Readings, Lamentations 3:19-25 and 2 Timothy 1:1-14
Image, Study for 'Painting with white border’ (1913) Vasily Kandinsky

Since 2022, this Sunday has been designated in the Uniting Church calendar, “UCA Older Persons Sunday.” A Sunday allowing us to reflect “on what it means to be a faith community of people who are continually ageing.” As the rationale notes, “We are all together in this ageing transition process; we are all slightly older than we were at breakfast time this morning. Some of us are experiencing faster ageing transitions than others, which can be uncomfortable, disorienting and hard to accept. This has implications in our church community for education, planning and pastoral care. As the people of Jesus Christ, we need to consider and prepare as a church community for the life-long transition called ageing.”
 
The Assembly provides possible readings for this service, instead of what is provided in the lectionary. However, I didn’t feel we needed those today, as this section of the Second Letter of Timothy celebrates well already, “what it means to be a faith community of people who are continually ageing.” Recalling your tears, the letter writer declares of Timothy, I long to see you so that I may be filled with joy. I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.
 
Faith here is a living thing, shared amongst and across the generations, weaving together the people of God as the body of Christ. Paul, reminded of Timothy’s sincere faith (as well as his palpable emotion) longs to see him again to be filled with joy. But in remembering Timothy’s faith, he also brings to mind those the faith lived in first – Timothy’s grandmother Lois and mother Eunice. This living faith moves through this constellation of people and so even when they are apart, or even when they are gone, it breathes and beats in new bodies.
 
Back when we were preparing to host Campfire at the Kirk the team came here for a meeting, which happened to overlap with a women’s fellowship meeting. It was great because it allowed the two groups to meet and talk. And I got to see folks like Mary, Gwen, and others sharing about the Sunday School/kids ministry of the Kirk and how the rooms were used, and how many kids were here, and where they used to take them when there was spill over, all while we were talking about how to use these rooms for a whole different group of kids, a whole different program, a whole new generation. What a witness to the living faith being shared across and amongst the generations, weaving together the people of God, making two distinct programs one shared ministry. The same faith, the same heart for kids, the same joy, beating in new bodies, all of it a reminder of the goodness of the Lord.
 
The goodness of the Lord which, through the Spirit and the saints preserves the church across time. Even when programs cease or shift, even if ministries move or merge, even if churches close or consolidate, the faith, our faith, is a living faith; not bound or diminished by any of these changes, but carried on in hearts and minds taking new forms and new voice rekindling the gifts of God. It is our trust and hope in the power of the Spirit and the livingness of faith that equips the church community for the lifelong transition called aging.
 
However, while we celebrate the faithfulness of God, whose steadfast love never ends and whose mercies never cease, we also recognise with the stated rationale of today, that aging can be hard and disorienting. Sometimes it feels like it happens all at once, sometimes it feels like time ravages some more than others. Sometimes, in the words of Philip Roth, “old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”  
 
And this reality, this feeling, this hurt, is not something to run away from or hide. Denial and sugar-coating only isolates those already struggling. For this reason, the act of lament takes on vital importance. The words we heard read from Lamentations 3 are filled with hope, but it is a hope that comes amidst and through honest lament. Because before we reached today’s words, this is what we find:
I have become the laughing-stock of all my people,
   the object of their taunt-songs all day long.
He has filled me with bitterness,
   he has glutted me with wormwood…
my soul is bereft of peace;
   I have forgotten what happiness is;
so I say, ‘Gone is my glory,
   and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’
This kind of lament should not be confined to our scriptures alone, but allowed to find voice in our individual and collective piety and prayer. We need to be able to lament the pain (physical and spiritual), the harm (emotional and social), the injustice and indignity that afflicts the aging. There are ample causes for lament –royal commissions have exposed the systemic and profound abuse and neglect that has occurred in aged care facilities, research has detailed the increasing amount of elder abuse perpetrated by families, and we would have here today a profundity of stories of quiet dismissals, subtle denigrations, and decreased visibility. The bitterness, pain, and fear this evokes needs to be given voice in the community and before God in order to form the community into one which is able to bear one another’s burdens, share one another’s tears, and stand together in the struggle for justice and dignity. It is honest lament which allows for the truthful proclamation of hope in the community of struggle (as opposed to the cheap optimism of shiny happy people).
 
Because it is only after those verses of lament that the reading reaches this moment:
But this I call to mind,
   and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
   his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
   great is your faithfulness.
The call to hope and faith, the call to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord, can only be made with integrity if we have allowed each other to give voice to lament, and if we have proven ourselves a people of refuge and dignity for all members. At this point the word of hope, the promise of Christ, the immortality of the gospel can be broached as a testament to the living faith which cannot be crushed, not even by death (let alone the little deaths of societal disregard or bodily limit).  
 
But the reason for this movement is not based only in the structure of Lamentations. Christ himself did not live his life in one mood (he wept and raged as much as he rejoiced and gave thanks). And so the church as the body of Christ must not live in one mood. To be a faith community of those continually aging involves both the thanksgiving for the sincere faith we see living from one generation to the next, and the lament for the pain and heartbreak that befalls our elders (particularly that which is inflicted through social neglect or injustice). Without hope we have despair, but without lament, we have ignorance, and the church as the body of Christ, an aging faith community, can give into neither of these temptations.
 
In the end, like Lois, Eunice, Timothy, and Paul, we must guard the calling of Christ for each other. Guard the good treasure of faith entrusted to [us]. For this was given in Christ before the ages began. And just as it cannot be denied to the young for their youth and supposed inexperience, it must not be denied or presumed diluted because of age and supposed diminishment. As a body made up of many (indispensable) members, we make room for the truth and look at one another as sites of sincere, living faith. A faith which is ever moving and growing, which, through the power of the Holy Spirit beats and breathes in our bodies. This faith (which is first and always Christ’s faith) shares in the immortality of the gospel and thus will continue to live in the community of the faithful, until the fulfilment of time, when Christ who abolished death, appears again, bringing the restoration of all things on his heels.  

Reading, Luke 15:1-10
Image, The Parable of the Lost Coin, Domenico Fetti (1589–1624)

​During our kid’s talk about baptism, we explored various imagery which helps communicate the reality of baptism. Our becoming part of the body of Christ, our being buried in Christ so that we can rise with him also, our light secured and enlivened in the fire of Christ’s light, our name being added to the great cloud of witnesses. The reading today carries two similar, potent images. The lost sheep and the lost coin, found and returned, the cause of much celebration.
 
Much comfort and hope has been gleaned from these most famous of stories. For in them, we see the attention, tenderness and determination of our God. This is a God not of averages but individuals. This is a God not content with rounding errors but who counts, knows, and delights in every hair on our head. The God who numbered the stars in the sky is as attentive to the human as the shepherd charged with the care of 100 sheep, as attentive to us in our billions as a woman to her 10 coins. These stories display the attention, tenderness, and determination of our God who knows when there is one who needs to be gathered, who knows where the lost will be found, and who celebrates their homecoming.
 
In theological speak, there is a term called the economy of salvation. The economy of salvation is used to describe the way in which God manages, or stewards, the salvation of the world. As an example, you might say, the economy of salvation is revealed in God’s decision to send the Son in love, or that the Spirit’s role in the economy of salvation is to awaken faith and understanding in the individual to the completed work of Christ. Baptism, even, can be part of the economy of salvation – not because it changes our status before God, but because as sacrament it points to the saving work of Christ and its effect in our common life. What we see, in parables such as those read today, is how different the economics of the economy of salvation are, from the economics of the world.  
 
By welcoming outsiders, the estranged and marginalised, Jesus risked not only his reputation, but the possible reception of his message. It was this welcome that brought about the grumbling that led to today’s parables. And the parables themselves attest to the deliberate attention paid to the few, the lost, the one amidst the many. None of these choices map onto the secure and prudent practices of worldly economics, all-to-ready to account for the odd lost coin or sheep, knowing that it is rarely worth the effort to retrieve.
 
And yet, time and again, Jesus teaches us that the kingdom of God is made known through an inversion of worldly values and expectations. Consider, for instance, the parable of the landowner who hires workers for his field at various points across the day. At the end of the day, the he gathers all the workers and pays each a day’s wage. Those who were there at the beginning grumbled at this wage parity. To which the landowner responds, Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?” So the last will be first, and the first will be last.’ 
 
Or consider, for instance, the parable of the banquet, when those who received the first invitation to dine do not come, and so the host sends servants to the streets to gather all they can find, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
 
The point is never order or longevity, deserving or protocol. For the joy is in the gathering up – is the bringing in of those outside, forgotten, and lost. It is in the inversion of the old order of things and replacing it with something sublime – the celebration over one found, the last being first, the hall filled with the good and bad. And the risk, as it was in for those grumbling at the beginning of today’s reading, as it will be for the older brother in the parable that follows the two we heard, as it is for those who went first to the fields, or turned down the invitation to feast, is to miss out on the celebration. Is to miss out on what is been made new in God’s attention, tenderness, and determination. To allow the economics and values of the world to rob us of the joy at something so strange and sublime as the attention, tenderness, and determination of God to fill God’s household with merriment, meaning, and fellowship. 
 
Because if we miss this celebration, if we grumble through what God is doing because it does not look like the logical or the prudent, if we scoff at the welcome of those so seldom welcomed, then we will miss what it is we are called to do. For as those who have received the grace of God and called to bear the fruit of the Spirit, we are called to live in response to God’s attention, tenderness and determination – to model it in our own life, to seek it in our community. For as the church we are called by God to organise ourselves after the economics of the economy of salvation.
 
This week you may have seen the story of Carlo Acutis, in the news for becoming the first millennial saint. Often what is first highlighted about Carlos’ life was his use of the internet to catalogue miracles and witness to the good news of the gospel (work he began at 11 years old). But what is also highlighted was that, between 11 and 15, Carlos was also known to go about Milan, giving out sleeping bags to the homeless, giving money from his allowance to the poor. When Carlos died, tragically from a rare cancer at age 15, his funeral was unexpectantly packed with a crowd of the poor and homeless from across Milan. His Priest remarked, “It became apparent that Carlo had befriended so many of these people.” What a witness to a life modelled on the attention, tenderness, and determination of God. One devoting gifts, passions, and time to the kind of upside-down economics of the kingdom of God which celebrates in the great gathering of the unexpected a testament to the nature of our God, who refuses to allow a one to be lost or forgotten. May our own days, our own community, be marked by such attention, tenderness, and determination.

Readings, Hosea 11:1-11 and Luke 12:13-21
Image, Mary Cassatt, Mother and Child (1880)
 
You might be familiar with the phrase “Chekhov’s gun.” It comes from the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who remarked – more or less – that if there’s a gun on the wall in the first act, it better be fired in the fifth. You’ll have encountered this in storytelling before, just recall any broad comedy that spends a lot of time early in the show drawing attention to grandma’s antique vase, you know that is coming crashing down later in the story. What you set up, needs to be paid off. So, what has been getting set up in Hosea?
 
Across the preceding chapters of Hosea, the wrath of God has been building toward Israel. God and prophet lay the charges of injustice and idolatry:
You have ploughed wickedness,
   you have reaped injustice,
   you have eaten the fruit of lies.
 
Their heart is false;
   now they must bear their guilt.
The Lord will break down their altars,
   and destroy their pillars.
 
The days of punishment have come
 
The promised judgment shall be swift and the punishment severe:
 
Even if they bring up children,
   I will bereave them until no one is left.
Woe to them indeed
   when I depart from them!
 
As Hosea declares, the very basis of the identity of the people as God’s people, recipients of the covenant and its promises, all this shall be snatched away:
Because they have not listened to him,
   my God will reject them;
   they shall become wanderers among the nations.
 
The verdict has been pronounced, the sentence prepared… and then, at the eleventh hour, in the eleventh chapter, there is a shift in tone.
 
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
Out of Egypt I called my son.
 
In this sequence, God describes Their relationship with the people of Israel as that of a mother to her infant child. It was I, God declares, who taught you to walk, I who lifted you from the ground so you could nurse, I who led you with bands of love.
 
In the first instance this seems only to heighten the betrayal. Israel’s idolatry is akin to the rejection of one’s own mother, who has done nothing but protect, love, and provide. But the image also signifies a shift – not in what Israel is done, but in what God is going to do:
 
How can I give you up, Ephraim?
   How can I hand you over, O Israel?
My heart recoils within me;
   my compassion grows warm and tender.
 
Here, contradicting Hosea’s earlier warning that God shall reject them, God asks, How can I give you up? It is the kind of question we may have asked ourselves, when despite all the rational reasons one might have to let go, or part, or reject, we realise that the heart is not so easily convinced, its desires not so quickly quenched, its ties not so swiftly sundered. As we read in our book club novel just this last week, “human relationships are not social services, and love has nothing to do with deserving.” How can I give you up, How can I hand you over. God’s own heart recoils within, and God’s compassion grows warm and tender, and the prophesied wrath will not come to pass.
 
There is a long abiding tension in the Christian tradition over the impassibility of God. That is to say, that for some part and parcel of what it means to confess God’s perfection is to confess that God never changes. To change, the argument goes, implies a shift from perhaps less perfect to more perfect. The argument also goes that a changeable God is not as reliable an object of our trust and devotion, compared to an impassable and unchangeable God who cannot be swayed or moved. But at the same time, the Biblical account, particularly through the Old Testament, is filled with stories of God changing God’s mind, of God relenting from a plan of destruction, of God been swayed by the appeal of a prophet.
 
What’s interesting to observe in this reading, is God’s own reasoning for the shift, God’s own rationale for the decision not to execute God’s fierce anger:
For I am God and no mortal,
the Holy One in your midst,
and I will not come in wrath.
 
It is human, it seems, to be able to forget the former love, human to resist the recoiling of the heart, human to be able to cool compassion and remain firm against its tender pull. It is human to be able to look upon a betrayer and reject, renounce, and depart… human, we might say, to be in a sense impassable in the face of deserved judgment and irrevocable breach. And we need to be able to be human, to sometimes be impassable to the appeals of those once dear to us who have hurt us, we need to be able to do this for our safety, health, and flourishing… but God is God and no mortal, and God doesn’t need to do anything. God is free to recoil, to respond to the tugs of compassion, to remember the days bending down to nurse those now bent on turning away. God is God and no mortal, and it is precisely as God, as the Holy One in [our] midst, that God does not come in wrath but is led by bands of love. It is not the promised judgment, nor the power to bring devastation and desolation, that the Divine Nature is revealed. Rather it is the compassion induced decision to not come in wrath that reveals what it means to be God in distinction to a mortal.
 
If God is impassable, perhaps it is that our human proclivity to sin and idolatry is not powerful enough to pass by, to overcome, or render null and void God’s earlier decision to be for us and for our freedom. If we go back to Chekhov, the gun of God’s judgment might have been on the wall in act one, but there is something deeper, and older of God’s nature which is the foundation of the whole set. God’s prior decision to be for us, holds up the entire edifice, and it is this, which is paid off in Chapter 11. For God is the one who called Israel out of Egypt, determined to be their God and have them be God’s people. Just as God is the one who in Jesus Christ chose us before the foundation of the world. This eternal decision of election, of covenantal love, of redemptive presence, is impassable. It cannot be altered by our misdeeds, forgetfulness, sin or tomfoolery. For God’s own heart recoils in the face of wrath, God’s compassion wells on the threshold of departure. Gods divine nature determines God’s divine activity and so God does not come in wrath but roars like a lion to call God’s children back to their proper home. God has chosen to be for us, often despite us doing anything to warrant such tenderness and compassion, but this is why it’s grace.
 
And this is also why we can do wild and crazy things like resist the urge to build up our storehouses and stockpile our wealth. This is why we can attempt to live into the topsy-turvy economics of the kingdom of God, which resists taking refuge in wealth and hoarding what we do not need so that there might be none with need in our midst. Someone in the crowd asks Jesus to arbitrate over their inheritance squabble, but Jesus is God, not a mortal, and has come in our midst for something far better than that. Jesus has come to share the riches of God so that we might be able to be rich toward God. Jesus has been sent into the world, not to condemn the world, but to show once more the world shall be saved through him. It is in being reminded of the nature of our God, compassionate and tender, steadfast in love and faithfulness, that we are strengthened and sustained to live a life which does not consist in the abundance of possessions, but learns to walk with God, led by bands of love and nursed at the table of grace.       

Readings, Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31 and Psalm 8
Image, Segment from The Holy Family with Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Bartolomeo Cavarozzi (1618)

What does it mean to believe in a Triune God? To confess the Holy Trinity? To live as though our God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? There are, of course, conceptual answers (more often than not teaching us what not to say: the Son is not created, the Father is not above the Son, etc), and they are important. A proper understanding of who Jesus is, or why the Spirit is sent at Pentecost requires the full picture of God as Triune.
 
However, while worthy of a sermon, this is not how I want to approach the question “what does it mean to believe in a Triune God” today. Instead, the sermon is: we glorify, recognise, and confess the reality of the Triune God in treating human beings as crowned by God with glory and honour, treating each person as one who the wisdom of God delights.
 
I’ve been reading a book on the Soviet dissident movement, called To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (which would have been my toast to myself had I come out to preach on the conceptual answers to the question of the Trinity). The book centres the simple though radical choice these dissidents made: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.
 
This serves as a guide for our own lives as subjects of the Triune God, citizens of the kingdom of heaven, living amidst worldly fracture, failure, and folly. That in a world of prejudice and discrimination, of abuse and neglect, of violence and war, of tyranny and despotism, of callousness and cruelty, we live as those who believe God cares for the human person. To confess the reality of the Triune God is to live in God’s reality. And in God’s reality, God is mindful of and cares for the mortal, has crowned the human with glory and honour. To glorify the Triune God is to defy the worldly appearance of things and live as if each person has really, truly been made little lower than a God.
 
To live “as is,” is not to live in blinkered delusion, but to awaken to incongruity. It is to wake and see where in the world people are treated as if they bear no crown, no divine image, no holy delight. The most recent Peninsula Living was delivered which detailed the rising scourge of elder abuse across the Northern Beaches (and across the wider State). Stories such as this create a clash between the world as it is and the world as it should be, a clash between how the vulnerable are too often treated in the world, and how they are viewed by God. And this clash acts as a spark, it ignites us to act, advocate, organise and pray so that the as it should be gains ground in the world. 
 
On the global scale, we see the humanitarian crisis spiralling out of control in Gaza. The blocking and destruction of international aid by Israel, their strategies of starvation and deprivation added onto direct military strikes, are enabled and empowered by their own (and much of the wider world’s) decision to classify a population not as little lower than a God, but far lower than human dignity, rights, and compassion. The cataclysmic death toll is enabled and empowered by the ability to look at some people not as crowned with glory and honour, not as a site where Divine Wisdom delights, but as an inhuman problem to be extinguished or expelled. Again these heart wrenching stories spark a clash within us, they create an undeniable incongruity between the world as it is and the world as it should be, about the human as seen through a sinful, worldly vision, and as they are seen by God.     
 
More intimately, we might connect this to last week’s message about the Spirit bearing witness with our own that we are children of God. God has crowned us with glory and honour, making us little lower than a God, and this creates a clash of incongruity with our own negative self-talk, which would seek to place us several rungs lower on that ladder.
 
We believe in the Triune God by not settling for the vision of the world as it is. We believe by  rebelling against the worldly categorisation and treatment of our fellow human beings as anything lower than what God has determined us to be. Because as the reading from Proverbs stresses, it is this relationship to the human that defines the nature of our God.
 
In language reminiscent of the prologue of John, the figure of Wisdom is described as being set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth. Narrating God’s ordering of the primordial creation, Wisdom declares Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him. It is writings such as these that resourced the development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the early church. But again, the emphasis today is not on the conceptual articulation of the Trinity. Rather, we find the emphasis in the following verse when Wisdom declares, and my delights were with the sons of men. Wisdom, who was with God when there were no depths, finds delight with the sons of men. Like the opening of John, In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and lived among us.
 
There is always a directionality, or focal point, for the figure of Wisdom or Word: to be among us, to be for us, to live and delight with us. While it is established that these figures are with God from the beginning, pivotal in the act of creation, the emphasis is not on their relation in an idealised pre-human eternity. Rather the emphasis is the movement toward the human, the decision to be with and for us. The emphasis is that God, who established the clouds above, the mountains below, and the limits of the seas; God for whom the moon and the stars are the works of Their fingers; should be mindful of human beings, that God should care for mortals, and make them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour. Who God is, from the beginning is the one who is turned toward the human. God is only and always a God for us. A God who has elected in freedom to be our creator, redeemer, and sustainer. Who is the Triune God? The one who crowned us with honour and glory. 
 
As Julian of Norwich wrote, I saw that God never began to love mankind; for just as mankind will be in endless bliss, fulfilling God’s joy with regard to his works, just so has that same mankind been known and loved in God’s prescience from without beginning in his righteous intent… For before he made us, he loved us. (Showings)
 
What does it mean to recognise this Triune God and live faithfully in this reality? It is to recognise ourselves and our fellow human creatures as those God is mindful of, and in turn be mindful of them. To recognise ourselves and our fellow as cared for by God, and in turn care for them. To recognise ourselves and our fellow as crowned by God and in turn treat each other as crowned. It is to live as dissidents to the world of sin and death, to the world as it is, and instead to live as free citizens of the kingdom of God; world as it should be. We live as those who see and consider neighbours and strangers with the dignity, respect, and love that befits God’s own care. We live as those who are troubled by the incongruity between the all-too-common worldly denigration of the human creature and seek to rectify this out of a robust vision of God’s as it should be. In doing so we believe in the Triune God as the one who in absolute freedom, and from without beginning answered the question of divine identity simply in being mindful of us, and in being mindful, loving us.

Readings, Acts 2:1-21 and Romans 8:14-17, 26-27
Image, Roman Barabakh (Ukrainian, 1990–), Descent of the Holy Spirit, 2017. 
​
Much is to be made of the external propulsion of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The scene is dramatically public. The domesticity in which the story begins is blown open by a force of eternity pouring out on flesh. The day begins with the disciples in a house, perhaps in prayer or enjoying a meal, and then suddenly – what a word – suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.
 
Naturally, a crowd gathers. Perhaps one of the few universals is that if there’s a spectacle we’re going to idle on by (we slow to this day to glimpse a car crash or house being demolished). Here a crowd gathers, but not only because of a general curiosity in spectacle, but because they hear a bunch of Galileans speaking in myriad tongues. A crowd from across the region remark: how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 
 
As I said, dramatically public. The external reality and impact of the coming of the Holy Spirit then as now is central to the Day of Pentecost. It is with the Spirit that the disciples can now follow Jesus’ command to be his witnesses in all the earth. It is with the Spirit that the gospel is now able to be proclaimed in all tongues, to find soil in all cultures. It is with the Spirit that the church can be filled with divine power to continue Christ’s work in the world. It is with the Spirit that we can become the body of Christ through the giving and receiving of the Spirit’s gifts. It is with the Spirit that we can bear the good fruit of the kingdom. All of these dimensions of the Spirit’s life in the church point to the truth that the Church is a body that is sent. That the church’s concern is not simply its own life, but the world which Christ loved and for which he lay down his life. The Spirit makes us a public-facing people, called do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
 
All this is rightly marked and celebrated at Pentecost. But Paul reminds us today, that there is an inner dimension of the Spirit’s animating life, a pastoral dynamic of the Spirit’s mission.
The Spirit we have received, Paul remarks, is not one which provokes us to fear, but is a spirit of adoption. When we pray, our Father, as we do each week, it is the Spirit making this possible. In these words (offered not only in our weekly corporate prayer but any time you call on the name of God in hope) the Spirit bears witness with our spirit about the most important thing about us. The Spirit bears witness with our own to that most beautiful, most soul affirming truth: we are children of God, and if children then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. The Spirit weaves us into the family of God. Waltzing with our own spirit, joining voice in song, we and the Spirit cry, Abba! Father! and it is so. We become who we have been made to be: children of God, co-heirs with Christ. 
 
But such a truth can be difficult to swallow. It can be hard to see ourselves as part of such a family, to say of ourselves: I am a child of God. We might well be able to say it of almost anyone else, but of ourselves surely it can’t be true. There are all kinds of reasons we might harbour these misgivings. Perhaps our experience of crying out to an earthly father or mother was not met with the kind of care and attention for the analogy to hold much water. Perhaps the prejudices of society have communicated that we were not fearfully and wonderfully made but lesser, aberrant, ugly. Perhaps our struggles and affections were cast as beyond the interest or acceptance of God. Perhaps the circumstances and sorrows of our life have led you to feel far more alone than adopted. Perhaps other names you have been named, spoken in authoritative tones, have made a deeper imprint on your identity than the name child of God. None of these are easy to shake, they cannot simply be waved away or quickly overwritten. It is tragic. What’s the old line, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has finished tying its shoelaces. The truth that we are children of God can be a slow truth to learn, and it can suffer setbacks. But for this reason we have the Spirit. Because when we do not know how to pray as we ought, when we do not feel able or ready to cry out Abba! Father! like children of God, it is the Spirit who helps us in our weakness. It is the Spirit who intercedes with sighs too deep for words, so that even if we cannot see ourselves as a child of God and co-heir with Christ, God does.      
 
Over the past month and a bit, various members of our community have shared songs or hymns that have shaped and sustained their faith. I have my own today to accompany this message. Julien Baker, a singer-songwriter from Tennessee wrote Rejoice in 2015, she was twenty at the time. The song, like much of her catalogue, wrestles with her experience of addiction, the death of friends, and the negative animosity toward her sexuality she experienced in her church. Despite the raw openness with which she gives voice to these wounds, woes, and wrongs, the song searches for and proclaims a ruddy hope. As she sings,
Give me everything good, I'll throw it away
I wish I could quit, but I can't stand the shakes
Choking smoke, singing your praise
But I think there's a God and He hears either way
I rejoice and complain
I never know what to say
 
Like the psalmist who sings, Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Lord, hear my voice! Baker proclaims in the face of her mistreatment at the hands of the church, in the face of her own mistakes, in the face of her frailty: I think there’s a God and They hear either way.* This is the Spirit bearing witness, that even when we do not know how to pray, even when we do not know there is someone to pray to, the Spirit groans and God hears either way. 
 
And because of this spirit of adoption, Baker is able to sing my favourite line: Lift my voice that I was made. I was made. There is perhaps no more important foundation on which to build a life. You were made. Fearfully and lovingly made. Who you are is not a mistake. Against the forces of sin and death which would say that some people are not made, are not children of God, that some people must hide, apologise, or assimilate some fundamental part of themselves, Baker lifts her voice against these forces to bear witness with the Spirit that she is a child of God. 
 
At the close of the song, Baker proclaims that the God who hears her, knows her name and all her hideous mistakes. But at this point she does not fall back into fear. For she has not been given a spirit of slavery to fall back into the bounds of earthly prejudice or limitation, but a spirit of adoption to say that she is heard, and if heard made, and if made, then a child of God. A child who, despite and amid the complaint, doubt, failure, and rage, might still sing, defiant and holy:
I rejoice, I rejoice
I rejoice, I rejoice 
 
((At this point in the sermon we listened to the song))
 
This Pentecost, may the Spirit lend voice to your rejoicing and complaining.
This Pentecost, may the Spirit comfort you with the truth that you are heard even when you have no words.
This Pentecost, may the Spirit remind you that you were made.
This Pentecost, may the Spirit bear witness with your own that you are a child of God.
This Pentecost, may the Spirit be a place of freedom.
 
This inner place of truth and freedom beats back worldly falsity and fraud. And it is out of this depth of love and understanding that the work of proclaiming the good news in all corners of your heart and your world begins. Out of this well-spring of trust may you find fresh words and deeds to tell out the good news of God’s grace. With tongues sparked to life by the warming of our hearts, may we find those bound by earthly lies and herald good news: where the Spirit is there is the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

--
* In more contemporary performances of the song, Baker changes the Divine pronoun as reflected here.

Readings, Revelation 1:4-8, 17-18 and John 20:19-31
Image, Caspar David Friedrich, Easter Morning, ca. 1828–35. 
 
Last week at Easter we meditated on and celebrated the faithfulness of Christ and the mighty acts of God. We marvelled at Christ’s tender care of his friends, his mercy amidst trial and terror, his victory over death and the surprising upturning of his resurrection. The Easter weekend is the crescendo of the work of Christ and all he finished and made new.
 
Now today, in our first readings following Easter there is still much to marvel. Jesus appears to his disciples offering them his peace, and to Thomas offering his wounds, he is envisioned at the end of the age coming on the clouds in glory, and he appears to John with all care and tenderness, offering words of comfort and hope: Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive for ever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades. Yet, despite all this we also glimpse the turning point the resurrection proves. The turning point in the narrative of the New Testament, as we move from the story of Jesus to that of his followers, living in the age between his resurrection and return.
 
For in the gospel reading, when Jesus brings his peace and presence, he says also, As the Father has sent me, so I send you. The disciples, still reeling at his arrival in their locked room, are already receiving their commission. This shouldn’t come as a shock. Jesus didn’t exactly hide that his work would be continued by them - going so far as to say they would perform greater works than he. But perhaps they were struck by the rapidity. Perhaps they, like Mary in the garden, thought they would get to cling to their Teacher a little longer before being sent. But the resurrection is a rupture, a new age has already begun.
 
The words in Revelation also signal the shift. As John remarks in his doxological greeting which we borrowed in our call to worship: To him who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever. The sentence moves quickly from the action of Jesus (who loves and frees us) to what this makes us (a kingdom and priests). The great action of Christ swiftly reveals its meaning upon our lives. The great shroud of death is barely pierced, the reign of Sin is only recently deposed, the depths of hell just now harrowed, and already priests are being called to serve. The stone is barely rolled away and already the word is entrusted to the mournful pilgrims: Christ has gone ahead of you, hurry along after him. 
 
Now you might be thinking, yes, of course, no real surprise there, that is Christianity after all… but we must not lose sight that this turn was not made without surprising a few passengers. That the great work should begin after Easter is hardly expected or inevitable. When Jesus ascended to the heavens after commissioning his disciples, they stay looking at the sky expecting him to come right back (likely with fanfare and angel armies precipitating the Day of the Lord when every knee shall bow). And yet, like at the empty tomb, mysterious messengers have to idle up to Jesus’ followers to remind them, hey, the work is only beginning, remember, as the Father sent him, so he is sending you.
 
The One who loves and frees us makes us a kingdom, makes us priests, and sends us out. We who are baptised into Christ’s death also share in his resurrection which means to receive his peace, his breath, his Spirit, his commission. We are entrusted with his message, bid to follow in his way, called to carry on his work to the ends of the earth and the end of the age.
 
But of course, we do not do this alone. The focus may have shifted to the action of Christ’s followers, but Christ has hardly exited the story. As we heard in John, he breathes out his spirit upon the disciples and as we shall celebrate in a handful of weeks at Pentecost the Spirit will descend upon all those who call on the name of the Lord. This Spirit, our advocate and counsellor, enlivens and accompanies us as we go forth in the name of Christ. The Spirit, our friend, pours out fruit and gifts, until the day of Christ’s glorious return.
 
The presence of the Spirit and the promise of Christ not only ensure that we are not alone as we carry on the work of the Kingdom, but also ensure that in so doing our labour is not in vain. That the work we undertake as part of the great work, that the acts of mercy, justice, grace, love, joy we endeavour in the image of Christ - the faithfulness we show to the gospel call - will not be in vain. Our labour for Christ (in whatever form it takes) will not be the thing that saves the world, it will not usher in the return of Christ, it will not bring the kingdom in its fullness, but it is nonetheless part of that story. Our labour (however much is it recognised or noticeable in our day) will be swept up on that day, vindicated and incorporated not only into the slow progressive labour of the church, but also the expansive, surprising, mysterious, and ultimately victorious work of the Triune God in history.
 
Easter Sunday unfolds into the Easter season, as the story of Christ unfolds into that of his disciples following after him in the power of the Spirit. And in this season we take up our part in the great work, sent by Christ as he first was sent into the world in love and service. And as we go forth in Christ’s peace and with his Spirit, we take heart, because like Christ’s own labour which was vindicated in the resurrection, we know that our own labour (even if it sometimes feels small, perhaps sometimes even futile) will also be vindicated on the great and glorious day when Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth comes on the clouds with the restoration of the cosmos trailing on his heels.

Readings, Acts 10:34-43 and Luke 24:1-12
Image, Maurice Denis, Easter Mystery (Mystère de Pâcques), 1891.
 
There’s this brilliant exchange in the film, Men in Black. For those who don’t recall, the film is about a bureaucratic agency which deals with the hidden alien population on earth. A new agent, made aware of the secret, asks why the government doesn’t just tell people about aliens, people are smart after all. To which the seasoned agent responds:
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the centre of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
 
It’s a line that has no reason to be that good. Without the alien reference it could be from Death of a Salesman. It expresses, succinctly, a profound and fundamental truth: our understanding and comprehension of the world around us is hardly fixed, and no one is immune to surprises that would upturn our worlds.
 
The Easter scene is one such upturning, a fundamental shift in the comprehension of the world. Those who go to Christ’s tomb hear the world-shaking, reality contorting words, Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Death, surely about as true an absolute as we have, has been undone. Christ is risen, he who died is not among the dead but out and about calling his friends to follow. So ludicrous is this claim, so contrary to what everyone knows, that when the women rush back to Jesus’ other friends with this good news, it is dismissed as an idle tale. Dismissed as the new agent in Men in Black might have dismissed a UFO sighting just 15 minutes ago. Indeed, the post-resurrection scenes in the gospels are a continued reversal of what everyone has known, as Christ gathers up his grieving and confused followers, demonstrating those beautiful words of John, Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. The great upturning of Easter, is that not even death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
 
And it is this great upturning, this triumph of Christ’s victory, that Peter announces in Acts. It is easy to hear this speech as a kind of summation of what has happened and to conclude (borrowing some of Jesus’ famous last words) that it is finished. That Peter declares there was the great upturning of Easter and now the surprises are left behind, belonging to another generation. And yet, if we were to read on just a few more verses, we find the following: While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.  
 
Just when Peter thinks he has grasped the great upturning of Christ’s resurrection, he is witness to another foundational shift in his comprehension of the world. Because contrary to everything he knew, here he beholds the Holy Spirit fall upon the Gentiles. Contrary to everything he knew and was proclaiming about this new Jesus movement, contrary to everything he believed about clean and unclean, and what was required in order to covenant with God, he sees that Christ’s resurrection means something more still. Then Peter said, ‘Can anyone withhold the water for baptising these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’
 
Contravening the practices of the early Jesus movement, the Gentiles are baptised. For there is no distinction, Peter realises – they have received the same Spirit, just as we have. This, for those familiar with the story of the early church, is a fundamental turning point. Gentiles shall be able to take up their place in the emerging church of Jesus Christ, without first having to undergo circumcision and keep dietary laws. For the upturning of the resurrection, the surprise of the empty tomb, is not one and done. The resurrection continues to fundamentally shift the way Jesus’ disciples comprehend the world.
 
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the centre of the universe. So says our seasoned veteran in black. After the Copernican revolution we know that the sun is the centre and the earth gently revolves around this point (I mean, we’ve all made a diorama or two in our time). And it is easy to approach such a proclamation as Peter’s and say, of course, it is finished, dust off our hands and move on. However, it is not the case. Because recently I saw this – admittedly terrifying – footage of what’s really going on beneath our feet. (Kind of makes you want to hold onto something)
 
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the kind of revolutionary upturning that keeps on surprising, expanding, and leading us into a new and remarkable comprehension of the world. For the resurrection is more than a fact. It is more than something which happened. The resurrection is the very inbreaking of the new creation. It is the foundational shift in reality where the world moves from being in Adam, to being in Christ. To know that Christ is risen, is to know that Christ is alive and on the move, leading us forward and upturning our world. To know the resurrection is to be led by the Resurrected One, out into the world, to see where the Spirit is at work, pouring out Their gifts.
 
To be a Christian living after the resurrection of Christ is to live with a possibility ever before us: imagine what you’ll know tomorrow. Imagine what the resurrection is making possible in light of what it has already made possible. Christ is risen, he is alive, and through the Spirit he bids us follow. And so while at Easter we look back to that first morning, and allow it to upturn and reshape what we know of the world, we also look forward. For then as now the living will not be found among the dead, and we follow a living God. A Living God calling us to participate in work which breaks down the dividing walls of hostility, proclaims freedom and jubilee, reconciles and restores creation, pursues justice and deliverance, demands solidarity and mercy, proclaims and pursues God’s peaceable kingdom. And like Peter, this work does not leave us undisturbed, rather it hurtles us on like a planet after the sun, asking us to remain open to wonder, surprises, grace, and love beyond perhaps our own imaginations, but not the imagination of our God who raised Jesus Christ from the dead.