One King, One People

 

 

Texts: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

 

We have come to the end of our story; and what we find ought to astonish us.  What we find is contrary to all human history, all human experience, we might even say, all human instinct.   What we find is contrary to the evidence of our own eyes, our own ears, our own prejudices, and our own desires.  What we find at the end of our story is that there is only one race, the human race – and that all divisions, all borders, all boundaries between us are human inventions, they are contrary to the will of God, and they are therefore sinful.   To put it in modern terms, globalisation, or, to use a better term, universalisation, has been God's plan from the very beginning, is now and will be for ever more.

 

And at the end of our story we find something else, too.  We find that, after Jesus himself, the hero of the story is none other than St Paul, whom the more modern-minded among us today usually look upon as more of a villain than a hero.   Perhaps 'hero of the story' is not quite the right way of putting it.  Perhaps I should say St Paul is the great narrator of the story, the one who explains the story to us.   Others play their part, of course, - the four gospel writers, the writer of Revelation – but surely without St Paul we would still be wondering what on earth is really going on.   Or would we?  Would we have even heard of the gospel today if St Paul had never arrived in the story at just the right time?

 

So as we come to the end of the story this morning I find I want to spend some time on St Paul, and the role he plays in it – either as hero or narrator or both.   Until the 20^th century scholars used to say of St Paul that he found the answer before he was aware of the problem.  What they meant was that St Paul' encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus was an encounter with the Saviour of the world, and it took place before St Paul knew that humanity needed saving.   As a Pharisee, so it was said, St Paul had all the answers in his head.  He wasn't concerned about the Gentiles – only the Jews were God's people, and God had provided for their salvation by giving them the Torah.   Stick to that and all would go well for you.  No problem – so why the need for a brand new solution?

 

But in more recent terms it has been argued that this picture of the state of mind of the pre-conversion St Paul is false.   There was a problem.  God had promised a future that was very different from the reality of St Paul's times.  He had promised to gather his people from wherever they had been scattered throughout the world, and bring them home to Israel.   Was that happening?  No, it wasn't.  Far more Jews were living outside Israel than inside.   In many ways, the great return from exile had not happened.

 

God had also promised to come to his people and set them free.  Had that happened?   No, it hadn't.  For hundreds of years Judah had been overrun by various invaders, and in St Paul's time, of course, it was under Roman rule.  So there was another problem – another divine promise so far unfulfilled.

 

And there was something else.  We can put up with an awful lot of hardship in the present if we have confidence in a better future.   What sort of future had God promised for his people?  At first sight it was a glorious one.  Through the prophets God had promised to raise up a new king, to restore the House of David.   Israel would re-live its glory days that it had enjoyed under its two greatest kings, David and Solomon.  And so impressive would this new king be that all the nations of the world would bring their treasures to Jerusalem and bow down to Israel's leadership.

 

A wonderful vision for any Jew to hold on to, but there were two major problems with it.  First, there was not the slightest sign that the world was moving towards it.   And secondly, even if Israel was restored to political greatness as in days of old, how realistic was it to expect the other nations of the world to recognise her superiority over them.   Rome was going to bow to the greater wisdom of Jerusalem?!  Something wasn't adding up, and St Paul, being the highly intelligent and learned Pharisee that he was, would have known it better than most.

 

Then comes his encounter with the very early followers of Christ.  Most of them, but not all of them, were fellow Jews.   And St Paul was horrified.  They were talking nonsense; and far worse, they were talking blasphemy.  Their leader was executed as a criminal, and the Law said he was under God's curse.   The Law said there was only one God and he alone was to be worshipped; but the Christians were worshipping their executed leader and insisting that he was God.   The Law said Jews and Gentiles were to be kept separate, particularly at mealtimes, and particularly in the Temple; yet Christian communities were forming that included both Jews and Gentiles on equal times, and they were eating together.   The Law said men and women were to be kept separate at worship; but in the Christian communities men and women were joining together for worship.

 

And so on and so on.  No wonder St Paul was outraged; no wonder he felt compelled to do all that he could to stamp out this terrible heretical movement.   But then he met the Risen Christ and his whole religious world was turned up outside down.  We're told that very soon after this experience he went to Arabia (meaning the desert) and spent about 3 years there trying to make sense of his experience in terms of his faith.

 

And out of that profound period of re-thinking he began to see a whole new vision of what God was up to in the world.   We often forget that he had never met Jesus, he had met Christians only as enemies to be exterminated, and he had very little knowledge of Jesus' teaching.  But one thing he did know, even before his conversion: when Stephen was martyred for his faith, he forgave his persecutors and died praising God.   How was such a thing possible?

 

And then the Risen Christ had come to him, had identified himself as "Jesus whom you are persecuting", and had called St Paul to become his follower.   And with all that in mind St Paul sits in his desert tent somewhere and starts to think.  Jesus had come to him at the very time when he himself was Jesus' sworn enemy.   How strange is that?  What can it mean?  It can only mean forgiveness and love prevail over ignorance and hatred, even between enemies.   In fact, it means that Jesus refuses to allow himself to be cast in the role of enemy.  Enmity is abolished.  But what would the world look like if there were no enmity in it?

 

It would be a world in which there were no divisions, no borders, no boundaries.  And perhaps the penny dropped a bit further for St Paul, sitting in his desert tent, as he remembered those very early Christian communities that had so shocked him.   They allowed no boundary between Jew and Gentile or between men and women.  Were they not early signs of God's new way forward?

 

Where might it all end?  And as St Paul pondered this, and read and re-read the Hebrew Scriptures, so his vision broadened and deepened.   Had not God promised a new King whose kingdom would have no end?  How could that be unless the King was divine?   Had not God promised that all the nations of the world would pay homage to this king?  How could that be if this were a mere King of Israel?  Had not God promised to set the people free?  How could that be unless all the people of the world were set free from all that drives us to threaten the freedom of others?

 

St Paul eventually emerges from his desert tent and starts preaching this wonderful vision.  We have another breath-taking version of it in our epistle reading today.   And again let me remind you that he is writing within 20 years of Jesus' death, before the gospels have been written, before any churches have been built, before the number of Christians had gone much above a few thousand, in a world divided between the monotheistic Jews and the polytheistic Graeco-Roman elite, a world in which the Emperor claimed divine authority for himself.

 

Despite all that, St Paul now sees Jesus as the image of God, the one in whom God is fully present.  He says that all things in heaven and on earth were created for and through Jesus.   He is the one in whom heaven and earth are united; he is the one in whom all enmity is abolished because in him God is reconciling all things to himself.  

 

And he agreed with St Luke that all this was first revealed on the cross.  In today's gospel reading, Christ is identified as king by the representative of the Roman government on the cross.   To all that we will return in the New Year.

 

Today we simply follow St Paul in acknowledging Christ as king over all the world – one king and one people.  That is the end of our story.

 

 

The End in the Beginning

 

 

Texts: Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 26:36-44

 

Today as we start our new year in the Church, I'm reminded of a friend who, on hearing that I was to be ordained, asked what that involved.   And when I mentioned preaching he was very intrigued.  What will you preach about?  The Scriptures, I said.   What will you preach about when you have finished those?  I hadn't thought of that.  In some consternation I went off and asked my mentor, a very senior and experienced priest.   I don't know either, he said.  I've only been preaching 35 years so it hasn't arisen yet.

 

That's part of the marvel of the Scriptures.  Every year for close to two thousand years now the Church has been telling the same story over and over again.   Think of the greatest novels ever written – Dickens, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, or whoever is your pick – which of those stories could be told and re-told, read and re-read, to the same people year after year without them becoming a tad stale?

 

Yet the Scriptures retain their freshness – their unique ability to shock, to surprise, to warn, to encourage, and generally to excite and hold our interest no matter how often we hear them.   That's due, of course, to the Holy Spirit, who speaks to us through the Scriptures, leading us ever deeper into their truth.  Someone has said that the Church reads the Scriptures, not in a circular way, going round and round and round again, but in a spiral, going round and down, exploring them at ever greater depth.   Our prayer, then at the start of a new year, is that the Holy Spirit will continue to guide us as we spiral down into the truth that God has chosen to reveal about himself through the pages of the Scriptures.

 

At the same time, we must remember that the story itself does not spiral, and it certainly doesn't go around in circles!   Like all great stories it has a beginning a middle and an end.  And like all great stories it only finally makes sense in the end.  Stories only convince us if, when we know the ending, we can see how it has arrived at that ending.   We can look back and see how the beginning led to and through the middle to the end.  It hangs together.  It makes sense as a whole.  Our story, God's story, is like that.  It only makes sense as a whole.  We need to know the end so that we can understand the beginning and the middle.

 

And so this morning we start where we left off last week.  Then we were celebrating the end of the story, the coronation of Jesus as the king over all creation.   We were reminded of the great vision of the prophets, especially Jeremiah last week, who looked to a time when all the peoples of the world would come to Jerusalem to worship the one true God.   We were reminded that this was the end God had in mind from the very beginning.  This was God's purpose in creating all things, to have creation as something other than himself, something to love and be loved by.

 

And we have been reminded throughout the last year that we are living in the middle of the story: that God is still working his purposes out as year succeeds to year.   We know how the story began, we know how it ends, and we know what our part is as we live out our lives in the in-between time, in-between the beginning and the end – in between the coming of Christ and his return.

So our first reading is from that other great prophet of the future, Isaiah, often called the Prophet of the Advent.   Over the next few weeks we will hear again his astonishing prophecies concerning the birth of Christ, and in the New Year as we move towards Easter we will reflect again on his prophecies about Christ's suffering.

 

But first, today we have his view of the end of all things as God's great creative vision reaches its fulfilment.   Like Jeremiah, Isaiah sees a time when all the nations of the world will be united in their worship of the God of Israel.  He sees it symbolised as people streaming to the Temple, the House of God, to be taught his ways, the way of life.   And he sees a new world in which there will be no more wars between nations, and all the wealth and material that is now wasted on the production of armaments will be turned into agricultural tools for the production of food.

 

No more hunger, no more disease, no more war.  A world renewed in accordance with that vision, that will of God. A world of peace and justice for all.   That is what our story is about, that is where we are headed, that is the marvellous and surprising end to which we are called.  The prophets saw it and proclaimed it to the people of their day.   Through the mercy of God, the Holy Spirit has preserved their words, collected them together, and gives them to us fresh every year through the pages of the Scriptures.   What then must we do in response?

 

First and foremost, we must say yes to God.  We must accept his gracious invitation to be a part of his story, to become actors, characters, participants in it.   Not just to accept it in a passive sense, grudgingly, as some Eastern religions would have us do.  We're not talking Fate here, or karma : we're talking relationship, the relationship into which God is calling the whole of his creation through humanity.    As we say our yes to God so we advance the story, bring it just a bit closer to the end.

 

That's one of the great strands of St Paul's teaching.  Each day is a day nearer the fulfilment of that wonderful vision of a new world.   Every time we do something that is consistent with that vision, so we help to implement it: every time we forgive, every time we turn the other cheek, every time we reach out to others in their best interests and not our own, every generous act or thought, every prayer for the good of others, every gift of money or goods to meet the needs of others – all of that and more means a step closer to the redemption of the whole of creation.   That's what the Christian story involves as it unfolds through time.

 

 

That's what St Paul is on about in our reading from his Letter to the Romans this morning.  He is a marvellous combination of visionary and pragmatist.   His vision is just as broad and deep as Isaiah's, but now he says something simple and straightforward.  Believers should lead decent lives.   Which part of that can't we understand?  We shouldn't waste our time in satisfying our selfish needs and instincts.  Life's too short.   Time is running out.  This is urgent.  It could be tomorrow.  Are we prepared to meet the Risen Christ face to face tomorrow?

 

And being St Paul, he throws in a wonderful image for us to ponder.  "Clothe yourselves', he says, "with the Lord Jesus Christ".   Recently, Rose and I attended a diocesan training day, and at one point we were in a small group reflecting together on the Parable of the Wedding Feast.   St Matthew's version is rather fiery, and has a strange reference to one of the guests being found without the proper wedding attire.   What on earth was all that about?   I think St Paul is giving us the answer here.  The proper wedding attire is the Lord Jesus Christ himself.  The Christian lifestyle is about conforming to the image of Christ.   Following his example, his way of life.

 

And doing it now, the only time in which we can do anything.  I have always remembered a conversation I heard between a mother and the Vicar of our parish.   The mother was explaining why her teenage son had stopped attending church.  He had, she said, discovered girls.   But she wasn't too worried.  He was young: there was plenty of time for him to rediscover his faith.  To which the Vicar replied: "Is there?   How do you know?"

 

I thought at the time that the Vicar's comment was a bit harsh; but now I'm not so sure.  "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son but only the Father."   Or as we say in one of our liturgies, "Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of our salvation."

 

That's why we must tell and keep telling our story.  It really is that urgent.

The Rudeness of Christmas

 

Texts: Isaiah 7:10-16; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

 

Christmas has got something to do with childhood; and perhaps that's why a rather strange thought popped into my mind when I started to focus on the coming week, and to re-read the Christmas narratives in the Scriptures.   I thought of my Mother, and her seemingly endless quest to teach me good manners.  There were various things that we weren't supposed to do at the dining table; we had to use our knife and fork properly (which meant, never turn the fork the right way up or put food on the knife), keep our mouths closed while chewing, and, of course, never, ever put our elbows on the table.   Many of the rules seemed to be like rules in a game, invented to make a very simple operation as complicated as possible.

 

But if there was one supreme rule in my Mother's collection that mattered to her more than all the others it was the prohibition on interrupting.   Children must never ever interrupt when an adult is talking.  And as my Father was a very quiet man, it's not hard to see who the principal beneficiary of this rule was!    Interruption was a very BAD THING!!

 

So why did all this come back to me as I started to think about the Christmas Season?  Because at all sorts of levels Christmas in about interruption – about disruption of normal routine.   At this time of the year we put things on hold.  Things like our education – our schools, colleges and universities close down – our learning is interrupted.   We go on holiday, interrupting our usual work routines.   National Radio takes off all the programmes we would now have time to listen to – even Morning Report goes into hibernation – or whatever the summer-equivalent of hibernation is.

Normal service will resume one day, but in the meantime we must survive the Christmas interruption.

 

And if you look at the Christmas stories in the Scriptures you will see a whole string of interruptions, political and angelic.   Earth and heaven is interrupted.  Caesar Augustus was one of the chief causes, of course.  He suddenly took it into his head to order a census to be held throughout the entire Roman Empire; and for reasons best known to him, every person had to return to their place of birth to be registered there.   Just think about that for a moment.  Apply the same rules to the Commonwealth today!  People were suddenly on the move throughout the empire, their lives interrupted for no obvious good reason.

 

But in the scheme of things, massively disruptive as that must have been, a political interruption of that kind was just part of the reality of life in that part of the world at that time.   Worst things could happen in occupied lands, and frequently did.  If all that your political masters wanted to do was count you, well, thank your lucky stars and get on with it.

 

Most of the other interruptions in the Christmas story come from on high.  Zechariah is going about his priestly business in the Temple when he is interrupted by an angelic visitor who tells him that he and his elderly wife are to have a baby, and then strikes him dumb for daring to express some doubt.   Mary receives a similar visitor with a similar message; Joseph gets a complementary message in a dream

And it doesn't stop there.  When the big day arrives, shepherds are quietly minding their sheep and are interrupted in spectacular fashion.   Wise men notice a star that was never there before, drop everything, abandon their families, work commitments and everything else and set off on a journey.   King Herod goes ballistic and orders mass infanticide; and Joseph and Mary are directed into exile in Egypt.

 

That's quite a lot of interruption caused by the birth of just one baby.  But, of course, this isn't just one baby.   This is the greatest interruption imaginable.  This is the interruption of history, no less.  This is the eternal God interrupting Time itself.   Spend a moment thinking about that first Christmas night – put yourself in that dark, smelly uncomfortable stable as Mary is delivered of her child.   Now remind yourself that, for much of the time ever since, and in much of the world, history has been divided into "B.C." and "A.D.", according to whether it occurred before or after the birth of that particular baby.   Isn't that amazing?  How are we to explain this interruption of history itself if not as the working of God himself?   Put like this, isn't it incredible – and yet it is an historical fact!

 

I wanted to put all this on the record first because there is no doubt that the Church has become more and more defensive about these Christmas stories in this modern age.   They make us feel uncomfortable with our educated friends.  They are hard to explain to inheritors of the scientific revolution.   It's bad enough that they are rather full of angels bearing messages, frightening people witless, and bursting into song.  But strangely it's not them we feel called upon to defend.   Perhaps we can all agree that they are colourful characters as real and unreal as Hobbits and other inhabitants of Middle Earth, and just as harmless.   We can indulge a taste for angels – it's Christmas, after all.

 

It's the virgin birth that causes us the real worry, isn't it.  That is flatly contradicted by science, so what are we to say about that?   Well, as Christians what we are to say about that is very clear and simple, and we will say it together shortly.  It goes like this: For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became fully human.   That's what we are to say about this infant, born on Christmas Day.  That in him the divine and the human came together, and that this coming together was for our benefit, for our salvation.

 

In him human nature was joined to the divine nature; in him it was taken down into the depths of death  and purged of sin; and in him it was raised up to enjoy full communion with God.  Christmas Day is as much essential to human salvation as Good Friday and Easter Day.   If that baby is not God incarnate, then Easter does not work.  As I have said on many occasions recently, the Christian story is one whole story – it only makes sense when taken in total.

 

How, then, do we tell it without deeply offending our scientific friends?  Well, as much as I love St Luke's gospel, I do think that when it comes to the birth of Jesus we should stick more closely to St Matthew, and then add a little dash of St Paul.   Look at today's passage from St Matthew: see how much more restrained and discrete it is.  By focussing on Joseph's reaction to the news that his fiancée is pregnant we are offered a way into the story that doesn't require any suspension of belief.   We can understand his reaction; we are sympathetic to him.  Then he has a dream – again, we are with him.  We all have dreams.  In that dream he is told the truth behind Mary's pregnancy.  He decides to accept the truth that the dream reveals to him.   He decides to accept that the baby is 'incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary".  He accepts that the baby's name is to be Jesus, the one who saves.

 

And look at the discrete but clear way St Paul puts it in the opening paragraph of his Letter to the Romans.  Speaking of the Son of God, he says: who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord.   The resurrection declared what had been true from the beginning – that Christ was both human and divine.  Christmas and Easter are all part of the one story.

 

The story of divine interruption.  And there's one thing more to say about that.   It's an interruption that does not end.  We live in the wake of God's interruption until the end of time.  Morning Report may return to air in January, but in the wider sense normal service will never be resumed.

 

That's the good news of Christmas.  It lasts for ever.  All we have to do is believe it – and live it!   May 2008 be another year of interruption – whatever my Mother would have thought of it.

With one eye on the future

Texts: Amos 8:4-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-7; Luke 16:1-13

One of the great things about Archbishop Desmond Tutu is the wonderful
stories associated with him, some of which may even be true. I'm
assured this one is. You may be surprised to hear that there's an
Anglican Cathedral in Cairo in Egypt – I'm not sure how that came to
be, but there it is. And the story goes that a young priest in South
Africa received an invitation to go to this Cathedral and preach.

He was honoured and excited to be asked, of course, but also a little
nervous, so he asked Archbishop Tutu for some advice. In particular,
he asked the archbishop what text he should preach on. "Egypt, eh?"
said the archbishop in his inimitable way. "Well, my son, if I were
you I stayed well clear of the Exodus!"

That's funny, but it also makes a serious point. The Book of Exodus
is a hard sell in Egypt. Whenever we divide people into us and them,
on whatever basis we choose, we run the risk of assuming that the
Scriptures are ours not theirs, and, even worse, that God is ours but
not theirs. The Exodus story is about the forging of a new people,
about a national or ethnic identity, and it necessarily is written
from the point of view of those people. The "other people" – the
Egyptians – are the enemy. They're beyond the pail. They cop the
plagues. Their army gets drowned. We're God's people, they're not.
Who cares about them?

But if we fast-forward from the time of the Exodus to the time of the
prophets, we find a rather different picture. At least, when we look
at the prophet, Amos. He's got up a full head of steam, but the
target of his vitriol is not the Egyptians, or any other "foreign"
group of people. This is all in-house stuff. Here the division is
not on national or ethnic grounds; here the divisions are
socio-economic, as we would call them today. The commercial classes
are giving capitalism a bad name. They are the epitome of unbridled
greed. They are cheating the poor, with false measures and with
inflated prices.

And there are two important points to note here, both arising from the
fact of who they are. They are Jews, descendants of the very people
whom God rescued from Egypt. The very people whom God endowed with a
land of their own. Yet, first of all, they are dishonouring God by
fretting about the restrictions on their economic activities on
Sabbath Days and Festival Days. Far from treating the Sabbath as a
day of rest and thanksgiving, they find it a tiresome waste of time
and want it over with as soon as possible.

Secondly, their victims are fellow Jews, fellow people of God. Far
from being a light to the Gentiles, an example to the other nations of
the world, Israel has become like everyone else, greedy, self-seeking,
and forgetful of God. But there is no immediate threat of divine
intervention, no plagues, no wholesale drownings. These people, rich
oppressors and cheats though they are, are still God's own people.
Still the people of the Covenant. There will be a final accounting:
God will never forget what they have done. But there is a sense in
which the prophet's words are to be taken as a warning: think what
you're doing; remember that you will be called to account. Stop your
evil ways, and repent.
In other words, there is no suggestion in this passage that the rich
oppressors are, to God, simply dispensable, as the Egyptians rather
seemed to be in the Exodus story. God loves all his people, rich and
poor, powerful and powerless, sinner and sinned against.

And that message is there for us in St Paul's First Letter to Timothy.
In this morning's passage St Paul is giving instructions about
worship; and in particular about our prayers when we gather like this
for worship. He wants our prayers to be all-embracing. He wants us
to pray for our rulers or leaders, for "kings and all those in
authority". And not just prayers of intercession, we should notice,
but also of thanksgiving. We should give thanks to God for those in
authority over us. We need them, with all their weaknesses, because
human society needs leaders to keep the peace.

There is no room here for any us and them divisions. Why? Because,
says St Paul, God "wants all people to be saved and come to a
knowledge of the truth". That is why Jesus Christ "gave himself as a
ransom for all". Divisions along national or ethnic lines, divisions
along socio-economic lines, divisions along political lines, all fall
to the ground in the face of the divine desire that all of us come
together and return to God as one people.

But what about division along the lines of faith and ethics? What
about the division between the Church and the world? It's time to
turn our attention to this puzzling parable in today's gospel reading.

The outline of the story is clear enough, and we are given a few clues
to fill in some of the details. In particular, we are told about two
of the debts owed to the master. They are both large, and each is
expressed in terms of an agricultural product. – olive oil and wheat.
So a fairly safe bet is that this master is a moneylender, who lends
money to peasant farmers at the start of the season, and expects
payment when the harvest has been sold. He isn't directly involved in
this business himself; he has employed a manager to run it for him.

The next clue is that this manager has not performed well. He is
accused of wasting his master's possessions. That word "wasting" is
the same word used of the Prodigal Son, who wasted his inheritance in
wild living. It doesn't involve actual dishonesty – the manager does
not seem to have been into embezzlement. Rather it suggests a lack of
care and prudence, and business acumen. Putting it all together it
may be that he is being accused of making unwise loans, without
checking to make sure that the borrowers had a reasonable prospect of
being able to repay the debts.

So maybe the master has now found that he has a lot of bad debts on
his books. He tells the manager that he is fired, and demands a final
set of accounts. All this seems feasible enough. So does the
reaction of the manager. He is now facing a bleak future, with no
source of income available to him. (This tends to confirm that he
hasn't been salting away his master's money in an offshore bank
account!) What can he do? He is facing a labouring job, a drop in
status bringing shame on himself and his family, or, worse still, a
life of begging.

So he hatches this plan that is at the heart of this story. He calls
in his master's debtors and discounts their debts by a considerable
amount – 50 percent in one case, 20 percent in another. He figures
that they will be so grateful to him that he can touch them for a few
favours later. Again, this makes some sort of sense.

But when his master finds out about this the story takes a real twist
towards the bizarre. His master commends him for his shrewdness. We
expect the master to go ballistic – to beat or at least abuse him for
ripping him off. But he doesn't: he commends him, and this is the
first aspect of the parable that bothers us. Well, I suspect that
this is the clue to us that the master is not an innocent victim in
all this. Perhaps the master is himself a rogue – a loan shark
screwing the peasant borrowers for all he can get out of them

Notice that there is no hint of reconciliation, much less of the
reinstatement of the manager. He is still fired. So maybe the master
recognises the devious scheme of the manager as one rogue impressed by
another. That, too, makes some sort of sense to me; but then comes
Jesus' teaching in which he appears to encourage his disciples to
learn from these rogues. What exactly are we to learn from them?

I think, perhaps, it's got something to do with providing for the
future. The manager was trying, in his shrewd, worldly way, to secure
his future. He used his master's assets to that end. Jesus seems to
be urging us to secure our future, not by stealing, of course, but by
using our worldly wealth for the good of others. When it is gone, he
says, we will be "welcomed into heavenly dwellings". Almost certainly
he has in mind the lovely Jewish idea that those to whom we have shown
kindness in this world speak for us on Judgment Day.

The message seems to be, don't be too proud or self-righteous to learn
from the worldly wise, but transform their wisdom into the godly
variety. And always remember that there is a final accounting, for
rich and poor, creditor or debtor, master or slave.

As a story, it may not be as pithy or as witty as those of Archbishop
Tutu. But at least it could be preached in Cairo Cathedral.

Saints Alive

Texts: Daniel 7:1-3, 15-18; Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31

November is the month of remembrance. On the first day of the month
we remember all the saints of the Christian Church, known and unknown.
And there's the first odd thing about all this. How can we remember
those who are unknown? Does that make any sense? Well, it makes at
least as much sense as the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. We remember
him, a victim of war, even though we do not know his name. We
remember our fellow saints, even though we know very few of them by
name.

And there's the second odd thing about all this. Even on All Saints
Day, or All Saints Sunday, when we are remembering all the saints
known and unknown, we still seem to need reminding each year that we
are included in their number. We are ourselves saints, in the
Biblical sense. Because in the Biblical sense "saints" simply means
"believers" – followers of Christ – or, more simply, Christians. It
was never intended to mark out the great giants of the faith, in the
way the term seems to be understood today. After all, even if we
think of saints as martyrs, we only know a very few by name –
thousands, perhaps even millions, of people whose names will never be
known to us have been martyred for the faith we share with them.
Today we remember them all.

So November, the month of remembrance, gets off to that important
step. Then, the very next day, we come to All Souls' Day, when we
remember the departed, those who, in the words of our Liturgy, "have
died in the faith of Christ". And those are wonderful words, aren't
they? People die in all sorts of circumstances, from the ghastly to
the peaceful. They die in infancy, they die in old age, they die at
every age in between. They die in hospital, hospice, home, or
wherever, surrounded by their family, or all alone. Some die by
accident, some are killed, some kill themselves. whatever the
particular circumstances may be, what should matter most to us is that
we die in the faith of Christ. All those who have done so, we
remember with thanksgiving on All Souls' Day.

There is another special day of remembrance in this month of
remembrance; on the second Sunday of the month, called Remembrance
Sunday, we commemorate the end of the First World War. It's an
opportunity for us to reflect on the evil of war, as well as to
remember the terrible wastage of young lives. Every Anzac Day we hear
that solemn promise, "We shall remember them". Those words are just
as apposite on Remembrance Sunday.

So this month has three special days of remembrance. But it also
shares with every other month a number of individual saints deemed by
the Church to be particularly worthy of being remembered. Every week
on the back of the pewsheet you will see the names to be remembered in
this way in the coming week. I wonder if you give them much thought;
perhaps you wonder why I bother. Isn't that all a bit too Anglican
(or, horror of horrors, Catholic!), too fuddy-duddy for today's taste?

Why do we remember the dead saints of the past? Isn't it enough to
pray for one another, to pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ
around the world? Didn't Jesus himself say 'Let the dead bury the
dead?" Yes, he did; but aren't we shocked every time we're reminded
of that? Anyone who needs to be persuaded of the human desire to
remember the dead has never lost anyone dear to them. Ask a Jew why
it is important to remember the victims of the Holocaust; ask an
American why it is important to remember the victims of 9/11. We are
surrounded by evidence of that human need to remember the dead. Look
at our cenotaphs and our Honour Boards; look at our tombstones and our
In Memoriam notices. Over and over again we see the promise never to
forget.

In many cases, of course, these are family affairs, or the offerings
of close friends. Of course we will remember our own family members
and dearest friends, how could we not? But why do the Jews remember
all six million victims of the Holocaust; why do the Russians remember
the 20 million they lost in the war? Why do the Americans remember
the three thousand lost on 9/11? Because in each case those who
remember, and those they remember, are one people. They belong
together.

And there we have precisely the reason why we in the Church remember
the saints, past and present, great and small, known and unknown. We
remember them because they are our people, they belong to us and we to
them, we belong together. Together we are the Communion of Saints,
the believers of every age including the present, living and departed.

And there is the extra reason we have for remembering our own. They
are with us yet and ever more shall be. Though they have died, yet
they are alive in Christ, as we are alive in Christ. That is what we
mean when, in the Apostles Creed, we affirm that we believe "in the
communion of saints". The living and the departed held together in
God's single loving embrace. That's the wonderful vision of the
future that our Christian faith holds before us.

And more wonderful still, it is the vision that God has had from the
very beginning, indeed, even before time began. Surely one of the
most mesmerising passages in the whole of Scripture is the first
chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians, from which our second lesson
is taken this morning. Many scholars insist that St Paul did not
write this letter; but whoever wrote it we see that same extraordinary
breadth of vision that St Paul displayed in some of the other letters,

In a nutshell the author summarises God's purpose in creating and
sustaining and guiding all things to the end he has always had in
mind. God created all things out of nothing to be his Significant
Other, to love and to be loved by. But the essential element of love
is freedom; love cannot be compelled, it must be freely given. And so
God created humankind free to love him or reject him, and ever since
has been wooing us with his love for us. The path of true love has
not run smooth, but it is still running. Through the ages men and
women have heard that loving call and have responded; and as they have
done so they have come to share in the very life of God, the life that
St John has taught us to call eternal life. The life that death
cannot overcome.

And so all those who, over the millennia, have entered into that life,
even though they have died, yet are they living still, and we with
them in the great communion of saints. That is the gist of this
glorious first chapter of the epistle. Just listen to some of those
phrases again: blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual
blessing…chose us in him before the creation of the world…predestined
us to be adopted as his children through Jesus Christ……the riches of
God's grace that he lavished on us…to bring all things in heaven and
on earth together under one head, even Christ…the riches of the
glorious inheritance in the saints…far above all rule and authority,
power and dominion…On and on it flows to this great climax: And God
placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be the head over
everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who
fills everything in every way.

That's the Christian vision of the new age, which began to break in
with the resurrection of Christ. Compared to that vision all else
falls away. Daniel saw four great fierce kingdoms, but what are they
compared to the Kingdom of God? Even stranger visions are to be found
in our In Memoriam columns sometimes. Visions of Grandma twinkling as
a new star in the night sky; or good old Rex riding his Harley
Davidson around the heavens, or catching trout, or having a beer. But
what are they compared to the vision set before us by the teaching of
our faith?

Today, All Saints' Sunday, we remember with thanksgiving our fellow
saints, living and departed, as we pray for a strengthening of our
confidence in the vision we share, summed up in the last verse of our
great opening hymn:

From earth's wide bounds,
from ocean's farthest coast,
through gates of pearl
streams in the countless host,
singing to the Father,
Son and Holy Ghost.
Alleluia, alleluia! Amen.

Heavenly thoughts

Texts: Job 19:23-27a; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

Last week, when we celebrated All Saints Sunday, I talked about the
Communion of Saints, and I reminded us that we are included in that
Communion. We are saints, not because we are particularly good, or
heroic, or special in some other way, but simply because we believe in
Jesus Christ. Saints, in the biblical sense, are believers,
Christians; and with all those people who have died in the faith of
Christ over the last two thousand years or more, we are the Communion
of Saints.

Today our readings invite us to say a little bit more about this, and
particularly about what we usually call life after death. What can we
say about that? Well, as I probably said last week, we can say more
than we sometimes think, but a lot less than some Christians are
inclined to claim.

For instance, I'm always surprised how many longstanding members of
the Church harbour a secret belief in reincarnation. Never mind that
it is entirely inconsistent with most if not all of the biblical
teaching on the subject – inconsistent with the idea of eternal rest,
of resurrection, of redemption and all the rest. Never mind that
nobody has ever been able to explain the 'mechanics' of reincarnation;
how can I still be me if I am born again to different parents, with a
different gender perhaps, or even as a member of a different species?
How do I get from one incarnation to the next? Does it happen
immediately, and, if not, where am I between incarnations? Who
decides my next incarnation? The whole thing is, to put it very
mildly, problematic, and far less credible that the Christian teaching
on bodily resurrection. Yet, despite all that, our critics will laugh
to scorn our Easter story while insisting that we must take with
utmost seriousness and respect, the bizarre notion of reincarnation.

But I digress. Let's get back to what we can say about our
understanding of life after death. We start today with this
astonishing insight from the beleaguered Job. Conventional wisdom has
it that Jewish theology knew nothing of resurrection until very late
in the piece, about the middle of the second century BC. It's from
that period that we have the Book of Maccabees, in which the argument
is developed based on the justice of God. The orthodox view in the
Hebrew Scriptures was that terrible things only happened to sinful
people, while good things happened to righteous people.

The evidence for that, from both points of view, was always pretty
weak, and it came apart during the Jewish fight for independence under
the Maccabees. They were fighting a just war; they were following the
Torah; they refused to fight on the Sabbath and suffered the
consequences. How could this be? How could those on God's side be
killed by those who didn't believe in God? Was God powerless to save
his people? Was there no divine justice?

There certainly wasn't this side of the grave; therefore, if God is
just, there must be a sorting out after death – there must be a
judgment, a day of reckoning, when the good and the bad receive their
just deserts. From then on the idea of some form of personal survival
of death quickly gathered support, until by the time of Jesus, the
majority party, the Pharisees, believed in resurrection.
But this passage today reminds us that such a belief appeared, albeit
sporadically, much earlier on in Jewish teaching. And here we see
that it wasn't worked out in the clever mind of a deep thinker; it
struck Job as a gratuitous insight in the midst of his great anguish.
A whole succession of terrible things had befallen Job, a righteous
man with a deep faith in God.

His friends, of course, attributed it all to Job's secret and
unrepented sin; but Job protested his innocence. What, then – was God
acting towards him unjustly? Job couldn't bring himself to accept
that either. So what was the answer? As he wrestled with this
agonising issue, he suddenly had this breakthrough. He couldn't
explain it, but there were certain things he was absolutely sure of.

The first was that he had a Redeemer, someone who would buy his
freedom, someone who would save him. Someone who was living at the
time, and 'in the end' will stand upon the earth'. Although living
now he is not on the earth now. So where is he?

Secondly, Job is sure that after his own death ("after my skin has
been destroyed") he will, in his own flesh and with his own eyes, see
God! In other words, speaking under prophetic inspiration, Job
affirms his faith in the resurrection of the body! There is the first
instalment of the encouragement that we can offer to anyone today who
is going through the sort of personal hell Job was experiencing at the
time. This hell will end; and then one day you will see God with your
own eyes – and all will be well for ever.

In a way St Paul deals with the opposite problem in his Second Letter
to the Thessalonians. They believe in the resurrection of the dead;
in fact, they believe in the rapture of the living. They are not
suffering any great hardship – their only problem seems to be their
own impatience. They are ready to go now – they are waiting for Jesus
to return and collect them. Why is he taking so long? St Paul gives
a baffling answer that few if any scholars even pretend to understand;
but the gist is that we are called to go on living in the certainty of
Christ's return and the uncertainty of its timing. We are to be
prepared, to live each day in the belief that it could be the last
before we meet God face to face. When the Master returns, what will
he find his servants doing?

And so to the gospel reading. Once again, a group of his opponents
have some to Jesus in the hope of trapping him into saying something
that will upset either the Roman authorities or the devout Jews. The
opening skirmish about the requirement to pay taxes fizzles out, and
the Sadducees take the floor to have a go at him about life after
death. They draw his attention to the requirement of the Mosaic Law
that if a married man dies childless, his brother must marry the widow
and attempt to have children for him.

They go a bit overboard with the story, but the issue is clear: if two
or more men have married a woman, whose wife is she in the next world?
It sounds a difficult one to answer, but it is really no question at
all. They are assuming that resurrection means something like
restoration or reinstatement; as if life after death continues much as
it did before death. As I said last week, we only have to browse the
death notices and the In Memoriam columns in the ODT to see that many
people today are under the same misapprehension.
But, says, Jesus, in the age to come, life is not like that. There
will be no such thing as marriage, and no such thing as death. In
that respect we will be more like the angels than earthbound human
beings.

And then Jesus concludes this teaching with one of the greatest lines
in the whole of Scripture. He says that to God "all are living".
Think about that for a moment – let those words sink in. They are
words of the greatest possible comfort to all who have lost loved
ones. Have you lost a child? That child is alive to God. Have you
lost a spouse? Your spouse is alive to God. A brother, a sister,
parents? Every one of them is alive to God. That is the teaching of
our faith; and, as St Paul often said, we have that from the Lord
himself.

How are they alive to God? What does that mean? Where are they? We
don't know because it hasn't been revealed to us, and therefore we
cannot say. Such details shouldn't trouble us. All that matter is
that we have a Redeemer, that one day we will see God with our own
eyes, and that all our loved ones who have died are alive to God.

What more do we need?

Confessions

Texts: Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22; 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18; Luke 18:9-14

We are nearing the end of the second half of our liturgical year in
which we have been invited by the Church through our weekly readings
to think about what is involved in discipleship, in following as best
we can Jesus' teaching. That teaching is not easy. It makes demands
on the whole of our lives. The Scriptures know nothing of partial
Christians. Christianity is like pregnancy in that regard; you either
are or you are not. Certainly we hope our faith grows within us so
that it becomes more and more obvious to others that we are Christian;
but once the egg of faith is fertilised then we are on the way. So
what does that way involve?

Well, according to the theme chosen for today it involves humility.
That's clearly right, but if I was choosing the theme again I might
prefer to choose a different word. I might now choose "Confession".
It's not quite the same thing, but they go hand in hand. They're
almost twins. And if you want to go for the trifecta, you could put
your money on mercy. Humility, confession, and mercy; they're a
formidable trio, and they are at the centre of the way of
discipleship, of being followers of Christ. And they are at the heart
of our readings today.

Here's a bit of an old chestnut to get us under way. A young man was
caught up in a conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte. He and
many of his co-conspirators were caught, tried, and sentenced to
death. He was the only child of his widowed mother, and without him
to support her she would be destitute. Somehow she managed to wangle
an audience with Napoleon and begged the emperor to spare her son's
life.

Napoleon was not impressed. "Madame," he said. "Why should I have
mercy on him? He is guilty. He deserves to die." "Oh, yes,' the
woman agreed. "He is guilty and he deserves to die. That is why I do
not ask for justice for my son, for that would do him no good. It is
because he is guilty that I beg you to be merciful to him."

I can't remember the outcome, so if you prefer happy endings you can
assume that Napoleon was bowled over by the widow's plea and her
clever argument and granted his would-be assassin a free pardon. Or,
if you're on a sugar-free diet, you can assume that Napoleon decided
to execute her, too! Either way, the point is that mercy is only
available to the guilty.

If we seek God's mercy we must first acknowledge our guilt, which is a
good enough cue to turn to our gospel reading. St Luke gives us this
very compact, well-known story. A couple of Jews go up to the Temple
to pray. One is a Pharisee, one who tries very hard to keep the Law.
And when we look at his prayer, we may have a little sympathy for him.
We won't admit that, of course, because previous experience tells us
that the Pharisees are the bad guys. But deep down, on the quiet, we
might admit to ourselves some sympathy for this particular Pharisee.

For a kick-off, of course, he has at least made the effort to go to
the Temple to pray. That's more than we can say for about 90% of our
compatriots on any given Sunday, let alone a weekday. Then we hear
what he is praying. He doesn't get off to the best of starts, I must
admit: God, I thank you that I'm not like other people. That puts us
on edge a bit, doesn't it? Who does he think he is thanking God that
he's not like you and me? But hang on a minute. We seem to have
misunderstood. He goes on to identify the sorts of people that he is
not like. It turns out he's not talking about people like you and me,
at all. He's talking about robbers, evildoers, adulterers, and
tax-swindling collaborators. And we're not included in that list, are
we? And thank God we're not!

He goes on, "I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get." Hmm.
It might have been better if he'd quit while he was ahead. This does
sound a bit boastful – not the sort of thing to say out aloud, even
though we might think something along these lines. The public arena –
and in particular the Temple/Church - is hardly the right place to
start boasting in this way.

But with that reservation noted, assuming he's telling the truth about
himself, he doesn't sound too bad, does he? It seems he makes a real
effort to keep up his religious observances. And in that respect at
least, he probably isn't like "this tax collector". This tax
collector is a scoundrel, ripping off his fellow Jews, and sucking up
to the Roman occupiers.

But then it's his turn to pray. And as he prays he (inadvertently)
creates the simple prayer at the heart of Eastern Orthodox
spirituality, known simply as the "Jesus Prayer". Of course, he is
not at this time addressing his prayer to Jesus; he is praying to the
God of Israel, the one true God. But his prayer is very clear. He
knows what he is like. He knows he is guilty. He is indeed a sinner.
Justice would do him no good at all. If justice had her way, the
Pharisee would have been acquitted and the tax-collector sentenced to
death.

But when Jesus passes judgment his verdict is the other way around.
They are both guilty, but one of them only has recognised that and has
asked for mercy. We are acquitted – "justified" in the words of this
passage – through God's mercy, not in accordance with his justice.

Now, this tax-collector had come to the Temple to confess his sins.
In modern parlance, dealing with sin was the core business of the
Temple - think of all the sacrifices made as sin-offerings – and for
several centuries the Church took over this role. We no longer needed
to make sacrifices, of course, because Christ has made the one perfect
sacrifice sufficient for all the world for all time. But it was still
thought necessary to confess our personal sins to and through a
priest.

Then came the Reformation. And ever since the Anglican Church has
held that we can confess our personal sins directly to God, whenever
and wherever, without going through a priest. We can use a priest,
and sometimes that can be very helpful, but we're not obliged to do
so, and few Anglicans today do so. So why do we still come to church
to confess them? And the answer is, we don't.

To understand what we do in our various Liturgies, we can turn to our
reading from Jeremiah. Here we see the corporate nature of prayer,
including prayers of confession. Judah is suffering from a terrible
drought, so Jeremiah, as a Judean and on behalf of himself and all
other Judeans, is crying out to God for relief from the never-ending
Big Dry, as our Aussie neighbours would say. But as he does so he
acknowledges that the people do not deserve rain – they do not deserve
divine help. Why not? Well, they are terrible sinners. What have
they been up to? Are they also the sort of people the Pharisee was on
about – robbers, evildoers, adulterers, and tax collectors? No, what
Jeremiah acknowledges is the sin of backsliding, that is, not being
zealous enough in their religious practices. They haven't prayed
enough, or fasted enough, or given alms, or respected the Sabbath, or
whatever. They've become less committed, lazier, in relation to the
commands of their faith. They're backsliders. We can thank God we're
not like them, eh?

The prayer of Jeremiah is the prayer of the People of God. In the
same way, when we gather together in this Holy Place, we are gathered
as the People of God, the Church; and so when we pray in our liturgy,
we pray, not as individuals like the two in our gospel story, but
collectively, with one voice, like the voice of Jeremiah. We
acknowledge, not our own individual sins, but the sins for which we
are collectively responsible in this place.

What might they be? Well, one example that crops up regularly at Holy
Trinity is our failure to love one another as he loves us. Whenever
we use this liturgy (page 404) our liturgists change the text a wee
bit: The text as written says: "In silence we call to mind our sins."
But our Liturgists usually change this to, "In silence we call to
mind our own failure to love as he loves us." Now, that's fine –
that's a perfectly legitimate use of the liturgy. And it can be
helpful. It changes from the relative safety of the general, to the
more challenging specific. Instead of acknowledging "our sins" in
general, which might be different from week to week, our liturgists
are telling us that the besetting sin of this congregation, time after
time, is our failure to love one another as he has loved us.

We are guilty of a failure to love. And so when we suffer our own
drought, when our membership and our finances dry up, we are right to
cry to the Lord for help, first acknowledging that guilt and our need
for God's mercy, for only God can end our drought. As Jeremiah said,
can the idols of the nations offer help? No, it is you, O Lord our
God. Therefore our hope is in you, for you are the one who does all
this.