We all thirst

A sermon on Isaiah 55:1 

“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters”

Everyone who thirsts, everyone thirsts, we all thirst.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to chat with a friend who is due to have a baby in around 3 month.  She thirsts.  She thirsts for change in the world because she fears for her child’s future.  She thirsts especially for action on climate change because she believes it is the biggest challenge her children will face.

We all thirst.

Last Sunday a young international student was found unconscious near the pool at Southbank.  He died a few days later.  On Wednesday his parents arrived.  One can only think that they thirst.  The thirst to see their son.  They thirst for meaning and understanding of what happened.  They thirst for healing of their broken hearts.

We all thirst.

Over the past week I have met dozens of students starting University for the first time.  They thirst. They thirst for knowledge, they thirst for friendship, they thirst for the opportunity show that they are adults, filled with life they thirst!

We all thirst.

During the week the Church Council met.  We thirst.  We thirst for God’s renewal of this congregation.  We thirst for God’s comfort for those among us who are facing death.  We thirst for new opportunities for the students who come here year by year.  We thirst for the energy and capacity to lead the congregation into a new future filled with God’s love and generosity.

We all thirst.

Take a moment thinking about the things for which you thirst.  Maybe it is a sign of God’s presence in your life.  Maybe it is for more time to do the things you want to do.  Maybe it is for comfort and peace as you face difficult health issues.  Maybe it is something for someone you love: your children, your spouse, your parents.

We all thirst.

Now turn and consider each other look at the people gathered here this day.  Do you know what they thirst for?  Have you asked?  Have you shared their journey?  As God’s people we are called to be here for each other. To uphold one another on a this journey through what at times seems such a  dry land.

We all thirst.

And now see, see with me and look at a man hanging discarded on a cross.  He is God’s son, he walked the earth, the dusty roads of Galilee and he shared the good news of God.  He healed people, he forgave them, the taught people of God’s presence and love! He opened the doors of hope for a relationship with God for all people.  But he was betrayed and left to die at the hands of the government of his time – the Roman Empire.  And the words that trickle from his dry lips “I thirst”.

Our God thirsts with us.

Jesus cries out.  “I thirst” and he is mocked and he is offered sour wine on a sponge but God, God hears, God hears Jesus cries as he descends into death and lies in the cold grave for three days.

But Isaiah’s prophesy is sure and true:

Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,

and delight yourselves in rich food.

Incline your ear, and come to me;

listen, so that you may live.

Jesus is raised from the tomb.  The rich feast of God is coming.  A feast not of human hands but a feast of God’s love in which we are all satisfied.  This is our hope, our hope in an eternal feast of God’s love – celebrating as we enjoy:

a feast of rich foods,

a feast of well-aged wines,

of rich food filled with marrow,

of well-strained wines strained clear.

A feast for all nations.

This is our hope. This why we come.  This is why we share this journey.  We are not perfect and holy people.  We are a people who thirst.  And we are people who have heard that Jesus thirsts with us and that he has been raised form among the dead. 

We come to listen.  We come really listen.  We come to seek the Lord whilst he is near and in coming we become witnesses to each other of God’s love and generosity.

The temptation for us is satisfy the deep thirsts of our life at the well of consumption – where the 

buying a selling of goods has been sanctified and our happiness is equated to what we own and what we have.  But in the words of the great Mick Jagger “I can’t get no satisfaction.”  We can’t get no satisfaction but filling our lives with more and more things, cramming more and more into our time, to fill our empty lives.

The invitation is to come and to listen for God, to encounter God, to share God with one another and with anyone else that we encounter in our daily life, or who walks through the doors of this place. 

God has opened the doors wide, all arewelcome.

We may find that we continue to thirst.  We may feel that God is not alongside us.  We might bear little or no fruit.  But take heart for God’s message is that in Christ he has come not to tear down but to open up the possibilities and to be patient with us. 

The parable of the fig tree reminds us that God’s desire is not to cut down but to bring what need the manure of life itself, the food, the water that we need to sustain us and to make sense of who we are and where we are going.  Our place is not to judge God or one another but to nurture one another and to be patient as God tends the garden of our lives and the lives of others.  The fruit will come.

“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters”

Everyone who thirsts. Everyone thirsts. We all thirst.

Hear the good news, the one who thirsted has been raised from the dead.  All our thirsts can be satisfied and we can drink deeply from the well of living water – eternal life.

Psalm 63:2-15

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.

So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips

"If": An innocuous word filled with temptation

Two simple letters “I” and “f” change everything.

If you are the Son of God.

The moment this little two letter word is stuck in front of the assertion that Jesus is the Son of God it brings into question the certainty of identity.

If you are the Son of God.

And the same uncertainty springs in to our lives as well, constantly harassing us with doubts as the word turns statements into questions.

If you are a good person?

If you are loved by your children?

If you are loved by your parents?

If you have had a decent education?

If you have faith?

If you are loved by God?

Two letters that take us from a place of security into a place of uncertainty and doubt. And from doubt into temptation.

If you are…

Questions our existence, questions our meaning, and questions our purpose.

When Satan, the devil, Jesus adversary asks if you are of Jesus I believe that the devil is trying to lead Jesus into that place of insecurity that most of feel; the questioning of our existence and its value.

Of course, this tempting by the devil that is reported to us, we are told, comes after a period of 40 days of testing and temptation in the wilderness.  But let us not be naïve about these 40 days and this moment of confrontation that is reported to us, temptation is a daily event, a daily grind, a daily exercise that we all must face.

We get out bed in the morning and idols of this world and messages inherent in our culture question the inherent value that we already have as God’s children.  They say to us we must earn our place and our place is valued only by what we do and what we own.

We live in a world where the buying and selling of goods has been sanctified and in this world, this free market economy that has been given a life of its own, we have reduced human beings to another commodity.

In every business place, and even in our Synod office, we have human resource managers whose very title betrays what we think humans are – things, resources to managed, measured by their skills and outcomes.

The value we place on a person and their gifts is constantly being quantified.  You are $15 and hour or $25 an hour or $50 an hour and the list goes into the thousands and even for some the millions.

The culture tells us the value you add or the cost you create for the community and in this our identity as amazing creatures of God is questioned if you are?

The signs of our personal value are measured by what we consume – the size of our house, the make of our car, the latest device that we have bought.  The signs of our personal value are conditioned by the outcomes we achieve – the businesses we build, the studies we complete and the positions we hold.

Here is our temptation to make an identity for ourselves.  To seek our 15 minutes of fame as Andy Warhol once suggested.  Or maybe to create our own identity on Facebook, or through Twitter or Instagram.  Constructing meaning for ourselves because our society constantly ask if you are.

The nature of Jesus three temptations to turn stones to bread, to accept glory and authority from what the devil offer, and to test God are all tied to this fundamental existential question.

Do we accept who we are?  Do we accept who others are?  Do understand that we have a place in the world that transcends what we can do and how we have been commodified?

Jesus answer to the devil on each occasion is to affirm the primacy of God and God’s purposes.  For it is from God alone that our true identity and our true meaning is found.

It is in this relationship with God that the word “if”, those two innocuous letters, can be removed and we can discover and remember that we are; that you are.

For Jesus it was a moment of clear proclamation – he was the Son of God, he did not need to prove by doing tricks or by showing the devil or the world his value.  His value originated in his creation through the divine hands of love.

And we, we who also struggle with our asserting our identity, who are constantly confronted by this word “if”, day by day, moment by moment, can find a twofold hope in this scene.

Firstly, a hope in Jesus who is able to know himself as God’s Son so thoroughly that he does not need to draw on the resources of this world to find or define himself.  It is a hope that in our lives being tied to his we are consumed by the moments that we fail to resist the temptation to turn to the world and its idols to carve out our own existence.

Secondly, we hear and see in this interaction the possibility of following Jesus lead and removing something of the doubt and uncertainty from our own minds.  No longer do our lives have to be controlled by the existential uncertainty of the word “if” we can know:

You are…

You are a created, wondrous being of God.

You are loved by your maker.

You are a reflection of God’s glory.

You are unique and you are a blessing and you are blessed. And,

You are invited to share in God’s very eternal life.

When we hear not “if” but simply “you are” then the temptation to make something of ourselves and our lives by the world’s standards is subverted.  Rather, confident that we are loved and valued simply in our being, in our existence, we can be released to live as God’s children learning to love one another.

For the temptation to compete for authority and define ourselves by our perceived value puts us into competition with one another and scales human beings as if some are worth more than others.

But when we see Jesus ignoring the “if” we know not just the good news that he is indeed the Son of God but that too as children of God are all of value.

It does not matter how much we contribute or how little.  You are loved.

It does not matter how old or young you are. You are loved.

It does not matter if you are in your prime or standing at death’s door. You are loved.

It does not matter if you earn a lot or a little, whether you own many things or a few. You are loved.

It does not matter if you have intellectual impairments or multiple degrees. You are loved.

It does not matter if you have a physical disability or are as fit as an iron man or woman. You are loved.

This is the starting point for understanding how we might resist temptation and to live honouring those who are loved alongside us.

I am not naïve, like you I constantly give in to the temptation to define my own existence.  To accumulate knowledge and position and wealth as a reflection of my identity but here in this place we are reminded together of God who is the origin of all that we have and all that we are.  Here in this place we are reminded that we are loved and valued and do not need to fight God or each other to know that.  Here in this place we encounter the one of whom we can say “You are the Son of God” and we can with Jesus, say to ourselves, say to each other and say to the world with all its pressures and temptations:

“It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

“It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

“It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

This is the good news, there is no “if” because God “is” and you “are”. Jesus knew this and resisted for our sake so that we might know that we too simple "are"

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Not knowing what to say

When I was growing up we used to move pieces of furniture around in the lounge room and using pillows and blankets we would make a fort or a cubby or a tent. I wonder how many of you did the same thing! Some of you may even still do it!

All you need is a piece of material and a couple of chairs and you can change a lounge room into a place of adventure and experience.  We could hide from our enemies? We could camp in the wilderness? We could tell stories and our imaginations turned us into heroes and villains?

These moments of imagination and excitement found in the joys of childhood are in their own ways divine moments when we live naively and exuberantly.  It struck me as I considered what to say about the reading this morning that at some level this naïve exuberance is what affected Peter, James and John.  There they were, up on that mountain with Jesus, and Jesus appearance changed and the prophet Elijah and Moses appeared before them and their whole world was changing.

When Peter offers to make tents he is not thinking of a child playing in a lounge room but of an ancient custom of building tents at the feast of tabernacles.  It was a way the people remembered that once upon a time in an ancient past they had been exiles and pilgrims.

The men and the boys would pitch their tents, or to be more accurate their tabernacles, and ground themselves in the story of a God who had walked alongside their people from those ancient times right up until the time in which they lived.

Building the tents pricked their imaginations to a history they had never known personally and took them on a journey of rediscovering that God had been with them through it all.

Of course, we are told that Peter said this because he did not know what else to say and I think the reality is that when we truly encounter the divine presence, when God shows up, often we are left dumbfounded.  The distance between God’s life and our lives seems vast.

Yet Peter’s response, as uncomprehending as it is, appeals to the habitats of faith that grounded him in God’s presence in the life and history of his people.  God had been with the people then and by offering to make the tents on that mountain maybe Peter was expressing an insight, however awkwardly, that his mind was struggling to grasp – God was with them in that very moment.

The gospel writer Luke seems to be having a little bit of a dig at Peter but it is a dig that we should see in the context of the fact that in this amazing moment amidst the confusion and terror the voice of God comes as encouragement and affirmation.  God says, “This is my Son, the beloved! Listen to Him!”  Peter’s now knowing what to say and his terror before God are not to be seen as something to be ridiculed but as a response of faith.

From the outset of today’s service I have invited you to think about why people come to church and even why you are personally here today.  For me, one of the answers lies in Peter’s response of wanting to build the tents.  It is here we learn the habits of our faith: how to pray; how to speak about God; how to listen to the scriptures; how to eat the bread and drink the wine; and so on. We learn the habits of our faith and we do so hoping that when the moments of revelation come we can respond.  When God shows up we like Peter will have something to say.

But more than that we come in faith that when we gather those moments of divine revelation can visit us as well.  Gathered here we are on the mountaintop and God is present.  Or like Moses, we are beside the burning bush.  I say this because I have a fundamental belief that when two or three gather in Christ’s name he is present through the power of the Holy Spirit.

We come and we share each week in pitching the tents.  Remembering God and we remember too that it is not just us that pitches tents.  At the beginning of one of the other gospels the one written by God we are told that in Jesus God pitched his tent among us. 

In Jesus, God lived and died and rose again in order that we might know God and God’s love and forgiveness more closely.

None of us responds perfectly to God or to the revelations that we might experience in our lives.  None of us comprehends God accurately.  As a congregation we probably have more questions than answers but we come here each week and we reminded that even Jesus closest followers struggled to know what to say when God was right there in front of them. So, it is OK for us to come and to listen and to respond as best we can as we offer to erect the tents of our faith as we imagine the possibilities of God revealed to those who have gone before us and those who are yet to come.

Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”

It is good to be here and let us pray that we might encounter that terrifying and reassuring presence of God in this moment.  

One body in Christ?

I wonder what it means for you to feel like you really belong that you are part of something.

When Paul was writing his letter to the new Christian community in Corinth he writes to a fragmented group that was struggling for a sense of identity and had problems with division.

There were members of the community who did not feel like they belonged whilst others claimed a stronger sense of belonging and so deliberately excluded others.  In many ways this behavior of this early Christian community reflects the nature of many community groups and churches right through to our present day.

Paul’s response is to emphasis again and again the unity and bond that the group has not in their own acceptance of each other but in and through God’s love in Christ and through the Holy Spirit:

¹² For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.¹³ For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.¹⁴ Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. 

So it is he uses political imagery of the community as a body to help emphasize that every member has importance.  It is highly likely that this body imagery that was borrowed from the Roman statesman Marcus Agrippa and was also used by one of Paul’s contemporaries Plutarch.

As modern day Christians we are probably used to hearing this passage and thinking of it as somehow uniquely Christian but the reality is that it is not.  It is borrow political imagery designed to help people see beyond feeling of exclusion and inclusion and into the embrace of God’s love which is offered to all.  It is about saying that you belong.  But, and this is an important but, it is also about saying you, and you and you and them and they and us belong as well.

This invitation and challenge to invite belonging in the body of Christ is a challenging one. It has been eroded by denominationalism and by the theological traditions that influence us.  It has been further distorted through history by nationalism and cultural imperialism.  Yet still we are called into the one body.

My feeling is that this sense of belonging to God and to community is a salient topic for us to be reflecting on together as we approach Australia Day or Invasion Day, however you might see it.  Often what creates belonging for one group creates exclusion for another and debates around Australia Day or Invasion Day reflect this within our own culture.

Nearly twenty years ago now a little book entitled Rainbow Spirit Theology began to explore the meaning of an Australian Aboriginal Theology.  It is a book that pushes theological boundaries and reminds us of our chequered history.  The authors ask, “whether the Gospel, brought to us by missionaries, is part of the culture which enslaved us, or whether the power of the Gospel frees us to be our true to ourselves and our land.”  The Jesus present to Aboriginal people was a “white” Jesus which it could be argued had been domesticated by the English and European culture of the missionaries themselves.

For us to speak of being one body of Christ in Australia as we approach Australia Day-Invasion Day the discomfort of our history should challenge us to go deeper into the resources of our faith to find that common ground and seek reconciliation with the people that were dispossessed by the arrival of Europeans.

The Uniting Church in Australia in its decision to adopt a preamble to our Constitution has recognised the history and therefore the very people which had been previously ignored in our past.  This preamble reminds us:

Many in the uniting churches shared the values and relationships of the emerging colonial society including paternalism and racism towards the First Peoples. They were complicit in the injustice that resulted in many of the First Peoples being dispossessed from their land, their language, their culture and spirituality, becoming strangers in their own land.

This act of confession is a step towards true healing and hope.  Returning to the book Rainbow spirit Theology we read:

Paul declares that Christ is the power of God which broke down the diving wall of hostility which existed between the Jews and the Gentiles of his day… Christ, who has broken down this wall, is among us now to break down the dividing wall which separates Aboriginal Australians from other Australian’s in this country.  Through Christ we can be one.  Through the suffering Christ we can be reconciled. Christ is calling us, inviting us to be a part of that healing, that reconciliation.

When Paul wrote to the Corinthians he was encouraging them to see beyond their ethnicity and status into their life in Christ: Jews and Greeks, slaves and free.   It was a political statement and an unsettling one.  The boundaries created by our human communities and our socio-economic status were being transcended by God’s love, could the people of God follow and embrace this reality.  If we examine human history and the history especially of the church the truth is that this has always been a challenge for us and it appears more the exception than the norm that people find a true sense of belonging at the same time as accepting those that are different.

So it is that we too in our day as Australian Christians are being continually called beyond ourselves and our tribalism: Anglo and Aboriginal; European, Asian, Islander, African, American and so on.  We are continually being called beyond ourselves and our elitism: rich and poor, educated and uneducated, white collar and blue collar.  We are one body in Christ and in Christ’s body every member has a place.

As I contemplated this I was struck by a reflection about Australia Day by a young Muslim women, Fatima Measham, who is a reporter in Australia.  She who talks about belonging in this way, “Belonging is not something to be conferred, nor is it the default effect of being here. In the end it depends on whether we feel fundamentally safe being who we are.”

As Christians we find this sense of safety first and foremost in Christ but as Paul reminds us this should lead us into our belonging in each other.  To me when we encounter such a sense of belonging as being one in Christ we are encountering what Jesus preached about in Nazareth – the year of the Lord’s favor.  And when that year comes good news to the poor, the captive is released, the blind see, and the oppressed go free.  

So the good news is this, Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. The question is of course can we accept that other individuals, different individuals, strange individuals are also part of that body? For whether we do or not, they are!

You belong, you and you and they and them belong – we are the body of Christ. This is the good news: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

We are one body in Christ!

Defined by Baptism

The reading from Luke 3 provides an opportunity for us to talk about something that is really

important. Something that is fundamental to who we are and more importantly to whose we are.

Today, we heard the story of Jesus’ baptism.

Jesus hears that his cousin John is baptising in the wilderness and Jesus goes out to the Jordan River and Jesus is baptised.

He was not baptised using a little bowl of water in a building like this one – as many of us were.

Jesus was fully immersed in the river as a sign of being made clean by God’s love and mercy.

It was a dramatic sign of God’s cleansing love and a sign of God’s promise made real in Jesus – to get rid of the chaff and to clean the threshing floor of our lives.

Jesus baptism, and God’s work and promise in and through Jesus, are affirmed in God’s presence and the words that came from heaven when Jesus was baptised, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

What Jesus did in baptism was identify fully with what it means to be estranged from God and through his life, his death and his resurrection he transformed estrangement to engagement.

Jesus is indeed God’s Son sent into the world to bring the fulfilment God’s promises in our lives – forgiveness, mercy and grace.

The invitation of the scriptures and the injunction of Jesus himself ever since is that people who hear the story of Jesus life and would like to commit themselves to Jesus story in their own lives are baptised.

More than that from the very early days of the church families were baptised, even children as a sign that God’s love was supreme.

Baptism does not require you to understand everything perfectly or to have a perfect faith.

Rather, it invites you to recognise Jesus as God’s son and to confess that it is in and through Jesus that God can draw us home into life with him.

Like me most of you here are baptised and like me for many of you your do not remember your baptism because your parents bought you in faith as an infant for baptism.

As a teenager I was given the opportunity to confirm what my parents did on my behalf and make a commitment to following Jesus.  An opportunity that did involve growing in my understanding of God’s love and forgiveness but an opportunity that was more a beginning than an ending understanding.

The same is true when we baptise adults, and again some of you here have been baptised as adults, we do not expect a perfect faith or a perfect understanding simply a willingness to be open to what God did in and through Jesus and to be joined into that by the power of the Holy Spirit.

It sets on a journey and relationships that defines the rest of our lives.  Once we are baptised our life is joined to God’s life and our lives are joined to one another’s lives as the church.

Each one of us will understand our relationship with God differently, each one of us may discover along our life journey new insights or challenges in our faith, each one of us will grow in our relationship with God but none of us ever really arrive at that perfection.

Rather we know that affirmation that Jesus himself heard belongs to us as well because our lives are joined to Jesus life. God says to us “You too are my Beloved, my son and my daughter”.

What defines us in life is that we are baptised people.

We live out the promise of God as we live out our baptism.

Yes this means being involved in the life of the church and worshipping God.

But more than that it means when asked that perennial question “So what do you do?”

Your answer should always be prefaced by the words “I live out my baptism…

I live out my baptism…

As a teacher, a programmer, a lecturer, a researcher, s sales assistant, or a retiree

Or maybe I live out my baptism…

As a mother, a father, a child, a friend, a grandparent, a neighbour, an enemy

Our baptism defines us as to who we are and more importantly whose we are.

In every setting we are in we are God’s children, loved by God and on a trajectory towards life with God eternally.

We live out our baptism not to earn God’s love but to celebrate what God has done for us in Jesus, to be a part of his story and to glorify God.

When we live out our baptism we also become living invitations for others to join us in the discovery of God’s life and love for us.

So often I read or I hear that what happens in a church on a Sunday does not relate to everyday life but if we understand that what happens on Sunday is a reorientation to living as baptised people every day of our lives and helping us to do that then what we do here matters to every other moment.

Living out our baptism can impact on our ethics and morals, it can shape our relationships with friends and enemies, it can influence our views of family, it can lead us into deep spiritual practices and reflection, it can help us decide how we will approach our work – living out our baptism can shape every other aspect of our lives.

The history and teaching of the church is as deep as it is wide and as we discover what it means to hear those gracious words of God you are my beloved and to live in the light of Jesus love, to recognise our lives defined by his love and to follow him.