We are all Samaritans (A sermon on Luke 10:25-37)

Posted on July 22, 2019 by Father Dave

One of the last things we did during our recent trip to Damascus was to meet with Dr Nabil Toumeh – a member of the Syrian Parliament and advisor to the International Human Rights Commission.

Dr Toumeh’s Ph.D studies must have been in the area of the sociology of religion as he certainly knew a lot about the subject, and at one stage produced a couple of enormous charts that visually graphed the history of religions across the globe.

Our group was impressed with Dr Toumeh’s learning and with these charts that compared Christianity and Islam and a variety of other religions, tracking their global influence over the centuries. If we’d been thinking that our version of religion was the only show in town, these charts would have given us a sobering corrective.

I’m not sure exactly what response Dr Toumeh expected from us. My response was that these charts covered only one dimension of religion – namely, the tribal side. They said nothing about the evolution of religious belief, and they could, of course, say nothing about the spiritual integrity of religious believers.

I shared a little with Dr Toumeh the basic thesis of my soon-to-be-published book in which I suggest that every religion has two sides to it – a tribal/identity side and a belief side – and that while it is important for believers to know their tribe, it’s also the tribal side of religion that generates prejudice and violence, and fuels wars!

“Religion is the opiate of the masses”, Karl Marx famously said, but it’s not religious beliefs as such that start wars. It’s the belief that my religious tribe is superior to your religious tribe and, indeed, that your religious tribe are a bunch of heretics!

Just then a lawyer stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 26He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” 27He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” 28And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.” 29But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?” So Jesus told him a joke …

A Jewish guy and a Chinese guy walk into a bar …

OK, it wasn’t that one, and I’m not going to tell you that joke today as you probably remember it from the last time I peached on this passage. If you missed it, look up the last sermon on www.fatherdave.com.au. Yes, it is, predictably, a joke that plays off racial stereotypes, and even if you’re not familiar with that particular joke, you are undoubtedly familiar with the genre – Irish jokes, Polish jokes, Australian jokes …

Yes, I do remember comedian Dave Allen telling an Australian joke. He said he’d been warned before how came here that Australians were difficult people, yet he found them the be the most generous and hospitable people he’d ever met. He added, “it was only the white bastards I couldn’t get on with”.

Telling racial jokes like these are generally another means through which we reinforce tribal identity (racial tribal identity in this case) and such jokes always require that the members of the group we are making fun of be all the same.

I read a fascinating book about this phenomenon recently – a book called “Tribes” by Seth Godin – which introduced me to the term ‘outgroup homogeneity’.

‘Outgroup homogeneity’ means that when it comes to the ‘other’ group (whatever ‘other’ that might be – other religion, other race, etc.) they are basically all the same.

I remember one study quoted in the book looked at the perception university students had of elderly people in a retirement village, compared to the view these people had of themselves.

According to the book, the retired people saw their community has being made up of a rich variety of people from various backgrounds, cultures, religious groups and political persuasions. The university students saw them as being all the same – frail and fearful, overly religious and politically conservative.

When the study looked at what the perception of the university students was, the stereotypes turned out to be just as strong in reverse. While the students saw themselves as a diverse and multi-faceted community, the elderly group saw them all as being loud and licentious and politically liberal.

The term is ‘outgroup homogeneity’. Our group is rich and diverse. The ‘other’ group are all the same, like those conservative evangelical churches that are all made up of people who hate LGBTI people and oppress women – all of them!

Of course, Jesus’ joke isn’t about conservative Evangelicals any more than it is about the Irish. It’s about Samaritans, and we all know what Samaritans were like. They’re all the same – lazy, dishonest, ignorant, and, religiously speaking, heretical!

“A [Jewish] man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. 31Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33But a Samaritan while traveling came near him; and when he saw him, he was moved with pity.” (Luke10:30-33)

“As if!” I hear you say! ‘As if a Samaritan would stop for a wounded Jew out of pity? If a Samaritan stops near the prostrate body of a Jew, it’s to check if he has money in his pockets! We know what these people are like, and they’re all the same!’

I guess that’s why Jesus goes on to fill in the details of His story, lest we fill them in with our imagination.

“[The Samaritan] went to [the injured Jew] and bandaged his wounds, having poured oil and wine on them. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him.35The next day he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said, ‘Take care of him; and when I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.’” (Luke 10:34-35)

This is an offensive story because we all know that a Samaritan wouldn’t do that. We know what they are like. They aren’t the sort of persons who care about us.

We’ve heard of plenty of stories like this, of course – true stories – but they generally have the Samaritans playing the role of the robbers who beat up on the defenceless Jew and not the other way around. Of course, this is just a story!

That’s the weakness of Jesus’ joke, of course, or at least it seems to be. It’s a story about a Samaritan who doesn’t perform in accordance with the stereotype we constructed for him. Even so, it’s just a story and we’ve got no reason to believe that it was a true story. Do Samaritans ever really behave like that? None that I know of!

If we feel tempted to think that way, it shows that we didn’t actually get the joke, which is not really a joke about Samaritans but it’s one where the joke is on us!

It easy to miss the punchline in this joke as it actually comes quite early in the story!

“Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side.” (Luke 10:31-32)

I know we covered that part of the story already, but were you offended by it?

I remember, as a youth, being brought up in the church and listening to sermons on this passage where the preacher would often speculate at this point of the story as to why the good guys – the priest and the Levite – would pass by on the other side.

After all, priests and Levites are a part of our tribe. They are one of us (or two of us) and they are exactly the persons we would expect to stop and help one of us if one of us where in trouble. And so preachers speculate:

  • Perhaps the priest was late for his synagogue service?
  • Perhaps they were worried that the man was dead, meaning that they would be rendered ritually unclean if they touched the dead man’s body?
  • Perhaps they were concerned that the robbers who assaulted the man were lying in wait for another victim? It was my friend Stephen Sizer (an Anglican priest in London) who pointed out to me that Jesus actually makes it quite clear why these two avoid the injured man. Indeed, it’s stated quite explicitly in the opening words of the joke. “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead.” The robbers left the man naked and half-dead (in other words, unconscious), meaning that the priest and Levite couldn’t see his clothing nor hear his accent. They therefore had no way of knowing whether he was one of us or one of them! This is how we distinguish between us and them. We discriminate on the basis of the way we dress and the way we speak. When someone says “G’day mate!”, he’s one of us! When someone speaks with a ‘funny’ accent, she’s one of them! When you see someone wearing a hijab, she’s one of them, and when you see a guy with a big, square beard, you know he’s one of them – a Muslim (or maybe a hipster). I do have a problem with my stereotypes in that area. How many times have I been about to say ‘Salam Aleykum’ to someone with a great big beard when I’ve noticed that they’re drinking beer … out of a jar!

Even so, this is the way, and it’s generally the only way, that we can tell whether somebody is one of us or one of them – by looking at the way they dress and by listening to the way they speak.

In Jesus’ joke, in the case of the injured man, the priest and the Levite don’t stop because the man was naked and unconscious. They couldn’t tell whether he was one of us or one of them, and the bottom line is, if he is not one of us then he is not our responsibility! The shocking thing about the Samaritan in this story then is not simply that he is an impossibly nice guy who doesn’t fit his racial stereotype. It’s rather that he himself is one who doesn’t pay attention to these stereotypes! He just doesn’t play that game.

The Samaritan doesn’t stop feeling responsible for someone just because they belong to the other team. He doesn’t care whether the injured guy is one of his own! He doesn’t care whether he’s a Jew or an Arab, and obviously Jesus doesn’t care either! Perhaps you thought that the “no Jew, no Greek, no slave, no free” thinking started with St Paul. No! It all starts here, in the jokes of Jesus!

I know some of you are disappointed that I’m not telling you the one about the Jewish and the Chinese guy in the bar, so let me offer you a different joke.

There’s a guy about to throw himself off a bridge and a woman sees him and rushes over to him, saying “don’t do it. You have so much to live for!”

The guy on the edge of the bridge says, “like what?” and she says, “well, are you a religious person?” and he says “yes” and she says “Great! So am I”

She says, “are you a Christian or a Muslim or something else?” He says, “Well … I’m Anglican”, and she says “Hey! That’s great! So am I”

She says, “are you a high Anglo-Catholic or from the low end of Anglicanism?” and he says, “I’m a low-church evangelical” and she says “Wow! I am too!”

She says, “Are you from the liberal, inclusive end of evangelical Anglicanism or from the more conservative end?” He says, “I guess you’d call me a conservative”.

She rushes over and pushes him off the bridge, yelling “die, heretic, die!”

I told that joke to Dr Toumeh in Damascus too. I couldn’t tell whether he liked the joke, nor whether he agreed with my thoughts on the dangers of religious tribalism. He did offer to publish my book in Arabic though, and I took that as a good sign.

Jesus’ joke comes in response to a specific question – “who is my neighbour?” The obvious answer to that question was, ‘Your neighbour is your fellow Jew, your fellow Australian, your fellow Christian, your fellow low-church, liberal, inclusive Anglican.”

The point of the question of was to get clarity over where our responsibility to love stops. It stops with our own tribe, surely? So Jesus told him a story about a man who didn’t pay any attention to tribal boundaries and didn’t know when to stop.

‘Go and do likewise’ Jesus says, and in case you misunderstood the punchline, the challenge is not simply to go find another injured guy and put him on your donkey. The challenge is to do what the Samaritan does and to move beyond the distinction between us and them!

First preached by Father Dave, at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday July 14th, 2019.

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Trinity Sunday Sermon 2019

Posted on June 25, 2019 by Father Dave

One of the highlights of my almost thirty years at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill, was the 2015 publication of the book by John Coleman and Bob Irving – “A Church for our Times” – which did an amazing job of detailing the colourful history of our church community over the last 150 years. One of the things though that the book did not tell me was why our community was ever called ‘the church of the Holy Trinity’.

I read through the first chapter of the book again yesterday, just to make sure I didn’t miss something, and then I rang one of the authors, just to make really sure. No, there was no mention of why we are the Church of the Holy Trinity, and that’s because neither John nor Bob have a clue!

If you wander down Marrickville Road you’ll bump into St Brigid’s – the largest church in our region. There’s no great puzzle there as to why that community was named after Brigid. Brigid of Kildare was a great saint, who founded numerous monasteries. We can only hope and pray that our churches produce a few more like Brigid.

Or wander up New Canterbury Road towards Hurlstone Park and you’ll bump into the community of St Paul of the Cross. Again, we don’t have to think too hard to as to why someone would name their community after the great Saint Paul. If only our region could produce a few more Saint Paul’s. it might generate a degree of chaos and bring down the housing prices a little, but no doubt it would be a very good thing.

The more difficult question is why those good souls who had the vision to found our community decided to name us after a concept rather than a person, and not just after any concept, but after an extraordinarily obscure and divisive concept!

Perhaps that’s unfair. Perhaps I shouldn’t be referring to the Trinity as a concept. The Trinity is a person, isn’t it, or rather, it is three persons, or, at least, it is three persons so long as we don’t confound the persons nor divide the substance:

For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity; to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord; So are we forbidden by the catholic religion; to say, There are three Gods, or three Lords.

Sorry. I’m lapsing into the Athanasian creed, which hard not to do when you’re discussing the Trinity as it’s there that you’ll find the concept most fully laid out.

Appropriately, as the church of the Holy Trinity, we love that creed, though I suspect that many of us would agree with Dorothy Sayers’ summation – “the Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, the whole thing incomprehensible”.

Yes, the doctrine of the Trinity is an obscure and difficult – even incomprehensible – concept, and, as I say, it is divisive. Indeed, it has historically been the litmus test, determining who is a genuine member of the church universal and who is not. This is how we determine who are insiders and who are outsiders. Do you accept the first three creeds of the church? Do you believe in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity?

Those who answer ‘yes’ to the Trinitarian shibboleth include all Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches. Those who fall into the outer darkness by balking at doctrine include Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christadelphians and, of course, Muslims!

When I asked my friend, Sheikh Mansour, what he thought it would take to bring real unity between Christians and Muslims worldwide, he said to me “I think if we could get past this doctrine of the Trinity there would be no real barrier”.

It was a couple of years ago since we had that conversation in Tehran, but I remember it well as Mansour became quite passionate about it. He said he had Christian friends who asked him if he could explain the doctrine of the Trinity to them and he said he could not. Mansour’s point was that if neither Christians nor Muslims really understood what this doctrine was about, why were we allowing it to divide us?

Why indeed, and why, you might ask, would a person like me, who is passionately invested in trying to build bridges between Christians and Muslims be unwilling to abandon this teaching even though I admit it is incomprehensible.

To answer that we need to know the history of the doctrine of the Trinity and how it came to be formed.

It all started in the year 313, in a town called Baucalis in Alexandria, where a man named Arius had just been appointed rector of the local church.

Arius was a tall and distinguished looking man with a charismatic flair that apparently had the women of the parish doting on him and the men impressed by “his aura of intellectual superiority” (so Epiphanius).

Arius taught his flock that the Lord Jesus was like God – indeed that Jesus was ‘homoiousios’ (to use the Greek word), meaning that He was made of a similar substance to God the Father. One day though one of his parishioners made a complaint about him to the bishop (whether out of genuine conviction or out of jealousy for Arius’ popularity with the girls we don’t know) saying that Arius was denying the faith! Arius was called to account by his bishop, Alexander, who put the case into the hands of his capable Archdeacon, Athanasius.

Athanasius agreed with the parishioner – that Arius was indeed denying the Christian faith. According to the Scriptures, Athanasius said, Jesus not just godlike, but was God. Jesus was not simply ‘homoiousios’ (of similar substance to God the Father), but was ‘homoousios’ (of the same substance as the Father). And so began a debate that raged for almost a century, became the basis of three world-wide Church Councils, enduring the reigns of three emperors, and which wasn’t completely settled until well after the death of both Arius and Athanasius!

Homoousios or homoiousios, of like substance with the father or of the same substance of the father, Jesus is very similar to God or Jesus is God – what’s the difference? Most church-goers at the time probably didn’t see a lot of difference between the two positions, and most likely most church-goers today wouldn’t see a whole lot of difference either! But the fact that differences don’t appear to be great doesn’t mean that they are not significant!

My father used to say to me that if I pulled up the floorboards and looked at the electrical circuitry of our house – both correctly wired up and incorrectly wired – it would all look pretty much the same to me. Who cares whether we have it exactly right? Well … when you find yourself sitting in the dark you start to care, for being close to right and being exactly right can sometimes be highly significant!

Was the conflict between Arius and Athanasius, over whether Jesus was of like substance to the Father or of the same substance as the Father, really that significant? I think so! For one thing, the problem with Arius’ position – that Jesus is like the Father – is that it makes good sense! A human being surely cannot be God, without God ceasing to be God. Therefore, it makes sense to see it all in terms of a hierarchy. God the Father is at the top of the ladder, Jesus the Son is on the next rung down, and perhaps we place the Holy Spirit on the rung below that.

The beauty of this hierarchy too is that it can help us to make sense of other religions. God, Jesus and the Spirit occupy the top three rungs of the ladder, we might say, but there’s plenty of room for Buddha and Muhamad and any number of other godlike figures to take their proper places on the lower rungs. It all makes a great deal of sense. Athanasius’ position, on the other hand, doesn’t make much sense at all. The very concept that Jesus is God, while the Father to whom He prayed is also God, and that while they are both clearly distinct and separate persons, they are both the one God, just doesn’t work as a logical concept.

Holding the two doctrines side by side, it must be hard to envisage how Athanasius’ concept of God ever won the day. Even so, I would suggest to you, while it was Arius’ concept of God that made sense, it was Athanasius’ concept of God that was more true to the Scriptures. Indeed, I would suggest to you that what Athanasius did, in all his fumbling paradoxical language, was to preserve for us the mystery of God as revealed in the Scriptures, whereas Arius simply followed the logic of his day.

Someone says, ‘I find it hard to believe that Jesus could be God’, and our natural response to that might be to try and tell them something more about Jesus. I have a feeling though that Athanasius would have probably turned that challenge on its head! ‘What sort of God do you envisage, such that you do not think Jesus could be this God?’ For when someone says ‘I find it hard to believe that Jesus could be God’, they obviously already have a predefined concept of God, such that they cannot approximate Jesus to that concept.

If you were an educated Roman citizen of the fourth century, whose mind had been shaped by the thinking of the great Greek philosophers, you probably grew up with a concept of God as a distant ‘force’ that embodied eternal logic. You probably believed that your disembodied spirit was moving towards this God, and if this were your concept of God it would be rather hard to envisage how the man Jesus could be that God, for Jesus was certainly a man.

Or what if you started out with a different concept of God? What if your concept of God was the Hindu god Shiva – god as the eternally active cosmic birther and destroyer, the great god of the dance? You’d probably find it equally hard to see how Jesus could be that God. Or what if you start with an Islamic conception of a God – one who is so holy and transcendent that He is really entirely beyond this world? You’d probably find it impossible to equate Jesus with that god too.

Athanasius says ‘what if, instead of starting with whatever concept of God your culture has given you, we turn the whole process upside-down? What if, instead of starting with a concept of God and trying to build Jesus into it, we start with Jesus, and try to shape our understanding of God around Him.’

What if we try to be humble enough to say ‘we probably know nothing about God, except what we see and hear in Jesus’? What if we stop pretending that we were born with some innate knowledge of who or what God is, and take as our starting point ‘Jesus is God!’

The problem for all of us, I think, is that we begin with a working concept of God, passed on to us by our culture, long before we get any real understanding of Jesus. In white-Australian culture we generally inherit a version of the Greek concept of God as a distant spiritual force who inhabits another dimension of time and space – either that or a combination of that with the modern concept of God as a sort of therapeutic force that warms and inspires, but never really interacts with us too aggressively.

God in popular culture is a force that cares and strengthens but doesn’t get too involved. God is like that guy who, when your car is broken down at the side of the road, drives by and calls out ‘hey, bad luck buddy, I hope things improve’ and then drives on – empathetic but ineffective, sincere but remote. If that’s your concept of God – omniscient, omnipresent, and distant – and somebody asks you ‘could Jesus be that God?’… it just doesn’t make any real sense.

But what if we turn it on its head? What if, instead of starting with our culturally defined concept of God, we start with Jesus? What if we say, ‘I don’t know much about God, but what I do know is that He had arms and legs and lived in Palestine, that He liked parties, touched lepers, and gave healing and dignity to people who’d never known it, and that He suffered on the cross, but on the third day rose again!’

It’s starting to sound a bit like the creed, isn’t it, and not by coincidence, for that, I believe, was the basic mindset of our fathers and mothers who wrote those creeds! The doctrine of the Trinity was a historic decision of the church that we begin our thinking about God with the person of Jesus because we are never going to know more about God than what we see in Jesus.

I understand why many of my Islamic friends and feminist friends and others find this way of thinking repugnant! ‘Are you saying that God was Jewish and that God had a penis? Are you saying God went to the toilet?’ … If these questions disturb you, you’re feeling the pull of Arius’ position. For indeed, I think the proper Trinitarian response to such questions is ‘Hey! That’s not even half of it! We are saying that God bled and suffered and died in Jesus!’

How do you make sense of that? Maybe we don’t need to make sense of that. Perhaps incomprehensible is okay? Perhaps it’s trying to make sense of God that is the beginning of all heresy? Perhaps instead of trying to think our way towards a logical conception of God, we should simply grab hold of the near end of God – the human end that we see in Jesus – and begin our thinking, prayer and worship there!

This is the doctrine of the Trinity. It is not just an incomprehensible set of beliefs about God. It is a different way of approaching God. This is why we cling to this doctrine and name our communities after it, because we insist on doing our thinking about God starting at God’s human end, because we recognise that whoever or whatever God is – omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent or … whatever, God is first of all our brother in the flesh, Jesus, who was born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried, but on the third day …

First preached at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday the 16th of June.

Father Dave: Preacher, Pugilist, Activist, Father of four – www.fatherdave.org

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Love one Another (A sermon on John 13:31-35)

Posted on May 20, 2019 by Father Dave

We are in the 13th chapter of the Gospel according to St John’s this week, and I’m going to unpack our reading verse by verse as it is a difficult passage.

“When he had gone out, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him.” (John 13:31)

The person who had ‘gone out’ was Judas, and the sentence seems to suggest that Judas’ leaving somewhat brought glory to Jesus, which sounds really odd.

“If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.” (John 13:32)

I really have no idea where to begin with that statement!

“Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come.’” (John 13:33)

That statement makes sense to us as Jesus speaking about his own impending suffering and death, though at the time it made no sense at all to His disciples.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-45)

That concluding pronouncement, I suspect, is the most difficult to understand of all!

“All you need is love!” – so said the Beatles.

When I read statements like these from the lips of Jesus, I can almost hear the soundtrack of that well-known Beatles song playing in the background.

“Love is all you need. Love is all you need …”

It’s not true, of course. Love isn’t all we need – not in relationships, not in families, not in governments.

We had an election yesterday. Did you vote for the most loving candidate? Should you have?

I tried to give some thought after reading this passage as to who the most loving candidate for electoral office was. It wasn’t obvious.

It didn’t take me long to come up with the names of politicians who were definitely NOT full of love and sweetness, but it seemed less obvious to me which candidates actually were.

Did the candidate who loves us the most win? Do we care?

In truth, in as much as we might say, “all we need is love”, I don’t think we really care whether our political leaders love us, any more than we really care whether our boss at work truly loves us. Love is not all we need. A good capacity for management is probably far more important in cases like this than is love!

Love is not all we need in government or in families, and it’s not even all we need in a system of morality! This might sound counterintuitive. Is not all of morality – all our statements about what is right and what is wrong – really an extension of that basic ideal of love?

Certainly, over the generations, scores of philosophers and other great thinkers have suggested that all of our moral intuitions can be reduced to one simple exhortation – if not ‘to love’ exactly, to something very akin to that.

The British philosopher, John Stuart Mill, saw all of morality as a system of increasing pleasure for people and reducing harm. He is probably best remembered for his ‘harm principle’:

“That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

I have a feeling that if you’d asked Mill what the essence of morality was, he might not have said ‘love one another’, but might well have said ‘don’t’ harm one another’, which is pretty similar.

Likewise, the great 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, believed that morality could be reduced to a single maxim – the ‘categorical imperative’:

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”

That’s always sounded to me like a really complex way of saying ‘love your neighbour as you would love yourself”, which, of course, was Jesus’ ‘golden rule’ that many people see as being His one-line summary of the moral law, along with the first and great commandment, of course, that you have to love God:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

We are familiar with these commandments. We hear them every week in church, and they do seem to suggest that everything in the law of God comes down to love, and that the rest is just commentary.

Is that really what Jesus was saying? St Augustine thought so, and in my previous sermons on these passages, I have suggested exactly that – that there is really only one law of God – that we love – and that the rest is just application. My more recent reading though has suggested that it’s actually a lot more complicated than that, at least if Jesus really was being true to His Hebraic tradition.

The Hebraic law centres around the Ten Commandments – the ten words of God to the people of Israel – and while it seems straightforward to see commandments like “thou shalt not steal” and “thou shalt not murder” as being extensions of the commandment to love, other commandments like “honour thy father and thy mother” do not seem to be so easily reducible. Honoring your father and your mother seems to be more about respecting authority than it is about love.

I’ve been reading a very interesting book lately by moral psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, called “the Righteous Mind”, in which he outlines what he calls ‘moral foundation theory’.

I’m not suggesting that everyone should rush out to get a copy of this book. It is not an easy read and could prove difficult if you don’t have an academic background in the study of philosophical ethics (which, thankfully, I do).

The author’s key point, at any rate, is that our moral intuitions can’t be reduced to any one simple maxim such as ‘love one another’ as morality is invariably more complex than that.

Haidt suggests that there are five reasonably independent dimensions to our moral awareness, and ‘caring’ for others is just one of those dimensions. The others are:

  • Fairness (which is all about justice, rewards and punishments)
  • Loyalty (which is associated with values such as faithfulness and patriotism)
  • Authority (where you honour your father and your mother, king and country)
  • Sanctity (which involves respecting your body and potentially embracing things like chastity, temperance and cleanliness)

Forgive me if I’m now sounding more dry and esoteric than the book I mentioned.  My point is actually a simple one – that ‘all you need is love’ is both simplistic and inadequate. We don’t only need love – not if we are going to be successful in our relationships or in all of life. We actually need a lot of things – courage, self-discipline, wisdom, nurture and support and a good education, and more!

Of course, Jesus didn’t say “love is all you need”. That was ‘The Beatles’. What Jesus did say was “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”. In other words, Jesus didn’t say that love is all we need to live a full and productive life. What He said was that it was all we needed in order to show the world that we are His disciples. That might sound like much the same thing but it’s actually quite distinct.

The life of love is not a strategy for success, despite what any number of tele-evangelists might have told you. Indeed, if it’s right to consider it a strategy at all, the life of love could only be a strategy for getting yourself killed. That’s certainly how it worked for Jesus.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that friend who said to me “I’m sick of hearing people tell me about all the problems they had before they met Jesus and how He solved them all for them. My problems didn’t start till I met Jesus!”

That’s difficult to hear, I think. We don’t want to think of Jesus as the one who leads us down a path of suffering and misery. We want to think of Jesus as one who elevates us to heavenly places.

Isn’t that what religion is for after all? Isn’t good religion supposed to benefit our lives and help us live more fully and peacefully with a great sense of purpose and fulfillment? Surely, it’s not just about suffering in this world so that we can enjoy a better life in the next? Surely there’s more to it than that?

I don’t think Jesus is saying that discipleship is all about suffering any more than it is all about success. Discipleship, Jesus says, is all about love, and everything else depends on what Jesus means by love.

Jesus says His command to love is a new commandment, and that’s a surprise. Certainly, the commandment to love is as old as the Scriptures themselves, so it must be the latter part of the commandment – to love one another ‘as I have loved you’ – that makes it new.

When we hear those words, I suspect most of us immediately think of the cross and Jesus laying down his life for us. That makes sense, and indeed the same Gospel writer, John, writes in his first letter “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16). Even so, without wanting to press the issue of the timeline too heavily, the exhortation we have in today’s Gospel reading –to love one another “as I have loved you” happens before the cross, suggesting that the model on view here may not be the death of Jesus but the life of Jesus!

Further, as noted, today’s reading begins with a reference to Judas – “when he had gone out” – and Jesus’ exhortation to love each other as He has loved us comes immediately before the two terrible betrayals from disciples whom Jesus had just broken bread with and whose feet Jesus had just washed – the one betrayal being from Judas, of course, and the other one being from dear Peter!

Jesus loved Peter, was betrayed by Peter, and would eventually be reconciled with Peter. Jesus loved Judas but would never be reconciled with him. Even perfect love does not guarantee a perfect ending to the story. Even so, love anyway – that’s the new commandment.

Yes, “greater love has no one than this – to lay down one’s life for their friends” (John 15:3). That is true, and bodily self-sacrifice is indeed the ultimate example of love, but most of the time love is not so grandiose and (thankfully) not quite so painful. The far more common (and in some ways more difficult) labor of love is the ongoing work of having to forgive those who fail us, and sometimes fail us very badly.

This, I believe, is the love by which everyone will now that we are His disciples – it’s the love that breaks bread with those who betray us and that washes the feet of those who turn their backs on us. It’s the love that finds its ultimate inspiration in the sacrificial death of Christ on the cross, but which likewise finds daily encouragement in the simple acts of grace shown by Jesus towards those whom He knew would radically fail Him.

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-45)

It’s not a strategy for success. It’s not a means to a better life or more successful relationships. It’s just the way that we demonstrate to the world that we are followers of Jesus. We break bread, we wash feet, we empathise, we forgive. We love one another just as He loved us.

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday 19th of May, 2019.

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In a battle royale between church and state, Father Dave just wants to box (SBS News, May 9th, 2019)

Posted on May 12, 2019 by Father Dave

On March 22nd, 2019, I was scheduled to do four rounds with Jason MacGura at Club Punchbowl. I was hoping that this would be my breakthrough bout. An hour before I was due to go on, the promoter received an email from the ‘Combat Sports Authority’ (CSA), prohibiting the fight from going ahead (read full story here).

Apart from writing to the CSA and approaching my local member, seeking an explanation, I put out a promo video, telling my story and appealing for a fight somewhere in the world where the CSA doesn’t have jurisdiction. This story came in response to that promo video.

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Pews and politics: Australian leaders chase elusive Christian vote as election looms (Reuters World News, May 9, 2019)

Posted on May 12, 2019 by Father Dave

A big thank you to Jonathan Barrett (the journalist) and Jill Gralow (the videographer) who put this piece together.

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Do you love me? (A sermon on John 21:15-19)

Posted on May 6, 2019 by Father Dave

“When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” “Yes, Lord,” he said, “you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.” Again Jesus said, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.” The third time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.” Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.

Very truly I tell you, when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Then he said to him, “Follow me!”” (John 21:15-19)

It’s the third Sunday in Eastertide, and so we find ourselves back on the beach with Peter and the remaining eleven Apostles.

Easter is the defining event of the Christian faith and so it makes sense that on these Sundays following Easter we deal each year with the same familiar Biblical texts that encapsulate our core beliefs and values.

Easter Day is our celebration of hope – the hope of resurrection and our hope for the victory of light over darkness. On the Sunday after the resurrection we focus on faith as seen in the story of ‘doubting’ Thomas. This week – the third Sunday of Easter – our theme is love; the love of Jesus and the love of Peter for Jesus – as played out in this scene on the beach.

I don’t know if you have a favourite Easter story or favourite Easter image. I think when it comes to warm and sentimental Biblical images, Christmas tends to have something of a monopoly – images of the baby on the manger, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men …

When it comes to Easter, Christian art has focused almost exclusively on the cross rather than the resurrection, which is understandable perhaps, but leaves us with a bit of a dearth of warm and winsome Easter images. For me, this story from John’s Gospel, with Jesus asking Peter if he loves Him, and Peter swearing passionately that indeed he does love Jesus, fills that gap. The curious thing is that the passage seems to have originally been no more than an appendix to the Gospel narrative!

I heard one commentator refer to this story in John chapter twenty-one as the ‘encore’ to John’s Gospel, and indeed, if you read the end of the preceding chapter, you’ll see that it’s quite clear that the author was concluding the story there:

“Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples which are not recorded in this book, but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” (John 20:30-31)

End of story, applause, the author takes a bow, walks off stage and then, as the applause continues, walks back on and says, ‘ok, just one more story’.

In truth though, it’s not likely that this story was added in response to the adulation of the crowd. The end of chapter twenty-one itself suggests that there was some confusion in the early church over whether Jesus had said to the Apostle Peter that the Apostle John was going to live to see Him return. This supplementary story was clearly designed, at least in part, to put that controversy to rest by pointing out that this was not exactly what Jesus had said. I wonder too though if this story wasn’t also included to resolve certain controversies surrounding Peter, who strikes me as the most elusive figure in the history of the early church.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in this field, but I think that if you were reading through the New Testament for the first time and had just finished the four Gospels, and had no idea as to what followed in the book of the Acts of the Apostles or what was said in the various letters that filled out the book, I think you’d be justified in assuming that Peter would feature pretty strongly in just about all of it.

“Upon this rock I will build my church” says Jesus of Peter (Matthew 16:18), and on the basis of that powerful commission our Catholic sisters and brothers have always designated Peter as the first Pope.

Peter was first amongst the Apostles – surely? Did not Jesus Himself made that clear? Peter was the rock upon which the church would be built, the hinge upon which it would swing! The only problem with this is that the history of the early church, as recorded in the rest of the New Testament, doesn’t really bear this out!

When it comes to church leadership, it seems that James, the earthly brother of Jesus, seems to have been the official head of the church in Jerusalem, and when it comes to leadership within the churches outside of Israel, there can be no doubt at all that the leading figure there wasn’t Peter but Saint Paul!

What happened to Peter? He was obviously active, and he did indeed contribute a few letters that are included near the end of the New Testament. Even so, in these early records Peter does not shine forth as the rock upon which the early church was built. He seems to be more in the background most of the time. What happened?

Was Peter involved in some controversy that forced him to pull back from taking a leading role in public ministry, or did he die early on?

Of course, those who know the ‘Quo Vadis’ story know that tradition has Peter meeting Jesus on the road to Rome where the early church was being persecuted, after which Peter follows Jesus back to Rome to suffer martyrdom with his sisters and brothers. Even so, most historians would consider this as a ripping yarn rather than real history. The truth is, we really don’t know what happened to Peter!

The other really perplexing thing about Peter is the question of what happened to the story of his initial meeting with Jesus after the resurrection.

St Paul says of Jesus in his first letter to the church at Corinth, “that he first appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve” (1 Corinthians 15:5). Clearly this was well known in the early church – that Peter was the first of the male Apostles to meet with Jesus after the resurrection – and yet we have no surviving written record of this meeting. What happened to it?

I think it’s generally assumed that this is what is missing at the end of the Gospel of Mark.

If you’re familiar with Mark’s Gospel, you’ll know that it is unique amongst the Gospel narratives in that it has no resurrection story at all – at least, not in its current form – or rather, that it has two or three different resurrection narratives in its current form.

Most scholars believe that Mark was the first of the four Gospels written, and with the oldest versions of that oldest Gospel story that we have, they end surprisingly abruptly.

After Jesus’ female disciples discover the empty tomb, we are told: “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8) THE END

This is hardly likely to be the way Mark intended to end his story about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The general assumption is that the original ending to Mark’s Gospel has been lost.

In its place you’ll find some other early resurrection narratives. They generally find a place in our versions of the New Testament as footnotes. Even so, the general assumption amongst scholars is that the original ending of the Gospel has been lost, and most of us assume that this original ending must have included the story about that early meeting between the resurrected Jesus and Peter.

It’s mysterious! How could such an important Gospel narrative get lost? Did something really embarrassing happen in that first meeting between Jesus and Peter after the resurrection, such that Peter (or some of his influential supporters) made sure that this story was left out when the Gospel was reproduced? That’s hardly likely, is it, as you couldn’t get much more embarrassing than what is included!

Did Peter perhaps get involved in another scandal of sorts, such that the bulk of the early church decided not to distribute some of the early stories that included Peter? That doesn’t sound likely either, does it?

The problem is that it’s hard to come up with any plausible explanation as to why anyone would want to deliberately lose the original ending of Mark’s Gospel. All we do know is that Mark has no ending whereas John apparently has two endings, and I think it is quite plausible that this extra ending in John, which was quite possibly published half a century after Mark’s Gospel, is there in part to make up for what had gone missing.

Now, you’ll have to forgive me if this sermon has thus far sounded like a lecture on Biblical literary criticism. I appreciate that while those of us who have been studying the Bible all our lives do get interested in all these questions about which Gospel was published first and why some bits are included and others are left out. I appreciate too though that if you’ve tuned in because you’re grieving and you’re searching for spiritual strength and peace, this sort of discussion about the dating of manuscripts and the construction of narratives can seem pretty dry. If that’s you, my request is that you bear with me just a little longer.

The point I want to make is that if the first of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances to the original group of twelve disciples takes place with Peter, isn’t it interesting that the last chapter of the last of the Gospels written also deals with a post-resurrection meeting between Jesus and Peter.

I think this is Peter’s epitaph, given to us by his friend, John. Whatever happened to Peter during those years when he stepped back from centre-stage in the early church, this is how the Gospel writer wanted him to be remembered.

“Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?”
“Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
“Simon son of John, do you love me?”
“Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
“Simon son of John, do you love me?”
“Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.”

It’s an intense and beautiful yet painful dialogue between Jesus and Peter. Repeating the question three times was an obvious allusion to the three times that Peter had denied knowing Jesus, just prior to the crucifixion. Jesus surely intended Peter to see that connection and the fact that Peter gets emotional the third time he is asked, confirms that Peter doesn’t miss the point.

Interestingly, Jesus doesn’t respond to Peter’s affirmations of love with the words ‘I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you’. Perhaps that dialogue of forgiveness and reconciliation was what took place in their first post-resurrection meeting. What Jesus does here is rather to commission Peter again. He appoints Peter once again to the role of tending and feeding the sheep – of extending the love he has for Jesus to the members of the community of faith who need that love.

And then we get that chilling prophecy:

“when you were younger you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.” (John 21:18)

And John adds, “Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.” (John 21;19)

Despite, John’s comments, it’s not exactly clear what kind of death is being referred to here, except that it would not have been a natural death. When Jesus says “someone else will dress you” does He mean that Peter will be dressed in animal skins before being fed to the lions, or does the image of him stretching out his hands simply mean that his hands will be tied as he’s led towards the block?

Either way, the image is chilling, and I can never read it without remembering Henri Nouwen’s reflection on this prophecy – that the fate of Peter is really the fate of every follower of Jesus. Nouwen believed that this image encapsulated the path towards spiritual maturity – a process wherein we increasingly stretch out our hands and submit ourselves to Jesus, who leads us into places where we do not want to go.

For Peter, as for Jesus Himself, this path of suffering is the flipside of his love. Jesus suffers because He loves us. Peter likewise will suffer because he loves Jesus.

‘Do you love me, Peter? Do you love me? Do you love me?’

‘Yes, Lord. You know that I love you. You know that I love you.’

This is Peter’s epitaph. These are the last words written in the last Gospel about a man about whom so much is said but about whom much is also left unsaid. The final word on Peter is given to the Gospel writer John. Peter was a man who loved Jesus.

Let this be our epitaph too. Whatever else they say of us – that we struggled, that we failed, that we displayed all the weakness known to the human condition – let this be said of us too, that in the end we loved Him.

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday 5th of May, 2019.

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Looking back and Looking Up! (Easter Sermon 2019)

Posted on April 26, 2019 by Father Dave

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”
(Julian of Norwich)

I can’t remember when I first heard those words of Lady Julian of Norwich. I think they were first read to me by my mother. What I remember more clearly is the number of times I’ve repeated them to myself when times are dark.

It may be that I have a penchant for the darkness and that I just need to work at becoming more of a glass-half-full kind of guy. Even so, I know for myself that whenever I’m lying awake at night, trying to get to sleep, the memories that come sneaking into my consciousness are almost never of the wonderful times I’ve spent with my children. They’re always memories of darker events.

How many times have I lied awake reliving the time my eldest daughter was almost drowned when she was only little, or remembering the deaths of my mother and father, or remembering the time I was mobbed by settlers outside Ashkelon Prison in Israel, or reliving my time spiraling around helplessly in a dinghy amongst the coral reefs off Manus Island in the pitch darkness.

Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps most of you, if you have trouble getting to sleep at all, lie awake remembering your first kiss, or the moment your first child was born, or the day when you won your first boxing match? Is it just me?

I don’t think it is just me. I think we all have a bit of a penchant to focus on the negative, and I wonder if that isn’t in part the reason that the church too, very early on, took as its symbol the cross rather than the rolling stone.

I’ve only ever met one person in my life who was trying to buck that trend. I met him in the Salvation Army Men’s Home in Surry Hills, back in the day where I was working as a volunteer with what was then the Sydney City Mission, and I was helping bus homeless men around to help them find somewhere where they could eat and shower and sleep. I still remember this big, burly Salvo guy showing me his tattoo of a rolling stone.

He said “I don’t know why Christians want images of the cross on their bodies. The cross is about suffering and death. I’m focusing on resurrection and life.”

That made a lot of sense to me at the time, and yet I can’t pretend that I’ve ever really taken it to heart, and neither have I ever seen a church that has. Even if we don’t go as far as our Catholic sisters and brothers, with images of bleeding hearts featured in all our artworks, we continue to decorate our buildings with crosses rather than rolling stones.

Are we all just a bit too morbid? Certainly, there are preachers out there who suggest that, and tell us that it’s time we made the ‘Good News’ good again.

These are generally the preachers you see on late-night TV, broadcasting from their own dedicated cable network somewhere in the USA, talking about the power of positive thinking, interspersing their presentation with lots of Bible verses, and invariably ending with a request to dig deep.

I don’t mean to bad-mouth these people. Nor am opposed to positive thinking, but the truth is that the New Testament itself is just not that positive, is it?

Am I wrong?

Most of you will know that I still have most of my theological library left in the old rectory building next door to the church, simply because there’s no room for all of my old books in the building that is the current rectory.

One of the books that I left in there, and which any of you are welcome to take home if you can find it, is a book I purchased many years ago from one of these American evangelists. I simply couldn’t resist it at the time.

It’s called “The Positive Bible”, and it was sold with the promise that you’d get “all the good stuff and nothing else”. It’s not the whole Bible, of course, and indeed, the sales page promised that you could read the whole thing in about an hour! That tells us something, as the Bible I’m familiar with cannot be read in about an hour, or even in a couple of hours. Obviously, a lot was left out!

In as much as I accept that there is a power in positive thinking, the Scriptures that have been handed down to us are not all sweetness and light, and I’m not simply thinking about all the wars and violence we find in our Old Testament. The stories of the death and resurrection of Jesus are probably the most imbalanced of the lot!

Look at the Gospel of Mark – generally believed to be the first of the Gospels written. It reads like a crucifixion narrative with an extended introduction. Mark doesn’t even really have a resurrection narrative. It ends with an empty tomb and with the disciples running about scared, not sure what to do next.

Mark is the most extreme example of the four Gospels, but in each case the story of Jesus’ death is a lengthy narrative, whereas the resurrection accounts are sketchy and leave a great number of questions unanswered.

The irony of this is that it surely should have been the other way around, as the death of Jesus was something that happened really quickly. There they were one night – Jesus and His disciples all having dinner together – and within twenty-four hours Jesus had been betrayed, tried, flogged and killed!

The resurrection saga, on the other hand, was a much more drawn-out affair. No one actually saw the resurrection happen, and it took a good while for the penny to drop with some people that Jesus really was back on the scene.

You’d think that this would make for a lengthy whodunnit-style detective novel where the disciples gradually put all the pieces back together and work out exactly what had happened to Jesus. No! Most of the pieces are left on the table. It’s the crucifixion that gets all the attention. Why is that?

I think to answer that we again need to think about how memory works – how we remember things and why we remember things, as the New Testament really is just the collective memory of the first followers of Jesus.

I read an interesting book recently by David McRaney, entitled “You are not so Smart”, in which the author went to some length to highlight what a volatile piece of machinery the human memory is.

We tend to think of memories as being like videos that are filed away in our minds – videos that we can pulled out at any time and played again to help us relive a past experience in all its detail. The truth is, McRaney says, that you can’t recall a memory without reshaping it.

I don’t know if you remember at little while back that we used to have different sorts of DVD’s that we could use to back up the hard drive on our computer. There was the read/write DVD where you could write information to the DVD as well as read information from it, and there was the read-only DVD, where you couldn’t write to the disk but only read from it.

The point I remember being made in this book was there no is such thing as ‘read-only memory’ when it comes to the human mind. You can’t read it without writing to it. You can’t recall memories without reshaping them.

This is why nobody is likely to say anything bad about you at our funeral. It won’t simply be that people are being nice (though hopefully they will be nice). It will also though be because the reality of your death will inevitably change the memories people have of you. Your friends will forget most of your bad points when you’re gone (if only they could forget them sooner).

Conversely, this is why in marriage breakdowns, estranged couple never have anything good to say about each other. All the good memories from the past are discolored by the pain of the breakup, and you can’t work out now how you ever fell in love with a person with so few redeeming features!

When it comes to the New Testament, the key to understanding the accounts we read of the cross and resurrection of Jesus, I’d suggest, is, similarly, to recognise that the disciples could only think about the crucifixion of Jesus in the light of His resurrection.

If there had been no resurrection, I’m not sure whether many (or any) stories from the life of Jesus would have ever been recorded. Why bother?

Had it not been for the resurrection, I imagine most people would have written Jesus off as a failed revolutionary and have quickly forgotten everything He’d had to say. I imagine they’d look back at all those healing miracles and think ‘I’m not sure now whether those people were as sick as we thought they were’

If it hadn’t been for the resurrection, perhaps some of the parables and wisdom teachings of Jesus might have been remembered, but if Jesus’ life had simply ended in a humiliating torture and death, how wise could He have been? It’s the resurrection that changes all of that.

Because of the resurrection, we see that everything Jesus said was important. Because of the resurrection, we realise that even Jesus’ humiliating death must have had a deeper meaning. It could only have happened because He let it happen, and so you go back over what Jesus said about His death, and you go back over the ancient Scriptures, and you start to reframe the whole experience in order to make sense of it all in the light of the resurrection.

The resurrection of Jesus is the lens through which the New Testament is written, and though which it needs to be read. It’s because of the resurrection that the followers of Jesus can spell out all the gruesome details of the torture and death of Jesus, because they know this is not the end of the story, and this too is why we can boldly take up what was once the symbol or Roman imperial power – the cross – and take it as the symbol of our freedom!

It’s not because the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross suddenly became less gruesome, but in the light of the resurrection, even that has been transformed into a symbol of life!

We tend to think that the past is fixed in historical concrete and that only the present is under our control, but the truth is that the resurrection of Jesus changes the past, the present and the future, and thank God it does, for it’s not only dark memories that come to me at night that bother me nowadays. It’s even more so the things I see when I open my eyes and get up! The ongoing violence in Syria continues to break my heart

On Manus another of our asylum-seeker friends has taken his own life

We see the signs of growing bigotry and intolerance on our own shores

And my friend, Julian Assange, has been arrested and is threatened with life behind bars, explicitly because he exposed war-crimes in Iraq.

Hey, I’ve got enough struggles of my own to deal with! How am I supposed to find the resources and energy to fight these battles too?

A friend of mine wrote to me only yesterday – a friend who is currently on stress-leave – and asked me how I cope with the pressure. I gave him a rather long and convoluted answer, but I think now that I probably should have just given him two words – embrace Easter!

Embrace Easter, and do so not only by listening to the message that the Gospel-writers share, but also do what the Gospel-writers did when they reframed all of life through the lens of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ is risen, and that changes everything. If there were only two certainties in life prior to the resurrection of Jesus – death and taxes – now there is only one certainty, and perhaps there are no certainties.

Maybe now, in the light of the resurrection of Jesus, anything is possible! “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” That’s resurrection thinking – thinking about the future in the light of the resurrection of Jesus.

There’s a similar saying that I also often quote too – generally attributed to John Lennon, though it actually goes back to Brazilian novelist, Paulo Coelho: “Everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end”. Again, that’s resurrection thinking.

Sisters and brothers, I suspect that most of you are far more balanced people than I am, but if you, like me, struggle with pains from the past and with fears about the future, today is the day to embrace Easter, and be liberated to live in the present! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Love has triumphed. His Kingdom comes.

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday 21st of April, 2019.

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Welcome to the family of Jesus (A sermon on John 12:1-8)

Posted on April 8, 2019 by Father Dave

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 2There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. 3Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.

4But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, 5“Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 6(He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) 7Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. 8You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” (John 12:1-8)

We don’t often see Jesus depicted in scenes of settled domesticity. This is about as close as we get in the New Testament. We are in the home of Lazarus, Mary and Martha – three of Jesus’ closest friends – and they’ve organised a special dinner for Jesus. The disciples are there. All Jesus closest friends are there. This is about as close as we get in the Gospels to a family portrait.

I don’t know about you, but I love family dinners. We had one last Friday night, partly in celebration of young Fran’s tenth birthday, though it all happened rather spontaneously.

We ended up at Pancakes at the Rocks in Darling Harbour – Ange and myself and all four children – and we had a lovely time, chatting, laughing and arguing about whether Jordan Peterson is a chauvinistic ratbag or a much-needed counter-balance to the twenty-first century feminist narrative.

In the case of Jesus’ family dinner, we’re not talking nuclear family, of course. If Jesus hadn’t disowned His blood relatives by this stage, He had certainly distanced Himself from them.

“Who is my mother, and who are my brothers? … Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12:48-50)

Here they are – the mothers, brothers and sisters of Jesus. Some are by now good friends, and those friends are all disciples, and the disciples are all friends, and all are family!

Our Gospel scene today is taken from right near the end of Jesus’ earthly life, so this is a group of old friends. Long gone are the heady days of walking the shores of Galilee, looking for ‘fishers of men’. Long gone are the days of the Baptist and the ‘sermon on the mount’. These people have been living with each other for three years now. They are an established family. How would you describe this family of Jesus? ‘Dysfunctional’ is the first word that comes to mind for me.

I guess it depends on which part of the narrative you focus on, and I was listening to a preachers’ podcast this week where the host said very emphatically that when your congregation hears this passage, their attention will immediately be drawn to the statement of Jesus at the end of the passage – that “the poor you will always have with you” (John 12:8)

The host of the podcast, who is a pastor himself of course, said that this is the verse people always quote back at him when he’s doing a collection for the poor. “Hey, preacher, Jesus said that we’ll always have the poor with us, so what’s the point? I’m not wasting my money on a problem that is never going to go away”.

I suspect that this says more about the congregation that this guy pastors. I think I can say with some confidence that nobody takes that attitude in our community. Having said that, Jesus’ statement does seem jarring.

Just when you think the disciples have finally got the message – that, indeed, we don’t need extravagance and luxury, but that if we have wealth to spare, we should be sharing it with the poor – Jesus comes out with a statement like this!

It may help to know that Jesus is quoting – a quote would have been recognised by those who were with Him. The quote is from Deuteronomy 15:11: The poor you will always have with you”, and the latter part of the verse goes on to say, “Therefore I command you, “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.””

In other words, according to the Deuteronomic code, the enduring reality of poverty means only that we have an ongoing responsibility to be generous.

Jesus is not contrasting the poor, who don’t matter, with Himself, who does. Rather, He’s contrasting the ongoing responsibility we have to the poor with an opportunity that is only going to be there for a moment and needs to be grasped – the opportunity for a special moment of love, as enacted by Mary.

It is Mary who grabs my attention in this passage, and I suspect that’s the case for most of us. She performs an act of love towards Jesus that is extravagant, passionate and intimate, but which also seems really inappropriate as there’s definitely a sexual dimension to it that might make us a little uncomfortable, and which surely must have made some of the others in the room uncomfortable.

“Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” (John 12:3)

Maybe if she hadn’t done the bit with her hair the scene might be open to a more conservative interpretation, but there’s no getting around the fact that this is exactly what happened. In a day when respectable women covered their heads altogether around men (just as many of our Muslim sisters do today by wearing hijabs) Mary not only let her hair down. She massaged Jesus’ feet with it!

I think that gritty detail is indisputable in this story, though many of the other details are open to dispute, as this story turns up in each of the four Gospel narratives, though with slight variations in each case.

The very fact that this story turns up in all four of the Gospel narratives should make us pause to consider how significant this incident is. Not many aspects of Jesus life make it into all four Gospels.

In terms of the countless miracles of Jesus, only one miracle makes it into all four Gospels – the feeding of the five thousand. The Christmas story (of Jesus’ birth) only turns up in two of the four Gospels. Indeed, there’s only a proper resurrection narrative in three of the four Gospels, but this anointing of Jesus is remembered in detail in all four!

Mind you, in the other three Gospels the woman who does the anointing has no name, and in Luke’s Gospel, she seems to be branded as a sex-worker!

In Luke, the scene takes place in the home of Simon, the Pharisee, and we’re told that “when the Pharisee who had invited [Jesus] saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is – that she is a sinner.” (Luke 7:39)

Does this mean that Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, was a sex-worker? Surely not? It is possible, of course, that there was more than one anointing, with multiple women letting their hair down but this is unlikely. More likely, I’d suggest, is that the woman who performed this act of love came to be identified as a sex- worker because good girls just don’t do this sort of thing.

There’s no denying that this was a self-consciously sensual act. What was going through Mary’s mind at the time? We have no idea. What does this imply about her relationship with Jesus? Again, we have no idea.

Was Jesus embarrassed by Mary’s actions? Was He gritting His teeth, or at least wishing that she hadn’t done it all quite so publicly? If so, He doesn’t let on. On the contrary, Jesus defends Mary against her detractors, represented by Judas in this case – someone who most definitely is a dysfunctional member of the family.

Interestingly, Judas doesn’t deride Mary for being shameless but for being wasteful, though it’s hard to know exactly what was going through his mind.

The Gospel writer, of course, thinks he knows exactly what was going through Judas’ mind – namely, that Judas was thinking about the money only because he was a thief. I’m guessing though that if Judas had still been around to defend himself when John’s Gospel was written, he might have asked that his questioning of Mary’s extravagance be interpreted a little more generously.

There we have it – this snapshot of the family of Jesus at rest. It’s a bit like one of those pictures you get when you have a family dinner and you ask one of the restaurant staff to take a picture of you all at table so that you can post the image up on Twitter for the whole world to see (something I totally forgot to do last Friday night).

Jesus didn’t have Twitter, of course, and yet this snapshot made it to the top of the social media anyway by getting featured in all four Gospels, and Jesus even predicted how many ‘likes’ Mary would receive.

In Mark’s version of this story (which is probably the first one written), Jesus is recorded as saying “Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her” (Mark 14:9)

In Matthew’s version of the story, Jesus goes even further, saying of the woman “She has done a beautiful thing to me” (Matthew 26:10), which is something I don’t think Jesus ever says about anybody else ever.

This anointing is clearly a critical moment in the New Testament, as it was clearly a critical moment in Jesus’ family life and a critical moment for Jesus Himself! The question is ‘why?’ What makes this act – as simple and as ephemeral as it was – such a pivotal moment in the greater Gospel narrative? I think the answer may be that this is really the only instance in the Scriptures where one of us – one of the disciples of Jesus – actually tries to give something back to Him!

We are familiar with the New Testament narrative. It’s the story of Jesus, and it’s the story of God’s love for the world, demonstrated for us and made real for us in Jesus, and on the whole, the love-traffic (so to speak) is all one-way.

As the Gospel-writer, John, himself says in his first letter, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” (1 John 4:10) The New Testament is the story of God’s love for us and not a story of our love for God. Yet in this story – in the story of the anointing of Jesus by Mary of Bethany, one of us does something beautiful for Him!

I think this story is unique in the New Testament. I couldn’t think of any other instance in the Gospels where one of us tries love Jesus back.

There’s the story of the women who go to embalm Jesus’ body post-crucifixion, of course, but that was when Jesus was dead, and people always think well of the dead. This event took place while Jesus was still very much alive and moving, and Mary’s action was risky, and it was flawed, and in many ways it was ‘human, all too human’ (to use Nietzsche’s phrase) yet she was clearly genuine.

Perhaps Mary didn’t really know what she was doing, and maybe she had a lot of confused feelings mixed up inside of her, and I suspect that if she’d told Lazarus or Martha what she was planning on doing (assuming that she did actually plan it) they probably would have tried to talk her out of it. Even so, this intimate and sacrificial action was a genuine pouring out of love for Jesus, and Jesus says, “Leave her alone … She has done a beautiful thing to me” (Matthew 14:6)

Mary is our representative, not because she is the ideal representation of what love for God should look like, Mary is as confused as the rest of us. She is our representative because she was willing to let loose her passion for Jesus.

Welcome of the family of Jesus. Yes, it’s a dysfunctional family in many ways. It’s a family with people like Judas in it – people who say the right thing but whose hearts are far from right – and it’s a family with people like Mary in it – people who do weird and embarrassing things, but whose hearts really are in the right place. And then there’s the rest of us, doing our best to sound as right as Judas but to love as genuinely as Mary. Welcome to the family.

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday 7th of April, 2019.

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Becoming the Answer (A sermon on Luke 13:1-9)

Posted on March 25, 2019 by Father Dave

“Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose
blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these
Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this
way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen
who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them – do you think they were more guilty
than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will
all perish.” (Luke 13:1-5)

Thus begins today’s Gospel reading, and in the translation I took this passage from it
included a heading – “Repent or die” – which sums up Jesus’ words here pretty well!
Some of you are here to celebrate a baptism today, and you may well have been
feeling pretty good up to this point. I didn’t pick today’s readings. Perhaps that’s why,
in the early church, baptisms all happened on Easter Day – a day we celebrate life!
Today’s readings centre around death, with people trying to get Jesus to respond to
news about a series of tragic deaths, and the response Jesus offers them seems
tasteless, especially for us in our current context!

I’m thinking of the dialogue about the Galileans in particular here – those “whose blood
Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices” (Luke 13:1). Apparently, the Roman governor
had ordered his troops to slaughter a group of worshippers while they were at prayer in the temple, and the image of people being massacred while at prayer is one that is
very raw for us after the terrible shooting at the mosque in Christchurch last week.

All murder is terrible, but slaughtering people at prayer seems particularly barbaric, and it
raises questions for us at a religious level too. How could God allow this to happen?
That may well have been exactly the question these people were putting to Jesus after
they raised the incident with Him, and Jesus’ response – that “unless you repent, you
will all perish as they did” (Luke 13:3) seems to be extraordinarily insensitive.

Jesus’ response to the other tragedy mentioned isn’t any more consoling either – that
of the eighteen people crushed in the collapse of the ‘Tower of Siloam’ (Luke 13:4)
Presumably, this tragedy was just one of those ‘acts of God’ for which no one in
particular was to blame, or perhaps the Tower of Siloam was something like the Opal
Tower in Homebush, where the tragedy may have been due to shoddy workmanship
or the skirting of building regulations or something like that. Either way, the lesson
Jesus derives from this incident – that “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they
did.” (Luke 13:9) – is not one designed to give comfort to those who are grieving.

This is our Gospel reading today. It is not a happy one, and it concludes with a parable
about a fig tree that is equally discomforting.

“A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did
not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, ‘For three years now
I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down!
Why should it use up the soil?’” (Luke 13:6-7).

‘Give it another year!’, the farmer pleads, and that’s where the story ends. We don’t
know if the landowner decides on a stay of execution for the tree or not. Either way, the
overall message – repent or die – is clear enough, and our newly-baptised member
could be forgiven at this point for wondering ‘what have I just got myself into?’

I’ll state at this point that I never see it as my job to make the words of Jesus palatable
for us. If Jesus’ words were meant to be offensive, it would be wrong of me to try to
sugar-coat them in order to take the sting out. Having said that, a text without a context
is a pretext for a proof-text (as we always say). In other words, if we do want to take these words seriously, we must understand the context in which they were spoken.

What were they really asking – these people who wanted to dialogue with Jesus about the murder in the temple? Were they grieving relatives? Almost certainly not! What then – were they just wanting to engage with Jesus in a bit of theological speculation?

One plausible interpretation of this dialogue is that there’s a political agenda at play.
Pilate is murdering Jews – Jews at prayer! What does Jesus have to say about that?
What is Jesus going to do about that?

I’d suggest that Jesus’ shifting of the discussion from the temple incident to the tower
tragedy (which, we assume, had nothing to do with the Romans) indicates that the
context was not really political but more strictly religious. In other words, these people
were asking the age-old question, ‘why does God allow things like this to happen?’

This is an age-old question. It can also be, I believe, a very dangerous question, as it’s
regularly associated with the process of scapegoating! I’m not suggesting that every
time we ask why something bad happened that we are looking to scapegoat someone.
It is a very human to ask ‘why’. Even so, a lot of the time when we are looking for
answers, what we are really looking for is someone to blame.

When tragedy strikes, be it by the sword of Pilate or by the bricks from a tower or from
a gun fired at a mosque, it can understandably make us feel insecure, and so we look
for answers in order to find reassurance. ‘If those people were gunned down in a mosque in Christchurch, does that mean I could be gunned down here in church in Sydney?’ That’s the question, and it’s the sort of question where we really want someone in authority to come up and say to us, ‘No. Don’t worry. I can’t happen to you because you’re not a Muslim’.

‘Isn’t that why bad things happen to people? It’s because they are bad people? Isn’t
that why there are all those wars going on in majority-Muslim countries. It’s not our
fault – surely – and it can’t happen here where we are all progressive, forward-thinking
white people who love our children and do lots of decent and forward-thinking things.
Those people who get shot or crushed by towers – there’s a good reason for that, and
even if I don’t know the reason right now I’m sure that God is just, and so those people
must have deserved what happened to them, and if they didn’t deserve it then there
must have been some higher purpose to it all, even if I just can’t see it at the moment.’

These are the sorts of dialogues we have with ourselves and, at one level, it’s entirely appropriate that we do. We believe that God is just. We don’t believe that things just happen randomly in our world, and we don’t believe that evil triumphs, do we? If we believe in God, we believe in order, surely, and justice. It’s offensive – blasphemous even – to not believe that there is a good reason for everything that happens. Well … that’s certainly what Job’s friends believed (for those who’ve read the Book of Job).

I’m not suggesting that it isn’t appropriate to ask these questions. Indeed, how can we
be religious people and not ask these questions? Even so, the danger is that in looking
for an explanation to tragedy, what we are really looking for is someone to blame so
that we can feel more secure. Who we blame probably doesn’t matter too much. It can
be Muslims, Jews, black people … anybody, so long as they are not ‘one of us’.

“Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans
because they suffered this way?” Jesus asks – those poor souls whose blood Pilate
mingled with their sacrifices. “I tell you, no!”

“Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them – do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no!”

Yes, these tragedies are terrible. Yes, they are unnerving, but no, these people did not
suffer because they deserved it. They weren’t any more sinful than anybody else.
Even so, get your act together or the next tower is going to fall on you!

It’s not immediately obvious why Jesus had to add that last line, reminding us about
our own mortality. Was He responding to a smug attitude on the part of the people He
was dialoguing with? Either way, one thing we can immediately get from these
sobering words is that there are lessons to be learned from tragedies like this.

There are lessons we can learn from the tragedy in Christchurch. It can remind us that
life is fragile, and that we should make the most of every moment that we have. In
watching those who are grieving in Christchurch, it may reinforce to us too that these
people are our sisters and brothers, and it may encourage us to reach out in love to
our Muslim sisters and brothers here in Sydney.

There are lessons we can draw from this tragedy, as from all tragedies. What Jesus
wants us to be clear about though here is that ‘something bad happened to those
people because they deserved it’ is not one of the lessons.

In a funny way I’ve had to apply the wisdom of this Gospel passage to my own life in
the last twenty-four hours. I don’t want to trivialise the tragedies mentioned in the
passage, and I certainly don’t mean to compare my struggles to those who have
suffered so much in Christchurch recently. Even so, when my fight was cancelled last
night it was for me something of a crisis of faith. How could God allow that to happen?

As I say, I appreciate that my concerns were relatively trivial. Even so, I had been
convinced that God wanted me to have this fight and that I was going to raise money
through it and that I was going to get some of that money over to people in Syria who
needed it, and when I turned up all ready to rumble last night, only to be told that the
powers from on high (the Combat Sports Authority in this case) had blocked my fight
from going ahead, it was something of a crisis of faith for me.

Interestingly, it was my Muslim friends at the venue who were telling me, ‘this is God’s
will. God obviously doesn’t want you to fight tonight. Maybe you would have killed your
opponent. Just wait and we will see what God is up to’. At the time I was less capable
of believing that there could be anything good in the fight’s cancellation but, as I
thought it through, and as I read over this passage again, it did occur to me that even if
I couldn’t work out why things had happened the way they did, there were certainly
other things I could learn from the experience.

The most obvious lesson for me was to be reminded of the wonderful support I had
from my friends who had come to be with me and support me in the ring. I also had
three wonderful text messages of support from my three wonderful daughters (one of
whom was there with me but decided to text me her support nonetheless). Perhaps it
was God’s way of reminding me of how much I had to be thankful for.

As I say, you’ll have to forgive me if that seems to be trivialising the dark and serious
issues targeted in our Gospel reading, but I do believe that even though the incidents
discussed are very specific, the relevance of Jesus’ teaching here can be very broad.
The broad issue at stake here, I believe, is simply how we deal with things we don’t
understand – most especially with really painful things that we don’t understand.

We all want answers. I find that the older I get, the more questions I have. I take some encouragement from remembering an interview done with Mother Theresa when she
was still with us. The interviewer asked her how she made sense of the suffering she
saw around her. I don’t remember her exact words, but her response was something
along the lines of ‘when I get to Heaven, I’ve got a lot of questions I want answered’!

Asking ‘why’ is very human though, as I say, it can also be very dangerous. It all depends on the context that gives rise to the question. The Germans actually have a special word for this – ‘Fragestellung’. It means, literally, ‘the putting of the question’.

How you put your question generally determines the answer you get. If you ask your
question out of pure curiosity, this leads to one kind of answer. If our questions arise
directly out of our insecurities, these tend to lead us to different sorts of answers.

Those who know me well know that I am a great disbeliever in science. Yes, I believe
the earth is flat and that evolution never happened. Well … no, I don’t really believe the
earth is flat and I have no real issue with evolutionary theory either, though I do
consider it to be just a theory, and a theory with a lot of problems.

It’s telling, I think, that in our society evolutionary theory is an almost unquestionable
dogma, and if you do question it you tend to get yourself ridiculed, and I think there’s a very straightforward reason for that – namely, it’s all we’ve got! In terms of the origin of the species, evolutionary theory is the only theory out there. The alternative is mystery
and we don’t like mystery.

This is what we are dealing with when we confront human and animal suffering too.
So much of it just doesn’t make any sense. We would like to make sense of it all
because we want to believe that the world is just and that everything is in order and,
hence, that we are safe, but so much of life just doesn’t make sense.

The alternative to having answers is embracing mystery, as the alternative to certainty
is faith, but who wants to live by faith when you can have science and certainty?

As I’ve noted, our Gospel passage ends in uncertainty. What’s going to happen to the
fig tree? We don’t know. It’s a mystery. What we do know is that the fig tree is only
going to survive if it starts behaving more like a fig tree and less like a weed. It needs to
undergo a radical transformation. In the words of Jesus, it needs to repent.

The Greek word here is ‘metanoia’, and it’s one that Jesus used a lot. It’s combines
two other Greek words – ‘meta’, meaning to move beyond, and ‘nous’, meaning mind.
To experience metanoia is to transition to a different state of mind, allowing ourselves
to undergo a mental and emotional reboot, such that we become different people.

This indeed is Jesus ultimate alternative to having all the answers. It’s not just
embracing mystery. It’s undergoing a metanoia, and so responding to the mystery of
suffering in our world and in our lives by fundamentally reorientating ourselves
towards God and towards our fellow human beings.

Forgive me if that’s an overly philosophical note on which to finish today’s sermon.
Perhaps my thoughts are better summed up by an aphorism attributed to the ancient
Greek thinker, Epictetus – “Reflection is endless. Action is lost”. There’s nothing wrong with looking for answers to the pain we see around us and the pain we find in ourselves, but our job, ultimately, is not to know the answer but to become the answer.

First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill on Sunday 24th of March, 2019.

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