Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

TV shows demonstrate a fascination with the stories of those in power. In recent years I have seen several movies and TV series about King Henry VIII of England and Queen Elizabeth I. At the moment there is a TV series called The Kennedys which tells the story of a well known American president. If there is a theme that runs through these movies, it could be the story of how to maintain absolute power. Always in these stories there is ruthless character who will do anything to maintain a grip on power; shady deals done in secret, an execution here and there, and even the odd murder or two. Henry in particular, tried to change the moral order and murdered two wives in order to get there. Money and wealth, flexing of military muscle and war here and there, the psychological pressures brought to bear by spies and the activities of the secret services, all these form part of a toxic mix of mechanisms used to stay at the top.

The gospels tell us that Jesus was also born into a royal blood line of impeccable pedigree. He was of the house of King David (in spite of the idealised memories of him, he who was not shy of using power to look after himself). But the gospels also tell us that Jesus was nothing like the kind of ruler we have been talking about. He was born in a stable rather than a palace, with no place to lay his head. He was first visited by lowly shepherds rather than princes and palace officials. His throne was a cross, his crown a crown of thorns, and his tomb was borrowed from a stranger.

Christ the King has nothing in common with the average earthly ruler. That means his kingdom will have very little in common with the typical earthly jurisdiction. In the world of Jesus, there is no ruthless ruler at the top of a hierarchy, because all are servants. Even Jesus said that he came to serve and not to be served. Those who aspire to the greatest are those who make themselves the least. The reward for service is not promotion or financial gain, but to be offered more opportunities for service. When his subjects become rich, they are more likely to be demoted, the mighty being cast from their thrones and the lowly raised up. Everything is turned upside down in the Reign of God. Tax collectors and sinners are given a place at the table before the Pharisees and the members of the religious establishment who expected the best seats in the synagogues. This is a very different world.

And this is the kind of kingdom that Jesus says in Good News. It is this kind of world in which we are called to live. Our task is to be partners with God in bringing this kingdom to birth: right here, rooted in this place, in Aotearoa New Zealand. After all, we are the Gospel incarnate in the places we live and work.

But this is not an easy task. If we are serious about living the Christian life, we can find ourselves straddling two worlds. We have to live in the one run by the world so that we can survive, but we are called to live in the one Christ has established. One temptation is to try and merge them together so that they look the same. If we can bring the values of our wider society into the church, that makes life in the church so much more comfortable. And, of course, we can get on with advancing our position in society and give a nod to God in church on Sunday mornings. But deep down, if you are like me, you are aware of the awkward juxtaposition we find ourselves in. There is an awareness that the structures of society that are not the same as those of the Reign of God.

We can see this unfolding in the story of our own country. The founders of our province, the leading members of the Canterbury Association, were Anglican. Many of the people they brought here were doing their best to escape the strictures of a class society in England. They wanted to get away from the lords and squires whose privileged position was based on the accident of birth. The Canterbury Association had an idealistic dream of a new society here, centred on the City of Christchurch. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, one of the founding members of the Canterbury Association, actually spent time in and English prison in the 1830s after deceiving a young girl to marry him. While in prison he came up with his idealistic dream about a new society that would be established here. It would be a society where people would be able to afford to buy land, so he would release small amounts at a time to make it affordable. Farm workers would be able to afford to buy land for themselves. Leaders of the new colony would have time to build schools and roads, and local government. Money from the sale of land would be used to bring more workers and build more services, especially a cathedral. Of course, those who came here would be of sound Christian character and would be under the strong influence of the Anglican Church.

All this sounds like building a slice of heaven here in this land. But the reality of it all turned out to be different. The deal to acquire land from Ngai Tahu under the Kemp’s Deed was a story of injustice. Kemp was only allowed by Governor George Grey to offer £2000 for virtually all their vast tracts of land, and there are suggestions that the agreement about price was reached under the threat of force from the navy. Ngai Tahu were promised important food gathering areas and reserves. But when Walter Mantell mapped the land in 1848, he reduced the size of the reserves and left out important food gathering areas. This was an inauspicious start. Human nature being what it is there were the usual grabs for land and wealth. Even some of the vicars who came here, and some lamented that they weren’t very bright anyway, spent more time acquiring land and farming it, than they did on their pastoral duties. There were problems with alcohol abuse and crime that dogged the new community. The odd recession and shortage of money in general meant plans for schools and churches went on the back burner. It was decades before the Cathedral could be built. Maori lost faith in the missionaries and in English justice and the gains of the early missionaries were lost.

Which brings us back to the essentials of the Reign of God, and the differences between the values of the wider society in which we live, and those of the Gospel. What are these? One is the willingness to repent, to be open to God’s challenge to apologise for the mistakes of the past and put past injustices right. That is what the Anglican Church’s commitment to a bicultural journey is all about. It is a journey of repentance, of learning to listen to the voice of another culture, of learning to share our gifts. It is why we use Maori language in our liturgy, and why we have ordered our constitution to give Maori a strong voice in our structures.

But even more importantly, the Reign of God is about grace, generosity, and forgiveness. That is the point of the parable before us today. Those who feel at home in the Reign of God are the ones who are ready to forgive and be channels of grace. They are people who feed the hungry, who give water to the thirsty, who welcome the outcasts, who clothe the naked and visit the sick, and who liberate those who are imprisoned. May God give us the courage, the gifts, and the grace we need to make this kingdom of God a reality in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

One of the realities of our humanness is that we have an innate instinct to protect our assets. In this community we have learned a great deal about insurance in recent months and what happens to those who don’t have it. We regard it as prudent insure everything that moves; our profits, our lives, our health, our homes and their contents, and our cars, our public liabilities. You name it and someone will insure it, and when the big one comes we keep our fingers crossed that all those premiums will result in swift and generous payouts on our claims.

The parable before us today, however, is a warning against using God as some kind of insurance policy. God is a generous giver of gifts, but God will hold us to account for the way we use them. God needs followers who will be enterprising risk takers. Living the faith, being a faithful community involves taking risks for God. God needs us to put our gifts to maximum use for the good of the kingdom. The parable we have before us today underscores the requirement that we should not bury any gift, any talent, no matter how small it may be. The backdrop to the parable is the parousia, the second coming of Christ, the moment when God turns up for a final inspection to ensure the church has its life in order. Many of us know what it is to live with the uncertainty of such an inspection. Imagine a new CEO is appointed at work, coming around to your department asking your team to justify its existence. Likewise, our parliamentarians are going through similar examination and scrutiny as the electorate weighs up the legacy of their local representatives in parliament. The scriptures remind us that God can and will call us to account at any time, unannounced, like a thief in the night. And when God does, God will be looking to see how we have developed and used our gifts for the extension of the kingdom. The question for us is this, “How will we be placed when that day comes?” The next parable in Matthew’s gospel will put the point even more sharply: how well have we fed the hungry, given water to the thirsty, clothed the naked, cared for the sick and the stranger, and visited those in prison? If we have done nothing on those fronts, we might well be classed with the person in today’s parable who buried his God given gifts in the ground leaving them unused.

The parable today is long and complex. The master, who is God of course, departs and entrusts his property to others. The master, having shrewdly weighed up the ability of each servant, generously gives to them his wealth according to their ability and then goes away. The five talent person immediately trades and makes five more; the two talent servant also doubles his talents. In the mean time the one talent servant buries his in the ground. Then we are told that after a long time, the master returns. By now we are coming aware of the real issue behind this story, “How well have these servants been faithful and trustworthy in their management of the talents?” And that is the question before us; are we being trustworthy with the gifts God has given us? Are we using wisely the gifts God has given or are we leaving them lying around unattended?

Well, as we know, the first two servants are treated well by the master, and both receive the same accolade, “Well done, good and faithful slave; you have been faithful over little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.” It’s the harsh treatment of the slave with the one talent that shocks our sensibilities with all that weeping and gnashing of teeth and subsequent finger pointing. When the servant is summoned to give account he says that he knew the master to be hard and so he was afraid. The master never accepts he is hard but all the same he calls the slave “wicked and slothful” and casts him out into eternal darkness. This is harsh is it not? Unlike other slaves in Jesus’ parables, this slave has not beaten anyone up or put them in prison; he hasn’t frittered the talent away either. In fact, he returns it intact.

So how can we understand this harsh treatment? The best approach to understanding the harshness of the master is to look more closely at the slave. The defect of the slave in this parable is that he is crippled because he misunderstands God. The slave calls the master “hard” and he is “afraid.” He is stuck with the view that God is obsessed with justice rather than grace, and the slave is afraid. In fact, the master was anything but hard. He entrusted one talent to the slave. That’s 15 years of wages (say $700,000 to the average earner in NZ.). Not only has the slave got it wrong about God, he is filled with fear. It was timidity; a fear of failing by a person with a limited understanding of God that caused the downfall. All through Matthew’s gospel, it is those who are afraid, who are paralysed by anxiety, doubt, and lack of trust who are condemned by Jesus. The same thing is happening here in this parable.

The reality is that God is bigger and more generous than our minds can cope with. God gives gifts boundlessly and with great generosity. Our task is to receive our gifts as God given, not because we have earned them or because we deserve them, but because God is generous and simply gives gifts to us out of love and grace. All we have to do is be thankful and use them responsibly. Often the only think stopping us from using them is fear and timidity; fear of our own failure, fear that God might in fact be an ogre that we need to please through avoidance of wrongdoing.

This parable reminds us not to fall into this particular trap. God is infinitely generous and gracious. God wants us to seize life by the throat and live it to the full. God wants us to be bold risk takers for the kingdom and God will meet those risk takers with bigger rewards. Secondly, God makes us gifted people and we must always see ourselves as loaded with God given talents. But these gifts are not our private possession to be used for ourselves, but gifts of grace given by God according to our ability to be shared for the sake of Christ and his Church and for the building up of the body. What matters is how we use them. God needs you and me to use to the full the gifts he has graciously given us so that they bear fruit. Just as God gave us Jesus, who assumed human flesh, and placed him in our hands allowing us to nail him to a tree, so that Spirit continues to place himself in our hands. We can allow that Spirit to transform our lives and participate in bringing the kingdom of God to birth. Or we can allow fear and timidity to get in the way. God needs us to set about using our gifts diligently. Each of us needs to be responsible with our individual gifts; as a parish we need to take corporate responsibility for the gifts we hold together. It may be that we have an ability to work for justice; or to care for those in need; or to offer a simple word of kindness where it is needed. Whatever it is, our world is so deeply embedded in the love of God that one seed planted will flourish to God’s glory. And when the master returns suddenly, God’s “well done” is our compensation for hours of tireless working for the kingdom.

We noticed earlier this year that Matthew presents Jesus as the Wisdom of God in human flesh. We have heard about Lady Wisdom and how she is to be recognised. The parable before us today is another clear example of a parable from the Wisdom tradition. If it shows another example of Lady Wisdom, we can also see Lady Folly played out in the foolish bridesmaids who find themselves running out of oil.

The parable paints of picture for us. There are ten virgins. Five are wise and five are foolish. The wise ones have flasks of oil with their lamps. The foolish ones do not. To our minds, you might wonder why the wise ones were so selfish. Why didn’t they share? What’s all this about waiting into the night? To the kiwi mind it all seems a bit odd. With a bit of Kiwi know how this could have been handled much better. In any case, everything goes wrong. The bridegroom comes at a strange time. The foolish girls are off buying more oil and find themselves locked out of the wedding feast.

Why were the foolish ones deemed to be foolish anyway? What groom in his right mind would turn up at midnight for the feast? The foolish are foolish because they had not taken every possible contingency to be at the feast. In fact, they did not realise until it was too late, that this feast was the feast of God, and to be at the feast means everything. It means giving your whole self over to God; the investment of one’s whole being. Not realising the importance of the feast, that this is the meal of kingdom, the foolish ones sat lightly and found themselves unprepared.

This meal, the Eucharist that we celebrate week by week, is a foretaste of this heavenly banquet. Are you foolish or wise? I suspect there is the wise and the foolish within all of us. The ill prepared expect life to unfold according to schedule. Things begin with the speedy arrival of the bridegroom at which point everyone gathers at table for the feast. Everything is laid on with minimal planning and forethought, no cost, no commitment. All we have to do is turn up and God does the rest. Maybe the foolish have a bet each way. After all there many possible solutions claiming to answer the meaning of life, and there are many possible purposes for our lives. Let’s drop in for a taste.

This brings us to the oil and what it signifies. Have you heard biblical writers refer to oil as the “oil of salvation”? What if the oil that the bridesmaids need is faith itself? Suddenly the parable is beginning to make a lot more sense. The feast is the feast of the kingdom, and the wise move heaven and earth to get to it. It is the only place to be, the only thing that will satisfy the soul. The oil is our faith, our relationship with God. That is why the wise bridesmaids are prepared to hang around waiting for so long, carrying extra flasks of oil. God is coming eternally coming toward us. He asks us to engage with him, he wants to be in relationship with you and me, which is what faith is: being in relationship with God.

As church, then collectively our task is to announce the Good News of God. Our task is to present Christ to the world, to lead people into faith through the proclamation of the Word and through the celebration of the sacraments, especially Baptism and Eucharist. This is activity we engage in together, all the people of God engaging in the task of passing on the faith, being Christ’s hands and feet and mouth in the power of the Spirit, as we await the second coming of Christ on the last day.

But faith is also a personal project. Faith involves a personal encounter with you and Christ, with the Spirit activating the presence of Christ in your heart and bringing us into a deeper communion with the Father. The reformers of the reformation did a great deal to emphasise the importance of paying attention to our personal relationship with God. What ever we think of them, this was one of their gifts to the church. They remind us that faith in Christ is central to our lives, that as we are nourished by the Body of Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, we are invited to grow into a deeper communion with Christ, and into an intimate friendship with him all through our pilgrimage on earth. We can think of the oil, then, as the oil of salvation, nourishing us in our journey of faith, enabling us to grow more and more like God and to become the fully human person God has made us to be.

The wise understand this. They know that there are other feasts, many possible purposes to our lives. But to the wise, these things are of no value. There is nothing else worth doing than saving the oil and looking after it. They know that being at the banquet is everything, that there is no other bridegroom worth feasting with. They will be there even if the bridegroom is delayed.

This parable is part of the final teaching that Jesus gave to his disciples before he died. Jesus wants us to be wise. The wise among us see not a churchy community dedicated to the smooth running of the institution. They do not want to be part of a community dedicated to the occasional charitable work and routine pleasantries on Sunday. They are not interested in a holy club where the members are only interested in looking after themselves. The feast that the wise are interested in is the feast where the bridegroom is present. They see hungry and thirsty people and see Christ present in their poverty. They see the cold and naked, and see Christ present there. They see the poor and the vulnerable human beings and see Christ present there. They want to be part of a feast in which the Spirit enables us to see Christ in each other, where there is a trust, where the people pray for one another, where there is a deep communion and an awareness that we all belong to God. That is the holy feast that the wise know is the only feast worth attending.

Are you one of the wise ones? Are you dazzled by the presence of God in this foretaste of the great banquet of the kingdom? In your prayer this week, ask God to give you insight into the desires and expectations of your hearts. Seek wisdom, for the Good News is that the Bridegroom comes eternally, over and over again. Those beloved of God find that their oil flasks are full, that they are welcomed with open arms into the great banquet by Christ himself, who is the host.

Today we gather to celebrate the saints of God; we recall that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, those who have gone before us. A saint, from the Latin word sanctus means holy, so a saint is a person who shares in the divine life of Christ. In the New Testament, that means every one of us is one of the saints. So if you want to be reminded about what a saint looks like – take a good, long, hard look at the person sitting next to you! Go on! Take a look! That person is indeed one of the saints.

We sometimes look at the paintings of the saints that are in churches and museums and think that they represent what being a saint is all about. These representations, often in stain glass windows, show people looking very calm, holy, and pious with a halo to boot. The point of these images, of course, is to keep the memory and stories of these people before us. But if we were to have some of these folk to dinner, we would very likely get quite a shock. Most of the saints were never satisfied with doing what we’ve always done. They were movers and shakers who disturbed the status quo. They often led exciting lives. Some of them were fanatics who went on mad escapades. Many approached life in completely novel and fresh ways. But the reason we remember them is because when we looked at them their lives were for us windows into God. We could see more clearly through their lives what God is like.

The New Testament, however, would not restrict the term “saint” to the heroes of the faith. The New Testament writers called all the people of God “saints”. If you want to live like one of the saints, live the Beatitudes in Matthew’s gospel. The Beatitudes are widely understood to sum up the teaching of Christ. They are to the New Testament what the 10 commandments are to the old. Be pure in heart, mourn the injustices we see in the world, hunger and thirst for what is right, but be merciful also, be peacemakers, be willing to face the cost of being faithful and for working for justice; these are the things the saints of God are called to be concerned about.

As part of our celebration today, we will recall those we have known and loved in our prayer – those who have led us in the way of the gospel – our loved ones for whom we still mourn.

The Christian faith teaches that there is life in Christ beyond death. The exact form and shape of that life we can only imagine. The first reading from Revelation paints a picture of life with Christ when he is fully revealed at the end of time, but none of us really knows in a scientifically definitive sense what life after death actually looks like. But the way we make sense of death is by placing it in the context of Christ’s death and resurrection. St Paul says that in our suffering and dying we are joined to Christ’s death, so that as he is raised by God we are raised with him into eternal life; giving the promise and hope of a future with God for those who love God. This means, of course, that the pain and loss of death is never taken away or even somehow diminished. That is part of the risk of living and loving. What our faith provides is a mega story within which our suffering and pain when we are confronted by death is giving meaning.

Even though we cannot see what the next life will be like, the bible offers many metaphors to help us make sense of death and dying. Today we will look at two of them. The first is the most important, and that, of course, is the death of Jesus which the New Testament interprets as a new Exodus. One of the Greek words used for ‘death’ in the New Testament is the word “Exodus”. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah talk with Jesus about his forthcoming departure. The Greek word there is “Exodus”. So “Exodus” is the first metaphor we can use to make sense of death. Death is our journey to God, toward our final reconciliation with God. The first Exodus story, of course, is the great departure that Moses and the people of God made out of Egypt into the Promised Land. Here, we can begin to see the multiple ways the bible uses the word death. In the Exodus story, death is equated with the hellish existence of slavery in Egypt. Little surprise therefore that death and sin are often linked together in the discourse of St Paul. The journey is the sojourn into a fullness of relationship with God in the Promised Land where the milk and honey flows and there is feasting forever.

In Christ, the meaning of this journey is expanded. Jesus’ death and resurrection is the New Testament Exodus story recapitulated and given new meaning. Slavery in Egypt is broadened to mean alienation from God brought about by sin. The Promised Land towards which we journey is the fullness of life in Christ; its consummation is our final meeting with Christ in when he is revealed in his fullness at the end of time. In this way of seeing death and dying, God is leading us on a journey of faith. His agenda is for our good, and he is joining to Christ’s rising from the dead and leading us to the fullness of communion with himself, which will be revealed at the end of time.

The bible offers another way to make sense of death and that is the metaphor of rebirth; being born again. Death is like a second birth. Just as there were hands that received us when we were born into this world, so there will be hands to receive us when we are born again into the next. Our baptism is a prototype of this, a kind of school for learning how to die and how to live in Christ. S. Paul describes baptism as a real death. In Baptism we join ourselves to Christ’s death so that we might be joined with his resurrection. It is a letting go; allowing something to die so that something else can be reborn. Our ego is put to death; the part of us that needs to be the boss, that needs to be the star at the centre or the wise one or the special one, the part of us that demands loyalty, perfection, or peace at any cost, that will do anything to belong and to be liked. Of course, this is a life long journey. But the point is, when we were unborn babies, we lived in a familiar place and birth was the process of passing into the unknown. So it is when we physically die. We leave this familiar world and move into the next, where once again there will be hands to receive us and hold us. Those hands will be the hands of Christ who is waiting to receive those who love him.

Today in our prayers, we will pray for those we have known and loved. There will be a time for lighting candles for our loved ones. If you are not sure what to pray as you light your candle, simply ask Jesus to pass on a message of love to those for whom you wish to pray. That way, you are expressing your love for that person in your prayer, and your prayer is addressing Christ and asking him to pass that love on. We can rest assured that the company of heaven are praying for us and cheering us on as we run the race set before us.

The church is not just you and me gathered here on earth. The church includes the whole company of heaven, all those who have gone before us. All the members of the Body care and pray for one another, whether we happen to be on this side of the grave or beyond it. In Jesus, death and time are transcended and we are united in one body. As we make our prayers let us chose life today. We pray for ourselves, that we may grow into the love of God where all that is good may be perfected, and all that is wrong will be healed, and that death when it comes, will hold no fear for us.

The text before us today contains another question that was put to Jesus by his opponents. In terms of the mega story, this is the part of the story of Jesus we call Holy Week. The momentus entry into Jerusalem, what we call Palm Sunday, has taken place. Jesus has undertaken the provocative cleansing of the temple, which is best described as ‘poking a hornet’s nest’. The religious leaders have come out in force to attack Jesus at every opportunity. Last week they tried to trap him with a question about tax. There was another question about the resurrection. Today they ask him a much simpler question about the great commandment. Just like the other questions, this one is also a trap. To the devout Jew, all the commands and precepts were a revelation of God’s will. Even though there were over 600 of them, if one or two are singled out, wouldn’t that indicate that some of God’s commands are more important than others? Will Jesus try to downplay some of the commands? This was the trap the Sadducees wanted Jesus to fall into.

As he usually did, Jesus answers this question on his own terms. He puts together two commands, love of God and love of neighbour, and shows that these two things are inseparable. We are used to hearing these commands often. For those of us familiar with the old Book of Common Prayer, these two commands were read every Sunday in the service of Holy Communion. Many preachers talk about them as one command or ‘the summary of the law’. It’s a simple message, love God, love your neighbour, love yourself. Jesus elaborated a great deal on this, most famously in the Gospel according to Luke in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Loving God and loving our neighbour are inseparable. Along the way Jesus sets a new standard of holiness. Loving our neighbour involves being able to include those who are very different from ourselves in the community of the redeemed.

We know all this: two commands – love God and love your neighbour. We hear it every year proclaimed from the pulpit. We try our best to put it into practice with varying degrees of success. Sometimes we struggle, especially when loving our neighbour involves making room for others just when we thought we had made a nice comfortable position for ourselves. The one I want to focus today could be called the third command that is implied in this, namely, the command to “love yourself.” This is one many fail to notice, but it is key to all the rest. It is impossible to love others or even to love God if we do not love ourselves. The problem is that we want to avoid being self centred, selfish, and narcissistic. And so many people avoid anything that looks like self love. Other parts of the gospel seem to encourage this. Wasn’t it the smug Pharisee that Jesus put down, the one who thought his prayers should be noticed over the prayers of the ordinary sinner?

Well indeed it was such a Pharisee. But the reason that Jesus was able to love others (and God) was because he loved himself and knew himself loved by God. On the other hand, the Pharisee’s way of loving himself was a form of grand standing, a calling of attention to himself, which is what people do when they don’t love themselves. Grandstanding is illusory. If are afraid that we are not loved, if we have to draw attention to ourselves to prove to ourselves that we are loved, that is because we fear being unloved. That fear drives us to manipulate, or to strive for higher achievements to get the love and approval we so desperately seek. The root cause of this is anxiety and fear. The fear is that if we look into the centre of ourselves we will find that there is nothing there, that our centre is, in fact, an empty space. And so we try and cover that space up or fill it with something. We try to make something of ourselves by surrounding ourselves with possessions and accomplishments. These things can serve as a kind of persona, a protective identity that we wrap around ourselves, all of which is masking the biggest fear of all, that if someone could look into our soul, they would find nothing there. The root of this ailment is the inability to love ourselves or to see ourselves as loved by God. If we don’t love ourselves, all we are likely to see is an empty space in our souls. If we cannot love ourselves, we struggle to receive love from others. It is even hard to allow ourselves to be loved by God or to believe that God wants to love us. It becomes harder to see the ways that God’s love us breaking through to us. We think we are not worthy of that love. One reaction to that is keep working harder and to try and run faster, or another response is to numb the pain with some kind of addictive behaviour.

Part of our spiritual journey is the task of taking delight in ourselves. It is important not to confuse this with smugness and narcissism. Narcissistic behaviour comes from a focus inward on our own pain to the exclusion of others. Smugness comes from an excessive focus on our own achievements, a bit like the Pharisee who wanted everyone to notice how much he prayed and fasted and that he kept all the rules. By contrast, love of ourselves comes from a profound knowledge that we are loved by God. We know that children who are loved by their parents as they grow up are more likely to love and value themselves. So it is with us and God. The more we know ourselves to be loved by God, the more we know that we owe are very existence to Love. If anxiety and fear is the root of sin, so love is the root or redemption. Love is the beginning of faith. When we know ourselves as loved by God as we are, then faith can spring forth and flower.

Ultimately, this is why Jesus had the spiritual resources and stamina he needed in the face of conflict and stiff resistance that he faced. As the story unfolds we see that the more goodness and grace and generosity of God Jesus brought into the world, the greater the kickback was from those who opposed him. We face this too, and the question coming up in the remaining chapters of this gospel will focus the question of where the inner resources will come to face the trials ahead. The ability to remain a channel of grace and peace, the ability to show love in the face of evil comes from faith. Faith comes knowing ourselves as loved by God. It is not something we conjure up. It is a reality we experience. When we know ourselves as loved by God, then we can be grateful for the gifts God has given us. Above all, we can be full of gratitude to God for the gift of ourselves. Being thankful to God is what sets us apart from the smugness and narcissism of our current generation. Our ability to be thankful to God is also what enables us to love others. That is why we pray the “Great Thanksgiving Prayer” in every Eucharist. It reminds us that gratitude and thankfulness is to be the tone of our lives.

Loving one’s neighbour entails seeing them as they are: gifts from God, absolutely loveable, unique bearers of God’s image. We are gifts from God. Our neighbours are God’s gift. The love we share with our neighbour is God’s gift. It is the same love that Jesus had for the Father, the love we know as the Holy Spirit, and it is the same love that is the heart of the being of God.

There is an underlying anxiety among the rugby fans in NZ at the moment. Before us world cup glory beckons. Standing in the way are two teams that have been a nemesis for All Black teams in the past: Australia and France. Australia has beaten us twice before in semi final matches. France has done the same. They form a kind of two headed beast for NZ rugby fans. There will be no end of nail biting until the Web Ellis trophy is held aloft by a victorious All Black captain.

Similarly, the Isaiah reading today brings back the memories of two nemesis of Israel. Isaiah is speaking to a people in exile in Babylon. They had been defeated twice. The first was to the empire of Assyria, who carried the northern kingdom away into exile never to return again. The second was Babylon itself, who finally captured Jerusalem, laying the city to waste and taking her people prisoner. Again, a two headed beast of failure and defeat. But now, as Isaiah speaks, Babylon in turn has fallen to a new empire, and a Persian king holds sway. That king is Cyrus the Great. He has conquered, and all the territories of the Middle East are under his control.

Incredibly, God calls Cyrus his “anointed”. Isaiah declares that he is God’s Messiah. Sit with that for a moment. We are used to hearing that the Messiah would be a son of David, ultimately Christ himself. But in this passage, God’s messiah is none other than a gentile king, potentially the next oppressor. He is the one “whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their robes, to open doors before him…” (Is 45:1) He is the one who will be God’s instrument to free Israel and make possible the return of the exiles to Jerusalem. This is an incredible passage, not well received by Isaiah’s audience I might add, in spite of the hope of restoration embodied in the text. The point is that God is the master of creation and it is God who sets the agenda and sees that his purpose will prevail.

Even if Cyrus is God’s Messiah for a moment, this is the Middle East, and ancient history is full of the rise and fall of empires: Assyria, then Babylon, to Persia, Alexander the Great and his Greek armies, then Rome. This is a story of empires and their claim to shape our world and the myths we live by. They rise up and they conquer. They also tax people to death. There is an old saying that there are only two things of which we can be certain in this life. One is that at some point all of us will face death. The second is that we will be taxed. Death and taxes, all we can be certain about.

Rome was no different. When Jesus arrived, Rome had risen. They levied a poll tax. That was the point of holding the census that comes up in Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. The idea was that everyone in Judea would pay one day’s wage every year to Roman conquers. If empires were unpopular, so were their taxes even more so. This was money that went overseas to feather the emperor’s nest and make his life more comfortable. From the Jewish point of view, this was paying the conquerors to be oppressive. Given that the local people had effectively lost their land and their self determination, this tax was the last insult. As you can imagine, the Romans had to contend with this resentment: the “we don’t want to pay this tax because we are poor and you are cruel to us!” response. But it was not the only problem the Romans had to contend with. The opposition was also ideological. They also had the: “paying this tax is against our religion!” sort of response.

So from the point of view of a faithful religious person in Jesus’ time where there were religious laws that covered every aspect of life, when it came to paying taxes they weren’t doing so for God or to be responsible citizens. Paying tax was simply another part of the injustice that had to be endured. Paying tax could even be declared impermissible, something that is against God and their faith. Tax therefore, was one of those ideological places, a point where society divided.

So when Jesus comes to Jerusalem and begins teaching in the temple, the Pharisees come presenting the perfect ideological question, one that is likely to spark opposition within a volatile crowd. Also against Jesus are the Herodians. They were a group that supported the Romans and received power, riches and favours as a result. Any answers Jesus gives will be dangerous. He could support the fundamentalists and get in trouble with Rome and the Herodians, or he could betray Jewish law and arouse the crowd. You can almost hear the Pharisees smug self satisfaction with the genius of their trap. They can smell triumph.

Unexpectedly, the question is thrown back. What belongs to Caesar? Let’s sit with that question for a moment. Caesar is the imperial head of an empire and to all appearances he has everything: power, wealth, and the comforts of life. But we have already noted what happens to empires. They come and go. Cyrus was God’s anointed 500 years ago, but what does he have now? For those with eyes to see is plain that nothing belongs to Caesar. Psalm 49 puts it succinctly:

“Do not fear when some become rich or when the wealth of their household increases. For at death they take nothing away with them and their riches will not follow them. While they lived they counted themselves happy and others praise them in their prosperity, but they will go to join their ancestors who will never again see the light.”

The point is, that to be Christian, to be a disciple, is to discover the point of God’s revelation. The point is that we are called to share in God’s life. That is our purpose and that is what will make us happy and contented, and will make life rich with experiences of intensity and depth; not struggles for wealth or power or for taxes.

“Give back to Caesar the things that belong to Caesar, and to God the things that belong to God.” Everything belongs to God, which leaves us with a problem greater than the one posed by the Pharisees. Giving what is God’s back to God? Could that mean giving our very selves to God? Could that mean giving all that is ours to God without holding back anything? Well, it might well mean that, but only because of the love of God in the first place. When I know that I am utterly loved by someone, only then might I be prepared to trust enough to give that person my whole life. That is the context here. We belong to God and we are made for God, and we make ourselves available to God, not because God is a demanding tyrant, but because God utterly loves us and his agenda is absolutely for our good. Once that is known and experienced, we can relax into being our truest selves knowing that we are loved as we are and not as we think others want us to be. Then we will set the world on fire. But we can do nothing or be nothing without God. Even the great Cyrus of Persia needed God, though he was unaware of it. “Though you do not know me, I am the Lord, and there is no other. I arm you, though you do not know me… From the rising of the son and from the west, I am the Lord, and there is no other.” (Isaiah 45: 5-6)

“The bible tells us to love our neighbours and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.” Thus said, GK Chesterton. On a day when the world remembers the horrors of 9/11 ten years ago and the terrible wars that have followed, we have before us today a series of texts that talk about the forgiveness of God. It’s a simple message: God is forgiveness. God’s goodness and mercy and forgiveness are infinite. It is by passing on that forgiveness to others that we share in the life of God.

It’s a simple message, but it one of the hardest to put into practice. While we all felt the grief and horror of the 9/11 attacks ten years ago this day, we have also watched as western governments have played out the human need for revenge and retribution, as the world undertook the war on terror. Thousands of people have died in the conflict, which is still going on in places like Afghanistan.

The world God is inviting us into looks very different. The first reading concludes one of the wonderful sagas in the book of Genesis. It is the conclusion of the story of Joseph and his technicolour dreamcoat. Most of you know the story well. Joseph was one of the youngest of Jacob’s sons. As the longed for son of his favourite wife, Rachel, Joseph was dad’s favoured son. His brothers became so angry that they plotted to Joseph’s death. At an opportune moment, they tossed him down a well, waited for a passing camel train, and sold him into slavery. They soaked his specially made coat in goat’s blood to convince his parents that he had been killed.

Joseph was taken down into Egypt. Through a complicated turn of events, Joseph’s ability at interpreting dreams was brought to the attention of Pharoah, who eventually gave him high responsibility in the kingdom. When the drought that had been correctly foreseen by Joseph finally arrived, Joseph’s brothers are forced down into Egypt where they find themselves confronted by none other, that Joseph himself. The terrible truth about what they had done came back to haunt them: selling their brother to slave traders and the deception of their parents, and so they feared for their lives. The saga of deception and guilt of course, had been eating away at their souls like a cancer. Would it bring further violence and death?

Thankfully with God, it did not. In spite of the horrendous events of the past, Joseph could see the larger providential purpose of God at work. Joseph and his brothers were reconciled and their father Jacob and the whole family were brought down to Egypt where, by the grace of God, they could be fed and nurtured in safety. God turned evil into good by placing Joseph into a position where the family would be cared for.

But our reading today comes after all that. The old patriarch, Jacob (Joseph’s dad), has now died. The power of the guilt and fear of the past still lingers in the family and the old wounds emerge once more. So the brothers go again to Joseph, and in fear and trembling fall down at his feet to beg for mercy.

But Joseph has grown wise in the ways of his God. “Am I in the place of God?” he asks. “Even though you intended to bring harm, God has intended for good.” In other words, God overrides the plans and schemes of the people in the story. Here, in these final verses of Genesis, evil is overcome an d goodness is restored again. The people of God have stabbed each other in the back. They have betrayed one another, tricked each other, and left some for dead.

But God has over-ridden all that. God does not holding it against Joseph’s brothers. God does not point the finger, or demand punishment and retribution. This is the point that is so hard to for us to believe. It is the same point that comes up in the resurrection account of the New Testament. Instead, does not seek vengeance or retribution. God comes to reverse the cycle of violence by offering mercy and forgiveness in its place. God does not leave us helpless in the face of evil. God means for good. God’s plan is for welfare. This is a programmatic affirmation of the gospel that governs the whole book of Genesis and becomes a theme all through the bible. Evil plans of human beings do not defeat God’s purposes. Indeed, with God, they are unwittingly turned to good. Joseph has seen that and that is why he has no need to take vengeance against his brothers. And so he forgives them again. Joseph knows God as forgiveness, and so he forgave his brothers again. When our instinct is to strike back and hurt the one who has harmed us, the response of Joseph points us to the way of God and the way Jesus wants his disciples to treat one another.

But this is not easy as we know. Peter puts the question to Jesus; “How many times must I forgive a brother or sister if he or she wrongs me?” And so Jesus tells the parable of the unforgiving servant. The first point of the parable is the vivid picture that is painted of the sheer immensity of God’s goodness and mercy represented by the master. The ten talents of silver represent debt that is humanly impossible to repay. Yet, all of it is forgiven.

The servant in the parable gets it wrong. Either he has completely forgotten God’s grace, or he has never accepted it in the first place, preferring to believe the populist view of God as a punishing tyrant. The debt of a few hundred denarii pales into insignificance against the ten talents forgiven him by the master. The servant shows himself to be small minded and hard hearted, the complete opposite of the life of God. This picture of the servant who refuses to forgive is a picture of the human condition. We do harbour grudges. We do remember old wrongs. We do scheme about ways of getting back at our enemies and jump at the chance when it comes. The reason we carry on behaving like the ungrateful servant is that we fail to see the immensity of God’s grace and mercy that is being offered you and me. We can only see our little bit of the picture. We can go further: Our reluctance to forgive is really our refusal to accept God’s forgiveness that he so very much wants to give us.

The end of the parable can make God look like a tyrant, and you can read the parable that way if you wish, but I want to suggest another way of looking at it. What if we are the ones who hand ourselves over to the jailor when we are unable to forgive? What if our failure to forgive locks us into a kind of prison that allows the cancer of bitterness to eat away at our soul? Maybe our reluctance to forgive means that we treat our brothers and sisters as if they are dead, and alienation and pain damages the community.

God is forgiveness; God is for healing. God is for our welfare. He sent Jesus to show us forgiveness and mercy being lived in a real human life. God is saying: “Forgive and you will share in my life. Forgive, and share in my work of healing. Forgive, and experience freedom to love and be loved. Forgive and you will be as I am.” We are to be a school for learning how to love and forgive; how to pass on God’s forgiveness. Today we will baptise Ayla. Because of this day she will know God’s forgiveness. May she too grow up to be as God is: set free to love and to be loved.

Conflict and hurt in our relationships! Conflict in the church – conflict between Christians! Few of us enjoy it. Sadly, most of us have a colourful story or two we can tell about things that have happened to us in churches; vicars that said or did something to offend, vestry decisions that upset us, the debate at an AGM where people said things. When Jesus was training his disciples to become apostles, he knew that there would be conflict among Christians. Having to face conflict can be very difficult. Few of us do it well. There are so many escapes. Some stuff their feelings down inside until the situation gets so bad they explode. Some people use gossip as a weapon because they are unable to face the person who has offended them. A person who can confront another, discuss it reasonably, and stay in relationship, is a rare person indeed.

On the world scene, it is easy to see how conflict between human beings can be brutal. Just look at the horrors unfolding in Lybia at the moment where there civil war is raging. There is evidence of nasty atrocities on both sides, use of torture, revenge killings and the like. Here at home, the media thrives on conflict. Current affairs programmes thrive on controversy and sometimes even create it by bringing in two people with extreme opposite points of view. The rush to identify conflict, and then to be outraged, offended, and victimised is one of the hallmarks of our world. Finding the culprit and laying blame is another sport that our society engages in.

So what is a good, healthy, Christian approach to managing conflict? As I have mentioned, Jesus knew there would be conflict among Christians, and he faced a great deal of it himself in his own life and ministry. The gospel paints a very different world from the one we see in our society. Jesus calls men and women to form the Church in a world which is marred and damaged, in which people are hurt by all kinds of experiences. But from the point of view of the gospel, the way we approach conflict is to be marked not by the need to find the culprit or lay blame or to be the offended one. Conflict is to be moderated by truth; the truth about God and about ourselves.

When one Christian has a case against another, the first step will be an attempt at a private reconciliation. There is good wisdom in that. It protects both parties from humiliation, from forming public positions that they cannot back away from. One when this fails does one bring in a third party, and after that it is brought before the church in a public way. This is good policy in other spheres as well. As a parent when our son was in primary school, there was a policy issued by the school Board of Trustees saying what to do if you were unhappy or if you had a complaint. The first step was to raise the issue with the staff member concerned, and only if that wasn’t satisfactory did one go to a more senior staff member or the principal. The idea was to try and stop some of the unhelpful gossip that went around the school community and help us work through conflict in a healthy way. So it is to be for us in the church.

What Jesus is calling us to do is to insist on truth, to remain hopeful, and to overcome our fear. The hope we need is the hope that others will see good in us and will want to stay in relationship with us. We also need enough hope in others so that we can expect to find goodness in those who wrong us. The real story however, is the persistent hope that human beings are able to hear the truth about themselves. But hearing truth is in fact what we also fear the most, which is why it is easier to use all sorts of avoidance mechanisms. Basic to the gospel is the hope that human beings are able hear truth about themselves, but also the hope that they can live that truth with joy, knowing whatever we have done and whatever we have been, God is with us and loves us to bits. “When two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.”

It’s easy to talk about hope that human beings can hear the truth about themselves, but we all know that truth can be difficult to face. To know who we have been, to face the messes we get ourselves into, to know how my actions or words have harmed someone, even those I love dearly, can be a heavy burden to bear. What Jesus is asking of us today is that we be prepared to face how we have failed another. It means being able to look at the real picture of myself, rather than the one I prefer to project, the one I want everyone to see. That truth can be a hard one to face. But the hope of the Gospel is that truth sets us free. The real conflict is not the kind of conflict where the innocent confront the guilty, the kind of conflict we might see on TV shows. The real conflict is the discovery of our failures and weaknesses, our complicity in harming others, discovering the ways we cause alienation and hurt and being able to face that squarely and honestly, but in the process find the love and forgiveness of God. That is the point of the readings today. God will always wait until the last minute to turn to him. There is always an extension of time and God is always ready to receive us.

There will always be conflict in our world and in the church. Today Jesus instructs us on how to deal with this conflict. He gives power to the church to bind and loose. Throughout history the church will have recourse to the precepts of Jesus. Sometimes we will have to be honest enough to declare that communion has been broken and ruptured. But the state of rupture and brokenness does not have the last say for the Christian. God sees past the messes we get ourselves into. The truth is that we are always loved by God, and when he looks at us he sees the unique image of himself that is ours to bear. He sees the face of Christ in our faces. That is the real story here: a story of a God who loves and who is forgiveness, and who seeks always to draw us into communion with himself, so that we can glimpse something of the truth that sets us free.