Today we are looking at the baptism of Jesus by John.  Baptism is an important rite of passage for us as Christians: in fact, the living out of our faith is hallmarked by the two sacraments of baptism and Holy Communion.

So I think it is important to celebrate our baptisms today and to recognise that our own baptisms are located back into the baptism of Jesus Christ himself in the River Jordan, which is what we heard about in our Gospel reading just now.

Now, baptism has come to mean different things to different people.  For some, it is just a traditional thing to do, for others, it is about becoming a part of the family of God, for others, it is about identifying with a particular church family, for others, it is about feeling washed free of sin and having a new start in life.

All of these are valid reasons for baptism.  But I want us to think this morning about what Jesus’ baptism told us about him and how that relates to each one of us and what that tells us about who we are.

Today we celebrate the Epiphany of our Lord, which means ‘revelation.’  God revealed to people who were not Jews, whom we call the Wise Men, that Jesus Christ was the Messiah, the Son of God who would reconcile all people to God, Jews and Gentiles. 

This is because God so loved the whole world (not just Jews), that he gave his only son so that all who believe in him could be brought back to their loving Father and not perish, but have eternal life.

So the big revelation of this season of Revelation is that God loves you and me in and through this Jesus, this Son of Man and Son of God, whether Jew or non-Jew.

There are many ways to look at this morning’s gospel from about the Wise Men, it is easy to focus on the gifts, but today I want to look at the Wise Men themselves and what happened to them. 

Today we are going to look a little closer at two betrothed teenagers, Joseph and Mary of Nazareth, chosen by God to be essential for most important event in all of history, just because they were faithful to God.

God uses many ways to speak to us.  We the Church, the people of God now, are the people of God in post-Pentecost times.

The Church, the people of God that Mary and Joseph were part of, was before the great revelation of Christ crucified and God often spoke to them through his sending of angels.

John the Baptist's question from prison is really the question for listeners of every age.  “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”  It is the question.

It jumps off the page.  Is Jesus the one or is there someone else?  What are we to make of this Jesus for whom we wait?  Is he real?  Could he really be ‘God with me?’ 

When John preached ‘Repent!  For the Kingdom of God is nigh,’ what are we to repent of, and how will we know that the Kingdom of God is here?

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray “Your kingdom come,” but what are we praying when we say this?  Jesus himself says “the kingdom of God is very close to you.”

Jesus is talking about himself.  In him is the Kingdom of God

For all the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and for the early Church, John the Baptist was the start of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus didn’t just arise out of a vacuum but is the continuation of what God had already been doing through the Jewish people.  

John the Baptist is the beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ.  He begins by prophesying that the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.

The phrase Kingdom of God or Kingdom of heaven is itself an Old Testament phrase used to describe the breaking in of God’s kingly rule into the world.  John is prophesying that the coming Messiah is the embodiment of God’s kingly rule over the world.

Then Matthew tells us in v.3 of today’s gospel, that the coming of the prophet John is itself a fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophesy:  “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:  ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

Until around 150 years ago, Advent was not so much a time of a time of waiting for the great joy of the promised Christ Child, but rather the time for ‘pious meditation’ on what are called the Four Last Things.

Not hope, peace, joy, and love, but rather the four last stages of the soul in this life and in eternity:  Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell.  Which is why Advent is a penitential season (like Lent).

Today is the last Sunday of our deep dive into Luke’s gospel, which we have been looking at for the last five months.  Today is the day we celebrate Christ the King and the end of the church year.

And how does Luke portray our King of Kings?  In his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension, or his coming again with the whole host of heaven to judge the earth?  No.  Crucified between two common criminals.  His body broken and bleeding.

We end this season of the Church - the Body of Christ, by gazing on the crucified and violated body of Jesus the Christ, Son of Man.

We are in the last fortnight of the Church Year.  And the focus of the readings in these last weeks is always what we call the ‘end times.’  So this year, the year of Luke, we look at Luke’s account of Jesus’ words on the last days, the end of times.

Last week we looked at the certainty of the resurrection, the very heart of our faith.  Today we will look at the things that point to the end of the world as we know it.

And next week, the feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday after Pentecost, we will look at what is means when we say Christ is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. 

And so to the end times.  Probably no other question puzzles and vexes the minds of believers (and non-believers for that matter) as what will happen just before what we call time changes, in some way, forever.

This morning, we are looking at nothing less than the resurrection of our souls, and what it means to be called by Jesus the “children of the resurrection.”

Our gospel begins with a question/riddle to Jesus from the Sadducees while he is teaching in the Temple courts.  This is part of a long line of escalating questions directed at Jesus by various Jewish leaders and teachers of the law.

Luke tells us earlier, (11:53-54), that the “Pharisees and teachers of the law began to oppose him fiercely and to besiege him with questions, waiting to catch him in something he might say.”

From there on the interactions the Jewish temple leaders and the teachers of the law have with Jesus are acrimonious.  The motivation behind the questioning is not to learn from Jesus, but rather to try and catch him out. 

It is arrogance and pride, dressed up as sort of banter.

Today we celebrate All Saints’ Day, the day we remember all those who love, and have loved God; those the New Testament calls saints.  All the gathered people of God who have ever lived, the quick and the dead.

‘All Saints,’ is the most popular name in the entire worldwide Anglican Communion for a parish church.  So it is for us in our parish too, a time to remember all the saints who have worshipped and continue to worship at All Saints, Cambooya.

And finally, it’s a day to pray for and thank God for all us saints everywhere, who worship the living God.  It is a day to re-proclaim pure and simple truths that Jesus is Lord of all the earth and the Lord of life.

Over the last month or so, we’ve twice briefly dipped our feet into Paul’s 2nd letter to Timothy, his son-in-Christ, and Paul his great Godfather.

As I’ve said before, this is Paul’s last letter, written from a Roman jail shortly before he was beheaded. He writes in v.6, “the time of my departure has come.”

In some ways this is an immensely sad letter. He writes in v.16, “At my first defence no one came to my support, but all deserted me.” Alone and knowing he is about to be put to death by the imaginative-if-insane Emperor, Nero.

But it is also an immensely hopeful letter. He fully knows that the Lord will defend him from the ultimate evil of death, and on that day he, and all who long for the Lord’s coming, will be crowned with the crown of righteousness.

Our Old Testament readings for the last couple of months have been from the prophet Jeremiah, the great prophet of the downfall of Jerusalem and Judah’s exile to Babylon.  A book vast in its prophetic scope and the longest book in the bible.

It can be difficult to follow because it’s not necessarily chronological!

God’s prophecy through Jeremiah shifts or transitions from a message of repentance to a message of the promise of salvation; of future hope and blessing.  Jeremiah 30 and 31 are the tipping point of this transition.

Now for us as post-Pentecost believers baptised in the Holy Spirit, we read passages like this (and much of the prophets) as very clearly pointing to Christ Jesus as the one, true fulfiller of all prophesy.  To us it speaks so clearly of Jesus.

For the last three weeks we have listened to Jesus’ intense teachings on money, forgiveness, and living with a servant mind-set. It is absolute and it is simple-in-a-difficult-way.

We cannot grasp for material gain alone.   We can either serve God or Money.

It is also about the absolute mercy of God, (consider Lazarus and the Rich man), which is where we are heading today, but in a different context. Jesus and his disciples are back on the road to Jerusalem.

Our gospel this morning is I think, centrally concerned with mercy and also thanksgiving or gratitude.  

In the gospel we heard last week, Jesus has just told the disciples the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, poor beggar and servant of any and everybody’s.  Yet the servant/beggar is raised up and the rich man is tormented in the great reversal of death.

Today’s passage follows directly on from last week and Jesus now teaches his disciples what this servanthood means.  It means that we seek to look at things, and think, and act, in ways that won’t cause the ‘little ones’ of God, so very, very precious to our Father, to stumble.

We can’t be the church, the people of God, if we cause others to stumble because that destroys the sacred community of Christ Jesus.  The sacred oneness between Jesus and his bride the church.

It can seem at first glance that today’s gospel is just several disconnected sayings strung together rather loosely, but on a closer look, Jesus is speaking to us about faith for living in this sacred community.

This morning’s gospel reading can be seen as part two of last week’s gospel about the dishonest manager.  Both last week’s and this week’s gospel parables begin with “There was a rich man!” 

Last week’s gospel ended with the phrase “You cannot serve both God and money,” and this morning’s gospel is a story illustrating the fate of one who served God and one who served money.

But this morning we are going to see a way in which Paul brings all these things together in today’s reading to his letter to his spiritual son, Timothy, written towards the end of his tumultuous life.

Jesus said that if “the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.” In today’s reading Paul tells us exactly what this freedom means, and how we are to live in this freedom in the full confidence of faith, in the bright and sheer light of the future.

Many of the parables Jesus told are perplexing, but none more so that today’s reading from Luke.  What an unpleasant character this manager sounds!  So what would Jesus have to say to us today in this parable?

As always, let’s begin by putting this parable in context.  This parable of the dishonest manager acts as a bridge between the stories of the Prodigal Son (15:11-32) and the Rich Man and Lazarus (16:19-31), which we’ll look at next week.

Like the prodigal in the preceding story, our dishonest manager has “squandered” what was entrusted to him (15:13; 16:1).  And, like the story that follows, this parable begins with the phrase, “There was a rich man” (16:1).

We join Luke again as he continues his record of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem and we arrive at the magnificent and unique chapter 15.

We could call this chapter the ‘gospel of lost things.’  It is a series of three parables beginning with today’s passage on the lost sheep, and the lost coin, and concludes with the parable of the lost (or prodigal) son which we spoke about in Lent.

So today we are looking at the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin and they have much in common.

It is easy to shy away from the tough teachings of Jesus, but every part of the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news, which is what the word ‘gospel means or course.

If we dig a little deeper, the tough teachings are also very good news! And here in Drayton Parish we truly want to be disciples of Jesus, and so we tackle uncomfortable and difficult readings head on … and we see amazing things.

Today’s gospel is uncomfortable reading, to be sure.  It is all about trust, discipleship and allegiance. To whom do we belong?

Jesus is really interested in mealtimes.  In Luke, these meals Jesus attends are often marked by some social faux pas, or breach of etiquette, out of which he draws a truth about the Kingdom of God.

In Luke especially, Jesus causes much to happen and has much happen to him over meals.  From defending eating with sinners (5:30), to encouraging a woman who gate-crashed a men-only dinner for Pharisees and had the audacity to pour oil on his head (7:36-50).

Being invited to a festive occasion, all of which had an official dinner, and where you were seated, were important in the honour and shame culture of Jesus’ Day.  Last week, we looked at how a shame-filled woman had her head lifted high by Jesus in the synagogue.

In a parallel vein, this week we return to a topic we have looked at frequently, the most beautiful of all character traits - humility.  It is to the humble and lowly, that the best seats at the heavenly banquet have been reserved.

All our readings today concern real encounters with the Living God doing very real things in lives.

Both Jeremiah and the bent-over woman were physically touched by God - Father and Son.

The Psalmist is crying out to God for refuge and help, in the full hope and expectation that it will be provided, because he has seen God’s faithfulness already when he looks back on his life.  They have all been seen by God, just as we have.

When the Kingdom of God comes so close to us and we find ourselves suddenly aware that we are seen by God exactly the way we are, and, for a moment, encounter heaven.