Past Sermons preached by
Bishop John Bayton AM

Presentation of Christ

5^th February 2006

Without apology I remind myself and you my friends yet once more of our need to interrogate the Scriptures at four levels of comprehension – the literal level, the moral level the allegorical or metaphorical level and the spiritual level.

Of the four Gospels, perhaps Saint Luke being a ‘gentile’ and not having come out of a Hebrew background, is closest to our own cultural imagination. As he himself informs us he sits down to write his gospel and has in front of him a large body or earlier writings - “Forasmuch as many have taken in hand….” - and so is able to edit earlier material in the context of deep theological reflection and present us with a beautiful structured Gospel.

He draws a comparison between two annunciations – to Zechariah and Elizabeth, John’s parents, and Mary. John the Baptist is conceived in the old age of his parents. Jesus is conceived virginally. “With God, nothing shall be impossible” – two ways.

He brings the two expectant mothers together to show which is the greater and in this exchange – the visitation at Ein Kerem – we have the first example in history of pre-natal awareness. “At the sound of your voice the babe in my womb leaped for joy”. And in this exchange we are challenged to consider our (contemporary) attitude to when viable life begins. And our attitude to abortion.

Truth is not ultimately subject to my intellect. Outside the text of this sermon may I say we don’t have to defend religion by proving everything. We believe not by reason but because of the deeper mystery revealed.

Categories beyond our experience to describe lie in the area of faith. As I consider many of the present day commentaries on the Christian faith made by radio and TV gurus I conclude it is a great danger in eliminating mystery from religion.

Compare the two births- John and Jesus. In both accounts Luke refers to the ‘eighth day’ . Then follows detailed birth of Jesus and the point to which our liturgy moves today. The old passes away, the new has arrived.

Narrative becomes the vehicle for proclamation. The story becomes the vehicle for telling out the Good News of salvation – GOD IS WITH US. Nothing less. This is the heart of the proclamation of the Church . It was for Luke, it is for us. No matter in what circumstance of life we find ourselves, God is with us.
And all before Jesus has uttered a single word. This is the powerful theme of the Christian myth. Jesus the unspeaking Child ushers in the new Age. (So much for ‘twinkle, twinkle little star’)
And it is in the Virgin Mary that we find the fulfilment of the faith of all the great women of the First Testament – Eve, Sarah, Rebekah, , Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, Jael, Judith and all those in the line of Christian believers who point to the role of women in salvation history.

For Luke the City of Jerusalem and the Temple loom large. He always situates his story in real places in the real history of known people. Read Chapter 3 of his Gospel where he sets the scene for Jesus ministry – In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar when Pontius Pilate was Governor of Judea, Herod Tetrach of Galilee, Philip tetrarch of Abilene….during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas…..”

This is not P.D.James or the author of Harry Potter’s exploits, but Saint Luke. Narrative becomes proclamation. That fourth level of comprehension And the signs to which he alludes in the infancy narratives come straight from the Book of Wisdom (Wisdom 7 v 4-5) – signs of a new Davidic king. The sign of the Ox and the Ass of Isaiah 1 v 2-3. where the prophet bewails the hard-headedness of the people of Israel. Luke reverses this tragedy when he placed the Ox and the Ass in the stable at Bethlehem.

At the end of the Barley Harvest ( End of September early October) at the time when shepherds bring their flocks in from the desert to glean the stubble left by the reapers and to provide fertiliser for the following year, and thus engaging in a symbiosis –

shepherds and farmers (remember Cain and Abel – ad lib) before the onset of the northern hemispheres winter, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Or was it in Nazareth?

On the eighth day Jesus was circumcised and thus made a member of the Chosen Race, all in accordance with the Law of Moses. Mary then began her period of purification (again according to the Law see Leviticus 12 v 2-8) When he was one month old Mary and Joseph took him to Jerusalem and again according to the Law (Exodus 13 v 1-2) he was redeemed by an offering of five shekels (Num 3 v 47-48) . Luke does not mention this but says two turtle doves or two young pigeons were offered for Mary’s redemption. Here we have echoes of the presentation of the little boy Samuel (1Sam 1 v22-24 when of course there was no Temple in Jerusalem) and of the prophet Malachi “The Lord whom you seek shall suddenly come to his Temple… vide Handel). Saint Luke’s use of the Greek word Hierosolyma - Holy Salem or Holy Space interests me no end because of the architectural device mandorla the intersection of two circles one representing the outer world and the other representing the inner world. More of that another time.

Jesus comes to fulfil the Torah and to the sacred space of the centre of the entire cosmos in order to fulfil all righteousness. The only begotten Son of God presented in the Temple as the firstborn of all creation.

For the front of today’s pew sheet I have drawn an icon in the traditional Byzantine style of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. Let us look at it and examine it for a few moments. There are four figures in it symbol of perfection. The old man Simeon whose name means “God has heard”. Simeon’s Nunc Dimitis is one of Luke’s most beautiful poems. Let us read it together – on page 11 of APBA.

Simeon is the one who holds the Christ Child. Simeon is not a priest, he is what we would call a ‘layman’. Why is sit that the Christ Child should be presented to a layman. Very profound stuff here! Saint Luke says of him that he was ‘righteous and devout’. What role did he have in the cult of the Temple ? We do not know, but he was obviously there on that day at the will of God for this purpose.

The eighty-four year old prophetess Anna whose name means ‘Grace’, ‘Favour’, daughter of Phanuel of the Tribe of Asher, symbolising the patient waiting for the Lord.

By holding together these two old people St Luke seems to be saying that God needs, requires, desires, in fact demands the unity of the masculine and the feminine in his plan for the salvation of the world. Remember Elizabeth and Zechariah ? Man and woman have the same gifts and the same measure of responsibility before God. Joseph holding in his hands two young pigeons which seem to be willing sacrifices. And Mary. Theotokos. She who bears God to the world.

The Old Testament – the Pentateuch, the history books, the prophecies, the wisdom literature are equally grist to the mill with the earliest Christian authors for Luke. All hold reference to the Presentation. Which is beyond human understanding.

Today, once more we are caught up in the “Never Ending Story”. Not simply narrative, but proclamation of the Good news that “nothing in the entire universe will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

The Conversion of Saint Paul

29^th January 2006

The village of Gish in Northern Galilee lies on the Via Maris – The Way of the Sea on the ancient trade route from Egypt Damascus and thence to Mesopotamia. At the time of the Exodus God’s Yahweh told Moses not to go that way, so they stumbled their way around Sinai and the Wilderness of Tzin and settled at Jabesh Gilead for 38 years where they seem to have forgotten everything Moses had ever taught them. Gish today is Christian Arab territory, the people predominantly Maronite. [I had the privilege of painting an Icon of St Maroun for the Church there in 1996]. Not far away lie the ruins of the first century city of Gamla where Josephus the Jewish General fell off his horse in battle and rather than commit suicide like his fellow officers, defected to the Roman Legion and went on (as you well know) to be the great historian of the Jewish people, name change and all - Flavius Josephus. Gamla is a magic place with steep cliffs where eagles, kites and vultures soar as easily as 21^st century para-gliders. There are Dolmens there, strange pre-historic stone altar-like edifices which mark the entrance to the Underworld, like Hawthorn bushes, so it is said. Graves? Altars of sacrifice? Who knows.

Nearby, on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus is the Crusader fortress known as Nimrod’s Castle. Further up the road is Druze country where men wear baggy trousers like oversized babies napkins, designed to catch their Messiah whom the prophets say will be born of a man.

The locals say that the man we know as ‘Saul of Tarsus’ was in fact born in the village of Gish and it is here that, on his way to persecute the early Christian Church he, like Josephus fell off his horse at the sight and sound of the true Messiah – Christ.

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” “Who are you, Lord?” [Every Jew answers a question by asking another question, as you know.] “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting”. I AM. The first of his seven great post resurrection “I AM’s”. (Do you remember the seven great “ I AM’s”of the Gospels? [The Door. The True Vine. The Good Shepherd. The Light of the Cosmos. The Bread of Life. The Resurrection and the Life. The Way the Truth the Life.]

Saul is led blind into Damascus to the house of Judas where a disciple, Ananias by name laid hands upon him healed him and baptized him. [Luke records this conversion in Acts Chapter 9] Paul himself tells his own story but does not speak of the ‘Damascus road’ experience Galatians 2 v 13 + It is certainly worth reading both passages and comparing them. Paul himself speaks of his early ministry not in terms of weeks but in terms of years, first his three years in Syria and Cilicia where not even the disciples knew who he was and then fourteen years later when he went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus. In this passage (Gal 2 v 4) we have the seeds of the earliest division in the Church. As a result of this Peter James and John were to be apostles to those under the Law and Paul and Barnabas Apostles to the Gentiles. Nasty stuff, insincere disciples, much bad feeling between Peter and Paul. Do read it.

Here in contrast with what Luke writes, that Saul went immediately to preach the Gospel, Paul himself gives himself three years of theological reflection and fourteen years before he meets up with those who had known Jesus from the beginning – Peter James and John to whom he refers “reputed to be pillars of the Church”. He also refers to Jesus own brother James of whom he says Peter was afraid. Read Galatians 2 v 14 where Paul accuses them all of hypocrisy.

What’s new in the Church ???

Now, who is this Saul of Tarsus who has become the Apostle Paul. Saint Paul. First he must have been a man of some influence and substance to demand of the High Priest letters to give him the authority to persecute the Christians of Damascus. Had he in fact known Jesus. Almost every scholar I have read says ‘No, he never knew Jesus; no he never saw Jesus.” We will look at that in a moment.

Paul is by his own voice a Pharisee born into the tribe of Benjamin. He is also a tentmaker. He is the person responsible for the stoning to death of Stephen the first Christian martyr. He is the person obviously known to the High Priest for he goes to him and asks for letters to persecute the Damascene Christians. Why would the High Priest send a scholarly Pharisee to Damascus anyway. Unless of course that scholarly Pharisee were a high ranking policeman with trade friends amongst the Roman Quartermasters.

“Who are you Lord? “I am Jesus (remember me? In the Garden of Gethsemane?).Surprise surprise? No shock. Horror. No wonder the sight of Jesus “whom you are persecuting” blinded him and left him with a sight impairment for the rest of his life too. No wonder he did not want to see anyone for three years. No wonder he did not want to confront Peter James and John for seventeen years.

As we consider these things another question arises. Why would the Jerusalem priests want to kill him and why, he being a devout Pharisee would appeal to Caesar for Justice unless he really understood first hand what had happened to Jesus when He was brought before the Court of Rome under Pontius Pilate.

And here is a puzzlement. Most scholars say that Paul had never seen Jesus in his lifetime. But what does Paul himself say about this? ? “Yes even though we have known Christ ‘after the flesh –ei kai egnokamen kata sarka - 2 Cor 5 v 16 – yet from here on we know him no more. (my own translation). Or as the RSV puts it – “even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view we regard him thus no longer”. Ambiguous but do think about it. This mysterious passage says to me that the words “after the flesh” mean, or at least imply that Saul had actually known Jesus before the death-resurrection.

Why on earth would the High Priest being an aristocratic Sadducee possibly have anything to do with a Pharisee unless of course this particular Pharisee held some position of authority in Judaism, such as e.g the role of Inspector of Police. In which case was Saul of Tarsus there in the Garden of Gethsemane when the ‘temple police’ arrested Jesus. As we consider his role in the martyrdom of Stephen it is possible. Tentmaker? Of what material were tents of the 1^st c AD made? Animal hides. Particularly sheep skins. As at the present day when all Bedouin tents are made of sheep skin walls and goat hair roofs. At the time of Jesus 20,000 sheep were slaughtered at the Feast of Passover alone. That’s a fair trade in tents. And who would have been the largest purchaser of such tents? The Romans.

You have hard me say (many times) that everything in the whole of creation evolves. That includes holy scripture. Matthew’s Gospel written “some time before 70AD” gives us an account of the Last Supper with the words of institution. (Matt 26 v 26) Mark, written about 55AD gives us an abbreviated form (Mk14 v 22. Luke, written 59-63AD (Lk 22 v 19) gives us two cups the first after Grace and the second after the supper itself. John does not mention the Institution at all. He is writing his gospel to those who were living the Eucharistic life and therefore were well acquainted with the words of Institution.

Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians at the end of his stay in Ephesus, that is about 55AD. Admonishing the Corinthians for disparaging the Lord’s Supper. So he is writing IN the history of the Eucharist, not ABOUT it.

Yet Paul is not a bit concerned about the birth, life and ministry of the Lord. He tells it as it has been revealed to him by Christ. When was that ? As we seriously consider the evolution of scripture, Paul’s ‘revelation’ seems to have been granted before any of the Gospels were in fact written down.. Which raises for me the question, ‘did the evangelists have access to Paul’s manuscripts?” Pure conjecture you say? That’s OK by me. My desire is to encourage you to study the scriptures for yourselves and critically examine all the events literally, morally, allegorically and spiritually.

All this of course raises the question about the nature of Paul’s Conversion and what the Lord actually revealed to him. In an instant or over a period of time.[It is said that a drowning person ‘sees’ their entire life in a moment of time].

For me, the Conversion of Saul of Tarsus was (as it were) the end of a whole host of incidents that led up to it – Saul the Temple Inspector of Police with direct personal access to the High Priest. Saul with the Temple Police at the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Saul, Stephen’s executioner listening to the martyrs recitation of God’s plan for salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Saul persecutor of the early Christians suddenly confronted with the Truth. And having the humility to ‘repent’.

From his own words we learn that after his sight had been restored he took himself off to Arabia (Petra?) for three years and then, went about his own ministry for fourteen years before he even met with Peter James and John. From this we learn of the need for us all, after every traumatic, dramatic or novel occasion in our own lives to withdraw in order to reflect on what is really happening. For that is what it is about. Not “What’s going on here”, but “what is really happening”. We are to live lives of reflection, not ‘action and reaction’ as is happening in Jerusalem right now. Nothing is to be gained by unthought reaction.

From Paul we learn many wonderful and exciting things. (1) this life is not simply a preparation for a better life. Paul recognised his own need to be faithful in this life.

(2) The Lord who calls us by our baptism is himself faithful. He will never forsake us.

(3) If Christ is not raised from the dead then we, of all people are the most to be pitied. But he is persuaded that “nothing in the entire universe is able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

4. If we truly live the life of Christ then we will be persecuted for it. From the life of Christ I learn that everything in my life that is good and true and noble and just will be crucified. Everything in my life that is good and true and noble and just will be raised up on the last day.

Paul’s majestic poetry – in Corinthians, in Galatians, in Ephesians in Philippians is written “for our learning”- about the life that ended in his own martyrdom. Yet he can say in his last letter to Timothy (2 Tim 4 v 7), “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord the righteous judge will give m on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearing”.

Epiphany 3 - God’s Environment

22^nd January 2006

Jonah 3 v 10 “And when God saw that they repented of their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.”

On Monday morning of last week, just as Anne and her friend Jennifer were leaving for their usual Monday morning walk around Blackburn Lake, two people a man and a woman walked into our front garden. Both carried brief cases and both looked like Jehovah’s Witnesses, which of course they were. I was dressed in a pair of old shorts and a Jerusalem Tee shirt and I was in the midst of pruning rose bushes. They introduced themselves by their ‘Christian’ names and I gave them mine. They said they had come to talk with me about an important matter and I replied by saying, “I guess your important matter is religion” to which they agreed. I then said, “I must tell you, ‘I am an Anglican bishop; I am a professional minister of religion and though I respect your views and your right to hold those views, I do not agree with them – you are Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t you? To which they replied “yes” – I simply cannot agree with you.

We talked on for a bit and they told me that according to the Book of Revelation God was soon to gather up his elect (and I gathered I was not going to be numbered among them), God was going to go to war at Armageddon and all the evil people who did not subscribe to their doctrine would be gathered up and burned in the Lake of fire.

I asked them if they had ever been to Armageddon to which they replied Armageddon was not a place but an event in God’s time. Now I told them that I go regularly to Armageddon – Tel Megiddo Har Meggido in the Jezreel Valley and that it is a mystical place, and like John’s Apocalypse is Poetic. Imaginary. Mythical.

How sad that people still believe in a destructive, capricious, vengeful god

No sooner had the God of the Hebrew Scriptures created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them than he, in the days of Noah wiped it all out. He destroyed his creation by flood because of the evil in the world. Things settle down for a while and then in the days of Abraham God’s Yahweh comes down to have a look at all the baddies in Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham argues with him and because in the end he can’t find five honest men God wipes them off the face of the earth.

Then in the days of Moses he drowns the armies of Egypt’s Pharaoh in the Red Sea.

He liberates the Israelites and leads them out into the wilderness for forty years because he cant trust them. In fact at one stage he tells Moses “I am sick and tired of this grumbling mass of humanity; I will destroy them and make of you a great nation”. Moses argues with Yahweh and he relents.

Next God’s Yahweh leads Joshua across the Jordan River into the Land of the Canaanites the Jebusites the Amonites the Hivites the Hittites the Girgashites the Amorites (and the Vegemites) and under direct orders from the Almighty Joshua perpetrates the first holocaust, killing all the men women and children, all beasts and cattle – everything. There is no-one to argue with God over this. Ethnic cleansing.

We move then to the time of the Kings and to God’s hatred of the Philistines. “Wipe them out” cries God.

Then Ezra comes on the scene and under God’s instruction commands the Israelite men to put away their ‘foreign wives’ – racism at its best as the ‘foreign wives and their children’ are sent away in the pouring rain.

Then Job. And the capricious God sends the powers of nature and God’s own enemies to wipe out Job’s family and all that he has in order to win a bet he had placed with Satan.

God, so it seems cares little or nothing for his natural environment or for the human beings he put in charge of it – “subdue the earth…..conquer the planet!!! Use the natural resources of the earth indiscriminately. Man sits over and above the natural environment and is its master.

This theology ruled for countless centuries. Until Jonah. And in the book of Jonah we discover God has moved in hit own thinking about his creation to the point where he actually cares for it – human beings, cattle and even a choko bush.

So we come to Jonah whom God calls to go to Nineveh to tell them “In three days I’m going to destroy the lot of you.” But this time they repent. Here we have communal repentance for the first time. We have witnessed individuals repenting such as David who after that marvellous dialog with Nathan the Prophet is able to say, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nevertheless God lets the little boy die for the sin of his Father and Bath Sheba.

It seems as though God is himself evolving in his awareness of the sacredness of what he has created. Has God had an epiphany? Heresy ? maybe, but it does raise for me the serious and exciting question of ‘The Evolution of Consciousness”.

Does God simply watch unmoved as we, his human creation simply destroys God’s Creation, the natural environment of earth. Or is it inconsequential in the context of the vastness of the cosmos. It wasn’t inconsequential the last time. Last time God stepped into his creation himself and redeemed humanity in the Cross- Resurrection. The Cross-Resurrection however is not simply an event in history, it is the daily experience of God in God’s relation to his creation. On-going.

And it seems to me and there are many pointers to uphold this view, that man, humanity, anthropos is on the way to self-destruction. We have the capacity to destroy what God has redeemed – the whole of creation.

Again it seems to me that as Scripture unfolds notions of human consciousness evolve. Knowledge evolves incrementally. Little by little human consciousness is confronted by mystery. Mystery (as you may have heard me say) is not “that which is hidden” but “That which has yet to be revealed.” Little by little we discover God’s mind for God’s creation.

There is a great question here (for me). Is there a great body of knowledge in the all-knowing mind of the omnipotent God that God releases a little bit at a time? I mean is there somewhere in God’s cyberspace the knowledge of everything that IS. Is it that God chooses to release it a little bit at t time, in accordance with humanity’s ability to receive it and understand it and use it or abuse it.

As I look at my own computer and the ‘world wide web’, and as I plug into it,(the www) it seems to me that almost, if not everything that human beings have ever learned or know about is accessible in cyberspace. But ‘What or Where is cyberspace?.” Is this knowledge finite or does God add to it as God Himself ‘discovers’ more and more about Gods-self. As I interrogate Scripture it seems to me that this is a distinct possibility. And very very exciting.

In Genesis God creates. Then God, incapable of comprehending what he has done, destroys his creation. He sees everything that he has made to be good yet he curses it.

Scripture unfolds in this way until the Book of Job where God seems to have come to some kind of revelation about his own nature. Then comes the Book of Jonah when God Himself ‘repents of the evil that he would have done, and he does not do it’. What a revelation that is. God suddenly comes to his own senses and chooses not to destroy the Ninevites and their sack-cloth covered blankets. God even rebukes Jonah for not having compassion on the choko vine.

Scripture continues to evolve. God’s original edict to humanity “dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” is turned on its head in the Resurrection of Christ. We are now, after all, not destined for oblivion, but for new life in God Himself. What is this ‘final’ revelation. Is this ‘final’ revelation actually ‘final’ or is there something else beyond our wildest imagination set in the future as God discovers more and more about his own nature. Of course the Church has taught that this is IT. So the Church teaches us to dismiss any other revelation.

What is IT ? Ah, there is the mystery.

The Church has decreed (maybe even invented) dogmas to satisfy the faithful. But what if these ‘dogmas’ turn out to be provisional? What if they even turn out in the long run to be disputable or even false (as Article 19 of the Articles of the Church of England suggests - “As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” Wow!! Only the C of E is right ! After all. What arrogance. As though Revelation concluded with the English Reformation.

Whilst there is a little ‘tongue in cheek’ about that, there is nevertheless a great seriousness about it to be considered. Wrong? Or incomplete.

It is my opinion (not ‘credo) that revelation is not complete. God has yet many wonderful things to reveal to us about Gods-self. And maybe, even God has more to learn about His creation also.

In the last Book of our Bible in the Apocalypse which we know as The Revelation to John God says to the angels to whom in the beginning of creation he had given power over the natural order, “do not hurt the earth or the seas or the trees till we have sealed the servants of our God upon their foreheads”.

Here in the end of Revelation God seems to have discovered something new about the creation which he had, once upon a time given to humanity to do with whatever men chose to do with it. God calls us now to an awareness that every one, everything in creation is interdependent. Destroy the earth and you destroy yourselves. Omnipotence and omniscience are both fictions. Everyone, even God is vulnerable (as the Cross informs us) Because Christ is revealed as the “Light of the Cosmos” every single person is responsible for the sanctity of the cosmos.

The Old Testament notion that man stands above the rest of the created order is a heresy. If we are not able to understand the rhythms of the cosmos, the ecology, the natural order, if we continue to pollute the creation, then we are doomed. In the face of global worming and its corollary (as we observe in Russia today) global freezing, we simply cannot afford to support those who continue to abuse the natural order. Now can we wait until some fictitious time when clever people will discover new ways of running our motor vehicles or warming our bodies or freezing our sausage rolls. We must co-operate with God who (so it seems to me) is trying to tell us something about what He Himself has learned - God is holy; we are holy and so it the entire cosmos..

Epiphany 2

15^th January 2006

St John 1 43 – 51

To exegete this marvellous, mystical passage which is the Gospel for today’s liturgy, let me take you back to the Book Genesis Chapter 28 and the narrative of the trickster Jacob who is about to get his comeuppance for swindling his twin brother Esau, but who in search of a wife, comes one evening as the sun was setting to a ‘certain place’ {Whenever we read of a ‘certain place’ we can be assured we are about to enter the realm of mythology. Like “once upon a time” as the Book of Genesis begins, as the Book of Job begins… as the gospel of John begins….”

Jacob comes to that place the place which Indigenous Australians would call “the Place of the Dreaming”. He finds a large stone and sets it down as a pillow upon which to rest his head. Here the narrator again confronts us with myth. This is the ‘mythical stone’ upon which the kings and queens of England and Scotland have sat to be crowned. So it is said.

Jacob lies down to sleep with thoughts of his god in a far away land. This is his Dreaming (as our aboriginal friends would say) and in his dreaming he sees a ladder set up from his stone pillow on the earth to the heavens above, with angels ascending and descending. He wakes from sleep to say, “Truly God is in this place. What a revelation. His god is not simply a tribal god watching over and influencing his own tribe, God is everywhere, even in this Dreaming Stone. He calls the place Beth-El – ‘House of God’

We move forward in our story to Genesis 32 verse 22ff. Jacob leaves the house of his father-in-law Laban and sets out to establish his own fame. He and L aban mark their boundaries beyond which each of them promises never to move. Then we come to the night before Jacob is to meet Esau. Jacob sends all his Tribe , all his herdsmen and shepherds, all his wives and children across the River Jabbok .

We are not told whether or not he fell asleep, but a man comes and wrestles with him until the morning light. In fact Jacob encounters God who wounds him, and Jacob prevails. He is given a new revelation and a new name. He is no longer Jacob the trickster, he is Israel, which means
”He struggles with God”.

Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan river. John declares his cousin to be “the Lamb of god who takes away the sin of the world”. Ione of John’s disciples, Andrew leaves his master and comes to Jesus as the Lord’s first disciple. Andrew then goes home to Bethsaida (the House of the fishermen) andbrings his brother Simon to Jesus. When Jesus sees Simon he says, “so you are Simon, from now on I’m going to call you Peter.”

Then Andrew sets out to find another prospective convert to the new rabbi – Nathanael, highly intelligent, scholarly mystic and, one might add, cynic (in the classical sense). “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote about in the Torah, and about whom the prophets also write, Jesus from Nazareth, the son of Joseph”. “Nazareth!” replies Nathanael, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”. Of course not, for Nazareth is not mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew scriptures. No-one from Nazareth could possibly bring Good News, nothing from Nazareth could possibly fulfil the hopes of Israel.

Not to be deterred, Andrew says , “Well, come and see for yourself”.

As they approached Jesus, the Lord said, “Well, Here indeed is an Israelite in whom there is no more Jacob”.

How do you know me?” asks Nathanael. “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree I saw you.” “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the king of Israel”.

Because I said I saw you under the fig tree you believe? You shall see greater things than this. You shall see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man”.

Hers indeed is one of the most powerfully mystical passages of the great mystical gospel of John. Jesus ‘sees’ Nathanael. He ‘sees’ into his mind. He knows that Nathanael under the fig tree is meditating upon the passage of what we call the book Genesis, of Jacob and the Dreaming Stone and of the passage where Jacob wrestles the angel of God and becomes what God always knew he would be, the Father of many tribes, the first to realise that God is not simply a tribal neighbourhood deity but Lord of the Universe.

Beth-el is a mystical place, one of those places which, when one has been there and experienced something of the ‘Other’ one is convinced that the “Other Place” as C.S. Lewis knew it in his beautiful allegorical narrative of Narnia “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” lies just beyond the back of the wardrobe. And the childlike in heart have access to that place where it is possible to live out a whole lifetime in a moment.

Nathanael knew that, and Jesus know that Nathanael knew it too.

What then do we derive from this encounter of Nathanael and Jesus in today’s gospel? For myself the assurance that whenever we fall to meditation we fall into the hands of the Living God, the One who knows us, who ‘sees’ into our hearts and minds and who knows that we are capable of far more than we can ever imagine.

Hers in this account we have another tale of a name-change. In the list of the Apostles of Christ we have one Bartholomew – an Egyptian name – Bar-Ptolomey, most probably an Alexandrine Jew of the Diaspora as he apapears in the list of Apostles in the other three Gospels. Here his name is revealed to us as Nathan-El. Like Jacob whom we know now as Israel. .

Who could possibly have believed that Jacob who had been a trickster, a crook, a thief from his mother’s womb the one who stole his brother’s birthright and his brothers blessing would be what he ended up being – the One who struggled (wrestled) with God and prevailed. God does not want us meekly to accept what ‘fate’ hands out to us in our baser nature, God expects that we too like Nathanael, should struggle with God in the Scriptures and prevail and become what God always intended we should be.

The words of the prophet Samuel find their echo here in this ancient Dreaming Story - “God does not see as humans see.” God sees our potential as Children of God, not as humans see – crooks and thieves and tricksters.

Baptism of Christ

8th January 2006

As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the spirit descending on him like a dove…….”

As I read in the newspaper of the de-classification of documents relating to the diaries of Winston Churchill’s private secretary, I was moved to go to my library shelves and read some of my own early diary entries. How interesting it is, not only to re-read stuff that one had written so long ago, but also to remember stuff that one had long forgotten.

My own diaries for many years have taken the form of Sketch Books with added notes.

One particular diary entry was written on the beach at Bali. I had gone there as one of three Australian delegates to the first Asian Christian Art Association. That day I was sitting under a thatched roof of a hut in company with my friend Albert Moor Professor of Religious Studies, Otago University, New Zealand and an Indonesian artist, Dhoti. Dhoti was telling us how the Balinese feared the water and how they could not understand how so many foreigners came to Bali to swim in the sea. To them the waters of the sea were the place of evil. The monsters of the deep dwelt there. Fishermen must placate the waters before launching out to gain their daily catch, by placing flowers and lighted candles on small rafts to drive away the evil spirits.

How right they were – the Boxing Day tsunami…..

We engaged in a serous discussion about what the bible had to say about water. In the beginning God separated the waters above the firmament from the waters below the firmament. God drew the created order out of the Chaos of the dark waters and for the Hebrews the “waters below the firmament” were the dwelling place of the ‘monsters of the deep’. “Save me O Lord for the waters have come up to my neck” of [Psalm 69 verse 1]. “There is that Leviathan..” The place of the crocodile and the hippopotamus of Egyptian mythology. All life is drawn out of the waters of creation according to Hebrew mythology…. This also is a fact of life.

The traditional stories, and the art that underpins those stories not only of our own Judeo Christian scriptures relate to conditions of life and enable people to adapt to the inner life of their own external environment.

So it is with the icon of the Baptism of Christ that attaches to this sermon. The physical landscape depicted here, like the landscape which we personally inhabit is also the topography of our inner life.

Deep down within the peaceful environment of our lives is the agent of chaos, depicted here by the little guy at the feet of Jesus, seen emptying his jar of dark waters into the clear waters of the River Jordan.

Jesus is up to his neck in watery chaos.

This is true for all of us who are called to live out the Baptized life, we live in the atmosphere of creation but also of chaos. In what Rowan Williams describes as “the neighbourhood of God”. In Baptism we are identified with Christ’s creative life and his chaotic life. It is not all beer and skittles! It is over the chaos of life that God in Christ addresses us, call us into our vocation and into our ministry. Jesus deliberately steps into that life. You will note that in our icon, St John the Baptist does not stand in the waters, he stands on the margins, on the bank of the Jordan. So do the adoring angels. Jesus is contaminated by the chaos, by the darkness of this world and indeed, as the scriptures tell us, he spends most of his time in the company of those whose lives are also contaminated by weakness, illness, madness, dis-ease and death. That is his destiny, to be identified with the agents of the darkness of this world the prostitutes, the tax-collectors, the lepers, indeed with those whom the world most despises. In this – his commitment to Baptism “Suffer it thus far…” he accepts the gone-wrong-ness of the world, the contamination of the natural order in order to be open to the Spirit.

Two weeks ago, at Christmas e were confronted sith the vulnerability of the Son of God who chose to become one with us as a baby, totally dependant upon the will of others. As we contemplate his Baptism we are confronted again with the vulnerability of the Son of God in his nakedness in the Jordan River. Was there a crowd of people there? We can hardly imagine John the Baptist without a crowd. A crowd of ‘gawkers’, just as there was a crowd of ‘gawkers’ ridiculing the naked Christ on Calvary’s Cross – “He saved others he cannot save himself.” Such is God’s vulnerability..

In our own Baptism where we were “buried with Christ….in order to share his Resurrection” and we share his vulnerability. We are cast into his ministry to those most contaminated by the sin of the world. “Forasmuch as you have done it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you have done it to me.” As time unfolds it will become dangerous for people to be followers of Christ, just as it was in the first centuries of Christianity. We must learn to accept our vulnerability as disciples and get on with our discipleship, like him, up to our neck in the contamination of the world, remembering that in the end there is a Judgment of Good News.

Did you notice in the version of today’s text that Jesus saw the heavens “torn open”, not simply ‘open’ but deliberately torn. Like the veil of the Temple at his death – “Torn in two from top to bottom” – from heaven to earth (in the language of myth).

In the mythical language of indigenous Australia we observe the same elements. Every living creature has its own mystical life and language, waterholes are holy places, mountains and valleys are the creatures of Rainbow Serpents’ creating. Every person his or her own ‘augud’ (totem), his or her own ‘dreaming’ and the narrative stories of these ‘dreamings’ are told, sung about and danced out in corroboree and by such the myth of the tribe is actualized. In the same way, the myth of our tribe is narrated, sung out and danced out in our own corroboree – the liturgy of the Eucharist in which the myth of our Tribe – Christianity – is made real in present time.

So in the icon of Christ’s Baptism we may read the story, we may sing the songs, we may dance the dance of life, re-creating ourselves by the Holy Spirit in the mystery of Resurrected Life.

Not for nothing then, as the ancient Hebrew myth of birth reminds us, does the Angel who sends us into this world lay her finger upon our lips (to leave that dimple between lip and nose) and whisper –“Sshhhhh” .

The Conversion of Saint Paul

29^th January 2006

The village of Gish in Northern Galilee lies on the Via Maris – The Way of the Sea on the ancient trade route from Egypt Damascus and thence to Mesopotamia. At the time of the Exodus God’s Yahweh told Moses not to go that way, so they stumbled their way around Sinai and the Wilderness of Tzin and settled at Jabesh Gilead for 38 years where they seem to have forgotten everything Moses had ever taught them. Gish today is Christian Arab territory, the people predominantly Maronite. [I had the privilege of painting an Icon of St Maroun for the Church there in 1996]. Not far away lie the ruins of the first century city of Gamla where Josephus the Jewish General fell off his horse in battle and rather than commit suicide like his fellow officers, defected to the Roman Legion and went on (as you well know) to be the great historian of the Jewish people, name change and all - Flavius Josephus. Gamla is a magic place with steep cliffs where eagles, kites and vultures soar as easily as 21^st century para-gliders. There are Dolmens there, strange pre-historic stone altar-like edifices which mark the entrance to the Underworld, like Hawthorn bushes, so it is said. Graves? Altars of sacrifice? Who knows.

Nearby, on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus is the Crusader fortress known as Nimrod’s Castle. Further up the road is Druze country where men wear baggy trousers like oversized babies napkins, designed to catch their Messiah whom the prophets say will be born of a man.

The locals say that the man we know as ‘Saul of Tarsus’ was in fact born in the village of Gish and it is here that, on his way to persecute the early Christian Church he, like Josephus fell off his horse at the sight and sound of the true Messiah – Christ.

“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” “Who are you, Lord?” [Every Jew answers a question by asking another question, as you know.] “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting”. I AM. The first of his seven great post resurrection “I AM’s”. (Do you remember the seven great “ I AM’s”of the Gospels? [The Door. The True Vine. The Good Shepherd. The Light of the Cosmos. The Bread of Life. The Resurrection and the Life. The Way the Truth the Life.]

Saul is led blind into Damascus to the house of Judas where a disciple, Ananias by name laid hands upon him healed him and baptized him. [Luke records this conversion in Acts Chapter 9] Paul himself tells his own story but does not speak of the ‘Damascus road’ experience Galatians 2 v 13 + It is certainly worth reading both passages and comparing them. Paul himself speaks of his early ministry not in terms of weeks but in terms of years, first his three years in Syria and Cilicia where not even the disciples knew who he was and then fourteen years later when he went up to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus. In this passage (Gal 2 v 4) we have the seeds of the earliest division in the Church. As a result of this Peter James and John were to be apostles to those under the Law and Paul and Barnabas Apostles to the Gentiles. Nasty stuff, insincere disciples, much bad feeling between Peter and Paul. Do read it.

Here in contrast with what Luke writes, that Saul went immediately to preach the Gospel, Paul himself gives himself three years of theological reflection and fourteen years before he meets up with those who had known Jesus from the beginning – Peter James and John to whom he refers “reputed to be pillars of the Church”. He also refers to Jesus own brother James of whom he says Peter was afraid. Read Galatians 2 v 14 where Paul accuses them all of hypocrisy.

What’s new in the Church ???

Now, who is this Saul of Tarsus who has become the Apostle Paul. Saint Paul. First he must have been a man of some influence and substance to demand of the High Priest letters to give him the authority to persecute the Christians of Damascus. Had he in fact known Jesus. Almost every scholar I have read says ‘No, he never knew Jesus; no he never saw Jesus.” We will look at that in a moment.

Paul is by his own voice a Pharisee born into the tribe of Benjamin. He is also a tentmaker. He is the person responsible for the stoning to death of Stephen the first Christian martyr. He is the person obviously known to the High Priest for he goes to him and asks for letters to persecute the Damascene Christians. Why would the High Priest send a scholarly Pharisee to Damascus anyway. Unless of course that scholarly Pharisee were a high ranking policeman with trade friends amongst the Roman Quartermasters.

“Who are you Lord? “I am Jesus (remember me? In the Garden of Gethsemane?).Surprise surprise? No shock. Horror. No wonder the sight of Jesus “whom you are persecuting” blinded him and left him with a sight impairment for the rest of his life too. No wonder he did not want to see anyone for three years. No wonder he did not want to confront Peter James and John for seventeen years.

As we consider these things another question arises. Why would the Jerusalem priests want to kill him and why, he being a devout Pharisee would appeal to Caesar for Justice unless he really understood first hand what had happened to Jesus when He was brought before the Court of Rome under Pontius Pilate.

And here is a puzzlement. Most scholars say that Paul had never seen Jesus in his lifetime. But what does Paul himself say about this? ? “Yes even though we have known Christ ‘after the flesh –ei kai egnokamen kata sarka - 2 Cor 5 v 16 – yet from here on we know him no more. (my own translation). Or as the RSV puts it – “even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view we regard him thus no longer”. Ambiguous but do think about it. This mysterious passage says to me that the words “after the flesh” mean, or at least imply that Saul had actually known Jesus before the death-resurrection.

Why on earth would the High Priest being an aristocratic Sadducee possibly have anything to do with a Pharisee unless of course this particular Pharisee held some position of authority in Judaism, such as e.g the role of Inspector of Police. In which case was Saul of Tarsus there in the Garden of Gethsemane when the ‘temple police’ arrested Jesus. As we consider his role in the martyrdom of Stephen it is possible. Tentmaker? Of what material were tents of the 1^st c AD made? Animal hides. Particularly sheep skins. As at the present day when all Bedouin tents are made of sheep skin walls and goat hair roofs. At the time of Jesus 20,000 sheep were slaughtered at the Feast of Passover alone. That’s a fair trade in tents. And who would have been the largest purchaser of such tents? The Romans.

You have hard me say (many times) that everything in the whole of creation evolves. That includes holy scripture. Matthew’s Gospel written “some time before 70AD” gives us an account of the Last Supper with the words of institution. (Matt 26 v 26) Mark, written about 55AD gives us an abbreviated form (Mk14 v 22. Luke, written 59-63AD (Lk 22 v 19) gives us two cups the first after Grace and the second after the supper itself. John does not mention the Institution at all. He is writing his gospel to those who were living the Eucharistic life and therefore were well acquainted with the words of Institution.

Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians at the end of his stay in Ephesus, that is about 55AD. Admonishing the Corinthians for disparaging the Lord’s Supper. So he is writing IN the history of the Eucharist, not ABOUT it.

Yet Paul is not a bit concerned about the birth, life and ministry of the Lord. He tells it as it has been revealed to him by Christ. When was that ? As we seriously consider the evolution of scripture, Paul’s ‘revelation’ seems to have been granted before any of the Gospels were in fact written down.. Which raises for me the question, ‘did the evangelists have access to Paul’s manuscripts?” Pure conjecture you say? That’s OK by me. My desire is to encourage you to study the scriptures for yourselves and critically examine all the events literally, morally, allegorically and spiritually.

All this of course raises the question about the nature of Paul’s Conversion and what the Lord actually revealed to him. In an instant or over a period of time.[It is said that a drowning person ‘sees’ their entire life in a moment of time].

For me, the Conversion of Saul of Tarsus was (as it were) the end of a whole host of incidents that led up to it – Saul the Temple Inspector of Police with direct personal access to the High Priest. Saul with the Temple Police at the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Saul, Stephen’s executioner listening to the martyrs recitation of God’s plan for salvation through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Saul persecutor of the early Christians suddenly confronted with the Truth. And having the humility to ‘repent’.

From his own words we learn that after his sight had been restored he took himself off to Arabia (Petra?) for three years and then, went about his own ministry for fourteen years before he even met with Peter James and John. From this we learn of the need for us all, after every traumatic, dramatic or novel occasion in our own lives to withdraw in order to reflect on what is really happening. For that is what it is about. Not “What’s going on here”, but “what is really happening”. We are to live lives of reflection, not ‘action and reaction’ as is happening in Jerusalem right now. Nothing is to be gained by unthought reaction.

From Paul we learn many wonderful and exciting things. (1) this life is not simply a preparation for a better life. Paul recognised his own need to be faithful in this life.

(2) The Lord who calls us by our baptism is himself faithful. He will never forsake us.

(3) If Christ is not raised from the dead then we, of all people are the most to be pitied. But he is persuaded that “nothing in the entire universe is able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

4. If we truly live the life of Christ then we will be persecuted for it. From the life of Christ I learn that everything in my life that is good and true and noble and just will be crucified. Everything in my life that is good and true and noble and just will be raised up on the last day.

Paul’s majestic poetry – in Corinthians, in Galatians, in Ephesians in Philippians is written “for our learning”- about the life that ended in his own martyrdom. Yet he can say in his last letter to Timothy (2 Tim 4 v 7), “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness which the Lord the righteous judge will give m on that day, and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearing”.

Epiphany 3 - God’s Environment

22^nd January 2006

Jonah 3 v 10 “And when God saw that they repented of their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.”

On Monday morning of last week, just as Anne and her friend Jennifer were leaving for their usual Monday morning walk around Blackburn Lake, two people a man and a woman walked into our front garden. Both carried brief cases and both looked like Jehovah’s Witnesses, which of course they were. I was dressed in a pair of old shorts and a Jerusalem Tee shirt and I was in the midst of pruning rose bushes. They introduced themselves by their ‘Christian’ names and I gave them mine. They said they had come to talk with me about an important matter and I replied by saying, “I guess your important matter is religion” to which they agreed. I then said, “I must tell you, ‘I am an Anglican bishop; I am a professional minister of religion and though I respect your views and your right to hold those views, I do not agree with them – you are Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t you? To which they replied “yes” – I simply cannot agree with you.

We talked on for a bit and they told me that according to the Book of Revelation God was soon to gather up his elect (and I gathered I was not going to be numbered among them), God was going to go to war at Armageddon and all the evil people who did not subscribe to their doctrine would be gathered up and burned in the Lake of fire.

I asked them if they had ever been to Armageddon to which they replied Armageddon was not a place but an event in God’s time. Now I told them that I go regularly to Armageddon – Tel Megiddo Har Meggido in the Jezreel Valley and that it is a mystical place, and like John’s Apocalypse is Poetic. Imaginary. Mythical.

How sad that people still believe in a destructive, capricious, vengeful god

No sooner had the God of the Hebrew Scriptures created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them than he, in the days of Noah wiped it all out. He destroyed his creation by flood because of the evil in the world. Things settle down for a while and then in the days of Abraham God’s Yahweh comes down to have a look at all the baddies in Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham argues with him and because in the end he can’t find five honest men God wipes them off the face of the earth.

Then in the days of Moses he drowns the armies of Egypt’s Pharaoh in the Red Sea.

He liberates the Israelites and leads them out into the wilderness for forty years because he cant trust them. In fact at one stage he tells Moses “I am sick and tired of this grumbling mass of humanity; I will destroy them and make of you a great nation”. Moses argues with Yahweh and he relents.

Next God’s Yahweh leads Joshua across the Jordan River into the Land of the Canaanites the Jebusites the Amonites the Hivites the Hittites the Girgashites the Amorites (and the Vegemites) and under direct orders from the Almighty Joshua perpetrates the first holocaust, killing all the men women and children, all beasts and cattle – everything. There is no-one to argue with God over this. Ethnic cleansing.

We move then to the time of the Kings and to God’s hatred of the Philistines. “Wipe them out” cries God.

Then Ezra comes on the scene and under God’s instruction commands the Israelite men to put away their ‘foreign wives’ – racism at its best as the ‘foreign wives and their children’ are sent away in the pouring rain.

Then Job. And the capricious God sends the powers of nature and God’s own enemies to wipe out Job’s family and all that he has in order to win a bet he had placed with Satan.

God, so it seems cares little or nothing for his natural environment or for the human beings he put in charge of it – “subdue the earth…..conquer the planet!!! Use the natural resources of the earth indiscriminately. Man sits over and above the natural environment and is its master.

This theology ruled for countless centuries. Until Jonah. And in the book of Jonah we discover God has moved in hit own thinking about his creation to the point where he actually cares for it – human beings, cattle and even a choko bush.

So we come to Jonah whom God calls to go to Nineveh to tell them “In three days I’m going to destroy the lot of you.” But this time they repent. Here we have communal repentance for the first time. We have witnessed individuals repenting such as David who after that marvellous dialog with Nathan the Prophet is able to say, “I have sinned against the Lord.” Nevertheless God lets the little boy die for the sin of his Father and Bath Sheba.

It seems as though God is himself evolving in his awareness of the sacredness of what he has created. Has God had an epiphany? Heresy ? maybe, but it does raise for me the serious and exciting question of ‘The Evolution of Consciousness”.

Does God simply watch unmoved as we, his human creation simply destroys God’s Creation, the natural environment of earth. Or is it inconsequential in the context of the vastness of the cosmos. It wasn’t inconsequential the last time. Last time God stepped into his creation himself and redeemed humanity in the Cross- Resurrection. The Cross-Resurrection however is not simply an event in history, it is the daily experience of God in God’s relation to his creation. On-going.

And it seems to me and there are many pointers to uphold this view, that man, humanity, anthropos is on the way to self-destruction. We have the capacity to destroy what God has redeemed – the whole of creation.

Again it seems to me that as Scripture unfolds notions of human consciousness evolve. Knowledge evolves incrementally. Little by little human consciousness is confronted by mystery. Mystery (as you may have heard me say) is not “that which is hidden” but “That which has yet to be revealed.” Little by little we discover God’s mind for God’s creation.

There is a great question here (for me). Is there a great body of knowledge in the all-knowing mind of the omnipotent God that God releases a little bit at a time? I mean is there somewhere in God’s cyberspace the knowledge of everything that IS. Is it that God chooses to release it a little bit at t time, in accordance with humanity’s ability to receive it and understand it and use it or abuse it.

As I look at my own computer and the ‘world wide web’, and as I plug into it,(the www) it seems to me that almost, if not everything that human beings have ever learned or know about is accessible in cyberspace. But ‘What or Where is cyberspace?.” Is this knowledge finite or does God add to it as God Himself ‘discovers’ more and more about Gods-self. As I interrogate Scripture it seems to me that this is a distinct possibility. And very very exciting.

In Genesis God creates. Then God, incapable of comprehending what he has done, destroys his creation. He sees everything that he has made to be good yet he curses it.

Scripture unfolds in this way until the Book of Job where God seems to have come to some kind of revelation about his own nature. Then comes the Book of Jonah when God Himself ‘repents of the evil that he would have done, and he does not do it’. What a revelation that is. God suddenly comes to his own senses and chooses not to destroy the Ninevites and their sack-cloth covered blankets. God even rebukes Jonah for not having compassion on the choko vine.

Scripture continues to evolve. God’s original edict to humanity “dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return” is turned on its head in the Resurrection of Christ. We are now, after all, not destined for oblivion, but for new life in God Himself. What is this ‘final’ revelation. Is this ‘final’ revelation actually ‘final’ or is there something else beyond our wildest imagination set in the future as God discovers more and more about his own nature. Of course the Church has taught that this is IT. So the Church teaches us to dismiss any other revelation.

What is IT ? Ah, there is the mystery.

The Church has decreed (maybe even invented) dogmas to satisfy the faithful. But what if these ‘dogmas’ turn out to be provisional? What if they even turn out in the long run to be disputable or even false (as Article 19 of the Articles of the Church of England suggests - “As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria and Antioch have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” Wow!! Only the C of E is right ! After all. What arrogance. As though Revelation concluded with the English Reformation.

Whilst there is a little ‘tongue in cheek’ about that, there is nevertheless a great seriousness about it to be considered. Wrong? Or incomplete.

It is my opinion (not ‘credo) that revelation is not complete. God has yet many wonderful things to reveal to us about Gods-self. And maybe, even God has more to learn about His creation also.

In the last Book of our Bible in the Apocalypse which we know as The Revelation to John God says to the angels to whom in the beginning of creation he had given power over the natural order, “do not hurt the earth or the seas or the trees till we have sealed the servants of our God upon their foreheads”.

Here in the end of Revelation God seems to have discovered something new about the creation which he had, once upon a time given to humanity to do with whatever men chose to do with it. God calls us now to an awareness that every one, everything in creation is interdependent. Destroy the earth and you destroy yourselves. Omnipotence and omniscience are both fictions. Everyone, even God is vulnerable (as the Cross informs us) Because Christ is revealed as the “Light of the Cosmos” every single person is responsible for the sanctity of the cosmos.

The Old Testament notion that man stands above the rest of the created order is a heresy. If we are not able to understand the rhythms of the cosmos, the ecology, the natural order, if we continue to pollute the creation, then we are doomed. In the face of global worming and its corollary (as we observe in Russia today) global freezing, we simply cannot afford to support those who continue to abuse the natural order. Now can we wait until some fictitious time when clever people will discover new ways of running our motor vehicles or warming our bodies or freezing our sausage rolls. We must co-operate with God who (so it seems to me) is trying to tell us something about what He Himself has learned - God is holy; we are holy and so it the entire cosmos..

Epiphany 2

15^th January 2006

St John 1 43 – 51

To exegete this marvellous, mystical passage which is the Gospel for today’s liturgy, let me take you back to the Book Genesis Chapter 28 and the narrative of the trickster Jacob who is about to get his comeuppance for swindling his twin brother Esau, but who in search of a wife, comes one evening as the sun was setting to a ‘certain place’ {Whenever we read of a ‘certain place’ we can be assured we are about to enter the realm of mythology. Like “once upon a time” as the Book of Genesis begins, as the Book of Job begins… as the gospel of John begins….”

Jacob comes to that place the place which Indigenous Australians would call “the Place of the Dreaming”. He finds a large stone and sets it down as a pillow upon which to rest his head. Here the narrator again confronts us with myth. This is the ‘mythical stone’ upon which the kings and queens of England and Scotland have sat to be crowned. So it is said.

Jacob lies down to sleep with thoughts of his god in a far away land. This is his Dreaming (as our aboriginal friends would say) and in his dreaming he sees a ladder set up from his stone pillow on the earth to the heavens above, with angels ascending and descending. He wakes from sleep to say, “Truly God is in this place. What a revelation. His god is not simply a tribal god watching over and influencing his own tribe, God is everywhere, even in this Dreaming Stone. He calls the place Beth-El – ‘House of God’

We move forward in our story to Genesis 32 verse 22ff. Jacob leaves the house of his father-in-law Laban and sets out to establish his own fame. He and L aban mark their boundaries beyond which each of them promises never to move. Then we come to the night before Jacob is to meet Esau. Jacob sends all his Tribe , all his herdsmen and shepherds, all his wives and children across the River Jabbok .

We are not told whether or not he fell asleep, but a man comes and wrestles with him until the morning light. In fact Jacob encounters God who wounds him, and Jacob prevails. He is given a new revelation and a new name. He is no longer Jacob the trickster, he is Israel, which means
”He struggles with God”.

Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan river. John declares his cousin to be “the Lamb of god who takes away the sin of the world”. Ione of John’s disciples, Andrew leaves his master and comes to Jesus as the Lord’s first disciple. Andrew then goes home to Bethsaida (the House of the fishermen) andbrings his brother Simon to Jesus. When Jesus sees Simon he says, “so you are Simon, from now on I’m going to call you Peter.”

Then Andrew sets out to find another prospective convert to the new rabbi – Nathanael, highly intelligent, scholarly mystic and, one might add, cynic (in the classical sense). “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote about in the Torah, and about whom the prophets also write, Jesus from Nazareth, the son of Joseph”. “Nazareth!” replies Nathanael, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”. Of course not, for Nazareth is not mentioned anywhere in the Hebrew scriptures. No-one from Nazareth could possibly bring Good News, nothing from Nazareth could possibly fulfil the hopes of Israel.

Not to be deterred, Andrew says , “Well, come and see for yourself”.

As they approached Jesus, the Lord said, “Well, Here indeed is an Israelite in whom there is no more Jacob”.

How do you know me?” asks Nathanael. “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree I saw you.” “Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the king of Israel”.

Because I said I saw you under the fig tree you believe? You shall see greater things than this. You shall see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man”.

Hers indeed is one of the most powerfully mystical passages of the great mystical gospel of John. Jesus ‘sees’ Nathanael. He ‘sees’ into his mind. He knows that Nathanael under the fig tree is meditating upon the passage of what we call the book Genesis, of Jacob and the Dreaming Stone and of the passage where Jacob wrestles the angel of God and becomes what God always knew he would be, the Father of many tribes, the first to realise that God is not simply a tribal neighbourhood deity but Lord of the Universe.

Beth-el is a mystical place, one of those places which, when one has been there and experienced something of the ‘Other’ one is convinced that the “Other Place” as C.S. Lewis knew it in his beautiful allegorical narrative of Narnia “The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe” lies just beyond the back of the wardrobe. And the childlike in heart have access to that place where it is possible to live out a whole lifetime in a moment.

Nathanael knew that, and Jesus know that Nathanael knew it too.

What then do we derive from this encounter of Nathanael and Jesus in today’s gospel? For myself the assurance that whenever we fall to meditation we fall into the hands of the Living God, the One who knows us, who ‘sees’ into our hearts and minds and who knows that we are capable of far more than we can ever imagine.

Hers in this account we have another tale of a name-change. In the list of the Apostles of Christ we have one Bartholomew – an Egyptian name – Bar-Ptolomey, most probably an Alexandrine Jew of the Diaspora as he apapears in the list of Apostles in the other three Gospels. Here his name is revealed to us as Nathan-El. Like Jacob whom we know now as Israel. .

Who could possibly have believed that Jacob who had been a trickster, a crook, a thief from his mother’s womb the one who stole his brother’s birthright and his brothers blessing would be what he ended up being – the One who struggled (wrestled) with God and prevailed. God does not want us meekly to accept what ‘fate’ hands out to us in our baser nature, God expects that we too like Nathanael, should struggle with God in the Scriptures and prevail and become what God always intended we should be.

The words of the prophet Samuel find their echo here in this ancient Dreaming Story - “God does not see as humans see.” God sees our potential as Children of God, not as humans see – crooks and thieves and tricksters.

Baptism of Christ

8th January 2006

As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw heaven being torn open and the spirit descending on him like a dove…….”

As I read in the newspaper of the de-classification of documents relating to the diaries of Winston Churchill’s private secretary, I was moved to go to my library shelves and read some of my own early diary entries. How interesting it is, not only to re-read stuff that one had written so long ago, but also to remember stuff that one had long forgotten.

My own diaries for many years have taken the form of Sketch Books with added notes.

One particular diary entry was written on the beach at Bali. I had gone there as one of three Australian delegates to the first Asian Christian Art Association. That day I was sitting under a thatched roof of a hut in company with my friend Albert Moor Professor of Religious Studies, Otago University, New Zealand and an Indonesian artist, Dhoti. Dhoti was telling us how the Balinese feared the water and how they could not understand how so many foreigners came to Bali to swim in the sea. To them the waters of the sea were the place of evil. The monsters of the deep dwelt there. Fishermen must placate the waters before launching out to gain their daily catch, by placing flowers and lighted candles on small rafts to drive away the evil spirits.

How right they were – the Boxing Day tsunami…..

We engaged in a serous discussion about what the bible had to say about water. In the beginning God separated the waters above the firmament from the waters below the firmament. God drew the created order out of the Chaos of the dark waters and for the Hebrews the “waters below the firmament” were the dwelling place of the ‘monsters of the deep’. “Save me O Lord for the waters have come up to my neck” of [Psalm 69 verse 1]. “There is that Leviathan..” The place of the crocodile and the hippopotamus of Egyptian mythology. All life is drawn out of the waters of creation according to Hebrew mythology…. This also is a fact of life.

The traditional stories, and the art that underpins those stories not only of our own Judeo Christian scriptures relate to conditions of life and enable people to adapt to the inner life of their own external environment.

So it is with the icon of the Baptism of Christ that attaches to this sermon. The physical landscape depicted here, like the landscape which we personally inhabit is also the topography of our inner life.

Deep down within the peaceful environment of our lives is the agent of chaos, depicted here by the little guy at the feet of Jesus, seen emptying his jar of dark waters into the clear waters of the River Jordan.

Jesus is up to his neck in watery chaos.

This is true for all of us who are called to live out the Baptized life, we live in the atmosphere of creation but also of chaos. In what Rowan Williams describes as “the neighbourhood of God”. In Baptism we are identified with Christ’s creative life and his chaotic life. It is not all beer and skittles! It is over the chaos of life that God in Christ addresses us, call us into our vocation and into our ministry. Jesus deliberately steps into that life. You will note that in our icon, St John the Baptist does not stand in the waters, he stands on the margins, on the bank of the Jordan. So do the adoring angels. Jesus is contaminated by the chaos, by the darkness of this world and indeed, as the scriptures tell us, he spends most of his time in the company of those whose lives are also contaminated by weakness, illness, madness, dis-ease and death. That is his destiny, to be identified with the agents of the darkness of this world the prostitutes, the tax-collectors, the lepers, indeed with those whom the world most despises. In this – his commitment to Baptism “Suffer it thus far…” he accepts the gone-wrong-ness of the world, the contamination of the natural order in order to be open to the Spirit.

Two weeks ago, at Christmas e were confronted sith the vulnerability of the Son of God who chose to become one with us as a baby, totally dependant upon the will of others. As we contemplate his Baptism we are confronted again with the vulnerability of the Son of God in his nakedness in the Jordan River. Was there a crowd of people there? We can hardly imagine John the Baptist without a crowd. A crowd of ‘gawkers’, just as there was a crowd of ‘gawkers’ ridiculing the naked Christ on Calvary’s Cross – “He saved others he cannot save himself.” Such is God’s vulnerability..

In our own Baptism where we were “buried with Christ….in order to share his Resurrection” and we share his vulnerability. We are cast into his ministry to those most contaminated by the sin of the world. “Forasmuch as you have done it to the least of these my brothers and sisters, you have done it to me.” As time unfolds it will become dangerous for people to be followers of Christ, just as it was in the first centuries of Christianity. We must learn to accept our vulnerability as disciples and get on with our discipleship, like him, up to our neck in the contamination of the world, remembering that in the end there is a Judgment of Good News.

Did you notice in the version of today’s text that Jesus saw the heavens “torn open”, not simply ‘open’ but deliberately torn. Like the veil of the Temple at his death – “Torn in two from top to bottom” – from heaven to earth (in the language of myth).

In the mythical language of indigenous Australia we observe the same elements. Every living creature has its own mystical life and language, waterholes are holy places, mountains and valleys are the creatures of Rainbow Serpents’ creating. Every person his or her own ‘augud’ (totem), his or her own ‘dreaming’ and the narrative stories of these ‘dreamings’ are told, sung about and danced out in corroboree and by such the myth of the tribe is actualized. In the same way, the myth of our tribe is narrated, sung out and danced out in our own corroboree – the liturgy of the Eucharist in which the myth of our Tribe – Christianity – is made real in present time.

So in the icon of Christ’s Baptism we may read the story, we may sing the songs, we may dance the dance of life, re-creating ourselves by the Holy Spirit in the mystery of Resurrected Life.

Not for nothing then, as the ancient Hebrew myth of birth reminds us, does the Angel who sends us into this world lay her finger upon our lips (to leave that dimple between lip and nose) and whisper –“Sshhhhh” .

St Nicholas

4^th December 2005

St Mark 9 v 36 Jesus said, “If anyone would be first he must be last of all and servant of all. And he took a child and put him in their midst and taking him in his arms he said to them, ’Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever does not receive such a child does not receive me.”

And St Mark 10 v 13ff. And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them; and the disciples rebuked them. Jesus saw it and was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me, do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a child shall not enter it” And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands upon them.

Each time I make the journey from Jerusalem to Mount Sinai I spend a night in a Wadi near to the village of Bier Zuriah – the “Little Well” – which is the home of the second and often the third wives of Bedouin men who live with their first (or Principal) wives in the town of Nuweiba on the Gulf of Aquabah..

This is a village of no men. The women and their children live in community and share their poverty. Their men come to them only to give them more children.

The little children wear cast-off clothing – T shirts that advertise the designer labels of many famous Houses, dresses often far to large for their meagre frames. They are bare footed and scramble across the hot stoney ground of the Sinai desert as though their feet were shod with leather. Sweet children who sell trinkets – geodes, keffyiahs, bead necklaces to pilgrims and tourists such as ourselves.

Bier Zuriah lies on the ancient Pilgrim Way from Cairo to St Catherine’s Monastery on the holy mountain.

Three trips a year are enough to get to know (‘en passant’)though never by name, for to ask their name is to rob them of their true Self, some of these little people.

From time to time a child invariably a boy whom one has got to know a little will have ‘disappeared’.

I often wondered what had happened to these “little people”, so I asked our Egyptian Coptic Christian friend Dr Rabia.

No child born into any family in this part of the Middle East has any part, place or inheritance in the family until the day its father bends down, picks it up, lays his hand upon it and blesses it. From that day onward the child belongs, not only to the family, but to the tribe and to the spiritual inheritance of the people. It has always been so in the Mediterranean. Sadly it is invariably only little boys who are so blessed. And when they are admitted into the family they no longer wear cast off T shirts and short trousers, they are clothed in the white galibeh and wear the traditional head-dress of the tribe. For the most part their mothers never see them again. For little girls the culture is quite different. Most of them remain with their mothers as children of second and third wives until their first period when they assume the traditional dress. Should their father pick them up and bless them they then begin to wear the dowry head-dress and are generally affianced to some man of their father’s choosing and traded along with maybe a camel or two or these days a Utility truck.

It was so in the days of Jesus. Bride price meant “First Wife”. Other girls became and become ‘second wives” – second class citizens. It is therefore no wonder the disciples were angry with the parents who brought their children to the Lord. They knew intuitively that Jesus had something better for them. Such an act would have seriously impacted on their culture. And Jesus knew that.

What Jesus did was of course very offensive, even scandalous to the disciples, not simply because children were considered to be a nuisance to be kept in place on the fringes of society , but because Jesus was admitting to his Father’s Kingdom little people who did not even have a place in their earthly family.

Not only did Jesus pick them up, he did what was even more offensive – he ‘stooped down’, he ‘held them in his arms’, ‘embraced them’ and ‘ laid his hands upon them’ and ‘blessed them’. In fact Jesus assumed the role of Father to these “little people”.

This, in essence is what is happening today. In some churches it would be an offence for a child to assume a liturgical role in the life of the community of faith. Worse, imagine the concept of “Boy Bishop” in a highly conservative Anglo Catholic parish, or in a fundamentalist low church parish where in neither parish would a woman, let alone a child be given the authority to read the Gospel, or to bless the congregation..

But here we are and we gladly submit ourselves to the authority of our own parish children today.

“Unless you accept the kingdom of God as a little child, you shall not enter it.” This is not ‘play acting’ it is accepting the legitimate and proper role of children within the Divine Liturgy of the Church.

The Twentyfifth Sunday after Pentecost

13 November 2005

Judges

Recently, in fact while I was in Israel-Palestine a few months ago the Government of Israel ‘disengaged’ from Gaza and dismantled the 21 Jewish settlements that had been illegally built there. It was a time of great tension. This ‘disengagement’ was not the result of dialog or discussion with the Palestinians, but was rather a unilateral action pushed through by Israel’s Prime Minister Sharon. This means of course that Israel is still legally and morally bound by the conventions of international law to be responsible for the security of all who live in the Gaza strip.

Aharon Barak, Chief Justice of Israel’s Supreme court said, “Judea and Samaria and Gaze area are lands seized during warfare and are not part of Israel.” His judgment upheld the Resolution of the United Nations of some fifty years ago that declared Gaza and the West Bank to be “unlawfully occupied territory”.

Thus the judgments of the UN and of Israel’s own Supreme Court are vindicated.

That does not mean ‘at last there is prospect for peace’. Not at all.

Last week I had an e-mail that told me my friend Ibrahim who has a small gift shop opposite the main gate of St Georges Cathedral has learned that “The Wall”, that thirty foot high concrete separation wall is now about to run right through his own ancestral home in East Jerusalem. This means he will no longer be able to get to work, nor will his children who are receiving their schooling at St. Georges be able to get to school. So much for lawful judgment. Ibrahim joins thousands of other Palestinians who have been grossly affected by military rather than lawful judgments.

What has all that got to do with us who in the readings of our Divine Liturgy have been encountering some of the Judges of the Old Testament these past weeks, who thismorning have heard read part of the story of Deborah a ruler and judge in Israel. What does judgment mean in scriptural terms.

[recount the story of Deborah.] “Thus once more the Israelites did that which is evil in the sight of the Lord”. This is the constant theme in the Hebrew Scripture. “So the Lord sold them over into the hand of Jabin, a Canaanite king who ruled in Hazor. They lived under his rule for twenty years” His army commandeer was Sisera. Israel appointed yet another woman – Deborah - to lead them.

Deborah called up Barak (same name as Israel’s present Chief Justice) and urged him to rebel against Sisera. He was scared so he said to Deborah, “why don’t you come with me?” Deborah said, “OK, but you will not get the credit for this, the credit and fame will go to a woman”.

Off they went to battle and Barak prevailed over Sisera’s army and there was not left one man among them. The battle weary Sisera made his way to the tent of Heber the Keneite who was a friend of King Jabin. Heber’s wife Jael met Sisera, took him to her tent and when he asked for a drink of water she opened a skin of milk and gave him to drink. He then lay down and fell asleep. When Jael was sure that he was in a deep sleep she took a tent peg and a hammer and drove the tent peg through his temple into the ground. The bible says “He died”.

So it was that Deborah and Jael became heroes of the faith in Israel.

They join that great line of heroes of the Jewish Faith about whom Apollos in his Epistle to the Hebrews writes – “And what more shall I say? I do not have time to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephtha, David, Samuel and the prophets who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice and gained what was promised.”

It is in the spirit of such heroes that the judgments and justice of modern Israel are founded.

Yet if we look closely at these people what do we find. Certainly not the law of Love that Jesus taught, no but the law of eye for eye and tooth for tooth. Barak the coward hanging on to Deborah’s skirts. Samson murdering thug, womaniser and racist. Jephtha who murdered his own daughter – as did Agamemnon who murdered his daughter Iphegenia, except that in good Old Testament style Jephtha’s daughter doesn’t even have a name! Jephtha the pinnacle of domestic violence and child abuse.

David? I have spoken of David before. Adulterous murderer, robber, thug who gave to the world the ‘Absolom syndrome – O Absolom my son, my son, would to God I had died for you, O Absolom my son, my son,” In other words, Thank God he’s gone. Credited with writing the Psalms . Really! Ended his days with a beautiful young woman as his hot water bottle! More historical evidence for King Arthur than for King David. Samuel who hacked King Agag to pieces “before the Lord”.

And Joshua himself who at the Lord’s command perpetrated the first holocaust.

Is the bible true ? Wrong question. Again. It is the physical, sociological and imaginative maps that give the texts their context. Not the words themselves however much we might sanctify them by repeating “this is the Word of the Lord”. By so doing, so often we tribalize God and make him out to be singularly prejudiced in favour of his” Chosen people” and clearly the enemy of all others. When all the others symbolize ‘evil’. Ancient Israel was built on military might with God on the side of his own armies, indiscriminately occupying the lands of the twelve ancient tribes (or kingdoms) Philistines, Anakites (territory including the five great cities of the Philistines – Gad, Gath, Gaza, Ekron, Ashdod), Rephaites (Og the king of Bashan) , Hivites, Jebusites, Perrizites, Amorites, Moabites, Gibeonites, Ammonites, Geshurites, Girgashites, Gebalites (see Joshua 11 )….. and his armies having defeated all these people God claimed all their lands for his own Twelve tribes. In the same way as English colonizers claimed all the land of Terra Austriala del Espiritu Santo – the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit – for their God and king, declaring it all to be terra nullius – a land without laws. Everything in ancient Palestine was declared evil, null and void before the coming of the Israelites. So it is today for the Zionist settlers.How does the judgment of Israel’s present Chief Justice on June 09 2005 stand against all this conquest – “Judea, Samaria and the Gaza area are lands seized in warfare and are not part of Israel.” Is the Judge speaking ‘generally’ or is he speaking in the particular, for if ‘generally’ then surely he is saying the “conquest of Canaan” at the time of Joshua is null and void! This has enormous implications for Zionism.

What would Christ’s judgment be? “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you” “Now is the judgment of this world, …..and I if I be lifted up will draw all people to myself.

The Twentyfourth Sunday after Pentecost

30 October 2005

Moses Seat - Authority

The two great figures of the Hebrew Scriptures are Abraham and Moses. We acknowledge them also in our Christiana scriptures. Apart from Mahomet they are the two great prophets of Islam. We speak of the three great Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity and Islam. [ I wonder about Buddhism and Brahma. Is the Brahma of the East the Avr’ram of the Holy Land? ]

We have begun a Bible Study on Thursday mornings interrogating the text of the Abraham Saga. I have called this “A Foundational Myth”. [‘myth’ as meaning “that which is essentially true”.] Apart from the study per se, we are engaging in an exercise of ‘understanding’ the faiths of Judaism and Islam. Adonai is Abraham’s God. Yahveh is Moses God. Allah is the God of Islam. For the Christian, Jesus is Lord. .

Abraham is the receptor of Covenants. Moses is the Lawgiver. Jesus is the initiator and inventor of the New Covenant. He is also the fulfiller of the Law. He, like Abraham is the eternal pilgrim, but unlike Abraham Jesus knows his destination. He is no ”wandering Aramean”.  Like Moses Jesus is the Prophet, the Preacher, Teacher and Healer. He sits on ‘Moses Seat’ as the Authority of and for the New Covenant. He is the preacher (proclaimer) of the Coming of the Kingdom of God, he teaches the values of the Kingdom of Heaven and he is the Healer and reconciler of all people, things, the only mediator and advocate. He sits on Moses Seat as the preacher and teacher with authority from God to do so. On the Cross he both priest and victim, the perfect sacrifice offered to the Father. Neither Moses nor Abraham were priests though Abraham offered sacrifice, even to the frightening point of the Aquedah.

Since the destruction of the Temple in 70AD Judaism has had no sacrificial priesthood. Salvation comes through observation of over 600 laws. [ I am aware that this is a simplistic view but that view is wrought out of my own experiences of living in a multi-faith country- Israel-Palestine with both Jews and Moslems.] Rabbis are not ‘clergy’ in the sense that we understand that word. Islam knows no mediator, no priest, no sacrificial offering . Every Moslem has direct access to Allah and Islam has no clergy, even though we may hear frequent references to Moslem ‘clerics’ in the secular news.

What is a priest in the Christian tradition in post-modernity ? What do we mean by ‘clergy’ in our own tradition in a post modern church?

The Qu’ran is to Islam what Christ is to Christianity. Mahomet is to Islam what the Blessed Virgin Mary is to Christianity – the receptacle for the Word of God.

In Judaism Moses not only receives the Law, he receives every interpretation of the Law. For this reason those who expound the Torah (Law and its every interpretation) sit on ‘Moses Seat’.

In the same sense, in the Christian Church, the Bishop who is the inheritor of the Preaching and Teaching ministry of Christ has his ‘cathedra’ – chair, in his cathedral. This is ‘Moses Seat’ and from it, in earlier times the Bishop always sat to preach. Today it seems the only time the Bishop sits to Preach and Teach is at Ordinations and Confirmations. When making an ‘infallible pronouncement’ the Pope of the Latin church speaks “Ex cathedra’ – from the chair (or throne)- Moses’ Seat.

It is my opinion that (1) because Christianity and the Synoptic Gospels are inheritors of an ‘Eastern’ culture and (2) because of the present Israel – Palestine conflict based on the ‘old’ law – “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” and (3) because of the escalating world climate of terror, it is becoming more and more important for us to know about the culture, religion and authority of Judaism and Islam and what ought to be the Christian response to violence and terror. Does the present war in Iraq reflect Christ’s teaching about the values of the Kingdom of God? Perhaps I should say, “Is there a Christian teaching about ‘Just War’ in a post modern Church or are we stuck with an older (Augustinian) paradigm.

We must interrogate our own Faith in order to know what is required of us under Christ’s law of Love. This involves us in an understanding of the Doctrine of the Trinity which is a doctrine of Holy Community. The Church as community must reflect the reality of the community of the Holy Trinity – love. [“love your enemies….]

What do we understand of Christ as the fulfiller of the Torah (Law and all its interpretations) the One who speaks from Moses’ Seat as ‘The Authority’. What do we understand of “Christ as God” in the context of Jewish and Islamic doctrine that (1) God does not have a Son and (2) God-in-Christ dies upon the Cross. How can God die?

Christ proclaims “No one can come to the Father except through me” and “He who has seen me has seen the Father”. How do these sacred texts stand up alongside “eye for eye. Tooth for tooth” (which in its day was a just law)

Faith for the strict observant Jew comes through strict observance of the Law.

Islam proclaims “I cannot know God for myself, I can only know God through the texts of Qu’ran” We remind ourselves Abraham knew God without any text. Until Sinai Moses had no text. The texts were not written down until 1200 years after Abraham.

For the Christian, Faith is a relationship, not a keeping of Laws or rituals and Prayer is the intimate relationship between ourselves and the Eternal God, a dynamic consciousness.

For the Moslem, Prayer is not a moment of mediation but a moment of obedience. The five prayers of the Moslem day are set down, unalterable. The Moslem fulfils the law of Islam by the physical act of praying five times every day.. There is no ‘intercession’ such as we pray it. Everything in life is “Insh’Allah”. Many Moslems believe that we Christians pray in order to alter the mind of God, which is not true of course. Also for the Moslem, Christianity is ‘folk lore’. The Moslem believes that Jesus came as a prophet to ‘correct’ the earlier revelation which we call the Old Testament. He had a particular role in history like John the Baptist. Like John, Jesus fulfilled that role and that was the end.

Salvation does not come through the Cross and Resurrection, but through Mahomet who is Allah’s prophet, and through the Qu’ran. The Qu’ran is not open to interpretation. It cannot be read in any other language but Arabic. It is too sacred to notate the texts. [ a prophet is one who can shape the beliefs and opinions of humanity. A prophet does not foretell, a prophet forth-tells.] Moses was a prophet because he was able to shape the political and religious beliefs of the Israelites.

However, like the Jew and the Moslem, Jesus proclaims a tribalism that needs our careful interpretation. “Who is my mother and my brother? Whoever does the will of my Father, the same is my mother brother…..” Interpretation of the text leads to certainty for some, then to literalism, then to fundamentalism. Scripture must be read at four levels of comprehension – literally, morally, allegorically (metaphorically) and spiritually. Scripture is not about God’s intervention into history, or into our own personal lives. God is not known by the rituals of prayer and fasting and so on. God is known only by Faith. What about when we don’t have faith ? what about ‘doubt’ you say. We live in doubt. There are no certainties apart from the faith that leads us into the life of Christ.

Sadly for many young people in our own country Judaism, Christianity and Islam are discredited religions so they turn to the East and embrace Eastern meditative techniques. But that is another story for another time. The rich traditions of our own Faith are there for us to study for in them we find revealed the true humanity of God. Unike Judaism and Islam the Faith of Christ is not based on a set of rules, as St Paul reminds us “If there was a law that could save us that law would have been given”. Christ does not stand “outside” that tradition but Christ himself is the tradition and is what gives meaning to creation because he offers us spiritual freedom. In Christ we see what may be constantly discovered rather than that which lies in the past.

All three of the great Abrahamic Faiths speak their certainties from Moses Seat.

As we read the texts of Abraham (written down twelve hundred years after the death of our forefather) we learn that it is Abraham who keeps God alive. Without the experience of Abraham there is no knowledge of God in the scriptures. This also is true for our own lives. To know God is to know Grace. And we see Grace, we discern Grace, we find Grace in the lives of other people. “He who has seen me has seen the Father ” says Jesus. “Forasmuch as you have done it to the least of these my brethren, you have done it to me.” God cannot be ‘known’ only worshipped in the Spirit of Christ.

The Twentythird Sunday after Pentecost

23 October 2005

“Jonah”

Part One

The sermon today is written in words and painted in pictures. ‘Jonah’. Jesus told the “faithless generation” of his own day, the people who were constantly looking for a sign, that “no sign shall be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah, for as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights – 72 hours - , so must the Son of Man be in the belly of the earth”- precasting of course his own death and burial. The sign of the prophet Jonah is also the sign of Jesus Resurrection. For the past six weeks we have been sharing a Bible Study of the book of Jonah and it seemed good to me that I should try to gather up some of the insights we gained during that interrogation. The response to the Thursday studies encourages us to continue with a bible Study so next Thursday (Thursday of this week) we will begin to search the narrative of Abraham for some other insights.

I have long been fascinated with Jonah, as a narrative, as a form of prayer, as an expression of the Wisdom of God. Although the book is set in the ancient history of the Middle East when Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire.

Is it a true story ? Wrong question. What is the purpose of the book of Jonah. The author sets the tale in the 8^th century BC but most probably it was set down in the 5^th. From a scholarly point of view the importance of the book lies in the evolution of prophecy in ancient Israel. However important it is historically, it is the ‘myth’ of the book that is important. It is the narrative of spiritual journey and it refers to our own self – ego.

God intends that Jonah should go to Iraq the prophet Nahum speaks Iraq as “…city of bloodshed, utterly deceitful, full of booty, no end to the plunder… horsemen charging, flashing sword and spear and piles of dead, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end – they stumble over the bodies. [Nahum 2 v 12 – 3 v3+4]. The history of Nineveh, indeed of Iraq is filled with such images of destruction, down to this day.

To go to this dreadful place God calls Jonah. “Go and proclaim liberty to those captive to sin”. How would you respond to such a call ? Holy Smoke! “Lets get out of here. No wonder Jonah fled from the Lord. Yet maybe it was not just the thought of his own inability to cope with such a mission, maybe Jonah could not possibly believe that God could show mercy to such sinful people. This being the case, Jonah acts as judge.

So he goes ‘down’ to Joppa. ‘down’ to the quay. ‘down’ into the ship, ‘down’ into the bilges of the ship and finally ;’down’ into the belly of the great fish.

But his physical journey has only begun. He has yet to engage on his emotional journey and then on his spiritual journey. Justas we have to do. Instead of heading East, he heads in the exact opposite direction. Nineveh was his call. Spain was hie destination.

His journey however was not ‘west’ but ‘down’. This is the descent into Self that each one of us must make if we are to find the Lord.

The Lord hurls a great storm against the ship. Remember the great storm of wind that the Lord hurled down upon Jesus and the disciples in the boat on Galilee’s lake. Physically. Morally. Allegorically. Spiritually. The storms of our own life – death, bereavement, loss of identity, sickness, failure, wrongful dismissal, oppression, illness, innocent suffering…..

The narrative describes how often we ourselves are being “torn apart’ by such things. And, like the mariners, we become afraid. We ask “Where is god in what is happening to me”. “I cannot possibly see how god could allow such things as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, sudden death, accidents, to happen. “Where is god in all this turmoil”. The mariners were afraid (v5), their fear becomes ‘a great fear’ (v 10) until in verse 116 their fear turns to dread, such dr4ad as makes the hair of the head stand up on end. (That is if you are lucky enough to have any hair on your head), an awesome dread such as we have all felt at some time in our lives. (Boigu)

The mariners and their captain are all good men. (not Christians). The captain searches for Jonah and finds him asleep down below. Ever felt like that – the desire to go ’down below’, pull down the blinds, climb into bed with the sheet over your head, curl into the foetal position and go to sleep. We have all felt like this at some stage. Jonah is asleep to his own identity. He has abdicated his responsibility as prophet, as leader, he has no self-respect, no faith, no confidence in his own ability to do what God has asked him to do. So the captain says, “So, you are asleep. Wake up and call upon your god”. Have you heard these words before? Yes, in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus says to Peter, James and John, “Wake up and pray”.

In all such situations in our own lives, the antidote to ‘giving in’ is prayer. Prayer means work. Jesus works while the apostles are asleep. The mariners work hard at their oars while Jonah is asleep. In the boat on the Lake the disci-les ask Jesus, “don’t you care if we perish”. So Jesus woke up, rebuked the wind and there was a great calm.

God is in the midst of all storms, physical, emotional, spiritual, cosmic. Fancy the prophet of the Lord Jonah having to be reminded by the pagan captain to say his prayers!.

Jonah comes onto the deck and they ask him all the questions people ask in pubs or upon first acquaintance – “Where do you come from” “what do you do” “what is your religion” Here on the deck of a boat is Jonah’s opportunity to witness to his faith. He tells them. Evangelism is opportunity. You cannot structure it. “What the must we do” the mariners ask Jonah. “Throw me overboard”. But they would not consent to this act of collective murder. When we are tempted to think that it is only Christians who are loving, caring, compassionate, it is good to look at this bit of the book of Johan, where there are as many gods as there are people. They rowed all the harder. Neither can Jonah bring himself to commit suicide by throwing himself overboard. He knows that he cannot solve the problem he has caused . They all pray - three things (1) for self-preservation. (2) for release from guilt and (3) the prayer of acceptance.

In the end Jonah enables this collective bunch of multi-cultural mariners to offer their sacrifice. Whereas they had prayer “each man to his own god, now there is a community of Faith praying to the Lord of heaven”. Over he goes.

But God has something else in mind. Enter the great fish. Jonah begins his great night journey. The fish turns out to be Jonah’s salvation. Exactly the opposite of what one would expect of the great white shark. Jonah descends to the Underworld.

What a metaphor. To Sheol. To Hades, like Orpheus. Like Odysseus. Like Dante. For this is the great universal myth. We must all descend to the place of the Dead just as Jesus did after the Crucifixion. Literally? Morally? Allegorically? Spiritually.

The ‘death’ of Jonah is one of the great universal myths. The death-Resurrection or Christ is our great myth and it is actualised in our time by ritual, the ritual we call ‘Eucharist’. It is essential that we preserve the myth of the tribe. Absolutely essential.

For this reason it is essential that someone is set apart by God to re-hearse the narrative of Christ’s death-resurrection in a ritual form

As you are preparing to welcome a new parish priest it is important for you to hear that this is why you must have a priest. Not only to offer spiritual leadership, not only t preach and teach, tend to the pastoral needs of the people (important as these things are) but your priest is set over the parish to keep above in this world Christ’s sacramental presence. To “tend the holy fire”. To BE and not necessarily to DO, apart from “do this to re-member me”. Re-membering, the opposite of dis-membering. Re-membering is what Jonah did in the belly of the great fish and his prayer is the recognition of the unity of the conscious world and the unconscious life that God calls us to lead. It is not the prayer of fear (such as the mariners’ prayer was). It is not the prayer of intercession, or of adoration or of praise. It is the prayer prayed “Out of the depths have I called upon you O Lord, O Lord hear my prayer”. It is the mystical prayer of Christ the Great High Priest as recorded in the 17^th chapter of St John’s Gospel, the prayer Jesus prayed in the midst of his own mid-life crisis.

Now I want you to imagine what the sun-bakers of St Kilda beach, the surfers of Torquay and Bells Beach would have thought as they saw this great fish rock up to the shore, open its wide mouth, burp and vomit this dishevelled prophet of the Lord, Jonah, complete with brief case, Bible and afterbirth of new life out onto the beach. How relieved the fish must have been to have got rid of his duodenal prophet.

I wonder what Jonah’s wife would have said. When he got home, “That you dear?”

What happens next is what happens to each and every one of us who has failed.

God gives us a second chance.

Jonah’s second chance will need to be subject of another homily.

The Twentysecond Sunday after Pentecost

16 October 2005

“The Glory of the Lord”

Recount the narrative of Moses and the Glory of the Lord.

I look out of my study window and wonder at the prolific growth of the hedge I planted along the fence line two years ago. I walk out into my front garden and wonder at the beauty of the roses which seem to have ‘come out’ all of a sudden . I walk into the kitchen clutching Friday’s edition of the Age newspaper and I wonder at the beauty of Anne’s African violets on the window sill and outside in the back garden the blossoming eucalypts and the flock of colourful birds having the nectar breakfast. A beautiful clear blue sky complimented by a delightful crisp morning light. There has been a light shower of rain overnight. How great is God in the goodness of his creation. The glory of the Lord is revealed in his creation as St Paul rightly reminded the early Roman Church.

I pick up my paint brushes and do half an hour on my latest painting – the peaks of the Sinai mountains in the early morning light. As I paint I do my early morning meditation, continuing my reflections on that awesome place where God’s Yahweh revealed Himself to Moses as the prophet huddled in the cleft of a rock. “You cannot see my face and live” says the Lord, so he passes by, showing Moses his rear end. Once again I remember climbing that holy mountain. How many times?

I consider how God lets us know, a little bit at a time of his revelation of wonder.

Down below on the plateau the Israelites cavort around the golden calf wishing like crazy that they were back in the land of Egypt with their true gods.

I go back to my study with a cup of Russian Caravan Tea and write the pew sheet letter for Sunday and e-mail it to Sandra. I read my e-mail one from London, one from Philadelphia, one from Brisbane telling me that the church I designed for the parish of Kenilworth is to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary this week. One from our daughter Janey in Hong Kong, one from Robin Richards, and a few more, and I marvel at the ways in which God has revealed his will for humanity by revealing so much of the wonder of his created order to engineers and scientists. It is now 6 o’clock on a bright and beautiful Friday morning. Too early to ring Eliza to wish her a happy 12^th birthday.

I reflect on the performance we saw earlier this week of the play “Odyssey” at the Malthouse Theatre, one of my most favourite narratives of a journey from brutal masculinity to gentle femininity and I think how much influence the Greek Myths have had on our theology and religion. Perhaps on Jesus himself as she watched the Theban Plays at the theatre in Sepphoris. There is a most powerful scene in the play ‘Odyssey’ where the hero Odysseus descends to the place of the Dead, the Underworld where he is confronted by the shades of a number of souls whom he has known, admired and loved. It is a grim place, a place of remorse and boredom, a place of ‘nowhere’, a place about which we read in the Biblical account of King Saul and the Witch of Endor. And I wonder again how greatly influenced were the Jewish Scribes in their search for something better than ‘No Place’. Nothing-ness” in the life after death. A reaching out for what we know (because of Christ) of the Resurrected Life.

We remember that Jesus gave the keys of this ‘Underworld’ to Simon Peter at Caeserea Philippi. Yet the Church has persisted with a doctrine of this shadowy place – Purgatory. Paradise. Sheol. And forgotten, or at least overlooked the Glory of the Lord in the life after death. How very sad. What has Sinai and the Glory of the Lord have to do with me, a post-modern artist-would-be theologian?

I see the Glory of the Lord in my Garden, in the sweet birds, in the life of 12 year old Eliza, in the violets on the window sill, in my own reflections of many journey up the Holy Mountain and the sheer awesome-ness of that place.

I see the glory of the Lord in the paper-thin eucharistic wafer. I hear of the glory of the Lord as I read the scriptures of Friday morning’s Daily Office and in the kindly thoughts God puts into my mind as I pray for those for whom I am bound this Friday morning. I remember “It was on a Friday morning as they took me from my cell. And I saw there was a carpenter to crucify as well. …. You can blame it onto Adam, you can blame it onto Eve, you can blame it on the devil, but it’s God that I accuse. ‘It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me. I said to the carpenter a-hanging on the Tree…….”

Toast and Vegemite and the Wizard of Id. Letters to the Editor and Leunig’s cartoon.

Front page news about Detainees in Nauru and abortion! A very cleverly manip[ulated photograph of Archbishop Denis hart with a black halo ! I wonder how many people noticed it. A very naughty photographer I reckon.

It is now almost 7am Friday and I have to leave to be at St. John’s at 9am for a pastoral meeting. I make toast and vegemite.

I switch on my car radio for the ABC news. 50,000 dead and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people displaced in the Pakistan earthquake. Another 50,000 still waiting to return to their hurricanes devastated US Gulf States. No news of the epileptic young man presumed drowned in the Yarra. Somebody shot dead. The glory of the Lord ! I switch over to 3MBS in the hope of hearing something of the glory of the Lord.

How is the glory of the Lord revealed in such dreadful things I hear about this morning.. In such things against which we pray in the Prayer Book Litany “From battle, murder and from sudden death, Good Lord deliver us”.

The day moves on. An hour with a family battling Immigration matters. My mobile has run out of money and I don’t know how to fix it. Call Anno. How ? I don’t know how the Office phone works. It is cleverly barred against people like me and of course thieves. A funeral to arrange. A hospital visit. And then a phone call…… ‘What do we do…. Ad lib.

I search my mind for “The Glory of the Lord”.

The scriptures of what we call the Old Testament are filled with images of that word –“Glory”. Shekeinah, the ‘feminine principle’ in the Godhead.

What do you think about “the Glory of the Lord” What does it mean? How is the Glory of the Lord revealed in 60,000 sudden deaths….. in a violent death….” To the perplexed parents whose infant is another SIDS statistic. “We don’t know what happened. The doctors are at a loss to tell us how”. One day she was as bright as a button and the next day…. the coroner will give his verdict in three months…..three months !!!

Handel, “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.”…[ Homer’s Land of the Shades. The Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory which is the same thing.

The 1662 Prayer Book puts it so well – “amid the changes and chances of this mortal life…” or as I prefer to think of natural disasters, battle murder and sudden death, aberrations, glitches on the great evolutionary path towards the perfection of Christ.

The deeper question about human sin lies in the comparison between St Paul’s theology of human nature and St. John’s theology.

For Paul, human nature (‘Flesh’) is corrupt. 1 Cor 15 “for this corruptible must put on incorruption, this mortal must put on immortality”. For S John it is in the human nature (‘Flesh’) of Jesus that the Glory of the Lord is fully revealed.

What a difference ! But, of course we still have to deal with the problem of pain, the problem of innocent suffering, the problem of those seven deadly sins to which we are all prone in one degree or another.

In Jesus Christ the Glory of the Lord is revealed fully on the Cross where he takes upon himself ‘the sin of the world’. All the ‘gone-wrong-ness’ of the world. All the innocent suffering. All the pain of violent death, separation, bereavement, injustice, imprisonment, cruelty and loss. All the puzzling and unanswerable questions –The ‘Whys’ of ten thousand generations of hopeless-ness. This is the ‘Glory of the Lord” that was to be revealed that the prophets of old saw dimly but could not grasp but which St Paul so eloquently describes in his letter to the Philippians, “…did not count equality with god a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself (of his former Glory) taking the form of a servant being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross, wherefore God has highly exalted him and given him the name above all other names, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”.

This is the Glory of the Lord that cannot be seen except in the ‘hinder parts’ pf God’s revelation – that is, with hindsight. As Moses saw it on the holy mountain..

The Twentyfirst Sunday after Pentecost

9^th October 2005

Sinai – The Golden Calf

It is long day’s drive along the ancient Pilgrim Way, inland from the Gulf of Aquaba.  Following the path of the Exodus.   We slept last night under the stars in a Wadi near the Bedouin village of Bier Zuriah – the Village of the Little Well - where the second and third wives of the Bedouin live with their children.   The night was bright with the full Sinai moon ( no wonder the ancients worshipped her with her big fat belly).   ‘Sinai’ means ‘Mountain of the Moon’.   The prophet Mohamed was brought up in the religion of the Moon God – Allah.   He and his family worshipped many gods, so it is thought.   They were polytheists but following his epic night journey in Jerusalem, and his contacts with Christians and Jews, Mohamed became convinced of the truth of Monotheism.   He decided that Allah the Moon god was the only one true God..

Moon worship was practiced in Mecca where the principal shrine of the god was housed in the Kabah.  

Mohamed evidently came to the conclusion that in order to win converts it was essential for him to proclaim the One-ness of God.   The Christian Bedouin of Arabia whose doctrine of the Trinity – Father, Son, Holy Spirit - had been skewed to a belief in Father, Mother and Son, were among his first converts.   Mohamed retained many of the rituals and customs of the worship of Allah the Moon god– praying towards the East and Mecca, (originally he prayed towards Jerusalem), pilgrimage to the Kabah, processions around and kissing the sacred stone housed within the Kabah; the Fast of Ramadan and so on.  

To this very day the symbol of Islam is the crescent moon.   In fact, in both Judaism and Islam to this day the Calendar that determines their daily lives and their liturgical lives is a lunar Calendar. The Greek Orthodox Church also retains the Julian Calendar, hence the difference in the annual dating of Easter between East and West.

As an aside, there has never been a ‘pure’ religion any more than today there is anything such as a ‘pure’ church.   We are all heretics.  The word ‘heretic’ derives from a Greek word that means ‘to pick and choose’.  

Worship in Biblical Israel – Judah was never pure.   The Hebrew scriptures are the story of constant apostasy..   Time and time again the Prophets called the people away from the worship of ‘strange gods’, ‘pagan’ gods and of course away from the worship of ‘Ashera’ who was Yahweh’s female consort.   The fact that they were so ‘down’ on Ashera is good evidence for the fact that people were worshipping her.   My own studies of the architecture of the ancient city of Arad (near Beer Sheva in the Negev desert) convinces me that the two standing stones in the temple there were not symbols of the two tablets of the Ten Commandments but rather, representative of Yahweh and his consort Ashera.   Masculine and feminine.   As in most Mediterranean countries worship of the Goddess predates worship of a masculine god”.   Worship of the great Earth Mother persists to this day in many and curious forms in that part of the world.  

Now, lest I get carried away and forget the purpose of this sermon, let me get back onto the track – I was reading to you from my personal diary.   The Pilgrim Way to Mount Sinai lies on the ancient trade route from Cairo in the south to Damascus in the north, the way of the Israelite Exodus.

When the moon is full in the Sinai desert, it is almost impossible to sleep.  To sleep under the stars is a marvellous experience.   I have lain away often, almost afraid to go to sleep lest I miss something in the heavens – One night I counted forty ‘falling stars’, dozens of satellites and stars moving across the entire skyline.

We stopped for lunch at a small oasis – tinned tuna with a drawing of a porpoise on the can, chopped tomato and onion, pita bread and humous, boiled eggs, watermelon washed down with Egyptian tea flavoured with cardamon.   Then we proceeded south to the Tomb of Sheik Firenze where one gets the first glimpse of Horeb, the holy mountain – Sinai.   Firenzi was a Moslem holy man, a Bedouin who lived in the desert in the early years of the twentieth century.   A cult of this Moslem saint has arisen based on his tomb where every year on the anniversary of his death people bring food, lay it on his grave and share a communal meal.   The implications for us Christians in this context are of course very profound.   The great supper of the Lord – the Eucharist stands in the same mythological tradition. We share a meal with our God!

The authenticity of a Moslem tomb-Shrine is vouchsafed through dreams, healings and miracles – night visions.   In the past, cult centres were validated by the rulers.  Today it is the community that validates a shrine.   Kind of Moslem congregationalism.

From the Sheik’s tomb we made our way past the Egyptian military garrison where the soldiers are dressed in ridiculous 19^th century British army gear complete with big polished boots, puttees and first world war Lee Enfield point 303 rifles, but with no ammunition.  These are the guards who say whether or not pilgrims may continue their journey to Sinai.   A kilometre past the guard room you take a left hand turn off the main road and there ahead of you, on a relatively small plateau is a tiny whitewashed orthodox church – The Chapel of the Golden Calf.

From this plateau Moses ascended the Mountain.   This is the place where the Israelites, convinced that they would never see Moses again, erected a shrine to the Egyptian god Horos.

It is a great story.   We heard it read as the first reading of this Liturgy.  

Thus begins the battle in history between “Word” and “Image”.   It contains an interesting improving moral - that individuals sacrifice their precious gold ear-rings bangles and bracelets for the common good.   Many small tokens went into the making of something else that was designed to bring blessings to the many.

Rather like what you and I might put into the plate on Sundays.

The sum total of what we give is for the common good.  

This is good stewardship.   Whatever we offer to God is blessed for good.

How appropriate then is it for us to remember to bless animals on the day the church calls us to remember the golden calf.   God himself did not baulk at being called an animal.   “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

25 September 2005

Water

It had been fifteen or more years since rain last fell here.   Not one of the children of the village of Bier Zuriah – the village of the ‘little well’ had ever seen, heard or experienced rain.  

Flying over this desert, as one does on the way from Bangkok to Tel Aviv, one can see great wadis of sand, like giant yellow rivers, flowing down from Mount Sinai in the south up towards the Gulf of Aquabah .   Rarely does the rain water reach the Gulf, for most of it is absorbed into the underground aquifers that feed the several oases along the route of the ancient Israelite Exodus.  

On a beautiful April day, having left Jerusalem at 500am and driven down through the Negev desert to Beer Sheva in time for breakfast, and then down to the Israel-Egypt border twin towns Eilat-Tabah, we waited for two hours while a very angry dispirited Egyptian Lieutenant of Immigration processed our Passports and Visas before crossing to meet our Bedouin guides and my friend Dr Rabia, a Coptic Christian medical doctor turned adventurer.   Next stop Nuweiba on the Gulf of Aquaba where we picked up water – Egyptian bottled water labelled “Baraka” – Blessing.  Then down the Old Pilgrim way south towards Mount Sinai with ancient graffiti carved onto rocks, some of it from the fourth and fifth century.   Overnight in the Wadi of the Village of Second Wives.   Eucharist at sundown, dinner of roast chicken with rice washed down with Egyptian tea flavoured with !!!!! Sleeping out under the stars.  Up before the dawn, breakfast of scrambled eggs, tomatoes Laughing Cow cheese and fig jam on Turkish bread freshly cooked on open fires.   Mors tea with !!! then across the desert to the Pierced Rock for prayers and meditation.   All of a sudden a great wind rose and the Bedouin called us to get on the Jeeps quickly.  Before you could say “What a nice day”, down came the rain.   Rain and it poured and poured as we drove like red shanks to avoid the rush in the wadis, and it did not stop raining until we reached the foothills of Sinai fifty miles away.  

As you travel through the Sinai desert you are confronted with the reality of the Great Rift Valley which runs from Syria in the north to Madagascar in the south.  You are also confronted with the awesome-ness of continuing creation.   Two great tectonic plates grind away at each other two centimetres, year after year.   Such has been the movement over the millennia that on the one side of the Rift you find red granite – fire rock- and on the other side limestone – water rock.

I would like to continue our thinking about the Exodus, our pilgrim journey from God to God as this is revealed to us in the scripture readings for the next few weeks.  

As we read the account of the Exodus narrative we remember that as the children of Israel went up out of Egypt a pillar of cloud went ahead of them during the day and a pillar of fire during the night.   Is the water-rock and the fire-rock metaphor for this?

The grumbling Israelites came out into this desert place to where we find them today in the first lesson of the liturgy of the day.

They have no water.   God’s Yahweh tells Moses that he should gather them all and he will provide water for them.   He instructs Moses to speak gently to the rock, to take his staff and to tell them that he God will provide them with water in abundance.  

Moses gathers the people and asks them if they would like to see him – Moses – bring water out of the rock.  In anger he strikes the rock and the water flows in abundance.  

What has he done? He has played the magician and not given God the glory and for this reason he is forever forbidden entry into the promised land. He has played God.

Terrifying story.   Terrifying place.   And indeed it is, as my own experience of the day when out of the clear blue sky flood waters cascaded down over the rocks of the Sinai desert.   We ought to re-read this narrative today and compare it with the same account in the Book of Numbers.

Sinai desert has influenced spiritual writers and mystics of the three great Abrahamic Faiths for centuries.   People are drawn into deserts physically and metaphorically, that place where Moses is drawn into the dread cloud of darkness to meet the God of unutterable light.

Anyone who has been to that place, and climbed the Mountain and watched the sun rise and set over the vastness of the granite environment knows that this is a mythical place, a place of sheer majesty.   This is the place of imagination, the place where God is encountered in deep darkness.   A wild place which, even though one has been there often, is an unknowable place.   You can die there any morning.

It is also the place of the inner landscape –desert, mountain, thunder and lightning, blizzard and scorching heat.   It truly is, as St Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century described it “the sacred chamber of divine knowledge”.

Did Jesus ever go there? During those ‘lost years’ between the ages of twelve and thirty.   Pure speculation, but I like to think ‘Yes’ – like Moses and Elijah who appeared with him on the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus knew the place.   The place of inner pilgrimage.

The beauty of the mountain is itself an embrace of terror.

“Give us water to drink”.   And like every shepherd who lives in the desert Moses knew that there are many sources of water in the wilderness.  Rain water.   Water from the oasis – the aiyn – Heb for eye.   Water from the wells – Bier.  And water from the rock.   Every Bedouin knows that behind the rocks in the desert is a great natural cistern.   If he strikes the rock in the right place – where the crack in the rock is calcified, water will gush out.   I have seen this for myself.   A natural phenomenon.

I have also witnessed great storms and blizzards on the holy mountain.

Like all mountains Sinai is the place of mystery and imagination.  The Bible describes it as the place of “sheer silence” such as Elijah experienced after the earthquake, fire and thunder.   The place of the loud trumpet as the great tectonic plates grind against one another.  

Let us go back a bit in this great narrative of the Exodus.   Sure, it is a great story – Moses leading 600,000 men (apart from women and children) out of slavery in Egypt, across the Red Sea into the Wilderness on their way to the Promised Land.  They have yet to come to the holy mountain.   We read this narrative at its literal level but we need also to read it at those other levels of comprehension where the narrative becomes MY story – salvation, baptism, spiritual pilgrimage, spiritual food – bread from heaven- and the water of life.

Remember the call of Moses who having killed an Egyptian ran away to Midian and spent forty years as a shepherd in the household of Jethro the Priest, his father-in-law.

There is no scripture text in the whole of the worlds great religions that is more hazzardly provocative and dangerous than the text of Moses engagement with the god of the Burning Bush.   YHWH – profound revelation and daunting denial.   The Word of God comes to his people.   There is an awesome terribleness about this story simply because at the deepest level of human consciousness it is our story, MY story and the truths that attach to it are pure abstraction.   “I am what I am”.   [as we have said in this place several times before this morning].  

As we journey with Moses and the Israelites these days of our Liturgy we will speak more about that place.

Everything in life is a preparation for something else.

Water! Moses is drawn out of the waters of the Nile, The Israelites cross the Red Sea, a symbol of salvation through Baptism, a preview (as it were) of the Baptism of Jesus by John in the River Jordan..   Water from the Rock, a predella of the water from the side of Christ on Calvary.   Jesus walks on water.  He teaches from a boat on the waters of Galilee’s Lake, He changes water into wine at his first miracle in Cana in Galilee.   From the cross he, who promised the water of life in the Temple and to the woman at the well, cries “I thirst”.  

Water, as symbol of spiritual life pervades the scriptures – from the separation of the waters in Genesis to the Book of the Revelation to St.  John, to the end of days when the waters of the Dead Sea will overflow with abundant life.

The Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

18^th September 2005

“in life everything is a preparation for something else”

Readings Exodus 16 2-15 (grumbling Israelites) Psalm 105 (the Antidote) Phil 1 and St Matthew 20 v 1-16 (grumbling workmen in the vineyard).

What do I do when things go wrong? What do you do? Look about for someone to blame.   That is the sin of Eden, the sin of Adam and Eve.   Blame someone else.   What happened when Australia lost the ‘Ashes’? Whinge.   Sack the coach, sack the captain, sack the cricket board, blame Ponting.   Blame the cricketers who dropped catches.   Grumble, grumble, grumble.   Blame Lathan for losing the last election, Latham blames Beasley, Beazley blames Howard, Howard blames the UN for not including stuff on the agenda of last weeks meetings… all the sin of Eden.  Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent….…..

[Some of you will remember the ‘grumble stone’ at the Ladies Retreat a couple of years ago when I gave you a stone to put in your shoe – a ‘grumble stone’.   I have used this little exercise in the Middle East.   Try it sometime.  Put a small stone in your shoe as a focus for grumbling.]

Remember the chap in the BBC TV series “One foot in the Grave” always grumbling [– bloody bugger !]

We have only to read the Psalms to come to grips with the human condition we call ‘grumbling’.   The story of the old Jewish fellow walking down the road cursing and swearing and grumbling .  His friend said to him, “Who are you grumbling about today? He said, “No one in particular, but someone will come along”.

I have some pet grumbling focuses myself – Looking up telephone directories.   Waiting for people who are always late……. Standing up in the train with a student sitting in the seat marked – for the aged and infirm !!! Being cut off in traffic.  

In today’s Gospel we have a classical example of grumbling “Why do you grumble about me.  Did you not agree with me for the wages I paid you?

Grumbling starts off fairly innocuously but often leads to rage and violence.

Grumbling is an expression of ego, perhaps the most primitive form of aggression.

I read an account in Tuesday’s Age newspaper magazine ‘Epicure’ of John Lethlean’s critique of a restaurant in Blackburn road. He grumbled about the food, about the way it was prepared, about the way it was served.  If I had been the poor restaurant owner would have gone out and either slashed my wrists or slashed his.   Negative grumbling.  To what will this lead ? Certainly not to an increase in patrons there.  

Let us look at the Exodus account as reported in today’s first lesson..

No sooner had the Israelites been released from their slavery in Egypt, so sooner had their enemies been destroyed by a mighty act of God (how we abuse this notion ‘act of God’), no sooner had they experienced the bounty of God and the relief of the Egyptians at seeing the last of them, than they began to ‘grumble’ against Moses and Aaron.   “Oh if only we had died in Egypt where we had good food, fruit in abundance and vegetables – potatoes, pumpkin, garlic and leeks, great pork sausages (no injunction against pork yet, that comes later) and roast lamb…… and here now we have this miserable stale unleavened bread.   Why did you bring us out here into this stinking wilderness – to see us die of starvation ? And so on.

So Moses tells them that the Lord will rain ‘bread from heaven’.   Not unleavened bread, not Helgas or gluten free bread, but ‘manna’. “Your ancestors ate bread in the wilderness and they are all dead.   The bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.” The bread in the wilderness is a preparation for the Bread of Life.   Our response to a life of grumbling is the living out of the eucharistic lifestyle.   Partaking of the Bread of life after due repentance.

How do I contrast the attitude to grumbling with St.  Paul’s admonition “In everything give thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus.”

To give thanks.  That is, to pray. Prayer is the Christian response, the response of our true nature to the limiting frustrations of our lives, the expression of hope and the positive task of living our lives as we were meant to live them.

Prayer is the living response to God’s relationship with us.

So much negative energy flows around us all the time.   In the daily newspapers, in the electronic media, in human relationships.  Prayer is the most basic instinct of our spiritual lives.

In life everything is a preparation for something else.   In the life of prayer, our thinking about “whatsoever is lovely, whatsoever is noble, whatsoever is honourable.  Think about these things… The truth of the Gospels that our lives can be understood only in the context of our relationship with God.   When we ‘forget’ God, then things go wrong.   We are unable to accept the limitations of our own lives, so we become negative, anxious, frustrated and we do what is natural in this un-natural state - we grumble.

As baptised people our relationship with God is not based on a set of rules.   Every code of law is a misunderstanding of the Gospel of love.   Love God.  Love your neighbour.  Love yourself.   As Christian soldiers the music we dance to is not the music of a military brass band but the music of the angels.   Joy.  In everything give thanks.   How hard is this !    Desperately hard.  As we all know.

It is so easy for us to forget that there is a Divine purpose.  A divine will.  A divine destiny for us.   It seems to me that (in my own experience) most things militate against my being joyful ad happy.   Every where I go I am aware that I am being observed by someone sitting behind a console somewhere.  Speed cameras.  Cameras at traffic lights.   Cameras that pan the football stands.   Security cameras that observe what I am up to on trains, or when I draw money out of an ATM.  

Grumbling has replaced what St.  Paul calls ‘the inner groaning of the spirit’, that is, the voice of conscience prompting me, not to a condition of hopelessness or failure, but to a life of repentance in order that I might grow in grace, into the fullness of life.  

The awful thing about sin is that it destroys our wholeness, makes us into negative grumblers about all sorts and conditions of our life.

The expression ‘bugger it’ has entered our every-day vocabulary as easily as the dog on the back of the Toyota utility truck.

It is when we forget our goal – eternal life – that we ‘grumble’ against God and against our leadership and against one another.   We forget who we are, we lose our way and the things of this world, the things that matter least in the long run, overtake us.   Grumbling gives way to all sorts of worse things, like violence.

In my experience, many Christians have lost the notion of repentance and forgiveness and tend to think of it as a negative emotion, or as a negative expression of neurotic guilt.   That’s bad.   Guilt makes us fearful and tells us that we are ‘bad people’ unworthy of God’s love, no good.

The sad thing about the call to repentance is that it is misinterpreted and lays burdens on us.

True repentance is a response to the holiness of God and our natural response to our true self, when we realise that we have not acted in accordance with our own best Self.   The expression of sadness rather than of remorse.

Prayer is the antidote to all those negative actions and reactions to which I am subject.

And these negative actions are unredeemed human responses to ego.   It is my ego that will not allow me to examine my own conscience and see that in fact I have not always done those things that I ought to have done, and I have done those things that I ought not to have done, and here is no health in us.

When I don’t get what I want, I grumble.   Instead, I ought to examine my own life and conscience and pray the prayer of repentance.   Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.  Lord have mercy.  

God’s mercy is a response not to our ‘badness’ but to our ‘goodness’.  

The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

11^th September 2005

Readings for the Day from An Australian Lectionary.
“In life everything is a preparation for something else”.

Little James came home from Sunday School at St.  John’s East Malvern and his father asked him, “What did you learn at Church today James?”

He replied, “Well Dad (have you noticed how everybody begins a sentence these days with the word ‘well’.  Listen to Alexander Downer some time), Well Dad, there was in the olden days a man called Moses.  And God spoke to him from a bushfire one day and said ‘You must go down into Egypt and tell the king that God wants all the Israels to leave off being slaves and to come down into the great mountain to pray.   Well, Moses went to the king and said, ‘Listen King, Thus saith the Lord, Let my people go.” ‘Well you can’t, says the king because I’m the king and youse are the slaves’.   ‘Well’ says Moses, after dinner were going and there’s nothing you can do about it .   God says were to have roast lamb and mint sauce for dinner and after that were off’.

‘Well’ says the king we’ll see about that.  

Then comes the bit about the angel whose called Azazel and he flies over the town and whenever he sees there’s no blood on the doors of the people he goes in and kills all the baddies children.  

Then after dinner when the Israels had painted red marks on their doors, they all take off and head for the beach down by the Red Sea.   When they get there they look round and see the Kings helicopters and gunships and tanks and everything coming after them.   ‘Holy Smoke’ says Moses.  What we going to do? Drop and atom bomb in the sea and then well all rush over to the other side.   So they do, Moses drops the bomb in the sea and the water of the sea rolls back on both sides and Moses and the Israels rush across to the other side then the water flows back and all the kings soldiers get drowned.”

“Goodness me” said James father.   “Goodness gracious me.   Is that what they told you in Sunday School?”

“Oh no, Dad, but if I told you what they told me, you would never believe me.”

End of story.

This morning we begin a series of reflections on the theme – “In life everything is a preparation for something else”.  

As we consider the prelude to this, perhaps the greatest of the myths of the Old Testament we remember that long before the Exodus, Jacobs older sons sold their brother Joseph into slavery, sold him for thirty pieces of sliver to a bunch of Midianites, who in their turn sold him as a slave in Egypt.  Thus Joseph was destined to be the fore-runner of the whole race of people who became slaves during the reign of the pharaoh who ‘knew not Joseph’ .   Thus Joseph became the prototype of Christ who was sold by his ‘brother’ Judas for thirty pieces of sliver.   In God’s plan Joseph the slave became Joseph the saviour.

In the providence of God, Joseph redeemed his family, just as Christ would redeem his family – the whole of creation.   For the Israelites, Egypt is a place both of security and nourishment and a place of bondage.

In God’s Providence the Passover meal and the Exodus itself is the Scriptural ‘preparation for something else’, that is, the prototype and preparation for the Christian Passover – the Death-Resurrection of Christ.

Today we come to that place in the great epic story of the people of Israel where Moses becomes the mediator between the people and God’s Yahweh as he brings about the redemption of the people and leads them towards the fulfilment of their destiny,

This the story of the Exodus is the most powerful account of the development of the human psyche , collectively and individually where Pharaoh is the ‘lesser self’ and Moses the ‘True Self’.

The Bible itself is the account of the ages-long dialogue between God and Man, telling the story of God’s Faithfulness and Israel’s faithlessness.   The characters are archetypes – images of encounters of individuals with the Divine.   In psychological terms, these stories, narratives, myths are the revelation of how my own ‘ego’ engages with my ‘True Self’.

To remind myself that if I read the great narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures literally, I will discover some marvellous and exciting tales.   But that is not the only way to read scripture – as literature.   There is a ‘moral’ in every tale.  There is an allegory to be considered.  But at the deepest level, the narratives of Scripture are in fact (as I have said) the revelation of how I (ME) acts and interacts with the YHOU – that is, with God-in-Christ.

The whole of my life, your life, and our life as a community of faith [and indeed collectively as human beings]] is this encounter.   To broaden the canvas, what is happening in the Gulf States of the USA at the moment involves me, and you, and every other living creature on planet earth.   For it is an encounter in the long run of the collective psyche with God.  

{How complex is this present day narrative when compared, say with the Biblical account of Noah !! And, the overthrow of the Egyptians in the Red Sea.   And the great mythical story of Jonah.}

All of us is on a pilgrimage, a dedicated and designated path towards what the psychologist refers to as ‘individuation’, what I refer to as the Omega Point in the entire process of evolution, that is God’s Creation.  

Whether little James’ account of the overthrow of God’s enemies the Egyptians in the Red Sea is viable in terms of human imagination, or whether the Biblical account is ‘true’ is not the point.  

The real point of this narrative in the context of current affairs is that the Egyptians are see to be ‘the enemies of God’s Yahweh.   What would you feel if you were an Egyptian, reading this narrative.   Of course there are many Christian Egyptians who have learned that this account of the passage of the Red Sea is [as I have already noted]] the preparation for the great event of the Christian Passover the Eucharist.

The narrative of Exodus is a lens through which we observe something of the incredible mind of God in whose foreknowledge of everything in creation lies our eternal destiny – Glory.

We remember how according to God’s eternal plan for salvation Moses was hidden in the Nile River bulrushes.   How he was brought up in Pharaoh’s household and how, having murdered an Egyptian he fled the country and for forth years in the life of a solitary shepherd God’s Yahweh prepared him for the day when to him God would reveal the ineffable name – IM WHAT I AM.   Every thing in Moses life was a preparation for something else.   His father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, it is said a descendant of Abraham, prepared Moses for hiss role as Judge.   Not simply that Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of ‘cause and effect’, but in the deepest spiritual sense an evolution, a creative growth under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

It is indeed very profound stuff ! On Friday when I was driving back to Blackburn from St John’s for my meagre Vegemite sandwich I had my car radio on and listened to an interview between John Faine and former Mayor of somewhere or other now turned novelist.   They were discussing the author’s new book – Jesus Judas and Mordechai… The author, like John Faine was Jewish though atheist.  The subject of life after death and Resurrection came up and the author said “I simply do not believe in the Resurrection”. As the talk went on I thought to myself, ‘ I wonder what sort of Resurrection he doesn’t believe in.   What sort of God he doesn’t believe in’.  ‘What trivial stuff this is, this pre-Sunday School theology.   Much of what he had to say about Jesus life and times I subscribe to myself but he simply failed utterly in not recognising the awesome-ness and majesty of the Resurrection miracle.   Failed completely to understand how God reveals the mysteries of God’s nature and of eternity little by little.   Our small minds cannot completely comprehend, let alone understand this great mystery.   The Resurrection cannot be understood out of the context of the crucifixion.   And, as I remarked last week, as Christians our notion y) of life after death is based on that – Death-Resurrection, not on the survival of the human spirit.  

ME.  I, as a psychosomatic unity die when I die.  That is, all of me DIES at my death.  Body and Soul die at the end of this life.   Then because I believe in that same Death-Resurrection that Christ ‘invented’ because of his faithfulness, I, the total ME, everything that is good because of the death of Christ in me will be held in the Divine Memory until the last day when God will clothe me in a new body and in some completely astonishingly new way, I shall be taken up into t he Divine Presence.

The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

4^th September 2005

For good or ill I expect (dv) to be here at St John’s with you until such time as God raises up for you a new priest.  

Ad lib Today’s “sermon” is a post-modern rag bag! A bit of this and a bit of that as a tribute to Father’s Day.   Happy day Dad.  

The world Calendar for early late August - September offers us some memorable events.  

Forty years of Chinese occupation of Tibet.

Thirty nine years of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank of the River Jordan.The first day of September is the first day of Spring in the southern hemisphere, the end of winter.   What do we read in this calendar ?

We are one year on from the devastating Chechin invasion of a small town’s security – over 320 killed, many of them little children.  People can never be the same again.  

Cyclone Katrina’s devastation of the American Gulf States with God only knows how many dead, how many more with nowhere to live, no employment for the foreseeable future.  Where do people find god in all of this ? In old fashioned terms such cyclones were once described as “acts of God’.   Blame God ? Who would be stupid enough to build a city two metres below sea level.   What hope is there for the future of New Orleans? It would not be the first time in history that an entire city was moved from one place to another following a natural disaster.   Remember Brasillia the designer city intended to be the capital of Brazil fifty years ago.  

.Consider Angor Wat.   Sepphoris, Beth Shean following the sixth century earthquake that validated the Greek myths surrounding Theseus and the Minatour 64 thousand people simply walked away from Beth Shean and 35 thousand from Sepphoris and settled in other places.  

A thousand deeply religious Iraquis killed in a human stampede.   Terrorism ?

Thursday 01 September the 25^th anniversary of the founding of ‘solidarity’ Poland’s trade union.   Lech Walenza - our audience with the Pope in Rome and the solidarity lapel badge.  

Friday 02 September is the celebration of the Martyrs of Papua New Guinea, that courageous group of young Anglicans, men and women, priests and laymen who, under the leadership of their Bishop, Philip Strong gave their lives for Christ – Mavis Parkinson, May Hayman, John Barge, Vivian Redlich, Lucien Teipedi, Leslie Gariardi, Margery Brenchley, John Duffill, Lilla Lashmar, Henry Matthews, Henry Holland, Bernard Moore.

Some shot, some beheaded on the beach; some axed to death… there are many ways of killing a man…

So much death, so much dying.   It is impossible to quantify this, let alone for simple people with no faith to understand the why of it all.   For the Moslem it is – Insh’allah.  It is the will of God.   For the Christian ?

Saturday 03 September the feast of St Gregory the Great who gave us the Calendar as we use it today in the West, often unaware of the fact that the other half of the known world uses another method of calculating the year – the lunar way of the Julian calendar named for Julius Caesar.

September 03 – 1939 the day when Australia with Britain declared war on Germany at the beginning of what was a most terrible six years, ended only when on the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ an American bomber dropped the first great weapon of mass destruction, the atom bomb on Hiroshima.   Then Nagasaki, the end of the war in the Pacific.   So many anniversaries.   So much death, so much dying.

September 08 the Birthday of the Virgin Mary about whom we spoke when I last preached here a few weeks ago.   So much hope.  So much joy.

And what of today.   This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.   This is the day of the Resurrection, the first day of the transition from Fr Geoffrey’s ministry to that of another priest yet unknown to us, but known to God.

Now why all this ‘trivia’. Simply because I believe one of the great challenges to all of us as Christians is to order of daily prayers around the daily newspapers.   G K Chesterton once said that the true Christian is the one with a bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other.  

What scheme of daily prayer do I have.  Do you have.   Do you use the daily intercessions as listed in the Melbourne Anglican day by day.   Do you have your own ‘prayer book’ with daily remembrances of family, friends, world needs and so on ?

You will most probably know that I have accepted the archbishop’s invitation to be with you during the interregnum.   No-one knows how long that will be.

It is my hope to preach a series of sermons on the theme –
Everything in life is a preparation for something else.
Sub title - “We all stand on the shoulders of other men (sic).”

As people of the Resurrection living in a Good Friday world, as people who are called by God to live a Christ-like lifestyle our hope is not in continuing spiritual life but in the context of Death-Resurrection.   The daily experiences of our lives are to be seen in this context.   Death-Resurrection is not only the last hope we as Christians enjoy, it is the daily experience as we walk with God and as we celebrate the triumph of good over evil, life over death.

What is expected of us.  Of me.   Of you.   Last Sunday this church was packed.   Today ??

What does it mean to “go to church”.   Certainly it is no convention.   Nobody in this secular society which is Australia expects that we go to church any more.   Yet, as I look at the church around the world I am convinced that despite the prophecies of the secular press, religion is not dead.   Christianity is certainly not dead.   In some parts of the world it is dead, but overall, the church is alive and well and we ought to proclaim

this from the house tops. We remember that Carthage in North Africa was once the centre of Mediterranean Christianity – in the days of the great black African St Augustine of Hippo.   Carthage was utterly destroyed by the Romans and there is nothing left of the church there.   But in other parts of Africa the church is increasing beyond its own ability to provide priests and bishops to minister.   People of good will, formed, framed and fashioned in the disciplines of Christian values are responding to situations of despair and gloom all over the world. Of course there are the ‘baddies’- looters in the Gulf States of the USA, fundamentalist aggressive, judgmental members of the ‘religious right’ in our own country, rabble rousers of the print media intent on crucifying those who have already confessed to their sins; and so on……

What we in the Australian Church need is to devise Gospel means of ministering to the nation.   And to a degree, the church is doing this in many ways.  

For myself the one thing necessary within our churches not only in this Diocese but far beyond is an emphasis on spirituality, study of the scriptures and Christian fellowship.   [Here I have fallen into my own trap and used ‘Christian’ as an adjective!”] Our land is in desperate need of spiritual renewal.  

During my time with you I am offering to conduct Bible Studies on Thursdays immediately following the 10.00am Eucharist.   I realise that this time is most unsuitable for most of you, so I would be happy to consider a more suitable time in addition.   The first studies on Thursday mornings will focus on the Book of Jonah.   The prophet Jonah was born and lived in Galilee, as Jesus did.  In fact you can see the Mountain of Jonah from the hilltop of Sepphoris.   It is said of Jonah that he died and was buried in Nineveh in present day Iraq.  

Also, I would like to consider with you the possibility of conducting a regular time for a Ministry of Healing, with the Laying on of hands and holy Unction.  

‘Mary, Mother of the Lord’

Sunday, 14^th August 2005

Inside ‘Jaffa’ Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City you will find two old gravestones.  Each is about two metres long, a metre wide and half a metre high.  They are made of white Jerusalem stone.   They are the graves of the two architects employed by the great Ottoman General Suleiman (Solomon) the Magnificent who between the years 1537-1541 undertook some of the most important and priceless architectural works in the Middle East.   He rebuilt the Haram es Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary) on which stood the Dome of the Rock, the shrine that houses the Mount of Moriah where it is said Abraham was prepared offered his son Isaac (or was it Ishmael) as a burnt sacrifice.   The same rock is said to have been the threshing Floor of Arunah the Jebusite which King David purchased and upon which King Solomon later built his famous Temple.   Sulieman also constructed the Walls of the Old City which stand there to this day, with its nine Gates.

Sulieman also ordered his architects to rebuild the Christian Church of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary inside the Walls, by the Zion Gate, to replace the old Byzantine Church that had fallen into disrepair.

He built many other places and rebuilt many other shrines.   His vision of Jerusalem was of a multi-faith city destined to become the centre of the known world.

His instructions to his architects were, however, never carried out.   They attempted to bribe the Christian monks living on the site.   They refused, so the architects had their abbey built outside Zion gate.   On his next visit to Jerusalem Sulieman called the architects and asked them. “Why did you disobey me?” They were speechless.   He called for a sword and beheaded them on the spot and ordered that their bodies be buried inside the Jaffa Gate as a warning to anyone who would defy him.   Their graves are there to this day.

Their abbey church, built outside the walls, like its predecessor, fell into disrepair and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century when the German Emperor (Kaiser) Wilhelm II ordered a new Church to be built over the site and given to the German Benedictine Community who minister there to this day.

Their Church, a basilica is known as the Abbey of the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary and it sits over the site where it is said Jesus’ Mother died.

The tradition tells us that when Mary knew she was going to die she summoned the apostles from all over the known world and they came.   Thomas, as usual, was late.   Mary died and at her last wish the apostles carried her body down the slope of Mount Zion and laid her in a tomb in the Garden of Gethsemane from where, on the third day she was taken up into heaven.

So there are two sites in Jerusalem dedicated to Mary’s Dormition and Assumption – Mount Zion and the Garden of the Agony.  

Dormition.   Assumption.

There are of course many traditions associated with Mary, but the New Testament offers us on the one hand a relatively simple ‘history’ of Mary, but on the other hand a most complex story.   Compare St Luke’s beautiful simple narrative of the Annunciation (Evangelisation) the Nativity and the childhood of Jesus with the awesome, mystical Prologue of St.  John’s gospel - “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…”

Who is this Child? This question invites another equally important question, “Who was Mary?”

Some have said she was a simple peasant girl born of poor parents, living in the village of Nazareth, but when one goes to Nazareth and sees across the valley to the great city of Sepphoris, 6 kilometres away, one comes to another altogether different conclusion.  

When one is confronted with the image of first century Palestine (as I was in my childhood and, yes, even in my theological studies,) of an agricultural land under Roman occupation and compares this with the reality of the recently unearthed (archaeological dig) great Graeco-Roman city “set on a hill” – Sepphoris, one must be drawn to other conclusions.

Sepphoris, where tradition tells us Joseph and his sons worked as ‘tekton’9tr ‘carpenter’) forces us to other conclusions about the Holy Family and, of course the family of “Mary of Nazareth”.

“Where do you live?” “I live in East Malvern”.   “I also live in Melbourne”.   Thus we may describe the environment of Jesus and his Mother and family.

To understand this we must set aside many of the safe, structural images of our own studies of Jesus that have sustained the church for generations and take a leap of faith into a new and far more exciting image of the reality of Galilee in the first century.

Mary and her parents, Joachim and Anna lived in the highly sophisticated world of Hellenism which was the beginning of Modernity.

This world of Greek and Roman culture gave the world much of what we to this day still ‘enjoy’.   Greek culture grew out of the cult of humanism.   Speaking from the perspective of art, the sculpture of this period gave us the most profoundly visible expression of the human body.   The Greek world was a world of reason, human reason which is able to discover by itself all ultimate truth, over against religion and all theological explanations.

Greek culture (and we remember that St Paul was an inheritor of this culture) declared that the laws of the universe could be known and identified and understood by observation and reason.  (cf Romans 1 v 20).

From Greek culture came also the notion of democracy.

From Greece then in first century Palestine, Galilee in particular, Sepphoris to be even more particular is to be found (in the archaeology) Reason, Humanism, Democracy.

And from Rome at the same period of history ? Other themes that we can identify with our own present times – Law.   Technological transformation.  Universal conquest.  Even to this day we are inheritors of this world in which Christ and his Mother and his family lived.   (vide Prof.  Finger of the East Menonite Seminary, Harrisburg, Virginia).

When we consider all these things, and add to them the common language of Greece and the extraordinary Pax Romana, they were, under God, things that facilitated the spread of the Gospel in the first century.  

This then is the world in which the Blessed Virgin Mary lived and into which she born the Eternal Son of God.

We, in the church are inheritors of these elements of civilisation.

Sepphoris, “a city set on a hill which cannot be hidden” provided the cultural environment for Mary’s life.   It was also later, following the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple in 70AD the religious centre of Israel.   The Sanhedrin, the great

Council of the Jews moved to Sepphoris and there, later Jehuda the Prince codified the Mishna.   From there came also the Bishop of Sepphoris who attended the Council of Nicaea.  

Tradition has sit that Joachim and Anna lived not in Nazareth itself, but in Sepphoris and that they were wealthy people, Joachim a merchant in this city which is set on the Via Maris, the main trade route between Europe and the East.  A trading post.  

Mary of ‘Nazareth’ far from being a country bumpkin was certainly a highly intelligent, sophisticated thoroughly devout young woman to whom God whispered his word of Grace, who conceived in her womb the child of Holy Spirit, who lived out her life of obedience in the continual awareness of her special vocation, whose heart was pierced by the sword of Christ’s Passion, who stood by Jesus on the Cross and who was there, on the day of Resurrection in the Upper Room, there on the Day of Ascension and there on the Day of Pentecost when the same Holy spirit descended in flames of God’s love upon the apostles whom she called from the ends of the earth to be with her as she died and who carried her body to the second ‘Empty Tomb’.

The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost

July 31^st 2005

Genesis 32 v 22 – 31

Once more we encounter Jacob on the run.   Afraid for his life, having fled from his twin brother Esau he now faces the inevitable confrontation.   He realises that Esau has the capacity to destroy him and acquire all of Jacob’s many wives and all of his possessions.  

He is naturally afraid.   He devises a plan to once again trick his twin.  

The ford of the Jabbok River separates Jordan from Palestine or, as the land was then called, Canaan.   It is worth while reading the introduction to today’s text to give it context.  If you want to be a crook you must devise detailed planning.   Jacob was a detailed planner.   His carefully devised plan is designed to impress his brother and, in offering Esau many gifts, to defuse the potential conflict.  

All that is now complete.   Everything he owns has gone ahead of him across the river.

Now Jacob is alone.  

In the telling of what happens next, most storytellers say that Jacob lay down and went to sleep.   However, there is nothing to indicate that Jacob was asleep when ‘a man’ appears and the two, Jacob and the ‘angel of the Lord’, wrestle until the early morning light.   Jacob prevails and the man says to him, “Let me go because it is daybreak”.   Jacob replies, “I will not let you go until you have blessed me”.   “What is your name?” “Jacob”.   “Your name will be no longer Jacob, but Israel, for you have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed”.

“What is your Name?” asks Jacob.   “Why do you ask?” And the man blessed him.

Jacob said (presumably to himself) “It is because I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been spared.”

Nevertheless, in the encounter Jacob is wounded.   The ‘man’ dislocates Jacob’s thigh.

From that day until his dying day, Jacob walked with a limp.   From this little detail we have one of Israel’s dietary laws even to this day.  

When we were children, in our family, Sunday lunch was always a baked meal, sometimes a roast of beef, sometimes a shoulder of veal, sometimes a leg of lamb.   Whenever we had lamb we would take it in turns to be given a treat – the lamb shank.   In fact it got to the stage where mother used to write on the Calendar in the kitchen who had the ‘bone’ last.   The custom of giving one of the children ‘the bone’ was handed down to our own children, as it is to this very day .   In Brisbane recently I cut off the lamb shank and gave it to our son-in-law Douglas.   Daughter Janey immediately said, “It’s my turn for the bone.  You gave it to Douglas last time”.   The ‘last time’ was about a year before! Such is the power of mythical tradition.

On Friday evenings in Jewish houses the lamb shank features to as one of the seven elements of the Sabbath meal.   The only difference between our (that is, ‘Christian’) eating the ‘bone’ and the Jewish lamb shank is that the tendon of the shank may not be eaten by Jews.   A continual reminder of the night when the angel of the Lord wrestled Jacob and dislocated his thigh.  

In the dawn Jacob crosses the Jabbok Ford and goes to meet Esau to whom he offers all he owns.   Esau says, “Keep what is yours, I have enough” Then comes the extraordinary revelation as Jacob says to Esau, “To see your face is to see the face of God.”

In wrestling with God, Jacob has seen the face of his twin brother Esau.   His shadow, his ‘dark side’.  

This is an extraordinary narrative which we must read at the deepest level.   Is it a ‘true’ story ? At the literal level it is a great yarn.   There is an allegory to the matter and of course there is the moral of the tale – God reveals us to ourselves in our dreams.   It is certainly a great story of mythical proportions.   A formative myth.   Yet another reason why we ought seriously to keep account of our own dreams.

What do we learn from this great story ? .  

What is the pattern of God’s way of dealing with us that we discern as we interrogate this narrative.

One.   God encounters us.   God seeks us out.   However diligently we may seek to find God, God is always one step ahead of us.   Sleeping and waking.   On this occasion Jacob was awake.  

Two God invites us to ‘wrestle’ with him.   To struggle with Divinity.  

Three In the struggle with God, we are wounded.   We persist “until the early morning light” and it is God’s will that we prevail.  

Four God gives us a new revelation of Himself and we receive a ‘new name’.   “A new name I give you”.  “ I give you a white stone with a name written on it that is known only to you.” As St John in his Revelation assures us.

As we reflect on this we are reminded of Saul of Tarsus on his way to Damascus to persecute Christ’s Church.   He encounters God.  He is wounded – blinded.   He struggles with this wound, as he tells us in his letter to the Galatians – four years.   God gives him the new revelation and his name is no longer Saul, but Paul.

This is one of the most encouraging stories in the Hebrew Scriptures and we may apply it to our own lives, day by day.

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

July 24^th 2005

The Kingdom of Heaven is like………

Each one of us has his/her idea of ‘the kingdom of heaven’.   That there exists somewhere beyond this time and space another realm, another world, an eternal timeless ‘other’, is belief common to most of the worlds great religions.  Yes, in this passage of scripture Jesus likens the Kingdom of heaven to material things.   Contradictions.   Doctrines and theologies about the kingdom of course vary from culture to culture.  The New Jerusalem, as St John our Patron describes it in Revelation 21, not heaven itself, but “coming down out of heaven from God….”

And there is a sense in which (as we considered last Sunday in the story of Jacob’s Ladder) all ideas of heaven with its reunion with Uncle Fred and Auntie Fanny, paradise (from the Persian paradiazi, meaning a walled garden that walled garden with its fountain of living water and its two trees), Nirvana – ‘nothingness’; all ideas evolve.   Evolution is the one consistent paradigm in the history of the cosmos.   Everything evolves from one thing into another by many processes – natural, accidental, by processes of mutation, by dramatic acts of metamorphosis, transfiguration and transformation.  

Ideas of God also evolve.   Images of the God of the First Testament are many .   God is a Warrior , often depicted as a destructive , vindictive nasty little piece of work as he is in the Book of Joshua.   A gambling, capricious god as he appears in the Book of Job.  

A god of trees and rocks as Jacob understood him.   But above all these anthropomorphic interpretations of God, God himself reveals himself to his people a little bit at a time to Abraham via the intercession of the Canaanits Fertility Priest-King Melchizadec as ‘God Most High’ – as Adonai, El Shaddai, to Moses as Yahveh – “I Am what I Am”, “ I will be whatever I want to be”.   and so on until his final revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus Christ.

Yet even as God’s people of every culture interpret that revelation in human terms, there is nevertheless, [albeit mostly hidden]], a majesty, an unknowingness, an ‘otherness’ that shines through. Mystery.   As not meaning ‘something hidden’, but as meaning ‘something yet to be revealed’.   God is revealed but not understood.   Yet.  

“Have you not known. ? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth.   He does not grow faint or weary, his understanding is unsearchable….  But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”

Compare this with “Surely God is in this place [that is, in this piece of rock]] and I did not know it.” Surely God is in this starving child in the desert country of Niger.   If I had known that this was God who was in this starving child I would most certainly have sent my dollar to Anglicord.….  In Nelson Mandela’s prison….in this great work of Jackson Pollock’s art….  In this beggar outside Jerusalem’s Dung Gate…in this dispossessed Palestinian Arab Christian Priest Naim Ateek….  

It is Jesus who reveals this insight to us.   The God of the Universe, God Most High, the Lord Adonai, the ‘I AM’ of the Empty Tomb chooses to dwell in the lives of those who need a feed or a cup of cold water or a pastoral visit by the prison chaplain.

“Little by little, line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little…” God reveals true Self.

God is in the great narrative, the less than great stories of deceit and fraud and lies and treachery in some of the Hebrew Scriptures.   God is also in the greater narrative of the deceit and fraud and lies and treachery of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives.  The truth of that great narrative is that “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself”. God’s final revelation of his nature and the true purpose with respect to his creation is in the revelation of humiliation without which there can be no resurrection.

Jesus’ says - “the kingdom of heaven is like…” not “the kingdom of heaven is.” Not “like what”, but “like who”.   The kingdom of heaven is like God.  

Remember (we said last Sunday) – ‘Jesus never asked his disciples ‘What do you say that I am’, but “Who do you say that I am”.

Throughout history god chose and still chooses to reveal God-self to his creation.   AND to his Church.   We ought never to forget that.   Revelation of god is complete in the Scriptures, but the interpretation of that revelation continues under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  

“Is the Bible True?”  Wrong question.   “What is the purpose of Holy Scripture?”

We wont go down that track.   The interpretation of Scripture is of course a complex issue, but (as I understand it) the interpretation of Scripture is like everything else in the universe subject to the ongoing revelation of the Holy Spirit to the Church.   It is still evolving.   If we accept this we will more easily able to be involved in current theological debates about the ordination of women to he episcopate, stem cell research, issues of human sexuality and so on.   God has not left his church without witness.   God has not left his Church without Divine guidance.   Problem is how to discern this guidance.   The Western church has infallibility vested in the Vicar of Christ ; the Orthodox have their infallible unalterable tradition; the Protestants have their infallible Bible and we Anglicans have an infallible Committee system.   Nevertheless God continues to inspire human beings in many fallible ways – not just theologians - with insights that enable the unravelling of the mysteries of creation.  

We do not have to understand the complexities of contemporary revelation in order to accept that God is not simply ‘above’ but in his creation, willing us to co-operate with God in every aspect of our lives, guiding us along the path of evolution towards the perfection of Christ at the Omega Point.’ Evolution involves ‘change’. Change does not necessarily equate to ‘contradiction’.  

As an aside lies the ultimate question, “Does God change”?.   I do not mean simply our understanding our perceptions about God.  

One of the things about the Prayer Book for Australia that drives me almost mad is the concept of the great ‘Adjectival God’ - you know, “Almighty…  Gracious…..   followed by our telling God what he already knows.  

We cannot ‘see God’. No-one can see God and live”.   Moses saw God’s backside! Yet because of the Incarnation it is possible to have a vision of God.   Not simply as Paul invites us to consider in his letter to the Romans – ‘in the things of this world, in

nature and so on, (as we considered last week) but rather in the mystical encounter that God offers to each one of us.

In St John’s Prologue (Jn 1 v 18) the Evangelist invites us to consider this idea - “No one has ever seen God.  It is God the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart who has made him known”. The ‘vision’ of God is Jesus Christ.  

Saint Paul makes this clear in his second letter to the Corinthians (2Cor 4 v 6) “For this is God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness.’ Who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

St Gregory the Theologian (4^th century) says “….we see God like a shadowy reflection of the sun in water”.   And Jesus says, “Have I been with you all this time and you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father”.

St.   Irenaeus 2^nd century martyred theologian, in his treatise - “The Presentation of Apostolic Preaching”, interprets this passage from John 14 v 9 thus – “….that which is invisible in the Son is the Father and that which is visible in the Father is the Son”.

The theology of iconography is based on the idea (as St John of Damascus tells us) that in the Old dispensation no-one had ever seen God, but as God chose to reveal himself in human form we are impelled to describe God in the human form of his only-begotten Son.  Thus the icon of Christ is always depicted as a first century Palestinian Jew.   This orthodox image is unalterable.   Since God became a human person, human persons can indeed claim not only to have seen God but to have touched, and heard, and experienced God with all their faculties in most intimate ways.

[I could digress and discourse about the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist – but ‘another time’.]]

It is the role of Christ to lead us to the Father.  God within.  It is the role of the Holy Spirit in the church to realise, bring about, and reveal this vision of God to our own world in our own age.

This revelation comes to us not in the Platonist way of ‘apprehension’ but in mystical ways through meditation, contemplation as we give ourselves to god asking nothing n return.   As we ‘wait upon God’.

This revelation is not about “what” God is, but “how” God is.   As to the “what” of God, that is beyond us.   (Jesus never asked the question “What do you say that I am” but “Who do you say that I am?”.  

The “How” of God, that is, “How is God seen?” To comprehend this, once again we turn to the Scriptures of the New Testament to learn that God is a communion of Three Persons.   The One-ness, the Unity of God is Trinity.   God the Father is God from all eternity.   God the Son is not the Son since Nazareth or Bethlehem, but from all eternity.   God’s being gives birth to the Son from beyond time. God the Holy Spirit manifests the energies of the Trinity - transcendentally, immanently and personally.

What then is the “Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of heaven like?”

Jesus tells us that it is like a human being – a lucky turnip digger, a merchant seeking goodly pearls, a fisherman.   Although beyond us and this world, the kingdom of God nevertheless is about humanity.   Like God himself.  

The kingdom of heaven is like….   It is Transcendent, It is immanent, It is personal. Beyond us.   Within us.  Of us.  

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

17^th July 2005

Genesis 28 10 – 19 Ps 1339 Romans 8 12-25 Matt 13 24-30

“Surely the Lord is in this place and I did not know it

Where is God? In the church, in this church, in the sacramental presence of the altar; in the aumbry; where two or three are gathered together; in the will and determination of suicide bombers; in the landscape; in the smile of a child; in the starry heavens;……

In the corrent debate about whether or not the God of the Jews is the same God as the God of Islam; whether or not the God of Islam is the God of the Christians.   No doubt you have been following the “letters to the Editor” subsequent to the recent debate.

Most of the arguments centre around the fixed doctrines of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. How can God who exists in Trinity be the same God as “Allah il Allah” or the monotheistic Yahveh of Judaism?

The debates and arguments are not about God but about perceptions of God – images of God doctrines of God; interpretations of revelation about God.

There is only one God.   To say otherwise is to put ourselves back into the days of Jacob – who wrestled with this question three thousand years ago.

What sort of God, we ask.

Jesus denied that thinking.   He never asked his disciples “what do you say that I am”, but “Who do you say that I am”.   A very different question.  

For the Jew, there is no image of God.   For the Moslem the thought that God could accommodate himself to the human condition is blasphemy.   But for us, the Christian, if we want to see God, if we want to see what God looks like, if we want to see who God is, we look to Jesus whose presence in Spirit resides with us here and now.

How can we discern the presence of the Lord in the midst of suicide bombings, innocent suffering, natural disasters and such like? Why is it, as our Lord tells us in today’s parable, goodness and evil grow together.   And of course there are many other questions that demand we believe that we live in a moral universe.  

It is so easy to say, as Jesus seems to say in this parable, “Oh well, in the long run, at the Day of Judgment ‘all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well’.   That is no consolation when we are faced with ‘battle, murder and sudden death’.   That seems to present no peace when we contemplate injustice.   “Pie in the sky when you die”.   What about now.   Where is God ?

Enter Jacob.   Jacob the Trickster, Jacob the swindler, Jacob the deceiver, Jacob the liar who cheated his brother out of his birthright and his blessing.   Why does God love this man Jacob and hate his brother Esau ? [as St Paul tells us in Romans 9 v 13]

Why does God hate anything or anybody.   Questions, questions, questions.

Why does God seem to choose ‘crooks’ – like King David for example, a murderer, adulterer, a thug.  

The answer lies in Samuel’s bon mot – “God does not see as humans see.”

Jacob has run away.  He is scared.   The brother whom he has cheated is after him.  

The story is worth retelling.

Jacob dreams.   How often God reveals his will to us in dreams.   We ought always to try to remember our dreams…to write them down as soon as we awake.   He dreams of a ladder set up from the stone pillow under his head, reaching high into the heavens, with the angels of god ascending and descending upon it.  

Do you remember in John’s Gospel the account of Jesus calling Nathanael who is sitting under the fig tree.   “Before Philip called you, when you were sitting under the fig tree, I ‘saw’ you”, says Jesus.   “Rabbi, you are the Son of god….” Jesus ‘saw’ into Nathanael’s mind and knew what he was ‘day dreaming about’.   Jesus goes on, “You will see the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man..”

Such is the power of this story from Genesis that it impels Jesus to see into the mind of a man of prayer.

Jacob had left his home believing that his god, the God of his father Isaac and of his grandfather Abraham was a tribal God.  A local god.  Obviously his idea of God as Lord of the Universe and all things in it, the idea of god espoused by Abraham had somehow gotten diminished.   God of all the nations upon earth had become yet again a tribal god.   It takes hardship and a dream to convince him otherwise.  Now he ‘sees’ that God dwells everywhere.   So he takes the stone pillow and anoints it and ironically ‘localises’ God in the stone which he sets up as a memorial.

As it happened, God had been with him all the time “and I knew it not”.   How easy it is to forget the abiding presence of the Lord.   W easy it is to overlook the judgement, the awful day when the weeds are separated from the ripe grain.   This is Jesus response to the question “Where is God”.  

You may know that last week I returned once more from Jerusalem.   I flew through London and at Heathrow, on my way to Gate No 5 to catch the British Air Flight to Tel Aviv, walking down the concourse I saw a sign –“Inter Faith Prayer Room.   Once upon a time we would have called it “Chapel”.   I steered my course into that place.   There was no-one else in it.   Moslem prayer rugs were untidily piled up all over the place.   There were a few curious symbols painted onto the wall.   There was an arrow pointing to the direction of Mecca.   A few Prayer Books.  A small table a wooden cross laid flat upon it.   Of the carpet that was laid over the floor Oscar Wilde would have said, as he did of wallpaper, “One of us has to go”.   It was a daggy flecked, dappled subversive mix of light grey and dark grey.   I stood there for a while taking in all the mess when suddenly I was transported.   I was ‘lifted out of myself’ for a few moments into that other place.   This was no great cathedral, synagogue or mosque, but a beat-up motley room of dozens of conflicting images.   God was there.   And I knew it.

I have been though that terminal at Heathrow a dozen times or more.  This was the first time I had been led to ‘have a look’ at the, so it seemed to me to be – uncared for, untidy, practical inter faith prayer room. I guess I could go there again a dozen times and see only piled up rugs, frayed prayer books, a few isolated symbols and what must surely have been, a second-hand carpet.. 

[The Genesis passage again reminds us of that other world to which we belong, the world of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, our guardian angel.   The great angels..]

Designed by: Heathmont Enterprises
for
© St John's Anglican Church, East Malvern, 2000

7 Finch Street, East Malvern 3145
Ph: 9571-6616
Fax: 9572-4662
email: vicar@stjohnseastmalvern.org.au