gregoryjenks

Author: Gregory C. Jenks

  • The God who is yet to be known

    Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
    Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
    7 February 2021

    [ video ]

    During these Sundays between Christmas and Lent—the Epiphany Season—we are invited to reflect on some of the many different ways that G*d is made known to us. We have been in a season of epiphanies, just as our lives are, in reality, a series of epiphanies, chains of revelation and cycles of sacred disclosure.

    That idea makes some religious people nervous.

    They like to think that they have G*d nicely defined in their creeds and their Articles of Religion. It is so neat. All set in black and white. No shades of grey. But no living colour either. Just monochrome religion. No room for imagination and no scope for G*d to do anything new.

    But G*d does not play by those rules. Never has. Never will.

    By the waters of Babylon

    The prophet whose words we hear in today’s first reading from the great Scroll of Isaiah the Prophet was seeking to explain to his community that G*d exceeded all of their preconceived ideas.

    They were in exile in Babylon; today’s Iraq.

    It seemed their god (Yahweh) had been defeated by Marduk and the other gods of Babylon.

    Not so, says the prophet we call “Second Isaiah.”

    Your G*d is too small, he says.

    Better still, you have a future in the hands of this G*d.

    Do not be afraid for the future. The future will be shaped by the G*d who is beyond all our religions and all our biggest concepts.

    When the future looks grim

    There are times when the future looks grim. Those tend to be the times when the good old days were always better than what we have now, and when we are uncertain of what the future may hold for us.

    This can be true for us as a nation. The way forward is uncertain and the options are all contested. In a post-fact world, what counts as truth and what really offers hope?

    This can also be true for us as a civic community here in Grafton. The empty shops and the small number of people younger than 50 can make us uncertain for the future and unsure how to act right now.

    This can also be true of the Cathedral. When they began to build this place Grafton had just 1,500 people. We now have ten times that number, but our congregations are smaller than at any time in the past. What does the future hold for us? Will the Cathedral survive as both the community and the churches go through major changes?

    And it can be true for us as individuals. For most of us here this morning, the years that remain are fewer than the years which have passed. This is true of me. In exactly 4 weeks and 4 days I turn 69. Most of my life is now behind me, and indeed it has been for several decades already. I just choose not to pay attention!

    Sometimes events in our lives force us to pay attention. I have had one of those weeks as I prepared for some medical tests in Brisbane on Wednesday morning. As I reflected on what lay ahead of me I found myself writing poetry, which I do from time to time. It is not something I shall be sharing here, but it canvassed three options:

    • All is fine, full speed ahead

    • Warning: the cancer is starting to recur, chemo may be needed. Will the cure be worse than the disease?

    • Emergency! The cancer is back and has spread to other parts of my body. Time to die well.

    As it happened, the outcome was fine but what I find much more interesting is that I was quite calm about any of the three outcomes.

    I have my preferences, of course. But ultimately any of these outcomes is fine since my life and my death, my past and my future, is already secure in G*d’s goodness. Not because I am special, but because G*d is the source of all that is, the energy which sustains everything, and to goal to which everything is moving.

    In its own small way, that realisation was an epiphany moment for me this past week.

    I pray that your week has also offered you personal epiphanies into the reality of G*d’s love and the possibilities of a future beyond anything we can yet imagine …

    Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. [Isaiah 40:28–31]

  • Doing religion

    Epiphany 2B
    Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
    17 January 2021

    [ video ]

    Doing religion (not just supporting it)

    In these weeks between Christmas and Ash Wednesday we are in a period called “Epiphany.” It starts on January 6—the fabled Twelfth Day of Christmas— and lasts until the Sunday before Lent.

    We can think of Epiphany as a kind of liturgical “unders and overs” tin. 

    With Christmas occurring on a fixed date but Easter occurring on the first Sunday after the full moon which occurs on or after March 21, the numbers of weeks between these two major Christian festivals varies from year to year. Easter Day is never earlier than March 22 or later than April 25.

    The length of Epiphany depends on the number of Sundays occurring between January and the date of Easter that year.

    This year Easter is reasonably early (April 4), so we have just six Sundays during the Epiphany season.

    The God we can know

    Whether Epiphany is longer or shorter, it has the same theme each year.

    Epiphany is an ancient Greek word meaning “revelation” or “manifestation.”

    So, we are invited to spend the weeks between Christmas and Ash Wednesdays reflecting on the ways in which we can know God. If you prefer, ways in which God makes herself known to us.

    And, yes, it does feel a lot different depending which way we say that statement!

    Epiphany

    The big idea, of course, is that God is made known to us in the person of Jesus. How he lived his life, what he taught and how he died is the great epiphany, the supreme revelation. At least for those of us who are Christians.

    We have no need to deny that God can be known through other historical characters or different sacred texts and religious practices. We simply affirm the truth which we know to be true for us: in Jesus we see  God, and in Jesus we see our better selves.

    That is what we celebrated on Epiphany, the feast of the Three Kings. In that legend we recognize that people outside the biblical spiritual tradition can still understand and respond to God in their own way.

    If the Christ Child accepted the adoration of the magi, who are we to say everyone must believe like us in order to know God’s blessing in their lives and beyond this life?

    Baptism of Jesus

    On the first Sunday after Epiphany we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus, which in the Eastern Orthodox tradition is known as the Great Theophany, the revelation of God. That is their name for the sacred icon depicting the Baptism of Jesus: Theophany.

    There are many ways to understand the significance of Jesus’ baptism. We see that as early as the New Testament, as each of the four Gospels seeks to solve the dilemma posed by Jesus submitting to baptism by the Jewish prophet, John.

    You can also see that diversity by watching a selection of sermons from last Sunday. As more parishes live stream their services we can see what other clergy are saying about each Sunday’s texts, as well as looking back in the archives to see what our own clergy said on that day in previous years: for example, 2018 | 2019 | 2021. (It seems we have no recording of the sermon from 2020)

    As we tease out the meaning of this Epiphany season for us, let me offer one brief observation about the Baptism of Jesus.

    This is a rare moment in the Gospels where we observe a religious experience of Jesus, rather than seeing him interacting with other people. 

    In his Baptism, Jesus was participating in a religious ritual being administered by someone else and he experienced a moment of revelation in which his own identity as a beloved Child of God was affirmed and renewed.

    A friend of mine (John Beverley Butcher, An Uncommon Lectionary) has expressed it this way:

    The evidence is clear that something profound happened within Jesus which provided direction and energy for a ministry of teaching and healing. Without Jesus’ baptism, there might have been no ministry, no getting into trouble with the authorities, no crucifixion, no resurrection experiences, no church, no Christian religion, and no church history! The course of human civilization would have gone quite differently.

    This is not a day for me to preach a sermon about the Baptism of Jesus, but let me draw your attention to one more element we may easily overlook: the theme of the voice from heaven. In the Jewish tradition this is known as the bat qol (“the voice of God”).

    Was Jesus the only person to hear the bat qol? (Of course not!)

    Do we hear the voice of God in our own lives? (If only we had time to go around the Cathedral and ask everyone to share a moment when they sensed God speaking to them!)

    Does the way we practice our faith assist people to discern the voice of God? Are we people in a sacred conversation with God, or do we think that is only for “special” people?

    Samuel and the voice of God

    In the first reading this morning we have a classic story of someone hearing the bat qol, the voice of God.

    Samuel is only a child. He has not yet been fully trained in the ways of a priest. Sleeping in a room nearby is the priest in charge of the Temple of God at Shiloh. While never called “High Priest,” that is the role held by Eli. He was someone well trained in the ways of religion.

    The voice of God comes to Samuel, not to Eli.

    But Eli is able to guide Samuel on how to respond to the voice of God.

    In that simple dynamic is the essence of Epiphany.

    The voice of God does not just come to the Dean or the Bishop. It can come to any of us at any time.

    On the other hand, we all share the obligation of assisting each other in hearing that voice and knowing how best to respond.

    In other words, Christianity is not a spectator event.

    You do not gather in this Cathedral to observe the sanctity of the Dean and bask in my reflected holiness.

    Rather, we gather around the Scriptures and around the table of Jesus to help each other hear what the Spirit is saying to the church, to explore how best we are to act in response to the voice of God, and to help each other be faithful in that response.

    I am not your spiritual champion, but I am your coach. And even that is a role shared with other people. Indeed, we are community of spiritual coaches. And we are all on the team: playing coaches! I am blessed to have you as my coaches as well.

    How we help each other listen to God will be the ultimate test of our success as the people of God in this Cathedral community.

    We do not come to the Cathedral for the fine music, the beautiful liturgies or the thoughtful sermons. 

    While we aspire to offer all of those things every week, that is only because they help us to be people who hear the voice of God and assist each other in developing “ears that hear,” as Jesus would say.

    Nothing else matters. Nothing.

    Nathaniel

    Notice how this message of direct religious experience is reinforced in the Gospel passage today as well.

    When Nathaniel is skeptical that anything good could ever come out of Nazareth (!!), Philip (“who was from Bethsaida”) says to him, “Come and see.”

    And when Nathaniel does come and see, Jesus said to him: “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

    Come and see … listen for the voice of God … know God in your own experience …

    Just imagine .. if the word went around Grafton that people who come to the Cathedral learn how to hear God speaking to them!

  • We Three Kings

    The Feast of the Epiphany
    Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
    3 January 2021

    Matthew’s story

    An early Christian author, who has become known to us as “Matthew,” was preparing an enlarged edition of the Gospel according to Mark. “Mark” had appeared a couple of decades earlier and was proving very popular in some of the Christian faith communities scattered around the eastern Mediterranean.

    For his community—or more likely a network of house-church communities across Antioch and in the neighbouring rural areas—Mark was a fast-paced action story, but it lacked the solid teaching which Matthew wanted his community to have at their fingertips.

    Matthew decided to combine the Markan narrative with another early Christian document, the Sayings Gospel which later scholars would call “Q”. This would address the lack of teaching from Jesus, with material such as the Sermon on the Mount.

    Matthew would also add a proper ending, since the way that Mark ended (with a handful women too scared to say anything to anyone after encountering an angel at the empty tomb) was hardly satisfactory. Matthew knew just what was needed: a final mountaintop epiphany as Jesus sent the Twelve out on their global mission.

    But Matthew also needed a better way to start the story of Jesus than Mark offered.

    Again, he knew just what was needed.

    He would describe the birth of Jesus in the royal town of Bethlehem. Such a messianic postcode for the child’s birth would signal to the corrupt rulers that their day was coming. But he wanted to do more than proclaim a davidic Messiah had arrived, he also wanted to say that Jesus was a second Moses (Moses 2.0). His story would feature a man called Joseph who had dreams, and an evil king who wanted to kill the baby boys, as well as a sojourn in Egypt before a new exodus as God calls his son out of Egypt as Hosea the prophet had declared. Only after all that was done would he arrange for Jesus to arrive in Nazareth, where everyone knew he was actually from.

    That would work for the Jewish Christians in the Antioch Jesus communities, but he also needed something for his Gentile membership …

    … wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” … When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

    We all know that story, but in Antioch around 110 CE as Matthew prepared his manuscript this was a whole new version of the birth of Jesus. In fact it was probably the very first version of the birth of Jesus, although others would soon follow: Luke, then the Infancy Gospel of James and later the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Not to mention all the nativity plays and the Christmas cards!

    Matthew’s story of the birth of Jesus has no annunciation in Nazareth, no census, no overland trip for a pregnant Mary, no search for somewhere to stay (and a quiet corner for a birth to take place), no angels (except in Joseph’s dreams), and no shepherds.

    This story which is so familiar to us was totally unknown to Paul, Peter, Mark, John, Thomas and even Luke (who says he researched everything before writing his own Gospel not long after Matthew). I dare say it would have been news to Mary and Joseph as well.

    This story is not about an actual event in the first weeks of Jesus’ life, but it is very much about real life events in Antioch more than 100 years later.

    Antioch ca 110 CE

    The city of Antioch was one of great cultural and trade centres in the Roman world. In many ways it was the ground zero from which the Jesus movement spread throughout the empire and far beyond.

    Antioch had a large Jewish population, but was also a critical location where the Jesus movement escaped its Jewish pedigree and welcomed non-Jews (Gentiles) into the community that acknowledged Jesus as their saviour and lord. Those two words sound like religious terms to us, and that is partly true as they derive from popular pagan religious cults at the time. But they were also political terms, since the Roman Emperors claimed to be divine figures (“sons of God”) and required their people to acknowledge them as sotēr (saviour) and kyrios (lord).

    Matthew needed to frame his gospel with a story that would locate Jesus firmly in the Jewish world, allow for the inclusion of wise persons from the East (or anywhere else), while asserting a claim to divine status that outranked the emperors of Rome.

    He includes the wise men from the East in the opening scenes, but notice how he ends his Gospel:

    Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” [Matthew 28:16–20]

    Matthew begins his story with foreigners coming from afar to worship the Christ child, but he ends the gospel with a command to go and make disciples of every nation, together with a claim that all authority (imperium in Latin) has been given to him in heaven and on earth.

    What we glimpse in the opening scenes becomes the mission of the church in the final scene.

    And both scenes are relevant to this feast of the Epiphany of the Lord Jesus to the Nations.

    A truth not mortgaged to historicity

    There is something very true in this story crafted by Matthew more than 100 years after the birth of Jesus.

    That truth has nothing to do with the visitors who came to see Mary’s newborn son.

    The truth beyond historicity concerns our love for the past, our compassion for others alive now, and our revolutionary belief that the only authority that matters is the power of divine love which not even violent imperial regimes can suppress.

    Like the Jewish members of Matthew’s house church network, we should treasure the ancient traditions to which we are heirs. The past is the store shed from which a wise disciple brings out just what is needed for the occasion. Sometimes it is something old and sometimes it is something new. (See Matt 13:52)

    A Cathedral speaks to that truth. This is not a temporary building. It has a long past and it speaks to a long future. There is a place for what we call “Cathedral thinking” as we imagine how our decisions right now build on the past but also prepare for a future in 50- or 100-years time. Unlike local, state and federal governments, we do not operate on a 4-year electoral cycle.

    But valuing the past does not mean erecting walls between us and other people. God was doing something new in Jesus, and God continues to do new things. Let’s push the circle out and make it larger. That was a hard message for the Jewish Christians in Antioch, and it can be a hard message for Anglicans on the North Coast. But guess what: we need to do things differently. The church is going to change.

    The mission of Jesus and the epiphany of Christ is not just about religion. As with sotēr (saviour) and kyrios (lord) 2,000 years ago, our beliefs have real-world political consequences. They start with addressing our own sins in the treatment of vulnerable people, but they extend to questions of justice, power, truth-telling, opportunity and the environment.

    The politicians will not always welcome our eyes-wide-open engagement with these issues, but neither did the high priest in Jerusalem nor the emperor in Rome. The Cathedral is not a museum for medieval English culture, but a research and development hub for gospel values on the North Coast in 2021 and beyond.

    To be all that God calls us to be we need to know and love our own tradition, we need to welcome people from different cultures and faiths, and we need to take seriously the revolutionary words of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth:

    The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.
    [Luke 4:18–19]

    For further reading: Jesus Database – Star of Revelation

  • Transforming a world by compassionate living

    This sermon for Christmas morning at Christ church Cathedral in Grafton was inspired by a beautiful paragraph in a Christmas letter from a friend in the UK.

  • Mary said, Yes

    There is no written text for this unplanned and unscripted sermon for the mid-week service at Christ Church Cathedral this morning, we do have a video of the sermon …

  • Marana tha

    Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
    Advent Sunday
    29 November 2020

    [ video ]

    Well, here we are: Advent Sunday 2020.

    A new church year has begun, and what a train wreck the last year has been! 

    We get to beat most people to the end of year reviews and NYE resolutions, but what are we to make of 2020 and what might we hope for in the future?

    Ah yes … HOPE. Our word for today, this first Sunday of Advent: hope, peace, love, joy …

    2020 has not exactly been a year marked by hope, or peace or joy. Thankfully there has been a lot of love and compassion on display for much of the time.

    While hope, peace and joy have been hard to find this past year, there has been an abundance of challenges that seek to eliminate any hope for a better life.

    This time last year the major source of concerns were the fires. Extreme fires. Across so much of the country including areas not far from here. Our skies turned red and the air was filled with smoke. Homes were lost. Lives were lost. Billions of animals were destroyed. So much of the landscape was scorched and vegetation burnt.

    Then came COVID-19.

    At first just a news report about a weird virus in one part of China, then the cruise ship slow-motion horror stories, followed by the outbreaks in aged care homes, then the death rates in Italy, Spain, France, the UK and in the USA. All year in the USA. Outbreaks in Sydney. A second wave in Melbourne. Closed borders. Families kept apart from one another.

    Businesses closed. Schools closed. Churches closed. Hand cleanser bottles everywhere. No singing allowed. Online streaming of church services. Face masks at the Altar.

    We are so ready to say farewell to 2020 and to the Year of Matthew.

    We are so ready to see things turn for the better.

    Our first reading today speaks to that reality:

    O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. [Isaiah 64:1–4]

    The anonymous prophet whose words are preserved in the final section of the great Scroll of Isaiah was seeking to speak hope to a community living with fear and disappointment.

    To paraphrase him, we might say: God, where are you? This would be a really good time to show yourself and let us see how well you can turn things around here!

    The earliest Christians spoke Aramaic, and some of their prayers have survived even in the Greek NT. One of their most striking arrow prayers is simply: Marana tha; Come, Lord!

    That is an Advent prayer, is ever there was one.

    In this season of waiting, longing and preparation our hearts cry out: marana tha … our Lord, come.

    In the gospel today we are offered a glimpse into the other side of our longing for the God we call Emmanuel(God with us) to come among us or, as Jesus would say, the God’s reign to here, active in our lives and in our contexts.

    It is a strange kind of text as it uses apocalyptic (end-of-the-world) and dystopian imagery to reassure the readers. It was intended as a message of hope even if our first reaction to this weird material is to wonder how to make sense of the extreme metaphors. After all, we understand—unlike the ancients—that the sun cannot go dark, the moon cannot turn to blood, and the stars cannot fall from the sky and land on the earth. It may help to think of all that language as first-century science fiction, but we cannot miss the point Jesus is making:

    But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. … And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. [Mark 13:32–33, 37]

    As we get close to the end of 2020 and as we begin a new church year, what does KEEP AWAKE mean for us?

    For sure it means we choose to reject fear, despair and complacency. We are never going to accept the ways things have been as good enough.

    We choose not to allow the past to be the best predictor of the future, our future.

    We choose to be awake and not asleep.

    We choose to make our future and not simply accept what life serves up.

    We choose to say YES to God and to work with the Spirit of Life to rebuild, reshape and recreate a broken, scorched and virus-ridden world.

    We choose to live into the future with our eyes wide open, with courage, with compassion and with hope.

    Marana tha … our Lord, come.

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