I’m about to ask you to try to do the impossible. It’s impossible to do this fully because of the experience pretty much all of us carry. As Christians, we are conditioned to look at everything through resurrection eyes. Even those who don’t hold to church teaching on resurrection are still conditioned to look at things this way, because in church, references to resurrection are inescapable. In this season of Easter we have fifty days – seven Sundays – to focus on resurrection intensively; through the rest of the year our liturgy is rich in words and images of resurrection; every part of the New Testament is written with resurrection eyes; and this has shaped the way we see things through more than two thousand years of church tradition. I’m not saying this is a bad thing!

But what I want you to do is impossible because these resurrection eyes we have are not simply glasses we can put on and take off at will. But I’m going to ask you to imagine that they are.

Just for a short time, I’d like us all to try and take our resurrection glasses off, as if the idea of resurrection was something rare; something we might never even think about; nothing more to us than a faint hope, or maybe just wishful thinking. That’s precisely what it is for many people outside the church today.

But let’s keep going with this. Now, imagine we’re living under the colonial regime of a foreign power – the most powerful empire in the world. Some people around us, especially the dominant religious and political authorities, collaborate with that regime. Some people just go about their daily lives as best they can. And some people get involved in resistance movements. Our group includes people from all three categories.

One thing we have in common is having been drawn to a charismatic leader with revolutionary teachings of nonviolent resistance – not only to the religious authorities and the regime; but, perhaps even more, to the everyday oppressions we all get caught up in – criticism, resentment, envy, hostility, bitterness, violence, guilt and shame, to name a few. In our short time together we’ve been inspired and amazed as we’ve seen him turn lives around by his healing presence and powerful love.

But on Thursday night just gone our leader was arrested, and on Friday he was executed, and we are devastated. This morning they discovered that his tomb had been opened and his body was gone. A bit later Mary came rushing in telling us she’d seen him alive – but grief can make you crazy.

Now it’s Sunday evening and we’re gathered together. We’ve locked the doors, because they might come after us next.

This is what it’s like, I think, for the disciples at the beginning of our Gospel reading today.

And then, all of a sudden, Jesus appears – in the flesh – and everyone practically jumps out of their skin!

‘Peace be with you,’ he says, which is probably exactly what they need to hear at this point. Jesus shows them his hands and his side. It turns out Mary wasn’t mad after all. Every man, woman and child there can see him for themselves – just imagine the joy flooding the room!

Then Jesus says it again, ‘Peace be with you.’ Jane Bodley once told me of a friend who took what she heard from the Bible without question. But one time, when they heard this story together, Jane’s friend mused, ‘I wonder why he said it a second time?’

I once saw a church sign that said, ‘Peace is joy at rest’. I love that idea.

When Jesus says ‘Peace be with you’ a second time, maybe it’s because he wants their joy to settle into a soothing, healing peace – which they actually need right now. And maybe they’re going to need that greeting of peace reinforced to help them process what’s coming next: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ With these words, the disciples are transformed from followers (or learners) into apostles – those who are sent; people with a mission to fulfil.

The mission Jesus gives them (and us) is to share God’s greeting of peace: to get out there and deal with ‘sin as it afflicts and affects the world;’¹ and to ‘bear the forgiving, transforming love of God into every sphere of human experience’.

And, to empower them to fulfil their mission, Jesus breathes on them, saying, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’– the breath of God – the same breath that brought humanity into existence at the dawn of creation; the same breath that breathed new life into Jesus’ own body in the tomb; the breath that inspires and enlivens and empowers God’s people to do things they’d never dreamed of before.

But not everybody is involved in this encounter. Thomas is somewhere else this evening, and he misses out. When the other disciples tell him they’ve seen Jesus, he’s a little skeptical, to say the least. ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side,’ he says, ‘I will not believe.’ And why should he? He hasn’t seen Jesus yet. Surely, his doubt is just as understandable as the others’ was before Jesus appeared to them. Just because multiple people think the same thing doesn’t make it true. They could all be deluded, and this is a far-fetched claim. A whole week goes by, and nothing happens.

Next Sunday evening, Thomas is with the others, the doors still shut, and Jesus turns up again.

Please note what Jesus does not do. He does not say, “O ye of little faith”, or, “Why did you doubt?” Instead, he gives himself, beginning with the same greeting of peace, then inviting Thomas into precisely the experience he needs, to see and feel for himself, so trust and faith can grow.

With the words, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Thomas becomes the very first person to explicitly identify Jesus as God. His doubt has been transformed into as firm a faith as any.

Then Jesus says, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me?’

Well, yes, and so have the others.

But there will be disciples who won’t get the chance to see Jesus in this way; disciples who will have to rely on what those who have seen Jesus tell them; disciples who knew Jesus before his death; those who will later become disciples through what they hear and learn; disciples like you and me.

‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.’ These words, as one commentator puts it, ‘turn Thomas’s faith outward; his faith in what he can see will be replicated by those who do not see’.² Thomas will eventually carry God’s greeting of peace and the good news of Jesus all the way to India, sharing his experience, identifying with people’s struggles, and showing through his life that doubt and faith walk hand-in-hand.

Our experience of God’s peace and new life in Jesus is not Thomas’s experience. Our experience is our experience, and this is what we have to share. This is what we are called to do: to share our experience, to identify with people’s struggles, and to show in our own lives that doubt and faith walk hand-in-hand.

~ Rev’d Sonya Patterson

We’re invited to believe in something harder to believe in than God raising someone from death

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Easter 2, 28^th April 2019

Once, around Easter time, I had a strange dream. It was about our Easter celebrations. We had organised the most fabulous display, more creative than ever before, with flowers, music and even fireworks, in a way that could only happen in a dream. Except, whoever was responsible for putting it all together, didn’t understand how it should all work. It was not going as it should have. Elements of the celebrations were combining with other elements in totally bizarre ways, much like the surrealistic paintings of Salvador Dali, in which swans reflected in a lake become elephants, clouds in the sky are actually a pair of giant lips, or memory is represented by melted clocks. In this dream, all the elements of our Easter celebration were present, but not as they were meant to be.

For the average person, this would be a strange dream, but for a priest, this was a nightmare, because it’s my responsibility to see that Easter is celebrated in a way that conveys what Easter is all about. In place of that, the elements of celebration were distorted in ways that are not possible. I woke up feeling very disturbed and frustrated, because I couldn’t do anything about it. It was beyond my control.  So, at 3am, I began to wonder why I had had this nightmare of a distorted celebration of Easter, when it hit me, that this was not a distortion of Easter. This was a revelation of Easter, because Easter is just like that dream: God takes the way things are in the world and makes something totally new out of them, in a way that is not humanly possible. It means that Easter changes the world. It makes something totally new possible.

Previously, resurrection was not possible. There are things in the world that serve as metaphors of resurrection, such as a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, but they are only metaphors. The resurrection of Jesus is something totally novel, rather than a more spectacular version of those sorts of things.

In today’s gospel passage (John 20:19-31) Jesus’ disciples are together in a house, with the doors locked, because they are afraid of the religious authorities. Out of that scared group, Jesus forms the church. The meaning of the word church comes from root words which mean a group of people who are called out. Jesus calls his disciples out of their locked place. His first words to them are ‘Peace be with you’. They’re the most common resurrection words in the bible and we need to hear them too. That’s why we say them to each other in our Eucharist. They’re not just addressed to us to calm us in our daily anxieties, nor were they spoken to just calm the disciples in their fear. The peace Jesus imparted to his disciples was a peace in and beyond a community who are discovering what it means to be raised with Christ, that is, how that looks in the relationships between them and as they go out into the world. (Uncovering Sin by Rosy Fairhurst)

In order to be a community shaped and empowered by the risen Christ, it must be a community of believers, and in John’s Gospel, believing means accepting that God is at work in Jesus, and then also imitating him. Thomas struggles with that. We are told that Jesus tells him to stop doubting, but he actually never uses the word doubt. (Bad translation.) What he says is don’t be unbelieving, but believing. So what we’re seeing here is Thomas going through the process of maturing in faith. Initially, Thomas is not ready to commit. He’s not ready to accept that God raised Jesus, nor is he ready to imitate him. He’s the religious equivalent of the adolescent – starting with questioning and needing to come to truth in his own way. (Maybe one reason we have so few adolescents in the church is because we forgot that coming to belief is a process which takes time.) And when we see what it is that we’re really being asked to believe, we might realise that even though we’ve been coming to church for years, we’re not sure if we fully believe yet.

What is it that we’re been asked to believe? What is the resurrection of Jesus? Are we being asked to believe that God raised someone from death? That is amazing, but it doesn’t change the world. (Remember I said in the beginning that the world is changed by Jesus’ resurrection.) No, it’s not that God raised someone from death. We are asked to believe in something that is much harder to believe in, and that is that God raised the crucified Jesus from death. What is so world-changing about that? Well, Jesus was crucified by our rivalry, our violence towards each other. Along with all humanity, we are implicit in that. We are guilty, but what does God do with that? How does God respond? By giving Jesus back to us as the forgiving one. In other words, God deals with our violence through forgiveness, God heals our violence through forgiveness, or to put that another way, the answer to violence in the world, is through non-violence. That is harder to believe than that God might have raised someone from death. When others are violent towards us, the solution is through us being non-violent in return. Believing that and living by that is what believing the resurrection of the crucified Jesus means.

We are forgiven for being violent towards others, towards ourselves, towards the earth. That is God’s non-violent response to our violence. We are commissioned as a community of faith, to spread that message to others. Jesus says if we don’t tell people their sins are forgiven, they will not experience forgiveness. That’s because the world will not give it to them. It will not set them free, for the world locks people in sin. It fosters reciprocity – and eye for an eye for those who hurt us, and it fosters the maintaining of advantages we can hold over others. Humanity needs to know it does that, but it is free from it, and we, the church, will express humanity’s freedom, by being non-judgemental, forgiving and inclusive.

The resurrection is forgiveness, being set free from rivalry. Do we believe in the resurrection? That is the foundational Christian belief. It means believing that forgiveness, or non-violence is the answer to violence. Do we believe that? Will we therefore imitate that? Will we forgive our enemies? Will we work for non-violent solutions to conflict? We will never believe in it for the world, we will never be able to forgive our enemies until we first accept that we are forgiven, and that means acknowledging our sin, i.e. the ways we are caught up in rivalry. We might do that by being competitive, or we might adopt the other side of the coin, which is to put ourselves down, so rather than placing ourselves above others, we place ourselves below them, but it’s just another version of the same thing. When we see how we do that, and know the damage it does, but that God forgives us for it, we can begin to let go of it –stop acting that way. But of course, like Thomas, it will probably take time to work through. Belief is a work in progress. And unless we start close to home, acknowledging and beginning to change the patterns of violence in our own lives, we will never work out how to do it in the world, where violence is more powerful.

As the church, we are called to spread the message of the resurrection of Jesus to save the world. That does not mean get people to call Jesus their personal saviour so they won’t go to hell. It doesn’t even mean get everyone to be Christian. What is does mean is convert people to the way of non-violence. It doesn’t matter whether they are Hindu, Muslim, have an indigenous spirituality, or remain atheists. We are not about people changing their religion or world-view. We are about them redeeming it. The goal is peace. It’s what we all need and deep down, all want. But do we believe in it enough to live it out? It’s harder to believe in than someone being raised from the dead is, because it’s a transformation of the way the world operates into something totally different and uncontrollable.

The resurrection occurs ‘out there’ and within us

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Easter 21^st April 2019

All biblical experiences of resurrection (meeting the risen Christ) involve people with some sort of prior connection to Jesus. Doesn’t that make the accounts of people who claim to witness the resurrection suspect? Of course they would say he rose from death. They have a vested interest in that. But to think like that is to fail to grasp that the resurrection involves the coming to life of Jesus and those close to him. There is one person in the Bible who met the risen Christ, without having met him before, and that was St Paul, but he was closely tied to Jesus through persecuting his followers. This tells us something about how the resurrection can transform us too. It also explains why, although forgiveness of sins, (i.e. being set free from our compulsion to sacrifice one another) is given to us as a gift from God, repentance is necessary to receive it, so that it can transform our lives. Please notice though, this is the opposite of being forgiven only if we repent. God does not forgive us because we repent. We repent because we have been forgiven.

There’s a television series called Anh Do’s Brush With Fame. It’s a series in which the Vietnamese comedian interviews people, while painting their portrait. I really enjoyed the episode where he interviewed singer Jessica Mauboy. Jessica Mauboy has an extremely warm and bright personality. She is so down-to-earth and straight-forward, and has a clear sense of what has shaped her life to make her the person she is today. When Anh Do asked about the influence of the runner Cathy Freeman in her life, she spoke about the day Cathy Freeman visited her school and inspired her to become what she is today. Just the memory of that visit made her more animated, until Anh Do suggested there were dozens of little girls who in twenty years’ time will say that Jessica Mauboy came to their school and changed their lives. Initially, she reacted with joy, but as she began to describe how happy that makes her feel, she began to cry, because I think she was overwhelmed with the awareness that she was talking about having received something wonderful that was bigger than herself and wanting to pass it on. She was like Mary Magdalene meeting the risen Christ at the tomb, realising that what had happened to him, had happened to her as well, and she wanted to share it with others – described in the gospel as telling others she had ‘seen the Lord’

It was only possible for Jessica Mauboy to give to others what had been given to herself, because she had received it through repentance. Only if we understand this, can we know what resurrection is.

Jessica Mauboy said that what touched her about Cathy Freeman’s visit to her school was that she was an indigenous girl, who shared her culture, had been through many of the same struggles in life, but showed her that there was light at the end of the tunnel. Cathy Freeman showed her that it doesn’t matter what your background is – the important thing is what’s inside and what can be generated, so that what you can give is more important than your past. Anh Do noticed that she said what she could GIVE, rather than what she could ACHIEVE, and she responded saying that she loves being on stage and without a thought about anything else, is able to just to give the gift that is purely herself. Jessica Mauboy may not be able to live that way all the time, but what she describes in that interview is a textbook account of being shaped by the resurrection of Christ.

I mentioned before that biblical characters who encounter the risen Christ had a specific connection to Jesus, which allows us to see what’s going on, but for people who aren’t in the Bible, the same life transformation can happen with or without that. What that interview showed, was that Cathy Freeman’s influence enabled Jessica Mauboy to realise the possibility of disengaging herself from what she refers to as ‘her past’. By that, she means that which defined what she was and what she could be. She had been awakened to the possibility that she could let go of that and be free of any restrictive influence it had on her. That is freedom from rivalry, from the mechanism of violence, which gave her a restricted sense of what she could be. Repentance, in her case, involved letting go, giving up, what had previously defined her, and thus releasing within herself a new potential – not the ability to achieve things (which means playing the games involved in having to be a somebody, who is special and stands out from others), but a potential which allows her to be herself and give herself to others. The world can never take that away from her, because it didn’t give it to her.

Now I want to share a different experience of resurrection, in which a person is able to break free from the power of rivalry, be true to themselves and give graciously, even within an institution which persecutes them. James Alison is a Catholic theologian, who happens to be gay. Some years ago, he was told that unless he was sacked, certain religious superiors would no longer support the college he taught at. It was a devastating blow. His gut reaction was to respond by playing the victim card. That would involve adopting one of the mechanisms of violence our culture gives us, which is the sacred victim: a role he could have used as a weapon to attack one of the stereotypical ‘baddies’ which our culture also gives us – namely, in this case, judgemental and oppressive religious leaders. But, he says, God had other ideas, and while on retreat, he learnt a greater truth about himself, which set him free.

His first discovery was becoming aware that God had nothing to do with the oppression he was experiencing. It was simply a mechanism of human violence, of rivalry, and nothing more. He came to this awareness, when he realised that only a few of his critics had actually ever met him, so their attack could not be taken personally. They were just caught up in a mechanism of violence so much, that they couldn’t see it. When he realised he was dealing with a mechanism, whose participants were its prisoners, he could begin to forgive them.

Further than that, he also came to see how, in fact, he too, had bought into the mechanism of violence, as he had been on a crusade of sorts, powered by a deep resentment towards individuals and an institution which had persecuted him. He had been trying to manipulate the church into accepting him, because deep down, he did not believe God accepted him. He had sought a sense of self from the church, instead of God. But the church is a human structure, and like any human structure, it is incapable of providing a true sense of self to us. Only God can do that. He had been trying to acquire an acceptable identity within structures which are shaped by and create rivalry, and the only way you can do that, in the midst of such violent structures, is through violence. He describes that course of action as a form of idolatry – worshipping the church, not God. (God is the only One who can give us our true identity, for God is free of violence and rivalry, and so unconditionally loving.) On becoming aware of this, he realised that he too was in need of forgiveness. It was through repenting of, or letting go of, his own participation in the mechanisms of violence, that allowed him to receive forgiveness.

This is the forgiveness, or setting free, from mechanisms of violence that the risen Christ provides for us, shown to us in the gospel account of Jesus forgiving those who killed him. It is in appropriating this forgiveness for ourselves that allows us to also forgive others, and then be truly free to give ourselves to others, as Jessica Mauboy put it. Or, in the language of St Paul, writing to the Christians at Colossae, it’s the process of setting your minds on things that are above, not on the things that are on the earth, for

you (as defined by mechanisms of violence) have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. In other words, your true identity is given by God. And we see that played out by Jesus asking Mary the rhetorical question – whom are you looking for? She says she is looking for him, which is the opening he is waiting for, where he can provide who she is really looking for, which is herself. He then gives her her name: her true identity: Mary.

The cross exposes the violence of the world

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Good Friday, April 19^th 2019

A ten year old should be able to understand why Jesus died on the cross, so I’m going to attempt to explain it to your inner ten year old.

Imagine a class of school kids. There’s one kid who’s a bit odd and the rest of the kids pick on him. Why do they pick on him? For any number of reasons. Maybe they just decided he’s a dickhead. Jesus comes along and takes the place of that kid. Now, instead of picking on that kid, the class turns on Jesus. Together the class feels strong and united, but that kid is set free. That’s why Jesus died on the cross.

Notice there was no mention of God. It’s purely kids ganging up on someone.

Now I’ll give you another version of the same thing, but this time, because it’s adults involved, it’s more sophisticated. They can’t just gang up on someone for being a dickhead. They need a more sophisticated justification.

This is a group of adults who bear the titles of Scribe and Pharisee: they’re the interpreters of the law and the keepers of the law. Someone comes along who they don’t like because he challenges their teachings, so they create a reason to gang up on him. They claim he has broken their laws and if they don’t put a stop to it, society will fall apart. Deciding he must die strengthens their identity and forges a friendship with the Romans, with whom they were previously enemies. It is for the good of the nation.

Now Jesus is not dumb. He knows they operate like this, so why does he play into their hands? Why does he antagonise them, knowing what it will lead to? Throughout the gospels he makes it clear he knows what’s going to happen. It’s not anything that God will bring about. It’s simply what happens when you challenge those who like power.

As with the example of the classroom, Jesus chooses the place of the victim, and he does so intentionally. He seeks to draw out the truth, make those with power show their true mode of operation. When someone is picked on for reasons others find acceptable, the violence against them is accepted, even considered respectable. But when the victim is a good man, who has done no wrong, then the violence done against him becomes obvious and the system which destroys him loses its justification. Exposing the truth takes away its power.

Part of the sophistication when adults act in this way is the creation of myths which justify the violence done to the victim. Many ancient myths served that purpose. Even Christians have done that too, creating the notion that God has been offended by human sin, so punishment is required to restore the relationship between God and humanity. Then Jesus was slotted into the role of the one to be punished and order is maintained: peace between God and humankind is restored. All it requires is allegiance on the part of believers to their status as law- breakers, who should show gratefulness for God’s kindness to them.

But did God actually ever actually demand punishment for human wickedness? You might point to those numerous stories in the Old Testament in which God certainly does. There are even stories of God punishing people for simply not being his chosen ones. Usually myths and accounts of history hide or gloss over the violence done by the victors, who are also the ones who write the, but the Old Testament is different. There, the violence becomes increasingly explicit and therefore increasingly difficult to justify, eventually reaching a point where there could no longer be any justification for claiming that God was behind the violence toward victims. That leaves the only conclusion to be that God has nothing to do with the violence and it is nothing other than human violence, projected onto God. The ultimate revelation of that is in Jesus, in whom God demonstrates an absolute absence of violence.

Not only does God not require punishment for breaking the law, code or rules, but God chooses to stand in for the victim human beings require, in order that we may see what we do.

Christians have not always grasped this. That’s because when we really get what Jesus did by allowing himself to be made a victim, is starts to undo something that is integral to the way we live with one another. Like everyone else, we are used to this mechanism which creates and maintains order through creating victims. It is so entrenched into our way of living, that it shapes the very way we see life. The need to create victims is not seen as something we choose, but something that is given. We believe there just are people who should be sacrificed for the common good.

So there is a Christian version of human sacrifice, for which the myth of Jesus as crucified to appease God for the wickedness of the world, provides the mythical underpinning. It makes everyone a second generation victim, by forcing them to accept that they should have been sacrificed for their sin, but in his kindness God sent his Son to take their place. Yes, God did send his Son to take their place, but not because God required it. God sent his Son because humanity requires it. Humanity required sacrifice for sin, for breaking law, violating code or just going against the status quo. God sending his son is not passing the buck. It is God in human form allowing us to sacrifice him so that our mechanism of maintaining goodness and order may be undone.

This Christian version of the sacrificial mechanism can lead to a sense of unworthiness, in which people feel there is something wrong with being labelled as perpetually disappointing God and depending on God’s condescension to be right with God. Only by absolutely not resisting human violence could God convince us that God has nothing to do with that.

By taking on the role of victim and exposing the labelling of individuals as sinners who should be punished, as a lie, other victims of this mechanism are set free. The leper who was told that he must be excluded from society because God doesn’t like lepers, discovers it’s a lie, and God doesn’t hate him at all. The woman caught in adultery. The woman who met Jesus at a well. Outsiders discover they are not outsiders with God. It’s a lie made up by human beings, who they no longer need fear, because the greater authority, God, requires no sacrifice for breaking the status quo, challenging the order of society, its rules, codes or accepted way things should be.

The trouble is that we are caught up creating outsiders, labelling others as sinners, and deviants, sacrificing them to our need to maintain a sense of being right and good. Their suffering makes us feel strong. Jesus’ death on the cross calls to us through their suffering and calls to others through the suffering they inflict upon us, to stop and find another way of living together. The sin of the world Jesus saves us from is bullying, victimisation, sacrificing one another for the alleged social good.

He saves us by showing that his little part of the world is run by the same mechanism which very much runs the whole world, including our lives. His death is what we do to others, what others do to us and even what we do to ourselves. In this act of sacrificial love, God is asking us to stop.

Sermon by Andy Wurm for Maundy Thursday 2019

At the last supper, Jesus shared bread and wine with his closest disciples. He took a simple meal, a simple ritual, and imprinted it with himself, so that by repeating it, people like us could remember him. Remembering Jesus in that way is not just remembering him though – not in the sense we usually use the term to just mean recalling to mind. Here it’s more a case of making present.

But the writer of John’s gospel tells us there is much more going on here. This last supper of Jesus is connected to all that will follow, which means when we re-enact the last supper, we to will connect with all that follows.

Basically, what’s going on here is Jesus is giving himself to his disciples, to the world and to us. But then there’s the question of what we will do with that.

Two words that are significant here are handing over (one word) and eat. But what’s interesting about these two words is that they can both mean two different things. The word for ‘handing over’ can also mean betray, and the word for ‘eat’ can also mean ‘destroy’. So the gospel writer is telling us that what occurs can have two meanings. So, Jesus handing himself over, can also mean he is betrayed. Jesus giving his body and blood can also mean he is destroyed by one who eats it. And there is more than one who eats a morsel of bread, so the possibility of destroying what’s given is there for all who are present.

In the last supper, Jesus hands himself over to his followers, by imprinting himself on the bread and wine. He transmits himself to them and to us. So they, and we therefore, become the recipients of his body and blood.

We are the new owners of all that he is. Hence in our Eucharistic prayer we recite Jesus’ words ‘this is my body, which is given for you, do this in remembrance of me’. In other words, do this to become me, so from now on you will be my body, my life’. And so also in the Eucharist, we proclaim ourselves to be the Body of Christ. In washing the disciples’ feet, Jesus imparts a final lesson on what that means.

After we have finished stripping the church, we hear what comes next, which is Judas heading off to betray Jesus. Some of the early church theologians talked about that as Jesus was putting himself on a hook, and the devil taking the bait. By not resisting what Judas and others will do and all that follows, Jesus will be trapped by their cunning plan. But the very act of trapping him and then killing him will expose their behaviour for what it is, and so dethrone their righteousness, by which they justify and mask the rivalry and competition which runs their lives and the systems which they serve.

Jesus can claim that Now the Son of Man has been glorified, because all that stands in the way of humanity becoming what it was created for is being deconstructed.

Eternal life is right in front of us

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Palm Sunday Evensong14th April 2019

Some Greeks went to see Jesus. They approached the first disciple they could find with a Greek name, who told the other disciple with a Greek name, and then they went and told Jesus, who said ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’, which in Australian lingo would be ‘I reckon I’d better tell people what I’m on about now’. And so he told people that he came to invite people into a better way of living – a more human way of living. And to describe that he used metaphors of living through dying and holding on through letting go. He used metaphors because he was talking about a practice, a way of life, and rather than be prescriptive about how people should do that, he just wanted to give them pointers to get them on their way. Actually, he wasn’t at all keen about telling people what they should do. Once when someone asked Jesus to tell his brother what to do, Jesus replied ‘who made me a judge over you?’

Jesus says that we must hate our life in this world in order to keep it for eternal life. To understand that, we must remember that Jesus lived in a time and place where people strongly exaggerated to make a point. So, someone might have said of their neighbour ‘I hope he roasts in hell forever’ to mean that he finds his neighbour irritating. When Jesus speaks of hating your life in this world, in order to keep it for eternal life, he means to not prefer it over the alternative. We also must remember that when he contrasts THIS WORLD with eternal life, he’s not contrasting the life you have now, with a future existence in heaven.

Eternal life is not heaven.
Eternal life is the world made just and fair by God.

It is in the future, but can be here and now for us, by us choosing to live it, choosing to make it present. Also, the ‘life you have now’ is life shaped by division and rivalry, so he’s really saying that we have a choice to live with division and rivalry, afraid of each other, so competing with one another, or a life being open to one another, being interdependent, cooperating, finding life with one another.

Later Jesus gets more dramatic with the line ‘Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out’. Note that he didn’t say now is the judgement of THE world, but the judgement of THIS world – in other words, THIS world of competition and rivalry, THIS world of judgement.

Why is THIS world of judgement being judged and its spirit being driven out? Because the mechanism of judgement will be exposed through Jesus’ crucifixion. When Jesus is killed, it will show how the competition, division and rivalry that he speaks about works, in fact, it will be an actual demonstration of it. It masks itself as the way things are and the way things should be, but really it is just the violence of human beings, driven by fear, jealousy and selfishness. By allowing himself to be killed, Jesus is letting this evil expose itself and prove he is right. That which produces judgement of people will itself be judged. Or using mythological language, Satan, who is the spirit of domination, and whose name means accuser, or judge, will be judged – he will be shown to be nothing more than a divider, condemner, promoter of rivalry. Once division, competition, rivalry and judgement are shown to be what they really are, and how they destroy lives, they will no longer have credibility, no longer have power over people, hence Jesus describes it as the ‘ruler of THIS world being driven out’.

This is what happens in our individual lives when we realise that the person we judged and avoided, is in fact not evil, and it was our prejudice that drove us to label them such. That is the ruler of our personal world being driven out, and that is our entering into eternal life, which is love and openness to others.

Coming down to earth, where eternal life is to be lived, I heard an interview with Graham Long, CEO and Pastor of the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross, Sydney. Wayside Chapel deals with over 300 down and out people every day of the year. In the interview, Graham spoke of the time his son died. He said that he was inundated with offers of help, such as friends’ holiday homes to go and stay in, to get away and grieve, but he preferred to stay at work, because he just needed things to be as normal as possible. Then one day at work, he was running late for a meeting, so he raced down the stairs to head out the door and there was a man blocking the doorway. In all his time there he had never seen a more dishevelled person, with the worst skin disease ever. Graham went to go around the bloke, but he moved in the way. Graham moved over to go around him, but again, he blocked him. So, Graham tried what solved 90% of people’s problems there, he reached for $2 from his pocket, but the bloke didn’t want any money. Instead he grabbed hold of him and came close, and kissed him on the cheek, and said ‘that’s from your son’.

That taught Graham that love is everywhere, and everywhere needs love from him too. That is the eternal life Jesus is talking about and inviting us into. It’s not something that can be earned. It is simply chosen.

We can choose to see Jesus – like the Greeks in the gospel story – to see love coming towards us, surrounding us, and to live that love, sharing it with others, or we can choose to see ourselves as separate from others, divided, in competition.

Yes, there is much in the world against us – in THIS world, but Jesus calls us to be in THIS world, but not OF THIS world. To live eternal life – life being loved and loving others.

Destroying false images of God and saving humanity from itself

Sermon by Andy Wurm for Palm Sunday, 14^th April 2019

Today we read the account of Jesus’ Palm Sunday journey into Jerusalem from Mark’s Gospel. It is rich in symbolism and expectation.

The story begins with Jesus near the Mount of Olives, which according to tradition, is to be the place of God’s final judgement. Mark is telling us that this is ‘it’ – the final countdown to the big showdown. We are about to witness the unleashing of God’s judgement upon those who oppose God’s ways.

Jesus instructs two disciples to collect a donkey for him to ride into town. There is no question whether the donkey will be available. The donkey’s availability is a sign that God has ensured that Jesus can complete his mission. It’s not a case of God intervening in human affairs, so much as God determined to save humanity from itself. In the stories of Holy Week there will be hints throughout, that while individuals act with varying motivations, none of them will prevent God’s purpose being achieved. This is a point of faith which makes a difference, for it means we have been given all we need for humanity to flourish. As we wrestle with challenges such as climate change, appropriate energy use, economic and social justice, it’s tempting to believe the problems are insurmountable, however, if nothing can stand in the way of God giving us what we need, then we can overcome the challenges. The question is whether we choose to or not.

Jesus, riding a donkey into Jerusalem, fulfilling an ancient messianic prophecy, thereby reminds us of the expectations which people laid upon him, some passed on from tradition and some current at the time. For Jesus to ride a donkey into Jerusalem and then specifically to the temple, is a statement that he is both the king of Israel entering his city and the Messiah entering his temple. Hence the crowds chant ‘God bless the one who comes in the name of the Lord!’.

So Jesus claims Jerusalem and proceeds into the temple. His temple. He goes in, looks around, … and then leaves, afterwards withdrawing to Bethany. It’s a taste of what’s to come in the week ahead – the week we call ‘holy week’. What he’s just done is symbolically taken upon himself the roles of King and Messiah and then emptied them of content.

As the human face of God, by emptying the roles of king and Messiah, Jesus has given a preview of what he will do in the week ahead, which is to empty God of the meaning of God. By that, I mean he will allow false images of God to be destroyed, through the very means he will reveal the true nature of God, and in doing so, will also save humanity from itself.

Which God did Jesus allow to be destroyed? It was the God of dominating power. Power over the world. Power over people. Power over us. Power over our enemies.

This is the God of whom there are many variations, the God we might believe in, or more likely, the God who might reside in the depths of our being, hidden from our conscious awareness. It is God who can be packaged and presented to people as demanding, yet comprehensible. Someone has been bold enough to suggest that as this is the God of religion, then through his death, Jesus destroyed religion.

Jesuit writer Gerard W. Hughes presents a great caricature of God in his book God of Surprises. He says to imagine God to be like a family relative called Uncle George. He’s loving, a great friend of the family, very powerful and interested in us all. Eventually we pay a visit to Uncle George. He lives in a giant mansion, has a beard and is fairly gruff and threatening. We find that we cannot share our parents’ love of Uncle George. At the end of our visit, Uncle George says that he would like us to visit him every week and if we fail to come, he will show us what will happen to us. He then leads us down to the basement where he shows us little demons hurling into furnaces people who failed to visit him once a week, or acted in ways he disapproved. ‘And if you don’t visit me, that’s where you will go too’, says Uncle George. On the way home, our parents ask us if we love Uncle George with all our heart, mind and body and of course, not being keen on furnaces, we say yes. So a split is established between what we give lip service to and what we really feel, and it is what we feel about God, that matters most.

Uncle George is a caricature, but represents something of the God we create as images of our tyrannical selves. In mainstream Christianity this view of God is not as popular as it once was, although he’s not totally gone. It is this God who opponents of religion tend to reject and we too should reject, however he’s not the real problem. He’s just the tip of the iceberg. To think we have got rid of the false God by getting rid of an Uncle George-like God, is like believing you can solve the problem of world poverty by getting poor people to feel better about themselves. If they don’t feel downtrodden, won’t they be much better off? Absolutely not, because their lives are caught in systemic oppression. It’s the same with getting rid of the critical God. He’s only a symptom of the real problem, the real false God. If we remove all critical references from God and stop talking about sin, the false God will still be worshipped. The fact that we feel diminished by the critical God, is because we have accepted the game of ‘ins and outs’, the game of acquiring approval, which is following the false God.

The person who said Jesus destroyed religion didn’t mean religion in the form of Christianity, Islam, or even Anglicanism. They are formalised and imperfect versions of religion, but the religion being referred to here is that which is woven into every culture of the world. It is violent in nature, using the power of domination and it is always accepted as ‘the proper way things should be done’. It is respectable and its adherents may be people with religious beliefs, or none.

It has been fascinating to see the emergence of comedians and social commentators adopting the role of moral guardians of society, using abusive language and labels for those they deem unacceptable. Language of ‘us and them’, ‘in and out’, is the language of the false God. Most of those doing this would of course reject any sense of following a God, yet they exhibit the same patterns of justifying violence against others by appeal to a higher authority. They are playing a game, with very serious consequences, but no less a game, in which people are defined over against one another, driven by distorted desire.

This is what Jesus came to save us from. Not so much from the naughty things we do, like driving over the speed limit, or desiring the wrong person. Those are only symptoms of something much more powerful, far more deeply ingrained, so much so, that we don’t even realise it. On our own, we are as capable of realising it, as our eyes are capable of seeing their own optic nerves and the brains in which their visual input is processed. That’s why it takes something very dramatic to uncover it for us. It needs to be drawn into the open for everyone to see. When Jesus rides into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday therefore, he makes himself into bait, which the forces which run the world, the forces which run our lives, will not be able to resist crushing. He’s inviting them to do the very thing they want to do, so the world can see.

Only a God who is absolutely empty of violence would allow him/herself to be violated like that, as an act of love, simultaneously setting us free and inviting us to a new humanity.

What if the Lord actually is my shepherd?

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Easter 4, April 12^th 2019

Our psalm for today can challenge us to think about what sort of God we believe in. For many, God is nothing more than a background figure, who created the world and lets it run by itself, but Psalm 23 speaks of God as very personal: the Lord is my shepherd.

It’s extraordinary, because it comes from a time when religion was a communal thing, not so much considered an individual’s business. The ancient Jews referred to Yahweh as their shepherd. Their neighbours, who worshipped Shamash, a sun god, considered him their shepherd too. But God was always the god of a people. We tend to forget that perspective. It’s not that God belongs to us in the old tribal sense, but that our church, our community, our nation, has a relationship with God too. So how does God’s love play out in a community, or in the action of a nation? When religion is purely a private matter, we ignore the communal aspect. I don’t mean that everyone in our nation should be Christian, but that as far as our relationship with God goes, justice and care for the vulnerable are far more important than matters such as an individual’s sexual orientation, for instance.

It’s interesting too, that this psalm is given a subscript in the bible – as ‘a psalm of David’. If we read the psalm from the perspective of a king – that the Lord is his shepherd, it means that as the leader of a nation, he recognises his dependence upon God. He acknowledges his fallibility and that to do his job requires God’s help. So how about us, in our leadership roles, as parents, grandparents, or as we act as someone’s carer: in what way do we need to rely upon God? In what way might God refresh our souls, as we fulfil our role? How might we lead others beside still waters?

The Lord is my shepherd : therefore can I lack nothing. How different is that to the message we usually hear, which focuses on what we lack, or what we supposedly lack? – money, security, certainty, status. We’re constantly encouraged to pursue and then protect what we are told we lack and ‘should’ have. It encourages a mentality of scarcity. But what if we do have enough? What if there is enough in the present for us? What if we are doing just what we should be doing at present in our lives? Very young children stop to observe insects on the ground, as busy parents attempt to rush them to the next thing. What if this moment, this day, or season, is one of fullness, a gift from God, containing all we need to thrive and contribute to the world? Someone composed this alternate version of Psalm 23:

The clock is my dictator, I shall not rest.
It makes me lie down only when exhausted.
It leads me into deep depression.
It hounds my soul.
It leads me in circles of frenzy, for activities sake.
Even though I run frantically from task to task,
I will never get it all done,
For my ideal is with me
Deadlines and my need for approval, they drive me.
They demand performance from me, beyond the limits of my schedule.
They anoint my head with migraines
My in-basket overflows.
Surely fatigue and time pressures shall follow me

All the days of my life.

And I will dwell in the bonds of frustration forever.

How different would our lives be, if we lived as if we lack nothing – that God provided all we need?

The shepherd will make me lie down in green pastures. Imagine a sheep doing that. Apparently sheep living where there are no predators don’t flock together. They’re secure enough to stand alone. The image of lying down in a green field suggests relaxing back, allowing yourself to just be. Do you allow God’s peace and love to wash over you? It means that nothing is required of you, other than to just be yourself. Do you accept what your life is at present? Do you allow yourself to do nothing at times?

The shepherd leads, refreshes and guides for his name’s sake. In other words, God acts only according to God’s nature. Only always, as love, for love. There is no other way for God to be, therefore we are always loved and never need to earn God’s favour.

Once, during a stressful time in my life, my soul needed refreshing. After six weeks of trying to buy a phone from Telstra, I was directed to a Telstra shop, where the wrongly-titled ‘assistant’ told me it was not possible. It’s an understatement to say I was angry. De (my wife) helped me calm down a little, but my soul was still deeply disturbed. Later on, I was in the car, waiting at traffic lights, when I noticed the driver behind me maneuvering his car strangely. Then I realized he was trying to make room so a woman behind him could turn left at the lights. Somehow, his action, mystically, transformed me. I felt less bothered. It was love that did it – a gesture of help by that man for a stranger. That’s the Lord refreshing my soul – through acts of love. It wasn’t total refreshment though. After shopping at the market, there was still some residual anger, however, I found the Lord shepherding me towards the ice-cream stall. Wrongly thinking that ice-cream would refresh my soul, I was joyfully surprised by the man who served the ice-cream, having a guitar slung over his shoulder and strumming little tunes for customers as he served ice-cream. Then was my soul refreshed.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me. God does not take way our suffering, nor is God waiting at the end of it to welcome us into his arms, rather, God is with us in our darkest times. It’s not always obvious though, partly because we’re looking for something that is not the true God, who is so with us to not be noticeable as God. The crucified Christ is the ultimate image of God with us in the darkest valley.

Surely your goodness and loving kindness will follow me all the days of my life. The Hebrew actually says your goodness and loving kindness will pursue me all the days of my life. Elsewhere the phrase is used in biblical stories where one’s enemies pursue them. Do we see our blessings as just good luck, or as somehow having the hand of God behind them? How might that be? How different might it be to live as if God’s goodness and loving kindness were pursuing us?

I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Dwelling in the Lord’s house can refer to intimate communion with God, or being in the temple, which is also the community of faith. The present and eternal are brought together here, as is always the case in ancient Hebrew, which has no terms to differentiate between past, present or future. Closeness to God, experienced within the community of faith or physical temple (church), continues on with us through our lives. Also our faith can be nurtured, but also partly reside, in the community of faith. We don’t have to be all-believing or all-trusting, for the community of faith carries our faith. You can pick up faith when you’re ready. Our faith is communal. We remember God is with us, because we participate in the community of faith.

Being spiritually at home

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Lent 4, 31^st March 2019

A few years ago, a circus used to hire All Souls’ parish hall. It was called Lolly Jar Circus and was for young people, including those with intellectual or physical disabilities or who are socially at risk. One day I dropped in and the first person I met was a young man who had autism. He told me his name, what school he went to and that he was fifteen years old. I said that was how old my daughter was and told him what school she went to. Then he asked me if she was disabled, which caught me by surprise and before responding, found myself weighing up how he might feel about the answer I gave. I suppose I didn’t want him to feel in any way inferior and that I accepted him as he was. I left having enjoyed our brief chat, but felt a little disturbed, because while I was the one initiating things, it was actually he who was telling me that I was not inferior and I was accepted just as I am.

When he asked me whether my daughter was disabled, I think there was a question behind his question, which was ‘are you able to connect with me?’ and behind that question was a reaching out to me because he wanted to connect with me. It was an instant, unconditional, offer of friendship, or could be seen as an act of compassion. We usually think of compassion as a reaching out to a person in need, so you might think it’s not really an accurate description of what he was doing, but like everyone else, I’m a person who needs love.

Jesus told a story of a man who had two sons. The younger son asked him to divide his inheritance and went off and spent it on extravagant, wasteful living. Even if a father in Jesus’ day did give his son half of his inheritance, which was extremely unusual, the father could still live off the income until he died. But not if it was all spent. It means the son treated his father as if he was dead, or to put it bluntly, he wished his father was dead. We can see the father in the story as God. God gives us all his love, which is all that we need to spiritually sustain us through the ups and downs of life, but we tend to resist that. We don’t want to remain at home with God, we want to go off and do things our way. We want God to be dead to us. This shows what nonsense is the notion that God thinks we should die for our sins, but lovingly substitutes Jesus in our place. No, it’s the other way around. It we who want God dead.

Why do we want God dead, when God only wants to give us his love? It’s the same answer as why the younger son wants to leave home and spend his father’s inheritance. He wants to do things his way. When I said before I left that young man at the circus, feeling a little disturbed, it’s because I wasn’t the one in control. I thought I was, for I was the one who initiated our discussion, but then he reached out in love, and when that happens, you’re no longer in control. There is what Jesus is talking about in his story – it’s the embrace of the loving father, which is the compassion of God, who draws us into his embrace, just as we are. No questions asked about where we’ve been and what we’ve been doing. No ‘I told you so’ or ‘have you finally come to your senses?’ Just unconditional embrace. Notice, while the son was still far off, the father rushed to him. How often are we told that God forgives us, only if we repent? No, God always runs towards us, to embrace us, to love us.

More than anything else, we want to be embraced in that way – to be loved, accepted as we are. We want to be ‘home’, in that safe space, where we don’t have to meet anyone’s expectations, earn our worth, prove our value or cope with others’ conditional acceptance (as long as we fit their requirements, they’ll be my friend). This is ‘the place of truth, the place of love. It is the place where I so want to be, but are fearful of being. It is the place where I will receive all I desire, all that I ever hoped for, all that I will ever need, but it is also the place where I have to let go of all I most want to hold on to. It’s the place that confronts me with the fact that truly accepting love, forgiveness and healing, is often much harder than giving it. It is the place beyond earning, deserving, and rewarding. It is the place of surrender and complete trust’. (Henri Nouwen The Return of the Prodigal Son,13)

There are all sorts of reasons we resist ‘going home’, into ‘the father’s arms’, into God’s compassionate embrace. Maybe we’re scared. Maybe we’re stubborn or proud. Maybe we like the power of refusing to be loved and establishing our own conditions of worthiness. Whatever it is, unless we finally ‘return home’ to God, we will never have that inner peace and sense of worth which energises us to be what we were born to be, and enables us to withstand all the attacks the world throws at us. The way back, is to do what the son in the story does, which is to recognise your need for love, which will occur precisely at the place where you have shut off and created some alternative. If you can muster the effort to acknowledge that, then you will also see that, from before you even began to ‘head home’ God has been running towards you. Through the compassionate, unasked for, unconditional love of others, God has drawn you into his embrace. You are not inferior. You are accepted, as you are.

The wonderful thing about Jesus’ story of two sons, is that we may find we are not just the younger son. We might also be the older one. The one who ‘stays at home’ – never rebelling, always helping, chipping in with boring, everyday stuff. Not branching out having fun, doing your own thing? But also jealous of others? Cross about having to put up with the ordinary? Angry that your constant giving is never acknowledged in any special way? Wishing that some sort of big break or reward might one day come (as you humbly state that you really don’t deserve it)? Ask yourself: are you at home? Do you feel at peace, embraced by God’s compassionate love? Not if you need others’ approval. Not if you feel life is unfair. Not if you are jealous of others. Not if you wish things were different. Then you have some work to do too, because what you have to realise, is that God has always loved you, but having never moved away and questioned it, you have never deeply realised it, and allowed it to embrace you. Look to what you’re unhappy about yourself, look to what you want to be different, and you will be on the way to seeing what you really want and need. And if you will let yourself have that need met, it will be.

There’s more to Jesus’ story though. We are born to be ourselves and God’s loving acceptance helps us to do that, but, in the language of the story, our real vocation is to ‘become the father’. Obviously that’s the wrong language for women, but bear with me for a moment, because something else Jesus says about fathers is relevant to this, which is ‘call no man father, for there is only one father, and that is your father in heaven’. In saying this, he challenges the power of the father in his society, who had absolute authority to dictate who could do what in the family. Now, in this story of two sons, Jesus gives us an image of what the father in heaven is like, and most importantly, what his authority is: it is the authority of compassion – to lovingly embrace our need to be loved. That is what becoming the father is too, or in the case of women, to become the mother. We can only do that after we have allowed ourselves to be embraced by the heavenly father and mother, for only then, will we be full of the love and peace that others need from us. This is our ultimate vocation in the world: to become a spiritual mother or father, whether to those who have been too independent to accept being loved, or to those who were so busy loving everyone else, that they didn’t allow themselves to be loved.

Faith can shape how we experience life

Sermon by Andy Wurm, Lent 2, 17^th March 2019

In the gospel reading today we hear Jesus being asked a popular question: is suffering punishment from God?
He is told of people who went to the temple to offer a sacrifice for their sins, and while they were there, the Roman governor had them killed.

Did God use the Roman governor to punish them, because they were particularly sinful?
“No”, is Jesus’ response.

And, in case they were wondering, neither were the people who died when a tower accidentally fell on them, punished by God.

We’ve probably all heard people ask some form of this question. Were the bushfires God’s punishment? Was the tsunami God’s punishment? Was a freak accident God’s punishment? And why do good people suffer?

Jesus doesn’t delve into the question.
He just says stop thinking like that.
God is not like that.

He steers the questioners away from their philosophising about whether God is responsible for suffering and gets them to focus on how they are living. He illustrates his point with a story about a tree which is wasting precious space in a vineyard, because it isn’t producing fruit. If it continues in that way, it shall be cut down. His point is: life is precarious and precious, so don’t waste it.

At the conclusion to the funeral service in our prayer book is a prayer which goes like this: God of truth and love, give us wisdom and grace to use aright the time left to us. While we have opportunity lead us to repent of our sins, and to do what we have left undone.. It is tragic when someone’s life is taken away from them, but perhaps even more tragic, is when we give away our lives, or let them slip away, because we can do something about that.

Knowing our frailty though, we know that we do let our lives slip away from time to time. Some years ago, in Catholic churches during Lent, statues were covered to remind people that sometimes they lose sight of goodness. That’s one of the main reasons for Lent being a season of repentance. It’s not always the case that we need to turn around the things we have done that are wrong. Sometimes we just have to regain sight of what is good.

One antidote to that is to see faith as a discipline. By that I mean to see faith as a point of view or way of living, rather than something which depends on what’s going on in our lives at the moment. Sometimes people say they don’t believe in God any more because things have not gone right for them or someone they love.

The trouble there is that they have allowed their faith to depend on the circumstances of their life.

Faith must be independent of our life circumstances for it to be faith. Otherwise it’s just observation.

For example, if I trust that electricity will flow through and illuminate a light bulb, it could be described as having faith, but if the bulb glows it is no longer faith which leads me to believe in it any more. It’s just observation. In a similar way, if I see things going well in the world, it’s a matter of observation, but to trust in God when things aren’t going well is faith.

Faith is not something we can acquire instantly, and that’s a problem for many today, because we live in a world where if you want something, you can get it fairly quickly. In the spirit of that, things tend to be user-friendly to make it easier for people to be involved. That’s not the case with faith though. Many people want to connect with God, but they want it straight away, on their terms, or they’re not interested. And faith is not user-friendly. If anything, it can be demanding and disturbing, questioning and challenging us.

If I could offer people an experience of God, here today, I reckon the church would be full, however, if I offer only the opportunity to deepen your faith, we would get the number of people we have here today.

Deepening or growing your faith takes time and effort. And it’s not for the weak.

I don’t mean that people who don’t come to church are weak, but that if you are weak in the sense of being unable or unwilling to commit to God without proof, then long-term growth in faith will be difficult.

One thing we must avoid is taking scripture literally when it speaks of ways in which God will care for us. If taken literally, we would end up believing that it is possible, and even likely, that we should receive from God a life free of stress and suffering, with all that we want, accompanied by absolute certainty in matters about God. That is not the result that those who wrote the scriptures intended. They have just taken a fair bit of poetic licence in the ways they describe God’s care and protection. If you look closely, you see that the scriptures are actually quite realistic in what they say is normal for a person of faith. There we find that hardship and suffering, doubt, and struggle are normal. What we believe in is God, not things going well.

These days we use the world ‘belief’ to mean giving our assent to certain ideas, but until about 400 years ago, the word ‘belief’ was only used in regard to a person, such as to say ‘I believe in so and so’.

To believe in God then, didn’t mean to agree with certain ideas about God, such as whether God exists and whether God protects us from snakes and provides a land flowing with milk and honey to live in, rather, it meant to trust in God personally, or to give your heart to God.

We need to remember that our observations and judgements, our interpretation of life and expectations, are not equivalent to how God acts in the world, so it’s not the case that we can just rely on these to understand God.

Rather, God transcends all that. What we are invited to put our trust in is God’s purposes within us. That means rather than waiting for the right circumstances to justify our belief in God, faith involves giving our heart to God. And there is a difference there, which we know from our experience with each other: if we meet a person and wait for them to show signs that they might be worth spending more time with, then our experience with them is one thing.

If, however, at some stage we decide to become friends, from then on, new experiences emerge, which we otherwise might not have. So when it comes to faith, faith doesn’t change our external circumstances.

We still might suffer and struggle, but our experience of that might be different.