Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost - 9th June 2024

Pentecost 3 – 9th June 2024 (Christ Church St. Lucia)

Readings:  1 Samuel 8: 4-20; Psalm 138; 2 Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1; Mark 3: 20-35

I want to begin with a brief comment on the first reading and then to spend a bit more time with the Gospel reading which has a couple of difficult passages in it.

Samuel is an old man, and he knows his time is short.  He’s been a judge over Israel – divinely appointed.  Judges then were more than the judicial appointments we think of now – they functioned as priest, prophet, political leader.  He appoints his sons to succeed him, but they are corrupt.  It’s been a period of relative stability, and the people turn their eyes elsewhere and see that their neighbours have kings.  Working, I think, on the principle that the grass is always greener on the other side, they decide they want a king as well.  God says to Samuel, “Don’t take it personally, but tell them what a king will be like.”  So, Samuel does just that.  He says basically, “You want a king?  OK then.  This is what a king will do.  He’ll conscript your sons.  He’ll require your daughters to work in his court.  He’ll spend up big on armaments.  He’ll levy the best of your land and your produce for his courtiers and flunkeys.  In the end, you’ll feel like slaves in your own land.”  Well, the people don’t listen.  They’re determined to have a king – and they do.  And the first king, Saul, is a disaster.  Everything Samuel predicts happens.  As I read through the reading there are three words that occur like a refrain.  You may have picked them up as you listened. They are “He will take.”  “He will take.”   Our faith calls us to the opposite – to self-giving and service to others.  A couple of weeks ago, National Volunteer Week was observed. Across Australia, it is estimated that over 5 million (5.025 million) people volunteered through an organisation or group in 2020. This is almost one quarter (24.8%) of people aged 15 years and over[1].   We can give thanks for millions of Australians who are givers of themselves in all sorts of ways and organisations.  We can give thanks for all those who give of themselves to God’s mission expressed through all the pastoral, liturgical and administrative facets of our parish.  We can give thanks for leaders who have given of themselves in the service of their peoples – would that there were more.

As I mentioned, the gospel for this morning has a couple of difficult passages, so I thought I might have a go at them.   First, to set the gospel reading in some context, it reflects a couple of themes that run through St. Mark’s Gospel.   The first is a continuing conflict with the religious authorities which begins very early in Jesus’ ministry and just escalates.  Already, in the early part of Chapter 3 read last Sunday, Mark tells us there is a plot hatched between Pharisees and Herodians to destroy Jesus.[2]  The second is the whole matter of demons and the demonic.  This was very much part of the worldview at the time.  Human subjection to the demonic world, led by the prince of demons known as Satan or Beelzebul was all encompassing. Destructive natural events such as storms were attributed to demons.  Illness, both physical and mental and moral, was attributed to demons.  The Roman occupiers were understood to be instruments manipulated by demons for their own ends.

We have these two themes come together in the passage this morning.  Jesus own family think he has lost it, basically.  The Greek translated as “gone out of his mind” means literally he is “beside himself.”  This of course is an opportunity for the scribes who suddenly appear and accuse him of being demon possessed.  He casts out demons by the power of the chief demon, they say.  Jesus, of course is more than a match for them and quickly dismisses their argument.  How can a divided house stand?  He uses a reverse kind of image about someone wanting to plunder a strong man’s house – the strong man must be first bound.  And then this difficult statement about those who blaspheme against the Holy Spirit can never be forgiven.  What sin can be unforgiveable?  Isn’t forgiveness available for all, no strings attached?  The Australian commentator Brendan Byrne writes on this passage “the thought of an unforgiveable sin has been a torment for the delicate Christian conscience.”[3]  Rather than asking what kind of specific act might lead to such a condemnation, we can look more closely at the passage in context.  Since it is by the power of God’s Holy Spirit that Jesus expels demons, to accuse him of doing so through the prince of demons is identifying the Holy Spirit with the unclean spirits of the demonic world.  It’s the intentional denial of the holiness of God’s Spirit, confusing good and evil, which Jesus describes as unforgivable.[4] There is an assurance of forgiveness for all when Jesus says, “Truly I tell you people will be forgiven for their sins.”  Jesus has come to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to offer the forgiveness linked with the onset of the Kingdom.  “The kingdom of God has come near”, he says earlier, “repent and believe the good news.”[5]  Only those who identify Jesus’ activity with what is its absolute opposite place themselves out of the reach of God’s saving grace.  Who might that be today?  Maybe those who misuse scripture to justify acts of violence, particularly domestic violence spring to mind.  In my visiting at Greenslopes Hospital for Legacy, a patient recently disclosed to me that an ex-husband had beaten her and quoted the gospel passage about turning the other cheek.[6]

And then Jesus’ natural family appears on the scene – his mother and brothers – and they try to make contact with him.  Jesus doesn’t acknowledge them at all but looks at the crowd around him and says that they are his mother and brothers and then goes on to say that whoever does God’s will is his “brother and sister and mother.” The text sets the natural family of Jesus, including his mother on the side of those who misunderstand Jesus and seek to divert him from his mission.  We tend to come away from Christmas with glowing, idealized images of the holy family, but Mark paints them in quite a negative light – much more so than Matthew or Luke.  It’s not perhaps what we might expect from a Gospel writer.  Brendan Byrne notes wryly “If one is looking for a rich theology of family life in the New Testament, Marks gospel is hardly the place to begin.”[7]  We like to speak of the “parish family”, but we need to be sensitive as to how we use the term as for some people family is or was hardly a happy place.  It’s also clear from today’s Gospel that there were tensions in Jesus own family.  What’s going on?  It’s possible that Mark wrote his Gospel for a community that was under some threat – the community was probably in Rome – and survival required single minded commitment to the life of the small faith community and sacrifice in many areas of life, so Mark has Jesus highlighting the significance of this for those who would do God’s will. 

So, it’s all rather a mixed bag this morning.  Perhaps one thing that draws the passage from Samuel and the Gospel together is what should characterize this community of the Kingdom, this family of Jesus.  And one thing that should characterize us is single minded commitment to service, exemplified for us of course in the life of Jesus, who, ignoring petty argument showed us the way of self-giving, who came not to be served, but to serve.  The kind of service encapsulated in the hymn Brother, sister, let me serve you, let me be as Christ to you.[8]

May we serve each other as Christ served us.

©The Rev’d. W.D. Crossman

[1] https://www.volunteeringaustralia.org/wp-content/uploads/Volunteering-Australia-Key-Volunteering-Statistics-2024-Update.pdf

[2] Mark 3:6

[3] Brendan Byrne A Costly Freedom – A Theological Reading of Mark’s Gospel St. Paul’s Publications, Strathfield 2008 p74

[4] 3 Rosalind Brown Fresh from the Word – A Preaching Companion for Sundays and Holy Days Canterbury Press Norwich UK 2016 p194

[5] Mark 1:15

[6] Matthew 5:39

[7] Op cit p75

[8] Together in Song No650 – The Servant Song

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost - 2nd June 2024

Pentecost 2 - 2 Jun 2024 Christ Church St. Lucia

Readings:  Deuteronomy 5: 12-15; Psalm 139: 1-6, 13-18: 1-10; 2 Corinthians 4: 5-12; Mark 2:23-6:6

In my second last or last year at primary school, I started playing hockey. I played right through high school, had a break while I was at university, and then played on and off for about 12 years when I was in the Army.  I guess there’s many things I have forgotten about my hockey playing days, but one thing I’ve never forgotten was my father’s reaction when I came home and told him we’d been asked to play on a Sunday.  He was not at all happy about it.  My father’s family came from West Country Methodist stock and my mother’s family from Northern Ireland Presbyterian stock, so Sundays were definitely days of rest.  In our family we’d go to church – my brother and sister and I to Sunday School and later to Christian Endeavour, then home for lunch, a rest, and then we’d often go on a family walk together – we didn’t have a car for a long time.  I think my parents would hardly recognise Sundays now.  Just about anything that can open is open, just about anything that can be done is done.   We rarely hear talk these days of “the Sabbath”, but years ago you did.   Sunday was “the Sabbath” and there were strict expectations and cultural norms about what could and couldn’t be done.  What do we make of the Sabbath these days?

The Sabbath was a Jewish institution, and its observance was grounded deeply in Jewish identity.  It reaches right back to the Creation stories when we’re told that God rested on the seventh day – in Genesis Chapter 2 we read “And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.  So, God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.”[1]  It’s not saying that God needed a rest, rather it’s saying that for God, rest was part of the creation.  The Fourth Commandment about remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy is one of the more lengthy and developed commandments and an extensive body of legal interpretation grew up regarding what did and did not violate Sabbath rest.  The evidence of the Gospels suggests that Jesus didn’t reject Sabbath observance, but he did question interpretations he judged to be at odds with the original purpose of the Sabbath.  And the two sabbath controversies we have in the reading from St. Mark’s Gospel today reflect this attitude of Jesus.

The first arises when the disciples walk with Jesus through a field of standing grain and begin to pluck heads of possibly ripening grain.  The Law allowed this – you could pick grain in this way, but you weren’t allowed to use a sickle.  That was harvesting, that was work.  When the Pharisees suddenly turn up, it’s not the picking of the grain they object to, but that it’s being done on the Sabbath.   In their defence, Jesus appeals to Biblical precedent – David and his followers, because they were hungry, had entered the house of God and had eaten the bread reserved for the priests.[2] The use of David’s name is significant – some say that there’s an implied messianic claim in the appeal to David.  Be that as it may, Jesus in the next verse takes the defence much further and he declares with authority the true purpose of the Sabbath – “the Sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.”  “Was made” some say is creation type language, so taking this view, Jesus is reclaiming an order of creation in the name of the Kingdom.  The statement is much more than a general statement reflecting a humane view of the religious law – Jesus is revealing something of the coming of the Kingdom.  He seems to make this specific in the next statement when he says the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.  As an agent of the Kingdom now dawning, Jesus has authority as Son of Man to institute the original intention and purpose of the Creator for human beings and to challenge with equal authority all the structures and attitude that are holding this back.  So, an incident that begins as a trivial infringement of perceived Sabbath Law has ended with Jesus declaring God’s ultimate will for humankind. Bishop George Browning in his book “Sabbath and the Common Good” comments that under this interpretation, Sabbath is a gift from the dawn of time, a gift not simply for the Jewish people, but for the whole of humanity within the community of creation – a gift that edifies and empowers human life.  This view does not allow for the abandonment of sabbath but promotes its rediscovery; its extraction from the legal requirements of disagreement to a celebration of engagement with God and the whole created order.[3]

The second conflict grows out of the first and it shows that Jesus is indeed the Lord of the Sabbath.  The Pharisees have possibly set Jesus up – using the presence of the man with the withered hand to see if Jesus will flout the law.  Traditional interpretation allowed for exceptions in matters of life and death.  The man’s ailment is not life threatening.  Jesus could ignore the man or postpone dealing with the situation until the next day. But he chooses to confront the Pharisees.  He questions them as to what the Sabbath is all about – is it about saving life or destroying it?  The Pharisees try to save face, but too late.  Jesus has already taken the issue beyond the limits in which they had set it – simple Sabbath observance – to another level completely – God’s will and purpose to bring life in its abundance to all human beings.  Jesus shifts the focus from what may be appropriate on the seventh day to what is always appropriate every day; a focus on sabbath as intended in the Genesis narrative; a focus on blessing and sanctification within the whole created order.[4] To delay the healing is to delay God’s Kingdom.  The healing becomes a proclamation of the Kingdom and a symbolic rescue of a human life from powers opposed to the Kingdom – and here it’s not demonic powers – it’s hardness of heart, slavish obedience to letter of the Law, resistance to life and wholeness.

So, what do we do with all of this?   The idea that ‘humanity was made for the Sabbath’ continues to be a popular theology in some places.  Its basis is that God created the law and humanity needs to live up to it or else we are lost.  In that theology, God is chiefly known as holy, and humans must achieve a certain level of holiness – through following laws or practicing certain observances or following certain restrictions - to be acceptable to God.   The alternative theology, which is the one Jesus poses, is that ‘the Sabbath was made for humanity.’ In that sense, God is chiefly known as love and as George Browning observes “humanity is crowned with supreme value in the embrace of sabbath, in the interconnectedness of life shared with God and the whole created order.[5]  The first sees “the sabbath” as one day of the week, the second sees “sabbath” as a gift from God.

In a polarized world consumed with conflict and western consumerism and individualism, sabbath calls us to a choice of mutuality shared with other human beings in the company of the whole created order under the sovereignty of God, or a life of competitive independence and self-interest.[6]    To respond adequately to this gift of Sabbath as God originally intended takes time and space.  That’s what Sabbath is about -that’s what we’re doing in worship – making time and space for God.  That’s what we do in times of quiet and rest – make space for God.   Sabbath observance shouldn’t be the legal straitjacket of Sabbatarianism,[7] but a joyful foretaste of something eternal. 

But there are so many things that claim our time and energies – and in one sense there’s nothing new about this – the English romantic poets knew it – William Wordsworth wrote:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon![8]

Busyness can affect and infect us all - it can be really seductive.  It can lead us to think we’re indispensable, or that we’re doing God’s work and no one else seems to be.  In our spiritual journeys as individuals and as community, Sabbath is still crucial – slowing down, taking time out, just stopping and being quiet long enough to see what God is doing and how we respond.   May God give us all grace to make that time and space.  Let’s pray:

O Sabbath rest by Galilee,
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee
The silence of eternity,
Interpreted by love!

Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of Thy peace.[9]

©The Rev’d. W.D. Crossman

[1] Genesis 2: 2-3

[2] 1 Samuel 21: 2-7

[3] George Victor Browning Sabbath and the Common Good – Prospects for a New Humanity  Barrallier Books West Geelong, Vic 2016 p134

[4] Ibid p138

[5] George Victor Browning ibid p178

[6] George Victor Browning ibid p178

[7] Sabbatarianism is usually defined as the belief that Christians should observe a particular day of the week as the Sabbath, either the seventh day or the first day of the week.

[8] Composed c1802, first published 1807

[9] Together in Song No 598

Sermon for Trinity Sunday - 26th May 2024

Trinity Sunday:  26 May 24 (Christ Church St. Lucia)

Readings:  Isaiah 6: 1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8: 12-17; John 3: 1-17

 Fifty years ago, a great controversy raged across the media for a while.  It didn’t involve some political or corporate or sporting scandal; it involved surprisingly enough a work of art – Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles”.  The National Gallery of Australia, with the support of a then fairly new Federal Government had paid what seemed like an enormous sum of money - $1.3 million – for the painting.  There were headlines in the newspapers for a while – one tabloid screamed “Drunks Did It!”[1].  Others worked themselves into a lather about the waste of money.  The gallery quietly exhibited the picture.  It is now one of our greatest treasures, worth many times what they paid for it - at last estimate $500 million - and they don’t seek to explain it.  You need to experience it.[2]  And when you do see it, it’s an enormous painting.  If you get too close to it, it doesn’t seem to mean anything much, but if you step back and take the time to look at it for a while, a pattern begins to emerge.  I’ve seen it more than once now, and each time the experience has been the same – not exactly the same – there’s always a subtle difference in what I see.

 The idea of the Trinity is a bit like that.  It emerged in great controversy.  The then emperor, Constantine, a recent convert to Christianity saw that the church was divided as to how God could be described as three persons in one – as Father, Son and Spirit.  Constantine didn’t want a divided church but recognised that events were starting to run away from him.  He called a Council at Nicea in 325 and a creed was accepted – shorter than the Nicean creed we will recite shortly.   At the Council of Nicea, the bishops went on to do other things – regulate the time of preparation for baptism, regulate the morals of the clergy, work out what to do with penitents in one church trying to get pardoned in another, laying down that a new bishop should be consecrated by all the bishops in that province – or at least three of them (still happens today) and so on.  Importantly, the Council established the equality of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity and asserted that only the Son became incarnate as Jesus Christ. After all this, the bishops went home – where away from the emperor and the other bishops, some began to have second thoughts and more controversies emerged.  It wasn’t for about another 50 years that things were tidied up.  Now I’m not going to go into all the details, but it’s a fascinating read, particularly if you thought the early church was sweetness and light.  The controversy raged – there was a great cast of characters – Arius, Athanasius, Sabellius, Hippolytus, Callistus (of whom Hippolytus said he was “a senseless and unstable fellow who improvises blasphemies in every direction.”)  There were excommunications, bishops sentenced to the treadmill or sent to the mines in Sardinia – just to give you an idea of what went on.  In the end, Gregory of Nazianzus, who along with Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa tidied the whole thing up wrote, I suppose in exasperation, “My inclination is to avoid all assemblies of bishops, because I have never seen any council come to a good end, nor turn out to be a solution of evils.  On the contrary, it usually increases them.”[3]

The early church tried to define Trinity – with words like persona rather than person, and substance and so on.  Maybe they tried to get too close.  I don’t think you can define Trinity – any more than Einstein’s E=mc squared and his Theory of Relativity defines or fully explains the majesty and glory of the universe that we can experience when we look at a clear night sky and with the psalmist consider the works of the heavens, the works of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars which have been set in order.[4]   Or have you ever attempted to come up with an exhaustive explanation of the experience of falling in love. You can’t do it, can you? You can say things about it that are true, but you can never explain it in such a way that a person who hadn’t experienced it would understand what you were talking about. In the end it is still a mystery. In fact, to push that analogy a bit further, imagine trying to write down a set of instructions for falling in love; an explanation or equation for someone who didn’t previously know the experience, so that if they followed your formula they would fall in love. Could you do it? I doubt it.

And yet the fact that you can’t explain the experience or write a manual for it doesn’t stop you from falling in love. The experience comes whether you can comprehend it or not.   I think the same is true of the Trinity. Before there was ever a doctrine of the Trinity, there was an experience of the Trinity. The early church experienced God in certain ways, and as they attempted to describe their experience the idea of the Trinity emerged. They began with their experience of the living God who’d come in human form as Jesus the Son and was now still alive and worshipped in the power of the Spirit. The theology came second.  Christian faith is not about explanations, it’s about experience; it’s about stepping back and taking time; it’s about a relationship with the living God.  

Yet we often feel under constant pressure to define things, to be certain about things.  The English theologian and biblical scholar, Dr. Paula Gooder has written; “We live in a world obsessed by certainty.  We are meant to hold clear, confident view on subjects that range widely from education to euthanasia, from economics to the environment – and to express our clear, certain views regularly….premature certainty is as corrosive of truth as lies can be.  Certain things in life need time for reflection as we wrestle with issues, questions and explore possibilities.  Rushing too swiftly to immovable certainty undermines our ability to grasp the truth.  Today we often feel that we can only worship if we are clear in our views, if we have dotted all the “i”s and crossed all the “t”s.  Doubt can be seen to be the antithesis of worship.  It is not.  We worship not out of our certainty but out of our response to God.  Fortunately, we do not have to comprehend everything about God and God’s relationship with the world before we worship.  In fact, sometimes it is our doubts that can draw us deeper into the mystery of God, and from deep within the mystery of God the only possible thing to do is worship.”[5]

In a much deeper way than one can be drawn into “Blue Poles”, the idea of Trinity, which we can’t reduce to some formula, draws us deeper into the mystery of God.  One of the things that most of the theologians agree on when considering the Trinitarian nature of God is that we are not so much talking about three persons, but about three relationships. Three relationships of love that exist within the being of God.

What we have here are love relationships that are extravagantly self-giving. Rather than becoming rivals of one another, they delight in one another and strive to glorify one another.  There seems no limit to their willingness to give themselves to one another, and to give themselves to the mutual strengthening of the relationships.

The more we step back and contemplate the relationships of the Trinity, rather than trying to define them, the more we see God’s emerging call to us to be like God and to love in ways which are not possessive and aggressive; to love in ways that do not seek the exclusion of the other or the glorification of ourselves. The more fully we imitate the self-giving love of the Trinity, the more we will be set free from possessiveness and self-gratification.  

The beautiful and extravagantly self-giving love of the Trinity is not only a model for us to imitate. It is also an invitation. Because just as these three relationships celebrate and glory in them, they eagerly look to draw others, namely us, into the life of those relationships. God is not a closed system, an exclusive love bond that has nothing to offer to those outside. On the contrary, God is intensely and overflowingly relational, and longs to draw us into relationship. The heart of the revelation of the nature of God is Christ’s self-offering on the cross, where Jesus, having been falsely cast as a rebel and troublemaker, gives up his life rather than reciprocate the hostility, and thus reveals to us the nature of God’s self-giving love and the invitation into that love. And that’s where we stand at this table today, as witnesses of that act of self-giving, as recipients of that extravagant offer, as the Trinity of Love reaches out to us and places the body of Christ into our hands. And so here again, we are faced with the call and the invitation. How shall we respond? We can grasp at all we desire seeking to possess and control, and gratify ourselves, or we can let go, and accept the invitation and be carried by the Spirit into a relationship with self-giving love – God’s love which has already been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.[6]   Trinity invites us to unlock our hearts and enter deeply into the mystery of God whose very nature is love.

 © The Rev’d. W.D. Crossman

[1] The Daily Mirror 23rd October 1973

[2] I first heard this connection made in 1990 by The Rev’d. Dr. Jim McPherson when I was a theological student in the Parish of Kambah (Dio Canberra-Goulburn) where he was the Rector.

[3] https://earlychurchtexts.com/public/gregoryofnaz_councils_of_bishops.htm#

[4] Psalm 8:3

[5] Paula Gooder This Risen Existence Canterbury Press Norwich UK 2009

[6] Romans 5:5