Centre of history

One of the deepest deficiencies of our current age is that our religious education presents the person of Jesus and the teaching of Christianity as if they existed in splendid historical isolation. You experience this in part with the tendency to focus only on the stories of Jesus - the parables and the mighty deed narratives drawn from the gospels, and perhaps a few lines from the writings of St Paul - and little more. Although formally most Catholics would acknowledge that the rest of the scriptures, including the writings of the Old Testament were equally part of divine revelation, in practice they are regularly ignored.
As we celebrate the nativity of St John the Precursor, we have to take account of the fact that both the Gospels and the writings of St Paul place the life and example of St John as central to the ministry of Jesus. So we must begin by taking time to remember what it was that provided the context of John's life and what he can continue to offer for us today.

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Recorded at St Paul's, Vigil Mass (6pm, 8'27")

A sacrifice of blood

Although the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ is the only feast day during the year where the traditional Latin name is still well-known, to call the feast Corpus Christi seems to do some injustice to the richness of what today's liturgy offers us. The readings today do not focus on the Body of Christ - but indeed on the Blood of Christ. Each reading, beginning with the description of the people of God entering into the covenant in Exodus 24, through the description of the feast of Yom Kippur - the annual Day of Atonement celebration in the Book of Hebrews 9, through to the remembrance of the Passover celebration with Jesus and the disciples in the Gospel of Mark 14 focuses on the blood of sacrifice.

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Recorded at St Paul's Camden, 5.30pm. (9'09")

A new covenant

Taking a friend out for a driving lesson a few weeks ago brought to mind my own experience of learning to drive a car. Growing up on a farm, our first driving experience was with tractors and motorbikes and eventually cars as we made our way around the paddocks. But once I actually received my Learner Plates and attempted to drive out on the roads of Bega, I soon discovered that roads and paddocks are different. All was going along okay, until another car approached in the opposite direction and I freaked out, pulling off the side of the road to allow them to pass. Thankfully as my skills improved, so did my confidence in driving. Now, so many years later, when I go for a drive, I don't have to really think about the mechanics of driving at all - it is now second nature.

It seems that God wants us to have a similar experience with his laws. At first we need to be given the structure and outlines of the law to shape us and guide us as we learn and grow in our knowledge of God and his ways - but the plan is that as we go along we begin to make these laws part of our being and they begin to be our second nature. It is unfortunate that so many people still think of the laws of God and the laws of the Church as merely external structures - which often make little sense - which are imposed upon us. But if I need a law to tell me not to kill the annoying person across the street, or to remind me that I should go to church on Sunday, or not to steal - then the laws have not yet become part of who I am.
The prophet Jeremiah provides us with a stunning insight into the heart of God - as he relates a most incredible promise. In the days to come, he tells us, the law of God will no longer be only written on tablets of stone, but now the Lord will personally write the laws of this new covenant deep within each one of us, so that we may truly know his way of life personally. It seems that even Jeremiah is so overwhelmed by this prophecy that he tells us four times in these verses that 'It is the Lord who speaks.'
In the ministry of Jesus we discover what it looks like for the laws and covenant of God to be written on the heart of a human being - indeed the word becomes flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. What is even more amazing is that Jesus offers to feed us and allow the New Covenant to come to life in every one of us as we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, and his promise to bring this covenant very near becomes actually real when we eat his body and drink his blood and so receive the very life of God within us. Amazing promises and even more amazing fulfillment!

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Recorded at St Paul's (8am) 09'33"

Ten words of freedom

To soften the hard edge of these sacred commandments that are presented in Exodus 20, the Rabbis' would often tell a joke - such as 'when Moses came down the mountain, he began by telling the people: well, there is good news and bad news; the good news is that I managed to talk the Lord down from 20 commandments to ten; the bad news is that adultery is still on the list.' Or, when Moses had a headache, what did he do? He took two tablets. Or, when the Lord asked Moses if he wanted a tablet of the law, Moses asked him how much they were. When the Lord replied that they were free, Moses said, 'okay, I'll take two.'

All jokes aside - and especially those jokes aside - what we encounter in this text, which simply presents God speaking 'these words' - it is not until Exodus 34 that the title of the Decalogue, literally, the ten words is given - is a sacred covenant that is deeply founded in grace and freedom. Scholars tell us that the covenant is an example of a Suzerain treaty, and it is God who first identifies the parties: 'I am the LORD your God' and we are 'you' who he brought out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

I capitalise the word Lord to emphasise the point that in the book of Exodus, the Lord only uses the special name that he reveals to Moses in their encounter at the burning bush in the wilderness a total of three times. In Exodus 3:14, when the Lord tells Moses that 'I am who I am', and again in Exodus 6. The Jews called this name, the Sacred Tetragrammaton - the four holy letters of Y-H-W-H. This is the last time that this name is used in Exodus (and never in Numbers) - although it is often used in other books, including anachronistically in the book of Genesis. It is as if the writer wants to preserve the sacred name to these key moments to highlight the covenant that is being entered into.

When we look carefully at the structure of the text, we can see that the three positive statements that punctuate the unnumbered list, provide an ordering of the commandments into three groups of commandments - the first three that deal with the right ordering of our relationship with the Lord; the second that orders our lives or worship ('keep holy the Sabbath'), and then the last group, that in the Hebrew text begins the fifth commandment with 'Honouring your father and your mother' leading into the last five commandments. [In the church, we are used to numbering the commandments according to the structure, not of the Hebrew bible, but of the Greek Septuagint text, which combines the first two commandments into one and separates the final commandment into two. The Hebrew numbering is to be preferred, but it may provide cause for confusion when a penitent confesses to a sin against the sixth commandment, leaving the priest to discern whether they likely mean murder or adultery!]

It is also worth noting that the final commandment is entirely internal; no one can ever truly judge how much another person is guilty of coveting - and so it provides a necessary corrective to the rest of the list.

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Sunday 3B in Lent. 9'31"

Entering the gate of Jesus

Many years ago, when I was a uni student in Sydney, I wanted to head back home to Bega for a family function. These was the days before the Internet (remember those?) so I bought the bus ticket from a travel agent and duly headed into the Coach Terminal at Central Station to catch the designated bus. I arrived nice and early at the terminal, and was a little surprised that there were no other passengers waiting around. I waited for the scheduled departure time, checking my ticket and the clock tower to make sure that my watch wasn't playing up. And so I waited. And waited. When more than thirty minutes after the scheduled departure time had passed and realised there was a number for the coach company on the ticket, so I gave them a call. Apologetically, they informed me that they had that week changed their departure schedule, and the travel agent had put the old time on the ticket. The bus I was supposed to catch had left an hour before and no other buses were running that day; so I had no other choice but to go back to my Sydney home and try again the next day. (My dear mother did write to the company and get a refund and a travel voucher, so all was not lost!)

So, do you have a ticket to heaven? Is it valid? Or has the salvation bus already left?

Have you ever had the experience of meeting evangelical or fundamentalist Christians who have asked you the question, "if you were to die tonight, would you go to heaven?" There only seems to be one question that they ask. So, if you were to die tonight, would you go to heaven? What about your brother/sister/mother/father/son/daughter/grandchild/neighbour/friend/colleague?

In the gospel today, Jesus is asked the question, 'will there only be a few saved?' Although this is a question we rarely think about, it is one that many people, from the Rabbis in the days of Jesus right through the centuries have often pondered and attempted to answer. In the Gospel, Jesus doesn't answer, but tells us to 'strive to enter by the narrow gate.' So what exactly is going on?

So how many will be saved? Do we think that Origin of Alexandria (3rd century) was correct when he surmised that in the end, because of the love and mercy of the Lord, the goodness of creation and that we have all been created in the image and likeness of God - that all would end up being saved? Or do we more tend to think that St Augustine of Hippo was right, who wrote in the fourth century that most of humanity were going to be damned and only a very few would be saved?

When Jesus tells us to enter by the narrow gate - what makes the gate narrow, and who or what is the gate? Does the Gospel Acclamation today help us? - when we are reminded of one of the seven declarations of Jesus in John's gospel, usually called the "I am" statements - "I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me." But then what do we make of this final vision of the book of Isaiah with all the nations who do not know the Lord finally coming to see the glory of God; or the second reading (Hebrews 12) about the Lord correcting and training his children.

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[8'51"] Sunday 21 C

Called through a covenant of trust

Each year on the second Sunday of Lent we are taken from the wilderness temptations to the heights of the mountain top experience in the transfiguration of Jesus. But in Year C the Church combines the transfiguration with the story of the Lord cutting the covenant with Abraham from Genesis 15. We shall see that there are a number of parallels between both stories that invite us also to join Abraham, Moses, Elijah and Peter to trust the Lord and join him in the great adventure of faith and living in the fullness of life.

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Recorded at St Michael's 9.30am (11'56") using a new Zoom H2 recorder.

The word of hope

Second Sunday of Advent (Year C) - Baruch 5:1-9; Phil 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6.

Luke begins the account of the ministry of John the Baptist with a list of strange names - what is he doing and why is he doing it and how does it relate to the splendour and integrity of a people lost in a foreign land?

In order to understand why Luke begins this account of the ministry of John, son of Zechariah, with all of those names - we need to do some background work. We need to go back to the first reading - from the prophet Baruch (the secretary of Jeremiah). Baruch prophesied during the same period - the time of Exile. This was an utterly devastating period in the history of Israel. For us to make any sense of the readings today we need to first attempt to at least get into the mindset of what it would be like for the whole of your life - and of the whole of your country to be turned completely upside down and inside out. They were treated as slaves and they lost all of the land of the promise; the empire of Babylon had swept down upon them and completely destroyed their land, their city and their temple. All that Jerusalem stood for was destroyed and taken away from them when they were escorted under military guard from Jerusalem into exile. Everything that they had based their lives upon was gone. It is hard to appreciate how devastating this was for them.

It is important for us to hear and understand what is happening when the prophet addresses Jerusalem - still in ruins and destroyed. The word of the Lord is addressed to Jerusalem to 'look to the east' to see the work of God - to restore and renew this people, who will come from east and west to fulfill the promises of God. Even though Israel knew that the exile was a result of their failure to live the covenant; even though they knew everything had been taken away from them because of their sin and breaking the commandments, the word of the Lord was telling them that God had remained faithful to the covenant that was first made centuries before during the Exodus, when the Lord had addressed the whole nation (not just individuals like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses) and made covenant with them (Exodus 19). God will continue to bring his purposes to pass. So he will flatten the mountains and fill the valleys so that the way of the people would be made smooth and allow their free passage to fulfill his purposes.

The word of the Lord continued to be addressed to Israel to bring them back from their exile and to restore them to their land and to the temple. But as time passed, the prophetic word was no longer heard. The prophet Malachi was the last of the prophets, and he ministered around 460 years before the birth of Christ. So for generation upon generation people longed to hear the word of God again, to receive a fresh insight into the plan of God for his people.

So when the Gospel of Luke opens, it is almost 500 years since there has been any recorded word of prophecy. The expectation that the Lord will speak to his people must have been overwhelming. So when Luke begins this chapter with a list of who's-who, it would have been even more jarring for the first hearers. The named individuals only serves to remind them of how far they have fallen as a people and community. They are under the oppression of the Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar (reigned 14-37 AD/CE); with his puppet governor Pontius Pilate (who reigned over Judea from 26-36 AD); then three of the four tetrarchs are named - the 2 sons of Herod the Great (Herod Antipas and Herod Philip II) and Lysanias. Finally, the current (Caiaphas, 18-36 AD) and former (Annas 6-15 AD) high priests are given. Even though Annas had left the office, he retained the title of high priest (cf. John 18:13,24). If there is an expectation that the 'word of the Lord' would come to someone, perhaps one of these 'high and mighty' individuals could be expected. Certainly you would expect that the Lord would address his people in a place of significance - like in the newly rebuilt temple in Jerusalem.

No, when the Lord chose to speak to someone after so many centuries, he addresses the word of God to a virtual nobody - to John, the son of Zechariah, out in the wilderness. That it was happening in the wilderness indicates that the great promises of Isaiah were beginning to be fulfilled in the ministry of John.

And what does John proclaim? That they (and we) need to undergo a baptism of repentance. So as we continue our journey through this season of Advent, we need to be mindful of this call of the Lord to prepare and be ready to receive his healing and cleansing word once again, so that we can be formed and prepared into the people that he longs for us to be, so that 'all flesh will see the salvation of our God'.

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Recorded at Sacred Heart, 9.30am (10'34")

Marriage in the beginning

Sunday 27 in the Season of the Year (B) | Mark 10:2-16

One thing that I have discovered, is that usually when a particular moral question is put to me by someone, almost inevitably there is a context - a back-story if you like. If I simply answer the question in the abstract, without attending to the particular situation that provoked the question, then equally inevitably, I will more than likely get the answer wrong. When Jesus is asked this question in the Gospel today, his hearers would have known what that background story was; but we can miss it, especially when we don't read verse 1 of Mark 10. There we read that Jesus and his disciples have just travelled to Judea, to the region beyond the Jordan River. If we think of the Jordan, than we should immediately think of the prophet who ministered around the Jordan - John the Baptist. Back in Mark 6 John had been arrested and then executed because he had challenged King Herod about marrying his brother Philip's wife Herodius. So we see that the test that the Pharisees put to Jesus is really a question of whether Jesus will stick his own neck out and make the same treasonous declaration about Herod's marriage which had got John killed. In answering the question, Jesus gives the injunction to return to the beginnings - to see what the Lord had said about marriage in the account of creation. So, like Jesus, we need to turn back to those first chapters of Genesis to see what God's original plan had been all about regarding the marriage covenant.

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View from a high place

15th Sunday – Year B – The view from on high (Ephesians 1:3-14)

I am going on holidays in the middle of August to the United States. I haven’t been there before, so I have been looking around at various maps, trying to work out my itinerary. I have been using Google Maps to work out how to get to the places that I want to visit – like Denver to visit some of the pilgrims who stayed in our parish last year during WYD – and Toronto and Steubenville to visit friends. With these maps I can get an overview of the whole country to see where places are in relation to one another, but also to zoom in to see a place in a little more detail and to see the lay of the land. I don’t think that I am alone in wanting to do this – everywhere you go, whenever you find an accessible high place, our ancestors have so often built a lookout there so that you can see where things are in relation to one another. How many of you have been up Cambewarra Mountain to see the vista of the Shoalhaven; or visited Mount Ainslie in Canberra; Mount Wellington in Hobart; Mount Coo-tha in Brisbane; or No (One) Tree Hill in Auckland? If you do you can begin to see the way that the city works and functions and the way that it all connects together.

There is a need for us to do this – to have that sense of how the whole story fits together. And that is what Paul presumes when he goes into this magnificent prayer of worship in our second reading. He has the usual greeting in the first two verses (which are not in our reading) and then he goes in to this almost ecstatic prayer and he gives thanks and praise for the wonders of what God has done across the centuries. So I will take you on a brief survey of the whole of salvation history to provide something of a background for what it is that Paul is leading us through. The first thing that we as a Christian people – as the inheritors of the promise that was given to the Jews – encounter in the Scriptures as we read Genesis 1 is to read that God created the heavens and the earth. What we see around us is not the result of a fluke; it is not the result of a random series of events that have come to pass and somehow (miraculously) have formed what it is that we see. No we worship a God who created the world and created it as good. Over the course of the tens of millions of years, indeed the more than four billion years that the world has existed, the Lord’s hand has been there – forming and shaping and crafting. He created us as part of that process. He created us to be in relationship with him as part of his good creation; created us to be one with each other; to be good stewards of what he had created. But then of course as the story moves on, all of that very quickly began to unfold. There is the sense of those first few chapters of Genesis of what began to happen; as we began to compete with one another and began to compete with God. This is what scripture calls the fall – that sense of falling out of that intimacy of union and relationship with God and consequently with one another. That quickly began to unravel even more – within the first chapters of the book of Genesis you see this story becomes more and more violent. In the next chapters you have the story of Cain and Abel beginning to act aggressively and which ends with the murder of Abel. More and more the people begin to be alienated from one another and from God. As these mythical stories and tales lead us into an appreciation of and understanding of what is happening.

But God does not allow this to be the end of the story. God begins to act to deal with individuals and through individuals to form a people. That is the reason that we have the story of the call of Abraham as he is called to be the father of a great nation. He is called to be in covenant with God. This covenant continues through his sons – through Isaac and then through Jacob and his twelve sons when they travel down into Egypt. The story continues – the story of God forming a people. It continues with the great events of the Exodus and Passover; the journey into the desert to meet the Lord on the mountain of Sinai – when God again reaffirms the covenant with his people. He reminds the people that he wants them to be his hands and feet. He wants them to be his people. He will be their God; he will set them apart and consecrate them as his chosen people – to go into the world as the bearers of this mystery; the bearers of God’s righteousness and God’s justice. But of course, the people are still fallen and they don’t get it right – and so you have again and again throughout the centuries, even though God continues to send his prophets to lead the people back into proper relationship with God – they don’t get it right. There is the sense of the great failure of the people of God.

Then of course you have finally – as planned from the beginning of time – the Lord sending his Son. Jesus is born and teaches and proclaims what it is to live the truth of the kingdom of God. Then all this climaxes in the great events that we celebrate at Easter – the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus is the Messiah – the one chosen by God from the beginning to be the fulfilment of this calling. Finally we are given the opportunity to live this covenant. Finally we are able to have that freedom from sin so that we can indeed be the proclaimers of the kingdom of God. In the beginning we were called and created to be in the image and likeness of God – but it is only when Jesus dies on the cross; it is only when he is raised to new life – that we are actually able to do that.

Finally we see the fifth movement in this story: the first was creation; the second was the fall; the third was the covenant; the fourth was the redemption and now the fifth is the mission that we receive as church and the great commissioning. This happens, of course, in the power of the holy Spirit. This happens in the great outpouring at Pentecost of the Spirit which allows us to live this truth and to be this people that have been chosen by God.

When Paul begins this prayer, he begins simply by blessing the Lord and praising the God who, from the beginning chose us – not randomly – but in Christ. This phrase ‘in Christ’ appears again and again in this reading; it almost becomes a punctuation mark that Paul users to remind us that the whole of our life revolves around the person of Jesus. Everything that happens occurs in relationship to the Messiah, to the king, to the Christ. Jesus is the source of all that happens. He created us and chose us; he destined us to be in him. Even before we were created; even before our parents made love to conceive us; even before we were only a twinkling in our parent’s eyes the Lord destined us to be his own. Not simply to sit back and think that this is lovely; this is wonderful. No – we were commissioned for a purpose. This purpose is to ‘praise the glory of his grace.’ This purpose is to be his hands and feet; this purpose is to continue to build the kingdom of God here on earth – to be the bearers of his mission; to be the ones who bring the kingdom of God to birth in our world. That is that whole sense of the inheritance – that Paul talks about at the end of our reading. That the Lord has given us all of these gifts, all of these treasures and wonders as the first down payment of what is to come – that whole sense of the new creation that the Lord is preparing for us.

So we have this place in history – we have this place as his people; chosen to be his own. So I invite you today to take time to sit with this reading and read the first part of the letter to the Ephesians (Eph 1:3-14). These 12 verses in a sense sum up so much of our whole history is about and gives us this opportunity to see the lay of the land and to see our place within it. Let us make this prayer our own. Let us also bless God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has chosen us to be his own adopted sons and daughters. Amen.

Recorded at St Michael's 9.30am (10'16")

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Cleansing and Covenant

Lent 3B (John 2: 13-25 & Exodus 20:1-17)
We really need to work hard to understand the real significance of the incident of Jesus going into and cleansing the temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Feast of Passover. There is nothing that comes remotely close in our experience. Doing the same in your local parish church, or even the largest church in our largest city is not the same. Because here, the temple is at the very heart of what it means to be a follower of the law - the temple represents the identity of the whole nation - socially, politically, historically - as well as spiritually. Jesus demonstrates the importance of what the temple is supposed to be about - but which it isn't. He shows that the temple is about truth and freedom of worship. By cleansing the temple at Passover, he also reminds the people of all that went with the liberation from slavery in Egypt. God brought together his chosen people to be his image-bearers in the world. He made covenant with them so that they could bring his justice into the world, and they could continue to hear the cry of the poor and the oppressed and bring freedom from slavery in their own lives and the lives of the nations around them. The commandments that the Lord gave on Mt Sinai are the means by which we can achieve this freedom and be his image bearers. Lent is a wonderful opportunity to reflect on our own lives and consider what areas of slavery we may have fallen back into - to ask the Lord what things in my life need his cleansing presence so that we can be his true image bearers in the world.

Recorded at St Michael's 8am (8'58")

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