – he literally walks and works through it.

We need to be clear; the Sabbath as a day where work is forbidden was, and is, a human convention, but a human convention in faithful and dedicated response to what was seen as God’s will, revealed in the Law given to the People by God through Moses. The keeping of Sabbath, the motivation behind it, was holy. Completely holy.

And … and … Jesus nonetheless says …

“My Father is still working, and I also am working.” 

God is still active. God is still love, and God is still loving and nothing can stop that love.

In the human sphere, and in modern parlance, Jesus with his body, with his healing, with his work is showing practically and so clearly, that ‘People are more important than processes’. The spirit is more important than the letter.

And just as Christ, fully divine and fully human, was the one to disrupt and disorder the status quo to bring the healing of God and restoration to the lost, so too we, as human and as images of God, so too we are also called to disrupt and disorder those processes, those ideas that place rules above people, ideology above life. In our lives, in our families, our community, our church and in our world.

In the cosmic sphere, Jesus is also saying, the work of God continues, abides and remains. At this particular moment, right here, and right now, and at each and every moment, God, the uncreated creator of all creation, holds us all in Her love and embrace, bringing and maintaining all things and all people in creation and being.

The work of God continues, the work of the Son continues, the work of His Body, as our bodies, and as our church, also continues, even when it disrupts and breaks the rules. Even when it breaks the Sabbath.

The Sabbath in the Jewish culture of the time was not just associated with ‘rest’, the literal meaning of word. It was also associated with darkness, endings and fallowness, the still point from which the new week, a new beginning will emerge. And so, for us, in the midst of our deep Lenten journey, our Gospel, our Saviour is speaking directly to us. Even in the dark, even in the wilderness, even when all the stars have fallen and all has gone, even there, God is active, God is working with us and for us.

And because we enter this darkness willingly and knowingly, because we choose to enter the Lenten-wilderness Road to Jerusalem with Jesus, because like him we consciously enter that place beyond all time and space where death is inevitable, we become part of the journey, part of the mystery. We participate with God, and in our walk, in our work, today and every day, God is still working, Christ is still working.

In his Name, Amen.

Text of a Sermon Preached for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C. Luke 15.11-32

Today’s gospel is mostly known as the parable of the prodigal son, the son who is wasteful, reckless, spendthrift.  This shows the church’s focus on sin over its focus on grace. For this incredibly rich story rests and falls on grace, shown through the love of a forgiving father. But the parable is not called the ‘Parable of the Forgiving Father’. And the second half of the passage is focused on the elder son. But it’s not called the ‘Parable of the Two Sons’. Also, through our title we focus on the individual, not the communal, something at odds with the parable itself.

Now as the head of a Jewish family, the father engages in many outrageous, extravagant and socially shameful acts of love – just as Christ himself did. Agreeing to divide his property was a public dishonouring. Running out of the property to meet his son was an act of disgrace, as was the public showing of compassion and affection – and the Greek here is lovely, it literally means “having run, fell upon the neck of him and kissed him”.

If we focus on this parable as an independent story, we miss a lot. For it is part of an interdependent three-fold set of lost and found parables in this chapter of Luke, increasing in intensity.

In the first two parables, the lost sheep – one out of a hundred, and the lost coin - one out of ten – are returned by the effort of the seeker, the shepherd and the cleaning woman. In our parable today, the restoration of the single human person – one out of one - comes through powerlessness and the turning of the heart.

The father allows his son to leave – he could have refused. Once his son has left however, he waits patiently, he does not exercise power and seek his son, but waits with his invitation of restoration. He is able to see his son ‘from far off’ because he has never stopped looking for his return. He has to wait, accepting powerlessness, until the son turns his heart; human restoration, unlike that of sheep or coins, is not by human effort, but by acceptance of the ever-present love of God.

And what has happened to the younger son? It is not so much his ‘dissolute living’ that’s the problem, it is his hiring himself out to one of the citizens of a foreign, Gentile, country. The Greek has other connotations for this word, “joined”, “glued”, “united”. He has lost himself in this union to someone who is not part of his family, not part of his culture, not his actual life - just as we also lose ourselves when we unite ourselves to selfish acts, to lives that we pretend are ours.

The younger son has so lost his Jewish and family identity he feeds pigs, and wishes to eat what they eat. But … perhaps because he is so lost, so far at the bottom, a place that we all know in some shape or form, perhaps because he is there, he actually remembers who he is.

As the text states, he “came to himself” – his heart is turned and he returns to seek out his proper identity – but now not as an individual looking out just for himself, as he did previously, and not as even as a member of his family, but simply as part of an interdependent community, as a hired hand.

By seeking connection, by seeking community, by accepting love, he that was lost is found, he who was dead is alive again. 

But … and there is a really BIG but here … the parable only tells half the story, literally half. Because this family, this community, to which the son returns consisted not only of fathers, and sons, it also consisted of women and girls. There was a mother, either alive or dead, as well as a father, most likely daughters, certainly women and girl slaves.  Not one is mentioned. All are lost to the biblical record; all are dead to history.

This is the patriarchal legacy of our scriptures, which were overwhelmingly written by men about men and for men.

The church has, like the younger son, hired itself, united, glued itself to empire and patriarchal society. In doing so, we the Body of Christ, have, like the younger son, lost ourselves. We have created doctrines of exclusion masked as gender complementarianism; we have denied God herself.

But our God is Living God, and She Changes Everything She Touches, even the patriarchal church. And the Good News is that we as church, even bonded with patriarchy and male privilege, we are still invited to come to ourselves, as the son came to himself. We are invited to find what is lost, to restore the fullness of life to women, girls and all others excluded in our churches through their sexuality or gender difference or race or neurodiversity or any other form of difference.

Today, in the secular world, and in more and more churches, we are celebrating the Transgender Day of Visibility, a day where we remember, see and celebrate transgender people made in the Image of God. This is a day, created specifically in response to the erasure of people, like the erasure of women from the pages of our bibles. This day counters the pretence that trans people do not and have never existed, or do not legitimately exist as equal, right and whole.

Transgender Day of Visibility was celebrated for the first time just over 15 years ago. Since then, its expansion has been remarkable. It has been endorsed, celebrated and added to government calendars all over the world, a wonderful growth, a wonderful inclusion of love. Its creator is an American psychotherapist, Rachel Crandall Crocker, who was raised Jewish and describes herself now as both Jewish and universalist Christian. She attributes her inclusive ethics to her faiths.

Though always a secular day of celebration, Transgender Day of Visibility is a perfect example of Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’ understanding of Mission. The Archbishop once wrote Mission is ‘finding out where God is active in the world and joining in’.

Today, Transgender Day of Visibility, is a day where God is active, a day where God is calling us to join in.

And being sacred scripture, alive and speaking to us right here, right now, our Gospel is God not only calling us to join in but also showing us how to join in.

This third parable in Luke is the intensification of the other two – we have moved from finding a lost sheep, 1 in 100, to a lost coin, 1 in 10, to a single lost person, restoring them to community and interdependence, to new life.

And now, we, as the Body of Christ must be the Fourth Parable.

We are called today, to be living scripture, a living parable to the world so loved by God. We are called not to find and bring to life an individual person, but to find and bring to life the stories and lives of women, girls, trans people and others excluded by the church.

Because as the Body of Christ, while one member of that Body continues patriarchal silencing and exclusion, we all suffer, we all are affected.

And so, as the Fourth Parable of the lost and found to the world, as Living Scripture, let us open ourselves to the disturbing Holy Spirit as She calls us to be noisy, to be bold, to be honest and to reveal the silenced wounding in our church. For only then, will there really be, as our reading from Corinthians states, a new Creation, only then will the old pass away, and only then will everything become new,

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Text of a Sermon Preached for Wednesday after the Third Sunday in Lent, Year C (observing the Annunciation) Luke 1.26-38

Today we enter the moment it all began – that brilliant, mysterious event that initiated the unfolding of the incarnation of Christ, his life, death and resurrection. That moment that was the alpha, the true beginning of the Gospels themselves, the formation of the church, and the spread of the gospel message throughout the world.

We are back at that time, that still, small time of sacred intimacy between an angel and a girl – these few holy moments which ultimately are part of the reason why we all are here today, why we all live into our eternal life, right now.

We are all back at that time …

And yet, this story of sacred origins, this retelling of the NEW also refers back and grounds itself in what has gone before. And the church does this every week, every day, by offering us an Old Testament reading that – sometimes a little mysteriously – links to the gospel.

Today’s reading from Isaiah is very important, and even more so for the story of Christ’s conception in the Gospel according to Matthew. 

Not long ago, and still today in some services and parts of our church, we would have heard the prophecy of Isaiah translated into English as the King James Version:

Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

In Matthew, Jesus being born of a virgin fulfills this prophecy;  it is one of the reasons WHY Jesus is born of Mary before she has sex. This fulfillment therefore makes clear that Old Testament prophecies were referring to Jesus all along. And though our Gospel from Luke does not refer to it directly, it was clearly in the mind of the Gospel writer and his audience.

Today, we heard a modern, and more accurate translation:

Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel.

A young woman. Not a virgin.  …. Now the confused translation of the Hebrew word for young woman, Almah, as “virgin” was not the fault of Matthew or Luke or anyone at the time of Jesus. Because the written texts of the Old Testament at this time were in Greek, not Hebrew. And it is in that Greek translation, long before the Gospels, where a word is used that could refer to either a young woman or a woman who has not had sex – a virgin.

The older bible translations into English, such as the King James, ultimately draw from that source, not the original Hebrew.  And in the original Hebrew and by the context within Isaiah, it is clear that “young woman” is the originally intended meaning.

And we, note that the woman in the original text is already pregnant “is with child”. It is not someone in the future; it is not Mary.

So … what does this little bit of history and translation tell us today? Does it invalidate the virgin birth? For some of us, “yes”, for others of us, “no”. Ultimately, we have to decide for ourselves.

When we examine our sacred texts in this way though, we are bestowed a gift … a gift of uncertainty which makes us look again with new eyes, a gift which makes us, like Mary, ponder and focus on the Holy Gift of the Living Word in front of us.

When we do this, we see the bible not as a literal description of physical events, but as a gateway into holy story, holy meaning and holy life which then informs, blesses and changes our life, our meaning and our own personal stories.

Our Gospel today begins “in the six month”. This is sixth months into the pregnancy of Elizabeth, wife of Temple Priest Zechariah, six months since she who was old and “barren” miraculously conceived John the Baptist. By beginning the Annunciation story in this way, Luke links Mary’s “yes”, Mary’s conception of he who is the New and Living Way, to the Older Story, the Old Covenant maintained by Zechariah and the Jerusalem Temple. And it is the same Angel, Gabriel, the power or strength of God, who announces both the Zechariah and to Mary.

And, if we were to read on in chapter one of Luke, after the annunciation story, we have that powerful, tender moment when Elizabeth and Mary meet.

Two women. Both, from the earthy, rational point of view, should not be pregnant. Elizabeth is too old, and Mary has never had sex. But as our text declares, “nothing will be impossible with God”. Life will come anyway.

 And through these miraculous  pregnancies, through these women, spanning the ages of all women, the link between old and new, the Jewish tradition and New Way is physically enacted in the darkness of their wombs. John the Baptist leaps when he comes close to the one who will be his saviour, the one who will be the saviour of all people.

This invisible and sacred action, this meeting, like all of this, all of our church and all of our tradition and all of our prayers, of course stem ultimately from these most holy words:

Let it be with me according to your word.

This is Mary at her most glorious, this is humanity in its most perfect state; Mary here is the icon of perfect discipleship and perfect participation in God.

The Angel Gabriel, the power of God, does not compel Mary. Her potential and glorious fate, as “favoured one” is laid out before her. But she is not forced, she is not required, she is not coerced. Her body is not appropriated. Mary, like we all are, is called, invited, is allured, and welcomed by the Holy One. Her response shows how we too may respond to God’s call. Mary is our model.

Here am I, the servant of the Lord.

Again, translations from the Greek matter. Because, at the time there was no real distinction in the Greek word used between servant and slave, so we cannot read the word servant as a someone with a job.

“Here am I, woman-slave to the Most High”, would be another accurate translation.

This shows Mary, has, CHOSEN to become a servant-slave, chosen to give the ownership of her body, her life, her totality of being to the Most High. This is full participation in God.

And like Mary, like Elizabeth, we are all favoured by God. Because God has called us into existence, She is with us, Her favour is our existence, our life itself. So, like Mary we are called to full participation in God, called to birth, to create, to bring forth God’s love as presence – Immanuel God is with us – into the world.

And like Mary and like Elizabeth, we cannot say we are not able, we cannot say we are too old, or too tired or not enough – because nothing will be impossible with God. If we say “yes”, as Mary said “yes”, God will respond.

And like Mary, we make a journey to birth something new into the world … a journey where we will meet and hold and touch salvation in flesh, as the Body of Christ. When, in a few moments, we come to receive the Eucharist, the holy bread, we are travelling with Mary to Bethlehem, where she gave birth – Bethlehem which means ‘House of Bread’. As we actively take, as we participate with longing and fullness in the eating of the Body, we are not only partaking in the death and resurrection of Christ, but also in the divine “yes” of his Mother as she opened herself to birth him into the world and into our lives. Amen.

Text of a Sermon Preached for the Third Sunday in Lent, Year C, Luke 13.1-9

Our Gospel today is difficult – there are two parts to the reading; today we focus on the first.

This passage is often titled ‘Repent or Perish’. This is to condense the message to a stark binary, often for dramatic effect, seeking to present a choice. This choice is then often expanded to a choice between Christ and hell, between eternal life and eternal damnation. But none of this is in the text before us.

And when we pause and attend to this holy scripture, much more is revealed, much that unveils the glorious truth of the Gospel and much that can be with us in our Lenten journey.

First, we need some context, because even the opening line is a bit opaque: Jesus is told “about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.”

What this is referring to is a recent sacrilegious tragedy in Gailee. Jewish priests, while they were offering sacrifices of animals to God, were murdered by soldiers in the command of Pilate. Thus, their blood, blood of consecrated humans is mingled with the blood of animals for the sacrifice.

Jesus then refers to an accident in Jerusalem where a tower, connected to the Pool of Siloam, which was used for ritual purification, collapsed killing 18 people.

In both accounts people are killed while practicing their religion, performing sacred and holy acts. In the first case it is through conscious, deliberate human evil – they are murdered. In the second case, it is through an accident. But in both cases, while they are close to God, they suffer and are killed.

We are reminded of events in our own time, reminded of the terrorist attack on the Christchurch mosques, just over six years ago, where 51 people were murdered as they worshipped. We are reminded of the accidental stampede that killed 30 people on pilgrimage at Prayagraj in India, just this January.

And, of course, we naturally try to make sense, understand and find meaning in such horror and tragedy. …

Now Jesus, upon hearing the account of the murdered priests, makes it clear that they did not die because they were great sinners. God does not work that way. ‘No’, Jesus says, though the Greek it is more intense, “by no means, not at all”, NO WAY – God is not like this.

God is not a vengeful deity, weighing up our sins in a ledger, looking for ways to punish us. God loves and cherishes all people, all life – each death is a tragedy, an aching loss that will, through Christ, be healed when we, our beloved dead and all things are restored in Divine love.

In his strident response, Jesus is doing something else besides correcting our views of God – he is speaking against his own tradition and the common-sense wisdom of the day. He is not staying silent in the face of harmful religious teachings, as so many of those around him did, encouraged by their tradition, as we too are sometimes encouraged to silence by our church traditions.

Jesus’ second example, of the collapse of the Tower of Siloam, extends his understanding of suffering to accidents. Accidental death, says Jesus, can never be ascribed to God. Accidents are no more the will of God than murder is. And again, today we have created a church culture where we often hear people describing accidents, illness and deaths as ‘God’s will’.

“No way!”, says Jesus as he speaks against this tradition, and we are also encouraged to speak against it.

The example of the Tower of Siloam, connected to the pool of purification, is also important because it was used by common people, not just priests.

There is no difference between the people and priests. All die, either by action or accident, but not as a result of their sinning or offending.

Jesus now links this universality of death to our spiritual unfoldment. We know from the end of chapter 12, that Jesus here is speaking to the crowd as a group of people, not as individuals, as he is speaking to us now as the Body of Christ.  

No, I tell you (plural); but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did.

Jesus does not say what we, the Body of Christ, need to repent from. This is because repentance is not concerned with changing our outward lives. Repentance from the Greek means to ‘think differently.’ Jesus is not interested in changes in our behaviour, but the change in our hearts.

Upon hearing of the death of the priests, engaged in outward sacrifices, Jesus, from nowhere introduces and reminds his listeners of the outward action of purification by the people at the Pool. Both priests and people are engaged in outer signs and not in the inner transformation that God invites us to.

Unless we turn our inner heart, our inner minds, around, we are still reliant on outer things. We are still focused on doing things to be ‘good’, doing things because our upbringing, the church or a sermon tells us to.

And if we do things because of this motivation, because of this outer motivation not an inner change, then yes, we will perish - we will lose our lives, because we are not actually living our lives, but living a life we think we should be living.

We lose our life not a result of any judgement from God – as Jesus states we perish just as the priests and the people in the tower, just as they did – and how did they die? Not because of any sin or offence.

As we are reminded in Lent, we will all, one day die physically. But also, while alive, we may die a living death when we do not enter the eternal stream of love offered by God. We die when we seek to maintain the ‘I’ of identity, the single ‘you’, while Jesus calls us to be one with each other – the plural ‘you’ – and one with God. If we do not turn our hearts and connect with that eternal stream, enter its flow, become part of it, then yes, we are separate from it, separate from the fullness of life.

Our repentance, our turning back to God, to Her ever-flowing stream of love is however, continuous – we enter, we retreat, we enter again, over and over. This is natural, this is life. This is Lent.

And of crucial significance is that our Gospel today does not point to eternal damnation. It simply says that if we cut ourselves off from the stream of love, we will not have life. It does not refer to eternity at all.

And we know our God is a loving God, a Living God who constantly calls us to turn and enter Her stream of love, no matter how many times we refuse. She will, as our reading from Isaiah states, “abundantly pardon” and continue to invite us. The Hebrew word for “abundantly” is related to words that mean, to grow large and increase, to be fruitful and multiply. It has the sense of continuous expansion.

And so, we can rest assured that no matter how many times we retreat from the stream of God’s love, She will always be there one more time ready to lead us back,

In the Name of Christ. Amen.

Text of a Sermon Preached for Wednesday after the Second Sunday in Lent, Year C, Matthew 20.17-28

In our Gospel Christ is holding up ‘servant-leadership’ as a new model of power relations within his new community. A community we continue here and now, today, and each day in St Cuthberts.

The passage draws on both the promise made to the twelve that they would judge the twelve tribes of Israel and the reversal characteristic of the Kingdom, where the last is first, and the first last.

Significantly though, it is the twelve apostles, those closest to, those who lived and dined with Jesus, those who shared life and the intimacy of the teacher-student relationship, it is those men who did understand this teaching at all.

And so, how may we move closer to embodying and living the spiritual truth of servant leadership when the twelve, who lived and prayed with Jesus, did not?

Well, we believe that what we have just heard is Holy. Something other. Something that can and does change our lives. Something that deserves our attention.

Attending to the text then, we notice that the self-focused desires of the sons of Zebedee, and the remaining ten, necessarily involve exclusion.

The ten are excluded in the request to Jesus to have the sons sit at his right and left hand. But also, the right and the left hand were second and third places of power – they were not equal in Jewish society – and so the brother at the right would exclude the one at the left. In fact, any ratification of worldly power structures within the Kingdom would mean the Kingdom would be not of the heavens but of the world.

And the remaining ten disciples, by their anger or indignation at the request show they are caught up in the same worldly power play. The entire circle of twelve, by placing their own desires first, are of course attempting to exclude God who is the sole agent in the choice and roles of the disciples. 

As Jesus makes clear, servant leadership involves inclusion: he himself will give his life as a ransom for many. The first among the disciples will be a slave to the entire group.

So, a way forward may to be attend to the text through the lens of inclusion and exclusion.

The excluded in our sacred texts, our tradition and contemporary church are only excluded through worldly concerns, not divine providence. By retrieving their excluded voices, we are countering the worldly push against servant leadership and making the church, and creation itself, more whole. By retrieving excluded voices, we form ourselves into servant leadership, if only because we become more aware of who it is we have to serve.

We know from context that Jesus, the 12 and other disciples were going up to Jerusalem. Despite common artistic depictions, and perhaps our internalized imaginations, a significant proportion of these disciples would have been women.

Here then, as a process of retrieval of the excluded, we are called to actively participate with God through the text and to imagine the presence of women disciples. And by doing so, by being active in this endeavour, we internalize the truth that Christ incarnated for all people, even if they are not recorded in the text, and we also embody our vocation to be servants for all people.

Matthew is editing Mark, chapter ten. A major change by Matthew is the inclusion of the mother of James and John. Her name though is excluded, and she is only included by reference to the head of the patriarchal unit as “mother of the sons of Zebedee”. She has no identity in her own right, even though she is one of the many faithful disciples, all women, to witness the Crucifixion in Matthew.

In Matthew it is she who presents the worldly ambitions of James and John. In Mark, it is the sons themselves. This change is often, though not universally, seen as Matthew, writing 20 or more years after Mark wanting to preserve the reputation of the disciples.

Because by the year 85 CE, when Matthew wrote, the disciples were starting to be seen as models of saintly life. By having their mother request this of Jesus, they are removed a little more from worldly taint. Though of course, they enter into the request pretty quickly afterwards.

An extraordinary exclusion occurs in verse 22 when Jesus, having heard the mother’s request ignores her completely and speaks directly to her sons. My partner, Morgan, experiences something like this when we visit hardware stores together and she speaks to male assistants, only to have them reply to me.

This points to an ongoing area of exclusion within the world and mirrored in the Church – the exclusion of women from participation in the priesthood and the episcopate. This still occurs in some Anglican dioceses and some parishes in this diocese. As servant leaders, for all people, within the One Body of the Church, how do we respond to this?

And of course, such contemporary exclusion, whether of women or people of difference, does not have to be so overt. It can be subtle. It can be unconscious. It can be hidden.

I was once blessed to be part of 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, these amazing, beautiful, strong parish women began to speak.

What emerged, what erupted, was an alternative history of the parish. A history that detailed their exclusion as women and withholding of communion by a former rector when they spoke to him of their desire to divorce their violent and abusive husbands.

Right now, whether we are aware of it or not, we contribute to the history of this wonderful parish. And as servant leaders for all people, we have the opportunity to help reveal and include excluded voices and people within the parish as part of that history.

And just as all accounts of the Gospel, despite human editing choices and exclusions, reveal God, so too all narratives, all histories when attended to, when held like scripture, may reveal God to us.

Because the Good News is that our God is a Living God involved in the world, and She changes everything She touches. Even Anglican parishes. Her Holy Spirit is active, constantly calling the excluded home.

The Good News is that the women at Morning Prayer, moved by the Spirit on a cold July morning, spoke vulnerable truth and found their stories, shared for the first time, mirrored the lives of others. Their exclusion transformed into inclusion and they became closer to each other and closer to God.

Text of a sermon preached for the Second Sunday in Lent. Year C. Luke 13.31-35

Back in chapter nine of the Gospel according to Luke we hear:

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

Jesus thus sets out on his way; on the way to Jerusalem and all that entails, on his way to rejection, death, absence and resurrection. As he makes his way to Jerusalem we are told, just earlier in our chapter today, chapter 13, that he went through “one town and village after another”. And he is joined by his disciples, his followers, his students and companions on the way.

And this is where we are today, right now in our Lenten journey, following Jesus on the way to Holy Week, on the way to death, absence and resurrection. We are enjoined with him on this holy path to die to our old self, be still and void held only by God in the silence of all things, and to be resurrected anew, knowing ourselves again for the first time in the light and love of God.

Our Gospel today is full of powerful, vibrant and poetic imagery that will draw us deeper into this mystery, draw us deeper on our way to our Jerusalem this Lent.

At the heart of all we hear today is a profound reflection on power and powerlessness. This is delivered by the One who as God Incarnate is the ultimate power in the world, but who, as the one destined to die tortured and abused on a cross, experiences the ultimate in powerlessness. Complete power surrenders to complete powerlessness.

Jesus begins his exposition on power by his response to the Pharisees who, for some reason, warn him of Herod’s intention to kill him. “Go and tell that fox” Jesus begins his reply. “That fox” – this description of Herod feeds into the symbolism of foxes we in the modern west also share: sly, cunning, crafty, tricksy. But also, in Jewish culture at the time of Jesus referring to a man in power as a fox also carried an extra charge, another layer of meaning. Great men, great men of power were referred to as ‘lions’, and the lesser men, the men who benefitted from being on someone’s coat tails were referred to as ‘foxes’.

By calling Herod a fox, Jesus is essentially labelling him as ‘small fry’, someone of lesser importance, someone who may not deserve the job he has, someone who is a pretender to power. And for his audience Jesus would have been speaking into widely held concerns about Herod, concerns regarding his ancestry, his relationship with his brother’s wife and his fitness for office, his fitness to hold power.

But it is also clear that Jesus uses the image a fox in relation and in deadly opposition to the powerful image we hear later. Jesus here explicitly images himself as a Mother Hen, a clear and contrasting image of the divine in feminine, in maternal, form as opposed to the normal masculine imagery we are so familiar with, Lord, King, father, son. Now if Jesus wanted to portray maternal power, success or authority there are several Old Testament feminine images he would have known and could have used:

God as an angry she-bear (Hosea 13.8).  God as flying mother eagle (Deuteronomy 32.11-12).  God as labouring woman (Isaiah 42.14). God as expert and caring midwife (Psalm 22.9-10).  

But those are not the images Jesus chooses.  Instead, on this second Sunday in Lent, as we walk with Jesus on the way to Jerusalem, on the way to the cross, we hear of his self-identification with a  Mother-Hen. Clearly as we have said, this is to contrast the image of a fox.

We all know what occurs when a fox comes for a chicken. It is literally not a pretty sight.

But equally, when her young are threatened, the Mother Hen will, regardless of the attacker, regardless of the impossibility of survival, as this passage vividly describes, gather her brood under her wings in love and protection. She may be powerless, but nevertheless the mother instinctively reaches out and shelters her children.

Of course, we, humans also do this.

In recent years I have chosen not to view the numerous images and footage of the sadly widespread wars and conflicts with innocent civilian casualties, casualties I know have included mothers, powerlessly protecting their children even as they died, just as a Mother Hen does. I do remember a vivid image from 1988, not of a mother, but of a Kurdish father, his arm around his toddler son, as they both died as result of the chemical gassing in Halabja by the forces of Saddam Hussein. His arms could not protect his son from the poison, but this father sheltered him anyway.

These images, whether recorded, or not are part of the violence and tragedy of human history. 

Equally part of human history is the incredible capacity of people to shelter and protect even those who are not their young, not their family, not their close community.  Monks Myanmar I am your mother story …

Jesus, as Mother Hen, is beyond even this human, selfless altruism. He longs, he desires to shelter those who do not want shelter, those who do not want his motherly protective and open wings. Even more, he desires to love and protect those who would, and will kill him: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets”.

It is this incredible love that is the key his collapsing ultimate power into ultimate powerlessness. As the infinitely powerful God Incarnate, he chooses final powerlessness – choosing to die so that his death may defeat death and free all people, even those who reject his love, reject his care, reject his maternal wings.

And today, through this living text, this acceptance of vulnerability and powerlessness is his gift for us in our Lenten journey.

Jesus makes it clear, that on the third day he will “finish his work” – this of course alludes to the third day, the day of resurrection. This follows the day of his absence and comes ultimately from the day of his death, the day of entering into the powerlessness of the Cross. He finishes on the third day – but the original Greek can also be translated: ‘on the third day I am perfected’. His perfection stems ultimately from his powerlessness, not his power.

So too, we as images of God will, in our Lenten journey be completed, be accomplished when we embrace the vulnerability and powerlessness inherent in our mortal life: from dust we have come and to dust we return.

And so let us pray, that like Christ the Mother Hen, this Lent we accept our complete powerlessness and at the same time allow our bodies, hearts and souls to instinctively move in love to protect and nurture those around us – and thereby unfold towards OUR perfection in God. Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for Wednesday after the First Sunday in Lent. Year C. Luke 11.29-32

Way back in 1980, a British pop band, the Korgis released a single written by its lead singer, James Warren. Lines from its very sparse lyrics read:

Change your heart, look around you
Change your heart, it will astound you.

Warren was really clear: ‘this wasn’t a romantic song at all’, he said ... it was about ‘an individual changing and being a different sort of person, finding the root of their inner confusion, dealing with it and becoming a better person’.

This is the core of our Gospel, the core of both our readings today – because the dominant theme in our Gospel and in our powerful story of Jonah is repentance, a changing of the heart.

Repentance though is often a highly problematic word, infused and confused with an array of related and misleading concepts like sin, shame, regret and wrongdoing. Very often the emotional charge connected with the idea of repenting gets in the way of seeing the beautiful spiritual reality this word is trying to convey.

The word in the Greek is metanoia, which literally means to ‘think after’, or ‘think beyond’, implying to “think differently after …” after, after something … after an encounter with the living God.

And the form of ‘thinking’ referred to in the Greek, the nous, is not simply a logical, intellectual cognitive change. It refers to the central agency, the central sphere of ourselves, that which manages and corrects our direction in life.

And so, metanoia is a complete radical reversal, a change of direction and of our orientation in life. A complete one 180-degree turn. It has nothing to do with feeling bad, being ashamed, atoning by certain actions or confessions or …  by giving something up for Lent.

For as soon as we, in the very instant, we turn again to God we encounter Her, because She has always been with us, even if we were not aware. And She is the one who restores us and forgives all our turning away, no matter what misdirection we have taken, no matter how many times we turn away again, our God of infinite love is there, no matter how long it takes, no matter how long we wander.

Sometimes of course, the change is not easy. We can think of metanoia as exercise laps in a swimming pool … EXAMPLE

But this example, though appropriate in some ways in our very individual modern culture, misses the cultural and social metanoia, change of heart, referred to in both our Gospel and our Jonah readings. “This generation”, Christ declaims, “this generation”, the people as a whole, people from the crowds, from Jerusalem, Galilee and all Judea.

In Jonah this group, this collective movement is even clearer: “And the people of Nineveh believed God”. They collectively, not as individuals, proclaim a fast, “everyone, great and small.”  

But notice what happens when the King hears of it? He removes his robe, his sign of kingly status and power, lowering himself to be one of the people and joins them in mourning and the symbols of repentance. Now his next act needs to be taken figuratively – proclaiming a fast for the humans and the animals of Nineveh, having them also, the animals, covered in sackcloth.

The point here is the universality of change, a universal change in direction. The inclusion of the animals shows the whole Kingdom, the whole Land is changing heart. And so importantly, the change, the 180 turn, comes from the people below, ‘a ground-up’ swelling of change, but which then is empowered and made more effective by the leaders.

Approaching our text as a living text, as speaking to us now, we may see this as a model for addressing societal and global problems, such as human made climate change or family and domestic violence. Universal change needs to come from the people, but then acted upon and made real by our leaders, who know themselves first and foremost as one of the people.

Perhaps more importantly our living text of Jonah today talks to us about where and from whom we hear the Word of God. From the Ninevite perspective Jonah was a foreigner, a stranger, an enemy away from his Land and his God. He had no status, no home, no family, no place in Ninevah – yet the people still listened.

So maybe, as a world, as a society, as a church, we need to hear from modern prophets without status, without power, without social standing – people such as the young climate activists, like Greta Thunberg, or those without homes, or refugees or people seeking asylum.

But perhaps for us, right here and right now, it is the centrality of group, of communal, of corporate change that is so important to us as we, as individual people, but as members of the Body of Christ, each a member of each other, undertake our Lenten Wilderness journey today and in the weeks ahead.

The presence of others as we sojourn and travel, as we pray and study, as we meet and talk and share, means the presence of the Spirit will be among us. She is with us when two or three gather.  It is this presence of the Spirit that helps us turn and change direction.

Because, as we, as any of us know, true change can be very hard: we turn back to God, then turn away, turn back, over and over repeating the same cycle.

But with the presence of the spirit, the divine both among and beyond us, we do not turn completely back to where we were – we are always touched and changed, because our God is a living God and She changes everything She touches.

And so, though we may turn away, shy away from the overwhelming inclusive love of God, we will find we are not back exactly where we started, but we have turned slightly more to face God, orientated ourselves more towards the Divine reality.

And so, little by little, degree by degree we will make our way to the full 180 shift, we will one day completely and fully face God, change our hearts and be open to Her love.

This, our faith, our gracious God who will never cease in love, promises – as the lyrics of the wonderful Korgi song we began with continues:

Everybody's got to learn sometime.

Everybody. Me and you, and all of us; in our Lenten journey now, or later, everybody will learn, will learn who we really are, in the Love of God.

Amen

Text of a sermon preached for the First Sunday in Lent. Year C. Luke 4.1-15

One of the key symbols and spiritual realities within our readings today is the Land. It is front and centre in the passage from Deuteronomy, only implied but still central in our Gospel, and hidden but still operative in the theology from our Romans reading.

The Deuteronomy reading shows us that God is control, working with and for the people of God, engaged with the human and natural worlds. We hear of God bringing the people out of Egypt, and though unstated here, after a period in the Wilderness, giving them the Land for as an inheritance for possession. But this is also intensely problematic, as it is without care or concern for the original first inhabitants of the Land, first peoples who are, in other biblical accounts displaced or massacred – all with God’s blessing. Some of this may be a little uncomfortable for us today, living in these Lands we now call Australia.

But this giving of Land is of utmost importance. In the world view of Ancient South-West Asia and what becomes ancient Israel, each people, each nation had their own deity, their own God who was God of the Land where the people lived. Each God was linked to, embedded within and oversaw a particular Land. And through the Land this God oversaw the growth and flourishing of Her people.

Today’s reading shows the God of Israel instructing the people how to form a relationship with Him in the new Land: by offering back the first fruit of the Land. By this they, the people, become caught within, become part of the flow of blessing and return to and fro from God. And in doing so, become closer to God and to the Land itself.

This is not so with the Wilderness, which is only implied in Deuteronomy but central to the Gospel. God does not give the Land of the Wilderness to Israel, and there are no excess fruits there to return to God.

Both the Hebrew and Greek words used for wilderness express  what we might expect – a desolate, deserted place with sparse vegetation, with little obvious support for animal and human life. But it was also used to express a lack of people, an absence of population, land that was not claimed by anyone or any tribal group, and therefore not in relationship with any particular deity or God.

The wilderness land therefore allows any wandering person, or any wandering people – for a time – to be present BUT without the grounded presence of the deity of that place. And this means the Wilderness functions as a liminal, an in-between space, a place of testing, trial, and spiritual growth. It is a place where people, and groups of people may  encounter isolation and hardship, a paring back, a stripping bare to who we really are.

And so, like the wandering people of Israel, who were in the wilderness for 40 years, Jesus now enters the wilderness for 40 days – to find out who he is.

And at the end of the journeys of both Israel and Jesus, a new relationship is formed; between Israel and God, between Jesus and God. And this is why we now, as the ongoing Body of Christ on the earth, here and now, this is why we enter the wilderness, this is why we travel our Lenten way – to create a new, deep relationship with the divine and with each other.

In our readings from Deuteronomy and Romans God’s agency in the world is undisputable. She has the power.  In our Gospel though this agency, this power is dependent on one, Christ, who is fully human, just as we are. It is held in the balance, requiring the choices of one who is tested, just as we are tested.

We know from the text, and arguably from the fact that we are here at all today, that Jesus passes the tests. He does not succumb to the lures of “the devil”, who here is functioning not so much as a source of evil, but more as the older Jewish figure of ‘ha-Satan’, the Adversary or accuser, one of the Divine Council who does the work of God (see the Book of Job).  

That ‘the devil’ is doing God’s work is evident in the first verse: Jesus is “led by the Spirit”. By the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. God is in control. God has ordained this testing of Jesus, of the one who is human but who is also God as flesh and blood.

It is significant that the testing occurs after Jesus’ baptism. Because of this baptism, when the Holy Spirit descended in “bodily form like a dove”, Jesus is now  “full of the Holy Spirit”. And at the end of testing, at the end of our reading, after the Adversary has departed, he is “in the power of the Spirit”.

No longer simply full, Jesus is now empowered for his teaching and his ministry. Importantly the Greek word for power here, dunamis, is the same word used for ‘miracle’ throughout the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Before this point Jesus, in the Gospel according to Luke, has not performed any miracles. Now, he is  empowered to bring the strength and love of God to the world for healing and restoration, empowered for miracles.

Significantly and pointing to the greatest of mysteries, this empowerment comes from the choices of God as human.

From our human point of view, Jesus as God, the Uncreated One within Creation would not have been bound by ‘the laws’ of Creation; he could have ‘always’ performed miracles. But his empowerment is only accomplished when God as human passes the tests of the Adversary. These tests speak directly to our embodied, earthy, frail human needs and desires, needs and desires Jesus fully shared: the need for food and comfort; our desires for status and power; and our longing to be invulnerable to harm and to death.

Only when Jesus, as human, accepts his weakness and vulnerability is he empowered by the Spirit. In the same way, today, when we as the Body of Christ, and we as members of his Body, accept our powerlessness, being fully open to God in our weakness, we may find the Spirit among us.

And though he does not mention the Land or the Wilderness, Paul in Romans today is drawing on the same ancient theological principle; each Land had its own deity, its own God – but with one huge difference. For Paul and for Christians, there is the inescapable reality that through the Incarnation and through the human testing of Christ, the world was changed forever.

God, the One God proclaimed by the ancient Jews is now God of the world, the entire world, of each and every Land. This is why Paul is confident that there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, between anybody, anywhere. It is why  ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ Everyone. Everyone in every Land.

And what this means is that right here, in this Land of the Hills, in this Land of Perth, in this Land of the Noongar peoples, right here, this Lent, held by the God of this Land, we too can enter the Wilderness. We too, right now can be tested as Christ was, we too can wander and be lost and confused. We too, full of the spirit from our baptisms and from our love, we too can be tested and changed and transformed and be in the Power of the Spirit, able, like Christ, to bring the miracle of the strength and love of God to the world for healing and restoration. In this Name, Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for Ash Wednesday. Year C. Matthew 6.1-21

The reality of death, the loss of both our loved ones and our own personal life has long been at the heart of human concern, human pondering, at the heart of our religion, our art and our literature. The world’s oldest story, a four-thousand-year-old Mesopotamian poem, the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’, poignantly shows the struggle of mortals when faced with our inevitable death.

Thousands of years later the same concerns are still felt. Modern German-American poet Charles Bukowski once wrote:

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”

Bukowski, perhaps because of his early childhood Catholicism, powerfully zeros in on some of the eternal verities, the universal truths at the heart of our faith, at the heart of our entering into the mystery of Ash Wednesday today.

We are all going to die. All of us, every last one of us.

And this death, “is a circus” – it is a tragedy, a brutal and cruel farce that should not be so.

The Christian tradition asserts death has no inherent meaning, is not “a balance” to life, has no goodness and is not part of any original plan of the Divine. Like illness, decay and that we may call evil, that which pulls us from the Good, death is actually just an absence of that Good, a result of turning away from God, a consequence of a creation-wide cataclysm whereby life and is estranged from the eternal. A ‘circus’ indeed.

Our natural, our human-made-in-the-Image of God response to this reality should be love. Because it is only love, only that which makes us act for others, regardless of self, only that which means we may give our life for others, it is only love that is as strong as death, it is only love that is stronger than death.

Bukowski though again astutely names and makes real why we do not love: “We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities”. By that which is not important, by that which is not of lasting consequence or meaning. We hold onto the trivial, the fleeting and the temporary, and we neglect the important and the eternal.

This terrorization by the trivial is, ironically, no more present than in popular misconceptions of death and the afterlife. As seen in so many modern movies and cute cartoons, we are fed on the idea that after death, we, our soul perhaps, live forever in heaven – pretty much as we are now. Our dearly departed are so often depicted as continuing their lives, same appearance, same name, same life, but now in heaven not earth. In fact, they are depicted as essentially not having died at all.

This is not the Christian understanding. We do die. We, the person we know and think we are now, has to die because we are both an image of the immortal One who made us, and mortal, formed from earth. Our mortal self, our life, our identity, our bodies all die and what we become, we cannot fully know.

We understand this more when we critically look at the popular idea of life after death described above, living in heaven like we live on earth. My mother died last year, 82 years old suffering from long-term Alzheimer’s. Is she in heaven now, as she was when she died, in pain and without full cognition? Or before she lost too more cognition. Or when she was 50? Or 30 and in her prime, but before she started looking after injured wildlife which made her so much of who she was? Who is in heaven?

Thomas Merton, the highly influential monk and mystic, the source of so many modern Christian contemplative traditions, once spoke of this confusion when he said:

“One thing for sure about heaven is that there is not going to be much of you there.”

There is not much of my mother in heaven. But who is there is the eternal image of the divine my mother was and is. It is this inner image, this inner person my dad loved when he met her at 18. It is this inner image, this eternal person he loved all through the years of family life, and it is this inner image he continued to love as my mother began to change physically, when she aged, and withered.

This inner image is the same person he loved as her illness progressed and her outward cognition and mental life failed. The person my dad loved, and loves, is beyond all outer, temporal physical reality, beyond the circus and tragedies of death and decay.

In our Gospel today, Christ lovingly shows us the same reality and how we may access the inner, eternal image of God who we are.

Do not get caught up in the visible trappings of spiritual and physical life, forget the outer trivialities of prayer and church that terrorize us away from eternal love. Instead, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.

Our prayer is to be both a personal and communal pursuit; alone but in a house, the house of God, a symbol for the Church. And the word for room here in the Greek, is the room at the centre of the home, where both the secrets and the treasures were kept, but also the place where the most important visitors were received – God and our inner self, made in God’s image.

Our prayer is to become an inner journey, a traversing to enter the depths of ourselves and meet the eternal image of God who we are.

And just as we pray alone, though within a house – a house peopled by those we love, ultimately we will take our final journey of death alone, but hopefully surrounded by those we love.

To deeply enter prayer is to enter death, accept death and meet that of us which is beyond death, the eternal image of the One, Christ, who was never Created and thus could never and will never die.

This is why Christ tells us to store treasures in heaven or of heavenly nature, that which is beyond the material circumstances of change and chance, beyond the circus of natural decay and human damage. By focusing on the eternal, our heart, the very, very centre of our being is changed: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

By inner focus, by prayer, by meditation and inner journey our heart, our centres become aligned with that within us which is heavenly, which is the image of the uncreated, that which will never die – all the while knowing that we will also die.

And so, we today, and all days, we may walk in the Great Mystery - that the moment of death is every moment and at every moment, we may die and rise in Christ, knowing ourselves for the first time.  Amen.