Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”  [Luke’s Gospel 18.1-8]

How comfortable it is to slip into that old pair of shoes we know so well, the ones which have adapted to the shape of our feet, which surrendered any pretence to fashion years ago, and which have so often accompanied us to relaxation. Good memories.

When we pick up bible stories, parables, especially the ones we have heard often, we slip contentedly into the way in which we have always imagined them. They have adapted themselves to our context; we know their measure and their timbre. If we are careful, we can avoid any real disruption.

Then we take the risk of asking someone how they hear the story Jesus tells, this parable of a steadfast woman and an unjust magistrate.

Who is most like God in the parable? Who bears the characteristics of one who is both worthy of worship and worthy of our trust? Who is persistent, faithful and seeking justice? Who reflects the one who seeks us out in love and hope, and will not give up?

Why, so easily, do we content ourselves with a pair of ill-fitting shoes; where a corrupt man of power, with no regard for God – or anyone – grants justice only out of self-interest? In what way is this man similar to God?

Does God require badgering? Does God respond simply from self-interest, in order to silence us?

This woman, this widow, emulates the persistent shepherd whose goodness and mercy pursue us all of our lives. Are there echoes of the Spirit who advocates for us when we can barely find the words, so that our prayers, our entreaties, sound like groans?

When we pray – for healing, or justice, or hope – we imagine a God who loves us beyond measure, and whose compassion is inherent because of the suffering God endures at the brokenness of our world.

This woman refuses to surrender. She insists on justice.

This one will stand with us as we advocate for those who have no voice for themselves. Would she delay in offering us her hand, her voice, her home, her food?

God insists on seeking us out, offering us life, acting to restore all life through the death and resurrection of Jesus. When do we imagine that God ceases to seek life for us, and to offer us mercy? God cajoles us faithfully to act mercifully, to forgive and forgive, to love those who seek us harm. God will not give up on us.  

Perhaps we are the ones who need convincing? Perhaps we are the ones who need to change, so that we understand where injustice crouches, and brokenness remains unrelieved. Perhaps this parable offers something entirely new.

Jesus asserts that God is nothing like this corrupted magistrate. Jesus proclaims a God who will not delay justice, who insists on standing with those in need.

When we think we know what God is like, and the manner in which God acts in the world, Jesus draws breath and tells another parable, about a Pharisee and a tax-collector.

How comfortable are those shoes now?

Listen, then, if you have ears.

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. … But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. {The Prophet Jeremiah 29.4-7]

There is a thread at which we are often hesitant to pull, as we think about the place of faith and the faithful, in the scheme of things. It is the thread of punishment and blessing.

The conversation about blessing is often articulated by two statements, one of which appears to follow the other, and which grow progressively threadbare. If we do God’s will, then we will be blessed; the second argument which (for a moment) sounds logical is that if we have wealth and good health, then we must be doing God’s will.

Blessing and obedience are far more nuanced than this utilitarian argument. As if we needed reminding that the most complete act of obedience is found in Christ suffering and crucified; discerning the profound nature of blessing begins and ends there.

Here are God’s people, Jeremiah’s people, bound in exile. Prophets on the right and left are speaking of the escape they must make, or the punishment they must endure. The people look over their shoulders towards the lives they used to live, and remember with some embellishment what life was like, then.

Blessing, or punishment. If we are exiled here, refugees, then Yahweh, our God, has forsaken us. We have no song to sing in this strange land. There is no blessing to be found.

Then God, with the voice of Jeremiah, reminds them of the God who creates, who restores, who wrests life out of death and light from darkness. The whole façade of curse and blessing is allowed to unravel, and God weaves something new – a theology of welfare and of life.

Rather than electing isolation, or social protectionism, the God of Sarah and Abraham calls their descendants to live their reoriented lives entirely in the community into which they have been placed.

“Build and live, plant and eat, marry and grow – live your lives fully in the place where I have located you.” Those who mutter omens of punishment or escape are offering nightmares masquerading as dreams.

It is here, when we think the wells are dry, that we discover who we are called to be. It is when we test our faith, and our faith’s narratives, when we examine the promises of our God and of our journey to this place, that we discern what is myth, what is celebrated and then laid aside, and what gives us foundation for the next steps we need to take.

“Exile is the place where God’s faithful promises work a profound newness”, says Brueggemann. When we offer the gospel as food for the hungry and a voice of justice, but also as celebration and renewal, then lives are changed, not least our own.  

We live our faith in such a way, that people are blessed in knowing us. We seek the welfare of our community, because that is best for them. There is no snare in our generosity, to entrap others into faith, or gospel; we serve, and care, and celebrate in order to offer life.

God offers the possibility of return from Babylon to Jersualem and home, but only after three generations of lives have been lived in exile – and in hope.

We are in this place, this life, because God has placed us here. It is in offering life to others, that we discern more fully the lives to which we are called, in Jesus Christ.

I have no psalm for this.

Only
the sound of God
dragging her hand
|through ash,
searching
for the shape
of a child
She once dreamed.

There are no angels here.
They refused to descend.
They feared the light
that does not forgive them.

What lies in Gaza now
is older than war
older than wrong.

It is the kind of silence
that speaks only
to those
willing to die
for listening.

Do you feel that, priest?
This isn’t grief.

That is God
amputated from his own body.

That is Gaza
screaming in a dialect older
than creation.

You speak?
you dare speak|
of sides, of justice, of peace?

Peace is a liar
that kissed the bullet
before it entered the child’s jaw.

Peace is the perfume
of empire,

a sedative piped in veins
so sleepers dream of justice
while chewing
the bones
of the holy.

And still
the tree grows.

Not out of hope,
From disobedience.

It dares
to place green
into a sky
that spits fire.

That is what love is.

Stubborn.
A blossom
in the throat of a grave.

You want love?

Then stand
where fathers have become
their own dust.

Then carry your grief,
like it was born in you.

Let it unbutton your chest

and place
in your hands
a name you do not recognise
but know belongs
to you.

Because we are not separate.
Not in this.

Gaza is not an elsewhere.
Sudan is not a shadow.
Congo is not a myth.
Ukraine is not another’s burden.

They are the edges
where your skin
forgets
it ends.

Laws?

What are laws
to the mother
who has outlived her entire house?

What is language
to the dust
that speaks only in bones?

What is justice
when the world
refuses to be born?

And yet
something grows
in the skull
of the fallen house.

A petal
A song.

A defiance
rooted to deep
even the gods
must stop and listen.

It says:
I remain.
I remember.
I refuse
to forget.

This, too,
is God.

Not the one who watches.
But the one
who cannot
look away.

So let the poets howl.
Let the sky split.
Let every drone rot in mid-air.

Let the empire implode
beneath the weight
of one
broken cradle.

For justice is not a verdict.

It is the burning tongue
of God
re-inserting herself
into the story.

And this time,
She will not come
with parables

but with the eyes
of a child
in Rafah

and the fury
of a mother
in Deir al-Balah,
whose womb
became a courtroom
and whose tears
wrote
the final law.

The land remembers.
The sea does not forgive.
The olive tree
weeps oil.

And in the centre
of the world,
where prophets bled truth

a child picks up a stone,

Not to throw,
but to remember
what hands were made for
before they were taught
to beg,
before they learned
the physics of bombs.

Call it rage.
Call it prayer.

Call it the final breath
of a planet
that refused
to forget.

Gaza,
the part of us
that never learned
to kneel
before
what is broken.

She is
what still burns
when every temple
has turned to dust.

She is the prayer
that prays
back.

[Jesus] also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”      [Luke’s Gospel 18.9-14]

Last week in Arizona, a man walks, in a stadium, full of people. He is wearing a suit. He is bearing a life-sized cross. He is waving to people in the crowd, as some of them applaud.

At the rally following the shooting death of a political activist in the United States, there were several indications of the syncretism of cultural, religious, political and media influences. Rage and worship, polemic and nationalism and grief took the stage during the event.

A few years ago, a primary school Easter drama in the Catholic Church of a regional town in western NSW. The usual mix of costumes compiled from cast-offs and sheets. A twelve-year-old boy bears the cross and the jeers of those around him, echoing that first Easter. He is Aboriginal. The poignancy of the casting causes me – and others around me – to catch our breath.

We know how this story appears to end.

For those of us who follow the risen, crucified One, the temptation is always present to align ourselves with the social and political resources available to us. We arrive there out of fear, or discomfort, or because our society measures success in ways in which we stumble, and in which Jesus has no interest.  

We will tailor the demands of Jesus to fit our culture more comfortably, and reinterpret his radical words of transformation, so that we remain undisturbed or, worse, confirmed in the way we live already.

A rational extension of this corruption is that we pronounce the social primacy of our faith and thus, the consequences for those who sit outside the schema we have shaped for ourselves and those like us. A moment later, we are talking of a Christian government, a Christian nation; in the following breath, we are talking of those who don’t belong.   

We’ll make Jesus look like us, talk like us, eat the same foods and dislike the same people we dislike. We have created the risen Jesus in our own image, and the crucifixion is a speed bump on the way to success.

And we have fallen amongst thieves.  

I spent this morning with a colleague considering funeral ministry; one of the places we consistently engage in public theology. We talked about mercy and our calling to offer this gift to all who will receive. People come in grief and need to hear hope and forgiveness, not the ephemeral equivalent of a self-help app.

Our world is desperate for hope. In our thirst we are lured by illusions of comfort for us and blame for them. There is only darkness found on that path.

We are able to offer mercy because we have first been offered it ourselves. We are recipients of that extraordinary gift, from a God who knows and loves us. This mercy, arising from Christ, crucified and risen, is the fount of life. It restores and cleanses, from all our brokenness.

A primary school child, carrying a cross. The story of God’s mercy does not end there. In the broken Christ, God’s presence is fully revealed. In Saturday’s silence, no speeches can be heard, no posts uploaded.

In Sunday’s wonder, the risen Christ embodies the only words worth hearing; forgiveness and life, the mercy of God. Never entitlement, always gift.

God of my integrity,
in whom knowledge of truth
and passion for justice are one;
my heart was sentimental and you cleansed it
with your rigorous mercy;
my thoughts were rigid and you engaged them
with your compassionate mind.
Heal my fragmented soul;
teach my naïveté;
confront my laziness;
and inflame my longing
to know your loving discernment
and live out your active love,
through Jesus Christ, Amen.

– a prayer from Janet Morley
All Desires Known, SPCK 1992

[Then Jesus told them this story] “There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores,who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried.”                  [Luke’s Gospel 16.19-22]

When I imagine this story, I see a man of wealth and power stepping, delicately, in order to avoid contact, over a broken man, lying at his front step. The wealthy man is fastidious in failing to acknowledge the destitute one at his gate.

It is one of Jesus’ blunt parables. It explains itself, so we twist ourselves into Gordian calisthenics to find our way out. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is confronting about wealth and responsibility. The middle-class church has always been uncomfortable, as was Jesus’ original audience. Which is, presumably, why he felt the need to engage them – and us – in this way.

Jesus is not content to leave us here. We will meet a rich ruler and a tree climbing tax collector in the days ahead. Our journey will be potholed with discomfort.

The Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage recently spoke about “the Politics of Humiliation”, addressing how we deal with other people, and especially how those in power deal with those they deem as lesser beings.

As Hage spoke, I was immediately reminded of this passage, with Lazarus the beggar and the unnamed wealthy man. The humiliation of failing, of waiting, of begging, of poverty in plain sight. The equal shame of being blamed for his own plight – his (or his parents’) sin, his failure to invest properly, his laziness, are all features of the monologue which presumes to narrate his straitened circumstances.

The degradation of being stepped over. Every day.

Humiliation pockmarks our politics, and our communities. We purport to know why people are poor, especially people from our First Nations; if they had only tried harder to fit in, to work, or perhaps to disappear altogether. We have destructive myths and lies which populate our discourse, to justify our judgment of those who do not (or choose to not) live as we do.

We find ways both to tolerate and blame those who seek safety in our country. We allow refugees and then blame them for the job cycle, or house prices, or a general sense of things “not being the way they should”.

Internationally, wealthy nations step past those who wait at their door for justice and hope. This is no recent calumny, but one which has been excused and rationalised for generations. Ask of those left behind in Afghanistan, ask of those waiting in crisis in Gaza, even as we read this.

As we scrabble for scraps of justification for our behaviours, we read to the end of Jesus’ parable. The last sits beside Abraham in paradise; the first waits in torment, and seems barely altered.

He recognises Lazarus for the first time, and asks him to run errands on his behalf, as self-involved now as he had been in life.

Righteousness and Justice are not only in Jesus’ vocabulary; they are inherent to the story of God in the world.

Ghassan Gage speaks of dignity, the opposite of humiliation. We feed the hungry and clothe the naked not because we have food scraps and castoffs, but because they bear the image of God.

We offer safety and welcome to those who seek it, because in doing so we welcome Christ. We sit beside those who lie at our gate, and offer them our hand, because that is how Jesus Christ has first met us, in welcome, in healing and, in hope.  

Let mutual love continue.Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. [Epistle to the Hebrews 13.1-3]

There was a season in many Church traditions, where we offered the elements of communion with as much expedience as possible. Tiny, symmetrical cubes of post-crust white bread, accompanying thimbles of grape juice.  

Moreover, if the bread was prepared many hours before, it could disintegrate when too much enthusiasm was exhibited by those receiving.

What is communicated when we speak of God’s hospitality, then offer the elements in such an astringent way? The body and blood of Christ, for you…

The central act of our shared lives is the worship of an extravagant, generous God; when the sacraments are measured out so carefully, communion can almost become a dissociative exercise.

The hospitality of God is measured in the gift of Jesus Christ, by which any constraints of expedience or implied risk are rendered meaningless in comparison.

Where does this leave our hospitality, in worship and beyond?

When we baptise, there needs to be an abundance of water, particularly when drought is integral to our experience of life in Australia.

When we break bread and share wine, imagine there being sufficient so that anyone hungry for food and justice can come for a second and third helping, whether they are the host, or receiving for the first time.

The hospitality we offer to strangers will be influenced by the God we worship, to whom we are discipled. If baptism is measured with an eye dropper, and communion with a laser level, our welcome to strangers and guests will be similarly disabled.

We can mistake hospitality for the tolerance shown an unwelcome visitor. Hospitality is not “allowing someone to enter our perimeter”, but the welcome of a kettle boiling, and a chair made ready.

The author of Hebrews is probably making reference to some Old Testament stories, where holy visitors (angels?) make surprise appearances to Sarah and Abraham, and soon afterwards to Lot, who lived in Sodom. The angels received generous hospitality in both places, even to the extent of Lot protecting his guests from the assault of other men in the city. Sodom’s sinfulness is the failure of its hospitality, its violence towards those in need.

This is more than tolerance, more than welcome; it is generosity and safety. Lot acts as host, even at risk to himself – and his family.

We are called into “embedded” ministry, where we identify with those who are suffering, as though we are suffering ourselves.  This identity is the reason we offer hospitality, because we know what it means to be hungry, to value shelter, to need the care of others.

Remembering others is not reduced to the short, uncomfortable stanza during the Intercessory Prayers. It is reshaping our action and our worship around those who are tortured and imprisoned. It is breaking bread, acknowledging the generosity of God by whom our daily bread is given and, in the same moment, naming the brokenness of lives and bodies and communities and cities.

Remembering is also the prophetic assertion that this suffering is not the entire story told in Jesus Christ. Our identity with those who suffer, the reason we serve others, is our affirmation that justice and forgiveness – and resurrection – are the inherent consequence of being named and loved by God.

We wait for the sounds of God
and the sounds of the sacrament:
the breaking of the bread
and the gushing of the wine
the pain of sorrow and the pulse of hope
the echo of our name and the bread in our teeth
a cup on our lips and breathing at our side
as we wait for the sounds of God
the breaking of the bread
and the gushing of the wine.                        (Gary Trompf, “Your Will be Done”)

In the hope of the Spirit’s breath, we remember forward that God is not done. God is not yet done.

And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.”          [Luke’s Gospel 13.11-14]

As I prepared to write this piece, I remembered something. I had an old friend who, after watching Dead Poets’ Society, sided with the principal.  

Just last week, we considered the division Jesus brings. Indeed, Jesus seemed pretty keen on the provocative and conflicted implications of his ministry.

When we explore those words of Jesus, we can imagine that the conflict might arise due to sermons challenging the authorities, or asking people to forgive each other, or even to love enemies.

However, when a person is healed? Really?

That a woman, unwell since Jesus was completing his final year of high school, has to wait until Monday? A woman is restored, and the first response – from the leader of the faith community – is complaint?

A person is set free, and the liberation is regarded as “work”, and not the shalom for which people hunger, and of which the prophets speak. As we frequently experience in the Jesus stories, the wonder of healing and restoration is less pronounced than the reaction of crowds and clergy.

We hear the crowds murmur, and the theologians criticise as tax collectors reimburse their victims, and people crippled with possession are set free. A woman anoints Jesus’ feet with tears and perfume; Jesus offers gifts in return, the blessing of forgiveness and peace. All his hosts have to offer are judgment and slander. A blind man cries out to Jesus, and the crowd seeks to jostle him into silence.

“O, captain! My captain!” Get back in your box.

We stand, conflicted and appalled at their behaviour. If we have sufficient empathy, we might imagine ourselves in the crowd, watching; if we have a smidgen more courage, we might see our face and hear our voice in the pharisees and leaders who condemn Jesus so easily, and those to whom he offers life.

A few moments earlier, Jesus talks about the burdens that are laid upon people’s backs by community leaders, and then nothing is done to lift them. People are trained to think that brokenness is acceptable, perhaps even that this is what God intends for those who struggle.  

Before we complete our sermon, let us ask ourselves how we contribute to the condition of those who are bent over so far, they can see barely more than a pace in front of their eyes. This is as true for our neighbour beside us, as those neighbours we witness in warzones and poverty.

When someone seeks our help, and we have no time today; when a person names their hunger and our response is to consult our calendar; when people ask for justice and are told that wounding is all they can expect.

A colleague of mine consistently reminds me of the powers and principalities which infect our age and season. The measure of our faith is not the culture in which we live; it is one who was executed and then raised to life.

The church so easily succumbs to the markers of “practical solutions” and the illusion of language which suits profit and loss.

For Jesus, the worth of this woman was not measured in her abilities, or lack of them. She was a child of Abraham, an inheritor of the promise of God; her value was her humanness.

Sabbath, the day of shalom, is a day for renewal and recreation, peace and life; is that not what Jeus offered her? Is that not what Jesus offers us?

Our calling is to help people to lift their heads and receive the blessing of freedom.

---

“I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!  I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed! Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division!”  [Luke’s Gospel 12.49-51]

“No one will be worse off under my housing/tax/employment/education/migration policy” is what we are accustomed to hearing, especially around election time. In a world overburdened with populist politics, you will rarely hear a candidate espousing the value of our sacrifice or personal cost; unless it’s borne by someone else.

There are great speeches from leaders of the past, which hold us to account for previous missteps, or which call us to the challenge of sacrifice for others, or for our future. Such rigorous, ethical discipline appears less likely in this current cycle of history; to misquote and deliberately reverse the intent of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address in 1961, “Ask not what you can do for your country, but ask what your country can do for you.”

It’s nice when people like us.

If we ever imagined Jesus to be polite in speech and mild in approach, this passage will certainly disabuse us.  Jesus has been building a formidable list of challenges, about true wealth and the destructive illusion of finding security in a property and financial portfolio. He has warned those who will listen about being prepared, and the consequences of not being ready.

And then he fails the test of being politically electable. He tells the unvarnished truth.

Choosing to follow Jesus will be costly, in terms of friends, and family, and decisions about how we live. Jesus really isn’t nice.

When we have been raised only with images of the comforting and safe Jesus, we are unsure how to respond to the Jesus who requires our obedience and talks of his presence bringing conflict. We can’t be surprised; the simple commands to love our neighbour, and the far more complex love for our enemies have confounded us since Jesus first uttered them.

Then, if we are sufficiently courageous, we ask about the outworking of these commands. Where do we, as disciples of Jesus, locate ourselves when we try to love our neighbour who deliberately harms others?

What about our understanding of the appalling conflict in Gaza at this precise moment? Christians have found themselves on all sides of this disaster, so perhaps the following question is how do we, as Jesus’ disciples, handle our own conflicts which arise from crises like these?

When we are raised to be nice and polite, we are ill-equipped to engage with the reality of the world which we are called by Jesus to love – and to serve.

How do our communities of faith address and resolve conflict? Sometimes we maintain a stoic (read polite), resentful silence, or relocate to another congregation, or we simply acquiesce. We need to be able to have conflict with the same dignity and care which Jesus offers to us; our discipleship matters.

We need also to discern whether our opinion is like the property of the rich fool in Jesus’ recent parable: self-satisfying and self-justifying.

Last week I asked when discipleship became so inexpensive. What words of Jesus led us to think that there was no sacrifice asked of us in order to live the way to which he calls us?

There are communities of faith which avoid engaging in the world around them for fear of what it might cost. In doing so they misquote and deliberately reverse the discipleship to which we are called.

The signs are all around us, as they have always been. Our task is to bear witness in this time, confident that the one who has been crucified and raised has, by that very act, addressed the crises of this – and every – time.  

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;cease to do evil,
learn to do good;seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.                   [Isaiah 1.16-17]

A close friend and I were talking recently – and at length – about all manner of things, as friends are wont to do. At one point, our conversation embraced our discipleship, and the shape it takes and has taken.

My friend reflected upon a discipleship of decades, a journey for which I have great respect. In recent times, he realised that his path in the past had been somewhat misdirected, attending with such vigour to some aspects of faith in Christ that he failed to apprehend the essential element – the outworking of his faith.

We explored how this had arisen, speaking of a particular formation in faith, the various communities to which he had belonged, and the teaching which both accompanies us and, is shaped by, the wealthy, educated world.

It is deeply perplexing.

The Old Testament prophets all speak with resonance of God’s passion for their world in which they live. Hosea, with whom we wrestled in these last two weeks, has deep concerns with the faithlessness of God’s people; his life and his words echo that concern and offer hope of God’s reconciliation.

Isaiah’s polemics about worship punctuate much of what he offers us. The cause of his ire is not worship itself, but the lives led by those who worship; they will speak of a faithful God, who comforts the lost and oppressed; they will pray for the forgiveness and justice residing in God’s heart and hand; they will sing of God, present to us when parent and partner and community have been torn from us.

And yet, when the singing and praying and preaching are done, there is silence and not justice. The orphaned child remains hungry.

How did discipleship become so inexpensive? When did liturgy become so anodyne?

It is clear that my friend’s paradox is not his alone. The contention about faith, as opposed to good works, bears no viable offspring. It is an argument of deliberate obfuscation, to avoid Isaiah’s – and God’s, it seems – profound despair.

The measure of the failing which the prophet addresses is that worship has no meaning if the hungry remain famished, the poor remain impoverished, and those who are oppressed cannot stand from the burdens which they bear.

This is not just bread in our hands and an open door, but voices which speak and sing for those who are able only to whisper for fear of consequence.

The contention which my friend and I resolved is that it is not only powers and principalities in the world around us which have formed us in this manner, but the complicity of the Church which keeps us compliant in our turn.

As a consequence, many aspects of worship remain beholden to praise songs which ask nothing of us, self-interested prayers, and sermons which are invested in transaction, disregarding mercy and hope.

Our Basis of Union asserts that “The Church is able to live and endure through the changes of history only because its Lord comes, addresses, and deals with people in and through the news of his completed work” – Christ is present and attends to people’s lives and struggles. This is where we are called, not in the abstract.

In the Uniting Church, we offer a missional refrain, speaking of worship, witness and service. As I continue to disciple myself to Christ, I see how these three are inherently inseparable. Each informs, and is informed by, the others. When one is diminished, our worship becomes performative, our service simply becomes social action, and our witness articulates only wishful thinking and not a hope, anchored in the risen, crucified One.

I admire my friend’s integrity, to reorient himself to the calling of Christ. In his faithfulness, I am reminded that is how each of is called to live, to be yoked to the one who will continue to correct that which is erroneous in our lives, to the glory of God.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like those
who lift infants to their cheeks.
I bent down to them and fed them.                       [Hosea 11.3-4]

The prophet offers us an image of God which we can all understand.

The picture of a parent, or grandparent, ushering the child they love from infancy into childhood. When I read Hosea’s words, I see a child with both arms at full stretch above their head, held by their mum who walks slightly behind them, to give their child the hope of independence.

The child is chortling with delight.

We all know this story, at least in part, perhaps in entirety. Which is precisely why Hosea, prophesying with the breath of God, offers it to an errant Israel and, thus, to us.

As always, with the raising of children, with families, there are good and bad days, better and worse seasons. None of this is surprising.

We have had someone hold our hands and lift us along; we have fallen down and been raised back up. We have carried and encouraged, stumbled and fallen. We have laughed and wept.

Our breath catches when God cries out after their recalcitrant, “How can I give you up?”

The novel, the poem, the movie, the homily, in which we can see our face and hear our heartbeat; these are the ones which capture us. However, we are neither Raskolnikov, nor Scout Finch, despite us feeling the depths of their struggle, or their hope’s exaltation. We are not them.

This is the rabbit hole into which we can be led, when prophet and preacher offer us a metaphor of God’s love, or anger, or blessing. We want to say that God is just like us.

Instead, we worship a spendthrift lover who tosses coins of gold across the midnight skies, as Thomas Troeger sings of God.

We attend to the beauty of the language when the prophets speak of God as a nursing mother, and a carer guarding each step, and a rock withstanding the seasons and storms, and the storm itself, and the still sound of gentle nothing. God is none of those things, and all of them.

We hold these images to help us understand, to help us embrace our faith, and to discover a way to, perhaps, grasp our God’s hand, even for a moment.

If we mistakenly imagine that God is just like us, then gradually we reshape God to dovetail with our emotions, our predilections; God is in the image of me. The wonder of imagining something of God’s nature, of God’s relationships with the creation, slides sidewards into self-involvement and we become the creators.

We become sufficient unto our task, we believe. As the farmer in Jesus’ parable remarks, “And I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’” [Luke 12.13-21]

This is an echo of what Parker Palmer refers to as “functional atheism”, the belief that ultimate responsibility for everything lies with us. It also means that if anything decent is going to happen, it is up to us to ensure its happening. It is in our hands.

The God who cries out for the woman and the man in the garden is not like us; the God who forgives, whose anger is like the wind, who steps out our life with each of us and calls us each by name, is not like us. This One who sacrifices their only child in an astonishing act of life and love and death-defiance, is not in our image.

In our lives, and because of God, in our love and our mercy and our sacrifice, we reflect something of this God.

It is only in Jesus that our hands and hearts might, with awe, grasp this One who loves us. It is on the cross when we may touch the profound wonder of God’s embrace, and when we might believe that something of that image resides in us and offers us life.

The cross is the heart of God’s creating, not metaphor, but meaning. When we choose the meaning, we find that which God hopes and intends for us – mercy, justice and life. This God, in whose arms we have been held, who will never give us up, and who will never cease to call our name.