gregoryjenks

Author: Gregory C. Jenks

  • The spirit that transforms

    Pentecost Sunday
    St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
    19 May 2024

    In place of notes for a sermon this week, I am offering some reflections on the dynamics of the Spirit in our lives as people of faith.

    These reflections are grouped under a series of headings: watery chaos, dry bones and freedom.

    Watery chaos

    One of the primal images for the Spirit of God in the Bible comes from the opening paragraph of Genesis:

    In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2 KJV)

    I have chosen to cite the words from the King James Bible as they have shaped our spiritual imagination in the English-speaking world for more than 400 years.

    Most modern translations render the Hebrew ruach elohim as “wind from God” or even “a mighty wind.”

    In biblical terms the imagery is much the same: a wind, a breath, a spirit or even a powerful storm is forming over the watery chaos. Something new is about to happen. Creation is about to begin.

    Until then there is no form to the world, just a dark primeval ocean.

    But once the spirit or wind or breath of God hovers over that nothingness, new possibilities emerge.

    That is not just a meme from the ancient Hebrew creation myth. It is a truth of our own lived experience as people of faith.

    The chaos and the darkness of our own lives can be transformed by the spirit of God.

    That is one way to talk about salvation.

    Dry bones

    The prophet, Ezekiel, lived in Jerusalem around 600 BCE and was taken into exile after the city was captured by the Babylonians. 

    He lived at a time when it seemed both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah had been destroyed. There was no hope for recovery.

    God gives Ezekiel a vision of vast valley filled with the desiccated bones of dead soldiers.

    It is a confronting vision, but God used it to assure Ezekiel—and the people with whom he worked—that there was still a future for them. 

    God would pour out his Spirit on the exiled remnant of the Jewish people and bring them back to Jerusalem once more.

    I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act,” says the LORD. (Ezekiel 37:14 NRSV)

    From a hopeless situation where it seemed there was no prospect of recovery, God’s Spirit renews and restores.

    Again, this is not simply a message for the Jewish people more than 2,500 years ago.

    It is a central element of our faith as well.

    There is no situation we can ever find ourselves in where the Spirit of God cannot turn things around and replace despair with hope.

    Freedom

    For the third reflection I want to draw on a theme found in Paul. 

    To do that, I will cite two brief lines from different letters where we catch a glimpse of how Paul understood the Spirit of Jesus in his own experience and in the life of the early Christian faith communities.

    In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes Jesus this way:

    Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. … The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. (1 Corinthians 15:45-49 NRSV)

    The other piece from Paul which I want to place alongside those rather unusual words are from his second letter to the Corinthians:

    Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. (2 Corinthians 3:17 NRSV)

    Jesus has become “a life-giving spirit” and as the spirit of God in our midst, Jesus sets us free: the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

    “Freedom” in this context is not about politics or social situation, but about our own existential reality. Elsewhere in Paul (Romans 8) we read about the amazing freedom we have as the children of God. 

    That whole chapter 8 of Romans is well worth a read this week.

    Chaos … despair … anxiety —all are transformed by the gentle power of the Spirit of Jesus.

    That is not only the message of Pentecost, but also the deep meaning of Easter.

  • Mothers Day and domestic violence

    A sermon for St Paul’s Church, Ipswich on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, 12 May 2024.

    Around the country today and in many other parts of the world people are observing Mothers’ Day.

    This year that celebration coincides with a growing awareness of the scourge of domestic and family violence, and indeed the whole of May is dedicated to raising awareness of domestic violence.

    More on those matters shortly.

    But first, a brief look back at the origins of Mothers’ Day and indeed Mothering Sunday as well.

    Mothering Sunday

    For churchgoing Anglicans, we have a special celebration of mothers on the fourth Sunday during Lent: Mothering Sunday. That, of course, is the official Mothers’ Day in the UK. However, it is essentially unknown outside the shrinking circle of Anglican Church life.

    In medieval times, there was a custom to visit the Cathedral—“mother church”—of the Diocese, or even the local parish church where a person had been baptised as a child on the Sunday that fell halfway through Lent. This was also known as Refreshment Sunday and it offered a brief respite from some of the rigours of Lenten disciplines.

    In Early Modern times, servants were sometimes allowed the day off so they could visit their mothers and take some fresh supplies from the kitchen of the great house.

    The modern revival of Mothering Sunday in the UK is just over 100 years old, and it was an English response to the development of Mothers’ Day in the USA.

    Mothers’ Day

    The back story for the development of Mothers’ Day is rather more complex. It begins as a response by women peace activists who were campaigning to ensure that the horrors of the US Civil War (1861–65) were never repeated. That was the war in which my own great-great-grandfather, John Henry Jenks,  was killed during the Battle of Cedar Creek at the very end of the war.

    In the years following the Civil War, Julia Ward Howell—who we know as the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic—appealed for women around the world to work together to prevent future wars. In 1870 she issued the Mothers’ Day Proclamation:

    Arise, then… women of this day!

    Arise, all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

    From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own. It says: Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence vindicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of council.

    Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them then solemnly take council with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own kind the sacred impress, not of Caesar, but of God.

    In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women, without limit of nationality, may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient, and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

    That was one courageous woman, even if her prophetic call for women to rise up for peace mostly fell on deaf ears.

    Almost 40 years later in 1908, Anna Marie Jarvis held a memorial service in honour of her own mother, Ann Jarvis who was a colleague of Julia Ward Howell. During the Civil War, Ann had worked as a nurse and campaigned as a peace activist. In honouring her own mother, under the cloud of a looming war in Europe, Anna Jarvis triggered the establishment of the modern Mothers’ Day and the reinvention of Mothering Sunday in the UK.

    It would be 1924 before the first observance of Mothers’ Day in Australia. So today we mark 100 years of Mothers’ Day here.

    Beyond the scourge of war

    Back then, the motivation for Mothers’ Day was to empower women to abolish war. It was a grassroots women’s movement for liberation and human flourishing. Who would have thought that behind the commercial flotsam of cards, floral bouquets and restaurant lunches there was such a courageous agenda for profound social change.

    And all this at a time when women were finally securing the right to vote!

    But now we face another plague of hatred and violence, with women and children suffering at the hands of men who are supposed to love them and care for them.

    We have all heard the terrible statistics in recent days.

    I was impressed to see these same cruel facts being presented at the Mothers’ Day breakfasted hosted by our local Mothers’ Union branch in the parish hall yesterday morning.

    In brief …

    On average 1 women is murdered very week in Australia by their current for former partner

    By the end of April, the rate this year was about 1 death every 4 days.

    And that is just the deaths of women who are beaten and killed by their partners. Even more are injured but do not die. Many of those women are mothers, and their children are caught up in the cycle of violence and sometimes killed as well. How do we count the number of these child victims?

    It is a cruel reality. 

    I know. 

    I grew up in a home where my father would beat my mother, until the day I was big enough to intervene, even if not big enough to stop my father. At least the beating shifted from my mother to me.

    Churches matter

    My parents were people of faith, and my family was heavily involved in the life of our local church. We were there several times on Sunday and actively engaged in church life during the week.

    How does such violence happen in a Christian home?

    Why did we make excuses for Dad rather than address the problem?

    The sad truth is that family and domestic violence is more likely to happen in a Christian home than in the average Australian household.

    The 2019 National Anglican Family Violence Research Project found that around 23% of Anglicans who have ever been in an intimate relationship reported having experienced domestic and family violence. That is almost 1 in 4 Anglicans who have ever been in an intimate relationship.

    We might think it is even worse in the wider society, but that is not the case.

    The rate for the general community was 15%.

    That is still awful, but it is almost half the rate of domestic and family violence among Anglicans.

    There is something about the way we teach people to treat women and girls that encourages violence by the men in their lives.

    That is simply horrific.

    This Mothers’ Day let’s seek the wisdom of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit to turn that around, and make sure that anyone who we influence treats women and girls as having equal value. 

    We need to be safe place for women and children.

    That can be our gift to Ipswich this Mothers’ Day.

  • While we wait

    St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
    Easter 6B
    5 May 2024

    Waiting can be a difficult time.

    “Are we there yet?” may only be expressed by the children, but the adults know the feeling all too well.

    “How long, O Lord?” is a cry of despair within the Scriptures themselves.

    How long indeed!

    It has already been several months since Selina left Ipswich to begin her new ministry at the Cathedral.

    It took a while for the Bishop to find a locum and another month before he finally got here.

    But here I am and here we are.

    We are in that space between what lies behind and what is yet to come.

    And we still do not know how long it will be until the new Rector arrives.

    No, good people, we are not there yet.

    I am not your new Priest.

    But I am the person assigned by the Bishop to lead this community of Jesus people at St Paul’s Church—and support you through this time of transition, whether it is a short time or a longer time.

    This week I join the waiting community at St Paul’s Church partway through the Great Fifty Days of Easter. Five weeks of the 50 days are behind us, and just 2 weeks remain.

    In the story line of the New Testament, the fledgling Jesus community in Jerusalem was about to enter the most challenging part of their waiting time.

    As Luke tells the story in the Acts of the Apostles, and as John tells the story in the fourth gospel, and also as Matthew told the story in his revised and enlarged edition of Mark’s gospel, something new was about to happen. The disciples needed to wait, but Jesus would be with them as they waited and also when the new thing began to happen.

    John has Jesus repeatedly telling this to the disciples before Easter. We had one example of that in this morning’s Gospel:

    I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last. [John 15:15–16]

    In Matthew we read this version of the tradition:

    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 28:16­20]

    And in Acts—just before the Ascension (which we observe this coming Thursday)—we find these words:

    While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

    So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” [Acts 1:4–8]

    So, two themes come through these texts: God is about to do something new, and we need to wait for it to begin.

    There was no time frame on this new thing happening. Indeed, in Acts we find Jesus saying that it is not for us to know the times or the seasons. That makes it all the more interesting that the invitation from Bishop Cam was for me to serve as locum here, quote, “for a season.”

    That season may be until the end of the year. It may end sooner if we find the new priest before then. It may even be a slightly longer season. Who knows?

    In this in-between time we wait, and we prepare.

    We do not prepare best for the new priest by keeping everything exactly the same as it was during the past 5 or 6 years, or even longer.

    We certainly do not prepare for the new priest by doing everything my way in the meantime.

    But we do prepare best for the new priest by deepening our own faith and consolidating our faithfulness as disciples of Jesus.

    Some things will remain the same, some things will be refreshed, and some new things will happen as we seek to discern the best ways for us to be disciples of Jesus in the heart of Ipswich, as we have been ever since 1859.

    Central to that process of reimagination and renewal is our mission action plan that was adopted by Parish Council this past week.

    You will hear more about that in the coming weeks.

    I did not remember to ask Sue to update the front page of this week’s bulletin, but you will see some changes already on the website and for sure in the bulletin next week.

    We have simplified our vision statement so that it now reads:

    an inclusive Anglican presence in the heart of the Ipswich community

    Nothing there is new, I hope, but it is expressed more directly and will serve as the litmus test for every action that comes to PC for approval. 

    Over and over we shall be asking ourselves, does this proposal help us be more inclusive, more authentically Anglican, more connected with our local community here in Ipswich?

    As we ask those questions, I hope we might also keep in mind the powerful words spoken by Pope Francis last Thursday when meeting in Rome with Anglican Primates from around the world:

    Only a love that becomes gratuitous service, only the love that Jesus taught and embodies, will bring separated Christians closer to one another. Only that love, which does not appeal to the past in order to remain aloof or to point a finger, only that love which in God’s name puts our brothers and sisters before the ironclad defence of our own religious structures, only that love will unite us. First our brothers and sisters, the structures later.

    That is true for the relationship between Anglicans and Romans, but also for relationships between all the churches in this city, and indeed for the inner spiritual dynamic of St Paul’s Church.

    We are not here to protect the past but to engage with the future.

    And while we wait, we practise authentic love for each other.

  • A truth deeper than historicity

    Annunciation to BVM
    Holy Trinity Church, Fortitude Valley
    14 April 2024

    [https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4942823]

    On this principal Marian festival—Lady Day—we celebrate Mary in both Scripture and Tradition.

    One of the key principles for hermeneutics that I seek to inculcate in my students is the idea that we do not mortgage truth to history. 

    That is a particular weakness of Western thought since the Enlightenment, but it does serve us well when we are seeking spiritual wisdom for everyday life as we are in this liturgy, and indeed every time we gather at the Table of Jesus.

    We would like to know what really happened, but we rarely can do that.

    However, what we need to know (as distinct from like to know) is to live now in ways that are holy and true.

    MARY IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

    Our shared memory of Mary, mother of Our Lord, is grounded in Scripture. But on closer examination is has a very narrow base within the sacred texts.

    Gospel of Mark – just a single episode in which Mary and the siblings of Jesus are participants in a scene (Mark 3:21–35 with parallels in Matthew and Luke). Here, Mary and her other children are so concerned about Jesus’ wellbeing that they have come to Capernaum to rescue him from the crowd and bring him home for some R&R.

    Gospel of Matthew – a revised and enlarged edition of Mark released perhaps 25+ years later. Matthew preserves the same incident from Mark 3, and famously adds the Bethlehem birth narratives. But in that story Mary is almost absent. All the action is with Joseph, the wise men, and Herod. Indeed, we are not even told of Mary giving birth to Jesus. Matthew’s birth story is all about Jesus as Moses 2.0 character, with Joseph being given instructions via dreams just like his ancient namesake. Mary sis simply the mother of the child whose birth is not even mentioned.

    Gospel of John – here we shall find two stories in which Mary is a participant. But in this gospel, we are never told her name. She is simply “the mother of Jesus.” In fact, in John 6:42 we even find the crowd saying: “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” The two episodes where Mary does appear in the action are the wedding feast at Cana and then at the crucifixion, since John has Mary present in Jerusalem for her son’s death.

    Gospel of Luke & the Acts of the Apostles – almost everything that we think we know about Mary comes from the Gospel of Luke. But it is also true that almost everything Luke tells us about Mary is found in the first two chapter, where he provides us with a beautiful infancy narrative for Jesus. This is not just a birth story for Jesus, but a set of intertwined stories about the birth of John and Jesus. Where Matthew wanted to portray Jesus as Moses 2.0, Luke wanted to present Jesus as the child chosen by God to be saviour of the world. Luke had his eye on Rome with its legend of Romulus and Remus, as he tells a new tale of two boys, one of whom is destined to be ruler.

    The rest of the New Testament – nothing at all is said about Mary and not even her name has survived.

    LUKE’S PORTRAIT OF MARY

    Unlike Matthew, Luke is interested in Mary, and he represents her in very positive terms. Joseph fades into the background and Mary is an active participant in the story that Luke tells.

    • The angel Gabriel comes to Mary
    • Mary responds with humility and courage
    • Mary spends time with her cousin Elizabeth out of the public eye
    • Luke crafts the prophetic Song of Mary (Magnificat) for her to sing
    • as an observant Jewish mother, Mary takes Jesus to the Temple
    • Mary is an anxious parent when the 12-year-old Jesus goes missing
    • Mary is reflective (she ponders these things in her heart)
    • Mary is at the cross and comes to the empty tomb (an idea borrowed from John?)

    This is the biblical portrait of Mary, and it is a sacred gift to us from the pen of Luke.

    What is the ratio of Lukan imagination and historical detail? 

    We can never know, but to spend time on those questions is to miss the point and also to miss the opportunity to grasp the spiritual wisdom that Luke is offering us in this beautiful account.

    God does not just send Gabriel to Mary. 

    The annunciation is not a once-off event, but a process that recurs across time and in every place, indeed in every human heart.

    God comes to each of us and seeks to engage us in the divine mission to transform creation and bring the kingdom (rule) of God into our lives, our villages, our workplaces, and our churches.

    In the character of Mary, Luke offers us a template for how we might offer a humble yes to God’s amazing invitation. Like Mary, we can be God-bearers. May her prayers assist us to say yes to God, and to be people who ponder these things in our heart.

  • Radical transformation

    Easter 2 (B)
    St Catherine’s, Centenary Suburbs
    7 April 2024

    Explanatory note: The liturgy planning for this Sunday at St Catherine’s where I am presiding and preaching tomorrow has listed the NT reading actually set for next week, but I have chosen to prepare a sermon based around that passage rather than correct the arrangements at this late stage. So a week early bonus for those people not reading 1 John 3:1–3 until next Sunday!

    Here we are … a week after Easter.

    Just week?

    In some ways last weekend seems so long ago, as everyday life has returned to its normal level like a rising tide returning to the beach.

    So we are now a week into the Great Fifty Days, a week of weeks, as we move from Passover to Pentecost (Shavuot). If we have ears to hear and eyes to see, this sacred season reminds us of our Jewish roots as people of Jesus.

    When I was a child, I would hear adults talk about a “month of Sundays,” but every year at Easter we are offered a week of weeks.

    During these sacred seven weeks we adjust our liturgical settings. Our first reading is no longer drawn from the Old Testament. Instead we listen to stories from the Acts of the Apostles.

    We also take a break from Saint Paul as we listen instead to other apostolic voices in the New Testament. This year it is 1 John, but last year it was 1 Peter and next year it will be the Book of Revelation.

    Even though this is the Year of Mark, during Easter we mostly listen to Gospel readings from John. Mark does not have much to offer us at Easter time, but we follow much the same pattern in the Years of Matthew and Luke. 

    So our menu of Bible readings has been modified for these Great Fifty Days … and we are invited to listen to some different perspectives on living the Easter mystery in our everyday lives.

    We are the children of God …

    In today’s second reading, a couple of portions—just tiny serves really—from 1 John 2 and 3, we are offered an amazing assessment of what our Easter faith means. These are words that we can easily skip over, so I want us to pause and reflect on them today.

    Let me read the critical first 3 verses of 1 John 3 again:

    See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

    1 John 3:1–3

    This remarkable paragraph says three important things:

    WHO WE ARE (NOW)
    WHAT WE SHALL BE (IN THE FUTURE)
    HOW THAT CHANGES THE WAY WE LIVE ALREADY

    During Holy Week and Easter our attention is turned to the past. Every effort is made to remember and even to re-enact, at least to some extent, the events of Jesus’ final days. Indeed every Sunday when we gather for Eucharist we “do this in remembrance of him” … we are looking back.

    But this brief statement in 1 John 3 reminds us to look at ourselves in the spiritual mirror and realise that we are looking at someone who is a child of God, and to look around us in church and notice how every single person here (even that person we find rather irritating) is just as much a child of God as we are.

    Being a Christian is a process of transformation, not a lifetime membership in an exclusive club.

    As 1 John says, “we are not there yet.” However, we are already God’s children and the character of God should be seen with ever more clarity in ourselves and in each other.

    This early Christian leader who we call, “John,” was not describing or leading a perfect Christian community. We skipped the last paragraph of 1 John 2 which talks about the pain of a split that has happened in that church. People who considered themselves holier than others had left the community and formed a separate holiness club. John was pretty angry about that. He even coins a brand new hate label for them: antichrists!

    Maybe John still had some transformation work to be done in his life as well?

    None of us are perfect; yet.

    That transformation process is not about the familiar hallmarks of a religious life: deeper and longer prayers, increased giving to the church finances (tithing?), healing from disease, financial prosperity, happy families, peace of mind, children that still go to church, and so on.

    Rather, the transformation process is about becoming more and more like God until we are the same as God.

    By the time our knowledge of God is perfect—which presumably is in the next life for most of us—we shall be like God because we shall see/understand God’s true character.

    Not scary at all, right?

    As the text will make clear later in chapter 3, that still means compassionate generosity towards one another; but then that surely is to be more like God who treats us better than we deserve?

    How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

    1John 3:17-18

    Love for one another—our sisters and brothers in Christ, fellow children of God—is at the heart of this, but the larger process is profound personal transformation so that each and every person is increasingly more like God.

    The practical question as I wrap us these reflections is to ask ourselves how much the activities and budget priorities of this church community are devoted to enabling that kind of radical transformation. And also to ask ourselves how much of our own personal self-improvement and well-being activities are devoted to this objective?

    How different might this parish be—and may our own lives be—if we took seriously those words from 1 John 3 this morning?

  • of back stories and afterlives

    St John’s Cathedral, Brisbane
    Choral Evensong
    20 August 2023 

    Of back stories and afterlives

    In a majestic edifice such as this Cathedral we are reminded that Christianity has a back story.

    As we participate in the beautiful liturgy of Choral Evensong, we are experiencing a form of worship that has sustained faith for hundreds of years and indeed much longer.

    The building and the prayer book draw together elements of Western civilization from at least the time of Jesus. The Scriptures go back even further and draw from wells of ancient wisdom and spiritual practice centred around the temple in Jerusalem.

    Yes, the church has a back story.

    Of course, that back story is not as venerable as the stories of our First Nations, but like the much more ancient stories of our Indigenous Peoples it is a story that reflects the wisdom of slow time.  

    As a “slow time” narrative, our back story is not captive to a 3 or 4-year electoral cycle.

    The great story of faith invites us to dream long-term while acting here and now.

    As people of faith—as people with such a back story—we do not build for a single generation.We invest in outcomes that may not be seen in our own lifetimes.

    This is sometimes called “cathedral thinking.” That term captures the truth that cathedrals can take decades or even centuries to complete; and are expected to last for hundreds of years.

    Not many architects are invited to create a building to last 500 years.

    In today’s throwaway culture we literally spend our fortune on structures that will not last; and were never designed to do so in any case.

    To step inside this awesome church is to cross from everyday time into a liminal space where the distant past remains strangely present in stone and text, music and ritual. The lingering aroma of incense as we enter the Cathedral draws us into the great back story of faith. 

    When we leave from this place we are imbued with the holiness celebrated here, and perhaps we take a little of that with us as we return to the everyday world. A lingering aroma of otherness. Of slowness. 

    The scriptures that we have read and sung in this service are from the back story of Christianity. Indeed, they all come from a time when the term “Christian” had not yet been fashioned.

    These are Jewish texts. All of them. Even the New Testament writings are Jewish texts although they were written to explore the significance of Jesus for individuals and communities during the first 100 years after Easter.

    Earlier in this service we heard a passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans. It is easy to overlook the fact that Saint Paul was a Pharisee. He was a proud Jew and had such a strong sense of his identity that he claimed to be a Hebrew-speaking Israelite. 

    Of course, he was also a follower of Jesus. But Paul would never accept any suggestion that this made him anything less than a totally kosher Jew.

    As our sacred back story, the Scriptures come from a time when we did not yet have a name for the new religious movement that was taking shape within Judaism but would eventually become a separate religion. 

    Yet there is more than a back story here in this cathedral, in our liturgies and especially in our scriptures. 

    The scriptures themselves do not just speak about the past. They imagine a future, sometimes described as the kingdom or empire of God in distinction from the way things are usually done in the everyday empire of how-things-happen-around-here.

    That back story disturbs what Crossan describes as the (violent) normalcy of civilization, and subverts the narrative of how-things-happen-around-here with a meta-narrative of compassion, truth-telling and reconciliation.

    These sacred texts are an incubator for what is yet to be, and they fashion faith that will transform successive phases of cultural normalcy with the subversive dream of a better way.

    We encounter that back story here in this place, where new light is indeed streaming; to quote some lyrics from a recent hymn. 

    However, the great story of biblical religions is not just an immense back story. We can also understand those sacred texts as a cascading series of afterlives. 

    The originating spark is hard to identity. Perhaps there were several independent moments of insight. But there came a time when the prophets of ancient Israel began to speak truth to power, and demand a society that expressed in its everyday arrangements the character of God spoken about in its liturgies.

    Scripture was born as the first afterlives of the prophets were composed: The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, and The Book of the Twelve Prophets.

    The fashioning of those written afterlives took many generations and in some cases more than a hundred year. Kind of like a cathedral, I guess.

    The prophetic afterlives then generated more afterlives as the rest of Hebrew Bible took shape, and then as people such as the community at Qumran wrote commentaries, targums and midrashim on these texts which they had themselves inherited from the past. 

    Indeed, we can think of Jesus as himself an afterlife of Second Temple Judaism. 

    Jesus was not opposed to the afterlives of the Moses and the prophets. He was a child of their wisdom and he embodied the compassion of which they spoke. 

    It was as an afterlife of Judean religion that we can speak of Jesus fulfilling what was written in the prophets. There is much more happening in that phrase than proof texts plucked from ancient scrolls as talking points for later Christian spin doctors.

    Jesus was inherently and authentically Jewish. 

    He was one of many afterlives that developed from the scriptures of ancient Israel. 

    For us he is the quintessential afterlife of Torah. The human face of God. 

    The earliest Jesus movement in all its diversity was itself an afterlife of Jesus; or a set of several afterlives, more likely.

    The different forms of Christianity that developed inside the Roman Empire but also beyond its borders, constituted multiple afterlives of Jesus.

    Well beyond the explicit contours of Christianity we can discern numerous afterlives of Jesus. Many of them are traced in various chapters of the three books we shall be launching here this evening.

    Not every afterlife of Jesus is authentic (even if they pay the bills) and some are clearly toxic. But the spiritual DNA of Jesus can be discerned in many people and in many forms of compassionate practice across time and in very different cultures.

    Why would we expect anything less?

    What else might “incarnation” mean? But there is more, and it gets personal.

    Each of us who takes seriously the wisdom of Jesus is creating yet another afterlife of Jesus.

    The afterlives which we are fashioning will express our best understandings of Jesus. The raw material for these new afterlives will be our own lives. In our better moments—and by the grace of God—the authentic spiritual wisdom of Jesus will be seen in our attitudes, actions and words. 

    We do not simply replicate Jesus. Nor do we duplicate what others have down before us, or alongside us. Rather, we allow others the space to fashion the kind of Jesus afterlife that is most authentic for them, and—we hope—they allow us that same freedom as well.

    And here is some surprising good news: these imposing cathedral buildings are great places for fashioning our own afterlives of Jesus. 

    They are not just monuments to the past. 

    They are also places where we create the future of what Jesus began as we fashion our individual and collective afterlives of Jesus.

Exit mobile version