Celebrate and Resist

Reading
Luke 2.1–20

In this fairly normal Christmas Eve service we have also had a few reminders that for some this is a difficult and a dangerous time, in the form of pictures that have appeared in the background. Let’s bring them into the foreground and look at them a little more closely for a few minutes. 

Some of our best-loved carols have an idealised picture of that first Christmas night. ‘Silent night’, we sing. And we shall sing it, soon. But was it so silent? ‘Silent Night’ is mythic rather than historic; it indicates a point of holy silence as God becomes human. 

The bare fact is, Jesus was not born into an ideal world of rustic bliss. His land was occupied by the troops of the Empire. The powerful collaborated with Rome. The poor were trodden into the ground. 

Yet people kept hope alive, hope that the time would come when they would see the Day of the Lord, the day when God would act to set the people free. Many assumed this would be by a violent uprising, and messiah after self-appointed messiah rebelled and paid the price. 

In the midst of all this, God snuck in through the back door. God came to us in the form of a helpless infant. This was a new creation. Who could have guessed it? 

Jesus would proclaim the Day of the Lord as the coming of the kingdom of God, when the first would be last, and the last first. Not a violent overthrow, but a revolution of the heart which saw the suffering of the poor all around and sought to bring God’s loving justice into being. 

It was faith with its eyes open. 

We need an eyes-open faith too. Let’s look at those background images, and bring them into the foreground.  

‘Peace on Earth’ was the call of the angels. We hear about peace at Christmas time, but we need to seek peace all year round. In our services, we greet one another with peace. We are called to be people of peace, which flows from deep within our hearts. 

On the left we have an icon of Mother and Child. On the right, a contemporary photo of a mother and child in Gaza. The choir just beautifully sang ‘O, Holy Night’. Yet is only one of these children holy? When God takes human flesh as the infant Jesus, God hallows all human flesh. In fact, God hallows all material reality. 

We don’t know the fate of this child in Gaza. But this child is holy. More than 10000 children have been killed in Gaza in recent weeks. This child, this holy child, may be among them. We just don’t know.   

This is the Nativity scene in Bethlehem Lutheran Church this year. Jesus is born in a bombed-out building and makes his bed in a pile of rubble. Normal Christmas services will be held this year in Bethlehem, though there will be no public decorations or festivities, in solidarity with the people of Gaza, people who are facing famine, and quite possibly genocide — while the world looks on. 

This is the world into which Christ is born this Christmas, 2023. We celebrate his coming and we welcome him into our lives — while our eyes and hearts remain fully open to the suffering and horror that is occurring in his place of birth. 

A friend wrote the other day asking, ‘Is anyone else conflicted about not wanting to celebrate Christmas for obvious reasons and yet wanting to provide some kind of hope for our grandchildren?’ 

I had to confess to being conflicted. So what can we do? We can both celebrate and resist. We do what we can in this season of Christ’s birth, a birth that changed the world forever. We can wholeheartedly celebrate the coming of Immanuel, God-with-us, into the midst of the world’s strife. We can pray for peace, and for the peacemakers; we can give as we are able to agencies helping the people of Gaza; we can advocate for peace in Gaza. We can resist the world’s violence. We can persist in hope. 

We can tell the story of our Saviour Jesus, and let him be born anew in our lives. We can be witnesses to and sharers of the peace that he brings into being within our hearts and our communities. May the deep and abiding peace of Christ be always with you. Amen. 

West End Uniting Church, Christmas Eve 2023  

Sit with this image, look at it, gaze into it for a while… listen for the Spirit of Christ to speak to you. You will find it at 

Christ in the Rubble Digital Image

God’s Peace

Readings
Isaiah 40.1–8
Psalm 85.1–2, 8–13
Mark 1.1–8

The journey has begun. The journey in time and out of time, which will lead us through the expectation, the anticipation, the now-and-not-yet-ness of Advent, towards God-with-us at the incarnation. A one-time only journey, yet lived each year, drawing us towards the beginning of the temporal life of the eternal God, and a journey that invites us into reflection as we wait for the apocalypse — the ap-ok-alup-tein, the revelation, the uncovering — of God come among us. — Carys Walsh, Frequencies of God: Walking through Advent with RS Thomas

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‘Advent’ means ‘coming’. The Advent God is the God who approaches, who comes to us. If so, how can we sense God drawing close on a balmy summer morning here in inner-city Brisbane? How will we recognise God when they come? 

One of the ways we distinguish the four Sundays of Advent is by naming them: the first Sunday is Hope, today is Peace, then Joy, then Love. We’re saying, aren’t we, that when God comes these things will be in abundance: hope, peace, joy, love. We’re saying, aren’t we, that God desires for us to fully experience these things. And we’re saying that our inner hearts and souls deeply desire true hope, peace, joy and love. Especially today, which is the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

Today, our focus is Peace. We’re all aware there’s no peace in the world right now, with wars for example in Ukraine and in several parts of Africa. And in Gaza, homes have been flattened, hospitals, mosques and churches bombed. Food and water are scarce. The whole infrastructure is at the point of collapse, if it hasn’t collapsed already. There’s no peace in Gaza. 

But was there peace before 7 October, when Hamas killed around 1300 Israelis and took over 200 hostages? There was no peace in Gaza. Authorities argue over the precise definition of ‘occupation’, and whether Israel is occupying Gaza; but the ordinary people of Gaza are not free to be at peace, hemmed in by Hamas on the one side and the might of the state of Israel on the other. There hasn’t been peace in Gaza for a lifetime or more. 

Let’s see if today’s readings help us to see more of God’s desire for peace. 

Mark’s Gospel starts with a title: 

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God. 

The Greek word for ‘Gospel’ is euaggelion. The Evangel, the Good News. People were used to hearing a similar word, euaggelia, hearing good tidings; ‘Evangels’ if you like. These good tidings were news of Roman victories over barbarians, news of the birth of a baby destined to be the next caesar. News of what they called the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. But the Roman Peace was won at the end of the sword. It was sealed with and soaked in the blood of its enemies. 

Mark, the earliest Gospel writer, takes this word for good tidings — euaggelia — and turns it into a singular word, euaggelion, good news. Perhaps Mark was saying that this one piece of good news surpassed all the other good tidings that Rome had to tell. It was good news about Jesus Christ the Son of God. Jesus, who would bring true peace. Not the Pax Romana, peace that dripped the blood of his enemies, but peace that involved him nonviolently submitting to the shedding of his own blood as he stayed the course in the face of mounting opposition from the powers that be. 

How does God draw near? God draws near where there is true peace. God brings peace, God is peace. We don’t recognise God in news of cities bombed, of soldiers or civilians killed, of supply routes disrupted; we recognise God as we hear of people who willingly give of themselves for others. They may even be people we know. 

Servant? Leader?

Readings
1 Thessalonians 2.9–13
Matthew 23.1–12 

While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in The Servant as Leader, an essay that he first published in 1970. In that essay, Greenleaf said:

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“

A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the “top of the pyramid,” servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. — https://www.greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/

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I enjoy reading David Hayward, who writes and cartoons under the name ‘Naked Pastor’. Sometimes his stuff is amusing, other times enlightening, sometimes disturbing. I really think he loves it when people are disturbed by what he says. 

Often, his words are quite thought provoking. Just last week, he wrote that he’d made a discovery: 

the more spiritual I think I am, the more of a dick I am. 

He actually ‘discovered’ this when his wife told him so. He says ‘that was a huge and painful revelation’. 

The more spiritual I think I am, the more of a dick I am. Naked Pastor says that applies more to men than women. Well, you might say, obvs. 

There are many stories of men whose spiritual high-flying caused difficulties for those around them. So we hear that the personal lives of men like Martin Luther King and Karl Barth were far from above reproach. We hear that John Howard Yoder and Jean Vanier abused women in their pastoral work. It’s not just Christian men; Gandhi used to sleep naked with underage girls to test his ability to resist temptation. 

But they were all such good teachers, we say. Perhaps it’s not helpful for a spiritual leader to believe what people say about them. Maybe spiritual leaders should keep in touch with the realities of sin that are within each one of us. 

Matthew has Jesus confronting the Pharisees in our reading today. They were spiritual men. But by the time Matthew wrote his Gospel, Jews and Christians were making life very difficult for each other. So Matthew presents the Pharisees as those who made life hard for Jesus. We don’t know how historical this is, or how much of it was written later; its value for us is not as history but as a warning against the wrong type of spiritual leader. Too much of Christian history has been taken up with Christians persecuting  Jews, and sadly at the moment there is an uptick across the world of behaviour that is antisemitic, as well as islamophobic. 

So: we can see why Matthew has Jesus arguing against the Pharisees. It fits Matthew’s context. What we need to know is what kind of Christian leadership is helpful. The first thing Jesus says is 

The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it …

If someone is teaching Christian truth, spiritual truth, any truth, have the grace to listen. There are plenty of people whose voices I just cannot hear well. But if they speak truth, I should have the grace to listen. 

But, Jesus says, 

do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach.

‘Practise what you preach’ is a word anyone who preaches needs to hear from time to time. It’s dangerous to preach. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either ill-informed or just fooling themselves. 

It’s also a word that anyone who leads in any way needs to hear. 

Do you have a role in the church? Practise what you preach. 

Do you have people under your authority at work? Practise what you preach. 

Are you responsible for a child? Practise what you preach.

Does anyone look up to you in any way? Practise what you preach. 

That should cover most of us. We all need to practise what we preach. 

We can say more. A Christian leader is a servant. The word ‘minister’ means ‘servant’. To minister is to serve. We all have opportunities to minister, whether we happen to be called ‘ministers’ or not. 

Jesus rails against those who lead from on high, who hand down orders, who ‘tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them’. 

Paul’s description of his work in Thessalonica showed that he grasped what being a servant leader is: 

You remember our labour and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how pure, upright, and blameless our conduct was toward you believers. As you know, we dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, urging and encouraging you and pleading that you lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.

These are not the words of one who places burdens on people’s backs, rules about what they can’t do, or must do, to please God; they are the words of one who shows the way by serving. ‘We worked night and day so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God‘. 

In general, we can say this about servant leadership: 

… the goal of the leader is to serve. This is different from traditional leadership where the leader’s main focus is the thriving of their company or organisation. A servant leader shares power, puts the needs of the employees first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.

Servant leaders put people before profits. In a church context, a servant leader wants people to grow in spiritual gifts. A servant leader puts the welfare of people above their personal vision for the ‘success’ of a congregation. Whatever success is in a congregation; do you know what that is? Personally, I think congregations are called to be a place where people thrive and grow in Christlikeness. Numbers? They are quite secondary. 

A servant leader leads through service. It’s about setting an example, about being empathic, about being with people where they are. 

It’s about the example of Jesus, who washed the feet of the disciples on his last night on earth. ‘Yesu, Yesu, fill us with your love, show us how to serve the neighbours we have from you.’ 

I said before that when men especially become conscious of our spiritual progress, we are inclined to become dicks. I think it’s because — and this is a huge overgeneralisation — we men tend to equate leadership with being the boss, asserting our dominance. 

Another overgeneralisation, maybe: women who find themselves leading tend to be more nurturing from the beginning. They may be surprised to realise that they are viewed as leaders, they may be prone to have more of an imposter syndrome, where they feel they are badly playing a leadership role that they are ill-equipped for. They may find it hard to step into the leadership space with confidence. 

All this is to say there may be gender differences in how people approach servant leadership. Let’s be conscious of these differences, work with them, and support one another. 

Let me end with words of Jesus from Mark’s Gospel, chapter 10: 

You know that among the gentiles those whom they recognise as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; instead, whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.

Whoever we are, we have many and varied opportunities for servant leadership, putting the welfare and growth of others above our own ego. It’s part and parcel of following the way of Jesus. 

West End Uniting Church, 5 November 2023

Love your Neighbour

Readings
Deuteronomy 34.1–12
Matthew 22.34–46

Peace is not just about the absence of conflict; it’s also about the presence of justice. Martin Luther King Jr. even distinguished between ‘the devil’s peace’ and God’s true peace. A counterfeit peace exists when people are pacified or distracted or so beat up and tired of fighting that all seems calm. But true peace does not exist until there is justice, restoration, forgiveness. Peacemaking doesn’t mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free. — Shane Claiborne et al, Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals

The name of God is the name of an excess, meaning it is what the world would look like, in the subjunctive, if justice flowed like water over the land, unless it is the name of the worst excesses, our best alibi for watering the killing fields with rivers of innocent blood. — John Caputo, What to Believe: Twelve brief lessons in Radical Theology

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Israel is a small country, when you’re used to Australian distances. Karen and I found that when we were there ten years ago now. I recall standing on Mt Carmel, where Elijah defeated the prophets of Baal. We looked east across the plains of Megiddo over to Gilead in the neighbouring nation of Jordan; we looked west across to the Mediterranean Sea. We could see the whole width of Israel from where we were standing that day. 

We went to Jordan too. There, we stood on Mt Nebo. Deuteronomy says that here God showed Moses the whole of the land: 

Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain — that is, the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees — as far as Zoar.

In other words, the lot, everything Moses could see north, south and west from where he stood. 

When we were on Mt Nebo, we didn’t quite get this view. There was a dust storm in the Jordan valley that obscured everything. 

No view of the Promised Land for us! 

I was disappointed at missing the view that day on Mt Nebo, but now I think it was very appropriate that I couldn’t see anything of Gilead, Dan, Zoar and the rest. 

It’s appropriate because I still can’t see much right now. I don’t want to try to offer anything on the politics of Hamas and Israel. I have nothing to say that others aren’t saying better. 

But I do have something to say. 

Seems I often speak of When I was a fundamentalist … But I did use to be one, and I can imagine what such people are thinking and saying right now. 

It’s the End Times!
Pray for Israel!
Hooray, Iran will soon be involved!
The Rapture will happen soon! 

There may be Christians getting all excited with joyful warm feelings while Palestinians who are crammed into Gaza, the world’s largest open air prison, die. These Christians are rightly concerned about Israeli deaths, and Israelis held captive. But they seem to talk as though Palestinian lives are expendable. 

And it’s because of the promise God made to Moses, to give the whole land to Israel, everything he could see from Mt Nebo. 

It’s also because of verses like Deuteronomy 7.1–2. Here, God commands the people to commit genocide: 

When the Lord your God brings you into the land that you are about to enter and occupy and he clears away many nations before you — the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and mightier than you — and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.

Let’s take a step back. That sounds like genocide. Did God really command that? 

Render unto God

Reading
Matthew 22.15–22

Tragically, our separation has bred disregard and dismissiveness — rendering many of us unable to even see other people as human beings created in the image of God, much less the neighbours on which our very lives depend. — Amy Butler, Beautiful and Terrible Things 

It is common for advocates of human rights to tie human dignity to their being made in the image of God. I emphasise “child of God” over “image of God” because the former does a better job describing God’s fundamental and abiding affirmation of each human life. The latter characterisation has too often focused on debates about which capacities (like reasoning or language) best communicate the divine image, capacities that have then been used against some people to exclude or marginalise them from full participation in God’s family. — Norman Wirzba, This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World

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Whose image is this?

This is the image that will be on the new one dollar coins, available later this year. It’s the image of the British king, who is yet the monarch of these lands now called Australia. 

Whose image is this? Jesus asked this question of those who wanted to see him removed as a threat to the status quo. They’d come to him with flattery and a gotcha question, the kind of question news reporters ask of politicians they don’t like:

Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?

However Jesus answers that question, he is sunk. If he says ‘Yes’, the people would turn against him because taxes were collected for the Roman occupiers and oppressors, so the paid for their own continuing occupation and oppression. 

If he were to say ‘No’, he could be charged with sedition against Rome, arrested and taken away. These men thought they had Jesus in a lose-lose situation. 

Jesus was ‘aware of their malice’, so he asks a gotcha question of his own: 

‘Show me the coin used for the tax.’ And they brought him a denarius. Then he said to them, ‘Whose head is this and whose title?’

They don’t yet realise they’ve been outmanoeuvred. They fall for the trap.   

They answered, ‘Caesar’s.’ Then he said to them, ‘Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.’ 

Now, this is Jesus quipping, using his wits to win a point against those who wanted to destroy him. It’s not just a throwaway comment though; Jesus is making a serious theological point here. 

But what is it? There are a few wrong turns we can make. Let’s just briefly look at one of them. 

The wrong turn I want to mention is what many people believe. It’s this: we can be good citizens of Caesar — we can follow a political line blindly, do whatever the government wants us to do — and at the same time, we can be good citizens of God’s kingdom. We can go to church, pray, do good works.  

These people think the two don’t have very much to do with each other. We could have voted selfishly at the referendum on Saturday last weekend, while being on the welcoming or counting or reading roster at church the very next day. Render unto Caesar on Saturdays, render unto God on a Sunday. 

It’s a neat division. It can be a real conscience saver, if your conscience isn’t too switched on. And it’s not at all what Jesus meant. 

Let’s look again at the story. This tax, the tax to pay for the Roman thugs to keep occupying the land, had to be paid with a Roman coin. Most likely a tetradrachm.  

This coin has the head of the then-current emperor, Tiberius on one side; the other side has Caesar Augustus, pictured as a god. 

This was a graven image, an idolatrous coin. Jesus was a good Jew who didn’t carry coins like this with him, but the Herodians didn’t have any scruples about idolatrous coins. They fished one out of their purse, showing everyone they paid this tax. 

Give therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. 

It’s Caesar’s image on the coin; give it to him then. But give God what belongs to God. And here’s where the rubber hits the road. 

What belongs to God? Everything. 

What belongs to God? Every person. 

What belongs to God? You do. I do. 

We are made in the image of God. I started thinking about what we mean by being in the image of God, things like the ability to think, to communicate, the appreciation of art and music, creativity, the ability to choose, the capacity to love others. I could preach a worthy-but-boring sermon on all this. 

There’s a problem in all this though. Do intelligent people reflect more of the image of God than the intellectually disabled? Are economically-useful citizens made in God’s image than people at the end of their useful lives? Does the colour of a person’s skin make a difference? What about their sexuality? 

Do you want to go there? All these things have been claimed. 

I wonder if its better not to think of the ‘image of God’ as something that separates us from the non-human creation, but which puts us in relation to the rest of creation. We are here to care for the Earth and for one another. I think the image of God may be as simple as that. When we care for the Earth, we are living in the image of God. When we destroy the Earth, including other human beings, we are not living in the image of God. 

Last weekend, Australia failed to reflect the image of God when 60% of us rejected the modest proposal for a Voice made by First Nations people. In the Middle East, Hamas and Israel are failing to see the image of God in the other whom they kill almost at will. 

Being in the image of God means being in relationship with others. How else can we reflect the triune nature of God who is eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit — Maker, Mother and Midwife — creating, sustaining and redeeming all things in Christ? 

Norman Wirzba suggests that it is better to speak about being a Child of God rather than being in the Image of God. ‘Child’ is a relational term. A child has parents. No one is a child independent of their parents. 

If I say I’m in the ‘image’ of God, I could be in splendid isolation. But if I am a ‘child’ of God, then God is my Father and Mother. Jesus is my brother. The Spirit is the life pulsing through me, us! We are all siblings. We are part of God’s holy Creation. 

One last point in what has turned into a bit of a ramble. The New Testament proclaims Jesus as the true Image of God, as well as the Child of God. If we want to know what a life lived in God’s image looks like, we look to Jesus. We follow Jesus. 

This is supremely true when we look at Jesus on the cross. His love took him there, his refusal to back down before the power of the state that was lifted against him. 

This is why the image we’re reflecting on today is Jesus giving his life on the cross. Not just Jesus, but Jesus as a black man. Not just a black man, but an Aboriginal man. This truly is the image of God. Not a white blond-haired Jesus. A black Jesus. An Aboriginal man, strung up, despised, hated, feared. 

This, my friends, is the purest Image of God I could offer you today, one week out from the Voice referendum. 

Render unto God the things that are God’s. 

West End Uniting Church, 22 October 2023

Scripture as the First Word, not the Last

Reading
Exodus 20.1–4, 7–9, 12–20 

Jesus proposed in Matthew 5 a kingdom-based improvisation of the law of Moses. The implication for us is that we can learn from Jesus how we, today and tomorrow, can improvise both the law and the teachings of Jesus for our world. — Scot McKnight, The Bible is Not Enough

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We were on holiday in Tasmania a few years ago, and we came to the wonderful little town of Ross, to the north of Hobart. Perhaps you know it? There’s a lovely little stone-built Uniting Church there, and inside on the wall flanking the pulpit are the Ten Commandments.  

I found myself wishing they hadn’t put the Ten Commandments there. It was confronting. I would rather have been faced with the Beatitudes, you know, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ etc. 

The Ten Commandments seem so forbidding, you know? All the ‘Thou shalt nots’? 

Is that what we’ve baptised E into this morning? A life of do’s and don’ts and shoulds and ought to’s? A life of ‘Thou shalt not’? 

No, it isn’t. I’d like to suggest today that the Ten Commandments aren’t the last word in knowing what is right and what is wrong. They are the first word, not the last. 

It’s been said that when a Christian utters the words ‘The Bible says …’, they are ending the conversation. You may have been taught as I was 

The Bible says it
I believe it
That settles it

No more discussion needed, nothing to see here, move along please. The Bible has spoken. 

But: when a Jew says, ‘The Bible says …’ it’s not the last word, it’s the first word. It’s not the end of the conversation, but the beginning. A conversation that has the potential to open up a much richer way to hear the scriptures. 

Unsurprisingly, the Bible operates in the Jewish way. After all, it was written almost entirely by Jewish people. 

Let’s look again at the Ten Commandments. Let’s see how they open up a conversation for us. Our First Reading begins,

Then God spoke all these words, 

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery … 

God has set the Israelites free from slavery! God is now showing them how free people live. Free people live honourably. They do not lie, steal or murder. They live peaceably in the land. 

Far from being a weary list of Thou-shalt-nots, the Commandments become a way to live with your head held high — that is, under the God who has delivered you from slavery. 

I am the Lord your God … you shall have no other gods before me. 

Have you noticed that at this time there are still ‘other gods’? As time goes on, the people of the scriptures realise there is one God only. By the time of Jesus, it’s taken for granted. 

So do we draw a line through this part of the Ten Commandments? No, because we realise that ‘things’ can become ‘gods’. Anything can become a god: money, sex, fame, status. Anything, even though it starts out as something good, can take God’s place in our lives. So we still need to be warned: ‘You shall have no other gods before me.’ 

Let this mind be among you

Reading
Philippians 2.1–13

All of God’s acts, blessings, and delights in creating are for others. In the Hebrew Scriptures this is typical of God, who is intimately concerned with justice, peace, and the flourishing of all creatures, who is “on high” but never remote, who is “over all” but faithfully and dramatically invested in life on earth. In the very act of creating and in relation to all creatures and creation, the Hebrew witness is to a God who is essentially kenotic. God does not exploit God’s power or embrace hierarchy or rest in privileged autonomy. God is love. — William Greenway, Feasting on the Word Year A, Vol. 4 

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I was born in the North of England in Harrogate, a town that was recently voted the Poshest Town in Northern England. Yet there are those who recall Harrogate in the 1950s and before who reckon its truly ‘posh’ days are history now. If they are right, it doesn’t say much for other so-called ‘posh’ places in the North of England these days. 

I recall as a boy in the late 1950s and early 60s often seeing posh cars in my town: Rollers, Daimlers, Bentleys, Jaguars, among others. And while we could never afford a car like that, I took it for granted that you’d see such cars wherever you went. That it was normal to have people who drove Bentleys living in your town. Or, whose chauffeur drove the Bentley. 

Philippi was a posh town too. ‘Philippi was a centre for the imperial cult, a retirement community for veterans of the Roman army, and a city saturated in social hierarchies.’ (Cynthia Jarvis, Connections Year A Vol. 3) 

I really resonate with that phrase ‘saturated in social hierarchies.’ When you grow up in a posh town, you are conscious of your place. You know where you belong. You absorb it without even realising. 

Philippian Christians knew where they belonged, and they imagined they knew where Christ belonged. He was top dog, aka the Lord of heaven and earth. His was the ‘name above all names’. 

So it may have surprised the average Philippian Christian to hear Paul say that having the same mind among you as Christ Jesus means being humble. Looking to the interests of others. Emptying yourself. Being prepared to lose your life. Even, at that time, to lose it on a cross. 

Let’s not forget that Paul wrote this letter from prison, a jailbird who didn’t know whether he’d survive or face execution. 

We don’t go to jail for our faith in Australia, but we still have to die to ourselves. Paul spells that out as chapter 2 begins:

If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be among you that was in Christ Jesus …

This wasn’t the message the posh, powerful folk of Philippi were used to hearing. They were proud, they knew how to exercise authority. At least, those who weren’t slaves, children or women could exercise an unquestioned authority. Someone’s got to be on the bottom of the heap in places like Philippi or Harrogate, right? 

In Paul’s time, it was clear who was right at the bottom of the pile. It was those despised, repellant ones who suffered the accursed death of crucifixion. 

Yet that’s just where Paul locates Jesus. With the lowest of the low, with the most contemptible of the dregs of humanity. And Paul presents Jesus to the posh, powerful people of Philippi as an example to follow. An example of humility, of self emptying, of serving others. Paul says that’s where there is true life, eternal life, right now. Who could’ve guessed? 

Grumbling, or Gratitude?

Readings
Exodus 16.2–15
Matthew 20.1–16 

Philippians 4.6–7

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

“In everything,” Paul says, they are to keep on praying. Come hell or high water, they are to keep on asking, keep on thanking, above all keep on making themselves known. He does not promise them that as a result they will be delivered from the worst things any more than Jesus himself was delivered from them. What he promises them instead is that “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” The worst things will surely happen no matter what — that is to be understood — but beyond all our power to understand, he writes, we will have peace both in heart and in mind. We are as sure to be in trouble as the sparks fly upward, but we will also be “in Christ,” as he puts it. Ultimately not even sorrow, loss, or death can get at us there. That is the sense in which he dares say without risk of occasioning ironic laughter, “Have no anxiety about anything.” Or, as he puts it a few lines earlier, “Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, Rejoice!” (Philippians 4.4–7). — Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words 

___________

Our readings today have two things in common. The first is obvious; the second, maybe not so much. 

The obvious one is murmuring (the word in the KJV!), or complaining. Out in the wilderness, when the buzz of leaving slavery behind in Egypt had gone, when it was just the day to day slog of walking God-only-knows-where, when they got hungry, the people murmured. They grumbled. They whinged! 

 The whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness. The Israelites said to them, ‘If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and ate our fill of bread, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’

They would rather have died as slaves with full bellies than as free people following God in a place where food is, well, scarce. Where they have empty bellies. I can identify with them, I think. Life looks so much better when there is food on the table. 

So God provides. God provides manna, a day’s bread, for them to eat. And this is the second, less obvious thing thing the readings have in common: daily bread. 

Jesus tells a parable about day workers in a vineyard. The owner of the vineyard contracts with some men to give a day’s work in return for wages of one denarius. A denarius was a silver coin, about the size of an Australian five cent piece. A denarius would mean the family ate that day. It would provide their daily bread. 

The owner goes out to round up more workers at 9, 12, 3, and — for some reason — 5 o’clock. He pays the last ones first, and gives them each a denarius. The other workers are rubbing their hands and nudging one another in anticipation. How much will they get? A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, right? 

They are bitterly crestfallen when they look down at the single denarius in their hand. Everyone gets the same? How is that fair? So they grumble. 

The Israelites murmured, the workers complained to the boss about their wages. Grumbling is something that threads a path through the scriptures. The prophet Jeremiah complains (20.7): 

O Lord, you have enticed me,
and I was enticed;
you have overpowered me,
and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all day long;
everyone mocks me.

My favourite Bible character, Jonah, also complains like mad. He tried to get out of going to Nineveh to proclaim God’s judgement, because he knew if these enemies of Israel repented, God would forgive them! And that’s just what happens in the little Book of Jonah. The people of Nineveh repent; 

… this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”

God’s people are accomplished complainers! Are we any exception here? I don’t know the Albert St Uniting Church very well, but … well, I’d hazard a guess that we’re no different from any other mob of God’s people. 

We’re in an interestingly fraught process of finding out once more what it means to be a church in the city, now that we are separate from Wesley Central Mission. Things aren’t the same now. And they won’t ever be again. Some of us may have let a little complaint (or two!) slip out of our mouths. 

How might we stop the urge to complain? One way is to practise thankfulness. Gratitude. Reframing our innermost attitude in the direction of thankfulness and gratitude is central. It’s been said that ‘Thank you’ is the most basic prayer. I agree with that. 

The work we do for the church, for the gospel, for the kingdom, for Jesus is a gift. Not our gift to God, no; it is God’s gift to us. A gift for which we should be thankful. 

God gives us a place in building a new creation, in creating shalom among people. We are not working for God — God is working through us. 

That reframing can help us to work thankfully as partners with God in bringing light into a dark world. 

It’s just wrongheaded to expect a reward for doing what we do; it is a Gospel privilege to work in God’s vineyard. 

It’s a privilege whether we have come to the work early or late. 

If we’ve come early though, we may have a particular temptation. We may be tempted to look down on those who have come late to lend a hand. We may grumble when they have their say, and complain that they haven’t worked as hard or as much as we have. 

God stands waiting, with a denarius in his hand for each of us. God has called each one to be part of the work, even if that part is only asking a question at a meeting. There just may be a new insight to come out of that question. 

God provided manna in the wilderness. God provides today. God will provide for Albert St Uniting Church. 

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Philippians (4.6–7):

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. 

Reframing our innermost attitude in the direction of thankfulness and gratitude is central. It’s been said that ‘Thank you’ is the most basic prayer. 

So when we come before the Lord of the vineyard, if the Lord holds in his hand a denarius for us and we hear him say those blessed words, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’, we may have already practised being thankful. Amen. 

Albert St Uniting Church, 24 September 2023

Love is the fulfilling of the Law

Readings
Psalm 149
Romans 13.8–14

So anyone who thinks he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them. — Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine 

___________

For my sins, I was once the chair of the national group in charge of writing the Uniting Church’s worship services. In that role, I became one of the editors of Uniting in Worship 2, which was published eighteen years ago next month, in October 2005. 

We should have published in 2004, but we had a vocal group opposing aspects of our work. This group galvanised the moderator and general secretary of one of the synods against our work. This threatened to derail the entire project. 

The problem centred around how we receive and read the scriptures in our worship together. One of the contentious issues was the use of the language of lament in our Sunday worship. 

Lament is biblical. There’s a whole book called the Lamentations of Jeremiah, for heaven’s sake. Lament is the expression of grief. Though difficult, it can be healing to express our sorrows and grief. 

This is how the Book of Lamentations begins. Jerusalem has been destroyed by the armies of Babylon: 

How lonely sits the city
that once was full of people!
How like a widow she has become,
she that was great among the nations!
She that was a princess among the provinces
has become subject to forced labor.
She weeps bitterly in the night,
with tears on her cheeks… 

Lament has been sidelined in the liturgies of the churches. We rarely hear a Psalm of Lament; our hymn book, Together in Song, has no place for lament in its subject index. We wanted to normalise lament, and include options for lamentation in the church’s normal worshipping life. Others wanted it to be left to one side. 

In the end, we won the debate in the councils of the church. And soon, a terrible tragedy finally quieted the voices raised against us. The Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 killed almost 228000 people, and shocked the world. Our congregations were clamouring for the Uniting Church Assembly to provide worship resources so they could lament this loss of life. 

No one has argued against providing options for lament in our liturgies since this terrible catastrophe. 

I mentioned the Book of Lamentations; the Book of Psalms also has many laments — more than 65 out of 150, in fact. 

In his book Life Together, Bonhoeffer was more concerned about another difficult kind of psalm, the Psalms of Cursing. Psalm 109 is perhaps the best example. It begins: 

Do not be silent, O God of my praise.
For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me,
speaking against me with lying tongues.

The psalmist goes on to curse his opponent (vv 8–9): 

May his days be few;
may another seize his position.
May his children be orphans
and his wife a widow. 

And the curses go on. And on. You may be relieved to hear this Psalm does not appear in the 3-year Lectionary. We rarely if ever hear it in church. 

Bonhoeffer wonders how we can interpret a psalm like this, a psalm of vengeance. He says we shouldn’t make it about us. The subject of the psalms is not us, but Christ. Christ is the one who is trampled on, cursed, crucified, and all for the sake of others. Including us. Bonhoeffer reminds us this is 

.… because all this suffering was genuine and real in Jesus Christ, because the human being Jesus Christ suffered sickness, pain, shame, and death, and because in his suffering and dying all flesh suffered and died.

This is a very helpful, devotional way of reading these difficult psalms. It helps us to see Christ at the centre, where he always should be. 

I’d like to add a couple of other ways of looking at the cursing psalms. One is a possibility about the original setting, way back in Israel’s tribal history. It has been suggested that local clans may have gathered to give voice to anger as well as grief. To address God in this way promoted resolution and healing for them. They could feel that God was still with them, even when they were mistreated, even when they wondered whether God even cared. 

These days, we simply go to a therapist. 

So, we have two ways of seeing the cursing psalms: firstly with Christ at the centre; secondly, thinking about what their original purpose may have been. 

I find a third way of approaching these cursing psalms to be very helpful. St Augustine lived in North Africa in the 4^th and 5^th centuries. He said that we do not read the scriptures correctly if we read them only to get our doctrine right, though that is always important. For Augustine, ‘the goal of all of Scripture is to engender the love of God and of one’s neighbour’. (Brevard Childs) 

Augustine’s approach to scripture could be put this way: 

… no interpretation could be true which did not promote the love of God or the love of humanity. 

We have important questions to answer: Does our reading of the Bible increase our love for God and others? Or do we foolishly settle for interpretations that do damage to other people? 

We can read the cursing psalms in such a way that we open our hearts to people who are in such a position that they feel they can only respond with anger or even hatred. We can begin to empathise with them. We may start to find a place in our hearts for them. After all, one day we may be among their number. Who knows? 

We do not join with them though in cursing others.  After all Jesus taught us in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you’. (Matthew 5.44) And if we begin to empathise with our enemy, we can pray for them too. 

Reading the difficult parts of scripture requires us to approach them in a way that seeks to build up what St Augustine calls the ‘double love’ of God and neighbour. 

Scripture can be hard to read, let alone understand. Loving others may be hard to even think about, let alone do. Yet this is the narrow path God calls us to walk. As the Apostle Paul says in today’s reading from Romans 13: ‘Love … is the fulfilling of the law’. Amen. 

Albert St Uniting Church, 10 September 2023

Silence

Discerning the Way

Reading
Romans 12.1–8

Christian discernment is not the same as decision making. Reaching a decision can be straightforward: we consider our goals and options; maybe we list the pros and cons of each possible choice; and then we choose the action that meets our goal most effectively. Discernment, on the other hand, is about listening and responding to that place within us where our deepest desires align with God’s desire. As discerning people, we sift through our impulses, motives, and options to discover which ones lead us closer to divine love and compassion for ourselves and other people and which ones lead us further away. — Henri Nouwen, Discernment 

___________

In our Romans reading today, the Apostle Paul writes about ‘discern[ing] what is the will of God’. How do we discern the will of God? 

I recall hearing a Christian speaker once saying that every single area of our lives needs to be submitted to God’s will. I was in my late teens I guess, a very keen and very impressionable young Christian. 

My mind immediately went to the morning routine of choosing which shirt to wear. (I mean, why not?) 

You see, it suddenly hit me: I thought if God is concerned with every little detail of our lives, God must have a shirt picked out for me to wear. Every morning. So I started to pray about which shirt to put on. Each day of this short-lived project, the answer to my prayer was a deafening silence. 

Eventually, I decided God’s concern with the details of my life didn’t mean that God wanted to decide whether I should wear a plain shirt, a checked shirt or a striped shirt. This was my responsibility. I couldn’t outsource it. It was a decision I made, rather than something I needed to discern. 

Let’s take a closer look at those first couple of verses in Romans 12. One of the first words is ‘therefore’: 

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters …

When you see the word ‘therefore’, you need to ask what it’s ‘there for’. Paul is looking back at what he’s just written. We talked about it last week: God’s grace is open to everyone, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, black or white, gay or straight! And Paul writes to house churches in Rome, with a whole range of people being church together. Jew, Gentile, slave, free, male and female. 

‘Therefore’, in the light of this amazing grace, Paul appeals to us: 

… present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship.

In gratitude to God for this outpouring of grace, we are to present ourselves wholly to God. Sacrifices were common in the ancient world, offered to effect communion with whatever god they worshipped. 

Animal sacrifices all had one thing in common: they lost their lives in the process of being sacrificed. We are asked to offer ourselves humbly as a living sacrifice. Our lives are not lost but found, not discarded but restored. As a living sacrifice, we rise in union with with Christ. 

Paul goes on: 

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect. 

Discerning the will of God is central to the life of a Christian, and to the life of the church. I ran into a dead end trying to get God to decide my shirts for me, but I was not let off the discernment hook. 

The question remains: How do we discern God’s will? Paul reminds us that we do not naturally discern the things of God. Left to ourselves, we fit comfortably into the ways of the world. Left to ourselves, we might assert our position over against others. But when we discern, we discern together. 

Paul says, ‘Do not be conformed to this age’. Don’t go along with the world’s way of thinking.  

I read a newspaper article online during the week about the Matildas that showed the power of not being conformed to the world’s ways. I’m one of many Australians who have been captivated by this team and their brand of football. Perhaps you became a fan too. (Of course, by ‘football’, I do mean the round ball game!) 

So, the Matildas were on field in the lead up to their game against Canada. If you watched these games, you’ll recall the teams in the Women’s World Cup walk out with each woman holding the hand of a child. 

Now, this was a high-stakes situation. To quote the article: 

The stakes were crystal clear for the host nation on this particular night in Melbourne: win, and move on to the knockout stages as planned; lose, and the story ends in ways that will leave permanent stains on career and character alike.

And that’s not even mentioning the millions of dollars at stake.

This is the usual narrative for a big sporting event, isn’t it? The winner gets glory, fame, wealth; the loser has their strength of character and their value as a player, even their value as a person, called into question. It can be so cruel. It’s the way that so many are conformed to. But something else happened that night in Melbourne. Something new.