The Fishburn Chronicles

During the last half of 2010 St. George's parish suffered the unfortunate absence on extended sick leave of its Vicar Rev. Barbara Colliver. She was greatly missed and we rejoice that she has now been able to resume duty.

But during her absence we were blessed by the services, as locum priest, of The Revd Dr Ross Fishburne, Dean of Studies, Trinity College Theological School. We felt particularly privileged that he was prepared to make the texts of his sermons available for posting on this website.

We feel that those who heard them "live" and those who have not had that opportunity, would equally benefit from and be challenged by reading this outstanding series of sermons.

Revd Dr Ross Fishburn - 19th December 2010

Fear Not!Gabriel
by U.A.Fanthorpe

For the uninformed to know
how to negotiate with me. I’m used to giggles,
panic, cries of Mu-um. This time I was careful,
furled tight as buds each glowing feather
of my wings, suppressed my halo, knelt
down at her level, said the appropriate words
Hail and Blessed. She was a well brought up girl,
asked sensible questions, tried to understand,
said Thank you nicely. I thought she’d do.

Mind you, the harder bits I left unsaid.

Yes, I know this is Year A, and the story is of the annunciation of the coming birth of Jesus to Joseph.  But I thought this poem even though it focuses on Blessed Mary, speak to us about the broader experience of annunciation which the Gospel for today sets before us.

You see it’s very common in the tradition for angels to tell the ones to whom they appear: Fear not!  This poem captures some of that from the other side! Whether it’s Joseph or Mary, the shepherds in the fields, or the disciples at the empty tomb, humans seem to need this encouragement when visited by an angel.  There is something about the messengers of the Lord which does that to us. 

I don’t think it’s just the wings, though. It might be the hovering several foot above the ground mind you. It might be the appearing out of nowhere. Certainly if they come with musical accompaniment it gets very overwhelming with all of that Gloria in Excelsis Deo over and over again.

But seriously, there is something here which says something about our human experience and expectation, about what it is like for us when we come close to the divine. Somehow we tend not to cope, we are thrown off our stride, and we feel uncomfortable, and in need of reassurance. We need to be told to fear not, that we are O.K., that we will not be consumed by heavenly fire or struck down by a thunderbolt.

Perhaps the problem is that we see the paradigm for this sort of thing in the story of Moses and the burning bush. As Moses comes to the divine presence, he is told to take off his sandals for he stands on holy ground. We take that as the typical attitude in the face of an epiphany, and manifestation of God, whether mediated by others, angels or shrubbery, or in God’s own form, as Moses later encounters such that his face shines.  So I suppose we might need the Fear Not instruction. We feel we must bow down and be fearful ion the presence of God’s holiness, because we are unworthy, sinful, and not up to the mark of the divine expectations.

But this story (and indeed the parallel story of the annunciation to Mary) is opening up for us a change in the divine economy. Joseph, and Mary and the Shepherds and even we may need to be told to Fear Not, but that is not simply because of our limitations, but because a new thing is being done here. This is the beginning of God’s work of partnering with humanity in the work of redemption and reconciliation. This is the beginning of God being named by that new and significant name Emmanuel – God with us. For the span of the human life of this one whose birth is announced to Joseph and to Mary, God really is with us rather than distant from us. There will not be a whole crowd of angels running around before him protecting him, glorifying him all the time. This baby will share in all the pains and confusions, the troubles and the strife of this earthly life, and we know with the benefits of hindsight, having already read the end of the story, and especially the bit before the end, that glory will not protect him from sharing in our death as well. He will share our human condition in every particular way.

God comes to share our nature, our humanity, in this birth which we anticipate in today’s story.

But there’s another aspect of this which involves a sharing. Not only does the divine come to inhabit a human life, and a human body, setting it apart as an instrument of God’s reign, a walking sacrament if you like, but also God partners with specific human beings in this work, fearful fallible humans who need to be told to Fear Not!   For this one moment of the story, God and his angels wait on the response of a human couple, on the Thank you that this poem record, on Mary’s Let it be to me according to your word, on Joseph’s unrecorded response which is nevertheless a positive consent to partner with God in this work.

When he awake from sleep he did as the angel commanded him; he took her as wife, despite the shame of a pregnancy before the wedding, and together they brought up the son who would be called Jesus. He did his yes for however long it was that he cared for Jesus in his earthly home, just as Mary’s yes had the life long consequence of her nurture and care of Jesus, and her standing by his cross.

This is the story of God inviting a couple of frightened Palestinian peasants to be partners in the work of salvation. They didn’t need to grovel; God needed them to say Yes, and to do Yes, and all God’s angel waited on the response.  No wonder the poet says the harder bits went unsaid.

This begins the story of how our human experience of God is transformed and deepened. No longer will God’s glory be an intimidating intrusion into our life which will overwhelm us and make us feel small and insignificant, deeply and irretrievable unworthy of the visitation which confronts us.  Now, whether we see the glory or not, God’s coming is something which meets us where we are, and takes us by the hand and asks us to come on the journey, and be part of the work of transformation.

Just as God through his angel invites Joseph and Mary to be part of the divine work, so to does God invite us. Advent reminds us not only that God came, and God will come again, but also that God is always coming into our lives. God comes to dwell in our hearts each time we come to the sacrament of Holy Communion: that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us in the words of Cranmer’s great prayer of humble access. God confronts us too in the persons of our neighbours and our enemies, and in sacred presence in the poor and needy and those who struggle. When we meet them, we meet Jesus whether we know it or not, as Luke’s parable of the sheep and the goats reminds us.

In all of this the angels message of Fear Not speaks true. We need not fear because God offers to take us by the hand and walk with us into the dawning light of the divine reign of shalom, of justice and of love.  And we must not fear, because if we do, we will hold back from taking God’s hand and becoming partners in the divine work of redemption.

St Paul knew why there was no need for fear, and what was different from Moses experience. He wrote in 2 Corinthains 3:18

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

As we come to celebrate Christmas once more, we remind ourselves to Fear Not as we embrace God’s invitation to be partners in the divine work. For at the centre of this story of which we are telling the beginning, we know that there is a new thing being shown about God. In Jesus we are shown that God’s holiness is not the weight and the rigour of justice but the power and unfathomable depth of God’s heart
 Cf J.M.R. Tillard, Church of Churches, p.101..

For after all the Christmas story is about the beginning of the earthly life of the eternal Son, whom St John reminds us is close to the father’s heart from all eternity, and whose glory we have seen in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Fear Not! indeed. 

Revd Dr Ross Fishburn - 12th December 2010

Matthew 11:2-11

Last week we looked at the beginning of John the Baptist’s ministry: his preaching of repentance in the face of the dawning Kingdom of Heaven, the coming reign of God. Today we see John in a very different mood indeed as his ministry nears its end. He is in prison suffering the consequences of his plain speaking and direct criticism of those in power.  Pharisees and Sadducees may be a brood of vipers; Herod may be a fox; but it doesn’t do you chances of keeping your freedom a lot of good to keep saying so, constantly and loudly,  does it? We know the fate of the political dissident, and the outspoken critic of the established order still today, whether it is Aung Sang Su Khi, or the Nobel peace prize winner from China, or even Julian Assaunge;  just like John the Baptist they are deprived of their liberty.

John began with confidence; now he is in the pit of despair.  He had expected a messiah who would be a deliverer, a sweeper away of wrong and corruption and sin, and yet now the forces of darkness and corruption, the very people he had condemned appear to have triumphed and have him in their power. Where was the winnowing fork and the fire that he expected to be in Jesus’ hand (or not far from it) when I welcomed him thinks John. So his question to Jesus via his own disciples is a sort of Please Explain?  Are you the one who is to come, or do we wait for another?  Are you the Messiah, the promised one or not? With that goes the implied message, was I wrong?

Jesus responds with a challenge to John to look around and see what signs he can read, and whether they are the signs he had been expecting.  Can you see signs of the dawning reign of God as you thought you would, John? implies Jesus.

What Jesus himself points to, what he invites John and his disciples to see, isn’t just evidence of what Jesus has been doing, a rehearsing of his mighty works. It’s not just a pointing to his own c.v. What Jesus is pointing out to John is fulfilled prophecy. These are six expectations of what would happen when the Lord’s expected one would come; six things that recall different parts of the prophecy of Isaiah. The blind see; the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news brought to them. (29:18; 35:5-6; 42:8,17; 26:19; 61:1)  It was pretty much all there, except for the key thing that John felt he needed most. But that absence transformed it all.

Jesus points to the wholeness that was expected as the fruit of God’s victorious presence. But it hadn’t come in quite the right order. God’s victory hadn’t happened; the oppressors were still in control, and yet here were the signs of God’s reign in terms of shalom and wholeness.

What Jesus is showing John and his disciples is a transformation of their expectation, an evidence of answered prayer in a different way to the way they had quite thought it would go. Look around you and tell me what you see: aren’t these signs of God’s coming, signs and evidence that God is doing something important to transform things in this part of the world? Hmm? Why would it necessarily be the way you were expecting it? Which one of us is God, after all?

We thought last week about repentance and about sifting. One side of Advent is the task of sifting and pruning, getting rid of what holds us back, leaving behind the excess baggage of heart and mind, the darkness of memory and of vision which focuses us in the wrong place, in the potential darkness and self absorption of ourselves. The other side of the Advent message is here for us in Jesus invitation to John and his disciples. Here we see the positive “turning to” which complements the “turning away from” of repentance. We turn to Christ as well as turning away from our sins.

What and where are the signs of the dawning of God’s reign, even if they are very small? Where is God being known and seen and felt as active?

You may recall a few months ago I spoke about a question that bishops were asked as they came to a Lambeth conference some years ago: what is the frontier of the kingdom in your diocese? What would change if God’s kingdom came in it fullness tomorrow? You may recall I invited you to wonder what that frontier was for you.
    What is the darkness to which Jesus is light, here?
    What is bad news, to which Jesus speaks the saving transforming word which is good news, here?

These are questions which replicate for us the question Jesus invites John the Baptist and his friends to ponder. They are good Advent questions.

There are two things that I want to suggest about how we ask ourselves those questions, how we go about this Advent task of looking for the kingdom’s dawning in our lives,  and in our community.

The first is to look and to pray with yearning.  If last week’s word was sifting, this weeks word is yearning. The prophets are full of yearning, the anguished cry for God to come and do something about the situation of the people, the yearning for change and transformation.  How long will you wait O Lord?  Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down!

When we look to God’s coming, as we are invited to do as an Advent task, we need to pray for it and look for it with yearning. We need to look with the expectation and the hope that our prayer will be answered, and God will be present to us and for us. That was what John the Baptist had lost, and it can be easy for us to loose it too.

Our Advent liturgies are full of this yearning. Look at the great Advent hymn that we will sing at the offertory: O Come O Come Emmanuel, with its great refrain of hope : Rejoice rejoice, Emmanuel will come to thee O Israel.  Each verse yearns for God to come and show the wholeness and the shalom of the divine reign and ask God to come to bring that desired end, each under a new title. Emmanuel, ransom captive Israel; Key of David, open wide our heavenly home; Rod of Jesse, free your people from Satan’s tyranny; Dayspring, come and cheer your people with dawning light, and banish darkness and death’s shadow. It echoes the great prayer of the early Christians: Maranatha; Come Lord Jesus.  Advent invites us to pray to God to come: to come again, and to expect him to come and do something now and in us, not just one day and somewhere else! So the first things to say about how we go about the Advent task of looking for God’s reign and the signs of its dawning is to look with yearning, to pray with expectation, Come Lord Jesus, and to expect God to answer the prayer.

The second thing to do is to prepare to be surprised. John was limited in his ability to see God at work by thinking he knew how God would answer the prayer, and how he would fulfil the prophecy. But he didn’t get it quite right; he hadn’t allowed for the fact that God was transforming the expectation and bringing peace and shalom and transformation in a new way, acting to a different timetable and in a different order to the expected one. There would be peace, and all the good things that flowed from God’s presence and reign were beginning to be seen, but without the massacre of the enemy that they had expected. God left out the day of vengeance! [cf Isaiah 35:4]

How often does it happen that we think we know how it will turn out, how God might answer our prayers, when perhaps it’s more a matter of how we want God to answer our prayers, and what we find is that God does give us what we need, and indeed fulfils our deepest desires and needs, which may be even beyond what we could articulate at the time, but in a different way to the way we expect?  Be prepared for God to bring God’s own solution and not yours!

One last thought. John was absolutely shattered in prison, and yet he still reached out in yearning. There are times when there is not much prayer left in us, not much hope. Even then, we can reach out in the glimmer of hope and faith that we have.

Remember I quoted from Harry Williams last week, about sifting? He won that insight the hard way, having come through to wholeness and healing from a breakdown and years of therapy. In his autobiography, he tells the story of being unable to pray much when he was at his worst, except for this prayer: O Lord I trust in you for grace and for glory.

That is an Advent prayer, a prayer of hope, even at our darkest moment to reach out in the darkness, for the glimmer of light. Lord, I trust in you for grace and for glory, even against everything else that is around me. I trust in you for grace, and for glory.
 
 

Revd Dr Ross Fishburn - 5th December 2010

“His winnowing fork is in his hand”  Matthew 3:12

In this year’s cycle of readings we focus on John the Baptist for two of our four Sundays. In a way they are focused at the beginning and the end of his ministry.

Today we see the general thrust of John’s teaching, his central theme and the pointed confrontation which flows from this central message when it is applied to the Pharisees and Sadducees. The message which begins as challenging invitation into God’s looming reign [Repent for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near!] comes to find a pointed target in these leading religious figures as he tells them to bear fruit worthy of repentance and not to presume on their religious status (being sons of Abraham), because the coming one, the greater, expected one, the Messiah, will come with that reign of heaven to cleanse and to set things to rights. His winnowing fork is in his hand he tells them, to sift through the people in judgment and bring reward and punishment in his wake.

He wasn’t a comfortable figure, John the Baptist, was he? Camel’s hair coat, wild locusts and honey for food, we are unlikely to want to invite him to dinner, are we?  Especially when he is inclined to call people you brood of vipers! The only time we hear that sort of language in polite society nowadays is across the dispatch box in parliament. [Remember Paul Keating and his characterization of the senate as unreformed swill?]  It’s not a recommended tactic for preachers.

How might we usefully hear the message of John the Baptist as an Advent message and call to us, today?

We’ve traditionally called Advent a penitential season, a time for spring cleaning one’s soul and one’s life, if you like, a time for earnest self examination, for confession, for amendment of life as a preparation for the celebration of the Lord’s birth at Christmas.

But I wonder if we simply stick with a surface reading of John’s call to repent, we might not get very far.  If repentance is only seen in terms of a narrow understanding of sin, or as primarily focused on sins (plural), we might not get to the heart of the matter.

Last Sunday,  as we pondered the vows of baptism, I recalled Martin Luther’s great definition of sin as human beings turned in upon themselves. This looks to the wellspring of sinfulness, sin as a state of being, a propensity for action rather than simply the specific outworking of our sinfulness in particular sinful deeds. We also remembered the meaning of the word repent as literally turning around. 

I think that is the first step in receiving the message of John the Baptist: attending to the call to turn around, to repent, to ponder the direction of our lives and our hearts, to ask ourselves whom we serve (and indeed what we serve and seek in our lives), to discern whether we are turned inward with the potential for darkness and hollowness that comes from that source, or whether we are turned to Christ and to our neighbors.

This isn’t just a matter of the general. Our general orientation in life has its fruit in the particularities of how we live. Sinfulness or sin in general results in actual sins. But I don’t want to launch into a catalogue of sins which we might have committed so that I can knock them all down. I want to take a different tack to help us in our repentance, in our turning to the light.

I was struck this year as I read this gospel by the image of the winnowing fork which the coming one is said to be carrying, so that he might sift the wheat from the chaff.  That reminded me of a favorite piece of wisdom from the English spiritual writer Harry Williams, who spoke of sifting our experience so as to be enhanced and not diminished by it.

Sifting.

Repentance is at depth a task of sifting, sifting through our life, sifting through our heart, sifting through our actions, so that we might see what is wheat and what is chaff, what is seed which will bloom into what feeds and sustains and nurtures us, and what is husk, rubbish which needs to be thrown away.

So I want to suggest that looking at what baggage we are carrying through life, what psychological and emotional baggage which weighs us down and can creatively be left behind, that this is a part of repentance, a part of the sifting which we need to do to effectively turn to Christ and torn away from the darkness or the hollowness or the emptyness within.

Once upon a time, a wise priest was reflecting with me as I was learning my craft as a priest and she spotted a piece of baggage that I was carrying around. I don’t actually remember what it was; what I do remember is her response: who told you that? , she asked me.  It can be a deep and searching question we need to ask ourselves about things we believe about who we are and what we can do, and most of all about what we can’t do. Who told you that?  Where did you learn that line which now limits you.  How true is it really?

This is a question of sifting through who we are, and what we think we are and can be. What do we carry around in our heads and our hearts that shape us in ways that don’t actually help us?

You see our actions come out of our memories, out of our images of self, out of the paradigms within which we function, the frame of reference which governs what we think is possible and impossible, good and bad, the mental box within which we think and live, the blinkers which limit what we see. Part of the task of repentance is a sifting through of all that inner architecture so that we are more aware of how it inhibits us or enables us.

The Zen masters tell a story about two monks who were travelling and come to a swollen river, and a woman standing by it who can’t get across. One of the monks carries her across the river. For the next day the other monk continues to berate the charitable monk for breaking his vows by touching this woman. St the end of the day the first monk can hold it in no longer, and he says to his angry brother, What is it with you; I carried a needy woman across a river, and I left her there, why are you still carrying her ? Let her go.

Sifting our experience can be about examining what memories we keep carrying with us, or how we carry them.  Do we remember them as failures or as opportunities for learning? Is the story that we remember an end, a finished point which determines who we are, or is it a stage on the way, even one which may not have turned out well, but which we can leave behind, and sometimes even grow from?

How often do we store up old hurts and grievances and hold close the memory of how dreadful a particular person has been to us?  When we do that, we are like the Zen monk who can’t leave the woman who was helped behind, and only can carry on the memory of what appears to him as rule breaking, not the memory of a person helped.  When we hold memories in this sort of way they can fester and turn toxic. The landscape of our spirit comes to be dominated by the hurt and not by the possibilities and challenges of the life before us in the present. Our experience and our memory of it needs to be sifted so that we carry the good, and leave behind the negative, that we carry forward only the learning.

We need to repent, to sift through our experience, our hearts and our memories, not because we are bad, but because we are liable to be hurt or misshapen by the trials and tribulations of life. We can be overwhelmed by life the universe and everything, and what we need to remember and carry with us is not our failure, but what we can learn from it, about who we are, how we can live and how we can’t, about what is to much to bear, and what we can bear after all.

For when we embrace repentance in this way, as the sifting which God’s spirit can help us achieve, we can find that repentance is indeed part of the Good News that God’s kingdom has come near, not as judgment which condemns and spells and end, but as liberating word that says, you don’t need to be like that. Unlearn the ways of darkness, the ways of limitation, the service of the lesser good; turn to the light, turn to God, and find healing and wholeness which is the fruit of God’s reign, the sign of God’s presence to enfold us in love and grace and blessing.

 

Laying aside the works of darkness;
owing no-one anything except to love one another.
Romans 13:8-14

There are two sorts of people in the world, those who divide the world into two sorts of people and those who don’t.

There is a venerable stream in literature and popular culture which does just that: divide the world into two sorts of people, into two camps really, the good and the bad, those of the light and those of the darkness.

Think of the Harry Potter franchise: the books and the films which tell the story of the boy wizard, Harry Potter the “boy who lived”, who survived the attempt of Lord Voldemort to kill him with his parents, and who lives to fight through a variety of battles, across 6 books and 7 movies. It comes to be a battle which divides the wizarding world into two opposing camps, the Order of the Phoenix and the Death Eaters; the light versus the dark.  It’s an enjoyable set of stories, though it gets a bit long for its own good sometimes, and we always like stories of the triumph of the good, of the underdog winning, of the seemingly insignificant and hopeless triumphing over the odds.  Think of Frodo in Lord of the Rings, of the Pevensie children in the Narnia books and movies; we want to see the little ones overcome massive disadvantages and become heroes.  I suppose it’s because its gives us courage to carry on against whatever oppresses us, or whatever struggle threatens to overwhelm us. Life can even be described as a set of multiple overwhelmings.

Of course it isn’t new, is it; it’s as old as the scriptures at least. The biblical genre is called apocalyptic, and it was a common one in ancient religious literature. It sees the world and its current crises and overwhelmings as the scene for the cosmic battle between good and evil, the light and the dark.

But do we see it as a literal account of how the world and the cosmos is, or is it more of a “myth” a story which speaks in highly colourful language about the conflicted nature of life (the universe and everything), and makes external what is just as much an internal struggle all have in living life? Myth is a very tricky word. People so often think it means something isn’t true. Perhaps it’s better to see it as saying something which is true in a particular sort of way: not true as historical fact, or as science, but true in a deep and meaningful way, true as a story which says something real and true about who were are and how life is, using larger than life characters (even if they are little hobbits or teenage wizards) to give a Large as Life message!

You see there is problem which the church has wrestled with down the ages, and wrestles with still: it is to take this larger than life characterisation of battle and cosmic conflict too literally and to read much of life in its terms. “The devil made me do it”, people say.  I wonder whether it isn’t just too easy as a way of renouncing responsibility for our own actions and choices and mistakes?  But the problem is deeper, more fundamental.  In my line of work we have name for it: its called dualism. It is when we describe the world totally as the product of two warring realities: God and the devil, good and evil.  The problem with it is that it elevates evil to an equal status God. In its worst forms it infects how we see the created world and the human body.  We can take as true the sort of cartoon character view of the human person that sees us individually as a battleground between God and Satan, with a little angel and a little devil on each shoulder each competing for the attention of heart and mind.  In fact we need a more sophisticated account of life the universe and everything, one which doesn’t overplay evil, which doesn’t underplay God and human responsibility, and yet which also acknowledges evil as being significant.

Part of the problem comes in personalising evil and the negative aspect of life. If everything bad is a work of the evil one, it tends to make this personal evil force an equal and opposite force to God.  But whether we do or don’t believe in a particular personal being of an Evil One, Satan, the Devil, the Adversary, or whether we see such a figure as a metaphor or myth, a big picture of the problem with the world, I think the problem is more about how we see evil.

Now it’s hard to go the next step without sounding like one is doing heavy philosophy, and philosophy tends to make my head hurt.  But the more helpful way of talking about evil which Christian thinkers have taken (to my mind) is to say that evil isn’t a thing in itself so much as it is an absence. St Augustine, the great thinker of ancient North Africa, said it was the absence or even more the deprivation of the good, privatio boni. It’s a sort of distortion of what is good which comes from a lack of being fed by all that feeds and nurtures the good in us. The 20th century theologian Karl Barth calls evil by a rather untranslatable German word, das nichtige: the closest one comes to it is calling it Nothingness. Perhaps we can get something of the sense of this, and indeed something of the force of evil, by seeing this nothingness as a sort of black hole, a negative reality (if that makes any sense), a No Thing which isn’t an existing thing, but has a negative and destructive force nevertheless.  The contemporary philosopher Terry Eagleton (who is not a Christian believer I don’t think) speaks of evil as a sort of negative suction, (an ontological gravity he calls it) which draws us towards self annihilation; it is the force perhaps within  us which draws us towards destruction.  [For those whose heads are now hurting, here ends the philosophy!]

The great reformer Martin Luther is the one who helps me most to see this whole thing well. He talked about sin as being the human person turned in upon itself.  [Homo incurvatus in se].  The human battle between good and evil then becomes an interior struggle for the direction of our life. Is it focussed inward on self, or outward to God and to others? That is the central thrust of our vows of baptism that we heard again this morning: do you turn to Christ; do you repent of your sins (do you turn around from that focus on self) do you renounce evil. The whole things can be seen as the two sides of the same action, the turning of the spirit and the life towards God in Christ as saviour as focus for living and as source of love and transformation. That is really what salvation is about. I turn to Christ: I embrace him as my source of being and my power to live and love and serve. I turn away from my sinful inward turning, from my service of lesser goods, and meaner objectives. I turn myself decisively away from evil from that negative force which would such me into all that is destructive & hateful.

They say it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Serving good, turning to Christ, loving God, and neighbour, all these things may not be acts of war against the power of darkness, (or if the metaphor helps, then they may be) but at the very least they are contributions to the growth of the light, to the increase of its pervasiveness in the world.

We might even find Karl Barth helpful again: to clasp hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.  All that comes from turning to Christ, from “putting on the armour of light” and “casting away the works of darkness” as our collect says, is a contribution to God’s reign being more real in the world, and is an instance of God working in and through us.

And so for me the most important thing I have read in the readings today is not the dualistic tendency which makes me want to divide the world into two teams, my team and the opposition, but rather the substantive advice of the apostle Paul:  owe no one anything except to love one another. Let that be our service and our delight, our duty and our joy, now and to the ages of ages, world without end, Amen.

Isaiah 65:17-25        2 Thessalonians 3:6-13    Luke 21:5-19

We have three very different “takes” on the End Times in our readings today.

The gospel reading sees it as a time of crisis, of turmoil and upset, in which believers will be threatened.

The second letter to the Thessalonians (one of the earliest of the New Testament writings chronologically) is set in the expectation that the end times were not far away, and so this exhortation to productivity can easily be seen in that light. It’s a bit like the bumper sticker: Jesus is coming. Look busy!

The prophecy of Isaiah looks forward to the end time in what seems to be the opposite way to the gospel, looking forward to the healing and renewal it will bring, seeing it as an occasion for God’s shalom; for the divine wholeness and healing prosperity to be manifested.

But in a way they all speak with the one message, even if two of them are almost opposite sides of the same coin.

What we have in the gospel and in the prophecy of Isaiah is a form of writing that is called apocalyptic.  Perhaps we get a glimpse of what it is like if we think of it as a sort of religious version of a disaster movie, overlaid with theological symbolism.  This sort of writing has two aspects, a before and after if you like. The “before” picture focuses in vivid ways on the difficulties of the End Times, the times of persecution and suffering in which the people who write this stuff and hear it feel they are caught up.  The way the troubles are pictured gets overlaid with symbolism as I said, and makes it appear as part of a cosmic contest, part of the great battles between good and evil, between the light and the dark.  By seeing things in that context, enduring the Troubles is seen in a positive way, something one does to play ones part in the ultimate victory of the good, the triumph of the light. It is a demonstration of faithfulness which wins a reward. So the final version in today’s reading says much: by your endurance you will gain you souls.

The flip side of this dark vision is the “after” picture.  This gives us a view of the consequences of the final victory, of the reward of the good, and what hap[pens when the light triumphs over the darkness and pervades everything.  So we have the vision of Isaiah, a vision of prosperity and welfare, wholeness and healing.
No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. 21They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

Peace abounds:
25The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent—its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

All this comes as God creates a new heaven and a new earth; all will be different from the time of turmoil and sufferings that Isaiah’s audience knew.

But what is that to us?

Here in Melbourne, life is pretty comfortable for most of us.  Even if we may have our personal struggles, we probably are able to put them in sufficient perspective as to not think that our hard times are examples of the end of the world for everyone, or a sign of the victory of the Evil One over the forces of goodness and light.

What use is it to remember the dark side of the apocalyptic parts of the scriptures. Can’t we just have the nice bits, the encouraging ones?  Well, no, we can’t. We have a pattern of readings to help us work through the whole of scripture so that we are immersed in the whole of it, and indeed fed by the totality of it.  Perhaps we never know when we will need it, or perhaps there are transferable lessons even from the apocalyptic writings for the times of apathy, for the religious doldrums of today’s world.  [So Paul’s line, Do not be weary in doing what is right,  may be very relevant!]

One line in the gospel stood out for me this week as I prepared the sermon, as pointing us in a direction which may just help us hold it all together in a way that helps us in this our day and age.  Make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict, says Jesus.  We wouldn’t want a barrister who did that would we?  You expect me to have thought through what I want to say in the sermon,  don’t you?  It seems very odd as a strategy.  Yes indeed it does.

 But then I recalled the story of one of the early martyrs, Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna in the second century, probably not many decades after the last of the New Testament writings were finished.  The recorded story of his confession of faith at his trial, and his martyrdom does have  something to say.  When he was brought before the proconsul (a governor who had judicial power) he respected Polycarp’s age and offered to free him if he would simply reject his faith and curse the name of Jesus. (Simply did I say; of course that’s the whole thing, it wasn’t simple to Polycarp!) What did Polycarp say?  For 86 years I have been his servant, and he has never done me wrong. How then can I blaspheme my Lord and saviour?

I want to suggest that this is a speech born of a deep wisdom, which speaks more eloquently than tight argument, or long and weighty words. For Polycarp spoke out of the depth of relationship with God, out of his own experience of God’s love and care for him. Polycarp trusted God above all other things, and knew that whatever the proconsul could order done to him would not remove him from that love. Polycarp knew himself to be held secure in that love, deeply and irrevocably, abidingly and eternally, and he was able to hold his own life loosely, because he was held in God’s love in that way.

This is really simply following in the same pattern as Jesus, whose knowledge of God’s love was the centre and foundation of his life, and enabled him to set his face towards Jerusalem, and endure the cross and the grave, and find the victory of resurrection beyond that, as he staked everything on the trust that God’s love could not be overcome.

We may not have to witness our faith before hostile judges, and give and account of ourselves before anything more aggressive than apathetic folk, the ones for whom the catch cry is “Whatever!”  But somehow, the knowledge of the possibility of that centre in God’s love and delight is there for us to sustain us in whatever challenges face us.

That is the thread which unites our readings, and runs through the heart of apocalyptic writing. We might even say it is the golden thread at the heart of all the scripture.  We heard it in Isaiah this morning:  be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. 19I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people;

I will rejoice and delight in my people.

Julian of Norwich was an English mystic of the late 14th Century. Not an easy time to live, but not a fraught with external threats as the times of our various readings today. But Mother Julian had this same deep wisdom on which she based her life, and she left it to us in her Showings, or Revelations of the Divine Love.  [Interesting that apocalyptic writings are also called Revelations!]   She knew the heart of it all.
He is our clothing who wraps and enfolds us in love, embraces and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us.

Out of that knowledge she was able to pray a prayer with which I leave you today:
God of your goodness give me yourself, for you are enough for me.

Tell them about the GLORY

Ephesians 1:11-23

In his book reflecting on the life of living at the presbytery of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, called A Place in the City, the Catholic priest & historian Edmund Campion speaks of the great historian Manning Clark, whom Campion had met on numerous occasions.  Fr Campion tells  the story of Clark’s funeral, held at the cathedral, and seeing a host of Labour politicians there, reminisces about a time when a mutual friend was standing for election, and Campion wrote to Clark to solicit a contribution. Clark replied with a generous cheque, and the message: Tell them about the GLORY.

So that’s what I’ll do today; for it gives me something of a text for my sermon: Tell them about the GLORY.  Yes that’s what I’ll do.

This points us to the glorious inheritance which the saints in triumph enjoy.

We might well think of Tomas Luis de Victoria’s (1548-1611) great Motet and the Mass setting which is based upon it: O Quam Gloriosum est regnum. O how glorious is the kingdom in which all the saints rejoice with Christ! Clad in robes of white, they follow the Lamb wherever he goes.

Many of the pictures and images of the saints in glory pick up the imagery of victory and power which we see at its fullest in the book of the Revelation.  The ones who remain faithful in the face of persecution and evil are the ones who come to share in the glory of God, to share in the shining victory and power which are symbolised by crowns and victory songs and chants. We probably are encouraged by this in our struggles to live well. That’s a good thing because these apocalyptic vision of John’s Revelation were given to the church for that very purpose, to encourage them in their faithfulness, and in their struggle to be good and do good.

Tell them about the glory. Tell them because it encourages them to persevere in the struggle. Manning Clark would agree with that!

But if that’s all I tell you about the glory, I won’t have done my job properly today. I may well have left you thinking that this glory is only for the success stories of the Christian life, the Olympic athletes of the spiritual quest. That would be selling the saints short and selling you short too.

Saints aren’t just the perfect, the ones who succeed. Saints are those who try, who struggle, who stumble and keep on getting up again. Who make a mess of things and have the grace (the presence and working power of God’s spirit) to have another go, and try to get it right, who admit to mistakes and failure and defeat, and who keep on going nevertheless. Think of St Peter. Think of St Mary of the Cross McKillop, newly recognized Saint from Australia, who was once excommunicated because she disagreed with a bishop whom her biographer called a bushranger. I suspect that slightly larrikin quality, and that determination is what Australian of all faiths and of none seem to admire in her.

So I think we sell ourselves short, and sainthood  & holiness short if we confine it to perfection and victory in Christian living. And even more importantly we sell it all short if we think that in the end it’s about us, our efforts and what we earn that achieves this perfection.  It is about what God does in us and through us, and how far we let God work. That’s why it’s about grace.

I’m reminded of some very wise, and very thick words of our Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams:

A human being is holy not because he or she triumphs by will power over chaos and guilt and leads a flawless life, but because that life shows the victory of God’s faithfulness in the midst of disorder and imperfection. The church is holy - and this congregation here present is holy - not because it is a gathering of the good and well behaved, but because it speaks of the triumph of grace in the coming together of strangers and sinners who, miraculously, trust one another enough to join in common repentance and common praise - to express a deep and elusive unity in Jesus Christ, who is our righteousness and sanctification. Humanly speaking, holiness is always like this: God’s endurance in the midst of our refusal of him, his capacity to meet every refusal with the gift of himself.

Tell them about the glory.

For of course the glory is God’s first and foremost and it is God’s in the end. It comes from the overflowing of God’s love from the beginning of all things, an overflowing of love which made a world and the human race to live on that world, to be in the image of God: to be God’s conversation partner of you like, because God’s love was too large to be contained in the bounds of the three person of the Trinity.

Tell them about the glory, because the glory that begins it all and the glory which shines through the saints is God’s glory, and as Michael Ramsey used to say, the glory of God in all eternity is that ceaseless self giving love of which Calvary is the measure.

Tell them about the glory: that glory which is ultimately seen best on Calvary, but which is always the heartbeat of God, the glory of self giving love.

I’ve been telling you about the glory because our second reading from Ephesians is shot through with the word, and the concept. He (the writer) wants us to know the glorious inheritance among the saints, which is the hope to which we are called. But while it is certainly about God’s power and greatness, God’s overflowing fullness which fills all things, it is a fullness which overflows and fills us: the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe. The glory starts with God, and overflows to fill the church and its people, and it flows back to God from the saints, from the whole church, as we fulfil the hope to which we are called and live to the praise of his glory.

Tell them about the glory. Yes indeed I will, because it is for our own encouragement, our own guidance and improvement, for our better flourishing in the life which God gives us.

The glory which is at its heart God’s unending and unconquerable love for us, which keeps on being poured out, and which calls us to be caught up in its movement and life, this glory is what transforms us and makes us saints, even when we struggle and fail, even through our stumblings and shortcomings. 

Tell them about the glory. But there’s one last thing to tell you. I think Manning Clark saw this as a big task for everyone to be involved in (even if he himself wasn’t quite talking about the church at the time!)  Tell them about the glory, is not just advice to the preacher, but a slogan for us all in our living.  Live lives that tell them about the glory.  Live so that your lives are the best sort of commercial that can be given for God and God’s love, as you come to know and show the ceaseless self giving love of God, reflected in the span of your life and your living, your doing and your relating, your own serving and hoping and loving.

Tell them about the glory. All of you, tell them about the glory out there in the world of this coming week, by the way you live your life to the praise of God’s glory, by the way you shine with the glory of God’s live working in you, and through you in loving others.

Or as the old offertory sentence from Matthew’s Gospel which we used in BCP says: let your light so shine before all, that they may see your good works, and give glory to your father in heaven.

Be the saints whom you have it in you to be, when you let God’s love dwell richly in you. Be saints, for that is what you all are, and even me too. And so we will all tell them about the glory.

“Salvation has come to this house” [Luke 19:1-10]

We were glad to hear a few weeks ago that the 33 miners in Chile had been saved.

We were glad to hear of the nine Australian surfers who were saved after their boat was swamped by a tsunami in Indonesia in the last week.

Today we here of Zaccheus being saved, and we probably wonder if it’s really the same sort of thing.

The Chilean miners were delivered from their imprisonment in the mine which had been their workplace and could have become their grave. They were brought to safety.

The Australian surfers were brought through a time of danger, through the perils of the sea, and they too were brought to safety.

Zaccheus has a guest to dinner, and proclaims his own good financial practice. Can this be an experience really anything like the others, one worthy of the name of salvation?

But make no mistake, Zaccheus is saved; salvation has indeed come to his house. This experience of the visit of Jesus is no less an experience of salvation as the other two, for what Zaccheus finds in response to his quest to see the visiting prophet Jesus is no less than him finding salvation. Or more to the point it is salvation finding him.

We can easily think of salvation as a very specialised use of the concept of being saved when we use it in a religious context, and we can give it a very restricted meaning if we aren’t careful.   We can think of it as being saved from our sons, saved from hellfire and damnation, and think that that’s all it is. For if we do that we think of it only in terms of the past, only in terms of what are saved from, and lose sight of what we are saved for.

You see salvation is a big thing, a big religious concept. The secular images of salvation, and uses of the word “saved” simply give us glimpses of the fullness of what salvation involves.

Salvation and being saved has dimensions of deliverance, preservation, freedom, restoration and even integration.  We can see how many of these words speak of aspects of what has happened to the saved miners and the saved surfers.  They have been delivered from harm, preserved against danger, freed from confinement, restored to family and friends, and even integrated back into their community.

What we see in this story of Zaccheus is a story of salvation coming for this short tax collector, literally salvation is coming to visit.  Now there are all sorts of dimensions to the salvation of Zaccheus too. He has been excluded from the community because of his occupation as a tax collector, and therefore as a presumed extortioner and thief as well as a collaborator with the hated Roman overlords.  Now he is restored to the community of the righteous; the prophet Jesus comes to visit him, to grace his table and accept his hospitality so he must be OK. Indeed the prophet Jesus proclaims that he is a true son of Abraham. He’s one of us. He demonstrates his own freedom from what might be called “his calling’s snare” – the occupational temptation that he must avoid day by day: he restores any money if he has defrauded people, and gives half of his income away to the poor, so he is an unusually righteous tax collector! [The verb here is present tense in the original, it means what he currently doing.]

The problem in too small a view of salvation is that when we want to use it in a religious sense, and think and talk about how we are saved, we get caught up in thinking in pairs of opposites, in rigid dichotomies. We become the sort of people who divide the world up into two sorts of people, the saved and the not saved.  But that is actually the very reverse of what salvation is about in the gospels, and indeed in this story.

Zaccheus seemed to be one of the not saved (because he was a tax collector) and yet Jesus visited him in response to Zaccheus’s remarkable zeal in trying to see him. Climbing trees to see the visiting celebrity is not what normal respectable business folk and government officials do either here or in 1st Century Palestine. But Zaccheus does; he doesn’t care, because he wants to meet Jesus. And he does, and he finds that in meeting him he finds salvation; or indeed salvation finds him, because that what Jesus embodies and brings.

For you see, salvation is at its deepest not about a negative condition at all. At its deepest salvation is about wholeness. When we have experienced or found salvation from whatever it is that threatens us, we find ourselves in that peaceful, integrated, comfortable place which is wholeness.  In the Old Testament their very rich word Shalom spoke of what one had when one had salvation: peace wholeness and prosperity. All was well with the world and one’s own place in it.

Zaccheus reaches out to Jesus, and he reaches out to take hold of salvation, as a way of life to live in, as a community within which to live, as his future. He has this glimpse of what might be in being with Jesus, and he does all he can to grasp it ( climbing the tree and demonstrating his financial good practice and thus his social bona fides!)  IN so doing he finds much more blessing than he could quite hope for. Not only does Jesus come to dinner, but Zaccheus finds salvation has come to dwell in his house.  The saving wholeness of God’s kingdom has visited him and come to stay, and will remain with him even after Jesus, who is the instrument and embodiment of that wholeness, has left.

Today we baptise Liam. The images of salvation in what we will do soon are strong, and they are many. But even more than washing away sin, even more than turning away from darkness and renouncing evil, even more than all the negative aspects of what happens, when we baptise someone they find salvation just like Zaccheus did. Salvation comes to their house. Salvation comes to make its home with them. Because in baptism we are all united with Jesus the Saviour, the bringer of God’s saving wholeness. We are united to him unreservedly, inextricably and irrevocably. No matter how often or how much we forget it or try to ignore it, no matter what gets in the way to obscure that reality from us, we are held in his love. Salvation has come to us, and is always there to embrace us, and hold us.

Thanks be to God.

Luke 18:15-30

Who then can be saved? What is impossible for mortals is possible for God.

Of course these days doing the impossible almost seems second nature to us, what with all those reality shows on the TV!  You know the ones, make a rhubarb and quince flummery in a Webber BBQ at the same time as designing a Melbourne Cup outfit before your competitor does.  We seem to have an insatiable desire to watch people do the impossible, or at least the almost impossible, whether it is overweight people doing boot camp to loose weight fast or couples redecorating derelict units, or their friends houses, or “laddettes” turning into ladies in a few short weeks. Yes, Susan Boyle can become a celebrity singer. We think almost anything is possible. [And didn’t Barack Obama assure that Yes we can!]

Yet the camel going through the eye of the needle seems to be a step too far.  How often have you heard sermons about the eye of the needle really being a very small gate in the city wall which required the camel driver to unload the camel before squeezing through!  If we look rationally at it we miss the point. This is a sort of proverbial impossibility, using the categories of the day to dramatise not just the difficulty, but more importantly the need for God’s transformation. We are in the realm of poetry not of science here. Camels were the biggest animal they knew in Palestine and needle’s eyes the smallest opening they knew.  It’s really that hard, almost as hard as it is to turn a laddette into a lady!

But of course the point is not in the human impossibility, or even its mere implausibility, but rather in the need for God.

Let’s go back a step. The line about possibility and impossibility is the punchline, the kick in the tale of this encounter between a wealthy ruler and Jesus. The whole encounter is about transformation, and about receiving God’s transforming love as a gift not thinking to claim it as a possession.

It isn’t an accident that this encounter takes place after Jesus teaching about children, and the kingdom. The one builds on the other. This ruler or magistrate is a good man, that much is clear from the story. He is very conscious of wanting to be good and do all he can to maintain that sort of identity. He has kept the commandments since his youth, he says, and Jesus does not gainsay that claim. So in the face of the parable of the tax collector who is justified when the “good” Pharisee appears to come off second best in God’s kingdom, and of the teaching about needing to receive the kingdom as a little child, this good ruler must be wondering what point there is in goodness, in following the commandments, the teachings of the Torah.  It almost seems as if anyone can get into God’s kingdom, and what use is that? Shouldn’t it only be for the really good, and those who work hard for it?

It’s not that one is exempt from goodness; the ruler is told that the way to inherit life is indeed to follow the commandments.  But the one thing more is what turns upside down his settled ordered world of power, influence and control. You still lack one thing; go and sell all that you own and give it away to the poor; that will get you treasures in heaven. You can almost hear him say to himself, oh really this is impossible. I’ve done all I can, and if that isn’t enough, then what’s the point.

This ruler was rich, extremely rich in fact, and that was the step he couldn’t take. 

What must I do, he asked, as if doing was the beginning and the end of entering God’s kingdom. It’s not that doing didn’t matter, but rather that a key part of it all had nothing to do with doing at all.  For the rich ruler wanted to earn his place in God’s kingdom, and that’s the one thing you can’t do.  You have to receive it like a little child, as a gift which can’t be earned.

This rich ruler lives in the world of doing, of achieving and possessing. That is, if you like, the sort of psychic landscape that he inhabits, it’s what life is about for him.  He’s not a bad man; indeed he’s clearly a good man and one who wants to be enduringly good. But in the end he misses crucial point in knowing God; he thinks that by doing he can belong with God eternally. But that’s not how it works. Belonging with God, being part of God’s Kingdom is a gift. It comes from God independently of what we earn or could earn, and despite what we don’t deserve, because God is the ultimate giver of gifts. God is by very nature overflowing gift. That big theological word Grace is really a way of naming that deep truth, that God is overflowing gift, and that all we have from God is unmerited gift.

When doing and achieving and possessing are what dominate our world and our way of living, we are probably seeking to find our security there, in what we have, in what we achieve, in all that we do. But in the end, I wonder whether that’s what matters to us most, and what we need most. When we age we often find these things stripped away from us, and even when we have a lot, when we have a long record of what we have done, we can find ourselves lonely, bereft and unable to manage. Perhaps the secret of it all is the secret the child knows before it starts trying to make the world in its own image, and to grasp and control. If our security is where the child’s is, in being held, in being loved, then we can endure much, and survive much.

Back when I was a parish priest, when I was called to sit with those near death, I tried to pray out of this wisdom. I wondered what we most needed to hear when we faced death, and it struck me that knowing that we were secure in love was as close to the answer as I would get. So I prayed for the dying one, N we surround you with God’s love, with the love of God the Father who made you, the love of Jesus who gave his life in love for you, the love of God’s Spirit and breath within you, we surround you with the love of the angels and the saints, we surround you with the love of the church, we surround you with the love of your family and friends. Know that you are held in God’s love and ours now and always.

Knowing that love is something that comes as a gift, and is never a possession, never a right, and while we can respond to it in love and in goodness, and spend our lives in love and goodness, in obedience and faithfulness as a response, that love and the gift of it is always there first, and it is always more than we can hope to give back in equal measure.

And here’s the other secret: when we act out of the love which we have been given as a gift, then we can endure much. Then we can live life and not be held captive by stuff, by the things we we might seek to possess. Then we won’t be defined by our work, or our achievements, nor cast down by our failure and our shortcomings. For then, knowing that we are beloved children of God, we become learners in God’s kingdom. Blessed are we then, for in God’s hands, we do the impossible, or perhaps I can put it better by saying, the impossible is done in us and through us. The camel indeed passes through the eye of the needle; the really big thing enters the small thing.

Let me leave you with a prayer that I found years ago, by the 19th Century writer Christina Rossetti.
 O God of patience and consolation, grant we beseech thee that with free hearts we may love and serve thee and our brethren; and, having thus the mind of Christ, may begin heaven on earth, and exercise ourselves therein till that day when heaven, where love abideth, shall seem no strange habitation to us; for Jesus Christ’s sake.

THE PARABLE OF THE WIDOW AND THE UNJUST JUDGE [Luke 18:1-14]


Jesus told them this parable about their need to pray always and not to loose heart.

Which brings two things to mind for me: the one a rather unsound joke, the other a line from a novel.

There was once an Italian boy who wanted a BMX bike . He pleaded and pleaded with his mother, "please can I have a BMX bike for Christmas" he would say. And so that she did not have to deny him she said, "You will have to ask the baby Jesus if you want a BMX bike."  So off he went to church and knelt down in front of the statue of the infant Jesus of Prague [the one with the gaudy robe and the crown] and he prayed, "Dear baby Jesus, please make sure that I get a BMX bike for Christmas." And every day after school he would go into the church and pray that prayer in front of that statue, until one day, he began to loose heart, and his thoughts began to wander and so did his eyes, and he looked around and saw a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and suddenly he had an idea! He looked around and checked to see that no-one else was watching, and then he jumped up and took the statue from its pedestal, wrapped his coat around it and raced home. After he had put the statue in his cupboard, he sat down to and began to write a note: "Dear baby Jesus, if you want to see your mother again, you'd better get me a BMX bike for Christmas."

And then her novel Whipping Boy, (a crime novel) Gabrielle Lord, one character says, that Prayer is not about outcomes, but about letting go of outcomes entirely.

Is prayer about outcomes? Is it about getting what we want from God?

The  parable seems at first sight to be endorsing the first sort of attitude to prayer.  It sounds like a story which tells us that it's all right to badger God for what we want, and that it is persistence in prayer which counts. If we pray long enough and hard enough then our prayer will be answered. And that's a bit of a worry, really!

Part of the problem is that this approach makes the outcome of prayer to be dependant on the extent of our faith or of the quality of our relationship with God. That would mean that we would get more of what we want if we have more faith; and didn't we learn a few weeks ago from the parable of the mustard seed that the smallest amount of faith was able to achieve the biggest of tasks? No, it doesn't work that way at all: God acts in God's way, and God's generosity is out of proportion to our deserving and isn't dependant on our prior actions at all.

And the real problem is that this isn't what the parable is teaching anyway. We need to go deeper than first impression, we need to go beyond the story Jesus uses and focus on what he says next. It's how Jesus uses the story and the context in which Luke places it which is more important.

So, having told the story, Jesus says, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you he will quickly grant justice to them."  He is not saying, keep praying because God will be worn down by your persistence like the unjust judge. Rather he is saying, if in this world unjust judges act because they get sick of listening to persistent widows, then surely God will be much more likely to be receptive to your prayers. God is so much the God of justice who hears the our cries that God will be sure to be responsive to our prayer. It's really a sort of parable upside down, to show us what God isn't like.

God hears prayer and responds, not because of the length of the prayer, or its frequency or its elegance or anything else about it, but simply because God is God, and God hears all prayers and responds out of boundless love for all people and inexhaustible justice which never rests until all things are set right and all is brought into the Kingdom of God. If unjust judges do the right thing in the end for mercenary motives, then surely the just God will bring justice.

We also need to recall the context of this parable in Luke's gospel. This story about persistence in prayer is placed by Luke immediately after some teaching by Jesus on the coming of the Kingdom which focuses on the uncertainty of its approach. The disciples had asked when the Kingdom was coming, and Jesus' reply teaches how unexpected it will be, and how it will catch people unawares. So in that context, to tell them to keep praying, because God is so much better than a judge who had no respect for people, is to reinforce for the disciples God's concern to act with justice and to bring in the Kingdom of God in which this justice is done, and to encourage them not to loose heart.    The prayer on which Jesus is focussing has little to do with our own agendas, but is about looking and yearning for God's Kingdom.

So when we pray, we aren't being like the boy who wanted the BMX bike, and we aren't being God botherers who come to pester God with our shopping list of needs. Prayer is not like bargain shopping in the market place, where the stall holder has to be worn down so that the buyer gets a good deal, because the deal has already been done, and the reward is ours anyway, for God's love is ours, freely and for the taking. What is happening when we pray is that we come to God who is love and who does justice, and we encounter that heart of love, and we find our needs both met and critiqued in the refining fire of God's heart. For when God responds to our needs and answers our prayers, God has only the one gift to give, but is the gift which most supremely fulfils our real needs, the gift of Godself, of the overflowing love and passionate justice which are ours when God is present with us.

So you will have guessed that I do have sympathy with the character from Gabrielle Lord's novel: Prayer is not about outcomes, but about letting go of outcomes entirely. At least it's not about our outcomes; that has the wrong focus. The outcome of prayer is God's outcome, which is always the coming of God's Kingdom of wholeness and grace. It's not that our needs are unimportant; the parable reminds us that we must indeed bring to God our cries for justice. But the dynamic is different. In prayer, we bring those needs and cries to God, but in that encounter with God, we gradually let go of our desired outcomes as we focus on the will of God. Not so much because we surrender our will to a superior force, but that we are captivated by the depth of God's love. In that encounter with the divine love, we discover what is for our lasting good, what is our true and only end, what brings us grace and glory.

Blessed John Henry Newman’s motto as a cardinal was Cor ad Cor Loquitur: heart speaks to heart. That’s really what prayer is, our heart speaking to God’s heart and God’s to our; our yearning communing with the divine yearning.

So as we commune with God in prayer, we may find that the needs and cries which we brought in the first place are critiqued or challenged, but in the divine yearning we discover also a depth of loving which takes us far more seriously than we are often prepared to take ourselves. Our prayerful encounter refracts our needs and desired outcomes through the lens of God's Kingdom, and as we meet God in prayer we discover both the relentlessness and the love which are to be found in God's will. Relentlessness for the Kingdom which God wishes to bring, and love for humankind and the creation which is the wellspring of all that God is and does.

And that is why, at the heart of the perfect pattern prayer which Jesus gave to his disciples, [which we call the Lord's Prayer] we pray, Your kingdom come, your will be done. This was the heart of his teaching on prayer to the disciples, to pray continually, without loosing heart, for the coming of God's kingdom, and the doing of God's will.  And this, I think, teaches us in our praying to let go of our outcomes entirely and be caught up in God's, to align our yearning with the yearning of God’s heart.

 

The Revd Dr Ross Fishburn - 10th October 2010

Luke 17:11-19

On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus was going through the region between Samaria and Galilee.

This is a story of the borderlands, the places between, the places where boundaries are close at hand, and indeed may be crossed, or not.

As I think of borderlands I think of the lands in the north of England, around Durham, which I have come to love in recent years, places which were once borderlands for England, where one came close to the territory beyond, the land of the barbarians, of the pagan Vikings, the marauders who could come and devastate the region. Borderlands like these were scary places, places where people felt unsafe and threatened. Yet they were also places that drew forth great faith and daring, and where the church raised up great saints like Cuthbert, who made a community on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and whose bones finally found rest in Durham in the great and might cathedral there, after a century or so of being carried around the borderlands to stop the pagans getting them!

I think too of another holy island, Iona, where Columba founded a community of monks again on the edge of civilisation, close to the borders where the feared pagan foreigners rampaged.  Yet this is a place of another border: of the border between this world and the next, for they call Iona a thin place, because heaven and the presence of God seems especially close there in this place where Christians have prayed since the 8th century, and lived the life of faith. 

And I also think of what I heard on the radio the other day; Margaret Throsby was interviewing a US astronaut. This astronaut said one of the things that was especially powerful about being in space, and looking at the earth was how you see no borders from space.

You see no borders from up in space.

Yet borders can be very real, very important lines of demarcation which are useful to us to observe and attend to. They help us realise when we are coming to an edge where we need to be especially cautious or sensitive, and even where we come to a place where we shouldn’t go.

What does our gospel today have to teach us about borderlands and living in them?

Well, as I said, here Jesus is in the place between one place and the other, between Samaria and Galilee, when he has this encounter which is all about borders as well as about healing.

Jesus moves between the place of rejection, (Samaria), where the community did not receive him, and the place where he began his public life, Galilee. He is walking an edge between rejection and acceptance as he goes into this village.  As he enters he come up against another borderland, as he is confronted with these ten lepers. For these folk have been exiled from the community because of their infectious skin disease, and condemned to live a life on the fringe, such that they must proclaim their exile and marginalisation to any who came close, saying Unclean, Unclean.  So as he enters the village, Jesus walks along a boundary line.

Yet these exiles from society reach out to him, and make a claim of him. They call to him as the holy man and healer who they recognise can transform their lives.  They call him by name and revere him as Master (as only the disciples do) and ask for mercy, the divine gift, which will bring them healing and wholeness. Of course that wholeness is not just deliverance from their disease, a freeing from infection and the blight on skin and on life, but also deliverance from the isolation and rejection that they suffer; it will mean reconciliation with society, cone their healing and wholeness has been attested by the priest. You are no fit for human society, is the verdict they have scarcely dared to hope for as a result of their encounter.

Yet Jesus doesn’t do what he often does when ministering the healing wholeness of God; there is no touch, there is no contact, no make of mud or spitting or anointing, simply the command to go and show yourselves to the priest. He both preserves the boundary of not touching the leper while reaching across it with a word, to destroy that boundary, and bring them to a new place, a new wholeness, a new relationship within society rather than outside it.

But the boundary crossing doesn’t stop there. For one of the lepers came back, and in so doing confronted Jesus with another boundary, and crossed it himself. For he was a Samaritan, and the social and religious boundaries were strong if unseen between them, forbidding contact and discourse. He comes back to Jesus in gratitude.

Now we tend to read this as a moral lesson in being grateful, and that is certainly there.  But there is more, and it is to do with boundaries.  For this Samaritan would have had a long journey to show himself to the priest and certify his healing, indeed to find it is real for him. His journey would be different from the Jewish Lepers. He was a foreigner as well as an outcast; an ethnic outcast as well as a social one.  Instead of going back into his own land, he chooses to cross a different boundary, and reach out across the divide between Samaritan and Jew, and claim the healing that was ready to hand. Instead of showing himself to a priest in Samaria, he claims Jesus as both priest and temple, and find the deep healing, social and ethnic as well as physical, that he needed.

Boundaries to travel along, and boundaries to ignore.  In these borderlands, Jesus crosses boundaries where that is what will bring wholeness, and witness to the reign of God, but in a way recognises other boundaries in bringing that boundary crossing miracle of wholeness to these 10 blighted lives.

In one sense we see here a revelation of the God who is not held back by boundaries, indeed whose love and acceptance, whose wholeness and grace and mercy literally knows no bounds or limits.  This is a showing of the bound-less God, of boundless love and mercy.

And yet, he doesn’t abolish all the boundaries; he refrains from physical contact, he keeps to the tradition of having the healing validated by the priest, and thus keeps the social, ritual which is embodied in that boundary. 

Borderlands are strange places, where we need to discern what is right and appropriate, what will make us safe, and what is an appropriate risk to take, what are the constructs, the rituals and the customs which we need for our good, and what are the ones that are just the ones we’ve inherited because that’s what we do here?

Some boundaries make us safe and keep us safe, because they stop us trespassing into where we don’t belong, or where we can damage or be damaged.  This works socially and psychologically as well as politically, and perhaps even more importantly so.  Te ultimate boundary we need to keep is the boundary of self, where I stop and you start, so that we work creatively with each other, and don’t press ourselves on others, where we wait to enter another’s space, physical or psychological until we are asked, invited and made welcome.

As in all things, Jesus, the bearer of God’s mercy and wholeness, the embodiment of God’s reaching across the boundaries that limit us and hold us back, Jesus travels the borderlines wisely and well, and respects the boundaries that are for our preservation and health.

Jesus does not reach where he is not invited, he respects our limits, and our free will, just as he invites, and responds here to the call for God’s mercy.

May we know the grace and the wisdom which Jesus embodies – to know where we stop and others start, where our appropriate limits and constraints lie, and also to know where the boundaries around us need to be crossed, where we should reach out across them to draw others in to the wholeness and healing of God, to break down the boundaries that become barriers and wall which imprison rather than protect. God give us the vision to know where the boundaries lie, and where and when they are important, and when they simply hold us back from the love, the grace and the wholeness of God’s reign.

The Revd Dr Ross Fishburn - 3rd October 2010

2 Timothy 1:1-14    Luke 17: 5-10

Guard the good treasure entrusted to you.

I have always been interested in mottoes. Once upon a time, these pithy sayings were put underneath one’s coat of arms if one was entitled to such a thing, by being a knight or a gentleman. Nowadays we have a sort of downmarket equivalent: the signature on one’s blog or on a post on a virtual discussion board. A teacher friend of mine drew on the tradition of Latin mottoes, but with a twist that sent it all up; his signature line was Certe Toto, non etiam in Kansate edesse. Which being translated is Gee Toto, we ain’t in Kansas any more! 

Well I raise that because today’s reading from the letters to Timothy contains a motto that was used by the cardinal who, at the time of the 2nd Vatican Council, ran what is now called the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, but used to be called the Holy Office of the Inquisition: Depositum custodi; guard the deposit, the treasure entrusted to you.

Now of course this fearsome conservative cardinal understood the text, and the charge that it embodied for him as having to do with guard the treasure of the faith of the church and the way it was expressed. He read it in terms of the previous verse and its exhortation to holding fast to sound teaching.  It certainly was becoming a concern of the church in the later New Testament period in which this letter was written and in the late 1950’s it was even more so. Modern “isms” were generally a bad thing, and the faith needed to be kept pure from modern interpretations and fads.

Now I don’t want for a moment to suggest that sound teaching isn’t important, and that we should take the teaching of the faith as light thing, a thing of little concern. But I think we actually mistake this text as a whole if we read this verse only in the light of the verse before.  Guarding the good treasure entrusted to you, is more than just keeping to the standard of sound teaching as if the content of the teaching is the whole story.

If we go back to the verse before that, we are shown who is the ultimate guard of what is entrusted and passed on; he is the one in whom the writer has trust, in whom he is not ashamed, the one who is, of course, the centre of the gospel itself.

Lest you think that I am proceeding to work from the end of the reading backwards a verse at a time, let me cut to the chase!  At the heart of the reading, and of this account of the treasure which is to be preserved and handed down intact, is the calling which Timothy was given, and the gift of which he is called to rekindle. It was given to Timothy at the laying on of hands, which may be a reference to his baptism, or possibly his ordination. But whichever is the point at which it came to apply to Timothy, and to have a hold on him, its ultimate source is the grace given to us before the ages began, but now revealed through the appearing of our saviour Christ Jesus, who abolished death, and brought light and immortality to light. 

At its heart, the treasure which is handed down and is to be preserved is grace. Grace understood not as a thing, a commodity, but rather grace as embodied in a relationship, grace as the gift of God’s very presence and love dwelling in us through God’s spirit. Grace is God’s ultimate gift, the gift wrapped up in a person not in paper; embodied in the life and the ministry of Jesus, in his teaching and his healing, in his living and his dying.  The gift of God’s creative Word which speaks love to humanity from before the foundation of the world, and which took the space of a human life to utter.

So you see I think Guard the deposit is a bad translation for a good motto. Guarding the treasure is not about worrying at the content of our faith and policing the standards of doctrine and sound teaching; rather it is keeping alive the relationship the church and all its members have with the Lord who gives us grace. Guard the good treasure entrusted to you;  keep alive and well your relationship with God and embody in your life the love which God has for you. Live it out in all you do, and live out of the love God has for you, stored up since the foundation of the world, and poured out upon you in your baptism, and week by week in the eucharist.

So, all that we do in being church is centred upon that relationship with God. It pivots on our experience of God’s grace and our embodying of God’s grace in what we do and say, and who we are as individuals and as a community. The treasure that is at the heart of our life is not a body of teaching which must be handed on without alteration, but a constant relationship of love and grace which must be continually renewed in each generation and in each place.

But is content then completely irrelevant? By no means. But I do think it is the means to the end of embodying the heart of the relationship of grace. 

 Let me give you an example which might make this a little clearer. There is much debate in the Anglican world about a variety of ethical questions, especially to do with human sexuality.  Just how do we usefully and rightly inherit the scriptural teachings which seem to many to be at variance with the spirit of tolerance which Jesus preached?

Now I can’t hope to resolve these questions today; let me simply make reference to a lecture that I have found helpful, and which I will make available to those who want to read it. It was given at Westminster Abbey in 2007 by the Dean of King’s College London, Richard Burridge. In this lecture he draws on the difficulties the church has had over the years with slavery and with apartheid and how both supporters and opponents have drawn on the scriptures to support their views.  Burridge makes the very useful suggestion that have to attend not simply to the explicit rules and principles of the scripture, but also to the practice of Jesus in advancing the teaching he gives.  That leaves us with BOTH a very rigorous call to holiness AND a liberating acceptance of those who are outside the experience and practice of that holiness at his time. Jesus calls all to be holy, especially those who seem least holy and find it hardest to be holy, and he encourages them in the path of holiness by a loving acceptance of them in their struggle.

Let me give you a little taste of what Richard Burridge has to say:
Jesus' demanding ethical teaching on things like money, sex and power should require very high standards from those around him, with the result that ordinary fallible human beings would find him uncomfortable. However, when we turn from his words to the biographical narrative of his activity, the converse is true. It is religious leaders and guardians of morality who found him uncomfortable, while he keeps company with all sorts of sinners - precisely the people who are not keeping his demanding ethic. He is criticized as 'a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners' (Matt. 11.19 // Luke 7.34). He accepts people just as they are and proclaims that they are forgiven without the need to go to the temple or offer sacrifice. His healing ministry is directed towards such people and the eucharistic words at the Last Supper suggest that he saw his forthcoming death as being 'for' them. A biographical approach means that it is not enough simply to look at Jesus' words and moral teachings; to be properly biblical involves facing the paradox that he delivers his ethical teaching in the company of sinners whom he accepts, loves and heals. Furthermore, a major purpose of ancient biography was mimesis, the practice of imitation, of following the subject's virtues. This is reinforced by the Jewish habit of ma'aseh, precedence, where the disciple is expected to observe and imitate his master as a way of imitating Torah and ultimately becoming holy as God is holy. Therefore, to imitate Jesus, it is not enough simply to extract his ethical teaching from the Sermon on the Mount; we must also imitate his loving acceptance of others, especially the marginalized, within an open and inclusive community.

 Richard Burridge, “Being Biblical? Slavery Sexuality and the Inclusive Community”.
http://www.westminster-abbey.org/whats-on/lectures-and-seminars/eric-symes-abbott-memorial-lectures/past-lectures-seminars/2007/may/the-22nd-eric-symes-abbott-memorial-lecture-2007-0000

We are called to imitate Jesus, who is the embodiment of God’s grace , the living presence of God’s love for us, poured out since the foundation of the world. That is the gift and the call we are given. But of course we know that at the end of the day, we are faithful to that call only in part, and as today’s gospel says, we are unworthy servants who have done no more than we are asked and expected to do. The gift is lavished on us, not because it is our right, but because it is in God’s nature to give good gifts, irrespective of how well or poorly they are used. 

Thanks be to God, the giver of all good gifts.


 

The Revd Dr Ross Fishburn - 26th September 2010

Luke 19:19-31

The French writer Jean Paul Sartre wrote his philosophy in plays and novels mostly. At high school I had to study a chilling play of which I am reminded by today’s parable. It’s called Huis Clos, literally closed door, but English versions tend to call it No Exit.  It is the story of three people caught in what is hell for them; they have died and are stuck in a room with each other. They try to tell their stories, and to convince their fellow inmates that they have been good or justified in what they have done or who they have been. But the problem is that they can’t.  When the door opens, they can’t leave (or they won’t which amounts to the same thing) because they are stuck with who and what they have become, not being able to change any more.

Here on this earth, in this life, we are still becoming who we are to be. As the newly Blessed John Henry Newman said, to grow is to change and to reach perfection is to have changed often. But when we die, we cease to become, we are who we are, in God’s sight. [The question of whether God is so rigorous in his justice as to leave us in that predicament eternally is another question, not covered by this parable, and awaits another day to answer it!]
Here we have another parable, another vivid story told with a pressing point to make, somewhat similar to last weeks parable, for it is pressing Jesus hearers to use well the time that is theirs, and change while the going is good, and embrace the kingdom of God with which Jesus is confronting them. I don’t think it’s intended as giving us detailed in formation about the next life and its geography or climatology: it’s not about whether there is a gulf between heaven and hell which cannot be crossed, or whether the wicked burn everlastingly in hellfire. That’s all just in the world of the story, and is probably carried over from the many folktales on which this story is based.
All the stuff about Father Abraham being unable to cross the gulf between him and the rich man is there to give us a vivid story which dramatises the need to make changes in our life while we can, while we are still becoming, so that when we stop having the opportunity to change, we can live with the self we have created for ourselves. Are we the sort of person we can cope with living with for eternity, and with the consequences of who that person is, is the question that this parable dramatically poses for the hearers of Jesus and for us.
It’s part of the two edged sword which the good news of Jesus embodies, isn’t it. For the gospel of God’s kingdom which Jesus preached is always both good news and hard saying, and sometimes, like this parable, both at the same time! The hard message of this parable is the need for change now while we have time before we become stuck with who we have become forever.  But the good news is that we have the opportunity and the invitation now to continue to become who we might want to be, with God’s help, and with the grace of God’s spirit working in us.

That is the big picture perspective of this parable. But there’s a piece of smaller detail which is also translatable, and to which we need to attend as well.
You might be tempted to think that we don’t have the same situation as this rich man where we regularly pass by a poor man who is in such distress as Lazarus. But are we really that dissimilar?  I wonder how many sermon’s today will draw the analogy between Lazarus and the people who we see selling the Big Issue on our street corners?

But I want to draw a wider link for us.

I don’t know about you, but I have become addicted to watching the ABC show The Gruen Transfer on Wednesday night. For those who don’t know it, it take a humorous, but enlightening look at advertising and how it works.  One of its regular features is a segment called their pitch, where they invite to ad agencies to try to sell the unsellable. This week it was to try to get the Australian people to like boat people. The first one was brilliant, I thought, and nicely illuminates this parable for us.
They’re desperate people; they’re frightened people ; they’re sad people; they’re proud people; they’re helpless people; they’re old people; they’re young people; they’re little people. But we just call them boat people. But they’re not; they’re just people like us. Shouldn’t we treat them like that?
Indeed. Shouldn’t we?

But here’s the thing which links it with the parable: we tend to marginalise boat people by our categorisation of them. They become those people who aren’t like us, and therefore don’t belong here. Isn’t that just what the rich man in the parable did?  He drew a mental boundary which excluded poor Lazarus at his gate, and allow him to see through him, and almost to treat him as a non person.

Now we might have no such extreme situation in our life and situation but are we entirely free from these sorts of blind spots? Do we never draw a boundary which sets others on the wrong side of it so that there beyond or beneath our consideration? As they say on the TV: Not My Problem.

John Donne memorably reminded us:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.

So one way in which this parable can apply to us is in society, and in the community, in our politics and in our thinking when we mentally exclude some group of people or other in our thinking and valuing from being the same as we are. It may be boat people, or indigenous people, or migrants, or … well, I don’t know the community of Ivanhoe to know your issues and blind spots do I, so I’d better not come in from outside and try naming them too specifically.

Now this is about more than just the person we meet on occasion and don’t recognise as deserving of our care; that’s the message of the parable of the good Samaritan. Lazarus is someone who was always there in the rich man’s life and society; he was there at his gate every day. Who might the people be who we are blind to, whom we might want to forget, or who are so tied up in our minds and hearts by the category we give to them that we don’t see how they have a claim on us, how we they might be more tied up with our lives than we might think?

That doesn’t have to be desperately political or dramatic. The hard bit may be that these people may be just as close to home as Lazarus was to the rich man.  Our neighbours, our workmates, our families and our friends. Do we ever take them for granted? Do we ever give them a low priority on our care and concern because they are in the wrong mental box or category for us. Oh my family are OK, they look after themselves… we may say.

Then there is the other people whom we can easily forget to care for; the people whom Archbishop Bob Dann called our nearest and poorest neighbours. That would be ourselves. Aren’t their times when we so categorise ourselves that we forget our own value and potential, we say its not right to have needs and care for ourselves as well as others. We can pigeon-hole ourselves just as easily as we pigeon-hole others, and exclude ourselves from the grace and mercy of God which is God’s gracious freeing and sustaining gift. 

Let me leave you with a question and a prayer.
Who is near me day by day, to whom I am blind, whose needs I forget or ignore?
What do I not want to see in myself, and refuse to trip over?
Lord wake me up today, open my eyes, even when I don‘t like it. Amen.