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All Saints
3/11/2024

Revelation 21:1-6a
John 11:32-44

Sermon preached by Rev. Rob Gotch

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Over the past few weeks, the lectionary has drawn passages from the middle chapters of Mark’s gospel, and also from the letter to the Hebrews.  This letter explores the obedience, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus as the one begotten by God and appointed as great high priest to appear forever before God on our behalf.  The many significant declarations made in this letter follow the no less significant introduction: ‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds.  Jesus is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.’

In order to speak this powerful word, Jesus arrives in the midst of human history, gathering a community of disciples and engaging in a ministry of healing, truth telling, justice seeking, and restoration.  As this journey unfolds, Jesus teaches his disciples about the kingdom of God, a kingdom that he inaugurates through his own humble self-giving.  Over and against assumptions that kingdoms are created and sustained only through the exercise of oppressive imperial power, Jesus inaugurates the kingdom of God by submitting to that power.  Three times in Mark’s gospel Jesus describes his impending passion, and on each occasion the misunderstanding and fear of the disciples beckons to us across the centuries and invites us to wonder about our own discipleship.

On this day that recalls the All-Saints tradition of the church, we shift briefly away from Mark’s gospel to read from the gospel according to John.  We read about the raising of Lazarus, and the apocalyptic literature in Isaiah 25 and Revelation 21, in which God’s oppressed and persecuted people hear words of hope about how God will wipe away all tears and swallow up death forever.  I suspect that much of the church’s most precious literature was written by those who were facing the end of life as they knew it.  So perhaps that’s the key for how we should read that literature in our own place and time.

There are many things in our own context that threaten life as we know it:  the obscene profit of those who peddle weapons of war;  the unaccountable exploitation of the politics of fear;  the loss of confidence in, and commitment to, shared truth;  the blind reliance on economic growth to build common wealth;  the rampant greed of industries that refuse to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  And just recently, the word apocalypse has been used to describe the shocking devastation of life, limb and infrastructure in Gaza, and the flood ravaged Spanish city of Valencia.  These things certainly threaten life as we know it, but do they also constitute an apocalypse in which the hiddenness of God is revealed to sustain God’s people in faith and hope?  Indeed, what would such an apocalypse look like?

In the gospel passage we hear the pain of Mary’s grief when she says to Jesus: ‘Lord, if you’d been here, my brother would not have died.’  And we also note the deep irony in the lament of her community:  ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept Lazarus from dying?’

How does this connect with your own experiences, feelings and fears about the things that threaten life as we know it?  Can you imagine yourself lamenting:  ‘Lord, if you’d been here, the things that threaten life as we know it would not cause so much anxiety and grief?’  Friends, if you can ask this question, then I hope you can also believe that, just as Jesus wept for the family and community of Lazarus, so too does he weep over your uncertainty and disorientation.

But note that his weeping in the gospel passage is not the end of the story.  It’s not enough for him to draw alongside Mary and Martha and their community in empathy and compassion.  He prays for that community, but not for some vague blessing, or that God will draw near in comfort and peace, or that God will journey with them and sustain them in hope.  These are all fine sentiments, and I’ve used such words myself many times, but this is not what Jesus offers in his prayer.  Rather, he declares that the purpose of his prayer is that those hearing him may believe that he has been sent by the one to whom he prays.  And it’s because he’s been sent by the God of life that, upon the command of Jesus, Lazarus comes out of the tomb.  We’re told that many people who see what Jesus has done believe in him.  They come to faith in Jesus, not just as a great teacher or miracle worker, but as the one who has power over life and death.

Indeed, this is the real and only purpose of miracles in the gospels – miracles are signs that Jesus is himself the embodiment of the kingdom he proclaims.  Apocalyptic literature graphically recalls the life denying forces in our world, but it also affirms that these forces have been overcome by God;  the God, according to John’s Gospel, whose Word became flesh to speak life into the world.  This Word, silenced briefly upon a cross, now speaks forever through an empty tomb, breathing the peace of his Spirit upon his fearful disciples in every age.

The crises of our time are deeply challenging, and it’s tempting to define them as an apocalypse.  They certainly seem to threaten life as we know it, but it’s not clear to me how they also declare hope in the God who draws near.  In fact, the most significant crisis before us is also the most unexpected one, because it comes to us through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The phrase ‘lurching from one crisis to another’ is sometimes used to describe a person or an institution that is out of control and about to descend into complete chaos.  This phrase reflects the notions of control and power that are so desired in our society, and in which a crisis is something to be avoided or managed.

But the Gospel declares the crisis of the cross;  not a crisis to be avoided or managed, but a crisis by which we are invited to recognise the tombs of darkness, doubt and despair from which Jesus yearns to release us.  Thanks be to God, whose Word gathers his saints in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, welcoming them to his banqueting table, where he offers himself in bread and wine, and raises us into life as his body.  Thanks be to God for the one who declares: ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’

And now to the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity, three persons and one God, be all glory and praise, dominion and power, now and forever.  Amen.

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Pentecost 23
27/10/2024

Hebrews 7:23-28
Psalm 34
Mark 10:46-52

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“Teacher, let me see again”, asks Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, sitting by the roadside as Jesus left Jericho.

Most of us know this story pretty well, so I won’t spend too much time on the details, other than to note that the miracle in the story – the opening of Bartimaeus’ eyes – is the miracle we are ourselves to expect when we gather in this way to hear and consider these accounts of the ministry of Jesus. The question to bring to the text is not whether Jesus “could” open a blind person’s eyes, but whether we are sure we can see.

The religious and the secular

So, rather than unpack our text directly this morning, I want to invite you into a space about which I’ve been recently pondering. This space is the rise of what is being called “Christian nationalism”, in the US, as well as in Europe and part of South America. What is there to see here?

What is interesting about this resurgence of religious identity at a political level is that is is happening now, after several generations of a predominantly secular outlook in the modern liberal West. In Western societies, religion has been reduced to an optional concern within the wider range of human pursuits which make up the secular city. Secularity has served as a kind of political and social neutrality which allows for religious conviction but does not require it. The secular is the universal – common to all – and the religious (and other things) are options within that universality.

On the face of it, the resurgence of religion within some social and political spaces looks to be a simple anti-secular move in which religion is reasserted as having public relevance: the churches (or mosques, etc.) are fighting back. But the resurgence of religion can be read to have less to do with conventional religion than the rejection of social, political and economic universals which deny local interests and commitments. This includes the rejection of many of the conclusions and impositions of Western secularism.

Religion is a useful means by which local or national communities can protest against a prevailing universalist order. If the religious are outsiders or a subset within a secular national or international liberal polity, then we can reject an imposed universalism like Western secularity by appearing more religious. The intention here is less to be religious than to be politically and culturally particular, against perceived imperialisms imposed from without. Such communities are not so much “religious” as just non-secularist, if acceptance of secularism means assent to a set of political, economic and anthropological narratives which we experience as oppressive or alien.

The irony here is that the secularism of Western liberalism has started to seem rather parochial, rather limited, rather like a religion, despite having no commitment to a god conventionally understood. And so as certain polities claim their religious heritage, they do it explicitly against the West: the West is not our religion.

Everything turns into religion

Of course, the secularist doesn’t want to look religious. Yet if, as the secularist holds, religion is divisive, it is reasonable to characterise what is divisive as broadly religious. And so it has become almost passé to observe that we “now live in broad settled ideological tribes,” which tribes “demand from us a devotion to orthodoxy and they abide not reason, but faith.” (to quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2022 Reith Lectures [the BBC])

Faith and religion are usually invoked in this way to signal decay; the notion is usually that common experience and rationality have been abandoned and we are back in the realm of metaphysics and credulity. But it is just as possible that this new religi‑fying of human existence is less a zombie-esque paroxysm of the previously suppressed disease of religion than the re­‑cognition of an ineluctable reading of the human – homo religiosus, the human tendency to construct fractious, religio-cultural political systems and, through these, to project universalised transcendences which suck the rest of the world into them.

The important point is that modernist secularity, with its intention to bind with certain social and political norms, is experienced by many as divisively religious in this sense. Adichie’s suggestion, then, that we “now” live in broad settled ideological tribes, is inadequate; the difference between “now” and the implied non-tribal “before” is not the recent emergence of religion-like ideological tribes but the re‑cognition of what was previously de‑cognised: the human as tribal, ideological, religious. The old turtles are now displaced by pieties and devotions: it’s religion, all the way down.

“Religion”, of course, is redefined here as what develops when two or three of us gather with intent. But if the redefinition holds, the current resurgence of religion in politics is not the political problem to be treated. Rather, this resurgence is simply the resurfacing of our Midas-like capacity for turning everything into religion, even our secularity. If I – a nation even – wish to resist the imposition of someone else’s idea of what I should do or be, religious identity is an effective means of resistance. Contemporary religious resurgence takes a nationalistic shape because borders are convenient fault lines for breaking away from oppressive socio-political impositions. In this, nations are less claiming themselves as profoundly Christian, Muslim, or Hindu than they are simply being polities with majorities having a particular religious heritage, which is useful for reinforcing a distinct local identity.

This is to say that politics becomes inherently theological. To say that religion is both universal and problematic is to say that the political problem is the religious problem; there is no neutral politics, certainly not “democracy”. And it is to say, further, that conventional religion is no convenient scapegoat for explaining our fracturing political compromises, as if human religiosity were a disease which could be treated. The resurgence of religion is a response to secular religion itself. “Christian” nationalism is not the problem; the deep-rooted and divisive religion of nationalism is: Make [America / Hungary / Brazil / Poland / Russia / etc.] Great Again.

Any lamenting of the resurgence of religion, then, misses the point. If it is true that our tendency is always to be divisively religious even as we try to be secular, the political question becomes not what to do with religion but which is the best kind of religiosity for the future of humankind. This is because it is the best religiosity which gives us the best secularity, the best political unity.

Eighty years ago, the Christian thinker Dietrich Bonhoeffer was sitting in a Nazi prison in Tegel, thinking through the relationship between particular religious experience and universal human experience. In his own case, he asked how Christian religion could be more than just for God-botherers, or the weak or the fearful? How does the God of all things break out of the confines of local religious identity into the wider world, speak from a particular tradition into all traditions?

Central to Bonhoeffer’s tentative thinking here was the idea of “religionless Christianity”. To modern minds, of course, this is a contradiction in terms, for what is Christianity if not a religion? And so what is it but limited and divisive?

The simplest explanation is to look at the example of Jesus himself, whose own existence we could say was “non-religious religious”. Again, this seems a contradiction in terms: as a Jew, Jesus looks to be thoroughly religious. And he is, in the way that we all are, one way or another.

Yet the Jesus who matters here is not the one defined by synagogue attendance but the one who stands simultaneously for and against his religious tradition, necessarily religious in some mode but not limited by that religiosity. This is a religiosity “for” others rather than over against them, a particularity which connects rather than isolates. Jesus stand as one for others, rather than against them. As a man who sees, Jesus is “there for” Bartimaeus, the one who does not.

This, of course, is precisely what is not happening in the resurgence of so-called Christian nationalism. Nations are doing what they have done pretty much since the rise of the nation-state – making themselves great. And, as has also been the case since the rise of the nation state, religion has been pretty useful for this – so useful that the nation and the religion tend to coincide and feed from each other.

What can we do about this? Jesus’ own fate is sobering – his purported resurrection notwithstanding – as was Bonhoeffer’s own fate. This may be what Christian maturity – religionless religiosity – looks like in a radically religious world: an actual or metaphorical death at the hands of the dominant religion, society and politics of one’s day: a death for God at the hands of the gods, a death for the other at their own hands.

Thinking this way about what is happening with religion in the world at the moment (and all moments) doesn’t give us an easy out. It simply clarifies what is happening and what is at stake. Whether it is conventional religion, or secularist and philosophical variants, religion is everywhere, and it’s killing us, as it always has.

We are in this place today to hear about Jesus only because we hope this might be a place where we might, with Bartimaeus, see such things a little more clearly. And if we do, then the invitation is clear: Let us, again with Bartimaeus, throw off the heavy cloak of religion and follow Jesus “on the Way”.

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Pentecost 21
13/10/2024

Isaiah 25:6-10a
Psalm 116
Revelation 21:1-6

Sermon preached by Alisha Fung

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What do you imagine?

We are given a scripture today of tangible and tasty images from the Book of Isaiah.

The only place in the Bible, in fact, where we’re given this much description of food and drink.

And so, it’s a scripture we’re meant to really sink our teeth into.

But it’s also a scripture we were meant to sing.

And in its rhythm and reverberations we just heard read, maybe we can even begin to imagine this day of celebration and restoration.

A time where all people are gathered on the mountain of God, sitting at the table of God with rich food filled with marrow and well-aged wine.

A time where the covering of sorrow and suffering, despair and death is lifted.

Where every tear is wiped dry,

where death will be no more and

where we will be glad and rejoice at last.

But do we really let these images sink into our minds, mold into our muscles and become a part of our marrow?

Do we let hope become part of our body, our breath and our being?

Or do we, like the wealthy guests invited to a master’s banquet, turn away?

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While I was doing my period of discernment a few years ago before candidating with the UCA, I was encouraged to take an improv workshop.

Even though I was new to improv, never having done drama in my life, there was something about it that was deeply intuitive.

It reminded me of my early childhood days in a way that I had completely forgotten; some of which were the most nourishing times of my life.

It wasn’t because of the clubs I was a part of, the vacations I went on or the kinds of toys I had.

It was because of my imagination.

I remember how easy it was to jump in and out of different personas like becoming a witch with my friend next door, making potions out of her mother’s herb garden.

To becoming one of the Spice Girls and performing in the corner of a playground. (I was Posh Spice if you were wondering)

But my fondest memory by far was spending the weekend creating a world with a bucket full of street chalk.

I remember the freeness of my imagination as I drew out railways, roads, and restaurants on the blank canvas that was the driveway.

And when the masterpiece was done, I remember taking a cardboard box and making it into a car as I drove around the world I created.

I didn’t care that in rainy Vancouver, the clouds would come and wash away my world as quickly as I had created it.

It was just an excuse to do it again the next time the sun came out.

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Looking back at it now, there was nothing that filled me with more joy than the simpleness of creating something out of nothing.

And it made me realize that, as children, imagination is as natural and as necessary as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

It was second nature to me and my hunch is, it was second nature for you.

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And then something happens.

We grow up and we enter the real world.

In the song ‘Aint no rest for the wicked’, Matt Shultz sings: “Money don’t grow on trees, we got bills to pay, we got mouths to feed, there ain’t nothing in this world for free.”

In other words, we set limits on our lives, boundaries around what’s possible.

We let the fast-paced rat race and the frequency of our news inform our world view of what’s fact, what’s fiction and what to be frightened of.

But this doesn’t just happen during our Monday to Fridays.

We often bring this temperament to the places we worship, not wanting it to disrupt us too much from our real world.

And so, if we’re not paying close attention, church can become a tempered and tame animal, within our calculated control.

And when a hint of imagination does surface, we might feel that it is either too dangerous or too disillusioned.

We mock it, we smother it but, at worst, we crucify it and leave it in the realm of our childhoods.

And yet, as Carl Sagan the American scientist said, “Imagination can carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”

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And this is the wisdom our scripture in Isaiah is tapping into:

that our imaginations are necessary for the fullness of life and are often stimulated, if not necessarily activated, in the presence of nothing.

For this was the context in which the prophet of Isaiah was writing from, amidst a time where the Jewish people were covered in sorrow and suffering, despair and death, exiled from their home and their place of worship.

In other words, a time of extreme change and extreme loss.

Does this sound familiar? As we look at the state of our church, our country, our world or maybe even our own lives in a rapidly changing 21^st century and as war and death reign overseas?

Imagining hope seems like it should be the last thing on the menu;

and yet, as we hear in our scripture,

this defiance despite reality

is actually what begins to change hearts, lives and, eventually, leads God’s people into new ways of experiencing God in seemingly desolate, despairing and desert times.

It’s like how Jim Wallis, the founder of the Sojourners magazine, says it “trusting God in spite of all the evidence, and then watching how the evidence changes.”

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Now hear what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying that we should use our imaginations to escape the realities of this world.

I’m not saying imagination should take the place of acting for justice in the world.

And I’m not saying that imagination is reserved for those with nothing.

What I am saying is when we give our imaginations over to God, it becomes the key that connects us to God’s real-world.

George MacDonald, the Scottish author, poet and minister of the 19^th century, says it this way: “It is by imagination God enters into our world, so that through imagination we can enter into the world of God.”

And it is through this kind of imagining we can begin to join in God’s feast.

But it might not be as comfortable as we think it is.

It is a feast, after all, that reorients all are misconceptions of who gets to take part:

It’s a feast for all the wrong kinds of people, of Pharisees and foes, sinners and Samaritans, the disenfranchised and the desolate.

But this is the song that’s being sung in Isaiah today, and it’s not the only place where it’s sung.

Hannah echoes this deep knowing in 1 Samuel by singing, “Those who were full hire themselves out for food, but those who were hungry are hungry no more.”

And again this tune is carried by Mary in the Gospel of Luke when she sings, “The Lord fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty.”

And our scripture in Revelation takes these songs of God’s feast of celebration and restoration, of wiping away tears and swallowing up death forever and riffs them and reverberates them into the here and now.

Notice the present tense in our Revelation reading, “It is done”.

Because the thing about our Christian story, about the Christ event, is that time and space collapses in itself so that the day of God’s feast is not just in the end, not just in the beginning but here amongst us now.

That is, the Alpha through to the Omega, the beginning to the end.

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God who, from the beginning, made creation out of nothing makes Jesus out of the nothingness of this world, dust of the earth, matter from an unmarried Jewish teenager.

He had Isaiah’s, Hannah’s and his mom’s song sung to him while he was bouncing on his mother’s knee.

He lived out these imaginings in his ministry, eating with all the wrong kinds of people and every uninvited guest, feeding the hungry, healing the hurt, freeing the enslaved, wiping away every tear from every eye.

And it was the power of this imagining that led him to his death and resurrection where he swallowed up death forever.

And here’s the wild thing: we are left with the rhythm and the reverberations of this imagining now.

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So when we participate in communion, we are meant to make real the fact that we are participating in God’s holy feast where every tear is wiped dry,

where death is no more, and

where gladness and rejoicing is realized at last.

When we eat what, sometimes, tastes worse than nothing in these small bits of bread, we are eating the rich food filled with marrow at God’s table where all things are made new.

When we drink this ordinary juice, we are drinking the well-aged wine from the spring of life where the covering of sorrow and suffering, despair and death is passing away.

These are the bits of nothing, the mustard seeds, the pinch of yeast that yields a radical celebration and restoration in God’s real world

A feast that will happen on the last day, has happened since the beginning of time and is happening here and now.

———–

You see, communion isn’t just about eating these visible signs of God’s promise, it’s about embodying them.

While we’re standing idly, we’re invited to imagine wildly the glass ceilings to our imaginations being shattered in light of what is possible.

We’re invited to join in these songs of old sung by these prophets so that we might live this radical feast in our lives.

And we’re invited to let these visions melt into our minds, mold into our muscles so that it might become part of our marrow.

———-

Because when we come to the table in a moment, we have a profound opportunity to partake in the new heaven that is coming to this world.

A world where all will gather at God’s feast on the last day, from the beginning and even here and now.

——–

So whether it be through a bucket full of street chalk, a mustard seed, some bread or some wine….

What do you imagine?

For it is the power through which we can participate in God’s feast at last.

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Pentecost 20
6/10/2024

Job 1:1, 2:1-10
Psalm 26
Mark 10:2-16

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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What was your childhood like? My memories of my childhood are pretty good really – when I think about the times and places that I grew up in – the experiences our parents provided for us, the adventures we got into, the stories and music that surrounded us. It would be pretty easy to reminisce through the happy filters of my memory and forget many of the realities of childhood. Just for starters – time went so slowly. We had to wait such a long time for anything to happen. There were so many things that we longed to do but we couldn’t because we hadn’t learnt how, or we weren’t big enough or strong enough. Kids weren’t allowed, we couldn’t go on our own, we didn’t have our own transport. Don’t forget the sting of the grazed knees, the terror of the dentist, the fickleness of playground friendships and the awful taste of wintertime tonics that were supposed to keep you safe from the hazards of poorly heated drafty classrooms.

Childhood was good to me, but it does not need to be idealized. The bible certainly doesn’t do that. Reports of children in scriptures usually involves then getting sick and dying. One was very nearly sacrificed by his father. Another was given away by his mother to be a trainee priest. Another was found in a basket on the Nile. Baby boys in Bethlehem were massacred. Aged 12 Jesus got into big trouble for going AWOL in Jerusalem at festival time. Jesus’ disciples turned the children away when they were brought to see him. Who would want to be a kid. It’s all pretty typical. You can’t come here because you are not old enough, or strong enough, or clever enough. You are subject to the authority of big people who have power.

In the bible, when you talk about children, you are talking about the most vulnerable, the most in need of rescue from a dangerous world. They are the ones whose survival is most precarious, yet they are the ones on whose shoulders the survival of the future depends. These were the ones that the disciples turned away. These were the ones on whose behalf Jesus rebuked the disciples. These were the ones that Jesus received. These were the ones that Jesus enfolded in his arms and blessed them.

By means of this story children have had a special place in the life of the church. Children were especially blest by Jesus, therefore the church has felt a call to provide blessing for children. What many churches lament these days is the lack of children it has to bless.

The department of Government Services wrote to me a few weeks ago.

Dear Peter Blackwood, Your Working with Children Check [long convoluted number] expires on [a date about a month away].

To continue doing child-related work, you will need to renew your Check. The renewal process is online and includes uploading a new photo.

The photo you upload must be less than 12 months old and of passport quality. To view the Requirements for an acceptable photo for your Working with Children Check, go to – and a link address was inserted. I know you will be relieved to hear that this week I got another email to say that my new working with children card is in the mail. I passed the photo test.

In my last job as a church bureaucrat one of my tasks was to attend settlement negotiations in which the church was required to compensate people for abuse that they experienced from employees of the church while they were in our care, and I was instructed by our church to offer an apology on behalf of the church for what happened to them. As far as I know the UCA was the only denomination to have senior staff attend these conferences with the lawyers and offer a personal apology on behalf of the church.

In my last job as a church bureaucrat, I was required to attend a state parliamentary inquiry into institutional child abuse. Our church, in response to Jesus’ example to receive children and care for them, inadvertently harboured a culture in which abuse flourished, and in our naivety that escalated into criminal negligence our church stood culpable in the eyes of society.

When his disciples turned away children they received a corrective word from Jesus. When the church of Jesus Christ has been implicated in the abuse of children the corrective word of God has come by way of government requirement. I am not complaining that I am required to renew my working with children check. This is a good thing the government requires of me.

It is kind of annoying and certainly embarrassing that the word of the Lord reminding us that Jesus received children and blessed them has its best effect, not by hearing this story every three years by this lectionary reading, but by social requirements imposed by government.

Let’s turn back to these few verses from Mark’s gospel. The disciples got it wrong and they needed correction. So what is being proclaimed into our context?

I dare to suggest two things.

Firstly, and obviously the gospel proclaims that the least powerful, the ones least endowered with life’s wisdom and experience and time to gain accomplishment in good deeds or virtuous endeavour, the ones turned away, are the very ones that Jesus received to be touched and blessed. Not only that. The kingdom of God belongs very particularly to them. This we learn from the account of the disciples, the children and Jesus but it is not only the children who are found to be powerless, denied opportunity to accomplish or are turned away. Other accounts in Scripture reveal those who were especially prized by Jesus, the Samaritan woman at the well, Mary Magdelene, the man, sick for 38 years who lay by the pool at the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem, the Gerasene demonic who lived among the tombs, to name just a few.

Of course, God didn’t just invent this particular concern when the Father sent God’s Son. Hebrew Scripture prescribes it. The Torah lists requirements of social behaviour and interaction that is especially directed for the benefit of the widow, the orphan and the stranger. This is most beautifully illustrated in the story of Ruth and the gleaning laws at harvest time that deliberately leaves grain that falls from the reapers’ arms, and corners of the field left uncut for the widows, the orphans and the stranger, the foreigner, the refugee.

God requires that the little ones, the powerless, are provided special care.

Secondly, our experience as the church, not just the UCA, but churches across the world facing government instigated inquiries and commissions into abuse and neglect of the powerless, comes as a reminder that the gospel that God declares in Christ is sometimes born down upon the church, not by bible readings, prayers, hymns, liturgies. It is this sobering thought. The society in which the church exists so often requires of us the same things that God requires of us. Sometimes it is our duty to remind society of what God requires and sometimes we need to humbly hear society reminding the church what God requires.

I will conclude with this little story concerning two school students. During this week I have been preparing this sermon. I had remembered the gleaning laws that helped Ruth and Naomi survive when they were most powerless. Friday was the saint’s day for Francis of Assisi who taught about the care of the poor and powerless to an extreme degree. On Thursday and Friday I was conducting a school holiday program attended by six young people who wanted to learn about painting icons. I had decided that they would learn by painting an icon of Mary the mother of Jesus. Two of them decided they didn’t want to paint Mary. They were our little rebel corner. I swallowed my old schoolteacher self that would usually not tolerate such defiance and decided to help them do what they wanted. The result was two beautiful icons, one of Ruth and the other of St Francis.