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

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

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

We are all back at that time …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let it be with me according to your word.

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

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

Here am I, the servant of the Lord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the Name of Christ. Amen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, we, humans also do this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everybody's got to learn sometime.

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

Amen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text of a sermon preached for Wednesday after Epiphany 7 Year C Mark 9.38-40. Sirach 4.11-19

Attending to the context of our Gospel passage today, the whole of chapter 9, brings us straight away to a question – what is it doing there at all? We start at verse 38, and verse 37 finishes talking about children. Then we have our passage, and another verse, 41. Then verse 42 picks up the thread and again is talking about children.

Our passage is completely out of context. It has no place in the narrative – and this shows it is something important, something the Gospel writer Mark, really wanted to include somewhere in his account of the life of Christ.

Because though our Gospel today is short in length it is long in meaning and importance. This text, a mere 63 words in English, can bring us to both some of the deepest spiritual principles of our tradition, and some hard truths, truths that may shake us up a little.

Our text is full of unexplained friction and dissonance, things that should not be happening, but things that seem, to the disciples, perfectly fine. John, on behalf of them says to Jesus ‘we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him.’ 

Straightaway we see these students of Jesus have formed a little in-club – “we”.

Now John was one of the earliest disciples, one of the earliest students of Jesus – and maybe the rest of the group, the rest of the “we” in the text were also early disciples. In any case, this little in-group, like little in-groups the world over, in churches, in clubs, schools, workplaces, anywhere we humans gather, this little in-group does what in-groups always do: they police the boundaries of the larger group.

The in-group act as gate keepers – who can be in, who must be out, who is allowed, who is forbidden – the in-group claims the authority to make these decisions, claims the power of membership and the life the broader group offers. In fact, they come to claim what the broader group is and does.

But even worse in our gospel today are these words “we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’”

The in-group of disciples do not try and stop the unnamed man because he may be doing harm, or because of any false teaching or any theological principle. No, they try to stop this healer – and in the ancient world, casting out demons was healing – they try to stop this healer because he was not following them. Not because he was not following Jesus, but because he was not following them.

They have usurped Christ; they have usurped God.

This usurping of God, this deifying oneself is always the dangerous end result of unchecked religious in-club boundary making.

And so, this is probably why Mark includes the passage. Mark was writing around 65-70 CE, a time of wonderful and creative diversity of early Jesus Movements, movements that had names like Saviour Clubs, Supper Clubs, Association of the Anointed and many more. But all which, in pluriform and gorgeous multiplicity, centred on Christ and his power to save, to heal and restore life.

But diversity and difference often engender the controlling impulse of the boundary making in-group, here clearly John and the others he names as “We”. They do not want others being part of the movements of Christ who refuse to follow them, the human ones, but rather follow the Living One, in his Name.

And Christ here is really clear. If we work in His name, if we do a deed of power, and the Greek here for ‘power’ is the same as ‘miracle’, if we work in the Name of Christ, we cannot anymore speak ill or evil of Christ.

Amazingly we have material remains, archaeological finds that may depict what this passage is referring to. There have been discoveries of Roman Pagan healing tablets, tablets with prayers and formulae for healing.

Though clearly Pagan, those dating from the second and third century begin to have a new Name next to the names of the Pagan Goddesses and Gods – Christos. The Name of Christ was known to be healing, salvific and life giving, and so he was included in the prayers for life, and slowly He began to be known.

And this is what Christ is saying: being in his Name we, like those ancient Pagan healers, are changed, we are transformed, we are formed towards him, because we partake of him.

This is because in the ancient world, and still today in many First Nation cultures, names, especially divine names are really, really important. The name of a God IS the God. The name of Christ IS Christ. When we speak, when we chant, write, attend to, meditate on the Holy Name, we make He who is the Name present in our lives and in our world.

And that ultimately is what Christ cares about; not about who or what human person or faction or in-group we follow, but whether in his Name we are changed and in that change we help heal the world.

And though written at the start of the Christian era, speaking to the tensions inside what becomes the early church, our Gospel today is continually alive.

The history of Christianity is populated by the graves and the memorials, the destroyed and rejected lives of those people, mostly good Christian women, men and companions who got on the wrong side of Church leaders who acted like John. Leaders who essentially wanted people to follow them, follow their church tradition, their theology, their doctrine, and not the presence, not the Name of Christ.

And though it is easy to think of others, other Christians not far away, we are always minded to ask ourselves – “Am I John?” Am I part of the in-group?” “Do I police the boundaries of our Church, of this Church assembling here at St Cuthberts?”

It is of course not easy to step outside ourselves, remove ourselves from our actions and motivations as these questions require us to do.

Fortunately, our First Testament reading today may help. From Sirach we hear of that greatly underrepresented and shockingly ignored divine figure who was with God at the Beginning of All, Woman Wisdom.

Woman Wisdom will teach us, will exalt us, Her children and will hold us when we seek Her. She will instruct us and be with us.

Of crucial importance is that the early church identified Jesus with and as Woman Wisdom. So, to seek Her, to seek Wisdom is to seek him.

And because Wisdom was at the beginning and assisted God in Creation, we may find Her and find Christ within all Creation, within all the diverse and wonderful nature and all that lives, all that seeds, sprouts, grows, withers and dies and silently bears His name.

So, our questioning our important and vital questioning of our hidden motivations, if we are subtly, like John, usurping God – these questions can be given to God. They can be handed over to God, to Christ, to Wisdom as we walk a bush trail, bathe in sunlight or reach our hands into soil and life. We bring questions of ourselves to the divine in nature, seeking Wisdom and we will receive Her instruction, Her Answers and Her joy.

In the Name of Christ, Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany. Year C. Luke 6.27-38

Jesus today presents such strong ethical injunctions we may think they cannot possibly apply in the real world, cannot, apart from wishful hope, apply to us. They fly in the face of our natural, our instinctual self: turning the other cheek to be hit again, accepting the theft of what is ours, giving to everyone who asks. None of this comes naturally to us, none of these sit well with our regular, natural sense of self.

Our natural sense of self comes from our growing and maturation, from our families, our friends and our society. All these help to form our sense of self where we know somewhat of who we are, but definitely what is ours – our family, our loved ones, our house, our job, our car, our bank accounts, our bodies, our lives.

Our natural self understands the world: we do things and then receive things in return. We act and things happen, we do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, we sin or transgress and are punished.

Our natural self does not incline towards the radical self-sacrifice Jesus calls us to, where we act for nothing in return.

However, our natural self which knows what belongs to it – body, house, wealth – this self is actually created by the world and will one day, in this life or at death, dissolve and disappear.

And it is only the loss of this self, the loss of our false, worldly selves that will allow us to fully enter the radical love of Jesus: “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you”.

Or to be the love required for us to “do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return”.

And so, Jesus calls us to a new self, and from that new self, a new ethic, a new way of being in the world and ultimately, to a new world – a world whose contours are sketched out in our Gospel today, a world that we are all invited to, a world that we will all one day inhabit.

All this begins with the opening words of our Gospel: But I say to you who are listening.                        You who are listening.

Let’s remember our context here. Jesus has previously called his disciples, his students, up the mountain, chosen 12 of them to be Apostles and then returned. On the plain, he heals not only Apostle and students but also a multitude of people, Gentile and Jew, outsider and insider alike. And this healing foreshadows the radical ethics in our Gospel today: it occurs without ANY action or commitment or even response on behalf of those needing healing. He heals all without qualification or expectation of any return.

He then, lowering himself, directly addresses his students to pronounce blessings and woes which startle and shock us – the poor have the Kingdom, the rich already have all they will ever have.

It is only then, after the healing of the many and the teaching of his students that we hear ‘I say to you who are listening’.

There is a focusing here: from the many who are healed, to the students who are taught, to the students who are actually listening – the ones who are paying attention, who are focused, who are centred in love on the one who is Love before them.

It is this focusing, this centring on Christ that is the key.

We all know there is a world of difference between simply hearing something, or someone, and actively listening. When we listen, when we attend, when we pay attention something remarkable happens – that to which we pay attention becomes real to us, real to all of us, body, mind and spirit.

This is the essence of the crucial practice of Christian meditation, and indeed our liturgy we work together as One Body each Sunday. When we attend mindfully, when we offer our full consciousness to Christ, then Christ becomes present to us, for us and within us.

And it is this attended-to presence of Christ, of God, within our lives which will bring about the death of the older, false self, and the rising birth of the new self. In C.S. Lewis’s words, our new, Christ centred self “will come when we are looking for Him”.

This new self, because we attend to Christ, because we are listening, this new self will partake of Christ and will in some measure be Christ. And to this new self, the radical call to “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you” is not impossible – because Christ loved his enemies even to death, even to death on a cross.

And, of course, this is not easy.

Paying attention, paying real attention, even in our most intimate and personal relationships is one of the hardest things we will ever do – much less as a Christian practice of meditation for 20 minutes on a hard chair in time carved out of our busy lives. And there are so, so many distractions within us and without us.

There are even distractions from the Christian tradition itself, teachings and ideologies that seek to subvert and co-opt the radical Christ-call to love our enemies.

A dangerous example of these modern views was espoused recently by American Vice-President JD Vance. Though a Roman Catholic, Vance somehow believes that our Christian Love should be ordered, should be controlled:

“We should love our family first, then our neighbours, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.”

For the Jesus of love, speaking in love, on the plain, this is utter nonsense.

Vance here has reproduced the hierarchy of love typified in the circles of holiness of the Jerusalem temple we heard last week. Jesus completely and forever dismantles these inner and outer circles, healing all, blessing all and teaching all equally. The command, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” is not qualified or modified by the proximity of the “others” to our lives. We do not “do” differently to our family and to the unmet seeker of asylum; we are called to love all, including our enemies.

So, as wonderful as our Church is, we need to remember we are always a union of divine grace and human, sometimes very human, forces.

But these external distractions and impositions to our attention on Christ are nothing compared with our own internal distractions and barriers.

As soon as we try to attend fully to Christ, to be one of the ones who are listening, to sit still in meditation, to focus inwardly on the liturgy, we will encounter obstacle after obstacle. Our mind will wander, our body will ache, emails left unanswered will arise, shopping to be done will make itself known. We will be swamped with disruptions. This is simply, though so powerfully, our old, worldly self, not wanting to die to the new Christ self, the new self that can and will love enemies.

So, we will fail. Over and over, we will fail to live into the ethics we heard today. Failure though is no reason not to try, no reason not to try and listen rather than simply hear.

Remarkably though, our failures are also part of our becoming.

We fail because we are human, just as Christ is also fully human. So even in failure we can find Christ, even in failure we can attend to Christ, and even in failure – failure at listening, at attending, in meditation or liturgy, even in our failure Christ is present to us and Christ is birthing in us the new self, the new self of love for enemies, the new self of the Kingdom.

In his Name, Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Year C. Luke 6.17-26

Our beautiful Gospel today opens with Jesus, coming down from “the mountain”, to give what is often called the ‘Sermon on the Plain’, corresponding to the more well-known ‘Sermon on the Mount’.

Many scholars think that these two sermons contained the core, the living heart of Jesus’s teachings. And so, they were passed on orally for 50 years by the early Jesus movements before being written down in the Gospels.

So, the Sermons, and our Gospel today, are very important. But of equal and easily overlooked importance is the context, locale and audience of the sermon itself, which we will focus on today. Who Jesus delivered the sermon to, how and where he delivered it are just as important as the teachings themselves.

And again, as always, to fully grasp the radical and revolutionary set-up, we are given by Luke in the first few verses, we need to travel backwards in time and miles across space to a culture quite different from our own.

Just before today’s action Jesus spent a night of prayer on “the mountain”. In the morning, he called his disciples and named 12 of them as Apostles also. The Apostles are the “them” at the start of our reading, “he came down with them”.

It is of immense significance that Jesus called his disciples up to the mountain. Mountains were, in ancient south-west Asia, thought to be the home of the Gods, the place where deity resided. In the Old Testament only special people and elders ascended the mountain with Moses to be near God. Here though Jesus, freely calls his disciples – and in the Greek of the time, disciple just meant “student” – Christ calls his students, calls anyone who wants to learn, up the mountain.

This idea of ascent, going up to meet God was reflected in the Jewish understanding of the Temple in Jerusalem. No matter where one lived in ancient Israel, east or west of Jerusalem, in a higher or lower place, on the flats, or in the hill country, one always spoke of “going up to Jerusalem” – because God resided in the temple, just as She was thought to reside up in the mountains.

Those who had been on the mountain, the apostles and the disciples, are however, just two of several distinct and diverse groups. These groups are listed in a very conscious and deliberate order intended to stir the emotions, minds and spirits of the first hearers of this Gospel.

·      There are the apostles, those students chosen by Jesus, those closest to him, those who will be sent out to spread his Word.

·      Then there is a “great crowd” of his disciples, his students.

·      Then a multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem – the native home of the Jewish peoples.

·      Finally, another multitude from the coast of Tyre and Sidon, the ancient Gentile enemies of the Jewish people.

The overarching image is like concentric circles of closeness surrounding Jesus: apostle, disciple, Jew, Gentile.

This consciously mirrors the Jewish idea of concentric circles of holiness surrounding the Temple in Jerusalem. Spreading out from the most inner area, the Holy of Holies, the Holiness got less and less in each subsequent circle – from Sanctuary to Vestibule to the City itself and onwards, less and less holy, more and more impure, more and more unclean.

The temple was the most important, the most holy place on the earth. Because of the constant ritual actions within, and the boundaries to the temple, the very heart of it was pure enough for God to actually reside there.

And the farther away you were from the Temple, the farther away you were from the Presence of God on Earth – until finally, all the way to the very, very, least Holy, the borders of the Land of Israel.

And here we note the first radical act of Jesus – standing with him are people BEYOND even the farthest limits of holiness, people of Gentile, enemy nations, all included in his teaching and his love.

But even more, as we discussed last week, the ancient Jewish understanding is that the seas and the ocean are symbols and the presence of chaos and de-creation. Now Luke tells us these Gentiles are not simply from Tyre and Sidon but are from “the coast of Tyre and Sidon” – and the Greek is literally “the sea-coast” of Tyre and Sidon.

These are gentiles, people who are unclean, people beyond any blessing from God, people who live with the powers of chaos and de-creation around them – and yet even these people have sought Christ and have been welcomed by him.

And even more, we have those considered unclean – Jew and Gentile – unclean because of their illness and disabilities, physical, mental and spiritual.  

And all, “all of them” are healed, all of them are made whole, restored in love by the Love of God.

They are healed because power came out of him … so much so everyone was trying to physically touch him. Power comes out of his body.

This is because God now, as Christ, is human. God is body and flesh just as those healed were, just as we are. God, the Incarnate God, is now longer fully available only in the Temple; God exists fully in the world, and there are no limits to his love and healing. Christ is present up the mountain and on the plain, at the heart of the temple, and at the shores of Tyre and Sidon.

Wherever Christ, as body goes, God is present, and power and healing comes from him to all.

Wherever we, as the Body of Christ go, if we are open, God will be present, and healing, making people whole, restoring life, renewing connections, repairing relationships, will come from us to all.

And is no accident that Luke describes this happening “on a level place”. The whole idea of going “up” to meet God is shattered – everyone, outsider and insider, apostle and gentile, Jesus and God are on the same level. God is among humans and all life-limiting hierarchy has been abolished in the love of God, in the presence of the Body of Christ.

What hierarchies do we, as the Body of Christ, do we as church abolish, how do we level all that needs to be levelled? 

And even more radically, though everyone, including Jesus is on the same level place, Jesus somehow looks up, somehow, figuratively, imaginatively, perhaps in posture and position, through speech and presence, somehow Jesus looks up at his disciples, at his students. Jesus, God, lowers himself to all assembled, the Master consciously becomes lower than the servant.

So, before we even hear the words of the Sermon, Jesus has shattered the traditional notions of power, of purity, of bodies, and of sacred locations. He embodies a new tradition, a new way of relationship with the Divine.

In this new relationship, which we as members of his Body are partakers, Christ levels all hierarchies, all systems of control that limit love, and calls us, out of love, to do the same.

In this new relationship, Christ declares all bodies, every type of body, abled and disabled, well and unwell, as holy and included, and calls us, out of love, to do the same.

In this new relationship, Christ brings God, as his Body, to all the places of the earth, and calls us, as his Body to do the same.

These are our tasks now – before we speak, before we as apostles and students of Christ, share the Good News of his teachings, we are tasked, as his body use our bodies to level, to heal and to bring God to all. We are tasked, using words attributed to St Francis, to “preach the Gospel always, and where necessary, use words”.

In the Name of Christ. Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany 5. Year C. Luke 5.1-11. Isaiah 6.1-8

There is a wonderful song by the brilliant Australian singer-song writer, Paul Kelly, that speaks into some of the rich and powerful themes of our Gospel. It’s called Deeper Water. Don’t worry, I am not going to sing it, though you may know it already.

The song uses the symbols of water and waves, swell and ripples, depths and surface to explore how we grow as humans, as people connected to each other in love. The evocative lyrics and music, like deep waves themselves, pull us on a journey towards wholeness as we hear of childhood, maturing, new life in childbirth, joy and connection – and always the pull, the call for us to go into the deeper waters, deeper into ourselves.

As magnificent as the journey of life the song depicts is,  however, it is inevitably bounded, contained and limited as these lyrics attest:

So the clock moves around and the child is a joy

But Death doesn't care just who it destroys

Now the woman gets sick, thins down to the bone

She says 'Where I'm going next, I'm going alone'

Death. Decay. Aloneness. 

This is the reality of the created world around us. It seems to be the inevitable, the natural, end of all creatures, of all life, ourselves included. We are born, we grow, we age, we wither, we die.

But our glorious Gospel today brings us the Good News of different story, one where the holy uncreated One, the invisible God of All enters creation, as one of us, for all of us, and brings all of us to the Life Eternal and the Life Abundant.

To enter this deep and sacred story, we need to bring ourselves closer to how the first hearers would have heard it. Otherwise, we can simply see it, as it is often described: “Jesus Calls the first disciples”. But it is so much more, in fact, the essence of the Gospel itself.

The first thing we notice is when compared with the other Gospels, the Call here is reversed. In the other Gospels Jesus calls to his disciples, without meeting them. “Follow me”, he says, and they leave their nets and follow.

Here, before they follow, the disciples are already helping, already assisting Jesus – they take him out into the lake, they take him deeper, they help with the abundant catch of fish.

This speaks to us of our participation in God, how we participate in the divine with our bodies, our intelligence, our minds and strength – and how that participation is used to further God’s plan, God’s provision of abundance for the world. We are not passive, but an active part of the working out of salvation, for ourselves, for each other and for the entire Creation.

And our sacred story today shows Christ bringing this salvation to Creation and to each of us. To understand this, we remember that in the ancient Jewish worldview, deep waters, lakes, the sea represented and were signs of the constant threat of chaos, discord and uncreation. This is not simply the personal sense of danger and fear of the unknown we may feel, when, like the Paul Kelly song, we enter “deeper waters”.

This is a mythic, spiritual, cosmic reality.

In the Book of Genesis, the world of Good Order, the world of Life is created by God from the chaos of the waters. But the ordered power of creation is always threatened by the chaotic forces of decreation, forces embodied in the waves and the depths.

So, when Christ, responding to the pressing of the crowds, enters the boat and speaks from the waters, he is doing so within decreation and chaos. And he speaks the word of God! He uses lips and breath to speak – and in the Jewish worldview and language ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’ and even ‘wind’ are expressed by the same word, ruach.

So, he brings the Word and the Breath and Spirit of God to and over the waters … just like we hear in Genesis:

When beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind, a breath from God swept over the face of the waters.

In our Gospel, Christ is initiating a New Creation. 

And this new creation is one where decreation, where death and decay are forever defeated because God has entered creation and, in the person of the Christ, conquered the deep waters and overcome all forces of chaos.

In this New Creation, unlike the Paul Kelly song, the deeper waters are not places of personal depths where we grow and change, but where we ultimately and inevitably wither and die. Rather the deep waters are places of communal new life and abundance. Surprising abundance, like the vast number of fish caught in our story today. 

So, like Simon, like the disciples, participating with Christ in the deep water, we too are called to bring Christ into the deep waters of our lives, our personal life, our family and social life and our life as church.

We are called to bring Christ into those deep, those unexpressed parts of ourselves, unexpressed perhaps even to ourselves, those depths where we dimly see and sense who we really are. Those depths that, while unknown, support the whole of us.

And we do this, when we travel this journey, not alone but with each other, like Simon with James and John, when we travel with each other and with Christ into the depths, we can expect abundance. We can expect new life. We can expect eternal life.

And it is no accident that here in St Cuthberts we are sitting in pews in the part of the church known as the Nave – this is from the Latin word for ‘ship’, an early Christian symbol for the church. We are right now, travelling together into the deep water, the deep where in Christ, as the Holy Eucharist, we find the Life Eternal and the Life Abundant. Our very participation today calls and allures us to enter deeper waters of life; by simply being here, by sitting here today, we have committed our bodies to this journey – Christ also calls us to commit our minds, our hearts and souls.

When we do, when we find the life eternal, the life abundant, when we like Simon see uncreation and chaos conquered, we will, like him fall on our knees. And being creatures of God, we will, inevitably feel wholly and utterly different to God, and perhaps even unworthy compared to God. We may, like Simon using traditional language, express that we are ‘sinful’, separate from God.

But when we do, let’s remember that Jesus’ only response to Simon was, “Do not be afraid”. He does not admonish him, he does not forgive him, he does not tell him to rise and sin no more. He does not even acknowledge that the sin actually exists; he only wants him not to fear.

Isaiah in our first reading has similar feelings of unworthiness. During his vision of the Holy One, he declares himself lost and having unclean lips. But we must remember that even the Holy Angels, the Seraphs, beings without sin, created only to adore God, even they cannot fully look at God: they cover their faces in the presence of the Uncreated One.

But amazingly through the Incarnation, when God becomes as we are, body and flesh, warmth and blood, amazingly we CAN see God fully and with uncovered eyes – in the Body of Christ. Not only each week here on our altar, but each and everyday in and as each other.

And in him and in each other, may we find the life eternal and the life abundant. Amen.  

Text of a sermon preached for Sermon the Presentation of Jesus-Candlemas, Year C. Luke 2.22-40

We hear this account of the Presentation of Jesus every year, and also an additional time in the year of Mark.

And from the words of Simeon we draw the words for the Nunc Dimittis – “now you are dismissing your servant in peace”. This is part of Evening Prayer and Compline. These words will, this evening, be prayed by millions of Anglicans the world over.

So, our passage is quite important.

But our Gospel today – and we often miss this – also describes one of the greatest tragedies, one of the most sorely missed opportunities and most blatant examples of prejudice ever recorded in scripture.

Today, as a baby, Jesus comes to the Temple – why he is there, we will explore soon.

In response to his presence, two things happen.

Simeon receives Jesus into his arms, and speaks the powerful words we quoted earlier, words that were preserved in oral tradition, words that Luke wrote down 80 years after they were spoken, words that are preserved and prayed today and every day.

And then we have Anna. She also speaks. She speaks “about the child”, about Jesus, to all “who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”

Anna is the only woman prophet of the New Testament; she is one of only a handful of New Testament people who are named as prophet. As prophetess she stands in the line of women like the judge, military leader and prophetess Deborah.

And yet, though we are told she did speak, spoke on the same occasion as Simeon, who was not a prophet, whose words are prayed today and every day, nothing of what Anna says is recorded.

Not one word. We cannot understate this.

Anna is a prophet. Prophets speak the Word of God to the People of God.

With Anna, it is the only time a prophet speaks the Word of God to the people of God about the Incarnate God, while in the physical presence of the Incarnate God.

And yet – not one word is preserved.

There is something wrong, something discordant about this aspect our sacred story. Somehow, the voice of Anna, prophetess of God, the inspired word of God, was silenced, and is still silenced thousands of years later.

This silencing is mostly unintentional, a reproduction of the culture and mindset we are raised in, no matter how versed we are in scripture, theology and tradition.

This time a year ago at St George’s Cathedral, the Primate of the Anglican Church in Australia, the Most Reverend Geoffrey Smith, preached on the same text we hear today. In his fine sermon, the Primate praised Simeon and Hannah for their faithfulness, for watching, and I quote, “for the activity of God, even in an environment of foreign occupation where God’s prophets had been silent for many years.”

God’s prophets silent for many years … yet here, in the very text being preached on, there is a prophet who speaks. Somehow though the silencing of Anna is easy to ignore.

The early parts of our Gospel show us the cultural ideology that underlies this silencing of Anna, this silencing of the divine:

“When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.”

Here Luke conflates two things. Firstly, the dedication of Jesus, as first-born male, to God, which did not actually require a visit to the temple at Jerusalem, and the purification of Mary after childbirth, which did.

The first hearers of this Gospel would know what is referred to here, but we may not. The Jewish law stated that after childbirth, the mother, in this case Mary, was considered as unclean as “at the time of her menstruation.”

For a baby boy, in this case, Jesus, this period of ceremonial uncleanness would last seven days, as it would for each period, every month. For a baby girl, it would be two weeks.

For both boys and girls though, their mother would also be unable to touch holy things or enter holy spaces for an additional period of time: 33 days for boys and 66 days for girls.

This impurity was only lifted by visiting the Temple and offering a sacrifice – a lamb and a dove, or if the family was poor, as in the case of Mary and Joseph, simply two doves – only then would the mother, in this case the Mother of God, “be clean from her flow of blood”.

There is much here we may, today, very reasonably find objectionable and repugnant. And while we may console ourselves with the knowledge that was then and this is now, the same patriarchal control of women’s bodies and undervaluing of girls and women was behind the silencing of the prophetess Anna.

So even if, all was gender equal and balanced now in the church, and in the world, we would still, as we are, be without the words of God, through Anna, about God incarnate.

What did God say about themselves, incarnate as a baby, in the temple 2000 years ago? Thanks to patriarchy, we will never know.

And of course, it is not all equal and gender balanced.

To realise this inequality, we only have to drive 20 minutes this morning to find a range of churches where women are not permitted to preach or take up their vocations as priests.

To realise this imbalance, we only have to reflect on the knowledge that last year, here in Australia, women earnt at least 13 per cent less then men.

To realise that the same patriarchal control of women’s bodies we see hidden, but active in our text, still exists - we can reflect and lament on this sober fact: just a couple of years ago a survey of Australian men revealed that nearly a quarter believe they should have rights over their women partner’s choices of work, birth choices and intimate relations.

It is NOT all equal and gender balanced.

But, as always, our scripture guides us to the overflowing life and love God wants for all Her people regardless of gender and gender history.

The Gospel writer Luke often works in pairs, such Mary and Joseph and the sending out of the 70 disciples in twos. Here we have Simeon and Anna. When Jesus enters the temple, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God … the Greek word used for “took” also has a more passive aspect, receive, and in the Orthodox tradition Simeon is known as ‘Simeon the Receiver’ – the one who receives God as the Body of Christ.

And of course, we too, every Sunday take and receive the Body of Christ, we see – and we taste – Salvation.

But there is also Anna – who speaks, prophesies and gives out to match Simeon’s receiving.

So, after receiving we too are called to speak and give out.

Just as Anna talked of Christ to all looking for the redemption of Jerusalem, so we must talk of Christ to all looking for the redemption, the healing, of the New Jerusalem, the Church. And there are so many of us who want this, who need this, who know the Church as a place of healing and love, but whose voices are seldom heard.

Just as Anna was prophet, so too we must be prophets, but prophets who are not silenced – prophets who give voice in our church to the silenced, to women, to girls, to the young, the neurodiverse, LGBT friends, the mentally ill and all excluded.

Just as Anna talked, we must talk of the Christ child in our midst. We must talk of the Christ body.

We must talk of the body itself in all its beautiful and messy life of incarnation, growth, pleasure, illness, decay and death – because it is in Body, the Body which human law and patriarchy try to limit and silence and declare as unclean – it is in Body, only in Body that Christ redeems us and the entire Creation. Only in Body. So, we must talk and never be silent; we must talk and never silence. Ever again. Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for the Third Sunday after Epiphany. Year C.

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Today.

In the Gospel according to Luke, this is the first recorded word of Jesus’s teaching and ministry. Today. Not yesterday, not tomorrow - today. Today the gracious promises of our ever-loving God have been fulfilled.

Today Jesus brings Good News to the poor, proclaims release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. Today he lets the oppressed go free.

And yet, as people who engage deeply with sacred scripture, as people who engage at any level with the news, the very mixed news of the world around us, where innocent people are still captive and oppression still abounds, we naturally react against the idea of “today”.

Our gospel text though helps us understand this seemingly pie-in the-sky optimism of Jesus, proclaimed in a backwater village in an occupied nation. Before the bold and world changing declaration of “today”, Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah. He consciously brings a venerable, and well-known prophecy from the past, from ancient tradition into his day. He takes the words and the proclamation of Isaiah and makes them his own, transcending the barriers of time, collapsing time past with time present.

And as he does so, he makes the prophecy even more beautiful, even more poignant - he tweaks the words. The bulk of the quotation comes from the beginning of Isaiah 61, but Jesus – or Luke – adds the all-important words “to let the oppressed go free” – which comes from Isaiah 58, a chapter where God proclaims Her radical program of social justice for all people.

So, there is not a passive acceptance, not a simple replication of ancient tradition; Jesus negotiates with the past and with sacred scripture and brings it into his present, alive and vital, ready for his day, ready for us, today.

How he does so, how he bridges past and present is crucial.

Jesus uses his body: he stands, he receives the scroll and uses his hands to unroll; he reads with his eyes, proclaims with his breath and his lips; uses his hands again to roll and hand back the scroll, and finally sits once more. His body - breath, limbs, lips - is the vehicle for the renewal and revitalizing of the ancient tradition.

And of course, we are the Body of Christ!

As St Teresa of Avila reminds us:

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which He looks

Compassion on this world.

So, it is we, we who are his Body, who are called to continue his embodied work of proclaiming release and good news. It is we who through our bodies, as the Body, once more collapse time and space and bring the past from Isaiah, through Jesus to the world, right now - from the Temple in ancient Jerusalem to a simple synagogue in rural Nazareth to our community here today in Darlington-Bellevue, we make this scripture our own.

We are able to do this, because, like Jesus, through our baptism and our love, the Spirit is upon us and we too are anointed to bring Good News.

So, we who are made in the image and likeness of a Loving God, we who in the words of C.S. Lewis are being formed into “little Christs”, it is we who are to bring release to the captives, with our bodies, walking our Gospel, making physical changes in this physical world.

We do this, in the words of Paul from our Corinthians reading today, as members of the same body, having care for one another, the whole body suffering if a single member suffers. And in the full vision of Christ, the Body includes the whole world; all people, all beings, everyone and everything is caught up in his love.

And it is here we need caution. Because membership of the Body of Christ has in the past, and sadly, even today, been bounded by human concerns in contrast to Christ’s universal love. We have and still today exclude certain bodies from the corporate body and from the Body of Christ.

Today, Australia Day, the recognition of these many Lands we now call Australia, is a cruel and sad example. Aboriginal bodies were excluded from the corporate body, not counted as citizens, until 1967. And even today, in the corporate body of Australia, aboriginal bodies will die earlier, live harsher and suffer more chronic health problems than any other bodies.

And though these examples are stark and awful enough for us to easily repudiate them, we have to remember that the church, our church, this very church once supported government policies that gave rise to them. To some people sitting in the same pews we sit in today these policies seemed right and just and proper and in accordance with the will of God.

Because of this our church has, and still does, exclude certain bodies from the Body of Christ or from full participation in the Body.

Left-handed bodies, divorced bodies, Roman Catholic bodies, black bodies, Irish Bodies. All excluded at some point.

And still today, not many kilometres away, there are Anglican churches that exclude women bodies from the altar. And we still, as the Anglican Body of Christ, exclude our LGBTIQA+ sisters, brothers and companions from the fullness of the sacramental life; marriage and holy orders.

At the other end of the Anglican inclusion spectrum though are people like Bishop Mariann Budde in Washington. You may have seen and heard a sermon by Bishop Budde this week on the occasion of the Inauguration of President Trump. In that compelling and quietly powerful sermon Bishop Budde lived the Gospel and appealed to President Trump, pleading with him to be compassionate and include all people within the corporate body of the United States; people of black and coloured bodies; migrant bodies and transgender bodies.

She did this because the spiritual powers and principalities, the ideas and ideologies, the defensive thought patterns to exclude and define and guard the boundaries of our corporate bodies and the Body of Christ are alive and are still potent. They still harm, they still bind, they still oppress, and they still kill. Ask any member of the transgender community.

But we, by living the prophecy of Isaiah and of Christ in our world today, we by our anointing and empowerment by the spirit, we can free the oppressed, we can bring new sight and we can release the captives.

We do this, like Bishop Budde by looking the powerful and the lowly in the eye and quietly proclaiming the ancient, the revitalised and ever-new Good News that Christ includes and loves all people, all bodies in his One Body. No one is excluded, no one is left behind, because if one body suffers, we all suffer.

We may not be called to do this with a president or a world leader; but the harm and violence of exclusion only has power when it is held and reproduced, often unthinkingly, by the regular ordinary people in our lives.

And we can look our family and our friends – we can look at them at work, in our social settings, at church – we can look at them in the eye and quietly, but insistently proclaim the radical, inclusive love of Christ, for all people, for all bodies.

If we do this, if we do this wherever there is exclusion and limitation, speaking truth, then like Christ, we also can rest and sit and say:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled”.

Amen.