ST JAMES’ ANGLICAN CHURCH, KING STREET, SYDNEY, NSW

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HOLY WEEK AND EASTER SERMONS

2011 ____________________

By The Reverend Elaine Farmer

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THE REVEREND ELAINE FARMER

The Reverend Elaine Farmer comes from the Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn. She gained her BTh at the Sydney College of Divinity through St Mark’s National Theological Centre, Canberra, and her MTh at Charles Sturt University. Some of the Elaine’s extensive preaching engagements have included: • In the USA, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Wall Street NYC; The Church of the Transfiguration NYC; Christ Church New Haven Connecticut; 2006 All Saints’, Pontiac, Illinois, Holy Week Series; Church of the Good Shepherd, Blue Springs, Virginia and The Church of the Transfiguration, NYC. • In New Zealand, cathedrals in Auckland, Dunedin and Wellington; and various parish churches. • In Indonesia, University Pelita Harapan Chapel, Lippo Karawaci; Christmas and Easter Eucharists at Ambassador’s

Residence. • In Malaysia, St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral and various parish churches and workshops and conferences on interfaith relations particularly involving Sisters in Islam. • In Australia: St George’s Cathedral, Perth; St Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide; St John’s, Reid, Canberra; All Saints’ Ainslie; 2008 Holy Covenant Jamison Holy Week Series; St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne, Three Hours Devotions; St Paul’s Manuka Three Hours Devotions; various parish churches in the ACT, NSW, Victoria and South Australia. And of course here at St James’, including the 2004 Holy Week series. Elaine is an experienced leader of retreats and quiet days, and has been the keynote speaker at various Australian and international conferences. In the early 2000s, Elaine was a tutor in Homiletics and Ministry Formation at St Mark’s National Theological Centre while leading the St Mark’s Anglican Ministry Formation program for future Anglican clergy. She was also Associate Editor of St Mark’s Review, and from 1999–2002, Acting Editor. All this while performing her responsibilities as Honorary Associate Priest, St Paul’s Anglican Church Manuka and Director of Liturgy. In 2009 Elaine was literary editor of the English translation of Defeat and Victory, a trilogy about life and politics in WWII Japanese-occupied Indonesia, by leading 20th century Indonesian philosopher, writer and linguist, Sutan Takdir Alishjahbana. Her other publications include: • “…And the Angels Held their Breath. Sixteen Reasons for Exploring the God-Option”, Australasian Theological Forum, 2006. A translation in Bahasa Indonesia was published in 2008. • “Kindlers of Fire, Lighters of Firebrands” in Don’t Put Out the Burning Bush; Worship and Preaching in a Complex World, Boland OP, Vivian (ed.), Australasian Theological Forum, 2008. • “Aids & the Bible”, PNG Medical Journal. • “Women and the Bible”, material used in UNFP.

These sermons are copyright to the Reverend Elaine Farmer

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A PASSIONATE TALE FOR A GOD-HAUNTED WORLD A Sermon Series for Holy Week 2011

DAY TITLE AND TEXT PAGE

PALM SUNDAY ‘A DONKEY RIDE FROM DEATH’ 4 Processions and Passion Matthew 21:1-11

MONDAY ‘WOE TO YOU!’ 8

A Passion for Righteousness, Holiness and Justice John 12:21

TUESDAY ‘THE DREAM OF GOD’ 12

A Passion for the Kingdom of God John 12:36

WEDNESDAY ‘THE FRAGRANCE OF LOVE AND MERCY’ 15

A Passion for Mercy John 12:3 MAUNDY THURSDAY ‘LOVE ME, LOVE MY PEOPLE’ 18

A Passion for Compassion & Service John 13:3-5

GOOD FRIDAY ‘BEHOLD YOUR GOD!’ 21

A Passion for Truth John 18:37-38

EASTER VIGIL ‘THE CHRIST BECKONS’ 25

A Passion for the People of God Matthew 28:5-6

EASTER DAY ‘RESURRECTION FLOWERS’ 28

A Passion for Life and Hope Luke 24:13-16

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A DONKEY RIDE FROM DEATH

— Processions and Passion — SERMON for PALM SUNDAY, 17 April 2011 St James King Street Sydney Liturgy of the Palms: Mt 21:1-11; Ps 118:1-2 & 19-29 Passion Service: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Ps 31:9-18; Phil 2:5-11; Mt 26:14-27:66 ____________________________________________________________________ When they had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage … Jesus sent two disciples, saying … ‘Go into the village …and … you will find a donkey … and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything … just say … “The Lord needs them.”1

Why did Jesus send for the donkey? This man didn’t do anything just because; without thought; without purpose. He was a passionate driven man, as we will see during this week, and driven people don’t do anything just because. As he approached Jerusalem, Jesus would have been acutely conscious of how important this entry into Jerusalem was. He would have realised that the most likely outcome for him would be disaster and there was precious little time left to influence the people for his cause—the kingdom of God. To do that, he had to remind them of who they were, of their history, of the stories of their tradition, of their god, and what God required of them as people of faith. And he had to do it decisively and quickly. Matthew says a very large crowd was there—some had come with him, others greeted his arrival but we don’t know how many. The gospel writers are unclear. Mark refers to many people2, Luke to a multitude of disciples3 and John to a great crowd.4 But, however many there were—and, after all, how many is ‘many’?—a procession of sorts seems to have formed up around Jesus as he approached the city5. Dusty and ragged no doubt, but a ripple of excitement running through the people—the kind of ‘what’s happening?’ excitement that the shout of just a few can stir in a crowd. It was as if a stage was set. The situation was full of meaning to serve Jesus’ cause. Fresh in the memories of all of them, including Jesus, would have been the new year Festival of Tabernacles—or Booths—just past. This was Sukkôth6, the most important of the three annual pilgrimages to the sanctuary. ‘A most holy and most eminent feast’7, Josephus, historian and contemporary of Jesus, called it, and for them it meant tales in their scriptures of a week of joyful feasting, of thanksgiving

1 Matthew 21:1-2. 2 Mark 11:8 3 Luke 19:37 4 John 12:12 5 Note that the gospels vary as to whether the people acclaimed him as he approached Jerusalem or after he had entered the city. 6 Held at some time early in the year after all the harvests are in. De Vaux, Roland, Ancient Israel. Its Life and Institutions, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1986, p.498. 7 Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, VIII, iv, I, Willoughby & Co, London, nd., P.162.

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for Yahweh’s rescuing them from their desert wanderings.8 And the blessing of a successful harvest—another year’s supply of bread and wine for their sustenance and comfort. Sukkôth in turn would revive memories of their great ancestors, Moses and David, and of Israel’s past glory. Of the story of the wonderful procession when the ark and the tabernacle Moses had built for it were carried by the priests to great King Solomon’s beautiful new Temple. King and people had led the way moistening the ground with sacrifices and drink offerings, sweetening the air with pungent clouds of incense, singing and dancing in endless praise to the glory of God.9 Perhaps, in their own time, many in the crowd with Jesus had been pilgrims to the festival at the great Jerusalem Temple. Perhaps, like their ancestors, they had bound together branches of willow, myrtle and palm—lulab these bundles were called—to wave over their heads as the priests processed round the altar, branches in hand, pouring silver bowls of water and wine upon ground and altar. Together they would have sung the great Hallel10. Hosanna!11 Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!12 And they sang it now; joyfully; sensing triumph in the air. This was the man everyone was talking about. Some of them had even seen the amazing things he had done. Here he was, riding a donkey and heading towards Jerusalem. They remembered other things their scriptures said. The great prophet Zechariah proclaiming to their ancestors:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.13

Was this Jesus that king? The question flashed through the crowd. Zechariah had said what kind of king they were to expect:

He will cut off the chariot from Ephraim and the warhorse from Jerusalem; and the battle-bow shall be cut off, and he shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth.14

So … would this Jesus drive the hated Romans out of Israel? Would peace, longed-for peace, reign? They waved their branches high, spread their cloaks and branches on the ground in front of Jesus on

8 For example, Deuteronomy 16:13; Leviticus 23:34; Ezekiel 45:25 and 1 Kings 8:2,65. 9 Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, VIII, iv, I, Willoughby & Co, London, nd., P.162. 10 Pss 113-118, psalms of praise. 11 Harking back to Ps.118:25: Save us, we beseech you, O Lord! O Lord, we beseech you, give us success! This was more a cry of acclamation than a plea for salvation. 12 Matthew 21:9 harking back to Ps 118:26: Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! We bless you from the house of the Lord. 13 Zechariah 9:9. 14 Zechariah 910.

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his donkey, and followed him towards Jerusalem—willing it all to be true. Wanting him to be the one to make their dreams of freedom and glory come true. Meanwhile, on the other side of Jerusalem, approaching from the west, was another procession; a very different procession. Here there were no downtrodden peasants dreaming of past glory. Here was power and might and glory now. Roman power and Roman glory. This was a procession of soldiers and cavalry accompanying Pontius Pilate, Governor of Idumea, Judea and Samaria—the presence of Rome, the voice of Caesar—to Jerusalem. He was coming from the coastal town of Caesarea Maritima where he and other governors before him, and after, lived. With modern splendours and cooling sea breezes, it was much more pleasant than the inland city of Jerusalem with its dust and heat and surly provincial people. But while Jerusalem was not the residence of choice for Rome’s governors, this is where they always came when major Jewish festivals were held; particularly the Passover—a dangerous time when these troublesome Jewish subjects celebrated their liberation in another age from another ruling emperor—Egypt’s Pharoah. So Rome came to Jerusalem to reinforce the city’s garrisons and show its muscle. No humble donkeys here but high, elegantly prancing horses, their proud riders sitting tall and secure in their power. Here were fluttering banners, golden eagles on poles, armour, weapons, and jingling bridles; sun glinting from metal and gold; clouds of dust rising from stamping feet; the beat of drums and about it all warning and threat. Here were no shouting joyful crowds but silent bystanders, wary, clutching their children to them; some awed perhaps - many resentful. All of them sniffing danger in the air and understanding all too well the meaning of this imperial display—make no trouble and you’ll get none—and hoping they could believe it. From the east and from the west the two processions entered Jerusalem and moved towards its heart—the Temple—and towards each other. They represented everything that was ‘opposite’. And their meeting could only lead to bloodshed and death. For the politics of Jesus and the politics of Rome meant a clash between non-violence and violence, between the power of powerlessness and the might of the sword. But there was more to this clash than politics. This was also about theology. A meeting between these two processions meant a clash between the kingdom of God and the self-proclaimed divinity of Rome’s emperors. From the days of the great Augustus15 not so long before, the title ‘Son of God’ had been claimed by Caesar. Augustus was said to be the son of the god Apollo and was called ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’. It was claimed that, at his death, he joined the gods in heaven and thereafter his divine titles belonged—not to some itinerant peasant preacher—but to the successors of Caesar Augustus including Tiberius, emperor when Jesus was wandering Judea, preaching about the kingdom of God and earning a reputation as a dangerous troublemaker for Rome.16 These two processions are at the heart of everything that happens this week, of everything that leads to the crucifixion. Why did Jesus do it? What drove him to dangerous action that invited the most horrible death? What drove him to stare down the might of Rome that was ready—and able—to swat him like a fly as soon as blink?

15 Augustus was Emperor from 31 BCE to 14 BCE. 16 Tiberius was Emperor from 14 CE to 37 CE.

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That’s what we will explore over the next days. At least, we will explore a little and, hopefully, understand a little. And I want to focus on one particular word: passion. It comes from the Latin word passio, which means ‘suffering’. Hence its application to Jesus’ suffering on the cross and all that happened to him in the last week of his life. But in English we use the word quite differently. Thus sayeth The Macquarie Dictionary which lists twelve definitions for ‘passion’. No.11 relates to the suffering of Christ, the gospel narratives about it, and musical or artistic representations of it. No.12 acknowledges an archaic use for the suffering of martyrs but all the rest refer to feelings—emotions of all kinds from joy and desire to grief and anger—or to consuming commitment, dedication, enthusiasm. In other words, we use the word ‘passion’ to say something about who we are. What we are passionate about—whether it is model trains or the sex life of earthworms. In Jesus’ case, his passion was for the kingdom of God, for bringing about the justice of God. He wanted to recall people to their faith in Yahweh, their God. He wanted them to recall the prophet Micah’s words: O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?17 These passions of Jesus—justice, mercy, compassion, humility—these are the keys to understanding why he died as he did that first Good Friday. They are the links between his life and ministry, and his death. Without those passions, the passion of Christ on the cross becomes just another bloody death, a death without meaning for all the world’s tomorrows. And so this day, Palm Sunday—a schizophrenic day if ever there was one—we are assaulted by conflicting emotions and agendas. We stand between these two processions, one of might and circumstance, the other of humility and powerlessness. Which procession will we follow? This question we will carry with us through this solemn week. Of course, we know what our answer is supposed to be: that we will follow Jesus, holding our palm fronds high and shouting with the crowds, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’ But we also know that, instead, by week’s end, we will have flung our palm fronds away and raced to wave the banners and golden poles of worldly power, crying out ‘Crucify him!’. We will have turned our backs on Jesus on his little donkey clip-clopping his way to death. In all our din we will not hear the words the poet gives to the little donkey:

Fools! For I also had my hour One far fierce hour and sweet; There was a shout about my ears And palms before my feet.18

Which procession will we follow? Which one have we already joined? Elaine Farmer 2011

17 Micah 6:8. 18 G K Chesterton, “The Donkey”

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‘WOE TO YOU!’

— A Passion for Righteousness, Holiness and Justice —

SERMON for MONDAY IN HOLY WEEK, 2011 St James King Street Sydney Texts: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Ps 70; Hebrews 12:1-3; John 12:21-32 ____________________________________________________________________ ‘Now is the judgement of this world,’ Jesus said. ‘Now the ruler of this world will be driven out.’19 I spoke yesterday about keeping a tight link between Jesus’ suffering and death—The Passion—and the actions of his life—his passions. We’re looking for a vision of the crucifixion as not just another random act of violence in a violent world. We’re looking for that particular grace that infuses his crucifixion with meaning that cleanses and transforms our souls. Today I want to look at the world in which Jesus lived so we might see a little more clearly what he was so passionate about. In those ancient days there were three important characteristics to the way societies worked: political oppression, economic exploitation and religious legitimisation.20 Political oppression is clear: you have a few at the top with most of the money and power—traditionally monarchs and aristocracy—ruling the vast majority with little or no money, and no power to effect change. Economic exploitation is also clear. Once you have money you have power and can use taxes and land ownership to make sure you stay on top. Subtlety comes with religious legitimisation: religious language is used to justify the rule of law, the divine right of kings, and an established social order deemed ‘the will of God’, the ‘natural order of things’. This particular ‘order of things’ was absolutely normal for thousands of years and it’s not totally unfamiliar today. A question for us is to what extent it still exists—but we’ll come back to that. This was the way the Romans ran their empire. The Roman method was efficient, brutal and effective. They conquered. They identified willing collaborators among the wealthy local ruling class. They wiped out the non-co-operators and then gave their chosen local favourites a pretty free hand so long as they rendered unto Caesar absolute loyalty, and treasure. It worked. But in Israel Rome ran into trouble because the local Jewish elites were fighting for power among themselves. Not too sensible a course of action for conquered subjects of Rome, I would have thought. Eventually Rome decided to resolve the squabbling by appointing a local king, and their choice was pretty controversial. He wasn’t born a Jew. He was Idumean and only recently converted to Judaism, a man called Herod—not the one who slaughtered Jewish babies but the earlier one known as Herod the Great. This first Herod happily set about doing Rome’s work for it by wiping out the old aristocracy, confiscating their wealth and property and divvying it up between himself (doubtless getting the biggest and best of it) and some carefully selected new elites who would thereby owe their position and wealth to him. Money and power stayed where it had always

19 John 12:31 20 Material for this sermon based on Borg, Marcus J. & Crossan, John Dominic, The Last Week. What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem, Harper San Francisco, 2006.

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stayed—with the rich, even though they were new rich. And the poor—well, the poor stayed poor, and powerless. The ‘accepted way of things’ was secured. And thus it continued until, just six years after Christ was born, Rome adopted a new management strategy. They decided to get rid of the local king and send out governors from Rome instead. They still left local administration in local hands and this is where, from our perspective, new trouble started. Those local hands belonged to the temple authorities. So an institution which had always held the religious centre stage now did so politically and economically as well. It set up that sad conflict of interests we have seen ever since when money, social position, and power, fall into the hands of religious leaders. Look at the quintessentially established Church of England. ‘The old Church of England was the church of the governing classes of a Protestant imperial power,’ says one writer. ‘It never had much foothold among the working classes, even at the height of its strength and influence in Victorian times.’21 Many of the working classes were ‘chapel’ people, not members of ‘the squire’s church’. It isn’t that the kingdom of God is not concerned with societies, their politics and culture. It is. The trouble is that, while God might will it otherwise, most human beings are simply incapable of managing a balance between money, status, power and religious authority. So it was in Jesus’ day with the Temple authorities—the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes22—busily colluding at the heart of the Roman domination system. The chief priests came from elite priestly families, the elders from elite lay families, all of them wealthy and most of them appointed by Herod the Great. The scribes were of lesser rank but owed their positions and living to the priests and the elders. The scribes happily found loopholes for the priests in Jewish law that forbade them to own land so pretty well everyone was flush with land and money. Except the poor but no one was concerned about them. Again, the poor stayed poor, and powerless. Again, the ‘accepted way of things’ was secured. The scene was set. We saw yesterday how the Roman governor’s procession, all might and precision, entered Jerusalem from the west, and Jesus on his donkey and his procession of peasant followers, all powerless and disorderly, entered from the east. The Temple authorities waited nervously in the middle, anxious to justify themselves, to make sure these troublesome peasants accompanying Jesus understood that the way they were running things was ‘just the way it is’. They had plenty of reason to be anxious. Jesus was the one known to accuse sternly, ‘you know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you!’23 But it was and he was saying so publicly, attacking them—the Temple authorities! They were the ‘great ones’ among the Jewish people! Not only was Jesus opposed to the Roman domination system, he was deeply critical of the Temple’s role within it. His rebellion, if such it can be called, aimed to establish God’s non-violence in place of oppressive Roman domination, and God’s justice in place of high priestly collaboration with Rome.24 No wonder the Temple authorities were

21 Andrew Brown, ‘A narrow church’, The Guardian , January 7, 2008 http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/andrew_brown/2008/01/a_narrow_church.html 22 Mark 14:53. 23 Matthew 20:25 24 Borg, Marcus J. & Crossan, John Dominic, The Last Week. What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem, Harper San Francisco, 2006, p.89. I found this book after I had decided on the creative structure of processions and passions for this Holy Week series. It subsequently provided much useful material for some of the sermons. It is also a great

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anxious. Jesus, social prophet, exposed raw truth about them and they didn’t like it. No wonder the Roman authorities were wary and alert. Jesus, illiterate and itinerant peasant preacher, possessed the oral brilliance25 that could stir up a dangerous anti-Roman uprising throughout Judea. It’s important that we are very clear at this point. There were two basic passions in Jesus’ attack: passionate opposition to the Roman domination system and passionate opposition to the collusion of the Temple authorities with it. The first enshrined injustice and the co-operation of the priests legitimised and sanctified that injustice. But he wasn’t attacking Judaism. He was attacking misuse of it. To think of him as other than Jewish is to eliminate meaning from his work throughout his ministry and especially in these last days of his life. To think of him as other than Jewish is to eliminate the grace in his dying, the grace to transform our lives. Jesus’ passion was for the kingdom of God already present and yet to come—the dream of God of a kingdom in which justice—and love—would rule. Given that the Temple had become a den of collaborators busily propping up injustice in the homeland of the God of justice, Jesus’ ‘woes’ that Luke reports are sharply pointed. ‘Woe to you!’ he thundered at them and you can see the blazing eyes and the jabbing finger. ‘You tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God … You love to have the seat of honour in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the market-places … You load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them.’26And on and on he raged. Both Matthew and Luke tell us Jesus condemned the city of Jerusalem as corrupt and faithless—‘the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!’ ‘Your house is left to you, desolate,’ he lamented. But he also mourned. He mourned for a Jerusalem where the dream of God should have come true but instead was being crushed by the weight of human fickleness, greed and injustice. ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,’ Jesus sighed, ‘and you were not willing!’27 No, the priests and elders of the Temple were not willing and they didn’t care a fig about his mourning either. What they cared about were their positions and power and how they might silence him; permanently. His was not the only Jewish anti-Temple voice around but the people were listening to him. They liked what they heard Jesus saying and the priests dared not move against him openly. And so the plotting began, behind closed doors and around establishment dinner tables. Meanwhile, we stand there—outside the Temple. The processions have met and the conflicting arguments pull us this way and that. What is this conflict to us? That ancient world’s domination system is a far cry from Australia in 2011. Isn’t it? We’d like to think so. Certainly the differences are great but there are voices that come through the din to remind us of injustices in our own land. We talk about ‘dominant stories’ and we mean the stories of the dominant groups in society - the biggest groups. The ones who get to write history, to say what will be recorded and what will not. Do they always speak the truth? Are they always just? Aboriginal Australia would say no. So would

pleasure to discover one’s own idea in the work of the scholars but a salutary reminder that Ecclesiastes got it right: though one might like to think otherwise, there is nothing new under the sun (Eccles. 1:9). 25 Crossan, John Dominic, Jesus. A Revolutionary Biography, Harper San Francisco, 1989, p.58 26 Luke 11:42-43 & 46. 27 Matthew 23:37-38.

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many women. So would many gay men and women. So would many disabled, and child migrants, and non-English speakers, and Muslims. Perhaps there is a little more familiarity about Jesus’ world than is comfortable for us to admit. ‘Now is the judgement of this world,’ Jesus said. ‘Now the ruler of this world will be driven out.’28 Will we stay with his procession to fight for justice? Or will we not? Elaine Farmer 2011

28 John 12:31

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THE DREAM OF GOD

— A Passion for the Kingdom of God —

SERMON for TUESDAY IN HOLY WEEK 2011 St James King Street Sydney TEXTS: Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 71:1-14; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; John 12:20-36 ____________________________________________________________________ If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.’ Yesterday we thought about the society in which Jesus lived where the masses were politically oppressed and economically exploited—a society in which human injustice was deeply entrenched and given religious sanctification by the chief priests, the elders and the scribes who ran both the Temple in Jerusalem and the local administration for the Romans. It was a far cry from the dream of Jesus—the kingdom of God in which God’s justice, love and mercy would rule. But just exactly what would that kingdom of God have looked like to Jesus? One of the scholars says ‘the kingdom of God is about God’s will for this earth. Heaven is in great shape; earth is where the problems are’. Jesus would have agreed and he had some pretty confronting things to say about how human use of power and God’s differ and what the kingdom of God on earth would look like. I watched that bloodthirsty film ‘Gladiator’ recently and noted a Roman Senator’s interesting comment on people management: ‘Fear and wonder,’ he said, ‘are very effective tools in keeping control.’ That must be one of the great clichés of history. Every empire and a lot of lesser political entities who could not claim such a grand title have known the usefulness of fear and wonder in controlling populations. Rome used military displays to inspire and to intimidate. The Nazi Reich took a leaf out of the Roman book with torchlight parades, banners and mounted eagles. The British Empire took pomp and circumstance to the greatest heights. They’ve all of them struck awe into the hearts of their own people and fear into the hearts of the conquered. The church has done the same. Fear in the language of a god of wrath, of judgement and punishment, in the images of hellfire and brimstone. Wonder before a God of judgement—all-powerful, all-mighty, of glorious but unchangeable will; an implacable god. What happened to the god of love, compassion and mercy, and to belief in the power of prayer, I wonder, in the church’s rush to impose its will on the hearts and minds of its people? These methods are ugly no matter what the community—large nation, institution or family. Domestic violence— whether the weapons are fists or words—is power misused. And to all this abuse of power Jesus says, ‘No! The kingdom of God is not about controlling others. It’s about relationships. And the grace that transforms.’ Which sounds very agreeable but Jesus said a number of other things about the kingdom of God that are likely to upset most of us. Let’s begin with family relationships. We’re all familiar with variations of his theme ‘whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’. And the other one ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No … rather division! [Households] will be divided … father against son … mother against daughter…’ and so on. This

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is interesting—Jesus says faith isn’t the trouble in families. Having faith or not can split a community, including a family, but in any direction. What he’s passionately concerned about is power—because power in families in his society set the older generation over the younger, and males over females. This immediately created the potential for abuse. His ideal family group models equality under God and that abolishes the danger of abusive power. It’s a model that flew in the face of families in his time and sadly it still does in ours. But equality under God was part of his vision of the kingdom of God. It’s yet to be achieved. Another part of that vision concerned poverty. Again, we know the lines. ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God,’ is Luke’s version of what Jesus said. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’ is Matthew’s and his little insertion ‘in spirit’ has proven very, very useful. It diverts attention from economic poverty to spiritual poverty which, frankly, softens Jesus’ injunction into something easier to live with. Trouble is the Greek word πτωχοὶ[ptōchoi] used by Luke and Matthew for ‘the poor’ doesn’t mean ‘poor people’. There’s another word ενία [Penia] for that. τωχοὶ [ptōchoi] means ‘beggars’ - the destitute. Jesus, according to Matthew and Luke, wasn’t saying that all poor peasants of his day were blessed. He was talking about beggars. I don’t think this was some kind of a romantic delusion about the charms of destitution’. Jesus wasn’t naïve. To understand we need to set aside individual and personal applications. Jesus was attacking systemic injustice, the kind that oppressed the Jewish peasants—him included. Injustice that seemed so normal it could never be overturned. Those who could get by, would, but at the bottom of the heap were the destitute—‘human junk’ in society’s eyes. For Jesus, these were the only innocents because, having nothing, they suffered the most and had the least capacity to protect themselves or to change their lot. Jesus was making a passionate and swingeing attack on societies that tolerate such destitution, that don’t tackle injustice because there is no place for injustice in the kingdom of God. Matthew’s poor in spirit softened that message—and so do we. There are homeless people in our society, wretched settlements where indigenous Australians are locked in poverty and self-destruction, families where successive generations cannot find work. We know this to be so. And Jesus says none of us is innocent while such conditions exist. What about ‘whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it?’ What was the point of passion for Jesus in this? Again, let’s look at his social context. Children were nothing—nameless nobodies—until acknowledged by the father. Only then were they accepted as family members. Unwanted children, often females, were abandoned, perhaps in rubbish dumps where they died. Or maybe were found and sold into slavery. Here’s a sobering quote from a letter, written in the year after Jesus was born, by a man to his pregnant wife: ‘If by chance you bear a son … let it be, if it is a girl cast it out’. It was a horribly brutal world and Jesus was saying this will not happen in the kingdom of God. There are no ‘nobodies’ in the kingdom of God. Remember the words of the rest of this story? ‘People were bringing little children to him in order that he might touch them. The disciples spoke sternly to them. But when Jesus saw this, he was indignant and said to them, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs’. The disciples tried to keep them away from Jesus. Why? Were these abandoned children who had been found? Was it to avoid the responsibility that making them family members would mean? Jesus, let’s note carefully, was indignant. He took them up in

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his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them. These are the actions of a father acknowledging children as family members. In the kingdom of God, there are no nobodies. No abandoned ones. All are acknowledged members of the one family. But it was not so in Jesus’ world and it is not so today. Misuse of power, turning a blind eye to injustice, treating people as nobodies: these were affronts to Jesus. They are key themes in his gospel and he meant what he said—with a passion! It got him killed in the end. This is the week when we have to face complicity in that deed. Each of us must ask ourselves: do I blink at the wrongs in the community around me? Am I saying it’s someone else’s responsibility and I can’t do anything about it? Am I echoing perhaps the Temple authorities saying ‘this is just the way it is’? The kingdom of God turns out to be a pretty challenging and dangerous place. Jesus compared it to a mustard seed. The mustard plant germinates prolifically. It’s like a weed that takes over everything. If it’s somewhere else, you can ignore it but, if it’s in your carefully cultivated garden, it’s a threat to all you have worked for, all you hold dear. That’s the trouble with the kingdom of God. Like the mustard plant, if we let it take hold, it will upset the balance of a society in which we have comfortable places. But the kingdom of God is out of our control. The kingdom of God just isn’t about control; it’s about relationships, and the grace that changes our lives. Since Palm Sunday we’ve watched those two processions, one of Jesus and his ragged peasant followers, the other of the mighty Roman soldiers. As we walk towards Good Friday, perhaps it’s not a question about which to join. Have we been following the soldiers all the time because our faith is imperfect and uncertain and the true way of Jesus is really just too hard? Elaine Farmer 2011

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THE FRAGRANCE OF LOVE AND MERCY

— A Passion for Love and Mercy — SERMON for WEDNESDAY IN HOLY WEEK 2011 St James King Street Sydney TEXTS: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Ps 31:9-18; Phil 2:5-15; John 12:1-11 ____________________________________________________________________ Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. For the last days we have focused on Jesus’ passion for justice and the kingdom of God. We’ve watched the crowds of disciples processing after him. We’ve watched the procession of imperial soldiers. We’ve had to consider which group we’ve really joined in our own lives. Do we prefer secular power or holy humility? We’ve probably all secretly hedged our bets but now the focus shifts away from crowds, where we can hide, to individuals—and we’re on our own. Now we come face to face with two characters in this week’s tale of passion and tragedy. One—Mary—we’re supposed to emulate but usually don’t. The other—Judas—we’re not supposed to emulate but usually do. The scene is Bethany; the occasion a dinner party in honour of Jesus, and one of the guests causes a stir. Like all hosts, Lazarus would be hoping for no untoward incidents during the evening. Certainly that none of the guests would do something outlandish and bizarre. But, poor Lazarus—it just wasn’t his night. One of his guests, a woman at that, Mary, took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. The fragrance was fine but such extravagant behaviour was really rather embarrassing and likely to disrupt the evening; even upset his guest of honour. It certainly upset Judas, but not Jesus. As she had lavished perfume upon him, so he lavished praise upon her. ‘Wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world,’ Mark says he told the others, ‘what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’ It is an extravagant—and unique—compliment from Jesus. Why did she deserve such a response? Mary had probably travelled among the disciples accompanying Jesus on the way, through Galilee to Jerusalem. She would have heard Jesus’ prophecies of his death. Whereas the disciples didn’t seem to get the message, she did. She understood that when Jesus spoke of the way he meant more than a physical journey. He meant a spiritual journey to God. Unlike the disciples she didn’t reject Jesus’ words, and the horror of his prophecy about dying. She didn’t go into denial, or simply fail to understand him. She understood very clearly that Jesus meant what he said. ‘I am the good shepherd,’ he had said to them. ‘I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish …The Father and I are one.’ This Mary heard; this she believed. Her gesture of anointing him was in the tradition of their scriptures which told how prophets poured oil over the head of kings anointing them as ‘messiahs’ to rule over the land. You’ll remember, for

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example, the charming description of the anointing of King David. Instructed by Yahweh, Samuel sent for David. He was ruddy, the Bible tells us, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The Lord said [to Samuel], ‘Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.’ Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward. Just so did this woman anoint Jesus, deeming him ‘messiah’, ‘the one’, anointing him to rule. Her action stands as an act of utter faithfulness. This woman knew nothing of the empty tomb. She simply heard and believed—and anointed him to rule—and to die. There are two important points to make about her gesture. First, it was an act of service which foreshadowed his burial when his dead body would be washed and anointed for the grave. Perhaps that’s why John tells us that the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume—he’s creating a link with that day they all remembered when Jesus brought the dead Lazarus to life and out of his tomb. Then they had known the smell of death. Now John implies that the fragrance of Mary’s perfume is sweet, underscoring the goodness of her devoted service. Death is no more. Second, Mary’s gesture was an act of love which foreshadowed the foot-washing. Just as Jesus would demonstrate his love for the disciples by washing their feet, so she demonstrated her love for him by anointing him. She didn’t have to be told what to do. Intuitively, she seems to have understood Jesus’ kind of leadership—the paradoxical upside-down, back-to-front business of modelling oneself on those who are without power as the world sees things: children, servants, slaves. So Mary becomes the model Christian leader and the model disciple, the one we are to emulate by placing the needs of others before our own dignity. It is a very different matter when we come to Judas - the betrayer. The one we are supposed to despise but perhaps the one most necessary to Jesus and whose shadow exists within each of us. Everyone seems to have a different idea about why Judas turned traitor. The three verses John devotes to Judas in this passage are the most detailed description of him in the whole New Testament but three verses aren’t a lot to go on. He did it for the money; possible. He did it for political reasons thinking he could force Jesus’ hand and make him lead an armed rebellion against Rome; possible. He did it because he was a thief; possible. John brings the devil into it. Earlier in his gospel, he claims Jesus knew all along that he would be betrayed by Judas but that hadn’t stopped him from including the man in his inner circle. ‘Did I not choose you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil,’ John has Jesus say and he added, ‘he was speaking of Judas son of Simon Iscariot, for he, though one of the twelve, was going to betray him.’ So Judas heaps scorn and derision upon Mary and her gesture of love. Her perfume was made from nard imported all the way from the mountains of Himalaya and cost almost as much as a labourer would earn in a whole year. ‘Why wasn’t this sold and the money given to the poor?’ he demanded. He probably thought, why did she buy it in the first place? Actually, I don’t think this makes him sound evil, just pompous and officious. He may well not have cared about the poor—John certainly thought so and says as much—but not caring about the poor isn’t a logical basis for John’s other assertion that the man was a thief. Nor that he was evil or, in some way, possessed. Be that as it may, Judas gets short shrift from Jesus. ‘Leave her alone,’ he says and we are left knowing that any act of service done out of love for another, no matter how extravagant, is an act on behalf of God. There’s no underestimating the importance of this story of the dinner party in Bethany. In fact, it is one of only five events in Jesus’ life that are recorded in all four gospels. The

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others, by the way, are his baptism, the feeding of the five thousand, the cleansing of the Temple and the story of his passion. We are being presented here with two models: one of how to be a disciple of Jesus and the kind of loving service that means, and one of how not to follow him. The question, of course, is how often do we really manage to get it right? How often do we follow the way of Judas and forget the service of Mary? So we walk on, towards Calvary and Good Friday, those two processions we have watched all the way from Palm Sunday still plodding their dusty way ahead of us. Mary follows Jesus’ rather pathetic little band. Judas follows the Roman soldiers with their glittering eagles and fluttering banners. Who to follow? Will be we failed disciples like Judas or loyal servants like Mary? Elaine Farmer 2011

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LOVE ME, LOVE MY PEOPLE

— A Passion for Compassion and Service — SERMON for MAUNDY THURSDAY 21 April 2011 St James King Street TEXTS: Exodus 12:1-4 (5-10) 11-14; Psalm 116:1-2, 11-18; 1 Cor 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35 ____________________________________________________________________ During supper, Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going to God, got up from the table, took off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet.’ When we hear about Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet it’s easy to be warmed by his love, humbled by his service, affected by his humility. The temptation is to settle for the love and the warm inner glow. That’s understandable enough, I suppose, because we human beings sit uneasily with humility, no matter what we say or pretend or want others to think about us. Besides, why worry? We know where this story is headed and that—in the end—all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But the challenges of Lent, and especially of Holy Week, are still here to confront us with a lot we’d rather not think about. And there’s a tendency within human beings to give in to the temptation to step off the rough road—to Calvary, for example—and head down some smoother path in a different direction. It’s a tendency I think Jesus understood. There’s a special tenderness in his words in the John passage. ‘Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and … I say to you, Where I am going, you cannot come.’ He knew betrayal, denial and abandonment were in the wind. Jesus knew what was going on around him—the hostility of the authorities, the darkening mood. Arrest and death were increasingly inevitable, an outcome he was prepared to accept for the sake of his passionate commitment to the kingdom of God. I don’t think we have to call that divine foreknowledge. It was simple common sense which also told him that even his most devoted followers would fail when put to the test. ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’ First Judas would betray him. Then Peter would deny him. Then all the rest of them would lose stomach for the danger of discipleship and slip down the nearest alleyway before anyone could catch them near him: betrayal, denial, abandonment. What’s in a word? They all amount to the same thing: all of the disciples—not just Judas—would betray him by not sticking by him. It was less than a week since he had been anointed by Mary at the house of Lazarus in Bethany. Anointed as he would be for burial and John emphasises that foreshadowing. Death is on John’s mind. The other gospels have Jesus sharing a Passover meal with the disciples but John puts the meal on the day before Passover. A whole 24 hours before. Why? Because the Passover meal was on the Friday night—at least it was that year; it varied—and the lambs to be eaten would be slaughtered during that afternoon—the time when Jesus was crucified. For John, Jesus doesn’t eat Passover with his disciples because he is the Passover Lamb and he is going to die. He bleeds and dies as the Passover lamb. For the same reason John doesn’t mention the institution of the eucharist because Jesus is the eucharist.

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But … according to John, on the night he was betrayed Jesus did share food with his friends. And betrayal, denial and abandonment sat among them like unwanted guests. Except … except that when you share a meal with Jesus there are no unwanted guests. Not even these three wandering lost souls—betrayal, denial and abandonment. That’s what it’s like in the kingdom of God apparently. A loving host and everyone welcome. No matter what sinful secrets we have locked away in the basements of our minds. But in the real world in which we live and move and have our being things are rather different. Did the disciples jostle and manipulate to get to be the ones to sit beside Jesus? I bet they did! Remember how James and John, the sons of Zebedee, tried to wheedle favour out of Jesus? ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory,’ they begged him. In Matthew’s version of that story, it’s their mother who tried to curry favour. Either or both—it’s pretty demeaning behaviour and cut no ice with Jesus. Status, privilege, position, and the power that flows from them—these are among the guests at many a dinner table. I know. I saw it all the time in the diplomatic world. Most certainly these things matter more to some than to others. For some people they are genuinely not important BUT I’ve never met anyone who wants to feel ‘on the outer’. It’s a human anxiety, it seems to me—the need to belong and to matter. It afflicts us all to varying degrees and who gets to sit where at a dinner table seems to bring it to the surface. Status at a dinner table is where the expression ‘seated below the salt’ comes from—it means you’re low on the social totem pole. There’s an old story about a woman at an Ambassador’s dinner who said loudly and frostily as she sat down: ‘I’ve never seen the paintings on that side of the room before!’ That was her way of saying ‘I’ve been wrongly seated. I haven’t been given a high enough place!’ Basically everyone wants to feel valued, unless they are afflicted with the martyr syndrome—that woman wasn’t—and so we create rules to deal with the problem of who sits where and next to whom. Hence, rules of protocol; A lists and B lists; orders of social precedence and so on. It sorts everybody out nicely. It mightn’t eliminate competition or lower anxiety for those who care but at least things are understood—more or less—and controllable—more or less. Rules keep hierarchies—and egos—in place and smooth out the social wrinkles. Jesus’ dinner table doesn’t bother with any of that but that’s the kingdom of God for you. Anxiety levels through the roof! It’s even more so when it comes to the foot washing because that involves something else about relationships in the kingdom of God that can be very disturbing for some—intimacy. If at table we have to deal with Jesus as loving host, now we have to deal with him as intimate servant. Peter didn’t like it. It upset his understanding about social behaviour. Here was a leader behaving like a servant—worse, like a slave—which was highly inappropriate. What would the world come to if social hierarchies were flouted, if A lists and B Lists ignored, seating arrangements thrown out the window? Chaos and no control at all, that’s what would happen! But Jesus lets Peter know that he doesn’t have a choice. There are no A lists and B Lists in the kingdom of God and control doesn’t enter into it. ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me,’ Peter is told. In other words, Peter, says Jesus, give up on control and allow yourself to be served. And he says it to us as well. There really isn’t any hiding here. Perhaps we could hide when we mingled with the crowd outside the temple on Palm Sunday. Or even during the last few days as we considered Jesus’ driving passions, but no more. Jesus is placing himself and his passions at our feet. What he is offering is an intimate relationship, a mirror of his intimate relationship with God.

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But intimacy means vulnerability. And vulnerability means you have to trust and that’s— well, that’s not easy for many people. The usual answer? - self-protection. Faced with Jesus at our feet offering loving service, self-protection comes in a couple of guises. We can fall back on sentimentality, for example. That warm inner glow I talked about earlier. Stick with that and you can hastily appropriate Jesus’ service. Or we can fall back on denial. Stick with that and you can avoid the risk in accepting Jesus’ service. Either way—sentimentality or denial of risk—amounts to the same thing: rejection of Jesus. Both ploys avoid the challenge of tomorrow’s cross, so we can safely rush on to claim Easter joy now—which really translates into ‘all forgiveness and no responsibility’. ‘Yes, yes,’ we say. ‘We know all about Good Friday and the crucifixion and we’d rather not go there. We’ll settle for the happy ending without the pain and without any more challenges, thank you very much.’ Unfortunately for us, we can’t rewrite the story to suit ourselves. Not if we’re honest. We have to keep our eyes and minds open and face the love and the humility and the risk. We might get burned, I’m afraid, because there’s more to it than intimate service. There’s always another layer where Jesus is concerned. His ministry is both personal and political. ‘Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right …So if I … have washed your feet you also ought to wash one another’s feet … I have set you an example that you also should do as I have done to you’. It is a call to embody Jesus’ love as a community, to act out that love in the world. It’s a call to care of neighbour. We are to give as he gave, love as he loved. Love me, love my people. Participation with Jesus means participation with the world. ‘I give you a new commandment, that you love one another,’ Jesus said to the disciples—and there’s no mincing words here. ‘Just as I have loved you,’ he continued, ‘you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ All the debates in the world—and there are plenty—about just who one’s neighbour is, about whom we’re to love or not, really don’t amount to a row of beans when we see Jesus at our feet. ‘Love me, love my people.’ You can see it in his eyes. Maybe they’re our feet he’s washing but it’s his world he’s charging us to care for! There we have it: a commandment that drives us beyond concern for ourselves smack into concern for others. That’s the gift of this day: a political demand from Jesus wrapped up in personal love for us. So … we set out on Palm Sunday knowing we should join Jesus and his straggly procession of disciples and peasant followers but wondering whether we would actually join the other procession of Roman soldiers, familiar security, worldly comfort and control. Or, indeed, whether we knew in the secret places of our hearts that we had already chosen for the world. The question’s no different today, just harder. Now there are obligations and commandments in the mix. Tomorrow we will each know what our true choice is. It’s all in the eyes really. ‘Love me, love my people,’ says Jesus as he washes our feet and his gaze upon us is unwavering. ‘That’s the kingdom of God.’ Can we stand that gaze I wonder? Elaine Farmer 2011

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BEHOLD YOUR GOD!

— A Passion for Truth — SERMON for GOOD FRIDAY 22 APRIL 2011 St James King Street Sydney TEXTS: Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12; Ps 22; 1 Cor. 1:18-31; John 18:1 - 19:42 ____________________________________________________________________ Pilate asked [Jesus], ‘So you are a king?’ Jesus answered, ‘You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.’ Pilate asked him, ‘What is truth?’ Nobody has quite settled on how to say those last words of Pilate’s, ‘What is truth?’ - with scorn, derision, world-weary cynicism, maybe with bewilderment—or a nod to the elusiveness of truth? Uncertainty is understandable, I think, for ‘real truth’ and ‘poetic truth’ dance together and who knows who leads the dance? Joining the Good Friday dance are various characters wearing crowns with labels like ‘ransom’, ‘penal substitution’, ‘propitiation’, ‘expiation’ and so on. They are some of the theological ideas about the ‘atonement’, the meaning of Christ’s death on the cross. They all have the power to crack brains, so it’s a refreshing relief to recall that the early church theologians never settled on a single meaning. They hunted down the Trinity with great precision; they picked over the divine nature of Christ; they worried away at the Virgin Birth; but the atonement they would not pin down. They would not say this or that is what it means forever and ever, amen. With wisdom, imagination and deep respect for the mystery of God, they called into service a range of symbols, avoiding precision and settling instead for ‘poetic truth’. Sadly, that hasn’t stopped many of their descendants from doing the opposite. They have picked over these symbols, discarded ‘poetic truth’, and dug into the mystery, hunting for ‘real truth’ and naming their findings ‘God’s truth’. This, they have said, means ‘salvation’ and ‘redemption’ and they’ve nailed these poor creatures to the cross, pinned them to their banners and killed, excommunicated, derided, vilified or just plain damned anyone with contrary views about truth and who holds to poetic ambivalence. Certainty about the truth of God is the one thing about which none of us ought to be certain, none of us can be certain—none of us being God—but the drums of certainty are still beaten. Behind the rhetoric and the issues, it’s that certainty which has torn into the Anglican Communion over the last years. The hypocrisy and arrogance of it are stunning. Neither has a place in the kingdom of God, that touchstone of Jesus’ passions. Instead hypocrisy and arrogance should be laid at the foot of today’s bloody cross; along with the broken stones of the fortress religions we create to protect ourselves from uncertainty. We should be on our knees before its mystery to beg forgiveness for these and other sins. There, before the crucified Christ, we need to listen for an echo of Isaiah’s words, ‘Here is your God!’, though, on this day of tragic drama, I admit to a secret preference for the more dramatic and poetic words of the King James’ Bible, ‘Behold your God!’ The poets often do better with the mysterious things of God. One modern poet says:

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I look upon that body, writhing, pierced And torn with nails, and see the battlefields Of time, the mangled dead, the gaping wounds … … … The widows worn and haggard, still dry-eyed, Because their weight of sorrow will not lift And let them weep… … … I see … … … All history pass by, and through it all Still shines that face, the Christ Face, like a star Which pierces drifting clouds, and tells the Truth.

The truth again! Rowan Williams calls Jesus ‘the one true holy place of the Christian religion’. On this day, he says, Jesus is ‘displayed to the world as the public language of our God, placarded on the history of human suffering’. Religious busyness and fortress religion have no place except to be laid at the foot of this cross; along with rules and certainties. Because there is only one certainty here and it comes on God’s terms, not ours. This place is about the gift of God for the people of God. All we are to give in return is ‘naked trust in [God’s] naked gift’. In working out what this naked gift means to us, and requires of us, we need to recall that, in his ministry and passion for the kingdom of God, Jesus was not rebelling against Judaism. The scriptures that guided and governed his life were Jewish scriptures. The culture that shaped his thinking was Jewish culture. The society that formed his politics was Jewish society. Judaism is the only context which gives meaning and sense to his life, his ministry—and his crucifixion. From within that context, what he was calling for so passionately was repentance. Now there’s another word we’ve got into terrible tangles about. We use it to mean ‘I’m sorry’. Which too often translates into: ‘I’m sorry for what I’ve done. I wish I hadn’t done it but I did and will probably do it again anyway and I’ll have to say “I’m sorry” all over again.’ But when Jesus said ‘repent’ he meant more. He meant ‘turn back’! ‘Turn back to the God who gave our ancestors commandments for living and said, ‘When your children ask you in time to come, “What is the meaning of the decrees and the statutes and the ordinances that … God has commanded [us to obey]?” then you shall say to your children, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien …When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us …we cried to …[God who] heard our voice and saw our affliction … and our oppression … [who] brought us out of Egypt … into this … land, a land flowing with milk and honey”.’ ‘Return to this God,’ said Jesus, ‘[and] follow exactly the path that … God has commanded you … that it may go well with you’. That’s a lot more powerful and demanding than ‘I’m sorry’. That’s about saying ‘sorry’ and then doing something about it. The confronting thing about Good Friday is that we have to face what Jesus thought we should be turning back to. His call to repentance resonated with history and promise, but it also warned of participation and obligation—which is why Christianity has always softened his message. Domesticated and spiritualised it because that’s the only way we can manage. None of us, none of us, could bear to live the lives Jesus would demand if we truly repented, if we

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truly ‘turned back’ to our God. We can really only stand Jesus’ way—say ‘amen’ to it—on our terms, not his. It’s the dilemma of this day. ‘Wherefore could not I pronounce “Amen”? agonised Macbeth. ‘I had most need of blessing, and “Amen” stuck in my throat.’ Just so it sticks in ours. So, for us as Christians, what are Jesus’ terms? Live in God’s way—and, he added, ‘I am that way.’ We are simply—my God, simply!—simply to turn back to honouring the central passions of his life and of the kingdom of God: God’s rejection of the misuse of power, God’s rejection of turning a blind eye to injustice and God’s rejection of treating people as nobodies. These things drove Jesus along a path that inevitably led to his death. Jesus didn’t die because he was a mystic, a healer, or a teacher of wisdom. He was executed—executed because he was a social prophet whose criticism of the entrenched injustices within the religious and secular establishments could not be borne. What happened this day two thousand odd years ago did not begin when he was arrested and tortured. It began when, only a few years before, he’d emerged from wandering in the desert where the meaning and purpose of his life had been crystallised within him into a passion for the kingdom of God, for ‘the healing of the sick, the liberation of the humiliated, and the forgiveness of sins’; in other words, into passion for the fight against the misuse of power, against turning a blind eye to injustice, and against treating people as nobodies. Why am I emphasising all this about power and inadequate faith? It makes me terribly uncomfortable and I imagine it does you too, because none of us will truly heed Jesus’ call to repentance. This is the very point about the Holy Week journey—we have to face this reality and our need for forgiveness. As so often, Shakespeare’s insight into human existence says it so well: ‘[We] at some time are masters of [our] fates,’ ‘The fault,’ Cassius pointed out to the betrayer, Brutus, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, ‘is not in our stars, but in ourselves’. If we deny this fault our only comfort will be self-delusion—which is no comfort at all in the end. Self-delusion won’t pull the nails from Jesus’ hands and feet nor stop his blood dripping down the jagged wood of his cross. Self-delusion will leave Jesus hanging there—forever—‘God-forsaken’ and ‘God-cursed’ —and this will be no more than a day of death. Forgiveness and hope compromised for we cannot forgive ourselves. ‘These deeds must not be thought after these ways,’ Lady Macbeth warned her husband as he longed for blessing, ‘so, it will make us mad.’ Perhaps the wicked old queen was right in that at least. Mad—she went mad—or believing that hope is dead. But I said earlier that I won’t trade in rigid certainties and I won’t trade in hopelessness either. I agree with the poet who made some pretty awful accusations about ‘the filth of mind and soul’ of humankind ‘wallowing like swine’ but who, nevertheless, saw good as well as bad. ‘This life stinks in places, tis true,’ he wrote,

‘yet scent of roses and of hay New mown comes stealing on the evening breeze, And through the market’s din, the bargaining Of cheats, who make God’s world a den of thieves, I hear sweet bells ring out to prayer, and see The faithful kneeling by the Calvary Of Christ.’

So—how can the Calvary of Christ, this place of horror and death, mean the birth of hope? After all, if Jesus’ passion was to make people repent of their tolerance of injustice in society and temple, then Calvary was a place of ‘disappointed hope, a betrayed love, a tortured body and a godforsaken death.’ I think trying to explain how this can be is not the answer. We make a muddle of this too, I

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fear. Explain. Explain. Explain. We are too certain of ourselves; too black and white about truth; all reason and no poetry. Deeply ingrained in most Christians is the idea that there is only one truth about Calvary—that Jesus died for the sins of the world—even though it was more than a thousand years after his crucifixion before that view dominated other views. Perhaps another truth is that he died because of the sin of the world, the sin that so legitimised injustice that it seemed utterly normal, part of God’s ordained order. The sin Jesus railed against so passionately because it violated the kingdom of God. Whatever truth moves your heart we stand together this day before the cross. Behold our God!—‘the one true holy place of the Christian religion’. God’s naked gift that we are called to trust. What matters is not that we understand but how we respond. On Palm Sunday we began to follow the two processions making their dusty ways to Jerusalem--one of might Roman soldiers, the other of Jesus and his followers--wondering to which one we belonged. Today we have followed the mocking and triumphant procession that brought Jesus here for execution. The deed is done. Jesus is dead. Now new processions are moving away. Which one will we join? One group is so disorderly it can’t reasonably be called a procession. Peter and the disciples, fleeing through the alleyways of Jerusalem fearful that someone will point the finger at them again and know they were Jesus’ friends. Shall we join them abandoning Jesus for safety? Or we could follow the soldiers with their bloody hands marching down the hill, back to Jerusalem, their job done, to settle relaxed among familiar comforts? Shall we abandon Jesus for comfort? Or shall we join the sad little group carrying Jesus’ body to his grave. Shall we risk facing the demands of this dark place? Have we the courage to watch a great stone rolled across the tomb’s gaping mouth. For in that place, this day, truth is just a cold dead corpse. There is no certainty left to us; and nothing for our hands to cling to but hope and naked trust. Can we say with the psalmist:

Remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope. In you our ancestors trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them. To you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame.

Can we say that? Lord have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us; Lord have mercy upon us. Elaine Farmer 2011

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THE CHRIST BECKONS

— A Passion for the People of God — SERMON FOR EASTER VIGIL 24 April 2011 St James King Street Sydney ____________________________________________________________________ The angel said to the women, ‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. It’s been a difficult week. On Palm Sunday, waving palm fronds, we acclaimed Jesus as king, but found ourselves caught between two processions entering Jerusalem for the Passover: one, Jesus and his followers, triumphant and hopeful, but powerless in the ways of the world, and who would crown him if they could; the other, Governor Pontius Pilate and his imperial Roman soldiers, triumphant conquerors and all-powerful, who would kill him if they needed to. Two processions, two choices—both key to the Holy Week pilgrimage. Which one would we follow? Indeed, which procession had we already joined? Those questions have dogged us since Good Friday when we saw Christ, nailed up and bleeding on his cross. And there are more questions. We’ve had to ask ourselves whether, for the familiar comforts and security of the way of the world, we have abandoned Jesus and his passion for the kingdom of God, for God’s way of justice, love and mercy. How far do we really honour Jesus’ gospel of equality and dignity for all people? Are we failed disciples? Through it all, has echoed the word of God through the prophet, Jeremiah: ‘only acknowledge your guilt, that you have rebelled against [me], and scattered your favours among strangers … and have not obeyed my voice … Return, O faithless children.’ Good Friday confronted us with the worst in humankind. Easter Day calls us to the best. Where better to begin than with the great theme of the Genesis creation story, often read on this morning: ‘and God saw that it was good’. Easter Day and a new journey begins for us with this great gift—a reminder that, no matter what, we are created by God, loved by God, and called back to God. God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, the great Genesis text continues. This is the day when, confident in God’s love and forgiveness, we ask ourselves how will we live up to that blessing? There are two basic ways to deal with the Easter stories. We come to them—as we do those of Christmas and Good Friday—with preconceived ideas. A picture made up from bits and pieces melded together and colouring how we hear the stories. It’s the same method of image-management we unconsciously bring to all our experiences. Where the Bible is concerned, the picture rests, by and large, on a received view that the stories are historically, factually, true. We hear presentations that imply the events happened in exactly the way the Bible says. We could argue about this interminably—and Christians have and do—but I think the argument about literal truth is less important than what the stories mean. The sadness about the argument is that those who believe in the literal truth fear the rock of their faith will shift beneath them if doubt is allowed through the door. And, on the other hand, that very certainty is a stumbling block for those who cannot accept

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literal accounts and believe, therefore, that they cannot be Christians, regardless of the attractions of the Christian way. Either way, the argument gets between God and God’s people. There is another approach. What is true about the Easter stories is what is sensed and experienced of God, not unprovable details about the number of angels or who saw what when and so on. In the same way, the contradictions between the gospels are just there, arisen from the agendas of the gospel writers. They make for interesting discussions but don’t matter in the larger business of faith. In the end, we live with unresolvable contradictions every day of our lives. And we believe unprovable things—or not—as we wish. It helps, I think, to recall Jesus’ parables. Was there a real Good Samaritan or a real Prodigal Son? Were any characters in Jesus’ parables actual people? The scholars don’t seem to think so--because it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we get his point! In each parable, Jesus was trying to make people understand something about God, life and themselves. The factual truth of his illustrations is beside the point but the meaning is very relevant. In other words, what matters is where these stories take us in our individual journeys to God. All of which brings us back to that other idea we have pursued all week—the things that got Jesus killed—his passions - his passion for the kingdom of God, for the justice of God; the God of love, compassion and mercy. Just as there is no Easter without Good Friday, so there is no kingdom of God without the people of God. Remember how he railed against those who oppressed the people? Remember his exasperation over the intransigence of the people themselves? ‘Hear me, all of you, and understand.’ ‘Do you not yet perceive or understand?’ Remember how he mourned over Jerusalem, longing to bring the people back to God’s way, back to faith, but they were not willing? Jeremiah had seen that long before. ‘You [scatter] your favours among strangers,’ he had railed. This they were still doing in Jesus’ day; this we still do now. For the strangers of Jeremiah’s poetry are simply the things we allow to come between us and God’s way - the delights of our lives. But our delights hide within them the power to become our gods, and thence our idols. Idolatry is as old as time and has the world’s largest wardrobe. There are so many idols! Money and power are simply two. So can be our theological propositions and rules and doctrines and religious certainties. ‘Do you not yet perceive or understand?’ It seems so simple. ‘Faith in God is your answer,’ says Jesus. Which, of course, leaves us with a question—“what is faith?”—a question as difficult—even more difficult— to pin down as Good Friday’s question “what is truth?” The answer the biblical narrative gives is a story. A story about a faithful God who led the people to freedom and said ‘I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. You shall know that I am the Lord your God who has freed you from the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you into the land that I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord.’ A story that has been told over and over, with new chapters added, new beginnings discovered, new lives lived, new endings reached, as many as there have been faithful believers in search of freedom ever since Abraham laboured up that mountain, probably—hopefully—blinded by tears, dragging behind him a bewildered Isaac and a donkey staggering under wood for the sacrificial fire. What Abraham learned, as we must learn, is that faith isn’t about unquestioning adherence to rules. Nor is it about devising our own comforts for the dark times. Faith is about commitment and trust—in the Easter God. Faith is also about worship, not analysis; which is why it’s so very, very hard. Faith means risk and human beings are much more comfortable knowing outcomes ahead of time rather than winging it. … Return, O faithless children.’

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But the angel said to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, ‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay’. Matthew tells us that the women left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy. You’ll note he puts the fear before the joy. How could it have been otherwise? Fear because they went to see a sealed tomb, not angels rolling back the stone to reveal dark emptiness. Not angels telling them of resurrection. Not angels at all. Joy because something new had happened. Inexplicable but, who knows, perhaps it was as Jesus had said it would be. A new world full of promise and hope for Christ had risen. Just so began a new chapter in the history of a gracious God and the people of God. ‘The empty cross!’ the poet cried. ‘Where is the one who hung there? There! Standing on the horizon, in the ruins, Beckoning me to venture with him. Lord, I am a prisoner—of hope!’ Elaine Farmer 2011

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RESURRECTION FLOWERS

— A Passion for Life and Hope — SERMON for EASTER DAY 24 April 2011 St James King Street Sydney TEXTS: Luke 24:13-49 ____________________________________________________________________ Two of [the disciples] were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and talking with each other about all [the] things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognising him.

‘If,’ [asked Samuel Taylor Coleridge] ‘If a man should pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye, and what then?’

What indeed? This is an Easter question for it seems to me that the resurrection of Christ, the gift of this day, is that flower, part of the dream of God. God’s great rebellion against the power we allow death in our lives. As a symbol, resurrection appears in many ancient myths about gods who died and came back to life. Our ancient forebears saw the cycle of life from seed to plant to seed and wondered if such a cycle of birth, death and new life applied to them as well. By Jesus’ day some, among them the conservative Sadducees, dismissed resurrection as nothing more than a self-deceiving illusion. Others, among them the Pharisees, accepted resurrection as possible, but only as part of an unknown future judgement and end time. Resurrection was, therefore—then as now—a symbol that embraced both ambivalence about the certainty of death and fascination with rising from the grave, a sign perhaps of persistent human inability to give up on that preserve of the gods, immortality. For Christians, the resurrection is the symbol of something we glimpse in a moment as in a dream—transitory, mysterious—but in which we invest faith, trust and hope for future possibility, that death will have no power over our lives. And so we’ve waited through Holy Saturday, the dead day, when Christ’s tomb remained silent and sealed. We’ve waited, knowing the end of the story but caught, nevertheless, in a tense breathless moment. We’ve waited to hear again this day’s resurrection stories assuring us that hope is not snuffed out, there is something to dream of, faith is not an illusion. Talk of resurrection stirs great passion. It can burst in a person’s soul with unexpected brightness and a mystifying sense of new life. It can—and always does each year—attract derision and trick questions designed to expose Christians as poor deluded fools who haven’t grown out of believing

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there really are fairies at the bottom of the garden. In our anxiety about this, we are not always the best advocates of our own faith. There are often, sadly, too many words thrown about in a language not ‘understanded of the people’ outside the church. How could they be? The language of faith is difficult to understand even for us who call ourselves believers, except we use the language of poetry and metaphor and speak of the kiss of a loving God. If we want to avoid condemnation as deluded followers of a fairy tale, it’s important we speak of faith as involving real people interacting with a real world in which good and evil circle each other, vying for dominance in us as much as in any human soul. To do that we must keep Good Friday and Easter together. Good Friday without Easter gives us nothing but a horrible theology of death and punishment, in this case of Jesus dying instead of us. It’s the stuff that says God thinks suffering is what we all deserve but, hey, let’s make Jesus suffer instead! It turns God into a sadistic monster and leads to cynicism. And it justifies the view of the nay-sayers who think that’s the way the world’s always been and always will be. Power, might and money rule and, if you think it should be otherwise, well—dream on! - so much for Good Friday without Easter. On the other hand, Easter without Good Friday flirts with sentimentality. It gives us a sort of content-free theology where everything in the garden is lovely. Faces are set to refined rapture. God becomes a kind of benign grandparent; all presents and pats on the head. Bluebirds twitter incessantly (and irritatingly) and it’s always springtime in paradise. It’s the kind of pietistic sugar-dipped religion that makes many—including many Christians—gag. By themselves neither of these options tells the story of Christ and this God-haunted world. So it’s important that we hold on to the view that Easter Day is not about a happy ending to a passionate and tragic tale labelled something like ‘Memoirs of a Tragic’. It’s much more. The ‘happy ending’ option is an escapee from the whitewashed-tumbling-rose-covered-stable kind of theology and is about nothing more than seizing this day, its joy and gift and relief. The ‘happy ending’ option undermines the whole Lent and Holy Week journey, dismisses the painful and momentous events of Good Friday and turns its back on the cross and its demands. So … what of encountering the Risen Christ? Those two on the road to Emmaus—I wonder were they in search of the ‘happy ending’? Had they turned their backs on the cross, the pain and awfulness of it as just too much? The way Luke introduces this story has not a trace of anxiety or rush about it. It’s just two of the disciples, chatting, walking along from Jerusalem to tiny Emmaus to the northwest. He doesn’t tell us why they were going there. It’s not even clear who the two of them were. If you follow the pronouns back through the text there are various possibilities, including women. Be that as it may ... one of the most interesting interpretations of the Emmaus incident comes from the novelist, Frederick Buechner. He says Emmaus is:

the place we go to in order to escape—a bar, a movie, wherever it is we throw up our hands and say, “Let the whole damned thing go hang. It makes no difference anyway.” … Emmaus may be buying a new suit or a new car or smoking more cigarettes than you really want to, or reading a second-rate novel or even writing one. Emmaus may be going to church on Sunday. Emmaus is whatever we do or wherever we go to make ourselves forget that the world holds nothing sacred: that even the wisest and bravest and loveliest decay and die;

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that even the noblest ideas …about love and freedom and justice …have always in time been twisted out of shape by selfish [people] for selfish ends.

‘It makes no difference anyway.’ The angst of life, that is. But we know it does. That’s why we turn to comforts and illusions. ‘The world holds nothing sacred.’ Well, maybe, but God does! - and passionately! God’s covenant of faith with us for a start; wherever or whatever our personal Emmauses are, God-in-Christ meets us there. No matter how far we walk away from the cross we will be pursued. Or, if that language sounds too threatening for you, God-in-Christ waits to meet you wherever your Emmaus is. No matter how ordinary the place, or extraordinary the circumstances, God will be there, expected or not. God is nothing if not persistent; and faithful, and patient which is a mercy for we are a dithering, faithless lot. Resurrection is a gift; pure and simple. We teach our children to say ‘thank you’ for gifts. Our ‘thank you’ will be known in our response, a response which comes in two forms. The first is personal, the second, political. Most human beings sense that there is something askew about life. Some of us struggle more than others over what the trouble is. And I fear the more we struggle the more we sink in a mire of self-deprecation that is more about the size of our egos than our faith in God. We need transformation. We need grace. We forget that we are beloved of God even though our sin is ever with us. As Martin Luther put it a long time ago: ‘Sinners are fair because they are beloved. They are not beloved because they are fair.’ Too focused on our own sin we forget grace, and that grace, just like sin, is also ever with us—if we look into ourselves and remember the God-image within us waiting to be nurtured. God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. Remember this blessing and we will discover resurrection and Christ’s new way of life. If we also remember there’s the political side to the resurrection. ‘The experience of God is not a private gift.’ On behalf of the God of justice, Jesus entered Jerusalem to face down the imperial Roman system that was grinding life out of the people, and the Temple authorities who were colluding with Rome for the sake of their own comfort and security. He condemned the brutal oppression of Rome and the religious betrayal of the Temple. He condemned both as peddlers of injustice and corruption. He exposed the real problem: human injustice. What he offered in its place was God’s justice. And he died because the price of changing the system was simply too high and nobody wanted to pay it. True, we are invited by God to go on a personal journey of transformation through death, resurrection and new birth but, if we focus only on the personal, and blink at the political, then Jesus’ death was just wasted agony, another violent death in a violent world. We will have become betrayers, along with Judas, and those who abandoned him at Calvary, who fled to save their own skins. We will have betrayed the passions that drove his journey to God, and into Jerusalem. His passion for the kingdom of God. His passion for God’s justice. We are called this day and every day to participate in Jesus’ great struggle for the kingdom of God, the fight for justice and equality for all. It is a call that too often has only been whispered in Christian churches lest it disturb, I suspect, those of us, whose lives, like those of the Temple authorities, are comfortable. It is a confronting call. It means turning round on the way to Emmaus, climbing back up the hill at Calvary, picking up Jesus’ cross and hoisting it to our own shoulders; fighting Jesus’ fight against injustice and for freedom for the downtrodden; speaking for those who

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cannot speak for themselves. It means doing whatever we can to infect the lives of those we meet with hope, even at cost to ourselves. During this past week, we have encountered different processions offering different choices; soldiers and the world of power and control; Jesus and the way of love and relationship. The question all along has been which to join. And so it will remain, if this Easter Day is to be a true beginning. We could wake tomorrow accepting ‘more of the same’ and walk on to Emmaus, unchanged in an unchanged world. Or we could say to ourselves, ‘Good Friday gave us forgiveness for our sin and today we have the grace of this resurrection flower in our hands. ‘Aye, and what now?’ We could crush it and see its bruised petals fall lifeless to the ground. Or we could nurture it with the grace of God and see it bring new life to us and to others. It is the Easter choice: the way of the world or the way of the Christ. One of the poets puts it this way:

… … … through it all Still shines that face, the Christ face, like a star which pierces drifting clouds, and tells the Truth … … … And good lives on, loves on, and conquers all— All war must end in peace. These clouds are lies. They cannot last. The blue sky is the Truth. For God is love. Such is my Faith, and such my reasons for it, and I find them strong enough. And you? You want to argue? Well, I can’t. It is a choice. I choose the Christ.

AMEN Elaine Farmer 2011