Readings, 2 Timothy 2:8-15 and Luke 17:11-19
Image, René Magritte, La reproduction interdite, oil on canvas, 1937. 
 
You may have heard it said: we are mysteries to ourselves. That is to say, just as we cannot know everything about another person, that other people are not transparent to us (we cannot stop them in time, lift them up and observe them from all angles inside and out) we are also not transparent to ourselves. We are somewhat inscrutable even to ourselves. We act in ways that surprise us, we feel in ways we cannot properly put into words, our desires shoot out in baffling directions, we cannot always predict our reactions, we – as Saint Paul so immortally described – do not always do the things we love, but the very thing that we hate. “Know thyself” the old adage goes… “not so easily done” we might respond.
 
I’ve been reading some Saint Augustine for my studies. Augustine, the fourth century African theologian and Bishop of Hippo, is perhaps known most for his Confessions. Among its themes, Augustine suggests that to work out who I am, I need to be speaking and listening to God. Augustine shares the sense that the self is not-transparent, not able to be examined or narrated with any finality as even the appeal to our own memory is a shaky rather than stable exercise. But this recognition does not render impossible the understanding of a sense of self, instead, “once we have recognised how obscure we are to ourselves we somehow see that only in relation to the infinity of God can we get any purchase of the sort of beings we are.” (Rowan Williams, On Augustine, p. 4)
 
That is to say, we need to present ourselves before God in order to get a handle on who we are. To begin the task of self-discovery we do what is instructed in the second letter to Timothy: Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel. It is Christ, after all, who is faithful when we are faithless, because while we might not know ourselves, Christ cannot deny himself. Such is the surety of Christ’s self, that even when we waiver and are faithless, Christ can only be who he is: with pure steadfast consistency, and Christ is the faithful one of God, the saviour of the world, in whom we live.
 
Today’s gospel reading helps illustrate these points. Jesus, travelling toward Jerusalem, encounters a group of lepers. What follows -up to the point of their departure - is entirely in keeping with the religious customs of the Judaism of Jesus’ day. It is what happens next that is surprising:
 
As they went, they were made clean. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus asked, ‘Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?’ Then he said to him, ‘Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.’
 
We note that the lepers were not made clean in Jesus’ presence, but, somewhat mysteriously, while they were on their way to present themselves to the priest. The Samaritan saw the change and turned back praising God and giving thanks to Christ. I have some questions: do you think he is the only one to turn back because he is the only one who thinks to thank Jesus, or because he is the only one to notice being made clean? Does he turn back because, as a foreigner, he is not expecting a warm welcome from the priest? What do we make of the fact that the one who turns back and receives commendation from Jesus, is the only one who disobeys his direct command? And, finally, what does it mean for Jesus to say to him that his faith has made him well, when he – like the others – were already made clean before and despite their decision to return and honour Jesus?
 
Perhaps the nine who pressed on did not notice they had been made well. Perhaps so accustomed to their affliction and its resulting isolation they struggled to see themselves anew, struggled to notice that new life could break in through old wounds. Soon enough they would arrive before the priest and their change would be revealed, but it can be hard to recognise changes in ourselves. If we take this as possible, then perhaps the reason the Samaritan is able to notice that he has been made clean, is the same reason he turns back to Jesus, and the same reason his faith has made him well… it is that he has gained purchase on who he is because he recognises that he came face to face with the infinity of God. With this newly established point on his compass the Samaritan can recognise both that he has been made clean and who he owes this blessing, and in so doing a new faith has been awakened in him. This faith is not what makes him clean, but it is what makes him well, in that it gives him a clearer more dazzling picture of himself, because he has a clearer more dazzling picture of what God is doing through Jesus Christ. 
 
How might we come to do the same? Present ourselves before Jesus Christ, and relate ourselves and our quest for self-understanding to him? It is significant to the story that the one who turns back is the Samaritan, a foreigner. This continues a theme developing in the gospel of the surprising capacity of outsiders to recognise the significance of Jesus – a recognition that is often set in contrast of the inability of Jesus’ own people to recognise him as their messiah. And what this theme, and particularly this instance, reveals for us is that proximity, familiarity, and a sense of privilege obscure us from recognising our need for Jesus, and in turn, obscure our understanding of ourself.
 
That is to say that part of why the Samaritan recognises what has happened is because of his outsider status. Because of the animosity he has faced, because the usual sites set apart for the encounter of God and God’s people have been closed or hostile, he is open to seeing a new thing, open to having his religious life reoriented, open to recognise the inbreaking of something new. The lesson for us is that proximity and familiarity can muffle the sense of unrecognisability of the self. A life lived on the inside, comfortable in our religious status, can in turn settle the sense of ourselves. We can come to believe that who we are can be known and defined perhaps through a label, or an association, or by reference to our own character, beliefs, actions. The fallout of such a settled sense of the self, of settling on a view of ourself as good, or elect, or churchly, is that we can neglect the need to continually orient the self in relation to Christ. Because this orienting act is never complete, it is ever occurring in the act of repentance, taking up our cross, and following Jesus. Ever occurring in the act of presenting ourselves before Jesus Christ as one approved by him.
 
Recognising the finiteness and incompleteness of any label, or any self-attained sense of self, and in resolving to gain a sense of purchase of ourselves in relation to the infinity of God, keeps us open to the peculiar movement of the Holy Spirit which can disrupt the familiar and allow us to see in the strange and the new the workings of God. Our worship seeks this kind of ever occurring reorientation of the self to Christ. We disrupt our sense that we can know and control the full motivation and effects of our works in the act of confession. We disrupt the sense that we have no more good news to hear through the act of the proclamation of the Word. We disrupt the sense of ownership and obligation through the act of offering. We disrupt the sense of our self-sufficiency through coming to be fed at Christ’s table. We disrupt the sense of our limits through the act of sending. And across the week in our response to the call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God in our service to and solidarity with our neighbour we disrupt any sense of self that is not interdependent with creation and dependent on God.
 
In baptism we confess our identity is known only in Christ: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him. And so let us commit together, to the collective work of continual reorientation of who we are in relation to the heart of our faith: Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel.

Readings, 1 Timothy 6:6-19 and Luke 16:19-31
 Image, The Rich Man and Lazarus, David Wojkowicz
 
We likely know Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or at least a filmed adaptation (with or without muppets). Wealthy, miserly old Scrooge is visited by three ghosts – of Christmas past, present, and future – and told to change his ways or be forever cursed. Scrooge is confronted by the harm of his greed, the pain caused by his profit-seeking and closed heart. At first, Scrooge resists the lessons, until seeing that his own future death will be met with no tenderness or grief (but relief and giddiness) and pledges to change his ways (and in so doing seek to prevent the death of poor Tiny Tim).
 
What I’ve left out of this little summary is an important visitation that occurs before the ghosts. Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s deceased business partner, equal in his greed and miserliness, appears before Scrooge, weighed down by chains and money boxes. Marley has been cursed to wander the earth so encumbered, and warns Scrooge that the same fate awaits him should he refuse to change his ways.
 
When considering this tale next to today’s parable, Dickens seems more generous than Jesus. For if we consider the rich man to be Jacob Marely, begging Father Abraham to send Lazarus to the house of his brothers to warn them of the awaiting agony, Abraham refuses this request. No further warnings, They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them. No, father Abraham; The rich man persists, if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. But there shall be no Marley, there shall be no ghosts: If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.
 
Perhaps Jesus’ lesson is that so tightly does greed and wealth close the heart to one’s neighbour that in reality, Scrooge would be unmoved even after his Christmas visitations. Perhaps thinking of the story of Moses, Jesus reflects on the closed heart of Pharoah, whose heart remains shut even to the most remarkable of signs; unable to release the slaves even when it would prevent him from agony.
 
Indeed, it appears that the rich man’s heart remains closed to his neighbour even in agony. For while he demonstrates concern for his brothers, this doesn’t mean much (as Jesus says elsewhere, anyone can do that). For the rich man, in the language of 1 Timothy, has wandered so far away from the faith, has, in his desire for wealth, become so trapped by senseless and harmful desires, that even in agony, even looking up to the unreachable heavens, his selfishness is untamed. For both of his pleas to Father Abraham are accompanied by demands of Lazarus – and not only demands, but indirect demands – he never addresses Lazarus directly. He speaks to Abraham, but about Lazarus, a sign that in death, as in life, the fullness of Lazarus life goes unrecognised. The chasm that exists between the rich man and Lazarus goes back a long way.
 
Indeed, as the writer of 1 Timothy makes clear, the chasm created by the love of money estranges us in three directions. It creates a chasm between the individual and their neighbour, between the individual and God, and between the individual and their own life. Those who want to be rich, declares the writer of 1 Timothy, fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.
 
As we heard Jesus say last week, we cannot serve God and money, because the love of money opens a chasm between us and God; it makes God’s wisdom and commandments a thing to be despised. This chasm in turn opens another between us and our neighbour. And in becoming estranged from God and neighbour, a further chasm will eventually open within ourselves. Our desires, our self-understanding become gnarled, twisted, and perverted around the insatiable want for riches, plunging us into ruin. For this is what has befallen the rich man of the parable: in failing to attend to the teachings of Moses and the prophets, he has become estranged from God. Failing to see Lazarus (in life and death) as a full human deserving of dignity and care, he has become estranged from his neighbour. And unable to understand his life in relation to God and neighbour, to see the chasms which had opened around him, he has become estranged from himself.
 
In contrast to this this life of estrangement and chasms, is what the reading in 1 Timothy describes as the life that truly is life. One of my absolute favourite phrases in Scripture. This phrase concludes the instructions to those rich in this life, who are told not to trust wealth, but be rich in good works, generous, sharing what they have – in such they make a good foundation for the future so that they may take hold of the life that really is life.
 
For the life that truly is life is one lived like the swallow finding a home at the altar of God. It is a life in harmonious relations with God, neighbour, and self.
 
It is a life lived in communion with God, marked by a grace-filled the enjoyment of God, the love of God’s wisdom, and an earnest attempt to live God’s way. It is a life lived in openness to our neighbour, an openness marked by a willingness to give and receive, to learn and to grow, to serve and be served in pursuit of flourishing, justice, and dignity. And it is a life lived in a rightly ordered understanding of the self – where the self is not defined by what we can claim ownership of, by numbers and acquisition, by grind and reach, but the self defined through relationships (dependence on God and interdependence with creation). This is what marks the life that truly is life, the life we learn from Moses, the Prophets, and the one who rose from the dead – the blessed and only sovereign. For after all, Jesus was more generous than Dickens, becoming himself the one risen from the dead not only to proclaim both the call to change our ways but also to make this possible through the news of his completed work, the sending of the Spirit, and the gift of the Church.
​
The challenge for us then, as a people, is not to require ghosts of Christmas past, present, or future, not to need someone sent back from the dead with ill-tidings and skeletal warnings, to alert us to the widening of chasms separating us from God, neighbour, and self. Because instead of ghosts sent on the precipice of disaster, we have the completed work of Christ, the gifts of the Spirit, and the daily fellowship of the saints. We have one another to encourage, correct, and walk with down the path Jesus has opened. We, who are sent by Christ to the world, are also bound by Christ to one another. In the counsel of the Spirit, we take up the responsibility of siblings to remind each other to remain open to the words of Scripture and the presence of our neighbour. We have each other (as well as the tireless example of Saints long passed) to build bridges over chasms and to seek together, day by day in the land of the living, the life that truly is life. The life which knows a day in the house of the Lord is better than a thousand elsewhere. Like the mother of Jesus and the beloved disciple standing at the foot of the cross, we have been given by Jesus to one another to be and become a people who assist one another to pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. [Who] Fight the good fight of the faith; [and] take hold of the eternal life. The life that truly is life.

Readings, Luke 16:1-13
Image, Marinus van Reymerswaele, Parable of the shrewd manager (1490)
 
One of the great things about this parable, before even get to anything specific it might be teaching, is that it reminds us that parables can be strange. That parables can trouble our attempts to smooth out their rough edges, and disrupt our desires to map them on to easy, consistent, and predictable lessons (or, we might say, disrupting our assumptions of who is who in the zoo of a parable). We are so familiar with Christ’s parables – or at least the greatest hits like the lost sheep and coin we heard last week, that we can sometimes lose the ability to be surprised by them. But this parable is surprising.
 
To recap it… As was common practice, large landowners didn’t tend to spend a lot of time on their property and would thus employ a manager to handle the logistics and finances. In this instance, the manager has been squandering the property and stands to be fired. The manager doesn’t dispute the charge, but knows there aren’t other jobs he’d be able or willing to do. So he devises a plan, he will not try and win back the esteem of the rich landowner, he will try to win the esteem of tenants in the landowner’s debt. He calls together those who own money and has them write down their debts, take the bill of 100 and make it 50, take the bill of 100 and make it 80. The plan being that in reducing the debt, the people will be grateful and offer him lodgings when he is fired. Now the practice of reducing the debt in order to get it paid was common then as it is now, it is better to have some money and keep the people around than evict, get nothing and lose future income as well. Which means the landowner commended the manager’s shrewd action (though, we notice, does not decide to keep him on).
 
Slowing it down only amplifies the feeling that this is a strange story for Jesus to tell. Who are we meant to identify with, whose actions exemplify the kingdom, who stands in for God?
 
All this gets more complicated when Jesus offers this commentary: the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. Now we have more questions, why is it that the children of the light are less shrewd? Is this a bad thing? Using dishonest wealth to make friends seems strange – and what are we classifying as dishonest wealth? And then the reason we are told to make friends is odd: that they may welcome us into eternal homes… what are eternal homes, and how are these people able to offer such welcome?
 
Jesus continues: ‘Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much. Ok, that’s not too bad, seems like a straightforward moral axiom – having lots or little doesn’t really change the character of our relation to money. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? Does it not feel strange that faithfulness with dishonest wealth is the path to being trusted with true riches? It seems a peculiar barometer for our capacity to handle something eternal – could all earthly wealth be dishonest?  And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own? No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.’ We get to this last pronouncement and almost breathe a sigh of relief – not because this command isn’t difficult or terrifying, but at least it feels adamantly straightforward.
 
So what is going on? What are we to make of all of this?
 
We’re in a section of Luke’s gospel where Jesus is speaking a lot about money, wealth, and the strange inversions of the kingdom of God. He has already told his disciples they must give up all their possessions if they are to follow him. He has told parables of the wedding banquet, of lost sheep and coins, and a son who squandered the wealth of his father’s inheritance only to be thrown a lavish party. And Jesus will go on to tell the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and the agony of flames awaiting those who refuse to use their wealth to ease the sufferings of the poor. This strange parable takes its place in this nexus of stories, and as such we might begin to try and parse some lessons for Christian living.
 
We might begin by comparing the manager to the rich man of another parable, who realising that his storehouses were simply too small to house all his wealth, tore them down and built larger ones only for his life to be demanded from him that night. Wealth cannot be taken with you – and like the rich man who ignores Lazarus at his gates – it can end up creating a chasm between us and our neighbour, between us and God. The manager, on the other hand, recognises that all that he has can (and will) be gone. So he uses what he has while he has time. He doesn’t not squirrel and store, but uses his authority to ease the debt of those around him and in so doing make friends and neighbours who will welcome him in his hour of need. The manager, unlike so many other figures in the surrounding parables, is commended for using what he has (in the knowledge that he will not always have it) to relieve burdens, build trust, make neighbours, and receive welcome. What might it mean for us, who wish to be trusted with eternal riches, to do the same?
 
Expanding this point, if we can demonstrate faithfulness in our shrewd use dishonest wealth to make friends and receive welcome, then we come show we can be trusted with more important things. For in using dishonest wealth to ease the burdens of the poor, to create community and neighbourliness, to receive the welcome of those around us, we demonstrate that we do not serve money. We demonstrate our understanding of the finiteness of money, which even the finest and largest storehouses cannot secure from the forces of death. We cannot, Jesus remarks, serve God and wealth, but we can use wealth to serve God by using it to serve others.
 
But using wealth to serve God requires us to recognise a few things. The first is that there is something of a dishonest character to wealth – that is to say the kind of exorbitant wealth acquired by the landowner in this parable cannot really come to be without systems of inequality, injustice, and exploitation. Little wonder then does Jesus say that to devote oneself to wealth, to love wealth, is to despise God, for God is a God of justice, liberation, and dignity. And so if we find ourselves with access to dishonest wealth, do not serve it, but shrewdly use it to make friends (now, importantly, from the parable, the kind of making friends we are talking about are the poor, who the manager seeks to release from debt – in so doing he keeps with the mission of Jesus himself; as announced in Luke 4). There is something of Jesus’ instruction to his disciples that we are to be innocent as doves and wise as serpents – we must not make ourselves ignorant to either the character of wealth, nor the way it can be used to serve and bless others. And finally, the manager makes an important connection – one which is all too rare in many an age – despite having a position of some authority and importance, he is much closer to the tenants working the land the owner of the land, much closer to those in debt than to the one they are in debt to. The manager recognises this, and in so doing recognises that his future wellbeing is found in friendships and trust with the debtors rather than the landowner, the many rather than the one. This is an important lesson for us both on a material reality (as our work of justice, equality, and mercy will be bolstered by a recognition that by and large we are closer to our unhoused neighbour, or our neighbour who is a climate refugee, than the increasingly small top % whose storehouses contain the vast majority of worldly wealth) and it is also important as a spiritual reality (as we are all those who are taught by Christ to pray for the forgiveness of our debts, as we pray to be those who forgive our debtors – we are all those who rely on the largess of Christ’s grace to welcome us into the eternal household of God).
 
But even as we glean these possibilities for Christian living, we come back to the beginning and let the parable stay strange. In its strangeness we are reminded again, that the story and movement into which we are called is something of a strange one. For we seek, against the wisdom of the world, to devote ourselves to God, revealed most dramatically in the folly of the cross of Christ, as the loving master of our lives.

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, Psalm 71 and Luke 13:10-17
Image,  Thomas Schaidhauf, Christ Heals the Crooked Woman (c. 1780-1800)
 
Some months ago, members of the congregation shared about songs or hymns which shape and sustain their faith, songs from which they draw comfort, meaning, and hope. I’m sure many of us have these kinds of songs, or if not songs then passages of scripture, which are part of the story, part of the pastiche which leads us here to worship. That is to say, that we have, deep in our heart, songs and stories which have taught us something about God, and having come to believe this thing about God, we come to this place where we worship and learn about God together. And this, I contend, is no different for the woman who comes to the Synagogue in today’s gospel reading, who I want to suggest, with no evidence other than to know it is possible, is led to the synagogue because of Psalm 71. We heard the psalm read, but it might be good to also hear it sung. (Hymn 40 The Lord is near to all who call)
 
Let us imagine this woman on her way to the Synagogue, likely not an easy task – neither physically, as she has been suffering from this crippling spirit for eighteen years, nor perhaps spiritually or emotionally. And yet she makes her way to the synagogue with these words of the psalm on her lips:
For you, O Lord, are my hope,
   my trust, O Lord, from my youth.
Upon you I have leaned from my birth      
We can believe she would know something about leaning on another to rest, to steady, to persist. It would perhaps serve as a fecund image for her relationship with God, her reliance on God’s grace and promise. In hope and trust she moves toward the household of God.
 
But as she does, she starts, perhaps to get some of the familiar pangs of anxiety, and gives them voice in these verses:
I have been like a portent to many,
   but you are my strong refuge.
We know that at times people suffering from prolonged maladies, ailments, or disabilities could be seen as portents; signs of sinfulness, wickedness, curses, or calamity. Perhaps this had been suggested to her in the past as a reason for her prolonged suffering. Perhaps she has been made to feel less than holy, less than welcome. It might not have always been this way, but perhaps, over time, she came to experience derision or disregard. And perhaps when the place became less of a refuge, the feeling of God as refuge took on all the more resonance. Or perhaps even if she experienced nothing but understanding and compassion from her community, she may nonetheless suffered under the lowering of expectations, of the quiet dismissal of her capacity that can afflict many in our communities who are seen, either because of disability or age, as unexpected to contribute. And in the face of the good - though patronising – will of others, she filled her heart and mouth with the plea:
Do not cast me off in the time of old age;
   do not forsake me when my strength is spent.
 
And at this point she appears in the synagogue and in our story, and at this moment, and the yearning of the psalm infuses once more with her own,
O God, do not be far from me;
   O my God, make haste to help me!
Little does she know just how near God is to her this day, little does she know that help is here. Emmanuel, God with us, Jesus, the Word made flesh, is teaching in this very synagogue this very day. And he sees her. Quite unable to stand up, but nonetheless here, and Jesus sees her and calls over to her. This whole time the words of God swim in her mind and cascade off her lips, and now the word of God calls back, Woman, you are set free from your ailment. The God of her refuge and hope, who she pleaded to be near to her, is here with her. Laying his hands upon her, she immediately stood up straight and began praising God, perhaps, drawing once more on the words of this psalm:
My lips will shout for joy
   when I sing praises to you;
   my soul also, which you have rescued.
All day long my tongue will talk of your righteous help
 
And yet, in the midst of this joy, in the wake of this wonder, in the afterglow of this glory, the leader of the synagogue, [was] indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath. Talk about letting the air out of the balloon. There’s an interesting little detail here, the leader of the synagogue is noted to have kept saying to the crowd his complaint. Kept saying, paints the picture of a kind of glum persistence, perpetually interrupting what is undoubtedly a moment of revelry. We might imagine him going from group to group trying out his little line, or looking for quieter moments to interject, getting louder and louder, incessant in his insistence that this blessing is a crisis.
 
I wonder what, in this moment of praise and joy, the woman feels as she hears this persistent complaint. Well (perhaps surprising no one at this point) there’s something in the psalm which might have come to her mind:
Let my accusers be put to shame and consumed;
   let those who seek to hurt me
   be covered with scorn and disgrace.
It turns out this is the very thing that happens. For following Jesus’ response to the leader of the Synagogue, Luke reports, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing. Rejoicing, perhaps following the prompting of the woman, with the words of the psalm:
My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,
   of your deeds of salvation all day long,
   though their number is past my knowledge.
I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God,
   I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.
 
As I said at the beginning, I have no evidence for the significance of this psalm to this woman other than to know it is possible. But if not this psalm it could well be another, or perhaps some word of the prophets, or story from scripture where God delivered people from suffering. But the point, in the end, is not simply to infuse this story with backstory, not simply to connect petition with psychology. Rather it is to commend the sustaining strength that can come from weaving into our life the words of Scripture. The hope we can find in tucking our life into the passages of God’s word. The meaning we can make when we can bring to mind God’s promises or the prayers of God’s people, in our own moments of need. The Basis of Union, our movement’s founding document, “lays upon its members the serious duty of reading the Scriptures” because in the scriptures we, like the woman coming to the synagogue, find in its pages the songs, prayers, stories, and promises of God which can help lead us to this place, to this people, where we might once more hear the call of Christ which raises us up, and sparks great rejoicing for all the wonderful things Christ is doing.  

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, Amos 8:1-12 and Psalm 52
Image, Vincent van Gogh, “Olive Grove,” July 1889​

There’s an old axiom that a preacher should preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Hardly an iron, or even golden, rule, but there are times, even when one does not set out to do so, that the news and the assigned reading happen to touch. This week one particular story overlapped so much with our reading from Amos that the Venn diagram is practically a circle. We’ll get to the story soon, let’s begin with Amos.
 
Last week, Amos was told to pack up and leave by the powers that be, this week we see what he has to say in response: The Lord said to me, ‘The end has come upon my people Israel.’ Hardly likely to reverse the prevailing antagonism being directed toward him.
 
Readings like these are part of a slew of texts which stress the sinfulness of economic exploitation and injustice. The word of the Lord given to Amos rails against those who trample the poor and treat the Sabbath and holy festivals as inconveniences delaying their profiteering off their neighbour. When, they ask, can we go back to practicing deceit with false balances, buying the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals and selling the sweepings of the wheat. The exploitative nature of these practices is evident – placing a thumb on the scale to increase price and profit, trapping the poor and vulnerable in cycles of debt, issuing dangerous loans to those without basic necessities, selling that which God’s law stipulates is meant to be left for the vulnerable. The Lord promises that these deeds shall not be forgotten, and God’s wrath shall be swift and severe: I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation.
 
Today’s psalm also looks forward to a great upturning where those who performed mischief against the godly, trusted in abundant riches, and sought refuge in wealth will be broken down for ever, snatched from their tent, and uprooted from the land of the living.
 
The vehemence of these condemnations is due to the fact that these violations of the poor, this exploitation of the needy, this rank profiteering is a gross abnegation of what it means to be the people of God. God’s people are set apart to serve as an example to the nations, a witness to the nature of God, a testament to the possibility and beauty of another way to be in the world. From the beginning, when Israel is shepherded safely across the Nile, they are called to be different to the empire which had enslaved and exploited them. As the fourth commandment declares in instituting the Sabbath, Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day. The Sabbath is placed in contrast with exploitative earthly economics which work people, animals, and land without rest. It is the same with the laws of Jubilee, which decree that every seventh year the land must be allowed to rest, that land sold because of economic trouble, should be returned to those who sold it, and that those who had to sell themselves into slavery are set free. In this way the laws of Sabbath and Jubilee, like the broader laws around the care of orphans, widows, and foreigners, are aimed to stress that economic exploitation and injustice which cause perpetual inequality and indenture are anathema to the Lord. In contrast, the Lord requires justice, mercy, and kindness, desiring a people determined not to let struggle and bad luck entrench generational divides of haves and have nots, free and unfree, rich and poor. In short, a people who do not seek refuge in money, but trust in the steadfast love of God. It is the dire gap between the people as they should be and as they have been that provokes the judgment of God delivered by the prophet Amos.
 
Now to the promised stories. Which are also a situation where in the realm of economic justice the has comes up despairingly short of the should. SBS News reported on a recent study of nearly 3000 workers under the age of 30. The study found one-third recorded been underpaid by their employers (some are being paid $10 less than the minimum wage), 1/3rd were found to have not been paid their compulsory super and the same number had been banned from taking entitled breaks. As alarming as this sounds, the researchers are confident that these numbers underreport the issue, as many, many more simply do not know or understand that they are being exploited or underpaid.
 
Another story reported the expansion of the AfterPay app and the intention to make it as widely available as card payments. Debt support groups have expressed alarm and concern, that such ease (especially when used to purchase every day, basic necessities) dramatically increases the risk of already vulnerable people getting trapped in debt spirals.
 
Another story recorded on once more that not only is the current gap between rich and poor the widest in history, but the gap between rich and “comfortable” is so ludicrously large we cannot even fathom the maths required to comprehend it. For instance, let’s say tomorrow when you awoke, I gave you $150million. Pretty sweet deal and likely enough to get everything you ever wanted or needed. And then the next day you wake up and I give you $150m again, okay, still sweet, now you can likely get everything all your loved ones ever wanted or needed. Ok, the next day, 150m again, look now you can buy a sports car and a house for everyone working at your favourite ten cafes. Another day, another 150m, now you can give handsomely to all the charities that mean a lot to you and become an esteemed patron of the arts. Another day… now don’t tire on me yet, we’re not even out of the first week! Imagine this goes on and on, every morning for a year. Do you know what you have at the end of this year, after receiving 150m a day for 365 days, what your refuge of wealth will have amounted to? ¼ of the net worth of the world’s richest man.
 
So perhaps it’s better to focus back on that SBS article: the little infringements, the small thefts of wages, which are hardly insignificant in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. But one of the troubles we face when we consider our response is that, in contrast to Amos, we are not speaking to or about the people of God. That is to say, we cannot presume to say, hey this is wrong because our God loves justice. We cannot presume to say, if we do not fix our ways, the songs of the temple shall become wailing. Because that might have meant something to Amos’ audience (though perhaps not enough) but it means little to less now.
 
It is interesting then, to consider exactly what God says shall befall Israel for its wanton disregard of the commands for economic fairness and integrity: The time is surely coming, says the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. This is the cataclysm that is coming, this will be the result of all that false piety. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.
 
Could this have befallen our own day? Could such inequality, injustice, and rank ignoring of systemic jubilee, be the result of a famine of hearing the word of God? Could it be that so few who see the state of the world are moved to act is because the words of prophet and psalmist have fallen on closed ears? That these stories can be frowned upon without the fear of God, could this be in part the result of a famine of hearing the words of the Lord?
 
If this could be the case then what is needed is what the psalmist describes: people rooted like a green olive tree in the house of God; ready to laugh at the evildoer and trust in the steadfast love of God. That is to say, what is needed are those who live not on bread alone but every word that proceeds from the mouth of our Lord. Those able to see the mockery of God in the tipping of scales, the stealing of wages, and the building up of storehouses so monumental they make the tower of Babel seem a miniature made for model train set. Perhaps one way through is for people rooted in God’s word and love to speak, like Amos, the word of righteous judgment against the sins of exploitation and inequity.
 
But importantly, this people, being rooted in God’s word and God’s love, fed on scripture and song, must offer more than just critique. The point of a people of God is to be an alternative, to embody possibility. The people of God are set apart to witness, to be a testament to what is possible when rooted in God’s house, God’s word, God’s love. To show what can happen when we commit to living the way of justice, mercy, and kindness, where our way of relating to people, creation, and wealth is not one of competition, acquisition, and surplus, but is grounded on rest, peace, wholeness, community, and abundance of life.
 
The call placed upon us as the church, as a people set apart, is to glorify God and serve the world by being a living example of what can be possible when rest, mutuality, jubilee, justice, and neighbourliness, shape the ordering of our days together. What we owe to the world is a commitment to this vision, possibility, and calling. And we sustain this commitment by being rooted in the house of God so we shall never hunger or thirst for God’s word. It won’t solve everything, and we can’t do it alone, but the wider results of such witness are almost secondary. Because first and foremost such a commitment is one which keeps us from being uprooted by the winds of worldly allure, by grounding us in the house of God where in the presence of the faithful we proclaim the Holy Name, for it is good.  

Readings, Amos 7:7-17 and Luke 10:25-37
Image, Emma Amos, Untitled (1962)
 
Let’s ask one of those classic questions we ask when reading the Bible: where, or who, do you think you are in the story? There are seven people: the teacher of the law, Jesus, the injured man, his attackers, priest, Levite, and Samaritan (and perhaps a donkey if you're so inclined). To whom do you relate?
 
In many ways we have been taught to place ourselves in the role of the Samaritan – or at least to see our role as aspiring to be like the Samaritan. An understandable tendency since, Jesus ends the parable with the command: go and do likewise. At the heart of discipleship is the love of neighbour, as so, we as disciples, are called to be like the Samaritan: hearts welling with compassion, devoting our time and material goods to alleviate the suffering of others even if they are very different to ourselves and have no way of repaying our kindness.
 
This is a good goal to fix before us. However, we can run into trouble if we fix ourself in that role, if we, like the classic Actor-Director of the local theatre company, continue to cast ourselves as the heroic lead and never the one in need of help (let alone as a villain).
 
Because who we relate to in the story is not fixed. At different points in our life, we might relate to most, if not all, of these players. Like the man attacked, we have probably all been someone who needed a neighbour, needed care and support in a difficult time and perhaps found it performed by an unexpected person. Likely, we have all had a moment like the teacher of the law where we have wondered how far our responsibility for care extends, who exactly we need to prioritise as an object of our love. Perhaps you have found yourself in the position of Jesus, helping to teach someone the importance of treating others as we’d like to be treated, challenging parochial approaches to charity and justice. If we are honest, I’m sure we can all name times where, like the Levite or the Priest, we have averted our eyes, quickened our step, or rationalised our decision to not stop and help. And if we are really honest, we may look back at moments in our lives where we have knowingly caused harm, where we have taken unjustly, where we have been cruel.
 
And if it can be true for us that we move between the various stars in the constellation of this story, then it can be true for everyone. That is to say, the story is a moving map of the world, as who among us does not, at some time, need a neighbour, be a neighbour, ignore a neighbour, create a problem for a neighbour, or discuss the ethics of neighbourliness. And the reason I am emphasising that it is not only us who move across the spectrum of roles in this story, is because it is the very act of fixing people in a role, in associating a person or community with a single role, while keeping ourselves centred as the Samaritan, that makes the very command of the story, go and do likewise, impossible.
 
A couple of weeks ago, Sureka Gorringe was here from UnitingWorld. She made the observation that mission and Christian aid has often been imagined in this kind of fixed relation. We are the Samaritan who show up to help our overseas neighbour who is in need. We don’t hear from them; we just decide on the path of care and move on. And while much of this was performed with compassion, and much of this addressed urgent needs, it does not, Sureka taught us, reflect the proper nature of the church. It ignores that the image of the body is one of interdependence – where there are no lesser members who can be ignored or cut off. Indeed, the church is made the body of Christ in the mutual giving and receiving of the Spirit’s gifts – no one is only given gifts to give, we are also to receive from one another. Too rarely, Sureka noted, has the Western church seen itself as the one requiring compassion and care from those typically cast as disadvantaged or needy.
 
Naomi Wolfe, a trawloolway woman, historian and theologian has made a similar point when considering her experience with this story in churches. She’s written* about the perpetual casting of Indigenous people as the voiceless victim in need of a good white neighbour. But this ignores the wisdom, testimony, and witness of Indigenous siblings in Christ – just as it ignores that in matters of justice in this land, the mainline church has played, at varied points, the role of bandit, Levite, Priest, and teacher of the law wondering who really counts as neighbour.
 
Assuming the fixity of our role as Samaritan, as the benevolent extender of compassion and justice, of the neighbour with rather than without, also risks closing ourselves off to the word of truth which brings repentance and freedom. Amos goes to the heart of his nation with the word of God’s judgment. But the Priest of Bethel says to the King of Israel:
Amos has conspired against you in the very centre of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words.
 
The word of God, given to the prophet, is unseemly to the priest and the king. It is not a prophetic warning but conspiratorial threat, it is not righteous judgment but words which taint the land and tarnish the nation. The prophet’s words are deemed to spit on the image of the people as the people of God, on the status of the city as sanctuary of the king, the temple as temple of the kingdom. So fixed is the view of the priest, king, and nation that they are the centre of God’s story, the agents of God’s agenda, that the words of the prophet, the words of truth, the words of warning, can only be received as a threat and their teller must be expunged: O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there.
 
We might hear echoes of these words in many times and places, where those who raise a word of critique against their society or nation are met with the rebuff, well if you don’t like it, leave. We might hear echoes of these words across the eons of the church where the call to reform has led to excommunication and persecution. We might hear echoes in these words in families and communities who claim calls to redress the past as conspiracies against the foundations of the house. We might hear echoes in the defensiveness of friends and loved ones who were unable to bear warnings about the perils of their chosen path.
 
And time and again these rejections, rebuffs, silencing, and accusations are the result of a fixed conception of the self (or the institution, community, nation) as the good guy. As one whose only role is Samaritan (or aspiring Samaritan). But the only one who is ever only in that role, the only one without need, the only one without error, the only one possessing only gifts to bestow is God. The church is foremost the church in repentance, in a posture of humility and confession, understanding that we have not always got it right, that we do need correction, that we do need, perpetually, to turn once more to follow Christ.
 
Because to follow Jesus’ command to go and do likewise, to inherit eternal life, to love our neighbour as ourself requires us to be more than just the Samaritan, it asks more of us than solely compassion and charity. To love our neighbour, to be part of the kingdom we need to allow ourselves to be loved, allow ourselves to receive help, allow ourselves to be shaped through relationship.
 
To repent and seek the kingdom means we have to be open to the truth, open to the word of the prophets, open to the judgment of God, and to do this we have to be able to consider the various roles we embody, and the various roles our church has played. We need to recognise the times we have been a neighbour, but also when we have needed, ignored, or mistreated a neighbour. We must resist the lure to justify ourselves, to consider our obligation to the law fulfilled and recognise that we – like everyone else – are never one thing to each other, even though we are always, and perpetually one thing before God: one who has been rescued by God from the power of sin and transferred into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
 
When we know ourselves first as the one rescued and in perpetual need of rescuing, we are freed to see the fluidity of our movement across the spectrum of this story, to receive the prophetic words of repent and repair, and to know that even if we have not always been a neighbour, the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit make it possible for us to change our role in the story.  

--
* Naomi Wolfe, "Reading the Bible in Australia: A Place for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples," in Reading the Bible in Australia, Edited by Deborah R. Storie, Barbara Deutschmann and Michelle Eastwood (Wipf & Stock, 2024), pp. 30-31.

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.