In Jesus, God’s desire is to change what we desire into what God desires

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Lent 3, 15^th March 2020

You may be remember the controversy which arose a few years ago from a video of two people having a discussion. The Bible Society released a video involving two Liberal Party politicians discussing same-sex marriage: one for it and the other against it. The Bible Society neither advocated for, or against same-sex marriage, but encouraged a ‘light’ discussion of the subject. To symbolise that, the politicians were engaged in their discussion over a few bottles of Coopers’ Light beer and the slogan ‘Lighten Up’ was used. It was not a Coopers’ advertisement, or even sponsored by Coopers, although Coopers did at the same time, release a special beer commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the Bible Society.

In response to the video, some people said they would never drink Coopers’ products again and some hotels announced a boycott. Coopers went into damage control and pulled the commemorative beer from the market, apologising for any hurt caused and stating they are supportive of all sorts of people and make no judgements etc. The Bible Society also pointed out that their video was not a Coopers’ production. In response to Coopers’ decision to take their beer off the market, there was a second backlash, but this time, from people who were angry at Coopers for pandering to people who they saw as engaging in the very discrimination they complained about. So, in the end, there were people boycotting Coopers’ products for completely opposite reasons. I may be blind to what was really going on there, but fail to see how suggesting that taking a ‘light’ approach to a controversial issue is an act of discrimination or hatred. If it was only suggested that those on one side of the argument should ‘lighten up’, then that would be unfair, but surely suggesting it to both sides can only be helpful.

Today’s gospel story also involves two people having a discussion and there is some of the same dynamic at play. That dynamic is rivalry – here involving competing or fighting with others in order to reinforce or create your identity (understanding of who you are). In the case I’ve been talking about, we see how destructive rivalry can be. In the gospel story, it’s not so obvious, yet it is revealed as that which prevents human flourishing, which is referred to as ‘eternal life’, which is sharing in God’s life.

Jesus arrives at a well in a Samaritan city. He is tired from his journey. It’s not the physical journey that has worn him down, it’s the spiritual journey – trying to teach people who are too foolish or resistant to his message. Fools drain us of energy. Wise people, humble people, loving people, energise us. Jesus’ disciples have gone into the city to buy food. This too is symbolic. They think they have to go and get nourishment, yet it is in their midst – i.e. in the form of Jesus. Their blindness and slowness to ‘learn’ allows us to see more clearly how different the woman Jesus encounters is, so we will pay attention to her and then do what she suggests to those in her city, which is to ‘come and see’ Jesus. Notice she doesn’t say come and believe (in the sense of accepting certain ideas), but just come and see. It’s a message we get throughout the gospel – to see for yourself and work out for yourself what Jesus is about and what he might have for you. Something which takes time.

Jesus opens the dialogue by asking the woman for a drink. That’s strange considering this is an interaction between a person and God (in human form). Isn’t it meant to be the other way around? We are the thirsty ones, the needy ones, and isn’t God meant to provide for us, meet our needs? That’s true, but here Jesus shows it’s not the whole picture, for in fact, while on the surface, he is thirsty for a drink of water, underneath the surface, he is thirsty for the opportunity to help her. It’s a play on words. But that’s a profound picture of God: that God’s greatest desire is to help us. And we discover

that the help God has for us is that we might be able to desire what God desires.

The woman is at the well in the middle of the day – the hottest part of the day, which is when there is unlikely to be anyone else there. Why does she go at that time? Firstly, because she’s a woman, and it was customary for women to not be spoken to by men. She would be keeping out of their way, so they wouldn’t be in the awkward position of having to avoid her. She has had five husbands too and that would have hardly made her the pin-up example of the ideal Samaritan woman. But none of that is relevant to Jesus. He breaks the taboo of not speaking to a woman and later actually addresses her as ‘woman’, a term indicating equality. He also ignores the taboo of interacting with someone regarded in her society as a social failure and as well as all that, he also breaks the taboo of Jews not interacting with Samaritans, who Jews considered inferior. When they come to talk about worship and where the best place to worship is, Jesus says there is something much bigger here than petty differences, which really are just about point-scoring.

And indeed, there is something bigger – embodied in him. He refers to it as something which rises within, producing eternal life. In other words, whoever has it, has divine energy bubbling up within them, so much so, that it could be said that through them, the Creator is creating. Jesus is offering this to the woman.

She can only have it because she has met Jesus and been willing to receive what he wanted to give her: she has quenched his thirst, symbolically by giving him a drink, but in reality by humbling herself and being prepared to let go of who she thought she was, until she met Jesus. Who did she think she was? As a woman: a second-rate citizen; having had five marriages: a social failure; as a Samaritan: a racial inferior. What does it do to a person to be identified in that way? What does it do for them to come to see themselves as that? We all have our own versions of that, e.g. I was never as good as others, I was a failure at marriage, I have never been popular, or perhaps the opposite: at least I was president of the Lobethal Hamster Society in 1970. And we all have ways in which we have defined people like that, and continue to do so: labelling, defining, in terms of good or bad, success or failure, superior or inferior, for and against, friend or foe, for Coopers, against Coopers, for same-sex marriage, against it.

Labels are not all bad though. They can clarify where we stand on something and help us face reality. At Alcoholics Anonymous’ meetings, people face up to their truth by stating ‘I am an alcoholic’. The label is meant to help them break free of kidding themselves they don’t need help, but there is no sense that the person saying that is any worse than, or inferior to, anyone else in the room. In fact, it’s really just their turn to state their version of what is true for everyone, which is that we all need to rely in some way, on a ‘higher power’. It’s virtually the same as us saying our corporate confession in the Eucharist.

The same thing as in the AA meeting is going on between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. Jesus names her truth: five failed marriages, but he does so, not to bring her down, but to help her see how her problem has been desiring the wrong husband – symbolic of desiring something or someone to give her an identity. Each time her desire, or thirst, has been only temporarily satisfied, because, caught up in rivalry, it has made her into an outcast, so she’s always thirsting for more. This is what Jesus wants us to see: that when we are victims of, or driven by rivalry, we just keep trying harder to find satisfaction, but never will. In contrast, Jesus can ‘satisfy’ us, because he offers us no rivalry whatsoever – just unconditional love, acceptance and encouragement to be what we are: energy which flows without ceasing, because it is free of rivalry, threat or competition with others, and only desiring the same for them. And that’s something we might want others to c0me and see.

Finding life through focusing away from evil and letting go of fear

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Lent 2, 8^th March 2020

Our family cat is having a spiritual crisis. She is overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world at present, in particular, another cat keeps appearing at our back door, and as it’s a glass door, she can see it. When the cat appears, her tail starts flapping, the hissing begins and sometimes she even launches at the glass. Unfortunately for our cat (Leela), cats somehow trigger the teasing part of my brain, and so having discovered that by turning the outside light on and off, I can make the cat appear and vanish, I enjoy making Leela’s behaviour alternate between attack mode and relaxed. While my power over Leela’s behaviour amuses me, what amuses me even more, is the fact that there is no cat outside the back door. She’s just seeing her own reflection.

Leela has developed a habit of this now. She’s obsessed with this evil cat and keeps looking for it. I might try getting her to pray our Prayer of the Day, which asks God to help us renounce evil and cling to Christ. That could help, because at present she’s doing just the opposite: focussing on evil and clinging to fear. Fear and Jesus are opposites, because Jesus’ life is based in trust in God and therefore not afraid of what goes on in the world or what other people are doing.

We’re probably all familiar with the words Do not be afraid spoken by angels to various people in the stories around Jesus’ birth, but we may not be as aware that throughout his life, Jesus encouraged people to not be afraid, or at least if they were afraid, to not cling to their fear. Jesus also encouraged people to hold a light attitude towards themselves, on the grounds that God’s capacity to bring about good was always greater than their sin. That’s a way of telling people to not be afraid of themselves. Do not be afraid appears in scripture more than any other phrase. Clinging to Christ, or trusting in Christ, involves not focussing on fear, or not letting it get a hold of us.

It’s important to remember, that like our family cat, we may not have a perfect picture of what is really going on out there in the world – what we do have, is the picture we have formed in our minds, generally based on what those who control the news feed to us. So, it’s a combination of facts, possibly distorted, and then possibly shaped by the most dangerous force within us, which is the mixture of fear and imagination. That mixture robs us of trust (in God, ourselves and each other) and self-protection becomes our dominating desire. Isn’t that what panic-buying of toilet paper is?

Even though we may not have a perfect picture of what’s going on in the world, there are significant things going on and they are serious. But what is never helpful is to let fear or concern with what’s wrong with the world, what’s wrong with others or what’s wrong with yourself, run your life. That could be described a spiritually panicking. When it comes to physical crises, panicking never helps. If people rush to act, it usually results in more people getting hurt, and just because you’re not panicking doesn’t mean you’re not taking the situation seriously, there’s just a better way of dealing with it. The same goes for times of spiritual crisis.

At home, we’ve realised that we have to put things between the cat and the glass door, so that she stops focussing on the alleged evil lurking outside (aka her reflection). How can we achieve the same result for ourselves, so that the circumstances of the world don’t overwhelm us, so we don’t feel afraid of what’s going on, or what might occur, or so that our anger over other’s actions, or incompetence doesn’t dominate our lives? How can we avoid feeling that life is meaningless and not lose hope, ending up believing there’s no point in trying to make the world a better place?

A good way to start comes from today’s psalm (121), which begins I lift up my eyes to the hills: where shall I find help? To be able to lift up your eyes to look to the hills, you must be on the plain, which means to look up is to look above, or beyond, your present situation. In other words, to not focus on what you see or what you are being shown (on the news, in social media etc). When the psalmist looks up, they realise that help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. It’s the same God who created the world, who called Sarai and Abram to leave their birthplace, inspired St Paul to speak of love and came into the world as Jesus. It’s the same God who is with us and who helps us now. Our focus then, needs to be on God’s goodness.

In our first reading today, we hear of Abram and Sarai hearing God’s call to leave their birthplace and journey to a new home, thus taking God’s blessing into the world. We can think of our own lives as a journey too – a journey towards what we were made to become, and what gives meaning and purpose to our lives. Each of us have our own way of living out that journey, but essentially our journey is into God’s life. Or to put it another way, the point of our lives comes from receiving God’s love and living out that love towards others.

Today’s gospel says that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. That’s a fancy way of saying our lives have meaning and purpose through receiving God’s love and living out that love towards others. The first thing that involves is not focussing on what’s wrong with the world, what’s wrong with other people, or even on what’s wrong with ourselves, but focussing on God’s goodness. It’s said that one’s appetite grows according to what feeds it, so the more we focus on God’s goodness, the more we will become aware of God’s goodness, and that will change how we cope with the world around us.

God’s goodness can seem fairly abstract. What does it mean when there seems to be so much wrong with the world? To find God’s goodness, all you have to do is look within yourself, to your longings and dreams. Driving along the road just outside of Port Elliot, a convoy of about 2o semi-trailers loaded with hay came along. I guess they were heading for Kangaroo Island. It was a very moving experience – all those people in the trucks driving all that way to help people and animals who were suffering from the fires. In a way it was humbling, but there was something more to it, a sense of something deeply wonderful and profound, that people would do that. It made me aware of God’s goodness, working through those people. If I let myself imagine that I could do anything I want, I can imagine myself driving truck full of hay to people on Kangaroo Island. I would love to do that. That desire, within myself, is God’s goodness within me. It’s part of my longings and dreams, through which God is drawing me to experience and share God’s love in the world. The more attention I pay to those longings and dreams, instead of focussing on what’s wrong with the world, the more aware I will become of God’s goodness and the more I will live it out.

If you do that and still find yourself bothered by what’s wrong with the world, don’t despair, because that bother is coming out of your longing for things to be different. That’s God within you, nudging you through your frustration, your fear, your anger, to pay attention to your deeper desires for what is good. You’re being bothered by what’s wrong with the world is a sign of your longing for God – longing for God’s love and longing to be able to share God’s love. So feed that appetite for love.

How do we come to want what we want?

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Lent 1, 1^st March 2020

The preface for Lent which is added to our Thanksgiving prayer in the Eucharist says that Jesus ‘was tempted in every way as we are, yet he did not sin’. Today the stories of the garden of Eden and of Jesus tempted by the devil in the wilderness, both mention temptation. In the garden of Eden story, the man and woman give in to the temptation to sin, whereas Jesus does not. We might interpret this to mean that Jesus holds the world record for being good, so that perhaps, as a baby, he never threw his food on the floor, as a child he never stole a biscuit from the biscuit jar, and as an adult, he always told the truth. But that’s not what it means for Jesus to be without sin.

The answer has something to do with what it was that the man and woman gave into, but Jesus did not, which was letting someone else tell you what to want. In other words, for your desire to be given to you.

The man and the woman were happy in the garden of Eden. God told them they could eat of every tree except one. They were satisfied with that and didn’t want anything else until the serpent came along. Before the serpent appeared, they didn’t want to eat the forbidden fruit, but afterwards they did. It could be that they were attracted to the fruit because it was forbidden, like when someone touches wet paint to see if it is really wet, despite the don’t touch sign. But the story tells us that the serpent caused the woman to desire the fruit. After the serpent spoke to her, the woman ‘saw that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired’. And then the woman passed on her desire to her husband.

This being given your desires by another person is not remarkable really. That’s generally how we come to desire things. We’re not born with a manual of how to be a human being, so part of becoming who we are is coming to desire things, and others help us with that. We come to desire things because others have them. This simple truth is what lies behind the tenth commandment, the last and most important of the second five commandments about avoiding violence towards others: Do not covet anything that is your neighbour’s. Except that’s a poor translation. What it really says is don’t desire anything that is your neighbour’s. Don’t want what is your neighbour’s. Behind that lies the truth that we tend to want what others have. Think of a group of children playing outside. One finds a stick and starts playing with it. How long will it be before others want that stick? The possession of the stick by one, results in a desire for it in others. Fortunately, we don’t seem to want everything others have, but there is a fair bit of wanting what others have. Without that there would probably be no wars.

Jesus also faces this situation, the temptation to have his desires given to him by another, except that he resists it. The devil wants Jesus to want what he wants – to possess what others need so they rely on you for their needs, to be able to dazzle people with amazing feats so they will follow you, and to be able to shape the world as he wants it. There are good reasons to want all of those things, but Jesus knows there are flaws in wanting them too.

Jesus doesn’t let the devil give him any desires, not because he’s super-resistant, but because he desires something else more than what the devil offers. Just before the Spirit shoved Jesus into the wilderness, he was baptised, and in his baptism, he had a profound experience of God’s love. The story puts it as him hearing a voice from heaven telling him he was precious. In other words, that God loved him absolutely, which implies that he would never need anyone else’s approval or assurance. He was free to be whatever he wanted and do whatever he wanted. It was the gift of life-giving freedom. That love from God became his deepest desire, what he wanted more than anything else. He was tempted to want what the devil offered, but none of it came close to his ongoing desire for God’s love.

In contrast with Jesus, the man and the woman in the garden of Eden gave in to the temptation to mimic the desire the serpent’s desire for the forbidden fruit, and then things deteriorated. They immediately realised they were naked and were ashamed – in other words, they felt there was something bad about themselves, something lacking. God had never said they should wear clothes. God never said they were deficient in any way, or needed to compensate for any lack. As far as God was concerned, they were just fine as they were.

The sewing fig leaves and loincloths was the start of their decline. Before long, they were afraid of God, in conflict with one another, and the earth suffered. Interestingly though, God then got out his sewing machine and made clothes for them, giving them what they wanted, so the story goes – saying that even though human beings may lose their way, God adjusts and still provides for our needs.

From since the serpent gave the desire for the fruit to the man and the woman, our desires have grown more and more: we’re always wanting more – more things, more approval and so on. The other side of being given our desires by another, or by others, is that we can end up feeling we lack things, such as our worth, being loveable, and so on, so we try to compensate for that. Advertisers have had been able to sell us stuff that we don’t need, we accumulate more than we need, and we can waste our lives trying to become the sort of people who we think would be better versions of ourselves than we are. There is a cost to all that – to ourselves, to our relationships and to the earth.

The deepest desire of any person is the desire to be loved, that is, to be approved of, or considered worthwhile. So much effort goes into pursuing that, unfortunately, from other people, who are not always perfect at satisfying that desire. Imagine how different life would be if everyone desired to be loved by the One who always gave it.

Jesus is the model human being. He shows us how different life can be if we allow our deepest desire for love to be given to us by God, so that we desire what we need and can always receive. The problem with human beings is not that we desire things. It’s that we sometimes desire the wrong things, by allowing the wrong desires to be given to us.

At our 10am service this morning, the choir will sing the words of a 15^th century song. Its message is summed up in the line ‘blessed be the time the apple taken was’. Behind that is the recognition that it is through our desiring the wrong things that eventually we can discover how to desire the right things, or how to be given the desire for what is life-giving, rather than what is not.

We cannot escape being given our desires by others, or at least some of them. Sometimes that will be a good thing, for our desires to help others and do other good things are probably also given to us by other people.

Allowing others to give us our desires is not what sin is. Sin is the rivalry that comes if our desires lead us into competition with one another. As we can’t avoid having desires given to us, and as some of them are good anyway, rather than trying to avoid being given what we want in life, the best thing is to allow God to be the one to give us our deepest desire. From that we can choose what else is worth desiring.

Our access to goodness only comes through our discovery of our complicity in hypocrisy*

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Epiphany 5, February 9^th, 2020

I thought that today I would talk about Climate Change, – but then I decided not to.

I wonder if just my suggesting I was going to talk about climate change resulted in any feelings arising in you. You may have felt glad I was going to address such a relevant topic. Or you may have felt deflated that you were going to be subjected to more talk about an issue which saturates our airwaves. If you knew the position I would take, and agreed with it, you would look forward to support coming your way; if you disagreed, you would probably brace yourself for opposition.

When it comes to serious issues, we tend to be either for or against a position. We assume that the view we hold to is the right one and that the view held by those who differ is the wrong view, after all, if we thought our view was wrong, we wouldn’t hold it. Following from this, we tend to view ourselves as right and those who differ as wrong, and we see ourselves as belonging to the group who are right, as opposed to the others. If we were going to phrase this in religious language, we would call ourselves the righteous and the others, sinners. The righteous are those who hold to the right values and do the right things. The sinners are those who do not.

The values we hold could be described as our own set of laws – rules if followed bring about the right action. We don’t come up with those rules all by ourselves though. As Christians, we consider laws, or commandments, given to us through scripture, especially Jesus’ love God and your neighbour, so I guess we think of God as our primary source for deciding what is right and what is wrong.

This way we come to decide what is right and what is wrong is necessary, but there’s a problem with it, which is to do with how we see those who differ from us as sinners, or ‘people who are wrong’. In the history of the church this has manifested itself in many ways, such as seeing believers as righteous and unbelievers as sinners. Married people were classed as righteous, but those who divorced as sinners. People who broke the law have been thought of as sinners, but law-abiders, or at least those who were not caught, as righteous. Heterosexual people have been seen as righteous, non-heterosexual people as sinners. These are the more explicit divisions created by judgement, but there have been other divisions which were not explicitly seen as good and bad, but superior and inferior, such as men being more suited to being in charge than women, and being better able to represent God because Jesus was male. Similarly, clergy were judged to be closer to God than the laity, and so held more power.

Once I was speaking with a man and he used a swear word. He immediately apologised, obviously thinking he’d done something bad. When people do that, I take it to be indicative of what the church has become for many people, which is a place of judgement: concerned, above all, with what’s right and what’s wrong, and so who’s right and who’s wrong. This flows from the overarching notion that our sense of what’s right and wrong is given to us by God, and seems reinforced by Jesus’ claim in today’s gospel passage, that he is the one who comes not to abolish, but to fulfil the law. That’s not what Jesus means though. By fulfilling the law, he means that he recasts it around the victim, so that the victim becomes the criteria by which the law is to be understood. The point of the law is not to catch people out and punish them, but to prevent the creation of victims or to at least lessen their suffering.

Long ago, the people of Israel, like the church, sought to live by what is good and reject what is bad, so they too created laws, based on their understanding of God’s will), but they ended up oppressing people and satisfying their own agendas. In our first reading today, we heard God roasting his people for that, through his prophet Isaiah. God said their society should provide for the needy and set e the oppressed free. The same is true for the church. It should be a safe place, where people can be themselves, rather than feel they should be something else, for only if we feel safe and accepted can we become the people God created us to be.

The way this comes about is by the church being a community which does not judge people, separating us into who is good and who is bad, sinners and righteous, so we can safely explore how to be human and how to share the earth and look after it. The trouble is, this pattern of judging and seeing ourselves as different to others is so entrenched in human society that we’re incapable of breaking away from it by ourselves. Even those who reject judgmentalism usually reject people who are judgmental.

How does Jesus save us then? How does Jesus help us deal with the issues such as climate change, which is so divisive in our present way of handling it? The answer comes in seeing that how Jesus helps us is not by providing us with laws to ‘shore up the order or structure of goodness in the world’ by calling us to join crusades in favour of this or that, but instead, he subverts our understanding of goodness (James Alison). He does this by showing us how the real sin of the world is the judgement – when we separate ourselves from others on the grounds that we’re right and they’re wrong. That always leads to crucifixion, in some form or another, whether it be exclusion or actual killing. Once we see this, we realise that seeing ourselves as righteous and others as sinners is hypocritical, because we are all sinners, we’re all caught up in and driven by judgement.

If we can see this, then instead of standing on opposite sides of the room to those who see climate change differently, or those who differ to our view of euthanasia, or abortion, or whatever, and sit together, as people who need to be freed from judgement and judgmentalism, then we’ll be on the same side and able to listen to and learn from each other, and create solutions and work out what it means to be human together.

To encourage us, I’ll finish with Jesus’ joke: no-one lights a lamp and places it under a bushel basket. You have to live in first century Palestine to get it, but as you don’t, I’ll explain. Jesus wasn’t talking about any lamp, but a special one – the Menorah, the lamp you lit for the festival of Hanukkah. The light of the lamp symbolised the loving acts of God throughout history, shining out through the windows of your home, reminding passers-by of that. More than that though, the purpose of the law, commanding you to light the Menorah for Hanukkah, was to remind you that you were meant to become a human version of that light. You were meant to live out what it represented. But there was a problem when it came to sex, which was very much encouraged during Hanukkah as a means of celebrating God’s creation. The law also required sex to occur in the dark, but you couldn’t put out the lamp, because blowing out the flame was extinguishing fire, which was work, and you couldn’t do work during Hanukkah, like on the Sabbath. So that’s where the bushel basket came in handy. If you placed it over the lamp, you’re in the dark and no work has been done. When Jesus said that no-one places a lit lamp under a bushel basket, he was making a joke, because people did. He was laughing at the hypocrisy of people lighting their Menorah with no intention of honouring what its purpose was.

We too are hypocrites, because the purpose of the law is not to oppress people, but to set them free, so they can discover how to be human together, but we make the law an instrument of oppression by using our rules to judge one another. The important thing to take away from this is that it’s okay that we are hypocrites, as long as we laugh at ourselves, like Jesus does, because then we’ve begun our

journey to not be. We start by seeing how that our judging is the real sin.

It is only when we’ve begun to stop judging and separating ourselves from one another, that we begin to do what God really wants us to do, which is care for each other and create a loving world, or in the words of Isaiah today: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the yoke, to let the oppressed go free… to share your bread with the hungry, house the homeless, clothe the naked and so on. It means to respect and nurture others’ humanity, rather than make them into victims so that we feel good about ourselves.

* Sermon title from a quote from James Alison “The Man Born Blind from Birth and the Subversion of Sin” Contagion 1997

We are blessed when our circumstances make us open to God’s life-giving energy

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Epiphany 4, 2^nd February 2020

St. Paul sums up a problem many people have with Christianity: the message about the cross is foolishness. To Christians, however, he goes on to say, it is the power of God.

Whether or not the cross is foolishness depends on what it stands for. If it stands for Jesus taking our place on the cross to pay God for our sins, then to me it would be foolishness and to be rejected. If, however, the cross stands for the generous, gentle and loving nature of God, then that’s worth paying attention to.

In today’s gospel story, we hear that Jesus saw the crowds (and) went up the mountain. That’s code for Jesus seeing into the lives of the people and knowing their experience and then teaching them where God is in all that. What he saw was the poverty of their spirit, their grief over losses, their vulnerability, their hunger to live good lives, their kindness, purity and so on. In his comments to his followers about those circumstances, he shows how alongside the hardship of all those circumstances, God is there, and that makes all the difference.

Jesus begins with ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’. To be poor in spirit is for your energy for life to come not so much from yourself, but from God within you. It’s that combination which takes a unique form in each individual, and enables us to become what we were born to be. And it is that which provides the vision and strength necessary for being of service to others. To be poor in spirit is a blessing because it is being open to God, the Source of Life. It is something that requires significant humility and trust.

Then Jesus says ‘blessed are those who mourn’. It’s not something I would say to a person grieving something or someone who is precious to them, however, it’s a good thing to store away in our thoughts. Mourning involves accepting loss, and when we do that, it opens the possibility of what or who was lost, taking on a new significance. The pattern of resurrection promises new life of some sort from situations of death. How that can be, is usually impossible to imagine. Perhaps Jesus is reminding us here that because life has many disappointments and some great losses, we should value and give time to mourning those things, in order that we can receive what God might be able to give us out of them. It’s not so much a matter of ‘moving on, or letting go’, but finding a new significance for what is lost or who has gone.

Then Jesus says ‘blessed are the meek’. What’s the blessing in meekness? When you look at the world, it’s not the meek who come out on top. Those who do come out on top, appear to have the power and most of the goodies, but do they have fulfilled lives? For some, the only way to be happy is to own and rule their part of the world. For others, it’s simple things, such as getting on with family, having friends, being reasonable to people and doing your best in your job or whatever else you do. The blessing that comes with meekness is finding contentment in simple things. It’s having all that money can’t buy.

Then Jesus says ‘blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness’. Righteousness is being right with God. It’s being able to sit in God’s presence and be comfortable with yourself. It’s about having integrity, and not wasting your life, but living to the full. No-one achieves that completely, but God is merciful, so it doesn’t matter. The blessing comes from your hunger and thirst, which is your drive to live to the full, to be fully human, with all its ups and downs. The point Jesus is making is that regardless of shortcomings, the best you can do is keep trying, because then you are open to new possibilities. If you take the opposite path and focus on your failures, you won’t ever transcend them. Jesus says that if you ask God for something, you will receive. That doesn’t mean you will receive what you want, but you will receive something. Having a hunger and thirst for righteousness is asking for what is good, and asking is being open to God.

Then Jesus says ‘blessed are the merciful’. The blessing of being merciful is that it also involves being open to God. Being merciful towards others is being a channel of God’s love for them. If you channel God’s love, it is available for yourself as much as others. That’s a kind of chicken and egg situation, as love for others and love for yourself come from each other. You can’t be truly merciful for others if you aren’t for yourself. True kindness for others is rooted in kindness for yourself. Any other source of kindness for others is manipulation. Forgiveness is another aspect of being merciful. Like love, forgiveness is an essential part of a life blessed by God, and like love, you are incapable of receiving forgiveness from others or forgiving yourself if you do not forgive others, for the same process is involved. To be forgiving then, is a blessing, because it allows us to accept forgiveness.

Then Jesus says ‘blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’. Jesus also taught his disciples that if they wanted to see God (‘the Father’) all they had to do was stand in his place. In other words do what he did. Be like him. Or as it says in the Eucharistic prayer ‘do this, in remembrance of me’. To be pure in heart is to love. When we can appreciate people, despite their flaws, and be generous and compassionate, our experience of others brings us close to God.

Then Jesus says ‘blessed are the peacemakers’. Peacemakers are blessed because they already have peace in their hearts. You can only make peace if you have it in your heart already, so inner peace is the blessing peacemakers acquire. Arriving at that requires significant effort though. Adam Goodes, one-time Australian of the Year, said there was a long process of inner work behind the moment he chose to confront the girl who made a racist comment at him during a football game. Inner peace also brings the blessing of strength – strength to act, even in the face of fear.

Then Jesus says ‘blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake’. This is an unfortunate sign that you are on the right track, if your cause is truly good. Also, ‘blessed are you when people … utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account’. It means you have hit on a truth. People only respond with evil and falsehood if there is no truth that can be raised against you. When individuals, nations or groups begin to fight dirty, it’s because they have no truth to fight with. The blessing here (which is a mixed blessing!) is that it confirms you are right. Violence is often only a last resort for those who exploit and oppress, because it exposes the false nature of their cause. At the end of his life, Jesus allowed those against him to do what they wanted to him. Their violence towards him only revealed their cause was evil and without truth.

Jesus shows that in all these circumstances, there is an aspect of transcendence, in the sense of something more to the picture, possibilities which may not be obvious. Another way to speak of those things is to consider them ‘God energy’, that is, God’s presence which transforms circumstances in subtle ways.

When we humble ourselves, when we suffer, when we endure hardship trying to make the world better, our reward is not handed out to us in the afterlife, like an Oscar at the Academy Awards, but there is an inherent reward or blessing in our action, because of God’s presence there.

Forgiveness frees us to incarnate love
Sermon by Andy Wurm, Advent 4, December 22nd 2019

When Jesus’ mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said ‘Don’t do that’.

Do what? Dismiss Mary. Why was Joseph going to dismiss Mary? Because even though he wanted to spare her public disgrace, he was a righteous man, and Mary being pregnant, not by him, was a breach of his righteousness, a scandal. It was, according to the rules of their society, a sin, and so Joseph was going to distance himself from the sinner. Here, right at the start of his life, even while Jesus is still in the womb, is rivalry and its peace-delivering resolution, scapegoating. Rivalry, through which we establish our identity by defining ourselves against others, involves separating ourselves apart from others who are deemed not like us. Joseph was about to affirm his place in society as belonging to the group which behave respectably. The angel says ‘don’t do that’. Don’t make Mary into a scapegoat in order to preserve your identity. Don’t make yourself acceptable to others, by making her not. And ironically, through this very pregnancy, which you are considering using as a means to uphold your honour, God is going to undo all mechanisms for doing that. God is going to save people from their sins.

Prior to the story of Jesus’ birth, the gospel writer presents Jesus’ genealogy, tracing his ancestry all the way back to Abraham. It’s Matthew’s way of saying this is the fulfilment of Judaism. He also inserts a number of women into the long list of men, four of whom engaged in non-respectable sexual activity. This is to prepare the reader for Mary’s situation, but also to warm us up to the fact that God’s action transcends what is socially acceptable. That’s reinforced by the fact that the baby to be born shall be called Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’, and not ‘God is with us only if we don’t get pregnant outside of marriage’, or ‘God is with us, only if we are Jewish, or Christian or Muslim, or Australian’, or if only anything else.

Joseph proves himself a good bloke in following the angel’s directive to name the baby Jesus, meaning ‘God saves’, or in the case of this particular Jesus, Matthew tells us, God ‘saves us from sin’. And there we have the heart of Christianity: we are saved from sin. What does that mean? Why is it good news?

Let’s think of this in terms of what we are doing when we confess our sins in our worship. We might think of it in terms of asking God for forgiveness for all the ways we have stuffed up, for bad things we have done. It might be to cleanse ourselves from guilt, to be right with God and other people. It’s something we have to do regularly, because we always fall short. Even when we receive forgiveness, we continue to sense that we’ll eventually fail again and so carry a sort of spiritual report-card, or slate, with our record on it, awaiting God, our judge, to set us free from our ‘crimes’. The trouble with all this is that means we are in rivalry with God, against God, or God is against us, in competition with us, not on our side, but wanting us to be different, something else, better, more this or that.

Seeing God as in rivalry with us means we have failed to receive the profound insight that the prophet Isaiah made 700 years before Jesus, which was monotheism: that there is one God. It was a huge advance on how God was understood in his time, – which was as the best among all the gods. If that was so, then his god would have been in competition with other gods, and so for example, need defending, as in the case of Elijah, fighting against the representatives of other gods for his god’s honour. This is not just a fight over beliefs, for it directly translates to how we treat each other. Isaiah discovered there was only one God, who was God for all people and was with all people –Emmanuel. That’s why in the passage from Isaiah set for today (7:10-16), Isaiah, on behalf of God, urges the king not to engage in the conflict he is being pulled into with his neighbouring kings against the Assyrian Empire. Rather than fighting, he must act on the basis of humankind as one, created by the one God, who cares unconditionally for all, and therefore is not in rivalry with us.

That God is outside of rivalry is reinforced by the inclusion of non-Jewish women in Jesus’ genealogy, and the angel’s directive to Joseph to not engage in rivalry over Mary’s pregnancy. There is one God, who is with us. Not who is with us as long as we’re good and don’t sin etc. If we think God is only with us, or favours us, if we are good, or if we ask for forgiveness for our failings, then we are trying to satisfy God and treating God as in being in opposition to us. That’s called idolatry.

If, on the other hand, God is not opposed to us, then what is sin? Sin is rivalry. It is what Jesus takes upon himself on the cross, for what else put him there than people in competition with him? Jesus’ prayer asking God to forgive those who killed him, ‘Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing’, reflects the fact that humanity is so engrossed in and driven by rivalry, that we can’t even see what we’re really doing. Those who killed Jesus thought they were doing something good, which needed to be done, like we do when we think we have to get ahead of others, prove ourselves right, put others down, to shore up our own position, or punish our enemies. Jesus dies and comes back to forgive us. That’s God showing us our rivalry, but at the same time forgiving us for it, saying it doesn’t change God’s care for us. It remains unconditional. So forgiveness is God’s gift to set us free. That means when we confess our sins, we are not asking for God’s forgiveness, we are responding to it. We only even become aware of what sin really is because we are forgiven for it, so forgiveness of sin proceeds our awareness of it. It’s like we are forgiven and so can look back and say ‘oh, that’s what we’re set free from’. Our confession of sin is the expression of our heart, which upon realising what we have been caught up in, is broken and contrite. (Psalm 51:17) We see our truth.

We are set free from rivalry, but the big question is whether we will take up that freedom and use it to transcend the barriers of social acceptability and power struggles. Will we allow it to enable us to forgive our enemies and create better lives for ourselves and one another?

At the school my daughter attended, they held causal days, when students gave a donation to charity and didn’t have to wear their school uniform. About half the kids choose to wear their sports uniform. Why? Because students judge one another by what they wear. They know (at least unconsciously) that through fashion, they compete with one another. Adults do this too. Imagine the power of being free from that? Imagine being able to wear what you want. Imagine being able to say and do what you want, with no fear or concern at all about what others would think of you! Absolutely no need for approval. We have all tasted that. That is what we see in Jesus, who, being without sin, i.e. without rivalry, is free to love, because his desires are not shaped by rivalry, but (divine) love. To repent of our sins is to be set free from rivalry, it is to choose to be free of any need for approval from others and be free of the need to win, to make ourselves acceptable. It is the Creator bringing creation to fulfilment by unleashing within us the ability to play our true role in the world, which is to incarnate divine love.