Go ... forgive ... love

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
FEAST OF JOHN THE BAPTIST (June 25^th[1]) 1989

 

READINGS

Isaiah 49:1–6,
Psalm 139:1–3, 13–15,
Luke 1:57–66, 80

 

You will go before the Lord to prepare a way for him,

to give his people knowledge of salvation

through the forgiveness of their sins

                                               (Luke 1:76-77)

A man came, sent by God. His name was John.

He came as a witness, to bear witness to the light,

so that everyone might believe through him.

He was not the light.

He was to bear witness to the light.

                                                                                                       (John 1: 6-8)

 

So John, the Fourth Evangelist, introduces us to this dark and shadowy forerunner of the Messiah, John the Baptist, whose life and death we celebrate today. Luke, from whom we read before, is careful to make the same statement, albeit more prosaically. For Luke Jesus is announced to Mary as “Son of the Most High,” a name, as is sung in some choruses, that is above all names. He goes on in our reading today to describe John in similar terms. But in John, the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, we have not the Son, but the “Prophet of the Most High.”

John the Evangelist is more poetic: He was not the light. He was to bear witness to the light. Indeed, the fact that both authors so laboriously peg back the significance of this wild man of the desert, this wild and woolly cousin of Jesus, must alert us to something important. For both authors the task and the significance of John the Baptist is in his role as the signpost to Jesus, the Jesus who pronounces a message of forgiveness of sins.

But the fact that they stress this so much suggests that early in Christian history the gospel came into contact with a group or groups who believed that John, not Jesus, was the chosen Messiah of God.

Luke is also setting the scene for the public ministry of Jesus. We have seen that Luke places emphasis on Jesus’ ministry as one of pronouncement of good news to the poor – the radical, upside down message that the poor are the image of God. But at the heart of the gospel is the pronouncement by Jesus that in him sins are forgiven. We saw in last week’s gospel reading that it is when Jesus says to the woman, “Your sins are forgiven” that the onlookers become particularly toey. “Who is this man, that even forgives sin?” Small wonder: forgiveness of sins is the prerogative of God alone.

So John the Baptist, foreshadowing this Jesus, the one whose sandal straps the Baptist is not worthy to undo, is to spend his life “baptising for the forgiveness of sins,” a dangerous ministry that was to lead to his being murdered by Herod the tetrarch. But, as John the Evangelist tells us, it was the ministry of John the Baptist to decrease in stature, while Jesus the Christ increased.

John and Jesus alike pronounce the forgiveness of sins. So too has Christianity since. It will be my task shortly, as a mouthpiece of God, to remind you of the forgiveness won for us by Jesus:

Almighty God …

… have mercy on you,

pardon you from all your sins,

and strengthen you to eternal life.

 

It is our corporate task to pronounce to the world that same message. Not merely the snide message beloved of some Christian bumper stickers, that “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” but the more radical message that Jesus is the Saviour of the World, the one in whom alone the sins of the world are forgiven. Even the sins of Hitler’s Auschwitz, the sins of Stalinist Georgia, the sins of Tiananmen Square. The sins of British – or English – Tasmania.

We must pronounce that message with our lives far more than with our words. We must proclaim it by our love of our neighbours, by our compassion for the hard-to-love, and, like John the Baptist, by our lives decreasing so that our Saviour’s life of love may increase within us.

In that way we may one day claim “it is no longer I that live, but Christ who lives in me” in solidarity with Paul. Then and only then will we be able genuinely to sing the chorus, “they’ll know we are Christians by our love, “and then and only then will our message of love – of God’s love – be audible.

---

[1] transferred from previous day

on dust and love

 

dust and love

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
ELEVENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (June 11^th) 1989

 

READINGS

1 Kings 17:8-16 [17-24]

Psalm 146
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17

 

[When I turned to prepare this 1989 sermon for posting I noticed it was a bit helter-skelter.

Hmm.

The useful thing about keeping a diary is that it sometimes provides explanations.

In the few days before this Sunday, 37 years ago, daughter # 3 was born, and I was sole parenting her two older sisters and, presumably, running a parish. Though I did manage to note that Australia declared at 601 for 7, not England’s finest hour in cricket. I wasn’t a happy traveller! I support England.

Here’s hoping there may be a thought or two contained in it that is useful for you].

 

Jesus accepted a dinner invitation to the  house of an influential Pharisee, despite his priority to proclaim good news to the poor, despite his radical teaching that the poor are blessed because they reveal the nature of God. These priorities did not prevent him from accepting and enjoying the company of the rich and influential. The gospel is for them, too.

A woman burst in. The “bad name” by which she was known around town suggests she was a prostitute, though there is no firm evidence of this. She came with the probable intention of anointing the head of Jesus with her oil. But as she stood behind Jesus the emotion overcame her, and her overwhelming tears fell on the dusty feet of this charismatic teacher.

Already confused by her impetuosity, she was further embarrassed by wetting the teacher’s feet. Forgetting herself she knelt down, released the long hair by which she advertised her available sexuality on the streets of the town, and tried to dry the tears.

Emotion continued to overwhelm her, and she fervently kissed his feet, before anointing them with the oil she had brought. It is probable after such a display of confused emotion that she no longer felt able to stand and touch the head of this man, as she had longed to do. She failed, anointed only his feet.

The passage is saturate with sensuality, sexuality even. The woman brings to Jesus expensive ointment, bought with the earnings of her trade. She embraced Jesus with the hair and lips that had been embraced by countless men. She horrified her onlookers.

The rock-musical Superstar, while careless in its amalgamation of several female characters in the gospels, nevertheless captures this woman’s emotions well.

 

I don’t know how to love him,

what to do, how to please him.

He’s just a man,

and I’ve had so many men before.

He moves me so.

He scares me so.

 

The Pharisees were horrified, embarrassed, cynical. Their cynicism was based on failed logic: if Jesus were a prophet, he would know this woman to be a prostitute. He would boot her out.

It disturbs me that the popular image of Christianity in the West is one of middle class niceness. It disturbed me further to discover this week, in The Age, that Australian clergy in particular and churchpeople in general do not see their vocation or ministry as being in the wider world beyond the church. Like the Pharisees we see our ministry as being amongst the washed, the clean, the lovable.

It was the clean who failed to wash the feet of Jesus.

The Pharisee’s mistake – and ours – is to believe that a prophet must not get dirty. To believe that a prophet’s role is that of a soothsayer, Jesus ought to know “what this woman is.”

We Christians often fall into that trap, ascribing to Christians a sort of superhuman insight. Clairvoyance, perhaps. Jesus is not a clairvoyant. Ironically, he sees far more than the clairvoyant. He sees not the woman’s occupation but the genuine pain of her repentance. He does not seek to remain “clean.”

God is the God who reveals his nature primarily not in the temples or on the high mountains but in the squalor of a manger in a back street in a rural village.

And in red light districts or a dusty town.

Jesus does even more than forgive the woman, as if that were not enough. Before a gathered crowd of chauvinistic Pharisees, who thanked God each morning in their pious prayers, that they were not born a woman[1] – he tells the woman that it is her faith, her actions that have saved her. The step towards God’s love came from within her, not from the society of men around her that had forced her to the streets.

There is almost too much to learn from this brief passage in the life of Christ. But at the heart of it once more is the contrast between the expectation of middle class religiosity: that God will be best known in the clean places. The actuality in this passage is that it is this epitome of poverty, the woman forced to the streets, who best reveals the focussed love that God seeks in his people. Jesus gave to the woman, amidst her squalor, in the face of her brokenness, the best of God’s forgiving, loving, dignity-bestowing love.

 

---

[1] On this prayer, and its revisions, see https://www.anschechesed.org/tefillah-tuesday-not-make-woman/.

look at your shoes

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
NINTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (June 4^th) 1989

 

READINGS

1 Kings 18:20-21 [22-29] 30-39
Psalm 96
Galatians 1:1-12
Luke 7:1-10

 

 I tell you, not even in Israel have I found faith as great as this (Luke 7:9)

In our gospel reading last week, we found Jesus placing his life into the context of his teachings, and his teachings into the context of his life. In the attempt to shatter any tendency to “club mentality” that might develop amongst his followers, Jesus suddenly pronounces that it is the poor who are blessed – and blessed because in their poverty they are closest to the nakedness in which God reveals his compassion on the cross.

Luke now, having recorded Jesus’ club-shattering sermon, provides demonstration as to how the club will be shattered. Luke is writing for a gentile Christian audience, and therefore, in an attempt to bolster their security in faith, frequently records accounts of the journey into faith of gentiles. His accounts of the life-ministry of Paul demonstrate exactly that, the impact the Christian gospel has on the non-Jewish world.

But Luke’s account serves a double purpose. The warning “not even in Israel have I found such faith” must also be read “not even amongst those I have chosen have I found such faith.” There is no membership ticket to the Kingdom of God.

Karl Rahner, perhaps the greatest Catholic theologian of this century, devised a belief in the existence of anonymous Christians. Traditionally Christianity has taught that there is no salvation outside the church. The infidels are condemned to remain separated from God, enmeshed in a morass of human sin.

Yet strangely enough the Bible has always been quite ambivalent about this. The Old Testament promise following the flood still holds true. Never again, says God, will I destroy humanity. And the New Testament writings to Timothy make clear God’s will is that all should be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). Is God so easily thwarted?

Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most powerful and public examples of a figure who embodied all of the best of Christian thought and yet rejected Christianity. The question that must be asked of Gandhi is “where in all Christendom has there been displayed such love and justice as this?” Gandhi rejected Christianity because of the undeniable evils perpetrated in its name. Christian crusaders of every generation and every cause have much to answer for.

Somewhere in Dave Wilkerson’s book The Cross and the Switchblade he tells the story of his first encounter with the street kids. As he attempted to explain Christ to the kids he followed their eyes in the direction of his feet. Brand new and expensive shoes worth far more than the kids could legally earn gave the lie to his concern to live among the kids. He gave them his shoes – in itself a complex reaction.

In our Christian life we must constantly seek to see whether our shoes speak louder than our words. We must constantly seek to see whether those around us and beyond our shores are not living a life centred far more on the gospel – albeit unknowingly – than is the life we lead. We must, as we seek to proclaim Christ to the world, ensure that we hear our own voices, that we monitor our lifestyles, that we look closely at those to whom we are speaking lest they are far, far closer to the Kingdom of God.

Love. Do not condemn.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
EIGHTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (May 28^th) 1989

 

READINGS

Side chapel at the former Holy Trinity church,
Ringwood East

Sirach 27:4-7 / Isaiah 55:10-13
Psalm 92:1-4, 12-15
1 Corinthians 15:51-58
Luke 6:39-49

 

[I don’t think I would start a sermon in 2026 with a harangue like the one with which I began this one in 1989 - but that is the way it was!]

 

One of the problems faced by the liturgical churches in the modern world is that in an attempt to make scripture manageable we carve it up into small but meaningless portions. Worse, we then slavishly attempt to link together an Old Testament passage, a Psalm, a non-Gospels New Testament passage, and a reading from the Gospel, contorting them together and imposing on them a meaningless theme. 

You will or may have already noted that I am doing away with the “theme for the day” idea given to us in the prayer book.

To illustrate this, what better readings could one have than today’s? A collection of disjointed wisdom sayings that managed all but accidentally to find their way into the Old Testament, and which contrast futility with wisdom. A Psalm which rejoices in the psalmist’s relationship to God while cheerfully condemning God’s enemies (and the psalmist’s) to utter destruction, a Pauline slice that in three verses attempts to summarise what Paul says far more effectively in three chapters of Romans, celebrating the undoing of death. A Gospel reading taken wholly out of its context in Jesus’ teachings. 

We are given a theme, “whence comes goodness?”  Not it seems from An Australian Prayer Book.

The answer to the question “whence comes goodness?” is as trite as the question itself. From God. Okay. Sermon over.

But there is it seems a more profound question we must ask – and answer – and that is, “what is goodness?”

To answer that question in the light of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection we must turn to his own teachings. We have a bare snippet of those teachings as our gospel reading today, and must place it in context.

We have to begin that by remembering whose account of the gospel we are reading. Any two writers telling of the same events will do so with different slants. For Luke the emphasis is on Jesus as the one anointed by God to bring good news to the poor. In speaking of radically good news to the poor the Kingdom of God is announced and its fulfilment begun. 

Good News to the poor, though, is more radical than mere gaining of riches. It is the receipt of the blessing of God.

How blessed are you who are poor: the Kingdom of God is yours.

It is this proclamation that, a few verses before our current reading, begins Jesus’  solemn Sermon on the Plain, and this pronouncement was in turn foreshadowed in the Temple when Jesus proclaimed,

This task is being fulfilled even while you are listening.

He was speaking to the Temple on the text,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

Having made that solemn pronouncement, Jesus goes on to set out the responsibility of his Christian disciples, you and me, within the scheme of pronouncing God’s blessing to the poor. He tells the disciples of the commandment to love.

I say this to you who are listening: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who treat you badly.

 Jesus demands of Christians a radical practice of love that does not look after its own, but by which we are asked to set our needs and the needs of our in-group far behind the needs of others. We are not a club, as so often we have tended to become, and as Luke’s Christian community would appear to have become. We are not even a club in the commendable way that service clubs are clubs. We are called to love those who seek to destroy us.

And Christ calls us not to judge.

Judge not, that you may not be judged. Condemn not, that you may not be condemned.

Do not, Jesus says, let the so-called security of our Christian morality lead us to point the finger at those who are unclean, lest God touch us where we are unclean. Do not point the finger at the practice of homosexuals, lest God touch the raw nerve of our sexuality. Do not condemn the sexual ethics of our young people, lest God touched the raw nerve of the same energy within us. Do not condemn the atrocities of South African apartheid, lest God touch the ugly wound of our own racism and the racism of our nation.

Love. Do not condemn. Sure, do not condone. But do not condemn. For we too struggle with beasts of sexuality or sexism or racism or countless other isms, including the isms of shonky business ethics, that rage within us.

Only in the context of those warnings does our Lord produce the warnings or illustrations that we heard read in our gospel reading this morning.

Do we have logs in our eyes as we condemn others?

Undoubtedly so.

Do we have our stems sunk deep into the good fruit bearing tree, that produces the fruit of self-denying love? Or are we thorns? Brambles?

For the words of the mouth flow out of what fills the heart.

Goodness is a life lived anchored in the radical love of Christ, the love that proclaims from the utter agony and loneliness of the cross,

Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.

As we adopt and grow into that radical ethic of love, we too will become a part of the upside down and illogical message that proclaims a blessing to the poor, to the hungry, to those who weep.

The nature of that blessing will be revealed only in the coming Kingdom.

look to the kauri

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA
and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH
SIXTEENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY
(July 12^th) 2026

 

READINGS 
 
Isaiah 55:10-13
Romans 7: 1-11
Psalm 119: 105-112
Matthew 13 : 1-9 & 18- 23                                      

 

Praise to you, God, for all your work among us.

Yours is the vigour in creation,

yours is the impulse in our new discoveries.

Make us adventurous,

yet reverent and hopeful in all we do.

This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

 

Just over 40 years ago, when I was ordained, the world was living in the thaw of the cold war. I was no fan of President Reagan, but he and Gorbachev were seemingly talking like civilised human beings. “Star Wars” – the military defence system, not the movie after which it was named – and Glasnost were things.

For what it’s worth New Zealand was entering the era of the second term of Prime Minister Lange, though I was living under a different regime, that of Bob Hawke, across the ditch. It was an optimistic time.

The past is a foreign country.

It was a mirage. Or at least in part. It was at time of idyllic days when the Berlin Wall came down, apartheid collapsed, Lady Di got married. But we forgot to keep our eyes on the ball of ongoing justice, costly compassion. Faith, too. We became complacent. We thought the finishing line, whatever it was, was ours.

It’s been a rocky road since then. For me the pivotal moment was in 2015 when some ostentatious squillionare that I’d never heard of rode an escalator down into the foyer of a gauche building somewhere in the USA.

He was, he told the world, going to be President. America – or perhaps just white masculine privilege – would be great again. I suppose it had been once, but really? Earth’s proud empires pass away.

I don’t think that Trump has ever read Romans 8, and St Paul’s famous analysis of the human condition, of humanity’s need for God’s intervention. Because in the same year that Trump declared his tilt at the presidency, he also declared that he was not a person who needed forgiveness.

I suspect the great emperors of, Rome or, earlier, of Babylon, emperors like Nero or Nebuchadnezzar, weren’t too hot on the idea of forgiveness either. Why bother with it, when one is oneself a god? The centre of the universe.

Isaiah – probably the second prophet of that name and tradition – was daring to speak to his people of hope. That doesn’t sound daring. Except it was at a time when the divine light of hope was pretty much extinguished. By complacency.

Isaiah was daring to speak to his people of a memory that they had lost. Some of us have known personally that to talk of the past can trigger unpredictable responses in sufferers of dementia. The Hebrews to whom Isaiah was speaking were suffering a collective amnesia, collective dementia, forgotten the land God had given their ancestors. Land from which they had been exiled, once a bitter separation, but now just a distant “meh.” They were far from interested in returning to a bunch of old religious laws. Babylon was fine, thanks.

Isaiah was not winning any popularity stakes. To dare to speak of a God of justice and compassion at a time when cruising along with corruption was the flavour of the century was a Not Good Thing.  

Reading Isaiah reminds us of the importance of reading Isaiah. Seriously. Reminds us of the importance of hearing the voices of the prophets, ancient and contemporary, in the not altogether edifying times in which we live. The past is a different country. But dear God, we can learn from it.

Just over 40 years ago, I was no fan of Reagan and his ’nomics, no fan of military build-up, no fan of the growing and spuriously Christian Religious Right centred around figures like Jerry Falwell.

But nothing was preparing me for the deep-seated corruption and cronyism that is the hallmark of that once proud empire across the far north east side of the Pacific Ocean.

No matter what their personal beliefs might be, and probably are not, Trump and Putin have in common the absolute inability to read faith for meaning. Each has turned the glorification of something called “nation,” into their highest priority – or, more particularly, to use that concept as a means by which to enhance glorification and financial enrichment of their own selves.

Their false gods of Christian nationalism (Putinism and Trumpism alike) are tearing the world apart. In such a time the brave God-focus of Isaiah has something powerful to say to us.

Isaiah and the prophets incessantly called God’s people to dare to hope. To hope not in the strength of armies, but in the strength of the love and compassion and justice of God. Hosea put it succinctly when he spoke about the command to focus on “the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Amos, when he spoke of “Justice flowing like torrents of water, righteous actions like a stream that never dries up.”

Isaiah, in a time of national amnesia, dared to speak of hope and joy. But not any old hope and joy, but hope and joy based on the deep and intimate knowledge of God and God’s justice for the vulnerable.

In the passage just before ours Isaiah cried out to his complacent people, “let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”

Turn from corruption. Turn from calling good evil and evil good. Turn, as Isaiah would go on to say, to “bind up the broken hearted,” to feed the hungry, heal the wounded, rescue the refugee. Turn from fast-growing glitz of superficiality to the hard work of creating a place for the cedar and the kauri and the totara that grows slowly but with awe-inspiring structural and visual integrity.

Create  space for what Isaiah called “the word that goes forth from God’s mouth,” birthing light and life.

Isaiah was determined to put God at the centre of his people’s experience once again. Compassion, love justice. It is our task to find, to listen to work with those who are speaking Isaiah-esque words of compassion and love at a time when shallow glitz and cheap nationalism, “make x-nation or y-nation great again,” have become society’s mantra. It is our task to take the less glamorous way of the Cross, challenging corruption and proclaiming gospel in whatever small ways we can. 

Even in our small world.

Physiologus, perhaps

 

In the second century Physiologus the pelican was an icon of Christ

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
TRINITY SUNDAY (May 21^st) 1989

 

READINGS

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31
Psalm 8
Romans 5:1-5
John 16:12-15

 

I can do no more on Trinity Sunday than offer to you a few questions, a few thoughts, and a “so what.” The Trinity is perhaps the only Christian doctrine that is utterly distinctive. The doctrines of Creator, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the Incarnation: all of these we share with one or more other religions.

As any good Jehovah’s Witness will tell you, the word “trinity” is never mentioned in the Bible. Yet, as our reading from Romans demonstrates, the notion is clearly there. In embryonic form, certainly, but there. Paul is beginning to speak of a one in three, of a mysterious relationship between the Creator, the Son, and the Spirit who enflamed the disciples with her strength,

We are at peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ …

God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit

which has been given to us.

Yet if God is one, how can this be so?

Hear, oh Israel the Lord your God is One.

This is, in Jewish thought, the first of the ten Commandments. It is small wonder that Jewish people accuse us of worshipping three gods, and Muslims accuse us of claiming that God – as Spirit – slept with Mary.

We are speaking in the midst of a mystery, and speaking of a mystery. Now I see as through a dark glass. Are we speaking merely of three faces of God? God in a kind of a Fatherly mood, God in a kind of a Sonly mood, God in a kind of a Spiritly mood?

Not so.

Such a view was centuries ago dismissed as heresy, though most of us, if not all, would embrace it from time to time.

Why indeed have a Trinity?

The reason is simple. If we believe, with John and Paul and all the New Testament, that Jesus is the way in which God’s nature – God’s face on which no person could look – is revealed to the world, that Jesus must be of the same make up, the same substance as the Father.

I cannot reveal to you what it is like to be a cat because I am a human. And if, since the Ascension, it is the Spirit’s task to make known to us the nature of the Son and of the Father, then she too must be of the same makeup or substance or stuff as Father and Son. All must be one.

So for centuries, the ancient Church Fathers deliberated until they eventually came up with a formula that best maintained unity of God, as revealed in the Old Testament, while accommodating the Father, Son and Spirit language of the New Testament. We say it each time we say the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed. Shortly we shall say it again, in another form [the Creed of Athanasius was used].

Nevertheless, in the end it remains a mystery. Three is not normally one, and one is not normally three.

So why not throw it out? Why not join the Jehovah’s Witnesses who dismissed the Trinity, or the Jews or the Muslims or the Unitarians?

I believe there is one very good reason. It is the same reason as explored in my Lenten sermons. As I travelled with you through Lent, I sought to emphasise the miracle that the God of Christianity is not merely the God “out there,” the God who makes and then exits from the heavens and the earth. God, who created humanity, enters utterly into the grot and experience of human beings. God takes into his own being[1] the experience of pain, of loneliness, of death. God cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And God rises.

The fact is this: that each person’s experience of the triune God is the experience of the whole triune God. The only God we know is the God who self-reveals in Jesus Christ. We can only grasp so much, but Father, Son and Spirit, our Creator, our Redeemer, and our Comforter, are one.  God in trinity experience all of our human suffering, enter into our suffering, and offer from within us the hope that Easter, the Resurrection, is for us. For us, and for the starving, homeless, angry and bereaved people of the world. For us and for all who, like us, are flawed, tainted, imperfect.

For us.

So the Spirit now enters us to strengthen us in our knowledge of the Son who suffers for us, and to remind us of the Father who creates us.

That is the mystery. Unable to be made simple – like water, ice and steam – for God is not simple. Unable to be understood, only to be explored, believed, celebrated.

God, Father, Son, and Spirit.
God, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.
God, who suffers as we suffer.
God, who rejoices as we rejoice.

 

All shall one day be made clear, when we see no longer through a dark glass, but see God face to face.

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[1] In 1989 I was still wrestling with adequate forms for inclusive language, including of the Trinity. I would put this differently in 2026.

that they may be one

 

If I leave my desk too long

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION (May 5^th) 1989

 

READINGS

Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 14:23-29

 

“I have given them the glory you gave to me,
that they may be one as we are one”

What is it, this mysterious and elusive unity that Jesus prayed for before his glorification and agony on the Cross? Where is the answer to his prayer? Why are we not one?

One of my few basic understandings of things scientific is that there is a law that basically says, “if you don’t put energy into a system then it degenerates or decomposes or fragments or generally becomes a mess.”

It often seems to me to be true. If I leave a sausage in the fridge too long it becomes green and furry. If I leave an apple on my desk too long it does likewise. If I leave my desk too long without an input of energy it becomes like it is at present: an atrocious mess.

Indeed, since today is the beginning of Marriage and Family Week, one might say that the same is true of home life. Without an input of energy a marriage decomposes to a waste land, and family life degenerates to frustration, boredom, disillusionment.

It certainly appears to be true of the Church. Since our Lord made his plea for the unity of the Church it has continually splintered into fragments. The Jews and the Greeks fought bitterly within Christianity in early decades. The East and the West formalised their split in the eleventh century, but it went back centuries before that. The Reformers and the Catholics, the Anglicans and the Presbyterians, Methodists, and other Protestant groups – even today we see new division between Anglicans and so-called Continuing Anglicans. In the Pentecostal churches I witnessed bitter divisions between pre-millennialists, post-millennialists, mid-millennialists, even a-millennialists (I’ll tell you one day what they all are!).

“I have given them the glory you gave to me ,
that they may be one as we are one”

Yet it is true also that there have been signs of improvement. No longer does the Catholic school kid cross the road sneering “protty pig” as a Protestant kid walks to school. No longer does the sensible Protestant presume that all Catholics are condemned to eternal fire unless they convert.

The fruits of seventy years of ecumenical labour are easily visible. Liturgies in Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist churches are becoming increasingly similar. Our scriptures readings each Sunday around this block of East Ringwood are almost certainly the same. We are being spoken to by the same God and at last hearing the same voice.

“I have given them the glory you gave to me ,
that they may be one as we are one”

But there is so far to go. Inter-communion is as yet far off, though many of us long for the day when we may legitimately eat our Lord’s flesh and drink his blood regardless of whether the Eucharistic rite is Roman, Anglican, or Uniting. That day will come.

But we must continue to expend energy, to place our energy into the system we call the Church. I believe that now, at Ascensiontide, the message is abundantly clear. Our Lord has expended his energy in bringing us salvation. It is up to us to continue the expenditure of energy to bring about the unity for which he longs, and to bring about the proclamation of the gospel to which he has called us.

Next Sunday we shall celebrate the coming of the empowering Spirit. There is, in other words, an input of energy into the Church since the Ascension of Christ. But there is also a responsibility on our shoulders to use our energy in the service of the evangel, the gospel. Or the gospel, too, may become green and furry. Or cluttered and disorgan
ised.  Or introverted and self-serving.

“Father, I want those that you have given me
to be with me where I am
so that they may always see my glory.”

 

The Lord be with you.