View or print as a PDF

Pentecost 21
13/10/2024

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

Sermon preached by Alisha Fung

---

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?

——–

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.

—————

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.

————

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.”

————-

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.”

—————-

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.

————-

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.

———

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.

View or print as a PDF

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.

View or print as a PDF

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.