imprenetrable darkness: meet inextinguishable light

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St. Martin’s, Duntroon

FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT (March 19^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

1 Samuel 16: 1b, 6-7, 10-13a

Psalm 95

Ephesians   5: 8-14

John 9: 1, 6-9, 13-17, 34-38

 

According to my flash new watch, which came I might add as a freebie, I am afraid of the dark. Now in my day – I’m not sure when that was or maybe will be – but in my day a watch was designed to tell us the time. The time appears on my watch to be a quite minor and unimportant function. However it does tell me my pulse rate, and I know that it is completely wrong when it attempts to tell me that my pulse rate soars disturbingly on the long dark section, about 17 minutes, of my pre-dawn morning walk. It tries to tell me that during that 17 minute section my predawn pulse reaches the same heights as it does on some of the steeper sections of my walk. The 12% gradients in fact, though I have to admit that I made that bit up because working out a gradient is way beyond my pay scale mathematically speaking. But the bit about the pulse is absolute truth, er, more or less.

Now I know that this new watch is spouting total nonsense, because I’m a big tough bloke, and a big tough bloke does not harbour secret fears. So of course my watch is wrong when on the flat bits of my walk it tells me that for 17 minutes my pulse, my pulse which normally rests around the mid-80s as I saunter along in the daylight, soars to the levels that it reaches on a reasonably steep hill, and hovers taunting me from the low one hundreds. I think the reality is that my watch knows that I am really very brave but wanted to provide me with a sermon illustration about humanity’s instinctive relationship with the darkness, formed back in the times when we were dwelling in forests and caves surrounded by tigers and bears. It, the watch that is, just wanted to remind me of those times, and of course I wasn’t scared at all because I’m tough and brave and modern.

Though I must admit I remember with some distress the dark, creaky dormitories and rattling sash windows of my preteens prep boarding school. I’m told one or two of my friends found those a little creepy. Not me of course. Although I am glad that I didn't have an irritating watch that measured my pulse and told me lies.

There is as some of you will know a prayer in our prayer book, in the late evening compline service, that draws a link between the darkness of the coming night and the darkness of the world and indeed of our own lives. Perhaps I’d be fibbing if I did not confess to a few darkness fears, which of course I don’t experience on my predawn walks as the shadows dance and loom and leer and I hear footfalls when no one follows me. 

But I’ll confess to some more serious fears nurtured by the images that I often mention, beamed into us on our internet news feeds and old fashioned television news services. Fears of global warming, of toxic sludge, of exterminated species, and of what French GP cum novelist Louis Ferdinand Céline called, somewhat poetically, “the insidious cancer cell even now crawling through the pathways of our body.” Except he used less polite terms.

For the mediaeval monks night was preparation for death, and each dawn was a celebration of resurrection. Earlier still the church fathers and mothers found in the rites of Lent a minidrama, an enactment of the slow human journey from birth to death to rebirth and resurrection. They knew that lifelong journey towards the light to be a journey towards the inextinguishable light of resurrection. They saw that resurrection light, the light that according to the author of the biblical book that we call Revelation, that resurrection light that shines on the coming City of God with such penetrating clarity that that city has no need of any other light. They saw that resurrection light pre-enacted in the experience of the blind man who encountered Jesus as he waited, sightless, by the side of the road. They saw in the anointing of that man by Jesus, anointing with dirt and saliva. They saw in that scene both an echo of God’s own creation of human beings from the dust of the earth and an echo of the rites of anointing at baptism that marked our entrance into the coming eternal New Heavens and Earth.

And so this passage came to be read at the more or less midpoint of Lent, reminding us and those who were preparing for baptism that the light of Christ penetrates and overcomes all darkness of human experience just as John, the author of the Fourth Gospel foreshadowed in his opening 18 verses.

The message for us is that this man is brought from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, that same journey on which we are called by the patient voice of God. The invitation that to us is to trust God in the darkness of an uncertain world around us, the uncertainties of our own life and the life of our communities, and to surrender our fears and any other darknesses of our life, to the searing and inextinguishable light of the risen Christ, the Lamb who is the light of the world.

AMEN.

fesity bloody women!

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 5^th) 2023

 

 READINGS:

 

           

Exodus 17: 1-7

Psalm 95

Romans 5: 1-5, 11

John 4: 5-42

 

 

Firstly let it be said that I think it is ambitious at the best of times to expect listeners to get their heads around John’s tightly packed, tightly constructed biblical passages. Each scene is a deep lesson in faith and in life, and some of the longer scenes, like that of our gospel reading today, could sustain several weeks’ unpacking in a university lecture format. I have six minutes. Or so. So for a start let’s park the other readings. They too are worthy of deep digging, but not today.

What is John telling us? To use the interpretive keys favoured by the diocese at the moment, what is weird, what is wonderful, what is a third W that I can’t recall but I’ll call it what is what? 

Or maybe just what is going on, what is Jesus even doing?  John flags this clearly: “Jews do not share things in common with a Samaritan.” No contact, see? Nada. 

This is a pretty fearsome woman – we’ll come back to that in a moment – and she knows that by customary law this is pretty much her well. A self-respecting Jewish man would back off. Not ask for a drink from her billy can out of her territorial well. Certainly a holy man, who may or may not be claiming to be some sort of messiah. Actually a decent self-respecting Messiah should get out of here 

… or she should, maybe? Something has to give. 

But she’s nothing if not stubborn. “Mate,” she would say, if she were Australian; “Bro,” perhaps, if  kiwi. Though that’s a bit more of a bloke thing. “Get your own water. From your own well.”

Irresistible force: meet unstoppable object. In moments Jesus is treating her with the deepest respect. She is worthy of theological argument. They engage, parry, seemingly enjoy. As we think of Afghan women being denied an education, or American women being denied life choices around their own bodies, we find Jesus inviting this woman to present a case on equal terms. And she does.

I suggested she is pretty fearsome. There’s a funny thing, here. Alone, I think, amongst the co-conversationalists of Jesus, this woman hears the claim “I am he.” I am God. 

It’s a reverberating moment though complacency makes us miss it. When this to us nameless woman starts to refer to the expected Messiah he cuts across her dialogue with unstoppable words: “I am he.” And, more than that, in echoing the great self-referencing of the God of the Hebrews, he effectively says, in Yoda terms, “God I am … I am God.” 

There are according to scholars, seven “I am” sayings in John’s gospel account, whereby Jesus of Nazareth claims to be an aspect of God. Bread of Life, Light of the World, Resurrection and Life, and so on. Yet here, in a risqué conversation, alone with, effectively, an enemy woman, he makes the first and forgotten “I Am” claim: “I am Messiah.”

Alone with a stroppy woman. No wonder Christianity majored in silencing women for the best part of twenty-one centuries. We silenced this nameless woman by portraying her as a loose woman, a whore, and a whole heap of other derogatory allusions. Forget that: she is a strong woman, an intellectual, and absolutely nowhere is it suggested she is somehow morally vapid. Married many times in a society where a woman was property like a cattle dog or a used car, this woman has been handed from husband to husband as, basically, breeding stock. And amidst all that she has nurtured a fierce intellect, and dares to challenge on equal grounds a male stranger at a well.

I have a fantasy. We know from the end of Mark that it was women who first dared to tell out the terrifying good news that the tomb was empty, the clutch of death mysteriously defeated. I don’t even know what that means. They did. We know they had stayed with Jesus when the men had fled. Mary, mother of Jesus, a Mary or two more, the woman with the sensuous hair, perhaps that wonderful feisty Syrophoenician woman who dared to argue with Jesus about the crumbs of salvation – perhaps this woman too – were those who gathered silently at the tomb, then fled, terrified, then overjoyed at the resurrection news. And blurted it out against all odds.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think women are perfect. Nor do I think this woman is more important than the Christ. Sorry. But women – most of you are women in case we hadn’t noticed – are no more imperfect than men, and on this day a woman dares to argue with God, as Abram once had, and prevails. 

Weird, wonderful – and the what? The what is a what are we going to do about following in her footsteps, telling out the mysteries of the God who enters every human soul and redeems us with irresistible – (in a good way) – irresistible love?

 

psychedelic breezes?

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU, SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT (March 5th) 2023

READINGS:

Genesis 12: 1-4a

Psalm 121

Romans 4: 1-5, 13-17

Matthew 17: 1-9

The Transfiguration is one of those surreal moments in which we, and for that matter the gospel writers, really cannot conceive or convey what is going on. I have been known to refer to them as “sacred mushroom moments” but of course I wouldn't do that here!

That said I admit that I am a lover of the psychedelic 60s. There is much that is beyond telling, and that era went down its own majestic rabbit holes of exploring the wildness of the human mind. Turn on, tune in, drop out, in Timothy Leary’s famous mantra of that decade, is a mantra that it is undoubtedly a good thing I came along too late to learn. I was too young to indulge in the psychedelic breezes that were blowing then. Yet in all seriousness they were the desperate attempts by a counterculture to fine meaning, love, joy, in life where society seemed to offer none. 

Perhaps I digress. I am not here or anywhere advocating psychedelic or hallucinogenic substances. I am saying however that there is much that the words of human conversation cannot convey, and the psychedelic poets of the 60s and the inspired writers of sacred scripture found themselves trapped in the same morass as they tried to find ways to express the inexpressible.

For this Transfiguration scene, common to Luke, Mark, and Matthew in their telling of the Jesus story, is telling us something, but it is something beyond words. It is prefiguring that other beyond-words sequence of scenes that began with the event no human eye could witness, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that first inexplicable Easter morning. I don’t know what happened on that Day, or, rather, I don’t know how it happened. But I know the frightened few became the bearers of resurrection hope, hope, justice, righteousness and life-laying-down-love from the moment that they learned that the man of Nazareth had shattered the cords of death.

And this was all prefigured, in its lesser way, in our surreal scene of Transfiguration. But why? Why are we being told about Peter, James and John and their encounter that was beyond words, their encounter with indescribable holiness on a mountain top, shortly before the terrible suffering and execution of their friend and leader?

I suspect if there is to be one central takeaway from this surreal scene it is simply that Peter, James and John, and of course Jesus, came down from their mountaintop experience. They came down with a new instruction which they heard, as they understood, directly in the voice of God. “Listen.” 

Soon they were to encounter that greater moment, the resurrection, which takes place after those protracted scenes in which we see revealed the extraordinary pains that divine love undergoes to bring about hope for humanity. With the suffering and death of God behind him, Jesus is prepared to add to that message “listen,” to add to that message the new command, “go, tell.”

It is worth noting what the disciples were not permitted to do at the time of the Transfiguration. They were not permitted to remain fossilised, memorialising nostalgically some moments in their past, like burnt out rock stars or sports men or women recalling their long-gone finest hour. They are told to listen, and later, after seeing the extremes of God’s love they are told to proclaim. To proclaim that love even to the ends of the earth and the end of time.

The sequence is critical. Listen. Pause, reflect, listen again if you like, for that is what Lent gives us a chance to do. And only then are we sufficiently renewed in faith to proclaim hope to the world.

turn, turn, turn

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT (February 26^th) 2023

Take a u-turn, bro

 

 READINGS:

 

Genesis 2: 15-17, 3: 1-7

Psalm 32

Romans 5: 12-19

Matthew 4: 1-11

 

Firstly, let’s get over talking reptiles and tall mountains from which human beings can see the entire face of a globe. That's got to be a pretty tall mountain, and it never has, never will, never could exist. I failed physics at school, but even I can get that.

One of the greatest tragedies to befall Christianity, in some ways more devastating than the great waves of persecution that Christianity has experienced ever since the first Easter, has been the invention of fundamentalism. Literalist, or fundamentalist reading of the scriptures of Christianity was a late 19th century invention that was set in concrete in the first two decades of the 20th century. It has done irreparable damage.

If I had a job as the devil for a day, I would invent fundamentalism. It strips our texts of meaning, pushes Christian faith beyond the boundaries of intelligence in a bad way, and hamstrings the gospel.

I add the rider “in a bad way” because we must also admit that there are aspects of our faith that are beyond human intelligence. That in fact is not saying an awful lot. There are aspects of science that are beyond human intelligence even today. I suspect there always will be, I suspect there always must be, otherwise human beings will have committed the final unforgivable sin of turning themselves into gods.

I am no scientist. I not only failed physics, but I only scraped through general science at school certificate level. But when I hear on the news that scientists have discovered that the sources of energy expanding the universe since The Big Bang are moving more rapidly than scientists think they should, then I respond with a resounding “meh.” There is so much we do not, cannot know or understand. I can live with that.

The founders of fundamentalism were terrified that scientific exploration and, alongside it, intelligent interpretation of texts would destroy belief in such fundamental doctrines as the resurrection. I have news for them. Resurrection, and most especially the unique moment of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from a tomb in the Roman province of Palestine, is a bit like the speed of the universe, or for that matter the intricacy of the human brain or a single cell: it is a matter beyond our human limitation.

I can live with that, too.

So, terrified as they were by intelligent critical reading, a small group of American Protestants invented fundamentalism and in doing so did immeasurable damage to the credibility of Jewish and Christian and perhaps other faiths.

So instead of talking snakes, let’s think about wet paint. Am I the only human being who has touched the paint to see whether the sign is telling the truth? Or the infamous “keep off the grass” signs that are so much a part of British city life. Am I the only person who has resented, if not rebelled against a sign that may in fact be there for good reason?

Forget the snake, but recall what the story tells us. Most of us have a sneaking capacity to do the wrong thing, if only occasionally.

Forget the pinnacle of the temple, or the Very High Mountain, too. As we read through the holy texts we can learn what to read as symbolic, what to read as history – though with the proviso that history was very different in the ancient world to what history is today. Geography, genealogy … we need to learn to dialogue with one another and with the great and credible scholars, too. We need to interact with the pages of those who interpret ancient texts, with a lifetime of their scholarly effort.

We might for example notice that the Satan who interacts with Jesus in our quite surreal scene today is constantly telling him to play act, to turn the relationship with the author of creation into a self-serving gimmick. We don't need to look far to find distorters of Christianity who do just that today, filling the airwaves and the plush auditoriums of so-called churches with entertainment and false hope.

What then is our task? Few of us will spend a lifetime studying 1000, 2000, 3000 year old texts in ancient languages. As we journey through the texts we will find that they challenge us to check the authenticity of our own lives. We will, surprise, surprise, fall short of perfection, but are we striving to put and keep our lives in order? What in my life is a sham? What in my life is shameful? What in my life is opulence or greed, what in my life damages or destroys the lives of others?

And slowly with the help of the God who comes to us in the humble Carpenter of Nazareth, the one we call Lord in our prayers and hymns, slowly with his help we are called, stumblingly, imperfectly, to, as the Ash Wednesday service puts it, “turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.”

 

Amen.

this is your moment

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Martin’s, Duntroon

SEVENTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (February 19^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Leviticus 19: 1-2, 9-18

Psalm 119: 33-40

1 Corinthians 3: 10-11, 16-239

Matthew 5: 38-48

 

 

It fascinates and saddens me that we followers of Jesus, the radical teacher of grace, have spent so long making the doors of faith difficult to open. Jesus the compassionate and unjudgmental judge, who welcomed the outsider, is the wone Christians claim to follow. Yet the Christian community has spent so many centuries setting up new barriers, replicating those that Jesus, and his very different followers Matthew and Paul, each in their own way spent an adult lifetime trying to pull down. Like the scribes and the pharisees we have spent so much time erecting not the porous boundaries of Jesus’ mission, but obscene walls, rules and regulations that make it so difficult for the lost and lonely to find comfort.

And of course I generalize. But our track record isn’t brilliant.

If you heard my Gospel Conversations this past week you will have heard that message loud and clear: too often we are a community of exclusion, not embrace. You would have hear Peg Riley’s tears, as she alluded to occasions in her life when the Christian communities have sought to exclude her. You would have heard Damon Plimmer’s measured reflection emphasising that the Christ who said we are salt, are a “good enough people” as I put it last week, without trying to find airs and graces to better ourselves, and worse to better those who might put a toe in our doors.  You would have heard Anne van Gend rejoice in the hand of God acknowledge the hand of God in our often clumsy attempts , turning darkness into light in the lives of those we cross paths with in our daily rhythms and routines, even when we don’t feel we’ve done very well.

As we look at our struggling church and churches it is only natural to wonder where we lost our people, where we went, arguably, wrong and lost touch with society. Yet we as individuals and collectively have done our best to put a decent foot forward; imperfect though we are, says Damon Plimmer, we are God’s imperfect people.

No doubt at this stage in the life of our parish we are all terribly, painfully aware of the frailty of our existence. Where is God in this? This struggle, apparently a losing one, to keep our metaphorical doors open (because our literal doors closed years ago). Where is God when we’re tired?

Of course over the years we’ve made errors. We have through history turned people away sometimes violently. In more recent decades we have still, while not emulating the Spanish Inquisition, nevertheless turned people away for not being Anglican enough, clean enough, straight enough, musical enough, in one dreadful case that I will never forget, pakeha enough. Clergy in particular have paraded their biases and pretensions. Don't get me going on that!

Yet paradoxically there is a deeper sense in which God does say to you “well done good and faithful servant.” Against the odds in a post-Christian world you have dragged yourself out Sunday by Sunday, maybe other days too. You have cleaned, welcomed, sung, played, even prayed! Believe me, I have not been a particularly good at loving my enemies – and in my small and unimportant way I seem to make a few.

Yet the paradoxical message that we have missed so badly over the centuries is simple. You and I are who God has put here, on this day, in this lifetime, for God’s unseen purpose. Mistakes, dear God, yes. But again and again God says, “Come on, let us start again, let us try again.” And God says to us also, “you do not see whose lives you have touched, who's darknesses have been turned into a lighter place through your being there.

I do not know your moments, and you do not know mine. I’m not even sure if I know mine or you know yours. But I know, looking back, that there have been moments when my life has been touched by the ridiculous serendipity of God, and I believe that we too may have been instruments in touching the lives of others. The irony in today’s readings is that we pretty much fall short of the demands of them all. But let’s put the guilt away. In all our failings, and there will be a few, there is a deeper text … you are who God has chosen for this journey and this moment in cosmic and human history.

 

 

 

about integrity, I hope

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St Alban’s, Kurow

SIXTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (February 12^th) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Sirach 15: 15-20

Psalm 119: 1-8

1 Corinthians 3: 1-9

Matthew 5: 21-37

 

 

Having told us, for those of us who recall from last week, that Jesus has addressed us as what Bruno Bettleheim might call “Good Enough Bearers of Christ,” we find this week that he is heightening the performance bar somewhat. Not one of the 613 commandments of Torah, the Jewish Law, is to be abolished, Jesus states. I haven’t read them recently, but I fear I have broken a good few, some publicly known, some in the deep recesses of my own heart.

So year by year as I find myself find addressing this passage for example, while I know myself to be known as having failed its harsh demands. For I am what is referred to in legal gobbledegook as “a divorced person.” In some legalistic minds I am worse, for I happen to be a divorced and remarried person (as I hope you realise, since Anne is floating around my house). Such a heinous crime would in the Diocese of Sydney, and no doubt some other legalistic and grace-free bodies prohibit me Christ-sized grace, at least insofar as I would no longer be permitted to be a priest. Perhaps such legalism is correct, for I’m not sure that we want those who have spectacularly fallen in one way or another to be our spiritual leaders. Or perhaps we live by a faith of grace, a faith that holds to a doctrine of redemption and second chances – or dare I say it, not though I am planning to exploit it, subsequent chances too.

I don't really want to make this about me, but I am also duty bound for the remainder of my preaching life, I guess, to acknowledge that some years ago I was forced to lawyer up in a legal spat, when unjust charges were brought against me. I was able at least to observe the letter of the law by permitting that case to be brought before a church tribunal, rather than before the secular judges that the New Testament writer Paul bars conservative Christians from approaching. Yet I must acknowledge that my lawyer was a somewhat sceptical lapsed Presbyterian, and I suspect I could do little to prevent him from thinking that at least some Anglican Christians were neandertals hell-bent on observing not the spirit but the letter of Christ’s teaching.

I confess too, as I did some years ago before my Queensland outback congregation, that I have occasionally – rarely of course – allowed my gaze to rest appreciatively upon a female form for more than the seven seconds that the somewhat legalistic if magnificent St Aquinas taught was the maximum duration of lingering permitted.

So … how do we read a passage that seems to have Jesus condemning the very fibre of most humanness? I assume my lingering glances at Anne Hathaway are somehow less mortal a sin then Vladimir Putin’s decision to slaughter thousands of Ukrainians and Russians, but it doesn’t seem that way. It seems to be that Jesus – or at least Matthew’s telling of the story of Jesus – is adamant that the 613 commandments of Torah stand unrevoked. Burn, Godfrey. 

Does this not pit Jesus against Paul, who is equally adamant that Grace, not Torah-observance is the gateway to God’s eternities?? Mind you, Paul and James already at loggerheads before Matthew began telling the Jesus story, which perhaps offers some comfort when I find myself, as I often do, in a fracas with my fellow clergy and others. Grace. 

And suddenly I find myself with a key to open this harsh Jesus vignette, this series of unattainable prohibitions and aspirations.

At least one key is Matthew’s dogmatic assertion that, while Jesus does not abolish the Torah, he does fulfil it. To some extent that casts the onus back on those of us who believe we have been baptised into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Can I look this same Jesus squarely in the eye? Or do I plead as some rather dubious Christians, the likes of Jim and Tammy Bakker, that the devil made me do it, that I am forgiven, washed in the blood of the lamb, and therefore absolved of all sin and indeed all responsibility? 

I don't think so.

Sorry, Godfrey, because while I can play that game, that is not the game of immersion in the resurrecting and resurrection love of Jesus Christ. I cannot play games with God. I make mistakes. I sin. I set my bar lower than many. But I hope and pray I never pretend I am conning God. I hope and pray I have integrity even amongst my failings.

And isn’t that just it? Isn’t that the self Jesus called us to be, honest and open before him, despite our deepest faults.

Be salt.

 

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

FIFTH ORDINARY SUNDAY (February 5th) 2023

 

READINGS:

 

Isaiah 58: 1-9a  

Psalm 112: 1-9

1 Corinthians 2: 1-12

Matthew 5: 13-20

 

 

 

I don't think we concentrate enough on the occasional playfulness of Jesus in his teaching. Certainly today we have Isaiah reminding us of the serious nature of the human need for God, highlighting the selfishness that can cripple the human heart, both as individuals and as any collection of people. Be it a church group, an entire region of the church, an entire church nationally or internationally, we can get far too weighed down by our own self importance, far too obsessed with our teachings, our rites and ceremonies, and sadly our overdose of self- rather than divine righteousness.

Actually that's why Paul in the whole string of his letters to the rather stroppy Corinthian church emphasizes that he seeks to empty himself of ego, of self centeredness. He seeks to proclaim only the life, death, resurrection of his Lord and ours, Jesus Christ. Sometimes though he's a little bit too complex to deal with in a sermon, and perhaps we should journey through his thoughts in a series of Lenten studies a little further down the track. If anyone is interested? Let me know if that's the case.

But Jesus is often a playful teacher. His humour breaks through in ways that have been all but deadened through 2000 years of solemnity, the very same solemn self righteousness, self importance that I mentioned just before.

With deadened baggage it's sometimes hard to realise how Jesus plays with us when he puts to us the rhetorical question “If the salt has lost it saltiness how can it be made salty again?” Of course when we lose our way as we often do we might remember the first part of this Jesus saying, “You are the salt of the earth.” It is about us ... or of the impossibvility of being not-us.  We tend to hear this as the threat of an angry teacher, a big red mark in the margin of our lives, rather than as a playful reminder that actually we cannot cease to be what God has made of us. 

If God has made us salt then we are simply called to surrender to God. And Jesus says that's precuisely what God has done. Being Christians we turn that into a set of all but toxic rules, thou shalt not, rather than a warm invitation to behave, with the help of God who is forming us even now, behave as decent caring compassionate human beings made in the loving image of God. 

In the end, love. And love is love, as we have learned recently to say, and as those seeking to follow Jesus we might just add the joyful reminder that God is love, and perhaps even love is God - or at least the very best taste of God that we can receive.

So salt can't lose its saltiness because salt is salt just the same as love is love. And the absence of salt is unsalt,  just as the absence of love is unlove, or of course those other words like indifference and hate. And when Jesus speaks of light and of our being light, he is effectively saying the same thing, because light under let's say a saucepan is no longer light. It is just an extension of the darkness. And for as long as we seek to be light, to be bearers of love and hope, to be whisperers of words like "are you okay," then we will be light, and not the unlight hiding in a saucepan with its lid on.

And I'm not even going into righteousness, the third point of these three sayings of Jesus, except to say that as we open ourselves up to the compassionate love and justice of God, to God's gentle healing touch in all its forms, (and I might explain what I mean by that another time too), then we become channels of that righteousness. We, ourselves! Make me a channel of your peace, make me a channel of your righteousness, make me a channel of your love.

We can obliterate the signs of God in our lives but on the whole we know when we're doing that, when selfishness, lovelessness, greed and aggression become the hallmarks of our existence. Most of us aren't very bad people, and I think in the context of these Jesus sayings our challenge is simply to say help me this day to be salt, to be light, and to be compassionate and just to those we meet.

By that can we be the sign of God's reign on earth as it is in the heavens.