pre-membering, 1986, 2025

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St ALBAN’S, NORTH MELBOURNE

SUNDAY, 28^th SEPTEMBER, 1986

 

 

Last week Alan[1] began a series of sermons exploring the meaning of the Eucharist, the Communion, the Mass, in which we participate here every Sunday. He reminded us that the Eucharist is something we are all called to do, that it is an action in which we all take part.

Now it’s my turn, and I have asked Alan if I could speak on the meaning of memorial, or remembrance, as we find it both in our liturgy and in the biblical passages about the Last Supper on which our liturgy is based.

Which leaves me with one small problem. In a very few minutes I’ve got to grapple with one of the most crucial issues that divides the church today. It’s a contentious issue, and although it wasn’t the cause of the Reformation it has remained close to being the single most divisive issue in dialogue between Catholics and Protestants, between various Protestant denominations, between Anglicans and Catholics, even, dare I say it, between Anglo Catholics and Evangelicals.

So, given that that kind of significance, the best I can now do is to offer you a few thoughts on my own understanding of the way we remember as we celebrate the Eucharist, ideas that have been helpful for my own spirituality. This is not something about which I would want to be dogmatic.

I guess there are various ways of remembering, and philosophers in particular have played with them throughout history. Plato, for example, believed we were born with some kind of a blueprint, a memory of an ideal world of which our world is only a shadow. That sort of memory is similar to what we might call instinct – the force, for example, that leads birds to migrate or humans to care for their young.

Another form of memory is our own memory of past events. Many of us for example remember clearly what we were doing the day John F. Kennedy was shot, or the day Armstrong landed on the moon. We remember our parents and our grandparents, and places we have lived.

The problem is that I believe these kinds of memory are precisely what Jesus was not talking about when, on the night he was betrayed, when he took bread and wine and commanded his followers to do in the same way, “in remembrance of me.”

Jesus, we must constantly recall, was a Jew, and the culture in which he spoke was that of Judaism. The night of the Last Supper was the night on which he and all Jews celebrated the events of the Passover – the escape of the Jews from Egypt in the Exodus.

Every year since the time of the Exodus the Jews remembered those events of the Passover by celebrating with a special meal. That is what Jesus and his followers were doing on the night when he was betrayed, in the upper room.

But the Jews didn’t believe they were merely remembering a past event and giving thanks for it. Instead they believed themselves to be recreating that event in their own homes as they celebrated the Passover. Not just a past event that they remembered, like some of us recall the glorious days when Essendon won grand finals, but actually recreating Essendon’s glorious events here and now.

It is in the context of that kind of memory event that Jesus commands his followers to remember him and the events of that night when he ate with his disciples.

But, and this is where it becomes complicated, it seems that he wanted them to remember not only the events of that supper, but also the events that were about to happen. The events of the Crucifixion, and, as we now know, the Resurrection. That is why he speaks of the bread as his “body” and the wine as his “blood.”

So he is asking the disciples not only to remember the events of that night, but also events that were yet to happen – to remember in anticipation.

Now for us both the events of the upper room and the events of the Cross have already happened. But I believe we are not only asked to remember, to make real in the present those past events, but also are called to “remember” another event that has not yet taken place. That event is the Banquet that is to take place in the Kingdom of Heaven at the end of time.

So we remember not only past events, but remember also a future event. We make both real, real happenings, in the present.

So what happens here each Sunday? It seems to me that, because Jesus had this very concrete understanding of memory, he was talking about making something really present. As he celebrated the events of the Exodus in the upper room those events became really present.

In the same way, I believe that he asks us, in remembering the events of the Last Supper, the Cross, and the Resurrection, and in remembering with anticipation the events of the great banquet of heaven, to permit those events to become truly present around this table as they were in the upper room, and as they will be at the end of time.

This I believe is what we mean when we talk about Real Presence. The Catholics have often been criticized for attempting to claim, with various philosophical words like transubstantiation and transignification, that the bread and wine really do become body and blood.

I would say that it is unhelpful to believe anything less than that. Not that these elements are mechanically changed, but that because the memory of the past and future events is so powerful, these events reoccur, are recreated and precreated in our midst as we remember them.

So it is an awe-inspiring task in which we are involved. It is an event of great beauty, and time for great thanksgiving – which is what “eucharist” means – because in these events we are reminded that we are reunited with Jesus and made at one with the Father through Jesus by the power of the Spirit, who binds us together and transforms both us and these elements into something new.

So what do I believe? I believe that as we share together in the Eucharist we really are experiencing Christ present in these elements as we receive them in obedience to his command. That, I believe, is what it means to “do this in remembrance” of him.

---

[1] The late Fr Alan Foster was Priest in Charge of North Melbourne in the mid 1980s. He was later the Rector of Coffs Harbour, where, sadly, he died in office after a battle with cancer. He was a significant influence in my own formation both as vicar of St Alban's and, earlier when he supervised my summer work placement in the parish of Pascoe Vale with Oak Park. 

early blurts of a theolog

 

 

 my first public sermon

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, HEATHMONT

St MARY MAGDALENE (July 22^nd) 1984

 

 John 20: 1-18

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

 

Today is set aside in our church calendar for reflection on the life and witness of Saint Mary Magdalene.

As is so often the case of those early followers of Jesus, we know next to nothing about Mary Magdalene. We know, from this account in the fourth gospel, and from parallel accounts in Mark and Luke, that she, together perhaps with Mary the Mother of Jesus, perhaps with some other women, was the first to see the Risen Lord. And we know from Saint Luke’s account that she was a woman who had formerly harboured seven demons. The number “seven,” incidentally, at that time meant not necessarily one more than six, but “the ultimate,” “infinite,” or “innumerable.” Mary, then, was a lady who had a lot of problems.

Somehow in Christian tradition it has become assumed that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. There is no sound scriptural evidence to support this tradition. And it seems to me that in the “folklore” presentation of Mary as a prostitute we have clouded two more essential aspects of her circumstances. By placing her in a box marked “prostitute” we have limited the scope of the “seven demons,” the “ultimate badness” that once inhabited her, and we have glossed over the primary problem that a woman in her position had to face, the problem of her woman-ness. Women, though respected to a limited degree for the functions they could perform, had, in first century Palestine, few more rights than the rights of our car today.

So, as we focus our attention today on Saint Mary Magdalene, what have we to learn?

If our Lord was prepared to entrust a woman, one formerly seen as ultimately bad, with the single most important message in human history, “I have seen the Lord,” then we as beneficiaries of that message should look very closely at the way in which we communicate the news of the Risen Christ.

In a day in which we claim, rightly or wrongly, relative equality of sexes, we should be seen to be working together to proclaim the gospel. Women and men with equal status, entrusted by our Lord to use different but equal gifts for our urgent work.

Too often though it seems we radiate only an impression of complacency and conservatism.

I guess for Mary herself the immediate result of Jesus’ entrusting of the glorious message to her was one of an inner feeling of self-worth. “I am okay. My master and my friend has given me a job to do.” Do we instil this kind of self-respect in our neighbour?

I sometimes wonder if our apparent failure to communicate the gospel to our neighbours isn’t directly the result of our failure to entrust the good news of our new life to the countless outcasts that are around us. Well I wouldn’t devalue the kind of training I am receiving as a future minister of word and sacrament, at the same time I have to stress that at the end of my training I am no better qualified to communicate the love of Jesus to my neighbour than is any other person.

I sometimes wonder if we aren’t gagging Jesus because of our inbuilt ideas of professionalism in the church. We leave the task of evangelism to the Billy Grahams, the task of pastoral care to the priest or pastoral worker, we leave the task of intercession to the intercessor, the task of reading the word to the reader.

Yet it seems to me that the only qualification Mary Magdalene had in order to set in motion the wheels of Christianity was a sheer, burning, naïve enthusiasm: “I have seen the Lord.”

To communicate that message we need to learn to work together. We need to learn to trust one another, as our Lord trusted Mary. We need to learn to encourage one another, to recognise and to emphasise one another’s gifts, as our Lord recognised in Mary a readiness to communicate, to bubble over with the news. Mary expressed the news with no great and articulate sermon but with that magnificent blurt, “I have seen the Lord.”

Mary blurted out those words, never stopping to consider the possible response of the shattered and frightened disciples. The disciples gathered there must have thought this woman crazy, reverted perhaps to her former demon possessed state. Later it was to become a frequent accusation levelled at the early Christians that they were drunk or crazy. Perhaps we too – and I definitely include myself – should learn to be drunk, crazed by the overwhelming news of the Risen Lord burning within us.

 

god on our side?

 

SERMON PREACHED IN THE TRINITY CHAPEL, PARKVILLE, VICTORIA

9^th JULY, 1984

 

[possibly the first sermon I ever preached, part of the homiletics formation programme at Trinity theological school]

 

Romans 8:31-end

It is not my intention here to launch into a learned exegesis of Pauline thought, or to present a well-researched paper on the soteriology of the Tentmaker of Tarsus. For what it’s worth, Bishop John Robinson describes this as the culmination of “perhaps the greatest chapter in the New Testament,” on which “all commentary is bathos.” Far be it from me to disagree.

In 1963, an angry and confused young man in New York wrote a poem that was to become one of the anthems of the folk protest movement in the United States throughout the 1960s. In it he attacks not the God of the Christians, but the mockery we have made of that God, the effigy we have raised up in Yahweh’s place as a screen to mask our seemingly insatiable search for power. 

Incisively that angry young man alluded to those words of Saint Paul that are our reading tonight:

FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS I HAVE NOT REPRODUCED THE LYRICS.

THEY ARE TO BE FOUND HERE 

Blasphemy? Or is the God we advertise by our words and actions – or lack of them – the type of God who applauds the double standards and hunger for power of a Judas Iscariot? Judas Iscariot betrayed our Lord with a symbol of peace and love, whilst in fact seeking power and – perhaps – wealth.

Perhaps we too betray Christ with a kiss? we don’t need. to be church historians to recognise the duplicity of our representations of Christ. We greet our Lord in love, yet have used him throughout history as a battering ram by which to inflict our will and our culture on unfortunate and unwilling peoples.

What, then, are we affirming when, with the apostle, we claim God is “for us,” all that we have “God on our side”? If God was not on the side of Judas Iscariot, then we must assume that he was on the side of the Victim of the betrayer’s actions. The Oppressed One, our Lord. And we don’t need to be liberation theologians to recognise the recurrent biblical motif of God’s love and concern for victims of injustice.

God does not change his mind – that reminder too is a recurrent biblical motif – so today we can assume that God still loves the poor and oppressed, whether they be heroes of our faith (or of other faiths) behind the Iron Curtain, or the ghetto dwellers neglected by the Reagan administration, the Bantustan dwellers oppressed by the South African regime, the Aboriginal People  divorced from their homelands in Australia, womankind alienated by patriarchal language and power structures, homosexuals condemned to misunderstanding and victimisation by the enforcement of macho norms … the list goes on. These are those whose side God is on.

The Labor government in various states in Australia is withdrawing privileged status from religious institutions … should we moan and fight to maintain our luxuries, or should we instead thank God that we are at last to come face to face with the implications of a post-Christian era? That our idiosyncratic structures are to tumble about our ears in the same way that “cultural Christianity” has tumbled in the face of two world wars? The decline of cultural Christianity has gone a long way towards shattering the myth that God is “for” or “on the side of” cultural, and predominantly bourgeois, patriarchal, and Caucasian Christianity, and for that we should give thanks.

Saint Paul talks about God being “for us.” But do we allow him to be for us, when we defend our obscure and elitist institutions? Can we be allies of God when we too often reduce our ministry to a numbers game, as parish level of “bums on seats,” ostensibly in the interests of extending the Kingdom, but more realistically in the interests of maintaining the vicar’s stipend, keeping leaks from the roof, or restoring a parish organ? Perhaps, in a post-Christian era, we have to look more closely at the possibilities of worker priests (of more than one sex}, self-sufficient parish communities, and home churches, before, with Saint Paul, we can truly claim that God is for us.

If we can overcome our crippling disabilities, disabilities of wealth, power, and patriarchalism, then we will once more be able to “thank God in all circumstances.” Particularly we might do so in the second chance he has allowed us in the secularisation of society, and in the resultant loss of ecclesiastical privilege. Then, once more, we will, as humble men and women reliant solely on the grace of our God, rejoice in the knowledge that if God is for us, “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the president nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

YOU MAY LIKE TO REVISIT THE FINAL VERSE IN DYLAN'S ANTHEM ... I DID

 

 

Rolling over. Rolling on.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

and

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FEAST OF ST PETER AND ST PAUL (June 29^th) 2025

 Final sermon of fulltime ministry

 

Matthew 16:13-19

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

I would of course be telling something other than the truth if I claimed that it wasn't just a little on my mind that this day is the last of a stipendiary ministry reaching back 38 years. It is a happy coincidence that we observe today the feast of the combined Saints Peter and Paul, who happen to be the saints after whom the two churches of this parish are dedicated. This parish, this faith community has provided such a heartwarming closure to my career, though perhaps not my vocation.

The unusually brief gospel reading makes it clear to Peter that he was to have a pretty significant place in what scholars call salvation history. I make no such claims for myself. It does though give me opportunity for me to cast my mind back over four decades of preaching, and a fraction less than that or presiding at Sunday services. To think back on what has been I guess a little more colourful a career than I expected when I was ordained in 1987.

This little interaction between Jesus and Peter is a broad hint that that following Jesus is going to be pretty significant. The changes in Peter’s life were mind blowing. He had to make huge alterations in the years before his martyrdom.

For me today the biggest point of reflection is the huge change that has taken place as what we call Christendom, in which Christianity was an official, almost imposed religion across vast swathes of the planet, has crumbled and disappeared into history.

In my early years as a priest I was often called on to breathe something of God’s peace and love into peak moments in human lives. I conducted many weddings, baptisms and funerals, civic functions, human crises. Few of those who called on me and my colleagues for those ceremonies were actively owning or following Jesus, but most had a sense that language of faith was appropriate in critical life-moments.

I have said often that the great current work of the God’s Spirit is the stripping away of assets that once gave us a sense of cosy complacency. Clergy in particular, consciously or otherwise, could too often take their role as an invitation to power and its abuse. There was too often temptation to wallow in a sense of entitlement, self-importance. I’m sure I was no exception. I made mistakes. There were I think Christ-bearing moments, too.

Peter went on to experiencer the cost of following Jesus. The, for want of a better word, “rockship” to which Jesus called Peter was of the hardest granite. This was no money for jam. No money at all, in fact.

My early days of ministry were remnants of the days in which belonging to a mainstream church could provide kudos in society. That was something of a downside, but also provided inroads into society. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

Some abused their status. Thank God most people that I served with and amongst, ordained and otherwise, made every effort possible to have integrity as they carried gospel words and actions into the places to which they were called and in which they lived.

I speak of a word of God’s Spirit. I have said it often, but I believe it is because we are now called to live solely, to proclaim Christ and his resurrection solely, by our authenticity. Our infrastructure is crumbling, and while in this parish we are unlikely to see it for a while, generally it is unlikely that we will be able to maintain expensive buildings and stipendiary clergy. There will be a tiny handful of exceptions, privileged to be so. Great responsibility comes with that privilege. Responsibility to nurture faith beyond our boundaries.

There is something hypocritical in my saying this after four decades of privileged existence! I know that. In a few weeks Bishop Anne, as I am getting used to calling her, will be ordaining four clergy. None of them will be ordained to what used to be called a living. They will be ordained to live and serve our God on their merits. They are tomorrow’s paradigm: non-stipendiary servants of God. As you are. As I will be, now.

The future, though, is God’s. It is full of excitement, challenge and gospel reward for this faith community and for all of us as we seek to serve God wherever God places us.

The  faith will go on. It will go on in this place and it will go on across the globe. These are exciting times to be following in the footsteps of Saint Peter and Paul. May God help us to do so with integrity.

 

dangerous places?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

And the GLENORCHY MISSION HALL

ORDINARY SUNDAY 12 (June 22^nd) 2025

 

Luke 8: 26-39

 

Jesus and his disciples arrived at the region of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee.  As he stepped out on shore, a man from the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had not worn any clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs.  When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me,”  for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.)  Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion,” for many demons had entered him.  They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.

 Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding, and the demonsbegged Jesus^[e] to let them enter these. So he gave them permission.  Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd stampeded down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country.  Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they became frightened.  Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed.  Then the whole throng of people of the surrounding region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned.  The man from whom the demons had gone out begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying,  “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.

 

 

I have a long and slightly tumultuous week ahead of me. Brian, who will be with you soon, has put me on the spot by emphasising that he only gives seven minute sermons.

I can therefore let you off the hook over these last two Sundays that we have together. Almost!

Still ... You  may have heard me say from time to time that the gospel takes us into what I used to call in my early days of preaching the “dangerous places.” I cringe a little as I look back on the naivete of my early sermons, which I am laboriously working through at the moment. I doubt if I’ve been anywhere more dangerous than an armchair in my entire life. 

Maybe on my motorbikes? Definitely. But hardly a gospel-imperative.

I would now be a little bit more conscious of ensuring that forays into places of “danger”– places open to risk of misinterpretation, is what I suspect I meant – were undertaken more cautiously, with risk assessment and due diligence. I learned something useful in my brief career as a firefighter.

Yet I hold by the kernel of what I saw back then. The gospel is a place of comfort, but not cosiness. Perhaps I’ve spent my life too cosily? 

Jesus in his teachings and in his action makes it clear that the way of the cross – the very name he gives it is stupendously threatening – is not a place of complacency. Neither is it necessarily, or even often, a place of popularity. Most of us like at least some popularity. He cared not a fig. 

In this little scene from Luke’s account of the gospel Jesus succeeds in offending almost everyone. There could be, to a first century Jew, few if any concepts more offensive than that of a manic, naked human-being living amongst the tombs, with pigs. 

It is as if Jesus was entering the very heart of reprehensibility, although of course we know the story. We know that his own confrontation with authorities takes him to the even more reprehensible place of crucifixion.

Nevertheless: naked, insane – whatever demonic possession might indicate it is certainly not sanity – living with the pigs and the dead. At this point surely the disciples were deeply worried that this was not what they had signed up for.

I have no idea what is meant in the New Testament references to demon possession. My hunch is that much that we would now call mental health was classified under that sort of label. We only have to look at the ways in which our society struggles to cope with mental health, with housing for, and medical care of the physical manifestations of mental health, to know that any claim that we are better is window dressing. I don’t pretend to know how to do better. It’s not helpful to romanticise the plight of those fragile edges of society. I admire those who work on the fringes, whether their work is faith-based or otherwise.

Ultimately we cannot but be challenged why this encounter with Jesus. I don’t think in our own society we are called to ride in and interfere in realms best tended to by mental health professionals. I do  think that we are called again and again to challenge those in authority to increase budgetary expenditure, to increase what we might call institutional compassion for those whose world is bewildering, frightening and vulnerable.

Let’s not be naive. For many there is no road to recovery from the grip of mental health dysfunctionality. We need to know our limitations. Mucking around in specialists’ fields is beyond our pay-scale as Christ bearers. Nevertheless as we watch Jesus encounter this man, this demoniac, this non-being beyond the fringes of society, we must surely ask ourselves if we might not risk a little unpopularity. Minuscule compared to that which Jesus encountered in polite society, after he strode into this deeply discomforting and risky scenario.

Jesus encountered this man with compassion. There may be many situations in which we need not to interfere but find responsible compassion for those who dwell on the most unpleasant fringes of the world. 

May we allow God to enable us to discern the demonic and unjust in our midst and to speak out in a society that would rather look the other way.

 

don't pay the ... who?

 
SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33

(November 13^th), 1988

 

 

There was a song doing the rounds some two or three years ago[1] whose words flirted with literary illusions, possibly lost on some listeners.

Don’t pay the ferryman,

don’t even fix a price.

Don’t Pay the ferryman

’till he gets you to the other side.

Ancient literature and religion frequently pay tribute to the belief that the dead passed over or through deep and sinister waters on their way to the hereafter. In a vivid scene from A Pilgrim’s Progress the hapless Christian finally crosses the river to enter the eternal city. In Dante’s Inferno the traveller descends to the underworld and is ferried across the River Acheron by the reluctant ferryman Charon. Dante and Bunyan alike borrow from Virgil, and Virgil in turn from Homer.

Arguably before even Homer there existed the notion of waters being part of the realm of evil and death.[2]  

The earth was a formless void,

there was darkness over the deep,

and the Spirit of God hovered over the deep.

                                                 (Genesis 1:2)

 

Christians quickly began to associate the death and Entombment of Jesus with the language of the waters of death known to them of old. It was after all the Jews, the People of God, who believed that they had passed through the waters of death at the time of the first Passover, and who had seen those waters closed behind them to claim the lives of their pursuers, the Egyptians. Christians soon began to talk of Jesus’ death as a “passing through” waters. Passing through the waters of death.

So it came to be believed by Christians that to pass through the waters of baptism as commanded by Jesus was to pass into and through the waters of death as experienced by Jesus, following the seemingly tragic events of Good Friday. In baptism we enter into the death of Jesus and emerge in him, alive, on the other side. [I wish that we were able more fully to enact the journey here, but it is as a step towards such re enactment that we entered the narthex before baptisms and returned to the nave of the church with the newly baptized.]

If baptism is a ritual by which we enter into the death of Jesus, then so too it must be one by which we enter into the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus emerges from the tomb-womb, just as the people of Israel emerge and are born anew out of the waters of the Red [Reed] Sea, and just as as these children will emerge and be born anew out of the waters of baptism.

So baptism is a sacrament by which we enter into the life of Christ.

The full experience of that sacrament is yet to come. Sacraments are a down-payment on the event of reunion with the fullness of God that is to come. Saint Paul, writing of baptism, says,

When we were baptized in Christ Jesus we were baptized in his death … we went into the tomb with him in death, so that as Christ was raised from death by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life.

                                                                      (Romans 6: 3-4)

It is to that new life that we are baptizing our children today. The fruit of our actions will only be known when these children in turn face Christ, first in their growing lives, and finally in the experience of death and judgement Then he will plead their cause before the Father. Then, after the last, [the eschaton], baptism reveals its value as a “grafting on” to Christ.

I wish one thing for these children, their families. I wish that they will grow up within the warmth of God’s church. To be Christians not only when it comes to filling in census forms. I wish that they will come to grow up in a warm and intimate relationship with Christ, a relationship in which his name rests easily on their lips not as a curse but as a prayer.

May they indeed

… be true to Christ crucified Do not be ashamed to confess their faith in him.

That is a conditional clause in the contract that we call baptism

---

[1] “Don't Pay the Ferryman” was released by Chris de Burgh in 1982

[2] In 2025 I would argue that Genesis 1 was written a little later than the time at which the Odyssey of Homer was set down on papyrus. Nevertheless, it is possible that the biblical and Homeric legends were coterminous; the dating of either oral tradition is a shaky science.

language of the heart

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and at St Peter’s, Queenstown

TRINITY SUNDAY (June 15^th) 2025
 

It was a somewhat shonky tradition of the church, at least in the Anglican tradition, that Trinity Sunday was the Sunday on which vicars and rectors headed off to ski, fish or play golf, and leave their curates to preach. Sadly or otherwise in my 38 years of priesthood I have only had a curate for a total of ten days, and they did not include Trinity Sunday.

In reality I would not take that course of action. The Doctrine of the Trinity dwells at the heart of my faith. Though as an aside I should mention that when the Bishop of Grafton in New South Wales licenced Anne to work with me in my parish he was very careful to make sure that she was my coequal priest and not my assistant. Nearly 30 years later it seems that all is not fair and just in the universe and I still don’t get to boss her around, but I have to submit it to her authority. Whoever said life was fair?

More seriously though, the Trinity is a doctrine that inspires and energises my faith. I have told the story many times before, probably even here, of Anne’s university friend who one day proudly announced that were it not for the ridiculous doctrines of a virgin birth and the Trinity he could subscribe to Christianity. He was Muslim, and his Islamic faith would not have to change at all.

Yet perhaps more than anything else this incomprehensible doctrine dwells at the heart of Christianity. While I do not subscribe to “turn or burn” doctrines of salvation, and believe that Anne’s friend was and is close to the heart of God as a sincere Muslim, I continue to believe that this is the revelation granted to the early Christians, by which our distinctive relationship with God stands or falls. At least, this side of the grave. Bye

We can't go into the history of how the doctrine formed or how it has been abused over the centuries, and I acknowledge every year that our Jehovah’s Witness friends are correct, the word Trinity does not appear in our scriptures. But our scriptures, the writing of which was complete within seventy or so  years of the first Easter at the very latest, are profound in their attempt to express, in love language,  how God is encountered. God: Eternal Creator. Incarnate God Man of Nazareth. God, throughout time and space in the sometimes overpowering experience of Holy Spirit, who we honoured last week.

Do not expect me in a short time to go into the complexities of the oneness and threeness of Godhead. The language of Trinity is the language of love. Like love it is beyond the limitations of words. It is the language of eternity, language that tells us that the God who flung universes across the heavens is the God who chooses not to sit out there beyond the universe is but to enter into and experience the very depths of human suffering. To experience it and there bring life and light and hope, spread light and life and hope throughout eternity. Light and life and hopoe accessible to all who open hearts and minds to that which is beyond human understanding but who comes to dwell with is, in us, in word and sacrament..

As a lover of contemporary or so-called popular music one song, a song which I like, torments me more than any other. “What if God were one of us,” sang Joan Osborne, though she was not guilty of writing it. I want to scream at the speakers: “you missed the whole point of Christian doctrine, of divine love, light, hope in the deepest  darkness.” Faced with the horrors – no less – of a Trumpian Presidency opening floodgates of violence across his nation and releasing dark genies from delicate political  teapots across the globe, a God who remains utterly distant has very little to say, very little to do except open his or her bucket of celestial popcorn and watch the ensuing debacle.

What though of a God who is one of us, a God who enters the depths of human experience in one unique event 2000 years ago? An event which ceases to be anchored in space and time, ceases to be limited to first century Palestine, ceases to be anchored to our limitations. An event which becomes eternally good news. News that is good, as long as the event of Jesus Christ is not just the coming and tragic going of an itinerant and eccentric wordsmith in an unimportant corner of the Roman Empire.

But the language of love. God’s love for us. Our response through 2000 years and more tells us that in the events of Jesus’ birth, life, teachings, suffering, death and resurrection, all human experience is taken into the heart of God. And, as we are taken into the heart of God, so divine, eternal  hope is made available to those of us. As we open our hearts to God, no longer at the outer edge of universes, that hope is known to us in the risen Christ of scripture and liturgy.

Like the infamous advertisement, there is  more. For through the Spirit all that we need to experience of God is made present and available to us. Present even as Iraq and Israel train their warheads on another, as the streets of the USA begin to burn. Even when our doctors or the police bring us terrible news of our own mortality or the mortality of those we love. Even when we dwell stunned, or anaesthetised perhaps, at the news of an airliner crashing into student apartments claiming some 300 lives. Even then the light of resurrection, the light of hope can break through.

Though of course while we are still trapped in mortality we cannot grasp the whole dimensions of hope, hope brought to us by a triune God, often mediated to us but friends and loved ones, even healthcare professionals.

Never will we get our heads around this. It is the language of the heart. If we open ourselves up to the mysteries of God in worship, in study, in fellowship, then we can through a lifetime journey grasp some small glimpse of the essence of God's love for us. The God who does not let our mortality or the mortality of any living being have the final word but promises and gives us hints of hope beyond our limitations. The God who suffers with us and teaches us moment by moment that there is another day, a celestial day, even when as the hymn puts it, “Change and decay in all around we see.”