gregoryjenks

Author: Gregory C. Jenks

  • Learning to be brave

    Learning to be brave

    St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
    Australia Day
    26 January 2025

    [ video ]

    What a week to be preaching.

    Every week the sermon is an awesome responsibility for any preacher. Some weeks the weight seems heavier.

    This is one of those weeks.

    Today we observe Australia Day.

    That alone puts the preacher between a rock and a hard place. How does the gospel of Jesus connect with the reality of a society constructed on lands that were stolen from its ancient inhabitants?

    How do we speak truth to power, or even simply to ourselves?

    Meanwhile, this has been the week when a new administration comes to power in the United States of America, and we have seen the sparks fly as an Anglican bishop challenges the core values of the man now wielding immense power as his party controls both houses of Congress after he has previously stacked the US Supreme Court with conservative justices.

    Let’s not even mention the coalition of oligarchs with wealth largely derived from their pervasive commercial technologies who have backed this man into power and now wait to reap their unjust rewards.

    It seems that the mighty have climbed back onto their thrones. The lowly have been cast down once more. The hungry have been refused food. The alien and the strangers have been targeted for deportation. And the rich get richer by the day.

    How do the readings set for this Sunday speak into these realities?

    Nehemiah 8

    Now that is a fascinating reading. 

    This is very first time we have a description of the Bible being read to an assembly of people by a professional Scripture scholar.

    As the storyteller imagines the scene, the crowd cannot even understand the Hebrew language of the Bible, so it needs a simultaneous translation into Aramaic by a team of support teachers (the Levites).

    Ezra stands at a podium on an elevated platform. We still do that some 2,500 years later!

    This was no pious devotional exercise. Ezra was establishing the principle that the sacred scriptures of the Torah—the first five books of the Old Testament—formed the constitutional basis for the province of Yehud within the Persian Empire.

    Let that little fact sink in.

    The very first time we hear about the Bible being read in public, it was being used for politics.

    So much for keeping religion out of politics, or politics out of religion.

    Not that we ever have.

    And these were nasty xenophobic politics, that justified the cruel deportation of residents who were deemed to be aliens and outsiders by the narrow-minded theological purists led by Ezra.

    I am speaking of Jerusalem ca 400 BCE, not Washington in 2025.

    Families were to be separated and torn apart, and the so-called foreign women—actually they were simply worshippers of God from the northern tribes rather than the southern tribe—were to be divorced and expelled; along with their children. These women were the grand daughters and great nieces of Elijah and Elisha, but that mattered nothing to the conservative hardliners who wanted a society defined by purity; at least by their definition of purity.

    The books of Jonah and Ruth may have been written to offer an alternative vision of God’s inclusive love, but the hardline policies of the right wing prevailed.

    Then as now.

    Luke 4

    Meanwhile in today’s Gospel we have the famous inauguration scene—yes, you heard me correctly, the inauguration scene—where Jesus announces his program as the prophet of the reign of God. What a contrast with the inauguration charade in Washington this past week.

    “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.”

    And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” [Luke 4:18–21]

    As Luke tells the story, Jesus follows the ritual set in place by Ezra some 400 years earlier. He stood up to read, presumably at the bamah, or high place. What we would call a lectern or a pulpit.

    Jesus finds the passage set for that day, perhaps following an early form of the Jewish lectionary. He highlights the prophetic words of the haftarah, the secondary text read alongside the Torah passage set for that Shabbat.

    He says that the following words had been fulfilled in their hearing that very day, right there in the tiny synagogue of 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.”

    This was a message of hope, freedom, liberation, healing and divine blessing.

    That, my friends, is the agenda of Jesus.

    We find it elaborated in the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount, which Luke preserves in this form:

    “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

    Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.

    Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

    Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

    But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.

    Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.

    Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.

    Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” [Luke 6:20–26]

    The good news of Jesus is not for those who are doing just fine in the present system, thank you very much.

    That point is made very clear in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, which of course the church has never asked us to learn by heart so we can recite it together when we gather at the table of Jesus:

    Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial. [Luke 11:2–4]

    The message of Jesus and therefore our message to the Commonwealth of Australia is to promote a vision of liberation and empowerment for the oppressed and the dispossessed. 

    We do not back one party over another. They have all failed to embrace the radical vision of Jesus Christ.

    But we do speak truth to power, and sometimes that begins by speaking truth to the person we see in the mirror.

  • Baptism as epiphany

    Baptism of the Lord
    St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
    12 January 2025

    We are now in the season of Epiphany.

    This is an elastic season that can be shorter or longer depending on the date of Easter each year. 

    This year Epiphany last for 7 weeks, or 8 Sundays if we count last week when we had the feast of the Epiphany itself.

    This is a time when the church invites us to pause and reflect on the many epiphanies—moments of insight and revelation—when we catch a fresh glimpse of God among us.

    Last we celebrated the birth of Jesus and the visit of the magi. The greatest epiphany moment of them all.

    This Sunday we are invited to reflect on Baptism as an Epiphany moment.

    Over the next few weeks we shall reflect on various other epiphany moments:

    • The miracle of the water becoming wine for the wedding at Cana (John 2).
    • The epiphany of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth (Luke 4). We shall spend two Sundays on that episode.
    • The epiphany of the miraculous catch of fish (Luke 5).
    • The epiphany of Jesus that call us to think differently (Luke 6).
    • And finally the epiphany of the transfiguration (Luke 9).

    In today’s Gospel, Jesus is baptised by John.

    This is a familiar story, and indeed we already heard the larger background story during Advent when we reflected on the role of John the Baptiser as a trail blazer— but also a spiritual master—for Jesus.

    Finally today we get to the part of the story where Jesus gets to be baptised by John.

    It is something of an anticlimax, and quite unlike the way the story is told in Mark and Matthew.

    For Luke, the actual Baptism of Jesus is simply mentioned in passing:

    Now when all the people had been baptised and when Jesus also had been baptised …

    Luke is about to describe an epiphany moment for Jesus, but he makes no fuss at all about the actual Baptism itself.

    We could rephrase Luke this way:

    When everyone had been baptised, including Jesus …

    Around the world today preachers will wax eloquent about the importance of the epiphany that Jesus experienced following his Baptism. The heavenly words and the outpouring of God’s Spirit upon Jesus, will be talked about at some length.

    They are pretty amazing words, and it may be that we have a rare insight into the spiritual life of Jesus himself here.

    Take some time during the week to read that section of Luke again. Perhaps the whole of chapter 3 in one go?

    But today I want us to reflect on an aspect of the story where we may find a fresh epiphany, and one which we might so easily overlook.

    I want us to think about the idea that Jesus was just one person in the crowd.

    Now when all the people had been baptised and when Jesus also had been baptised …

    We often think of Baptism as a very individual moment. 

    This is especially so when an adult is being baptised.

    There is something powerful when we hear an adult express their desire to be a follower of Jesus.

    But for most Christians throughout most of history that has not been the case. They were baptised as infants and often in large ceremonies with many children being baptised at the one time.

    Fundamentally, Baptism is about God’s choice of us; and that is always in the context of us being part of the people of God. Not simply me as an individual.

    Later this morning I shall be baptising a little girl, Arabella. She turned 1 just a few weeks ago, so this is not something that Arabella has requested.

    Rather, this is something that her home faith community, her family, has arranged for her.

    They are claiming Arabella for Jesus, and they are claiming a place for Arabella among the people of Jesus.

    There is a beautiful simplicity about the Gospel when we baptise a baby.

    The child has not done anything special or expressed any faith. It is all about God’s action on our behalf, and also about the role of the wider community as we come to faith and then as we form our lives faithfully.

    Even when the candidate for Baptism is an adult, there remains that collective element.

    The adult candidate will speak for themselves, but they have sponsors who bring them to the water and then walk with them as companions on the way after the Baptism.

    Indeed, the entire congregation are both witnesses and companions for each baptism candidates, regardless of their age.

    We cannot be a solo Christian.

    We need each other.

    And that, I suggest, is the epiphany moment for us this week.

    Look around the room and see the people God has placed us among.

    We do this Jesus thing together with everyone else, just as Luke describes Jesus being baptised along with everyone else.

    We are in this together.

    That is our epiphany for this week.

    And it is good news.

  • an outside-in church

    IMAGE: Ethiopian icon of the adoration of the magi. From the collection of the Centre for Coins Culture & Religious History, St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane. #3218

    Feast of the Epiphany
    St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
    5 January 2025

    [ video ]

    For much of the Twelve Days of Christmas we focus on the beautifully crafted story to be found in the Gospel of Luke.

    Over seven successive episodes, Luke invites us into story of two boys—John and Jesus. We hear about the unusual circumstances of their respective conceptions and we glimpse the lives of two observant Jewish households (one based in a small village outside Jerusalem and the other in an even smaller village up north in Galilee). The parents of Jesus undertake a demanding 4-day journey by foot that takes them from Nazareth to Bethlehem just around the time that Jesus is born. Shepherds from the rocky limestone hills around Bethlehem come to see the Christ Child, after angels tell them of this child’s significance for all humanity. After prayers for the week-old baby in the temple, the family return to their home in Nazareth. Finally, some 12 years later, the holy family is back in Jerusalem once more and we find Jesus engaged in conversation with the religious leaders at the temple.

    That’s the way Luke tells the story, and he tells it very well.

    But there is another Christmas story in the NT, and we find it in the Gospel of Matthew.

    Where Luke seeks to connect the birth of Jesus with the famous Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, Matthew wants his readers to link the birth of Jesus with the ancient Jewish legends of Moses and the great exodus from slavery in Egypt.

    In Matthew the family do not come from Nazareth. Indeed, they only move there after returning from a brief period as refugees in Egypt. They are locals from Bethlehem and Jesus is born at their house.  There was no searching for somewhere for Mary to give birth to her first child. It was a home birth!

    There is no mention of John or his parents in Matthew’s story, but Joseph has dreams that guide his actions, just like Joseph in the OT stories.

    There are no shepherds in Matthew, and angels in the night sky but—as read just now—there is another and very different set of visitors, and a king who seeks to destroy the Christ Child along with all the other baby boys in the area around Bethlehem. Another echo of the exodus story, but this time the holy family seeks refuge in Egypt until the evil king had died.

    Matthew is telling the story of Jesus for Jewish Christians, and he wants them to understand Jesus as Moses 2.0; a bigger and more significant version of the great leader from the past.

    As I have done for the past few services, I encourage you to read the opening chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. You will see that it tells a very different story from Luke, although we have somehow learned how to blend these two different stories so well in our minds that we do not even notice the massive differences between them.

    Most of the time we do not pay attention to what the Bible says about the birth of Jesus, because we think we already know that story so well.

    As always, my advice is to read the Bible—carefully and with our eyes-wide-open.

    We miss the messages that both Luke and Matthew are seeking to convey if we do not listen to each of their stories in their own words and for their own sake.

    We need to stop mortgaging Christmas to the nativity play.

    So here is the thing, Matthew was writing for Jewish disciples of Jesus.

    These were people who valued tradition, and in their religion there were lots of rules.

    They were a bit like us in some ways.

    One of the most important rules related to outsiders.

    Jews and only Jews were God’s chosen people. Everyone else was an outsider. The covenant blessings were only for the insiders. For the Jews.

    Insiders and outsiders. Honour and shame. Us and them.

    But Matthew had some tough news for his Jewish Christian readers (hearers, actually).

    Matthew could see that the good news that Jesus both lived and proclaimed was for everyone.

    By the last scene of his Gospel, Matthew will have Jesus sending the disciples out to all nations:

    Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them … 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 28:19-20]

    Just as Luke created his opening two chapters as kind of overture for the whole story he would present in Luke and Acts, so Matthew has created an overture for his account of Jesus.

    His overture draws heavily on major Jewish themes: a genealogy tracing Jesus’ descent back to Abraham, Joseph the dreamer, an evil king seeking to murder all the Jewish boys, and the miraculous preservation of the child of destiny who escapes to Egypt (of all places).

    All of that would only confirm Matthew’s readers in their view that God favours the insiders, the chosen people.

    So Matthew adds one special extra detail: a visit by pagan astrologers from the East.

    We are so familiar with this bit of the story in Matthew that we fail to appreciate what he was doing.

    These people should not have been in the story.

    They were not Jews.

    Worse still, they were astrologers. Everything about them made them outsiders, and their religion was forbidden by the Old Testament.

    But these despised outsiders with their false religion were the only people who recognised Jesus as the Christ Child.

    In his nearby party palace, all Herod saw was a threat to his own power.

    The stargazers were the ones who got it right, and they embodied the upside-down news that Matthew wanted his readers to understand.

    Like them, we can be a church that values our traditions so much that the rules come first and people come last.

    We have lots of rules.

    But not so many people these days.

    I wonder why that might be?

    As he tells the story of Jesus, Matthew is going to take his readers on a journey so they eventually understand that God’s love is for everyone.

    The outsider belongs inside.

    The kingdom of God is an outside-in society.

    We exist for the sake of those who are not yet here.

    As we celebrate the Epiphany—the manifestation of Christ to the nations—we ask God to erase the boundaries between us and them, insiders and outsiders, pure and impure.

    Everything we do is help those who are not yet part of our community discover God’s love for them, and for us.

    We too were once outsiders.

    Now we all have a place at the table of Jesus.

  • Child of destiny

    Feast of the Holy Family (C)
    St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
    29 December 2024

    [ video ]

    Last Sunday I encouraged people to take the time to read the whole of Luke’s story about the birth of Jesus, which we find in the first two chapters of his Gospel.

    As they left the church a few people mentioned their intention to do just that, so I hope we now we have at least a few people in the congregation who have a fresh sense of what a beautiful story Luke created as he wove together episodes about John and others about Jesus.

    There is a series of seven episodes, as follows:

    • Scene 1 – John’s miraculous conception (Luke 1:5-25)
    • Scene 2 – Jesus’ miraculous conception (Luke 1:26-38)
    • Scene 3 – Mary visits Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-56)
    • Scene 4 – John’s birth and naming (Luke 1:57-80)
    • Scene 5 – Jesus’ birth and naming (Luke 2:1-21)
    • Scene 6 – Presentation in Temple (Luke 2:22-40)
    • Scene 7 – 12-year old Jesus in Temple (Luke 2:41-52)

    This Sunday we have heard the seventh and final of those episodes, as Luke makes it clear that Jesus would be the one chosen by God to bring the good news of salvation to everyone in the world.

    Luke was promoting a perspective that would have sounded familiar to his readers in the Roman Empire.

    When Luke chooses to tell the Christmas story his way and not to follow the model found in Matthew, Luke is seeking to engage the attention of his Roman readers.

    He is not simply playing with the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus. He was being far more contemporary, and playing with the recent trend of celebrating the birth of Octavius (later Augustus) as the start of a new era of divine blessings for all humankind. Since August was the emperor at the time of Jesus’ birth, this was both bold move and a clever one.

    Just a few years before the birth of Jesus, the Greeks in Eastern Mediterranean were celebrating the birthday of the Roman Emperor Augustus as the beginning of a new age in human history when God was blessing them with a saviour whose arrival among them was good news for all people.

    Here is an excerpt from the longer text, which dates to 9 BCE:

    It seemed good to the Greeks of Asia, in the opinion of the high priest Apollonius of Menophilus Azanitus: ‘Since Providence, which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life, has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a saviour, both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things, and since he, Caesar, by his appearance (excelled even our anticipations), surpassing all previous benefactors, and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done, and since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings/news for the world that came by reason of him which Asia resolved in Smyrna.

    [Frederick W. Danker, Benefactor: Epigraphic Study of a Graeco-Roman and New Testament Semantic Field(St. Louis, MO.: Clayton Pub. House, 1982), 217.]

    The opening two chapters of Luke’s gospel function as a kind of overture to the Gospel as a whole and indeed to the whole double story through Luke and Acts. Luke concludes this overtures with the climactic scene of the child of destiny appearing in the temple at Jerusalem, where the experts in Jewish law are amazed at his knowledge and his wisdom.

    Finally, this series of delightful episodes ends with the following note:

    Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor. [Luke 2:51–52]

    The next time Luke tells us anything about Jesus he was already a grown man. Augustus has been dead for 15 years, and John is making quite a name for himself down by the Jordan River.

    During the intervening 30 years, Jesus was a child and then a young man in Nazareth.

    Luke tells us nothing about those years, or indeed anything else about the family of Jesus. He certainly tells us nothing about Nazareth in the early decades of the first century.

    Considerable efforts have been made in the past few decades to understand the archaeology of Nazareth in the time of Jesus, and at various points in time since then.

    I draw your attention to the photograph on the front cover of our service booklet today.

    PHOTO: The venerated first-century house below the Sisters of Nazareth Convent. © Gregory C. Jenks, 2013.

    It looks like a jumble of rock, stones and masonry—with a few modern power cables to add to the confusion.

    It is indeed a mess, but it is a mess created by people over hundreds of years who venerated an ancient cave at the heart of this location as the home when Jesus lived with his parents and his siblings.

    Whether or not this was the home of Jesus and his family, he would have lived in a cave house of this type. If it is not his home, it is the home of one of his friends from the village.

    Some other time we can unpack this picture and tidy up the confusion, but for now let’s just take on board the idea that in the time of Jesus people from Nazareth lived in caves, rather than in neat little free standing homes such as we see in Sunday School pictures.

    In the area of modern Nazareth that has been identified as the ancient village from the time of Jesus, there are a large number of these cave houses. They were interspersed with underground silos for storing grain and other supplies, and many of them were linked via a network of tunnels that also provided a place to hide from bandits (or tax collectors).

    PHOTO: Passages linking caves on the northern edge of ancient Nazareth with the caves in the centre of the village. © Gregory C. Jenks, 2012.

    While Luke is evoking the universal destiny of Jesus in ways that both echo and rival the great emperor August, life was much more humble for the holy family in Nazareth.

    The village was quite small, perhaps fewer than 500 people and maybe only 15 or so families.

    It was an agricultural settlement from the time of Herod the Great, with a Jewish population transferred north from Judea to increase the Jewish character of the region.

    It was an observant Jewish community with quite distinct cultural traits from the nearby city of Sepphoris.

    It most likely did not have a dedicated building for its sabbath gatherings, but the menfolk will have gathered for prayers and other community consultations.

    There was almost certainly no school.

    Apart from agriculture, the village seems to have quarried stone for use by wealthier settlements nearby.

    Typically people occupied caves and over time they added modest stone structures at the entrances to their caves.

    In that humble home in a very small village with no special pedigree and few public facilities, Mary and Joseph nurtured their children. First Jesus, but later at least 4 brothers—James, Joses, Judas and Simon—as well as a few sisters, whose names were sadly never remembered.

    Both Jesus and James went on to become significant spiritual leaders in the first-century Jewish community. And both were killed by the authorities in Jerusalem.

    Luke was working with a grand canvas, but God was working with more everyday materials.

    That same God is at work in our families, our homes and in our workplaces.

    That same God is at work here in this parish.

    When we are faithful in the small everyday things, then God can use us to achieve great things for those who need to hear the good news.

  • Not the palace but a cave

    Christ Mass 2024
    St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
    25 December

    IMAGE: Public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Herodium_02.jpg

    [ video ]

    For those familiar with the geography of Bethlehem there is a powerful theological message hidden in plain sight every time the Christmas story is rehearsed.

    As one stands down the street from the Church of the Nativity and looks towards Jerusalem, there is an odd-shaped hill about 5km away from the place where Jesus was born.

    That unusual looking hill is in fact an artificial mound created to disguise and protect the personal palace of Herod the Great, ruler of Jerusalem around the time that Jesus was born.

    In the centre of the artificial hill was a multi-story fortress which offered Herod and his guests luxurious accommodation and desirable security.

    SOURCE: Archaeology Illustrated. Used under licence.

    The top of the palace was 758m above sea level, so just a few metres above the highest point in Jerusalem some 12 km to the north.

    Herodion could be seen from all directions, and it offered surveillance over everything in its neighbourhood.

    At the base of this secure desert palace, Herod created a precinct described by the Jewish historian, Josephus, as a pleasure park with water features in the desert and structures that displayed Herod’s wealth.

    Such were the powers that be around the time that Jesus was born in Bethlehem.

    But the angels were not sent to Herodion.

    In the limestone hills around Bethlehem, there were groups of shepherds eking out a living for their families by running goats and sheep in the semi-desert landscape.

    They had no grand structures, just a few rows of field stones at the entrance to the natural caves where they kept their flocks of an evening.

    SOURCE: https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/matpc.03289

    There were no aqueducts bringing water from mountain top reservoirs to these simplest of dwellings.

    There was no ostentatious display of wealth and power. 

    Some of the shepherds could see the desert palace of the murderous king, and on a still night the sounds of his parties would drift across the hillsides to their dark caves.

    In one of those caves, on the edge of the little village of Bethlehem overlooking an area now called Beit Sahour, a child was born.

    A child whose birth we celebrate some 14,000km away and 2,000 years later today.

    His mother had retired to the area of the cave where the animals were kept. She was seeking some privacy while she gave birth to her first child.

    She and Joseph were not seeking a place to stay, but for some privacy while Mary gave birth.

    In a cave with only the animals as witnesses to this most amazing moment.

    As Mary laboured to bring Jesus into the world, I wonder if she could hear the sounds of night time celebrations from Herod’s party palace just 5km away?

    For sure, Herod was oblivious to the birth of the child who would later hold sway over the hearts of millions of people across time and space, cultures and ethnicities.

    As he enjoyed the dancing girls, Herod missed the biggest moment of his entire career.

    But the angels did not go the Herodion.

    The angels went to motley shepherds who were keeping watch over their flocks safely tucked away in the caves behind them.

    The good news of Emmanuel, God coming among us to save and to transform our world, was given to the shepherds, not the tyrant in the palace.

    The angels came to the shepherds and sent them to another cave on the edge of Bethlehem where they would find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a stone food trough.

    Many years later, the adult Jesus would say to the crowds:

    What did you go out into the wilderness to look at? A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? Someone dressed in soft robes? Look, those who wear soft robes are in royal palaces. What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. [Matthew 11:7-9]

    He was speaking of John the Baptist, but the image works for us tonight as well.

    Where do we look for Emmanuel?

    We shall not find him in the palace, but in those places where powerful people least expect to see God at work among us.

    May this church be such a place here in the heart of Ipswich.

    And may our homes be such places—ordinary places—where love abounds and the Christ Child is to be found.

  • Be like Luke

    Advent 4C
    St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
    22 December 2024

    IMAGE: http://www.wildwinds.com/coins/ric/city_commemoratives/_thessalonica_RIC_187_arrowhead

    Listening to Scripture and reading our context

    [ video ]

    Throughout this year we shall especially focus on the Gospel tradition attributed to Saint Luke. 

    This is year C in a three-year cycle for the ecumenical lectionary shared by all the major Christian churches. During the past twelve months we have been especially listening to how Mark told the Jesus story, and when we start Advent all over again next November we shall refocus on Matthew’s telling of the Jesus story. But for the next twelve months we listen to Luke.

    Who was Luke?

    Each of the Gospels in the New Testament are traditionally attributed to a particular apostle or close associate of the apostles.

    There is no historical basis to those attributions, and they really do not add anything to our understanding of the documents. We are better advised to pay close attention to the narrative that each Gospel offers us and then discern the different theological emphases that each provides. In other words, we read between the lines as we seek wisdom for everyday life.

    There is an added twist in that the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles seem to be volumes one and two of an original continuous account that has been separated into different parts as the NT took shape. The first half was eventually collected and transmitted in the set of Gospels, while the second part was often attached to the collection of Paul’s letters.

    The author/editor is never named, although they speak in the first person in the opening paragraph of each volume.

    Whoever crafted these two documents (which comprise more than 25% of the New Testament), seems to have been a Gentile (i.e., not a Jewish follower of Jesus) and yet someone who was deeply influenced by the Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures, the Septuagint. Whoever this person was, they wrote more of the New Testament than any other person in the early church. Even more than Paul!

    Let’s adopt as a listening strategy the idea that we are listening to the words of a Gentile Christian during the earliest stages of the Jesus movement. This will be somewhere during the last 25 years of the first century and the first 25 years (or so) of the second century. I would suggest later rather than earlier.

    By the time “Luke” is writing his account of things, several people have already written accounts of Jesus. Luke is aware of Mark and Matthew, and perhaps also the Gospel of John. None of this is 100% certain, but it is a reasonable set of assumptions to help us understand what we are going to be hearing in the coming year.

    Interestingly, Luke thinks the earlier accounts were incomplete or inaccurate and he writes to set the record straight!

    What did Luke do?

    Without delving too deeply into the details in a sermon, let me suggest that Luke was doing two things at the same time. Let me also suggest that he is offering us a model that we might well choose to follow.

    Luke is listening to Scripture, and he is also paying attention to his contemporary culture.

    I think that is exactly what we need to be doing as well.

    We see Luke listening to Scripture when he draws on the ancient stories of Samuel to provide colour and detail for his story of Jesus.

    This is especially the case today as we ready the Song of Mary, the Magnificat. This powerful prophetic song which Luke has Mary sing spontaneously after she meets her cousin, Elizabeth, is itself inspired by the song of Hannah from 1 Samuel 2. We read that prophetic song for our psalm portion on 17 November, as we began to turn our minds towards the Kingdom themes during the Sundays after All Saints Day.

    Any ancient reader familiar with the Jewish Scriptures would have easily recognised how Luke’s description of John the Baptist and Jesus echo the biblical stories of Samuel.

    Luke was not alone in searching the Scriptures when seeking to understand their experience of God in and through Jesus. All the early followers of Jesus did the same thing. For example, Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth draws on themes related to Joseph the dreamer, Moses and the escape from a murderous king.

    But Luke does something that most of his peers failed to do. Luke also paid attention to the cultural context in which he and his readers were located.

    To express that in more contemporary terms (even if slightly outdated now): Luke did not just read the Bible, he also read the newspaper.

    For Luke and everyone else in the Mediterranean world around the end of the first century, the dominant reality was the Roman Empire.

    Rome had its foundation myth, its national story: the legend of Romulus and Remus.

    Luke is writing his account of the Jesus story for people living inside the Roman world.

    Instead of the legend of Romulus and Remus—two brothers—one of whom would become the founder of Rome; Luke tells a story about two boys—John and Jesus—one of whom would become the saviour of the whole world.

    As you prepare for Christmas this week, take the time to read the first two chapter of Luke in one sitting. It is not a very long read, but we mostly hear the story in isolated chunks. Read the whole story as told by Luke in one go, and imagine how his original audience living in the Roman empire around 100 CE would have understood Luke’s message.

    This outline I prepared some time back may be helpful …

    Be like Luke

    The challenge for us is to be like Luke: to be people who read the Scriptures but also pay attention to the cultural world in which we live.

    That is something that comes naturally to us as Anglicans, since our tradition has always valued culture (fine arts, music, scholarship) while remaining firmly grounded in Scripture.

    To repeat the metaphor I used earlier, we need to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other hand.

    The Scriptures teach us how best to recognise God in everyday life, and our world invites us to express the good news in ways that transform lives and communities.

    That is our task this Advent, and during the year ahead.

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