 Reading, Psalm 23 and John 10:1-18
Image, Good Shepherd Sculpture, 280-290CE Today’s gospel reading is out of sequence. Since Easter we’ve been enjoying the post-resurrection accounts of Jesus gathering up his wayward disciples, but now we jump back to well before his death. Why is that the case? Why have we been taken here? I think we can approach it like a flashback at the end of a movie. One of those brilliant moments, when at the crescendo of the film, with the camera swirling and the music welling, we revisit an earlier, seemingly small moment in the plot, which is suddenly imbued with vibrant significance. All of a sudden a passing comment, an innocuous act takes on a new and greater meaning. The moment is plucked out from its sequence, and shown again, now in new light and clarity, demonstrated to relate palpably and personally to this moment in our protagonist’s life. Such is the nature of a well-executed flashback, and such is the power of today’s reading in this season of the church. We’re going to attempt then, to enter such a scene, to feel such a flashback, to encounter anew this teaching of Jesus in the light of the resurrection… Picture, the scene: early morning, green fields, a woman approaches rocky tombs. Her feet were drenched from the dew. She had trod this path three times already this morning; once walking solemnly, twice running bewildered. Now, as she inhaled the morning air, its crisp freshness felt coarse in her throat and lungs. Bending to look in the tomb, reeling with exhaustion, she grabbed her knees for balance. She wept long and loud, sweat and tears ran down her face, drops painted the dirt below. “Woman, why are you weeping?” came a voice from a stranger in the tomb. Her mind filled with all manner of horrors – Had the tomb been ransacked for valuables? Had Roman soldiers come by night, still giddy from the rush of power, to further violate the body of their victim? In desperation she exclaimed, ‘They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him!’ At that moment, still not having comprehended these figures occupying her Lord’s resting place, she heard footsteps and turned. She saw a gardener, sun rising behind his right shoulder. “Woman, why are you weeping?” she heard him say. Perhaps he had said it the first time too? Maybe the tomb was empty after all… “Who are you looking for?” For a split second she had a glimmer of hope, perhaps Jesus’ body just had been laid elsewhere, she asks the gardener if he moved her Lord, if so she will tend to the body. It is such a small request, surely if this man has any heart he will grant her this mercy. “Mary.”
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 Readings, Psalm 116 and Luke 24:13-35
Image, Maximino Cerezo Barredo (Spanish, 1932–), In the Breaking of Bread, 2001. I have four mini-sermons this morning, each of which will end with a question and a little time for silent reflection and collective sharing, about what this reading from the Gospel might mean for the Kirk. First, and carrying on from the message on Easter Sunday: the resurrection still on the move. I spoke on Easter that each of the resurrection appearances point to movement, Jesus is often already on the move ahead of the disciples, calling them to come find him. Here, we have another scene of resurrection appearance which is also on the move. What’s helpful to note is that this is not a departure but a continuation of the manner of Jesus’ ministry. For while we have records of Jesus’ preaching in synagogues, or his conversations in homes, the bulk of his teaching is on the go. Along the road, by lakeside, on hilltop and plain, Jesus expounded the kingdom of God, interpreted the Law, told parables, and proclaimed good news. And such movement was not incidental but ancillary to the message, as Jesus continually draws what is around him into his parables and lessons. And so it is with the life of the disciple of Jesus. While it is true that we gather, spending time in church services learning and worshipping, the vast bulk of our Christian life takes place on the road, on the move. And indeed our own acts of worship, evangelism, mercy, and justice, are, like Jesus’ often responding to the world around us – those things we see in our context that inspire us to thanks, lead us to wonder, draw us into action, sharpen our understanding. Like the scene on the way to and from Emmaus, our life with Jesus is marked by movement, by becoming, by living the way, on the way. The question then, for us as the Kirk, is how (and what) are we learning as we go? What are the practices and people that draw us near to Jesus as we go hither and thither?  Reading, John 20:1-18
Image, Kateryna Kuziv (Ukrainian, 1993–), Mary Magdalene Stood Crying, 2021. First, a poem, from one of the great post-WWII Jewish poets, Anthony Hecht: It out-Herod’s Herod. Pray you, avoid it. Tonight my children hunch Toward their Western, and are glad As, with a Sunday punch, The Good casts out the Bad. And in their fairy tales The warty giant and witch Get sealed in doorless jails And the match-girl strikes it rich. I’ve made myself a drink. The giant and witch are set To bust out of the clink When my children have gone to bed. - All frequencies are loud With signals of despair; In flash and morse they crowd The rondure of the air. For the wicked have grown strong, Their numbers mock at death, Their cow brings forth its young, Their bull engendereth. Their very fund of strength, Satan, bestrides the globe; He stalks its breadth and length And finds out even Job. - Yet by quite other laws My children make their case; Half God, half Santa Claus, But with my voice and face, A hero comes to save The poorman, beggarman, thief, And make the world behave And put an end to grief. And that their sleep be sound I say this childermas Who could not, at one time, Have saved them from the gas. Hecht knew well the horrors of his century. He fought in WWII, was present at the liberation of Flossenbürg concentration camp, and was charged with interviewing its prisoners. He was well acquainted with the 20th century as Leonard Bernstein described it: a century of death. And yet, despite the gap in time, works such as Hecht’s resonate with us still, because judging from these last 26 years, the C21st seems so determined to share that mantle. This might appear a peculiar place to begin the Easter Sunday message. And yet, the Day of Resurrection, as the gospel passage makes clear, begins in darkness: Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb. Mary begins her day in the grip of death and grief, the shadow of loss and mortality, of finitude and failure.  Readings, Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19 and John 13:1-17, 31-35
Image, Christ on the Mount of Olives, Arent de Gelder (1715) We know from the synoptic gospels that Jesus and his disciples sing a psalm during this final Passover meal together. Perhaps, it could have been the one we heard tonight, which opens with: I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my supplications. Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live. Saint Augustine asked the immortal question: what do I love when I love my God? The response of these opening verses is: I love the one who heard me when I have called out in the past. And because of this, I will call on God as long as I live. If this was the psalm they sung, it certainly maps onto the experience of Jesus across his life. His life is marked by intimate communication with God his Father, whom he has called on across his ministry, receiving time and again what he needs to tend to his friends, serve the people, and reveal God’s glory. God has heard Jesus’ voice and supplication, God has inclined an ear to Jesus, and so knowing his hour is at hand, Jesus places his trust in God once more. As the trial awaits, Jesus affirms he shall die as he lived: calling on God.  Readings, Ezekiel 37:1-14 and John 11:1-45
Image, The Raising of Lazarus, 1943, by Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) We have two incredibly famous passages today, both perfectly placed by the lectionary as the sun begins to set on Lent. Both point to what we are moving toward, what we will come to celebrate at Easter: the power of God over the forces of death. We have talked before that the gospels record much of Jesus’ ministry in a way that points to his power to cure and dispense with the forces of death. Across the gospel Jesus meets with, tends to, and heals those who have been made impure, all to foreshadow his crucifixion, where death will be taken up in Jesus’ own body, where death will seemingly overwhelm Jesus’ body, only for the resurrection to reveal Jesus’ ultimate triumph. The message of the Lazarus story, in such a sequence, is one of amplification. Jesus has healed those who are living but have the signs of death on their body (such as lepers), Jesus has healed those who have only recently died (such as the young woman), but now, Jesus heals Lazarus who has been dead for four days, whose very body stinks of death. And what’s more, Jesus heals him from a distance. The difficulty, as it were, of these conflicts with the forces of death have been increasing, amplifying the wonder of Jesus’ power, preparing the way for the greatest wonder of them all, which we will see with the Easter dawn. But we when we pause and pay attention to just how very dead Lazarus is, especially when we couple it with the Ezekiel reading, we can learn something more still.  Readings, Exodus 17:1-7 and John 4:5-42
Image, Still from Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Women, Art, Revolution (2010) What stood out to you in the reading, what struck you from the conversation with Jesus and the woman, or Jesus and his disciples, or the scene with the townsfolk afterwards? Any feelings? Any phrases that jump out. Discussion Two things struck me this time. The first, which is linked with the reading from Exodus we read together earlier in the service is the graciousness by which God shares the living water. To explain, let me just draw a little from the epistle that was assigned to this week’s reading in the lectionary, which we didn’t read today (I couldn’t ask any more from Kay!). But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us… For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. In this passage from Romans 5, Paul stresses the freedom of God, who out of abundant grace and steadfast love, acts to reconcile and redeem humanity while we were far off, while we were in a state of estrangement and enmity. It is not because we moved near to God that we have received the Spirit of adoption, but because God moved to us, found us, enfolded us, saved us – out of God’s generous, free desire to be with and for the creature. And this we see, in both of today’s readings is consistent with God’s character.  Readings, Psalm 15, Micah 6:1-8, and Matthew 5:1-12
Image, William DeMorgan, The Good Samaritan (1860s) Here’s the sermon in brief: the Christian life, is a life of creativity. For when we come to respond to the graciousness of God, what are we to do: Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’ That is to ask: is there a patterned response, a predictable, repeatable response to the goodness of God which can be tallied and measured with simple, empirical methods? Copied and pasted from one Christian to the next, to the next, to the next? God has told you, 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? Which is to say, no, no such patterned, predictable, and repeatable response ready to be tallied. The life we must live in response to the gospel is one that takes creativity, change, interpretation, improvisation, reflection, and growth. For to do justice here and now, is different than there and then. Loving kindness and walking humbly, these are, like any act of love and humility acts which need to be distinct and personal if they are to be authentic.  Readings, Isaiah 9:1-14 and 1 Cor 1:10-18
Image, Michael Galovic (Serbian Australian, 1949–), Ukraine Response, 2022. When I lived in Brisbane, in my early 20s, I lived near the biggest video rental place I’ve ever seen, which for an aspiring actor was paradisiacal. They not only had most movies sorted by director, but had a whole foreign director section as well. The best part was that, on Tuesdays, all weekly rentals were a dollar and if you could correctly answer a trivia question you got an extra rental for free… and folks, I know it is gauche to use a sermon illustration where you, as the preacher, come off all shiny and bright, but you need to know I got a lot of bonus rentals. What was great about this, other than the price and the range, was that when you got home with your 7 or so movies (I had plenty of time in those halcyon days), that was - more or less - the options you had when it came to at-home entertainment for the week. When night came and you started to think, what should I watch, you could simply look at this list. In seven days the movies went back and you borrowed some more and this became the short list to draw from. And while you, certainly, can umm and ahh for a handful of minutes over a handful of movies, the decision necessarily eventuates without too much stress or sweat. Now, however, when the kids are asleep and I want to watch a movie, it's disastrous. Because the short list is no longer those handful of films I rented, but is more or less the entire history of cinema stretched out over streaming platforms, YouTube, and the Internet Archive. And you can swipe and swipe and search and search and the short list simply doesn’t hit bottom (until of course you do strike upon an idea and then invariably discover it is not on the streaming service it was last month but on the one you cancelled when your seven day free trial ran out). The abundance of choice we have now - as has been fairly widely observed - does not make choice easier, and in many ways we watch less, despite having access to much more. Now, it is easy for me, as it can be for all of us, to look back on that period of video rental and pine. But that period has been gone for some time (how many of the youths around Forestway even know why that cafe is called The Old Civic?). But what’s more startling, or unnerving, is when we look back and remember, that not only has the period been gone for some time, it wasn’t even around for that long. The first video rental store opened in Australia in 1983, and by the mid 2010s they were basically all gone. A thirty-something year rise and fall. History is, after all, what was here today, but gone tomorrow.  Reading, Romans 12
Image, Joan Mitchell, Sunflower V Today we’re building off last week’s sermon on the confession that God’s good pleasure is the founding ‘why’ of the sending of Christ. Today the question is, what kind of community emerges in response to this delighting of God to adopt, elect, call and send a people in response to the loving good pleasure of our of God revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. At the risk of coming off like the supermarkets selling hot cross buns the moment it ticks over to Boxing Day, I am starting this January sermon at the Crucifixion. Specifically, the scene in John, where Jesus gives his mother and the beloved disciple to one another. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. We might say that in this tender scene the church is born. As one disciple is given to another, forged into a new family by faith of the Son. As Jesus has been preparing the disciples for his going ahead of them, to the day when they will no longer have him with them, he has urged their need to be with and for each other (just as he has been with and for them), to love one another (as he has loved them), and to be one (just as he has made them one with him). Jesus makes of these two disciples a new family in his name, and in so doing, begins the path toward the church.  Readings, Jeremiah 31:7-14 and Ephesians 1:3-14
Image, Lee Krasner (1908–1984) Through Blue, 1963 There are some pleasurable phrases out there you love to hear: “all inclusive,” “take your pick,” “I got both kinds,” “it’s all free!” Undoubtedly others come to mind. Characteristic of these is a freedom from imposition or limit, freedom from any concession or compromise, freedom from only if or only after. In hearing these phrases our decision is governed not by any consideration of external factors or tit-for-tat, but solely by the good pleasure of our will. Though it is not the good pleasure of our will that I want to focus on today. Instead, it is the good pleasure of God’s will that will occupy us, as we heard in today’s reading: God destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. Why does Christmas happen? Why is the Son sent? At a foundational level, the Christian confession is that all this happens… according to the good pleasure of God’s will. |
SermonsPlease enjoy a collection of sermons preached by Rev Liam at the Kirk. If you have questions about them, or attending a service reach out using the Contact Page. Categories
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