Monthly Archives: January 2021

April 22 – Trevor Huddleston

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These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

Trevor Huddleston, renewer of society

Born in 1913 into a privileged background and later an Oxford education, Trevor Huddleston sought Anglican ordination in 1937, then joined the Community of the Resurrection in 1939. This religious order had been founded by Charles Gore, Bishop of Oxford, with the apostolic community depicted in the Acts in mind. Gore had also helped found the Christian Social Union, which focussed the energies of High Church Anglicans on questions of social justice.

The Community sent Huddleston to South Africa in 1943 for what were to be 13 fruitful and tumultuous years. Apartheid became official policy in 1948, although racial segregation practices were much older. Working as parish priest in the slum area of Sophiatown, Huddleston became one of the fiercest opponents of Apartheid. His opposition to the regime and his association with leaders of the African National Congress earned negative attention from the South African police and government.

For blacks, however, he was a marvel. Desmond Tutu remembers meeting him when aged nine, and the way Huddleston treated his mother, who was cook, at a women’s hostel:

“I was standing with her on the hostel veranda when this tall white man, in a flowing black cassock, swept past. He doffed his hat to my mother in greeting. I was quite taken aback; a white man raising his hat to a black woman! Such things did not happen in real life. I learned much later that the man was Father Trevor Huddleston”.

The Community recalled him to England in 1956, and although he had become a South African citizen, he was refused re-entry to his adopted homeland as long as Apartheid reigned.

The publication of his book Naught for Your Comfort, also in 1956, was instrumental in the world’s discovery of the scandal of Apartheid. Desmond Tutu (whose son, Trevor, was named after Huddleston) stated: “If you could say that anybody single-handedly made Apartheid a world issue then that person was Trevor Huddleston”.

For Huddleston, this scandal was a Gospel matter. He was utterly convinced that the God who had taken on human flesh in Jesus Christ, and offered his own life for the life of the world, demanded nothing less of him as a Christian and a priest than immersion in the struggle to assert the dignity of all persons.

Huddleston was drawn back to the African continent. He became Bishop of Masasi in Tanganyika (later Tanzania) in 1960, and served there for eight years before returning to England as Bishop of Stepney in London. Ten years there were followed by his election as Bishop of Mauritius, and concurrently Archbishop of the Province of the Indian Ocean.

He retired in 1983 and returned to England, where his energies were thrown into the Anti-Apartheid Movement, of which he became President. He was eventually to return to South Africa and had the joy of seeing his friend Nelson Mandela elected President of a democratic nation in 1994. Mandela has said that no white person had done more for South Africa. Trevor Huddleston died in 1998.

In Naught for Your Comfort Huddleston wrote:

“I trust in the mercy of God for my forgiveness. For He too is a Person. And it is His Person that I have found in Africa, in the poverty of her homes, in the beauty and splendour of her children, in the patience and courtesy of her people. But above all, I have found Him where every Christian should expect to find Him: in the darkness, in the fear, in the blinding weariness of Calvary. And Calvary is but one step from the empty Tomb”.

Rev Dr Andrew McGowan

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April 4 – Leonard Kentish

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These weekly “People to Commemorate” posts are a kind of calendar for the commemoration of the saints, reproduced here from a Uniting Church Assembly document which can be found in full here. They are intended for copying and pasting into congregational pew sheets on the Sunday closest to the nominated date.

Images (where provided) are of icons by Peter Blackwood; click on the image to download a high resolution copy of the image.

 

Leonard Noel Kentish, Christian martyr (1907-1943)

Leonard Noel Kentish BA BD AFIA, was born in Richmond, Victoria, to Cecil and Alice (nee Jackson) Kentish in August 1907. When he was three years old his father led a group of 200 Victorians as pioneer farmers to “The Gums” in southern Queensland to take up pastoral selections. Len’s father, a Methodist local preacher, conducted weekly services in their log house, assisted occasionally by clergy from Dalby or Tara. When the family left “The Gums” for Ipswich, Len had successfully completed his primary schooling and two years at Dalby High School. In the Ipswich Methodist churches, he became a local preacher, leader and Sunday School teacher. While working as a State public servant in Brisbane he began accountancy studies and volunteered for Home Mission service.

After serving as Home Missionary at Mitchell, Len moved to Woodford as a candidate for ordination. There, in 1928, he met Violet Simpson, LTCL, AMusA, a qualified teacher of piano. The couple were engaged within 4 months. During the next four years Len resided in King’s College while studying Arts and Divinity at The University of Queensland. His fourth college year was marked by significant social, sporting and academic achievement and elected President of the college club. He served in Indooroopilly Circuit, assisting Rev Richard Pope in 1932 and 1933. After ordination in 1934, he and Vi married in Maryborough and transferred to the Townsville Circuit. In 1935 he was invited to fill an Overseas Missions ministerial vacancy in Darwin, the most cosmopolitan town in Australia, its population including many indigenous people. In Darwin he oversaw the building of a new parsonage and worked with Presbyterian minister, Chris Goy, to create the Inter-Church Club which, at the outbreak of war became an important recreational canteen for servicemen.

In 1939 his interest in Aboriginal work accelerated with his transfer to the Goulburn Island mission as District Chairman. There he gained rapport with the indigenous people and began translating the New Testament into Maung. He volunteered as a Coastwatcher, in regular radio contact with the long-range transmitter HMAS Coonawarra. Under imminent threat of invasion following the bombing of Darwin, Len planned the evacuation of the wives and children of his staff on five isolated stations in March 1942. In April he led to safety about 100 part-descent children, now numbered among the Stolen Generation.

As Chairman, Len Kentish planned to visit his remaining staff on their stations in 1943. When fuel rationing grounded the mission ketch, the navy maintained the transport of stores and personnel. Len embarked at Goulburn on HMAS Patricia Cam. He visited Milingimbi and Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island) and was on the way to Yirrkala when the ship was bombed by a Japanese floatplane, sinking it almost immediately. After a second bomb was dropped among survivors in the water, they were machine gunned for 30 minutes. The floatplane landed and captured Len at gunpoint. Those who made it to shore and survived were rescued and taken to Darwin.

After the war, it was learned that Len was imprisoned at Dobo in the Aru Islands, where he suffered beatings and starvation in futile enemy attempts to elicit information. When Allied aircraft targeted Dobo heavily for several consecutive days, in an act of frustration and possibly revenge, on 5 February, three Japanese officers took him to the edge of a bomb crater and beheaded him.

After the war, Vi learned of his fate by her persistent appeals through the press. Australian war graves and war crimes teams investigated, located his grave and arraigned three former Japanese officers for war crimes. Len’s body was reinterred at the Ambon Australian War Cemetery. The three Japanese officers were convicted by a war crimes court in Hong Kong. One was sentenced to death and two to life imprisonment. The Australian Government recognised Vi as a War Widow. Len was but one of many civilian victims of the inhumane brutality of war, unique as the only Australian captured by enemy forces in Australia during World War 2.

Kentish Court in Sinnamon Village and King’s College at St Lucia commemorate the name and service of Leonard Kentish, as does the Rabaul Coastwatchers’ Memorial. His name is listed as a missionary martyr in the UCA Centre for Ministry at North Paramatta and in the calendar of commemorations in Uniting in Worship 2. His story is graphically told in Eagle and Lamb (2017), written and published by his son, the Reverend Dr Noel Kentish, a Minister in Association at Indooroopilly Uniting Church, Brisbane. 
www.lenkentish.com.au

 written by Noel Kentish

Posted in LitBits, LitBits - People to Commemorate

Sunday Worship at MtE – 10 January 2021

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The worship service for Sunday 10 January 2021 can be viewed by clicking on the image below.  The order of service can be viewed here.

Other worship services can be found in the list below or at the MtE YouTube channel

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10 January – Baptised as the Foundation of the World

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Baptism of Jesus
10/1/2021

Genesis 1:1-5
Psalm 29
Acts 19:1-7
Mark 1:4-11

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

God may my words be loving and true; and may those who listen discern what is not. Amen.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the children of God shouted for joy?”

Book of Job. Chapter 38. Verses 4 and 7.

‘The Tree of Life’, an experimental film by director Terrence Malick, begins with this quotation from scripture. The film itself centres on the death of a child and the reverberating effects of this death on the child’s parents and older brother. To tell this story Malick weaves together images from across all of creation: from the formation of galaxies, surprising acts of mercy from prehistoric creatures, the human anxieties of modern life, and extending to the inevitable destruction of the Earth from the explosion of our sun.

‘The Tree of Life’ suggests that the tragic death of this child can only be understood when it is seen as a tear within the tapestry of reality itself. The singular tragedy at the centre of Malick’s film cannot be treated as an isolated event, but must be allowed to raise fundamental questions about the nature of the world itself.

The film, in the end, poses the question to the characters – and I suspect the viewer as well: is the world fundamentally a world of forgiveness, grace and healing or is everything, in the end, simply the ambivalent march of nature and its forces? More pointedly: by which reality will you respond and live? Will you live out forgiveness and grace in the midst of tragedy, or be consumed by the ever apparent ambivalence of the world?

Something like Malick’s experimental film is what we find in the four readings from Scripture offered to us by the lectionary for today. The central event is the baptism of Jesus. And yet, in order to tell this story the lectionary suggests that this story be set within an ever widening horizon of God’s activity in the world.

The story itself, taken from Mark’s Gospel, already alludes to the Jewish tradition into which Jesus himself was born and raised. The figure of John the Baptiser is cast as a tether between the prophetic hopes of Israel’s history, and the pending arrival of the Messiah, who is said to bring with him the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. To tell the story of Jesus’ baptism requires reaching back into Israel’s history, recalling the hope kindled in the midst of the tragedy of exile. The prophetic hope the figure of John embodies is the hope that God would vindicate God’s people and restore the good order of the world. This hope is echoed in today’s Psalm, as it gives voice to an acclamation of praise and hope.

At the same time we have also heard in the book of Acts a short story from the emerging Christian community in the city of Ephesus. There the community, seeking to be faithful to Jesus, had been baptised as Jesus was baptised: as an act of repentance, in the manner taught by John. Paul encourages these early Christians to see in Jesus not simply an example, but the beginning of a new way which grows out of and continues beyond the history which came before it.

In these references back towards the prophetic history of Israel, and forward to the small community of believers huddled in someone’s house for prayer, we begin to understand how it is that this singular event of Jesus’ baptism is set within the broad tapestry of the world. The full weight of this baptism’s impact can only be felt when we begin to appreciate how it reaches out beyond itself, and stakes a claim about the nature and reality of the world itself.

It is worth being clear about what we are talking about when we talk about Jesus’ baptism at this point. The Basis of Union, the founding theological statement of our church, offers the following:

“[Christ’s] own baptism, [which] was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and burial, and [which] was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.” (BoU # 7)

In truth these words from the Basis of Union are not so much about Jesus’ baptism – at least not the baptism we are commemorating today. Rather, these words from the Basis help us to distinguish between our own baptism and that of Jesus in the waters of the Jordan. For us, in our baptism we enter the harsher waters of cross and resurrection, where the Spirit of Fire leads us through death and into the new vistas of God’s resurrection. The baptism of Jesus in the Jordan is set quite apart from our own baptism; it is not the primary example from which our own sacred bath is drawn.

Although many were invited into the waters of the Jordan by John the Baptiser, Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan river stands alone, even among these. John, who offered a baptism of repentance, invited people to turn back towards God. For Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, this scarcely makes sense: even John anticipates that Jesus will go far beyond what he has to offer. (For a bit of homework, you might compare this story in Mark to how it is retold in Matthew, where we are told John initially resists baptising Jesus.) There is no need for Jesus, the sinless one, to turn back to the God who is his true Father. Indeed this is precisely what Jesus’ baptism reveals: in rising out of the waters the Spirit descends like a dove, the voice of the God proclaims like a tender Mother who Jesus truly, uniquely is: the Beloved Son, in whom the pleasure of God dwells most fully.

The baptism of Jesus is a free act of obedience: Jesus is not compelled into the waters of baptism because he needs to repent. Jesus’ willingness to enter the waters of John’s baptism is the sure sign that Jesus is already compelled by full obedience to the loving God. Jesus freely demonstrates his willingness to go where God wills to go: deep into the condition of our humanity, sharing with us in the journey back to God – even while he can never be apart from God. It is for this reason that only Jesus could enter the waters of the Jordan as he does. Jesus, the beloved Son, could never be apart from the Father whose pleasure dwells upon him, and because of this his baptism by John can be nothing other than a free act of love, a free act of self-giving, a free act of coming towards us to journey with us back to God.

This is the singular event we commemorate today, the unique act that only God in Jesus Christ could do. And because of this act, because of this free movement towards us to bring us back to God, we see more fully the nature of God. Here we cannot be content with a narrow focus on a Rabbi’s ministry beginning in a river. We must also head the words from the full sweep of scripture, the full sweep of history: the prophetic hope of Israel beginning to be realised, the story of those early communities gathered in prayer, the story of us here and wherever we are. All of this must be told in order to understand what the baptism of Jesus means: that God has come in Jesus the Christ to enter into our human state, not only to call us, but to journey with us back towards the beloved Father.

It is only right that the full reach of this act of divine love and solidarity invokes the deep story of creation from the very beginning. Here our reading from Genesis 1 must finally come into view – at the end, and yet also at a beginning. The God who brings the world into being by speaking light has come into the world to journey with us back to the light. I say here deliberately the God who “brings,” the God who everyday renews the light and life, hope and love of the world comes into this world to re-establish again and again this light and love. This is what the baptism of Jesus is about: it is the anchor of God’s free movement towards us, to call us back to light and life, hope and love. God once and for all came into the world to repair the tear in the tapestry of love which good creation ought to be. This is what is made visible when we recall Jesus’ baptism in the waters of the Jordan: the heavens open and the pleasure of God is proclaimed to dwell in the Beloved Son, so that this good pleasure might again be recalled as God’s good gift to the whole world. This is a story that cannot be told without reference back to the very beginning, to the very foundations of the world: not as a statement of history, but as a proclamation of the ongoing, ever new pulsating creative life of God for the world. God who speaks light into an unlit world, hope into the midst of despair, love into the midst of hate, enters into our humanity through baptismal waters.

We must again ask the question which Job offered as we began:

“Where were you when God laid the foundations of the Earth? … When the morning stars sang together, and all the children of God shouted for joy?”

By the rivers of the Jordan, when God’s free love was offered in solidarity with our humanity. In exile when God’s people yearned for justice. In small houses gathered for prayer. In North Melbourne, and in our homes, gathering to worship.

Where were we when God laid the foundations of the Earth?

We are here. We are in this world which is renewed daily with light and love, even against all chaos and resistance. Even as the light seems to fade and evening seems to come we proclaim the new beginning of morning. We proclaim the shining light and self-giving love of God, which relentlessly comes to us: journeying with us back to life and hope. This is what the singular event of Jesus’ baptism shows to us: that God is for us, loves, yearns to weave us into the tapestry of love which the world ought to be.

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Sunday Worship at MtE – 3 January 2021

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The worship service for Sunday 3 January 2021 can be viewed by clicking on the image below.  The order of service can be viewed here.

Other worship services can be found in the list below or at the MtE YouTube channel

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3 January – On Knowing the Unseen God

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Christmas 2
3/1/2021

Ephesians 1:3-14
Psalm 147
John 1:6-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Bruce Barber

‘No-one has ever seen God; the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known’ (John 1:18)

Arguably there is no more crucial a text for our day than this. Why do I say that? Because it begins by stating the conviction shared by an increasing number of our contemporaries. Convinced that “No-one has ever seen God”, inevitably leads them to their next requirement: “so, prove God to me”. And what they have in mind as demonstration will invariably conjure up God in the shape of a monarchical “Zeus”.

Proof, of course, is a language mistake with regard to God. What this text offers instead is a test. After the negative: “No-one has ever seen God”, then the positive: the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known’.

Let me come at it in a more abstract, even if, I hope, an interesting way. Our text takes the form of what is called a chiasmus. A chiasmus comes from the Greek alphabet letter X. We are familiar in everyday speech with a chiasmus. One example is the observation that: ‘we eat to live, not live to eat’ – most of us are likely to agree with a statement like this, except those, of course, for whom the weekly Good Food section in The Age is sacred scripture.

“We eat to live not live to eat” is a chiasmus: ab::ba – not to be confused with a Swedish singing quartet. Our text also unfolds in this abstract way as a chiasmus. It goes like this: first, a problem in the negative: “No-one has ever seen God”. Then a distinctive Son/Father relationship is offered as a resolution of the problem. After which, the positive conclusion follows: God is now known.

I can sense your delight: why has no-one ever told me about a chiasmus before!

Now, for the gospel of John, we are far from finished with this chiasmus. For the next 20 chapters following this prologue declaration, the entire drama of salvation will unfold as the way of “making known” this Father/Son relationship. For the next six months, every Sunday will take shape around this unveiling, including especially Trinity Sunday. To this end, the drama itself will culminate in a decisive disclosure: the incognito Christ will appear to Mary in the garden. Incognito, because at first she presumes that he is a gardener. The crucial revelatory moment only comes when she hears Jesus speak her name: Mary. Names, of course, offer recognition, so the naming now becomes mutual:

‘Do not hold me… but go to my brothers and say to them:

‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. Mary has a name – and now God has a name filled with content.

The disclosure of this name to Mary now leads to a concluding missionary chiasmus – which echoes the chiasmus at the beginning of the Gospel: “Go and say….: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’. And the point? The previously “unknown” God of the first chiasmus comes out of hiding – and God is known.

Can we now see why all this is so important today? Because it begins with the mantra of the agnostic and atheist: that ‘no-one has ever seen God’. But then it offers the drama of salvation by way of solution with its revelation of the unique language of the Gospel, Son/Father, and all that that has entailed. With this conclusion, the problem is resolved, and a face is sufficiently drawn in a mutual knowing of Father and Son in what we call Holy Spirit. Only now is God  recognised and named. In other words: God is now possible – not as a beginning – but as a warranted conclusion.

If God comes as a conclusion, and not a presupposition, then this is surely good news for a culture which assumes that “you first have to believe in God to be a Christian”. To which comes the retort: “I don’t believe in God”, which obviously closes off any further conversation – about anything else of substance really.

This text overturns all the assumptions of the culture. It demonstrates that God appears as a conclusion to a history. God is not a prescribed formal presupposition.

There is nothing new about this: it has been true from the beginning. Abraham, for example, left Ur of the Chaldees acting, we might say, not because of a solid presupposition, but on a hunch – that in that going Yahweh would take shape for the people as a blessing to all the nations of the world. And so, it proved. So, too, for Moses in the Egyptian exodus: the going confirms the reality of the initiating divine promise in the problematic journey via flood and desert to an unanticipated land ‘flowing with milk and honey’.

It is hard to envisage anything more radical than our chiasmus to subvert the hackneyed refrains of atheists, that God is nothing more than ‘an imaginary friend’, a figment of religious imagination, an unconvincing pre-supposition.

On the contrary, this text brings God out of hiding – who would have thought to look for God on the breast of Mary, God at a carpenter’s bench, God on a fisherman’s boat, God on a cross?

But just here today we encounter a major cultural dilemma. Access to this gift of God’s coming to expression as Father and Son has now become a problem not experienced by previous generations: there is a cultural antipathy to presumed patriarchal language, and a refusal to call God “Father”, just as Jesus has to be renamed as “Child” rather than Son. To speak of God as “Father”, it is said, and Jesus as “Son”, is simply a human patriarchal projection, now well and truly passé.

But God addressed by our text as ‘Father’ has nothing to do with the patriarchal language of the surrounding culture of the day, and certainly not for all subsequent patriarchal cultures.  It is of the first importance to understand that the God of our text is a God beyond all patriarchy, and so is beyond all matriarchy as well. Why? Because Yahweh has no consort. Unlike every other then-competing male and female deity, Yahweh is unique in having no feminine partner. For this reason, the God of Jesus is a God beyond gender. This means that if we take this text seriously, then we encounter the name “Father” as the conclusion of an unfolding drama. It is not a patriarchal imposition, now outmoded.

The reason why God is ‘Father’ is because he is the Son’s originating vocational source. This means that if there were no Son, there would be no Father. And because the Son’s Father has become our Father, therefore the Son’s God, has become our God.

“Do not hold me, but go to my followers and say: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, my God and your God’. With this en-fleshed chiasmus, the radical answer to the problem posed at the beginning has come true:

‘No-one has ever seen God: The Son who is close to the Father’s heart has made him known.’

Here, indeed, is surely a text for our times, not to speak of a mandate for the contemporary mission of the Church. But first, we have to tell the atheists: we agree with you: “No-one has ever seen God”. And then, we show them the Trinity!

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