MATTHEW 24 : 36 - 44 

Matthew in the Margins… Advent 1…Revised 2019

It makes sense to begin with some lead up rather than jump in cold as the lectionary does. Choose what makes sense to you & your congregation.

Astro-physicists & the like theorise about a universe expanding forever, not one that collapses into itself when some point is reached. Can we explore such ideas in the light of Faith rather than be scared off by fundamentalism or insecurity? What things are happening today making heaven & earth teeter on the brink? How can we help our congregation identify them, & respond positively?

Early disciples under persecution understandably opt for an Intervening God over a ‘Son of Humanity’, a fellow Suffering Servant. We can take just so much of this suffering business, can't we? Ever walked the beam of a see-saw? Go too far towards either end & we come down to earth with a jar! How are we to balance both Divine & Human ‘sides’ of God so we become complete humans with a complete God? Are we letting the Spirit keep our theological see-saw well balanced?

In the flood story from pre-history Noah represents those who have the discernment, to read the truth in what's happening round them, on earth & in the skies. When we feel sodden to the eyeballs & the flood is still rising, is trying to wring ourself out any real help? Why not, instead, build a new Ark, the Church, to God’s plan revealed in Jesus? Not out of timbers this time, but out of people. Is there any mileage for God or for us in our waiting for a Cosmic Christ to drop from heaven & snatch us from a watery grave? Might it be better to use whatever sails, or oars - or motors - God provides to keep our heads & the rest of us above water? Let’s not diminish God or ourselves in looking for an ark that never existed except as an important parable.

The Noah tale is a great & valuable religious parable, but, as Ian Plimer, then Professor of Geology, University of Melbourne, puts it in ‘Telling Lies For God’ ¹ ‘Despite efforts by creationists to salvage a credible ark & flood story, the story just doesn't hold water.’

Do we tend to read into the next bit that it's bad news for the one from the field, & one of the grain grinders to be chosen or taken? But if God's doing the taking, & these folk are ready, isn't this maybe the experience of Good News for them? OK, as long as it's them and not us, are we still thinking?

Brian

Afterthought: Would you believe the Ark, from our cosmic memory bank, still sails the seas of life today? Amid our rebellions against God? A reminder that though we flood ourselves with all kinds of destructive things, God is the Ground of our being. 

¹ Random House, Australia, '94, p.73

MATTHEW 2: 1-12 

Matthew in the Margins…The Epiphany…Revised 2019

Might we best preach the visit of the Magi as illustrating the way to find a meaning-ful God is by finding the One who still reveals Him-Self at ground level today? In unlikely places & among unlikely people? Through Jesus, & en-Spirited Jesus People? Isn’t this a basic meaning of ‘on earth as it is in Heaven’? Can we preach this in today terms & through today experiences? 

For instance, let’s try thinking of ourself as a today’s Gaspar setting out to follow the God-Star. At the first frontier we come to, the Border Protection Force wants proof of our identity, complete with photo-ID. They don’t like the colour of our passport; nor some of the stamps already in it! When we tell them we’re following a Star to find God, they can’t let us through fast enough!

What if at the next border, we meet up with a today Balthazar - but, instead, let’s call her Bathsheba - also searching for The One the Star is pointing to. She’s had a hip-replacement, the metal of which sets all the alarm bells ringing! She’s taken aside & strip-searched, but when they find nothing dangerous, & she tells them she’s also following a Star, will they be able to resist letting us both through as quickly as possible to get us off their hands!? At the next frontier, what if the two of us meet up with a Melchior, also following the Star! All three of us are told to put the gifts we’re carrying through X-Ray machines which react to the gold-wrapped chocolate bars Melchior has on him. Then the sniffer dogs go mad scenting Bathsheba’s Chanel No. 5 & my, Gaspar’s Hugo Boss for Men! We all have to do a lot of fast talking about carrying gifts for some King they’re never heard of! In the end, though, they let us through with sighs of disbelief! (After sampling a few of Melchior’s chocolates - just in case! 

We hear them muttering about building a great wall to stop people like us. Someone yells out, ‘Turn back the camels!’‘Chase their horses away!’ ‘Drive their donkeys into the bush!’ All this  kind of talk is about keeping God in God’s place as much as keep-ing any of us earthlings in ours! And we’ve not yet come face to face with Mr. Evil himself! Not Herod, this time; but do we need to face the fact that many of us are being ruled by someone as dangerous as him? A President, Prime Minister, Monarch, Tsar, or the like? How must we journey on to keep our rendezvous with God? 

Brian 

Afterthought: 

How many kinds of barriers / borders / frontiers do we personally face? Some of them human ones. Like the Magi do, & the Holy Family will soon need to. Once we see that God-Star, though, we’re called to journey on in different ways & in different company as that Star leads us. Step by risky step! Despite any barriers others set up!

MT 25:31-46 

 Matthew in the margins…Reign of Christ / Christ the King…Revised 2017

No matter how we expect the Cosmic Son of Humanity to come in His glory as King we have to hold our expectation in tension with the Earthed Son of Humanity glorified by being named & crowned King on the cross. (JN makes this point strongly.)

But there’s more! There’s yet another tension. This self-same Incarnate, yet Cosmic, King has never left us (as He promised!) Physically, maybe, yes; but in the Person & Power of His Spirit, the Spirit of God, He’s always present tense among us. As He is, too, in the Person of those who say, Eucharist by Eucharist, “We are the Body of Christ” & get on with the job of being that Body in the world at large. Apocalyptic aspects of Christ’s reign may appeal. But lose sight of the crucified, glorified, Christ earthed in & among us by His Spirit & His people, & we lose the plot of God's agenda for Planet Earth - for humanity plus. 

Praying, as we do, “Your Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven” means embracing the Crucified King, serving the Raised Everyday King, & expecting the Apocalyptic King. It’s a package deal, or no deal at all! Many international folk tales, not necessarily from a Christian background pick up on the thrust of Jesus’ allegory Jesus; the Unknown who comes among the simplest of folk unrecognised & is either provided for or rejected.

The great attractiveness of the Kingship of Christ for me is the inclusiveness of His Rule. By God’s grace there is room in Christ’s Kingdom for a lot of people who might be thought unlikely candidates for finding a place at Christ’s right hand. Me for starters! The way we treat others especially those at the bottom of life’s pile, not least the persecuted, the poor, refugees & asylum seekers, & how we serve them, is a litmus test of the kind of Christ the King we believe in & serve. If we’re choosing the wrong kinds of leaders, & serving those same wrong leaders in wrong ways, we’re simply fulfilling Jesus’ teaching by proving ourselves to be more goats than sheep! Choose, at all costs, Christ as King above any other would-be contender. 

Though He speaks of judgment, Jesus makes clear we choose our own present & future state & fate. Christ reigns through us being little Jesuses to others or He doesn’t rule at all! More, when we feed the hungry Jesuses, give drink to the thirsty ones, welcome those who present as strangers, clothe the naked ones, minister to those who are sick, visit the ones imprisoned then we’re speaking Jesus’ language by doing it; for all who are marginalised. God's Rule always includes looking out for & looking after God's 'little ones'. Again, not to do that is to place ourselves at Jesus’ left hand rather than His right! Goat stuff! 

Is ‘everlasting punishment' anything other than choosing to live without the King of the Cosmos by choosing to live without the Crucified, Raised, Earthed One here & now? Who needs hell-fire & damnation (if that's your line) when such a fate looms? Speaking of looming, Christ the King’s Passion looms in the very next verses!

MT 25: 14-30 

Matthew in the Margins …24th S. After Pentecost…Revised 2017 

The sums involved in today’s story are huge. Beyond the dreams of Jesus’ hearers & most of us, too. Like all good teachers, & Jesus is the best, He wants us to work out for ourselves what this story’s all about - just like the rest of His tales. A useful way to think of & explore parables is to discern them as being about the Kingdom, the Rule, of God. About how God’s Authority is respected & His Rule applied ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. Let’s not go down the path of a ‘stewardship’ sermon; not in a monetary sense, anyhow! What we might call ‘Kingdom Stewardship’ takes us back to the fundamental nature of our human relationship with God. Every day of our lives needs to be a Stewardship Day in which we audit how well we’re using YHWH’s provision of life & love for us & make any modifications that show up as necessary.

It’s easy to lose our way in this process. We once had a neighbour selling up & moving lamenting he’d once buried a stash of money in his backyard, but now can’t find it! (He never did!) Is that what we sometimes do with the life God’s entrusted to us? Trust lies at the heart of this story; but for that kind of trust to work, it has to be a two-way love affair. What does God have to show for His trust in us? (Why not ask, also, What do we have to show for our trust in God?) Let’s not bury our hearts in our backyard sand & not be able to find them when we really need to dig them up!

The greatest gift God gives us is God-self; made inescapably & confrontingly human in the person of Jesus. Who spends His life, & indeed his death, loving & serving. As he still does by His Spirit. Does our spiritual audit reveal us walking in Jesus’ steps that far?

Many of us are good enough at managing physical assets of one kind or another. But how good are we at managing our spiritual assets? Whatever earthly interest we may have earned during our lifetime, the only interest that will count on ‘That Day’ is the spiritual interest on the love God’s invested in us & we in others. 

MT 25:1-13

Matthew in the Margins…23rd S. After Pentecost…Revised 2017    

Jesus is a great storyteller. The greatest. Life is a collection of stories. God’s & ours. After reading / hearing any story, in this case His story of the wise & unwise brides-maids, the question is, ‘But what happens next’? For the participants in the story, the answer lies within the story; all’s well that ends well for some, & poorly is as poorly does for others. The acid test of a Jesus story is always, ‘Where & how do we take it on from where He leaves off?’ 

Not long before, Jesus has been warning of the coming destruction of the Jerusalem temple & the inauguration of God's Rule consequent upon this. Eschatology, though, if not interpreted well enough can all too easily lead to faith becoming ‘pie in the sky in the sweet bye & bye’! Jesus Himself, though has already given us the necessary perspective when He tells us to pray for God’s Rule, God’s Authority with a Capital A, to be implemented ‘on earth as it is in heaven’. The bridegroom is always present. Always inviting us to celebrate with Him now, not one day. We don’t have to wait for Him or anyone else to arrive in ‘the middle of the night’.

Jesus is careful to point out that all the bridesmaids trim their wicks. The foolish ones, however,  fail to see trimming a bit here & bit there can’t make up for the fact they’re out of oil. There’s a lesson for our spiritual life today here!

Think of our lives today being our ‘lamps’. Are we living them full of God’s Spirit, ’oil’, ready for anyone & everyone we need to be there for? Looking out for, looking after? There’s no such thing as being ‘half-full’ of Holy Spirit! When God fills, God fills! There are no half measures with God, nor does God settle for any half-measures on our part. If I’m right in exploring ‘oil’ as representing Holy Spirit, Jesus reminds us being half-full of Holy Spirit is a no-go! No use to anyone. Not just five unwise bridesmaids. If the five wise bridesmaids were to share their oil with the unwise ones, we’d end up with the whole ten bridesmaids with half-full lamps running out of oil. Their lamps would all be useless, leaving the bridal party, the community in total darkness. What kind of darknesses are our community living through today as a result of us or anyone else running low on, or running out of, the ‘good oil’, the God oil? 

Holy Spirit isn’t a commodity we can top up at our local church, or ‘revival centre’. The ‘good oil’, HolySpirit, is God’s own life He’s always sharing with those of us who know we need Him; with those ready & prepared to receive Him totally into the lamps of our lives to keep them filled.

Celebrating God’s being married to us all the hours of every day & every night is God’s wedding present to us; God’s own way of keeping our lamps alight & burning brightly for Him & each other.

MT 23: 1-12 & 37-39

Matthew in the Margins… 22nd S. After Pentecost…Revised 2017 

For ‘scholars & Pharisees’, try ‘bishops’, ’priests', 'pastors', 'elders', ‘wardens’, ‘church leaders of all shapes & sizes’! Jesus’ use of the term ‘Moses chair’, his ‘kathedra’, again raises the question of Authority implicit in our recent passage about the coin & ‘rendering to Caesar….’! There’s a clashing of far more than cultures here. The ‘A’ question probes much more deeply than that. 

Jesus tells crowds & His disciples in general, "Look at these Pharisees & Scholars! Do what they teach, but don't do what they do!” In saying this He’s underlining the importance of the Authority God delegated to Moses & that those He’s complaining about are heirs to. As we are, too, now. Back then they’re undermining that authority by blurring the lines between God’s Authority & their own. They’re wind-bags. Full of hot air.  As Jesus sees it, some of them are more interested in dressing for show than being clothed in righteousness. Once, long ago, an archbishop asks me to ‘vet’ a ‘nomadic preacher’ wanting authority to preach in the diocese. Sadly, I have to report back that the fellow is a puffed-up windbag! Full of self-importance! Are we, any of us, more interested in being celebrities than servants; rather than getting our hands dirty at ground zero in life’s margins alongside Jesus? 

We all live in cultures using some system of honorifics to mark contributions to civic, political, military, or other areas of life. I take Jesus to mean that any title we’re given needs to be one that indicates a commitment, a) to God’s Authority &, b) to His own Servanthood. Is it time to cut ourselves back to size before God does that for us, one way or another? Perhaps that hymn, 'Brother, sister, let me serve you, Let me be as Christ to you’ could become the ‘Christian Internationale’ for those who inhabit the margins of life & those who serve them out there? Sing it loud & clear in what we do for God & each other? 

Jesus has many harsh things to say about the Hebrew church as He experiences it. Maybe it's just as well we're skipping most of the rest of this passage today in our Christian sanctuaries! Weigh up the stones we’re about to cast before they bounce back on us! 

A mural / icon of saints dancing above & circling the interior of the church of S.Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco¹ incorporates a lot of people as unlikely as Jesus himself! Can we see our-selves there? Dancing round our own churches? Inside them & outside? Blessed, indeed, is everyone who, like Jesus, comes in the Name of the Lord!

¹ You can see this mural / icon through your search engine.

MT 22:34-46 

Matthew in the Margins… 21st S. After Pentecost…Revised 2017 

Pharisees rush in where Sadducees have not feared to tread. Those who live by Law rather than Love seem to slip into that habit rather easily!

In an old movie I once saw, a benefactor donates a rug to make the recreation room in an old-style ‘mental asylum’ a touch less bare & forbidding. But carers insist the patients not walk on that rug! Only walk round & round the outside of the rug so it doesn’t get dirty! So, day after day, patients dutifully circle round & round that rug until it becomes set in law that that rug must be circled. The purpose of the gift of the rug becomes lost on both attendants & patients! Today’s passage raises the whole question of the purpose of the Law of God.

Legal experts, or would-be experts, roll out that same rug in front of Jesus, daring Him to walk on it! He calls their bluff of course! I was about to write ‘in His inimitable fashion’, but the whole point of this passage is that Jesus IS imitable! That’s the whole point of the Gospel! JS enemies are trying to entice Him into mis-interpreting these Laws central to both Hebrew faith & the Gospel by turning them into that carpet on the floor of the ‘asylum’. Embedded in DEUT & LEV, these God-given laws have always been laws at their best because they need no explanation. It's not the interpreting that's the problem; it's the doing! As G.K. Chesterton once put it, ‘Christianity hasn’t been tried & found wanting; it’s been found difficult & not tried!’

Today, many are ignorant of the heritage that is our Hebrew Bible. (Sunday by Sunday listening to passages often lacking context isn’t much help.) If we remain ignorant, though, how are we to recognise the Two Commandments that all the Law & the Prophets hang on? Being a disciple of Jesus involves going on from where the Hebrews left off, carrying their old & precious treasures along with our new ones.

First round of this bout goes to Jesus. He doesn’t dismiss the Pharisees' question despite its clear intent of bringing him undone. Questions need to be explored. Jesus asks His question-ers to apply the ‘Great Commandments’ to Himself & themselves, rather than just theorise about them, or Him! Finding the right questions to ask in life comes before finding the right answers to them!

Jesus appears to change the subject, but if He is the Anointed, David's son, then the answer about the greatest commandment is physically standing in front of them! Unrecognized. The One who loves God & neighbour perfectly. “I’ve done it!” He’ll go on to shout from the cross! Loving God & others that far doesn't come out of Bible quotations or sermons!

The verses about whose son is the Anointed is another of Jesus’ hard riddles. But as long as we get our heart round His question, as well as, even more than, our head, the answer will be revealed! Let’s put following Jesus the Anointed into practice & not just keep circling Him like that rug on that floor.