gregoryjenks

Category: Sermons

  • 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.

  • On the Trinity at Trinity

    Trinity Sunday
    Holy Trinity Church, Fortitude Valley
    4 June 2023

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/23268776@N03/3696977620

    IMAGE: Holy Trinity Church, Fortitude Valley, 8 January 2007. Photograph by DBHKer.

    [ video ]

    It has been a long time since I last stood in this pulpit!

    As I recall, it was in July 1989 when I came back to Brisbane—from Adelaide where I was teaching at St Barnabas’ Theological College—for the conferral of my PhD at the University of Queensland. So that must be about 34 years ago. I was 37 years old at the time. You can all do the Maths.

    I remember various Trinity Sundays from my time here. Like your current Rector, I usually invited a special guest to be with us for the occasion. They were days when we enjoyed all the smoke and bells of the great tradition.

    However, the Trinity Sunday that stands out most strongly in my memories was one year in Jerusalem. I think it was 2009 and I had arrived in town from the airport. I was just in time to join the congregation at St George’s Cathedral for the Feast of the Holy Trinity.

    As I listened to a sermon on the Trinity, delivered in alternating Arabic and English, it struck me that day just how important this doctrine is for the Christians in the Middle East, and especially in Jerusalem.

    While this day is also the feast of title for this parish, for most faith communities this is that day of the year when the local clergy try to explain the Trinity, or perhaps avoid the topic as best they can. 

    Others, would you believe, invite guest preachers for this day. Some even go so far as to dust off retired clergy and past rectors from time immemorial to fill the preaching slot this morning.

    Of course, that is not the case here this morning. It is simply that Fr Rodney could not think of a finer preacher to speak about God on this feast.

    For our brothers and sisters in Jerusalem and throughout the Middle East the situation is totally different.

    For them, this is one of the great days of the church year where the very essence of their faith—our faith—is made plain.

    The affirmation of the Trinity is not simply an abstract theological puzzle for them. It is a live question that impacts every aspect of their existence. 

    The people in the congregation at St George’s Cathedral that Sunday in 2009 (and again those in the Cathedral this morning) are Palestinian Christians living in a Muslim-majority society and also under Jewish military occupation since 1967. Ever since the Nakhba, the Catastrophe, of 1948, they are largely displaced from their homes and their hopes, irrespective of their formal citizenship.

    The trinitarian faith defines who they are, and how their neighbours view them. In many cases it determines where they live, what occupations they follow, who they can marry, their family inheritance laws, and where they will be buried. 

    They may be targeted by their Muslim neighbours, if the latter fall under some extreme version of Islamic ideology. They might equally find themselves targeted by Jews who consider them blasphemers and worse, with no right even to exist in the Eretz Yisrael. 

    Their churches might be vandalised, their houses marked for future violence, or their cars tagged.

    Clergy and religious may be spat upon as they walk to the holy places in the Old City or in other parts of the country.

    Thankfully, most Jews and most Muslims do not act in these ways. But the extremists on both sides do, and the threat of hatred and violence is an ever-present reality for Christians in Jerusalem and the Middle East.

    It could not be more different here.

    Our neighbours do not care what we believe about God, and for the most part they would have no idea.

    Despite what the extreme fringes of the faith might claim from time to time, Christians in Australia are not persecuted for our faith in the Trinity, or indeed for anything else. 

    What we mostly experience is apathy.

    And perhaps condescension.

    In the past, Christians have fought over the precise words to be used to express the doctrine of the Trinity. We have consigned each other to hell, and even killed those who disagreed with us.

    Religion that kills is not unique to Islamic extremists or Jewish settlers, nor to Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, or even Hindu fundamentalists in India.

    Religious violence is the dark side of religion, and the shadow is especially dark in monotheism as our binary understanding of reality seems especially prone to violence against those with whom we disagree.

    On Trinity Sunday we are reminded that the truth which matters most to us is far from simple, and certainly not an invitation to draw circles around those we love and those we hate.

    We affirm that God is one.

    We also affirm that Jesus participates in God’s eternal reality, and that the Spirit of Jesus active among us and within us and between us is nothing less than the Spirit of God.

    The affirmation is straightforward, but the explanation is rather more complex.

    But here is the thing … no one outside the church (and many of us inside the church) are not in the least bit interested in all the fuss about trying to make sense of this central Christian belief.

    Where we once killed each other over homoousios versus homoiousios (yes, there is just one letter difference in those two terms), none of our neighbours and almost no one in our families cares about these internal Christian arguments over how to define the indefinable and express the inexpressible.

    The religious debate in Australia today is not about the Trinity, but about God.

    Is belief in God even a reasonable option for most Australians?

    As the world teeters on the edge of an ecological catastrophe that may see humans extinct within 250 years, what does our theological fine print matter?

    For millions of humans living on islands and in low-lying delta regions that will be submerged by rising sea levels in the next few decades, can belief in God make sense?

    As AI threatens to make humans redundant, what is the point of religion?

    Our mission is not to discuss the Trinity, but to live the vision of God—and of humanity—that Jesus both taught and practised.

    If people are to glimpse that there may be more to life than gadgets and status—if they are to embrace the call to compassion in everyday life—then they need us to be people who embrace the call of Jesus to imagine a world where God’s dream is realised. 

    Our fancy religious words for that are “the kingdom of God” or the “reign of God,” but it is as simple as saying: imagine if the life we live reflected the inner character of God’s own self?

    Indeed; imagine that!

    We are called to celebrate God as the ultimate reality, the meaning beyond every explanation, and the profound love that calls everything into existence.

    We are called to walk the way that Jesus walked. Read the gospels. Practise doing what Jesus did. Jesus got it right. We need to imitate Jesus. Better still, we need to be Jesus for those around us.

    Those who first walked the way of Jesus—and they called their religion, “The Way”—discovered that Jesus was still present with them, and that his Spirit was the same as the Spirit of God in previous times.

    They discovered the truth of the Trinity.

    They lived the reality of the Trinity.

    And we can do the same.

  • A week later

    Easter 2A
    St Andrew’s Church, Lismore
    16 April 2023

    [ video ]

    A week has passed.

    Last week the churches were abuzz with activity, beautiful flowers, fine music, the best robes, and as many candles as we could find.

    A week has passed.

    A week ago—as the Gospel of John tells the story—the disciples were surprised (freaked out, one imagines), when the risen Jesus appears in their secret hideaway. Luke tells a very different story about that first Easter night, as we shall hear next weekend. For now, let’s stay with John’s way of telling the story.

    A week has passed.

    John chooses to tell the story of Easter in intervals that will resonate with his readers, who gathered weekly—as we also still do—for the community meal and other shared business.

    A week has passed.

    John tells the story as if Jesus was off the radar for the days in between the Sunday gathering. That seems a bit odd. What kind of schedule is Jesus keeping during those first few weeks after Easter?

    On Easter night only ten followers are in the room when Jesus appears among them. Thomas is not there, but neither are the women disciples or any of the wider circle. No Mary and Martha? No Lazarus? No Mary Magdalene? Just a small group of confused and frightened guys.

    But let’s stay with Thomas for now.

    Thomas is not impressed by spooky stories from such a bunch of people.

    He wants evidence.

    A week has passed.

    They are back in that same room. Again? Or perhaps, still? But this time Thomas is with them.

    Thomas.

    Doubting Thomas has had a tough time during the history of the church.

    But he may well be a saint for our time and culture, since we are people who want to see the evidence, and are not going to believe something just because someone else says it is true.

    Thomas is portrayed as crippled by doubt, but perhaps he was trying to make sense of something which is way beyond our everyday experience.

    Not so much doubting, as seeking to integrate this mind-boggling new reality.

    Perhaps it is often the same for us?

    Are we doubting, or just asking questions to seek a better understanding of something that changes everything?

    We often overlook this point, but in Matthew 28 even when the 11 disciples (again, just the inner group of blokes) meet Jesus atop a mountain in Galilee, the text says: “When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted.” (v 18)

    Even then, some still doubted.

    It was not just Thomas.

    I like to think they were “processing” information that was going to turn their lives upside down.

    Questioning. 

    Wondering. 

    Doubting. 

    Confused. 

    Excited. 

    Perturbed.

    Perhaps we have stopped asking questions?

    Perhaps we have settled for the safe answers fashioned by someone else?

    Perhaps our lives are no longer turned upside down by the Eastering process I mentioned last week.

    But perhaps living with unanswered questions is a key element of Eastering.

    Questions and doubts may be essential for the Eastering that God seeks to do in us.

    The 100 days @ half time

    Last Sunday we reached the midpoint of the 100 days (or so, 97 to be exact) from Ash Wednesday to Pentecost. We are now in the Great 50 Days of Easter, which will culminate on Pentecost Sunday; 50 days after Easter.

    During the 100 days we have been encouraged to reflect on how the events we celebrate throughout this double holy period change everything for us.

    These are days for questions, for doubts, for insights and for new resolutions.

    During the days of LENT we often give up something as a spiritual discipline.

    During the 50 DAYS OF EASTER perhaps we might instead think of something to add as a spiritual discipline.

    To determine what we might best embrace as a new spiritual practice, we need to be asking questions about how Easter changes everything, what that looks like in our own lives, and inviting God to start eastering us; as individuals and as a church.

    Don’t avoid those questions or suppress those doubts; they could well be the points where fresh eastering can occur.

  • When Easter is a verb

    IMAGE: First-century rolling stone tomb below the Convent of the Sisters of Nazareth, Nazareth. Photo by Gregory C. Jenks.

    Easter Day
    St Andrew’s Church, Lismore
    9 April 2023

    [ video ]

    What if Easter is a verb?

    I had been planning to shape today’s sermon around the idea of God saying YES to Jesus, as a kind of sequel to Friday’s sermon in which I reflected on Jesus saying YES to God.

    But instead I want to explore the idea that “easter” might be a verb.

    I was alerted to this idea, found in the poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, by a Facebook post from Bishop Jeremy Greaves in Brisbane. That poem was composed as a homage to 5 Franciscan nuns who drowned when The Deutschland ran ashore on a sandbar on 7 December 1875. They had been expelled from the German Empire as part of the ongoing conflict between the Kaiser and the Pope.

    Towards the end of his lengthy poem, Hopkins put these words on the lips of the drowning nuns:

    Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east,
    More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls,
    Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest,
    Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.

    Gerad Manley Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutshchland

    Let him easter in us …

    We are familiar with “easter” being used as an adjective, but what if we play with the idea of it being a verb?

    And—if so—is “easter” the verb for when God says, “Yes;” to Jesus—and to us.

    Like the nuns drowning in a stricken vessel off the SE coast of England, Jesus needed to be eastered.

    And he was.

    There is much more eastering needed than the raising of Jesus:

    Our beautiful blue planet circling around the sun, needs to be eastered.

    The indigenous people of Palestine, yearn to be eastered.

    The state of Israel needs to be eastered.

    The people of Ukraine are desperate to be eastered.

    The Indigenous people of this ancient land yearn to be eastered.

    The city of Lismore and our neighbouring villages hope to be eastered.

    The whole Northern Rivers region looks to be eastered.

    Our families yearn to be eastered.

    Those living with chronic illness look to be eastered.

    Those lingering at the end of their lives yearn to be eastered.

    The diverse Christian community across our nation, needs to be eastered.

    The Anglican Church of Australia is in profound need of eastering.

    Our parish here needs to be eastered.

    I need to be eastered.

    Perhaps you also need to be eastered?

    Eastering is the power of God seen in the powerful wind that hovered over the primal sea in Genesis.

    Eastering is the story of a slave community finding its identity and its freedom as they walk into the waters of the Red Sea.

    Eastering is the sound of dry bones—scattered across a battlefield—returning to life as the Spirit of YHWH moves gently but powerfully among them.

    Eastering begins when a young girl from Nazareth says yes to God.

    Eastering transforms the dead Jesus into the risen Lord.

    Eastering happens when Mary meets her beloved in the garden.

    Eastering can be seeen when the Stranger breaks the bread in a house at Emmaus.

    Eastering occurs when the Risen Lord joins the frightened disciples behind their locked doors.

    Eastering continues when Paul encounters Jesus on the road to Damascus.

    Eastering is our experience when we say, “Yes” to God 

    Eastering occurs when we claim our place at the Table of Jesus.

  • When Jesus said YES to God

    Good Friday
    St Andrew’s Church, Lismore
    7 April 2023

    When Jesus said YES to God

    Today we face a brute fact: Jesus was killed by the empire.

    The people with privilege, power and position eliminated Jesus, because he posed an existential threat to their privilege, their power and their position.

    It was him or them.

    So it was him!

    Except that there was so much more happening, which was mostly beyond their understanding.

    The means chosen by the empire to get rid of the threat posed by Jesus reveals their assessment of things. He was despatched by the authorities as if he were a rebel. His death was intended to be slow and deliberate. The process of crucifixion was not so much about killing the victim (although it certainly did that), as it was designed to evoke fear, terror and submission in other people as they observed what had happened to the victim.

    This process was also in play near the start of Jesus’ life as well.

    When Herod the Great died in 4 BCE, the city of Sepphoris in Galilee declared its independence and refused to accept continued Herodian rule. Rome suppressed the revolt. They destroyed the city, which was just a few km from the village of Nazareth. And they crucified a Jewish rebel every mile along the roads leading away from Sepphoris, which was the capital city for the Galilee.

    Whether Jesus actually saw those crucified Jews, or simply heard about this act of state terror from the older people in his village, we can be sure that he knew from an early age what happens to people who cause trouble for Rome.

    The earliest followers of Jesus quickly saw the cross as the defining moment of Jesus’ life, and we can hardly disagree. But they did not have a single way of explaining how the death of Jesus could be the event that changed everything. They never solved that puzzle, even though they were certain that the cross was a pivotal moment of atonement, or reconciliation between God and humanity. 

    The Great Church has never defined the doctrine of atonement either, although that comes as surprise to many Christians. We simply affirm that the cross changed everything. But just how that works has been left undefined, despite the many prayers, hymns and sermons that seem so certain about their own explanations.

    As we think about the death of Jesus and the atonement that it secures, we need to avoid some classic mistakes found in the answers that been popular from time to time.

    One of those bad ideas about the cross, is that there was no other way for God to forgive sins. Of course, that is not true. It is of the very essence of God to forgive, and God did not need Jesus to die on the cross to be able to forgive people. God was already known as a compassionate and forgiving God in the Old Testament, long before the time of Jesus.

    Another bad idea is that the physical and psycho-spiritual suffering experienced by Jesus is what secures our atonement, our reconciliation with God. This is not only a bad idea, but it portrays God in a very poor light. Such ideas also make suffering inherently redemptive and have led generations of male priests to tell women and children to stay in abusive relationships, and more generally to encourage people to see their own suffering as somehow “good for them” and something that God wants them to accept.

    We hear a lot about the blood of Jesus in Christian songs and prayers, but we hardly ever come across the idea in the NT itself.

    There are almost 450 references to blood in the Bible, but only 21 of them refer to the blood of Jesus having some kind of saving power. Only 2 of those 21 instances occur in Paul’s authentic letters (both in Romans as it happens). The idea never occurs in Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 1 or 2 Corinthians, Philippians or Philemon. It isn’t even found in the Pastoral Epistles, but is found several times in Hebrews and Revelation.

    [For the curious, the complete list of NT references to the blood of Jesus includes: the 4 accounts of the institution of the Lord’s Supper; Rom 3:25 & 5:9; Eph 1:7 & 2:13; Col 1:20; Heb 10:19, 29; 12:24; 13:12 & 20; 1 Petr 1:2 & 19; 1 John 1:7; Rev 1:5; 5:9; 7:14 & 12:11.]

    There is a much stronger idea expressed in some detail in Romans 4, where Paul develops the comparison between the faith of Abraham that secured God’s blessing for the Jews, and the faith of Jesus that secures God’s blessing on all humanity.

    We do not even have to agree with Paul’s logic here (and it is not very convincing actually) to see that he offers a far more elegant and eloquent explanation for how the death of Jesus on the cross has been an immense blessing for all people everywhere.

    It is simply that Jesus trusted God, and that this faith demonstrated by Jesus secured a blessing first of all for Jesus (resurrection) but also a blessing in which we can each choose to participate if we adopt a similar attitude of trust (faith) in God’s compassion, goodness and love.

    What I like most about Paul’s proposal, even though I think his argument is a bit stretched, is that it coheres with the words and actions of Jesus during his lifetime.

    The message of Jesus as expressed in his parables and in his miracles is that the blessings of God are available here and now. Jesus calls that reality the kingdom of God. He does not speak about the need to find some way to secure God’s forgiveness of our sins. He simply invites us to act as if God already loves us, and all we need to do is express trust or have faith.

    How many times does Jesus say to someone, “Your faith has made you whole.”

    Today we celebrate the faith of Jesus as he says YES to God.

    And we ask for grace to have the faith to say YES to God as well.

  • Glimpsing the kingdom here among us

    MaundyThursday
    St Andrew’s Church, Lismore
    6 April 2023

    [ video ]

    IMAGE: Wikipedia Commons. Iglesia de Sant Jaume, Alcúdia, Mallorca, Spain

    Tonight our liturgy is closely connected with the services that will follow on Good Friday, Easter Eve and Easter Day.

    These are the great three days: the Easter triduum.

    This year I have the privilege of preaching at all of the services, rather than sharing that ministry with colleagues as was the case when I was at the Cathedral in Grafton.

    While I realise that not everyone can be at each service, I have been drafting my sermons as a set of three rather than as three standalone homilies.

    The livestream recordings may allow people to catch up with the whole series even when they cannot be here in the building for every service.

    In this first sermon for the Easter triduum, I am asking: What does the kingdom of God look like?

    What is the scene in the Gospels?

    A meal in an “upper room,” carefully prepared in advance, where Jesus could meet with his innermost circle for a Passover meal. Or—at least—a meal around the time of Passover and with Passover themes overshadowing their gathering.

    So the first answer to my main question is that kingdom of God looks like a small group of people gathered for an intimate meal.

    Nothing to see here, we might think.

    But we would be wrong.

    The dozen or so people at that meal were about to have their lives turned upside down, and in turn they were about to turn the world upside down.

    With the possible exception of Jesus, none of them had any idea of what was about to happen.

    In a sense, that is true each time we gather around of Table of Jesus—around the Table with Jesus—here at St Andrew’s.

    These days we are usually a pretty small group.

    Our numbers and our age profile do not suggest that the status quo is at risk. But that is actually the case each and every time we gather for Eucharist, as every celebration of Eucharist takes us back to this “night when he was betrayed” while also driving us out to spread the disturbing news of God’s reign (the kingdom of God).

    This is true each time we say the Lord’s Prayer, with its call for God’s kingdom to come.

    But it is even more true each time we gather around the Table of Jesus.

    What is happening here:

    • We are forming community
    • We are keeping alive the memory of Jesus
    • We are fashioning another “afterlife” of Jesus, in a set of afterlives
    • We pray for God to set things right, and we commit ourselves to be part of the answer to those prayers.
    • We celebrate reconciliation and healing of broken relationships.
    • We break the bread and drink the cup; we step up to the call of the Master.
    • We receive what we are and we become what we receive. (St Augustine, Sermon 57)
    • We renew our discipleship.
    • We go out on mission.

    I remind you of the words from our opening song, “Here in this place.”

    Here we will take the wine and the water, here we will take the bread of new birth,
    here you shall call your sons and your daughters, call us anew to be salt for the earth.
    Give us to drink the wine of compassion, give us to eat the bread that is you;
    nourish us well, and teach us to fashion lives that are holy and hearts that are true.

    Marty Haugen, b. 1952

    Take time to read and reflect on those beautiful words, whether here during the vigil prayers this evening or at home in the next few days.

    Various themes swirl around us on this special night:

    • The imminence of the cross
    • The gathering around the Table, do this is remembrance of me
    • The new commandment to love one another
    • The call to serve one another
    • The challenge to allow others to serve us

    The service tonight will end in darkness and confusion, as we seek to recapture something of the disciples’ experience in the Garden of Gethsemane as Jesus is arrested.

    But before we reach that point, we catch a glimpse of the kingdom of God among us.

    God is among us, and God has work for us to do: here in this place, here in this city.