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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

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.

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Pentecost 19
29/9/2024

Romans 6:3-14
Psalm 122
Mark 16:14-20

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

Over the years I have noticed that certain important topics, which ought to be preached about in a regular congregation are not, or hardly ever.  It’s rarely a practical thing to preach a solid sermon at a baptism – though if we baptized more adults, it would simply be necessary, and they would not disrupt as infants sometimes do.

In this, we at Mark the Evangelist have been privileged, since we have had a succession of ministers who have been thoughtful theologians as well as pastors.  But the matter or baptism has been occupying my mind lately, chiefly because it is the sacrament which joins people to Christ and the Church, and we are not alone in rarely celebrating it. Is this one of those signs of the times we had better take notice of? Is it not also a prophecy?

I fear that that the Uniting Church has generally failed to grasp the call to reform which church union opened to us.  Some have noticed that in the UCA we do things differently from our previous denominations; very few will have noticed that UiW-2 moved forward from its predecessor.

The Basis of Union says (#7) that “The Uniting Church acknowledges that Christ incorporates people into his body by Baptism. In this way Christ enables them to participate in his own baptism, which was accomplished once on behalf of all in his death and resurrection and which was made available to all when, risen and ascended, he poured out the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.”  That is a rich statement of the very Gospel itself, and baptism proclaims it, in a sacred action, a “visible Word”.

The baptism of a child cannot convey all the Basis holds out because it is built on their parents living the baptized life. It may preach the inclusion of children into Christ’s kingdom, but the mothers of Salem knew that. The accounts in the New Testament of children being baptized only occur at the baptism of their parents (and their slaves) which is what “household” implies in the text. That communal understanding of family carried the logic that all who live depending on each other should also share in the blessings of the God who is our Father and our Mother. But the fact is, theologically and historically, that baptism is for adults. (Yes, after all those years, the Baptists were right – at that point!)  It is a response to the Gospel by adults. It is for mature-enough human beings working out their faith in fear and trembling.

Both Uniting in Worship books set new standards in word and action, in 1988, to take the step from our three traditions into the new union; in 2000, to learn from the ecumenical renewal. They both offered baptism by immersion as the first option. Of “the mode of pouring”, the rubric (the little directions in red) reads “the minister pours the water visibly and generously on the candidate’s head three times, once at each name of the Trinity.”  The mode of sprinkling officially disappeared from the UCA in 1988.

Of course, there is a danger in rubrics: in the Nonconformist tribal memory is a deep-seated fear of anything imposed and I share it – except for when the Gospel demands it. Yes, rubrics diminish the ability of ministers to “do it their way”. They may reopen old arguments, but there may be fresh freedoms in our time.  It may be that we just don’t like change, so we blame the Anglicans or the Baptists because it was one of their peculiar ways.  They, by the way, have similar fears of us.  The Gospel itself demands a new way of life – and expects we will live it in the way of Jesus, and we accept that obligation as part of our faith.

Other churches are also making changes to reclaim a believable baptismal practice. On the front cover is one way of doing a normal Catholic baptism; on the back cover are two serious modern fonts, one in a Catholic Church just off Oxford Street in London, which regularly baptizes adults as well as children; the other is in the beautiful cathedral at Salisbury, UK, designed by William Pye in 2008 and he has now supplied a new moveable nave altar in the same style.  It can also accommodate a child or an adult.

Inside its rim are the words of Isaiah 43: 1-2,

‘Do not fear for I have redeemed you.

I have called you by name, you are mine.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.

And through the rivers,

they shall not overwhelm you.’

This font preaches. Every presbytery should have one!

Our inherited suspicions of “show”, both religious and Australian – have reduced what was simple and beautiful even under the Puritans to a harsh minimalism.  When I visited Methodist Churches in England, I used to play the game “Find the font”. In my native Cornish chapel, it was in the vestry and contained a pencil and a ping-pong ball. But without display, colour and beauty can find its right place in a Uniting Church. If they draw attention, let it be to central things and let their symbolic language be clear. Let what we do also critique the gaudiness and commercialism of our current culture. But there are further issues.

Some now object to baptism in the name(s) of the Trinity, because of our new and proper sensitivity to destructive relationships based on masculine predominance, and it is right that we have sought fresh expressions. But that trinitarian formula has been a test of Christian authenticity from at least the Council of Nicaea (325 AD), and if we want baptisms in the Uniting Church to continue to be accepted as true baptism in other churches – which has been one of the great ecumenical and pastoral victories of our time – then we will need to find ways both to keep it and express it acceptably.

Of course, the Nicene Fathers knew well they were trying to define a Mystery and were concerned to maintain both the unity of God and the distinctiveness of the ways God has revealed Godself.  I am not saying the questions need not be pursued: the Mystery was set for us by God, by the very nature of God, and the Spirit opens our minds to the truth. But tread gently, in next year’s seven-century celebration of the Nicene Creed, lest we lose everything.

The UCA is not face this alone – and the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church has shown what can be done. The great Pope John XXIII called for aggiorniamento, a wonderful Italian word meaning “up to today-ness”.  The Vatican Council startled us all by its thoroughness, holding together its high view of doctrine, church, liturgy – and evangelization. Then, it made a priority of educating the clergy and the laity in the implications of the reform.  (We have never done that thoroughly. After my Guide (1990), we had to wait for Pilgrim’s Anglican professor of liturgy to produce a most commendatory book on Uniting in Worship[2012] !)^[1]  In the process, the Vatican Council challenged all the other churches to reopen old debates and re-examine old prejudices, and to “up-to-today” it all, led by Uniting in Worship.  UiW-2 was published in the year 2000, a quarter of a century ago.  We no longer seek a UiW-3, but nor is there the slightest sign that we are providing material to inspire worship for the middle of this century, of a church which declares itself to be ecclesia reformanda, reformed and always being reformed.^[2]

This great work will fall to hands other than ours.  Our congregation, by its weekly eucharist, with its worthy preaching, and in its courageous outlook, is in the vanguard. We should continue to make sure that everything we do is the very best we can offer.

God will honour our sacrifice.  Christ will call disciples. The Spirit will be our

[1] Stephen Burns, Pilgrim People, An Invitation to Worship in the Uniting Church, 2012.

[2] At the very least, we should have material prepared to put into the hands of enquiring adults. The Catholic catechumenate has been adapted by Anglicans, Lutherans and Baptists.

helper.

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Pentecost 14
25/8/2024

Ephesians 6:10-20
Psalm 34
John 6:56-69

“…for our struggle is not against blood and flesh but against the rulers,
against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”
(Ephesians 6.10)

Paul’s talk of spiritual principalities and the powers strikes most today as quite alien. Even for many believers, it is embarrassing language, the residue of an earlier time we are keen to leave behind.

Yet, any embarrassment we might feel here about Paul’s language is in strange tension with what doesn’t embarrass faith – the very belief in God. There is a tension here because, recalling what we said last week about the God of Israel and Jesus Christ as one God among many, this God is a kind of principality or power. We find ourselves, then, in the strange situation that we can believe in God as a “spiritual” goodie, but not in Paul’s spiritual baddies – the principalities and powers. The spiritual realities Paul refers to in the first couple of verses of today’s reading are not something we now consider to be “real”, but God as spirit is.

And yet we know that there is real evil – at least in the “historical” world, if not in any sensible way in the “spiritual” world. This suggests that in much common religious belief, Good is fundamentally a “spiritual” thing insofar as it springs from God, but Evil is a secular or historical thing – something which springs from human activity and not from outside. Paul’s distinction between good and evil – between God and the “principalities and powers” – becomes for us a distinction between spirit and world.

This is much of the malaise of Christian faith today, for what has the spirit to do with the world? To throw away the principalities and powers as “spiritual” realities is to throw away any connection between God and the world, if God is “just” spirit.

Now, the point here is not that faith in God as spirit requires that we believe in evil spirits, as Paul seems to believe in them. Rather, the point is that our belief in God floats off and away from the world if what we will or won’t believe leaves us with an idea that the things of God are “spiritual” and so outside the world, and that whatever evil is it is something which resides in the world as only a historical, secular or human reality. If we really can’t believe in evil spirits – and I doubt that many of us actually can – then we must also dispense with the idea that God is a “spiritual” reality if the idea of “spirit” separates God from the world. We need to think the tangible world as the realm of spirit, or spirit as the worldly realm.

It’s not overstating the issue to say that the future of the church hangs on an understanding of what this means – not only the future of our congregation but of Christian faith itself.

The critical point has been that God deals with us as we are, here and now – not with a view to changing us into some perfect ideal of a human being, but to bring life to the kinds of people our particular history has made us. It is as we are – formed by our particular culture and history – that God addresses us. It is through the ideas and expectations of our particular world that we are called to faithfulness and trust.

This means that if, as is largely the case in our society today, there is really no other intangible “heavenly” world where powers for good and evil reside, then it’s in this very tangible and real world that we will meet God, in and through what we touch and do.

If God has no other heaven than the world in which we now live and move and have our being, then that world becomes the means of God’s work with us. If, as our modern society has come to understand, evil can only be believed to exist in the ins and outs of the historical world – and not in some spiritual realm floating above us – then this is also the place where God is found. God is found nowhere else but in the wo rld we can touch and see, because there is nowhere “else” for God to be. The battlefields of heaven and hell are the battlefields of our lives here and now. It is in the very midst of our lives that Paul’s “spiritual” battles take place. Or, to put it more clearly, our struggles in the world are precisely spiritual struggles.

In view of the struggle of faith Paul describes, he calls us to  “tool up” – to be equipped with the armour and the weapons which God provides for the purpose of standing firm in the promise of the full humanity of Jesus Christ becoming ours: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, as shoes whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

But just as the forces for good and the forces for evil are not wafty spiritual entities doing their thing in some invisible space, so also the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness and the shield faith and so on are not just nice Christian ideas to nod our heads at. They are not “spiritual” things in heads and hearts. These are disciplines – practices – which will necessarily mark every believer who is seriously engaged in the struggle for an authentic human and Christian existence.  If God’s place is in the world, so also are God’s ways with us “worldly”. We find a firm footing in life by attention to God’s calling, through practice and discipline, through study and prayer and fellowship and lives lived in accordance with God’s patterns for how we ought to relate to each other. As we can learn and be influenced and trained by negative influences, so also we must continually be learning and training ourselves in faith.

Paul’s claim is that it is hard work being a Christian because, the forces arrayed against human freedom are they are powerful in a very worldly sense. There is much to hold us back, much to limit us, much to tempt us into less than the fullness of life for which we were created.

We are called, then, to stand firm in all that God has given as resources for growing in faith and understanding, for defending what God has already made of us, and for working with God in making further inroads into the realms of darkness and captivity, that the world might take hope in the promise of light and freedom.

Paul ends his letter to the Ephesians with a call to them, and to us: Stand firm. Grow. Do not look back. Look only forward to the life to which we are all called, secured by what God has given us for the purpose.

This doesn’t happen as if by magic. One Christian commentator has remarked that one of the reasons our Christian faith often doesn’t make sense to us is that we lack practices which reflect it and make it real. If God is only a matter of head and heart – and in this sense only “spiritual” – then the things of God will make little sense in a world less about spirit than it is about what we actually do, touch and manipulate. Christian faith rests on habits and patterns which will strengthen us in lives of love and righteousness.

God is faithful.

If God will meet us with grace when we fail in our discipleship, how much more will God meet and strengthen us if we seek earnestly to be shaped by growing in knowledge and understanding, in the practice of prayer, in love and service, and in active commitment to peace in the world which God is healing.

Stand firm, Paul says to us. Continue not only to “believe” but to look like people who believe – people whose faith is not realised elsewhere but in the shape of the lives they live.

It is by God’s own grace that we might do this; let us, then, claim that grace, and give it form in lives which claim this world as God’s own.