good news why?

MEDITATION AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

GOOD FRIDAY (April 24^th) 1987

 

 

I was recently asked by a boy of about twelve why today is called Good Friday. One of his classmates immediately provided the right answer – that the name was a corruption of the older name, “God’s Friday.”

But this very correct answer given by the second boy does little justice to the theological significance of the first boy’s question. Why is the tragic death of a cult hero executed in Palestine nearly two thousand years ago, “good news”? Because as Christians we accept the belief that Jesus is God, why do we claim that the death of our God on a cross, at the hands of corrupt humans, is “good”?

The Archbishop,[1] In his first mission address to us, spoke of a sermon that he had heard preached by a Christian clergyman, and lamented that it could have been preached by the adherent of any of the world’s great religions – let alone one of the world’s monotheistic religions. Sadly, I believe that far too much that is spoken from the Christian pulpit has nothing to do with the Christian gospel. Says St. Paul, “I preach Christ, and him crucified.” That is the Christian gospel, and any preaching that does not grapple with the events we recall today fails to stand up to Paul’s criteria.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ …

God from God, light from light,

true God from true God …

for our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,

he suffered death and was buried.

 

At the very centre of our faith are two seemingly incompatible beliefs about Jesus. He was (and is) God, and he was (and is) human. He was (and is) as St. Anselm put it, the deus homo, the God-man. There is no more difficult tension to maintain in our faith. To emphasise Christ as God at the expense of his being human is heresy. To emphasise Christ as human to the exclusion of his being divine is heresy. Both heresies have surfaced again and again in the history of our faith. But why are they heresies, why does it matter?

If Christ were merely divine then he cannot die for us. His death is not the same as our death. His suffering is not the same as our suffering. The great modern atheists pronounced that God had died, and that human beings must therefore take responsibility for their existence in a universe without God. Were God to have died in such a way, merely, that is, to have drifted out of human experience, then there is for us no good news. God’s death, if it is as the atheists metaphorically proposed, leaves us alone and defenceless in an unfriendly universe, responsible to work out our own salvation. We have only to remember Auschwitz and Nagasaki to recall how horribly wrong human nature can be. If this nature is all we have to trust for our salvation then our present, to say nothing of our future, is bleak.

Those of us who faithfully watched Paradise Postponed[2] over the past several weeks may remember another powerful symbol of what came to be known in theological circles as the “death of God.” Dear old Simeon Simcox sincerely saw the Christian gospel in terms of the human drive for a better world, a world of equality between classes and races – and the sexes. Commendable though Simeon’s dreams and life were, he died knowing that his dream had failed, that God had not ushered in the age of equality he longed for. God had failed, and for Simeon’s son was effectively dead.

This though is not the good news death of God we come to recall today. Christ’s death is not good news if he is merely a divine hero, seeking to improve the world on our behalf. Were that the case, his death was in vain, for our world remains, as we can see only too clearly, enmeshed in sin.

Similarly, if Christ is merely human, we have no good news by which to make this Friday “good.” We may greatly admire in our century Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, or even John Lennon,[3] all who in their own ways sought to transform this world into a better place. Shocked as we might be by each of their tragic and unnecessary deaths, their lives have not ultimately changed society. Racism still survives, despite Martin Luther King’s great dream; the social evils Kennedy sought to eradicate continue, the colonial exploitation against which Ghandi spoke reemerges in new forms, the utopia of which Lennon sang to his generation is still as far away as ever.

But Jesus is the God-man. In his death both God and humanity are somehow mysteriously entwined, and humanity is provided with an answer to the problems of this world and of this life.

An answer? Does the death of Jesus provide an answer to the problem of human suffering? If God exists, we will constantly be asked, why is there suffering in the world? I believe our faith does have an answer to that question, but today we have a more urgent question still to answer: does so-called Good Friday provide meaning to life in the face of Nagasaki and Auschwitz, in the face of cancer, Aids, the road toll?

If Christ is God, then in the events of Thursday night and Good Friday suffering becomes an integral part of the experience of the godhead. God, as revealed to his people in the Old Testament, was never unmoved by suffering, but had never himself physically suffered. Emotionally, as the parent of a miscreant nation, but never physically. He is never the unmoved “God Out There” of the philosophers, but neither is he incarnate amongst his people, sharing physically in their plight. But in the incarnation, in becoming flesh of God in Christ, a new dimension is added to the experience of God, and to the relationship of God to humanity.

For the nails that pierce Christ’s hands are piercing God’s hands. The whips that scourge Christ’s back scourge God’s back. The vinegar offered to Christ is offered to God. The excruciating loneliness and sense of utter rejection experienced by Christ on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, is likewise the experience of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, as they in perfect union experience utter separation from God the Son. For the communication between. Father, Son, and Spirit is such that the pain of one is the pain of three, the joy of one is the joy of three, God is one in three.

Human experience then, is absorbed into the experience of God. God becomes present not only on Golgotha, but in all experience of human suffering: in Auschwitz, Nagasaki, in AIDS, cancer, starvation.

Where is God when it hurts? If God is merely “out there,” distant, unmoved, the God of the philosophers, then God offers no solution to pain. If God is merely the unmoved mover, then he is not the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ, not the God who makes this Friday Good Friday. Such a distant God is an impostor, and I for one want nothing to do with him. Were the God of Christianity this distant God I would rejoin the atheists, for even well intended humans provide more hope for the world than an unmoved, distant God.

But it is the Christian belief that God was in Christ. That the man on the cross in pain, hanging between two hardened criminals, is God on the Cross. The reason why we believe this is to be celebrated on Sunday.

To that day we look forward with longing. But let us first remember that the death and suffering that we shall all experience, you and I, is also part of the experience of the God who we have come to love and serve.

And therein lies the good news that makes this otherwise very black Friday Good Friday.

Now to him who suffered and died, and who was buried, who conquered, who was, is, and ever shall be God, we all honour and glory now and forever. Amen.

---

[1] David John Penman (1936-1989) was Archbishop of Melbourne from 1984-1989.  

[2] Based on a novel by John Mortimer, Paradise Postponed aired on BBCTV and the ABC over 11 episodes in 1985.

[3] I admit I was not a fan of John Lennon, but the elder daughter of my training vicar was!

washing feet, 1987

 

On this night when he freely gives himself to death

MEDITATION AT St. JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

MAUNDY THURSDAY (April 23^rd) 1987

 

 

Maundy Thursday; the time at which, since the fourth century, Christians have gathered to remember our Lord’s giving to his people the sacrament of the Holy Communion meal.

Maundy Thursday; since the eighth century the time at which those excommunicated from the church, having completed suitable penance, were admitted once more into the fold of believers.

Maundy Thursday; since perhaps the tenth century the day associated with Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet, an event commemorated in churches throughout the world by foot washing liturgies.

Maundy Thursday; the day mysteriously so named not, as some might believe, to add to the obscurity of our religion in the eyes of those beyond the pews. No:  named from the Latin word “mandatum,” commandment. it is on this day, according to St. John, that Jesus gave to his disciples the awe-inspiring commandment, “love one another, as I have loved you.”

Maundy Thursday, the day which you and I have come after journeying together through Lent. A day of communion, a day of forgiveness, a day of humility, and above all a day of love. And now, on this day we gather together with Jesus and his twelve disciples in the upper room, to share what Jesus – and Judas – knew would be the last meal of the disciples together.

Our Lord is full of the knowledge of his imminent betrayal, full of the knowledge of the betrayer’s presence in our midst. After washing our feet he will say to us, “someone who shares my table rebels against me.” It is no use us, like the disciples, turning to one another and asking, “is it I?”

For the answer is, “Yes.” It is Judas Iscariot who walks out of the upper room into the darkness tonight, but he was only the first to desert the ranks of Jesus on this night. Even dear Peter, of whose bravado we have heard read yet again tonight, is soon to leave Jesus in the trial, and walk out into the dead of night, walk away to the resounding cry of a cock crowing.

None of us stay with Jesus tonight, all of us choose to embrace not the light which has come into the world, but the darkness that is being away from, unfaithful to, that Christ-light. There will be much darkness between now and Easter morn. The darkness of the Garden of Gethsemane in which Jesus struggles alone in prayer, the darkness of the betrayal, the darkness of the long trial, the darkness that is to cover the earth at the time of the crucifixion. As Judas walks out from the upper room, John tells us, it was night.

We cannot look around us to wonder who it is that will desert the ranks of the one who has washed our feet tonight. Judas may betray him, but Judas merely embraces the extremes of darkness, the absolute act of cynicism. We all must admit to the darkness that is within us, tonight, the darknesses in our deepest recesses that are, ultimately, no more or less   than the absence of Christ-light in those parts of our soul that we keep from him.

Jesus knows only too well our darkness, our sin, and loves us yet, even as we desert him in the night. It is for this reason that he washes our feet, and not we his. We must let him, our servant, our deacon, our saviour, wash ours, lest we slip into the mistaken belief that he owes us any favours. We cannot earn re-admission to the light which is Christ, but can only accept the awe-inspiring mystery that he invites us to return to him. Despite our desertion of him in the night, the darkness that Judas enters tonight is not his alone but yours and mine.

We are not singing tonight the hymn, “ Ah, Holy Jesus,” but well we might.

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,

That man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?

By foes derided, by thine own rejected,

Oh most afflicted.

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?

Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee;

’twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee:

I crucified thee.

 

Paul tells us that he received the tradition that on this night on which we have come together, Jesus took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples saying, “This is my body.” We are also told that after supper Jesus took the cup, and gave it to his disciples saying, “This is my blood of the new covenant.”

Most important of all, we are commanded by Jesus always to do likewise, as a way of remembering the events of this night on which we have betrayed our Lord, as a way of recalling to memory the events that are to take place tonight and tomorrow, as a way of proclaiming to the world the enormous events of these next three days.

Every time we receive the elements, the body and the blood of Christ, we are to remember our unworthiness, to recall that we and all people have no right to embrace the light which is Christ, and that it is rather our universal human nature to embrace darkness, as we and all humanity do on this night of Jesus’ betrayal.

On Good Friday and Easter Sunday we will talk more of the death to which we betray our Lord, the death which we proclaim each time we joined together in Holy Communion. Tonight, though, we should remember the darkness: the night into which we go after our Lord has washed our feet. We shall remember the darkness, and remember that it is not only the darkness of Judas, but also the darkness of all the followers of Jesus, you and me included. It is my darkness and your darkness.

But so too it is your feet and my feet that Jesus washes. As I went into retreat a few days before my ordination I received and took with me the words of a dear friend: “Allow Christ to be your servant in the silence.” So too we must allow Christ to be our servant in the darkness of this night, and in the private darkness of our own soul. And the further we go on in Christ the better we shall know that the darkness of this night is our darkness.

Let us remember this night not only for the darkness but also for the words that Jesus speaks to us in the face of that darkness, the words for which this day has come to be named: “love one another, as I have loved you.”  And so, together remembering that love, let us go on to eat his body and drink his blood in the rite which he commanded us, so that we might proclaim to the world that for all we are in darkness, the light of Christ has come into our midst.

 

 

[In digging out this 1987 sermon I found a much longer version. There was much in it that I now find (even more) excruciating (in 2025) and I should remain very thankful that, I suspect, my training vicar Ken Hewlett put a red pen through two or three paragraphs of somewhat self-indulgent wallowing dressed up as meditation. Thanks, Ken …  I had the best training vicar imaginable!]

 

descending the mountain

 

 

MS Herald of Free Enterprise 

photo by Franz Golhen 
and made available as Public Domain.
Wikipedia. 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT  (March 15^th) 1987

 

READINGS

 

Genesis 12:1-4

Psalm 33:4-5, 18-19, 20, 22

Timothy 1:8-10

Matthew 17:1-9

  

In last week’s Gospel reading we
heard of an occasion on which Jesus drew aside from the demands of daily life, and was led by the Spirit into a desert experience, an experience of struggle with temptation. Now we find him once more withdrawing from the crowds. This time for a very different sort of experience.

In today’s Gospel reading, we hear of Jesus taking aside three of his closest disciples and with them ascending a mountain. The experience that befalls the four is one of those pinnacle experiences of life that fortunately occur rarely – too many experiences of the mountain type would prove too demanding for the human soul to manage. The experience that takes place is the experience that we have come to know as the Transfiguration.

Exactly what took place on the mountain it is hard to tell, for the account is rich in symbolism and light on detail, but it would seem that the disciples experienced a vivid vision. Three of the four gospel writers saw fit to include it in their account, suggesting it was felt to be of great significance for the followers of Jesus as they sought to live out their new found faith. Nothing has changed; the passage has much from which we can learn.

Most of us have heard numerous sermons preached on this passage, and in many ways I hope we will hear many more. The experience on the mountain is a moving experience in the life of our Lord, and of those of his disciples who were with him. As is so often the case, the disciples misinterpret the events that befall them. That the gospel writers learned of the disciples’ errors is testimony to the humility of those first followers of Jesus.

The scene on the mountain is a mystical scene of great beauty, often depicted in stained glass windows, and particularly in the European art of the Renaissance. But what does it mean for us?

What, as we journey together through the season of Lent, are we to learn from these events? As we prepare for our Lord’s death and the glorious events of Easter, what does this Transfiguration mean for us?

In answer to this I wish to take as my text one verse from our gospel passage. In verse 9, the final verse, we read, “as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, ‘tell no one the vision, until the Son of Man is raised from the dead’.”

The writer emphasises two points. The first is the obvious point that they do all return from the mountain experience. The second is that the meaning of the mystical experience they share on the mountain cannot be explained except in the light of our Lord’s death and resurrection.

So let us first consider the question, “why did Jesus command his friends to silence?” What is it about this mountain experience that is inexplicable except in the light of the events of Easter?

All three accounts in the gospels of the transfiguration scene tell us clearly of the disciples’ misunderstanding of the events, and of their awe, even fear. We should hardly be surprised. The prophet Malachi, who was writing five centuries before these events took place, warned the people of Israel to expect the return of Elijah, the ancient prophet, as a sign of the coming of the Day of the Lord. It was a vision a good Jew of our Lord’s lifetime would have longed for, as the end of the trials of the people of God, the beginning of the Kingdom of Heaven. It was a popular Jewish belief that Elijah had never physically died, but had been assumed bodily into the presence of God.

Similarly, some had begun to teach that Moses had likewise not died, and like Elijah had been taken bodily to the presence of God. Imagine, then, the disciples’ awe and fear when, on a mountain they were confronted by the vision for which their people had longed for so long.

Was this really to herald the coming Kingdom? The end of Roman rule? The reinstatement of the free State of Israel? All these interpretations may have flashed through the disciples’ minds. Whatever interpretation they took, this vision represented for the disciples a sign of the end of life as they knew it.

Their response is most sensible. They ask Jesus whether they should pitch a tent, provide a place for their master to dwell with the two ancient figures. They are recognising the enormity of the situation, and saying to Jesus, “Look, look, the wonderful day has come. Let us take this moment, the moment of the salvation of Israel, and treat it with the respect it deserves.”

Incidentally, it is worth noting that both Mark and Matthew describe this event as happening “after six days,” but failed to give a point of reference. The timing should remind us of the time of Creation. It is after the sixth day of Creation that God rests and pronounces, for the final and definitive time, “it is very good.” Are the authors trying to tell us here that the Transfiguration experiences are the eve of a New Creation, the new Kingdom of God? Luke seems to use a different phrase that may well suggest the same thing, telling us that the event took place after eight days, but again without a reference point.

So in many ways the three disciples were right. At the time of the transfiguration a new dawn is breaking. But it is a dawn more radically new than even the disciples expected. Only Jesus is fully aware of what the vision means, and only he knows the cost at which the new era must be bought.

So he tells his disciples that they must not attempt to restrict the scope of the vision they have seen, must not limit it to the scope that they as Jews have been brought up to long for and pray for. Matthew is writing his gospel for Jews who have converted to the new Christian faith. To those new converts the message of the Transfiguration would be only too apparent. The new dawn is about to break not only for the Old Testament people of God, but for the whole of creation. It is Matthew who concludes his gospel with the command to “go and make disciples of every nation.”

The “no” that Jesus gives in reply to his disciples is because the new era he is ushering in is far more radical than they or anyone else could have realized. It is an era that extends salvation to the Gentiles. The death and resurrection of our Lord, which is the price that the new era is to cost, is not to be the property of a chosen few, of  the Jews, but of all the world.

So Jesus tells the disciples not to build a tent. Instead they are to wait until the meaning of the vision they have witnessed becomes clear. Only when the Easter event has taken place will they or the world know the meaning, the enormity of the meaning of the vision they have witnessed.

And so to my final point. The disciples come down from the mountain. Jesus, if he is to be saviour of the world, cannot remain in a state of glory on the mountain. He must instead come down, and set his face towards his own death, towards the intense loneliness of the cross, towards seeming defeat, before the magnificent meaning of his life can become apparent.

It is that journey down from the transfiguration towards Jerusalem that we as a parish are sharing as we travel together through Lent. If we are to follow our Lord we must in some small way travel with him through his decision to enter Jerusalem, through Gethsemane, and on to the Cross. That is why we observe Lent, and why Christians have done so for seventeen hundred years. To understand the victory of the Cross by which we are saved we must first understand something of the suffering.

That I believe is the guts of this passage. Christ can be no saviour if we leave him in glory on the mountain. As we approach our parish mission we must be very clear that this is not the Christ we are to proclaim it to the world. There can be no salvation for us and for our neighbour if we avoid the tragedy, or as Paul puts it, the scandal of the Cross.

There is for our world no hope if we believe only in a Messiah who remains in a state of glory on the Mountain of Transfiguration. Instead, we rejoice because he comes down, descends to the Cross and to Hell, and only then, on Easter morning, rises in the fullness of his glory. It is so we can make no mistake about that that Jesus commands his disciples to silence and descends the mountain.

I thank God that he does, for otherwise we have nothing to say to those people tragically killed in the English Channel shipping disaster, or to their families.[1] Without the scandal of the Cross we have nothing to say to those who suffer tragic illnesses, or to their families and loved ones. For we would be speaking only of a saviour who knows glory, not suffering. We would have nothing to say to the children of Soweto, or to the victims of the Gulf War, or Beirut, or Afghanistan, or countless other tragedies.

But our Lord comes down from the mountain. He comes down and turns towards Jerusalem, towards the events of Easter. In doing so he brings the experience of suffering into the very heart of God, and simultaneously brings God’s victory into the very midst of suffering. So it is that as we journey together through Lent we can rejoice in the knowledge that not only Good Friday but the glorious event of Easter lie ahead.

So, to the Son who comes down from the mountain and turn towards Jerusalem, that we might all be saved, all be transfigured, be all blessing and honour, glory and power now and forever.

---

[1] The MS Herald of Free Enterprise capsized and sank at Zeebrugge on March 6^th, 1987, six days before this sermon was written. 193 passengers and crew lost their lives.

 

Servants of God (january 1987)

 

a Guatemalan stole, 
symbol of service from a suffering land 

SERMON PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL OF THE ALFRED HOSPITAL, MELBOURNE

SUNDAY 11^th JANUARY 1987

 

“Servant of God”; this is the name given to the person spoken of by the prophet Isaiah in a series of hymns in the book of the prophet, or prophets, Isaiah. We don't know who Isaiah was speaking of when he composed the Servant Songs, but from the time of our Lord followers of Jesus, and probably Jesus himself, have taken the words as referring to him, to Jesus, the Christ of God.

The Servant Songs, of which this is the first of four, are for me among the most beautiful passages in the entire Bible, and among the most beautiful poetry known to me. But they're more than pleasant entertainment; because they are applied to our Lord from the very beginnings of Christianity they are a stirring insight into who he was called to be, and who I, as a follower of Jesus together with you, are called to be in his name.

From the shortest of the songs we learn most of what is to be explored in the other three, longer songs. We learn that the Servant is upheld by God, that he is a source of delight to God, who is the speaker. We learn of his gentleness, yet it seems to me that above all we learn of his commitment to a message of justice and of hope.

Momentarily I am reminded of one servant of God very noticeable in Victoria at the moment. Desmond Tutu, like Christ, is a man unflinching in his commitment to justice and hope for all people, and at the same time is a man of great gentleness, who, for as long as there is any alternative, will strive to ensure that apartheid is destroyed without a bloody revolution. No witch doctor, but a servant of Christ, striving in faithfulness to bring forth justice out of oppression and state-endorsed violence.

But the Servants of God have always been called “witch doctors,” or called by countless other derogatory names. Martin Luther King had his house bombed years before he was assassinated. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged by Hitler. Saint Thomas a’Becket was assassinated for his commitment to justice, to name just a few. Such is the way of the Servants of God.

And you and I too are called like Tutu, like King, Bonhoeffer and Saint Thomas, to be Servants of God, and to pronounce messages of justice and hope. Sometimes such a call may involve a commitment to political struggle for justice. At other times we may be called to sit with those who suffer in the face of accident, illness, death, and there by our presence speak a word of hope in the face of evil. And at other times we must let others come to us, in the name of Christ, the Servant of God, and bring to us hope, comfort, or freedom.

The other week a woman I was visiting here cried out to me, “Am I mad? People tell me I look well, but I know I'm not well. Am I mad?” In her pain she wanted to hear a clear word of truth; her oppression was the pain of the illness and the added pain of those around her avoiding what she knew to be the truth.

“No,” I told her, “You’re not mad. And yes, you are ill.”

 “I think so too,” she replied.

She died that night, and while I wished I had done more for her, I breathed a prayer of thanks that I had momentarily, for her, been a servant of God, bringing the sad truth that no one was prepared to let her know.

We can be servants of God in many ways, but it is to that that we as Christians are called.

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 when he was 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.