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Lent 3
20/3/2022

Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm 63
Matthew 6:7-18

Sermon preached by Rev. Em. Prof. Robert Gribben

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I don’t need to convince such a congregation of the importance of the Lord’s Prayer. It is the only prayer Jesus gave us – whether he meant it as a text (which it became) or as a general guide, does not matter much, for the embrace of its concerns is wide.^[1] We could pray it more deliberately in church, but that applies to hymns too – we may pass by some familiar words, but suddenly one word will claim our attention afresh. So, the best thing is to take the prayer down from time to time and look at it, as today.

Most of us have also passed through a period when the wording has changed.  I was a member of the international panel which worked on those ecumenical texts^[2] and took part in a discussion of the Lord’s Prayer.

Our Father in heaven

The Greek opening simply says, ‘Our Father, the One in the heavens’, so not any earthly father, nor modelled on one.  This has been one of the great debates of our time. But it is not our experience of a father (or mother) that defines God; it is the other way around. A God who loves us, but – as we shall see – also tests us, covenants with us, recalls us to our path.

It sits alongside St Paul’s great affirmation, ‘I know … nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 8:38f). Because of that mutual love, we have the nerve to address God. Martin Luther used to challenge God: ‘You taught us to pray, to ask for what we truly need. So: listen up! I’m praying!’ Not arrogantly, not insolently, but with the boldness of an intelligent child. To pray ‘Our Father’ and to hallow his name, is to be given a share in Jesus’ relationship with God.

Your kingdom come/ your will be done on earth as in heaven.

It ought to be no surprise that a prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom and the fulfilment of God’s will was part of Jesus’ prayer as it was of his ministry from its first word (Mk 1:15). It is to ask ‘let the world be transparent to God, let God’s will and purpose for us all, and God’s own nature show through in every state of affairs.’

I cannot think of a more important prayer for our times. We who have heard Jesus of Nazareth speak about, and embody in himself, a world which exhibits the character of the love of God will want to work for, to live in that spirit, by that ethic. And we can see signs of it, but the hard fact is that, it is also yet to come. This prayer is aligned to the future. These days, I find myself praying these two lines with passion, urgency and hope.

The prayer of Jesus now suggests some petitions to follow.

Give us today our daily bread

But what kind of bread? The version used by the Narinyeri people of the mouth of the Murray River translates back into English as ‘Give us tucker till this sun goes down’, and I think that’s very clever. When will this sun go down? Well, none of can be in any doubt about the importance – to God – that the human race have what they need to sustain life. Think of the thousands whose meals are in doubt or not there in Ukraine, in Afghanistan, in Yemen – and in the flooded or burned north-eastern states of our own land. Daily bread is essential. But there is a tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, beyond today’s sunset. Perhaps, in our times, it means ‘give to us the ability to continue to feed the world’, or even, open up our markets in such a way that the marginalised are fed. Climate change factored in. And of course, it carries the meaning of ‘the bread for God’s tomorrow’, for the great feast when people come from every corner of the earth to sit at a banquet in that kingdom.

Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

My Scottish mother never quite understood why in her new country they did not pray ‘Forgive us our debts’ – but she did not know the Greek word was the same in both Mathew’s and Luke’s version.^[3] Certainly ‘trespasses’ will no longer do.

But some have thought that the straightforward naming of sin is a problem. It has become a favourite put-down of the churches that ‘they are always on about sin’. And the churches have made their own sin plain to see, to our shame. We have said ‘Sorry’ in a world which finds that hard to believe.

But the prayer’s accent is not on the ‘sins’ or the many debts we owe – but on the ‘forgive’. That is what e boldly ask. Someone has offered, ‘You, God, have forgiven me, and my thankfulness makes it possible to forgive someone else who has hurt me!’ I believe that is how it works, and why the petition is mutual: God is always ready to forgive, but we have, as mature people in Christ, a responsibility for what we ask.

Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.

What to do about ‘temptation?’! We had an argument in the panel. The English suggested ‘Bring us not to the test’, which the Americans thought sounded like cricket – or exams. The Americans proposed ‘trial’ and the English said that sounded like a courtroom.  The American ace was that that the courtroom is a common metaphor in which the New Testament speaks of our salvation.^[4] There was argument about ‘do not bring’ and ‘save us in’, and so we finished agreeing on ‘Save us from the time of trial’.^[5]

The trial of faith for early Christians was quite graphic: they could die for it. They could deny Christ and save their skin^[6]. That’s not our trial. Given the changed standing of religion in western culture, the acceptability of atheism whether you know what it means or not, the journalistic glee for the faults of the institutional church (which we have acknowledged) have made it much more difficult to claim Christian faith publicly. And given the direct attack by Covid restrictions on how Christians celebrate our faith – in communal worship – there are many who will be tempted to give it all up.  We need to pray it will not be so, and that we will be delivered from darker, evil times.

The late great Russian Orthodox archbishop in London, Anthony Bloom, wrote much on prayer, and in his exposition to the Lord’s Prayer, for he said that we need to remind ourselves of to Whom all this prayer is offered: God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and for the coming of that kingdom.  But even the first compilers of prayer books felt it needed a note of affirmation to end on, so added the doxology, ‘For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever’. Amen!

[1] It was rightly pointed out to me that in John 17 there is Jesus’ ‘High Priestly Prayer’; but this is clearly a theological composition by the evangelist. The Lord’s Prayer is full of Jewish references.

[2] The English Language Liturgical Consultation consisted of representatives of national ecumenical bodies, in my case the Australian Consultation on Liturgy. The texts and commentary are in Praying Together, Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1988.

[3] The churches of Scotland pray, ‘Forgive us our debts’ following the Luke translation.

[4] e.g., the word ‘redemption’ is a juridical term.

[5] I spoke to my notes rather than read them, and I left this paragraph out. But it’s a good story.

[6] I mentioned other examples of persecution of Christians to our own day.

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Lent 2
13/3/2022

Philippians 3:14-4:1
Psalm 27
Luke 13:31-35

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

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The gospel lessons through Lent traditionally and understandably relate to Jesus’ travelling towards Jerusalem. That is where the crucial drama will happen. But on the way there is plenty going on. On his way to Jerusalem Luke’s Jesus has been saying some interesting and provocative things.

Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! (Luke 12:51) 

 A gardener is told, ‘If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ (Luke 13:9)

To some Pharisees he said, ‘You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water?’ (Luke 13:15)

‘Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.’ (Luke 13:24)

Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’  27 But he will say, ‘I do not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!’  28 There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth… (Luke 13:26-28)

If Jesus had been running for an elected position he was certainly getting right up the nose of his opposition. Even some who were not on his side were warning that going to Jerusalem was not a good political decision.

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” (Luke 13:31)

Did Jesus take their advice? Hardly. ‘Go and tell that fox… (Luke 13:32) he replied – I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’ Then follows the deep sigh. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’ (Luke 13:34)

It looks like there are to be consequences for not being willing to be gathered by Jesus. The reader may well ask whether they are included among the unwilling, among the not gathered. Surely not. Me, the reader couldn’t be a part of Jesus’ deep sigh. Anyway, I am not from Jerusalem. I am Australian, and if you want to push my ancestry, I am Celtic – a long way from Jerusalem. I visited there once but surely that doesn’t count. My belonging and heritage don’t number with the prophet killers. My lot didn’t lob stones at the ones sent by God – did they?

You can see what I am doing here. I am looking to point the finger onto someone else, at least anxious to point away from me. It might have been easier to do this if I hadn’t read all the other bits of Luke to discover that no one seems to escape Jesus’ deep sigh. The religious leaders are hypocrites, Judas betrays him, Peter denies him, the other disciples run away. The occupying Romans get a red card – Pilate washes his hands of him and the rest of them didn’t know what they were doing so he forgave them. In Luke’s world all humanity seems to fit into the company of the unwilling.

What about our world? The image on the front of our order of service this morning was painted by an artist in St Petersburg. The artist posted the image on social media two weeks ago. Above it he wrote: ‘My country invaded Ukraine. I am really sorry. I wish it never happened. Please, forgive me if there was something I could have done and didn’t do.’ Philip had been praying for peace for weeks. He and his wife have been on the streets protesting. They have signed petitions denouncing the war. Their son is of inscription age. Her mother lives with them and agrees with every decision the President makes. Luke’s Jesus said there would be families divided. Philip has played no part in the violence against Ukraine, but he wears the shame of what is happening as if he did. As willing as he is to be a follower of Jesus, to defend the prophets, he knows himself to be part of the community of the unwilling, the ones who refuse to be gathered.

I was talking of these things with Kateryna, a Ukrainian friend, another icon painter. She told me that the stories she is hearing of the attacks and resulting privation remind her of the stories her parents told her of the time they had to leave Kiev in the Second World War.

Then she said something that came like a slap in the face. She said, ‘I wonder if these stories remind our indigenous people of the times their land has been attacked and stolen by us.’ Pointing the finger at what is happening half a world away was a whole not more comfortable than remembering Australian history of the past 200 years.

Jesus’ deep sigh over Jerusalem applied to all its inhabitants, all its visitors, all who looked to Mt Zion for strength and inspiration and faith. Jesus’ deep sigh over Jerusalem envelopes that city and all cities that have ever looked to Jerusalem as a focus of the saving actions of God – all the cities with links to the Abrahamic faiths. The sigh ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills … and stones…’ can always be applied to cities everywhere. Moscow, Moscow, the city that… Canberra, Canberra, the city that… then fill in memories of first peoples’ dispossession and refugee incarceration. ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’

The good news is that Jesus’ desire to gather the children of the cities of the world never fades. St Anthony of Egypt said, ‘To say that God turns away from the sinful is like saying that the sun hides from the blind.’ Jesus’ invitation to be gathered continued as he made his way into Jerusalem, as he confronted hypocritical displays of virtue, as he was tried and executed, as he rose to new life, as he ascended to reign at the right hand of the Father.

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Lent 1
6/3/2022

Psalm 91
Luke 4:1-13

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In a sentence:
All temptation questions our relationship to God; all resistance to temptation claims that we are God’s children

In our gospel reading today, we see playing out something of what has just been put to us by Stanley Hauerwas in his reflections on the mission of the church. Jesus, that is, engages “wittily” with the Devil.

The wit is ironic – the assertion below the surface of Jesus’ responses that there is more going on than first meets the eye. The joke Jesus hears in these temptations is the suggestion that he look for something which has not been lost – his identity. “If you are the Son of God…”, then do this. That is, prove – or test – that you are who you say by making bread from stone or being miraculously caught in free-fall from the pinnacle of the Temple.

For Jesus to have his “wits” about him here is simply for him to know who he is. In his exchange with the Tempter, he is forced to express his identity negatively by saying No to the Tempter’s proposals, but the No is not the point. The point is the “Yes” Jesus implies. For he is confident that he does not, to draw again from Hauerwas, have to prove himself to himself, to others or to God; Jesus doesn’t have to “make the world work”.

If the testing of Jesus here is the same as the testing – the temptations – we experience, then our temptations are about the same thing as his, and about one thing: who do you think you are?

We might do many right things at any moment of decision, but there is only one properly wrong thing. It looks like there are many wrong things as well, but only one of them will present itself as the thing that “tempts” us, or “tests” us, and so which we work hard to justify. We could be irresponsible with our money in a hundred ways, but it is only the one way we choose that we argue most strongly for, for it is the point at which we have to prove we are acting like the children of God. We could tell lies about a hundred different things, but only the one lie we want to tell matters. We could choose from a dozen future options for the congregation, but only one of them is really going to tempt us, is really going to require the necessary rationalisation which will prove to everyone that it is where we are most faithful. At this point – as with our money, or our flexibility with the truth, or our infidelities, or our forward mission planning – we will be “making the world work”, particularly for ourselves, and making God work for us too. We will, in this, be proving ourselves to ourselves, to others and to God.

But to know ourself as a son or daughter of God – this is not to make anything “work”, not to prove anything. If we are a child of God, the work has already been done. We need then only be as children are at their best: without guile. We are only ever tempted at one point: does this which I want to have or to do or to say express that I am a child of God, here and now? A “Yes” to this question cannot be argued, cannot be proof-texted. Children just are and do; there is no “if”.

Our childness, of course, is often compromised. Parents muck it up. Siblings drive us crazy. We are ourselves simply rebellious. In all of this, the “if” is making itself felt. We wonder, am I the child? This is the source of anxiety, fear and self-justification.

To learn to live by our wits as Jesus does – and it is a thing learned – is to learn to see when our being in God is challenged, and to laugh it off.

For we have nothing to prove. In Jesus is proof enough that nothing can separate us from the love of God. All that we do should be proof that we believe this.

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Ash Wednesday
2/3/2022

2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
Matthew 6:1-6, 16-20

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In a sentence:
Lent is a time to give up anything which reduces us or others

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

We hear this every Ash Wednesday and, with the text ringing in our ears, we have learned that Lent is a time of “giving up”. We “give up” wine, or meat or coffee or chocolate or some other thing which might count as a “treasure”. This is, in part, an act of sacrifice which honours Jesus’ own “giving up” of his life in faithfulness to his calling.

Of course, the implication o “giving up” for a season is that we will then, with a sigh of relief, “take up” whatever we have sacrificed once Easter arrives. There is nothing particularly wrong with this, especially if the disciple of such time-limited sacrifice causes us to think about the ministry of Jesus and the meaning of the cross.

But let’s consider that not all treasures are alike. In particular, not all treasures glitter but they still seem important to us. At least, we invest a lot of time and energy in them.

So, for example, what would it mean to give up gossip for Lent? Or slander? Or snobbishness? What we treasure in these things is judgement. Let us give up being judgemental for the 40 days of Lent; there’s plenty of time to judge others over the rest of the year.

Of course, the real sting in judgement is that, if we are really good at it, we will also judge ourselves, for better or for worse. The “worse” is the more interesting here. What if we gave up our shame? Or our guilt? Or our fear? Again, the venerated tradition of giving things up for Lent means that we can start feeling ashamed and guilty and afraid again once Easter comes. Lent is only 40 days, and surely we can cope with not judging ourselves for that long.

Where your treasure is, there is your heart. Where your heart is, there is your treasure. This tells us what we value, but not what is valuable in itself. What is valuable, Jesus says, is what cannot rust or be snatched away. Whatever good Lenten disciplines might indeed do for us, penitence is not a season because forgiveness is not a season. Forgiveness doesn’t corrode and can’t be stolen away because it is a re-valuing of all value – God’s own re-valuing

To judge another is to place a value on her, and so we feel justified in denying her our treasures. To judge ourselves is to have treasured the wrong thing. We reduce ourselves to our knowledge of who we are rather than God’s knowledge of us.

Lenten disciplines are targeted at those things which make us less than free and loving human beings. We give up only what does not accord with that, and we do not take those things up again. This might or might not include wine or chocolate; it almost certainly includes slander and guilt.

Let us then, at least for the season of Lent, stop being sad and fearful at our own expense, greedy and safe at the expense of others.

And let us see what God will do with that.

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Transfiguration
27/2/2022

2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Psalm 91
Luke 9:28-36

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In a sentence:
We don’t know what we see in Jesus, but we know that it is good

Many approaches have been taken to the story of the Transfiguration. Some imagine that we have here a dream sequence or a vision – something which only happens inside the disciples’ heads and but not “really” occurring in time and space. The story is so rich in symbolism that the symbols themselves cry out for recognition, to the extent that questions of “what really happened” become quite secondary. Others have thought that this is a resurrection narrative that has been dislodged – deliberately or accidentally – from the end of the gospels to become something of a hinge point in the middle of the narrative. Others, of course, have taken it to be a reliable account of a historically “objective” event.

Our approach today won’t be to untangle these tightly knotted and confused approaches but simply to take the story at face value, and dive in at one particular point. In response to the strange change in Jesus, Peter apparently gathers his senses and speaks on behalf of the disciples: “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”. Our focus text today will be the remark which follows: Peter has spoken, “not knowing what he said”.

We’ve long heard that this comment characterises Peter’s state of mind at this point. Like the callow teenager who has long loved from a distance a pretty girl in his class, only to respond with something utterly stupid when one day she speaks to him, so Peter is generally cast as blurting out the first thing which comes into his head, “not knowing what he said”. On this reading, he might as well have said, “…the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”.

But biblical texts are economical. We already know that Peter and co. are out of their minds with fear. His building proposition, and naming this as incoherent, scarcely seems necessary.

We might, then, come at this another way. The Greek word behind “dwelling” is translated in other places as “tabernacle”. The Tabernacle was a tent-like structure in which God dwelt before the construction of the Temple. This is, then, a heavily loaded word – not merely a “place to stay” but having connotations of a holy presence. In the prologue to his Gospel, the evangelist John writes, “…The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1.14). John uses the same word here: the Word “tabernacled” among us.

In this light, Peter’s proposal of tabernacles becomes less silly than naïve. That is, tabernacles might be entirely appropriate but does Peter understand what that would mean? Has he grasped what it means that Jesus is in the same room as Moses and Elijah?

The Transfiguration story follows an episode in which Jesus puts a question to his disciples, Who do you say I am? To this, Peter responds, You are the Christ. Jesus then goes on to explain what will happen to him. In Mark and Matthew’s version of the story, this greatly offends Peter, who demands that such things must not be allowed to happen. Jesus then hammers Peter in return, naming him “Satan” and announcing that Peter, in effect, has not understood what he himself has said – what “Christ” means.

Luke doesn’t have that part of the story. Still, perhaps Peter’s announcement about the tabernacles is the same: “not knowing what he said” is about saying the right thing while not understanding what it means, or saying the wrong thing but, at a deeper ironical level we don’t yet recognise, being precisely right.

This naïve irony is not an unusual experience – certainly not merely a “religious” experience:

“Will you take this man, to have and to hold in the covenant of marriage, loving, comforting, protecting and faithful

as long as you both shall live?” “I will”, she said, not knowing what she was saying.

“Let’s start a family,” he said, not knowing what he was saying.

“We would like to offer you the job”, they said, not knowing what they were saying.

“You are the Christ”, Peter confessed, not knowing what he was saying.

“Let us build a tabernacle”, Peter said, not knowing what he was saying…

Or consider our own current deliberations:

“Let’s amalgamate with another congregation”, said the one, not knowing what he was saying.

“Let’s find another place to call our own”, said another, not knowing what she was saying.

As a community, we have before us a range of options, about which it can be easy to speak and yet not know what we are saying. If we are ignorant of the facts or simply ignoring them, we have a responsibility to expose those deficiencies. This will be part of the work of the Church Council towards a final tabernacling proposal.

But there is another “not knowing what we say” which has to do with the very nature of the church as the people of this mysterious transfiguring God.

We have spoken about the fact that change is inevitable. When things are more or less comfortable, more or less easy, change becomes something we endure rather than embrace. To endure what happens next is to doubt that God could look anything different from what God appears to be here and now. To embrace what happens next is to expect God to be transfigured for us but still be the same God. This transfiguration won’t be a mystical mountaintop vision but perhaps a re-discovering of God in a house of sticks or straw after having we have known him in a house of bricks. To embrace what happens next is not to know that it is right, but to commit to it being right and then discovering how – in God – it can be. And if it is truly a choice for this God, what we have chosen will be both wrong and right: we didn’t expect that, but we needed it.

In a couple of month’s time we will hear a proposal from the Church Council which will be put for all sorts of good reasons, and in Peter’s sense we won’t know what we are saying, or choosing. If we are to continue to represent what we think MtE has stood for up to this point, what is required from every one of us is the expectation that God will meet us in some unexpected transfiguration, whether our next thing is a house of bricks or that we become members of someone else’s household.

The deep ironic truth in Peter’s “let’s build a tabernacle” is that a tabernacle is built for Jesus in the gospel. It is just that his tabernacle is made of only two pieces of wood joined in the shape of a cross. And, to recast his call to discipleship, this Jesus says to us: whoever would be my disciple must take up his tabernacle and follow me. This is not a call to mere self-sacrifice on a cross. It is a call to believe in the God who raises the dead.

This we say, not really knowing what it means, but that it matters. For we do know that tabernacling God, the giving of flesh to our faith, becoming the Body of Christ: this is the end of all things, the goal towards which all creation is oriented, and what God most earnestly seeks. To hope that we will faithfully be the church in all that we choose is to hope…we’re not quite sure what, but we know that it matters.

To say it again, what is required of us now is the expectation that, whether it is on a mountaintop or in the last place we might have imagined MtE to end up, Jesus will meet us there and, in his own strange way, will remake us and renew us.

The dwelling we seek to build is not about mere space. It is about place: life in all its fullness. The tabernacle of Jesus doesn’t finally house him but us; he is a place for us in God, wherever we find ourselves in the world. And we will discover ourselves – not knowing how – finally at home.

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Epiphany 7
20/2/2022

Psalm 37
Luke 6:27-38

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In a sentence:
The command to love knows no bounds, and is to be part of everything that we do

Take a few moments to reflect upon who your enemies are.

Perhaps this is a confronting task. We are strongly conditioned today towards keeping the peace through broad tolerance. Having enemies is perceived to be wrong – so wrong, perhaps, that we are inclined towards thinking we don’t have enemies, only people we can learn to tolerate under certain circumstances.

Yet let us consider: are there places you cannot go because of who is there, or who might be? Perhaps a part of town, or a country, where we would expect to be unwelcome, or perhaps certain streets after dark, or the gatherings you can scarcely abide but must attend and yet cannot speak your mind.

“Enemy” might seem too strong a word for characterising at least some of those we might encounter in those spaces. But it’s worth keeping in mind the etymology – the word sources – behind our word “enemy”. The English word is comprised of two constituent Latin words. The second is the most interesting: the ‘-emy’ at the end of the word comes from “amicus” – friend (amicable, amiable, amigo, French “ami” – friend/ly, etc.). The first part of our English word – the “en-“  – is just a negation. An enemy is, literally, an “unfriend” (the Greek word in our gospel reading today – echthros – similarly goes back to meanings of “stranger” and externality). This broadens greatly our sense of what “enemy” might mean: not merely those who passionately oppose us but those we don’t want much to do with.

It is not such a long bow to draw, when we equate enemies and unfriends. The social media platform Facebook calls adding people to your network an adding of “friends”; to remove someone from your network is to “unfriend” them. This is very often taken with great offence by the one excluded in this way. To unfriend can often be to make an enemy.

But the presence of enemies in our world is reflected more deeply than in word origins and social media spats. Our perception of the omnipresence of enemies is reflected in our story-telling, something very close to the heart of our being as social creatures. The stories we tell are almost universally structured by “agonism” – by conflict. The protagonist – typically the hero or heroine – is opposed by the antagonist: Churchill vs. Hitler; Dr Who vs. the Daleks; Harry vs. Voldemort; Little Red Riding Hood vs. the Wolf; Jesus vs. – well, how we complete this last one would reveal a lot about where we think enmity finally resides in the world – for another time, perhaps!

Some have wondered whether this experience of the world and our telling stories to inform that experience needs to be changed. This is because the fact of unfriends easily morphs into the need for unfriends. We can begin to define ourselves over against our unfriends. And our world shrinks a bit with every unfriend. With each unfriend we identify there is another place we cannot safely go, another thing we cannot learn, more love we cannot receive. However, the losses we incur in “enem‑ising” others often seem to be offset by gains. Enemies can be convenient. We can cast enemies as the source of all that is wrong in our experience. In this, we can transfer what might be wrong in us to another. It is easier that she might be “a piece of work” than that I might be.

This is all very general, of course, and in any particular instance there might be at play things over which we have little control. But recognising the general dynamics of life with unfriends might help us a little towards acting on the confronting imperative of Jesus: love your enemies, do good to those, who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.

Let’s see whether we can bring this closer to home by considering what it might mean for our life together as a congregation and the decisions we have to make about our future. Most of us met last week to look at some basic scenarios for that future, including obtaining a new place of our own (even if only on long-term lease), co-habiting with someone else and amalgamating. Very roughly, only a few of those 25 or so people present preferred amalgamation over the two remain-as-MtE options, and only about a third could “live with” amalgamation as a prospect. The two stay-as-MtE options each gathered about half the group as a first-preference and about 80 per cent of us as a “could live with” continuing as MtE in our own or a shared space.

At first blush, I took from this that our thinking prioritised retaining our identity as a congregation. It looks like an affirmation of what MtE is and stands for in itself. By extension, however, amalgamation looks like the loss of what is signified and made possible by a continuing of MtE.

There are various reasons why we might say not to amalgamation – some better than others – but let us consider some which have been articulated.

We wonder whether the congregations we might join value what we value. Will we still be able to have a weekly Eucharist? A liturgy like the one we still have? Where there are differences, we wonder whether other congregations can become more like us so that we need not become too much like them.

Implicitly, perhaps, we take the answer to these questions to be, No. We have not yet tested this, of course. But as the Church Council considers what it has heard from everyone, and the resources we have, and our freedoms and responsibilities, it must also consider the motivations behind our expressed preferences. In this case, is amalgamation per se the problem, or who we might amalgamate with? We need to be sure we know why not if we choose not to go this way.

In making these observations I’m not proposing that amalgamation is our best option. It’s just that, while we did a good job last week of hearing Where people are “at”, we didn’t do so well at testing and teasing-out and understanding more deeply the Why. In this case, why do so few of us find amalgamation unattractive, given the many clear benefits it could have? Regarding the perceived differences between ourselves and others we might say – humbly – that we are too difficult for others to get along with, so it’s not going to be worth trying. Less humbly, we might mean that, given they are impervious to the truth, we don’t want to have to give up what matters to find a way to get along with them.

Or is it that amalgamating would be admission of defeat? Or do the anticipated conversations seem too difficult? Do we fear getting lost in such a change? Of course, more positively, we might think that there really needs to be a Uniting Church in North Melbourne(-ish). But we haven’t quite said that.

Again, I’m not proposing (yet!) that we amalgamate. I am simply wondering what the relationship is between our future as a congregation and Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies. We might not consider other congregations enemies, but perhaps they are not quite friends either and, in some sense, are unfriends. When Jesus says love your enemies, it’s almost easy to agree with him that it is a good idea – easy because our enemies are often a long way away. Or, to take him literally, no one really hates us, curses or abuses us. But “love your unfriends” – this is hard, because unfriends are everywhere, even very close, and are not quite nasty enough that Jesus might have meant that we should love them.

What then, shall we do? There is no final answer yet, but we might still need to put some questions to the answers – the assumptions – we think we already have.

In view of what Jesus says today and our place in the Uniting Church, we might at the very least say that the imperative to love our enemies ought to part of the rationale for all that we do, not least what we plan to become as a congregation.

“Love your enemies”, Jesus says, “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you…Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful…Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven…give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

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Epiphany 6
13/2/2022

Genesis 3:1-10
Psalm 130
Luke 2:22-40

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In a sentence:
God clothes us with Christ and, so attired, we are dressed for anything.

What is the question to which the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist seeks an answer, the problem we need to resolve?

Obviously, it is how we will continue as a congregation once we leave this place. Less obvious is what “how” means – “how we will continue”. Central to our thinking today and in the weeks to come will be the question of “where?”: Where will the congregation be? This understanding of what matters predominates for us because “where” has been central to our efforts over the last too-many years.

Yet the challenge we face is not simply that of location. If we were the congregation that built Union Memorial Church, we would also be able to fix it – this is what congregations of many hundreds of people can do. But we are not that congregation. The church-world relationship we considered last week has shifted monumentally since those foundations of UMC were dug – not quite deep enough. Buildings aside, the crisis moment of our congregation includes the declining fortunes of the broader church in western societies.

And so what we need is not only a new location but also a clear sense of the time. What does this particular moment require? As we reflected a couple of weeks ago, nothing about tomorrow is clear except that it need be nothing like yesterday. This is to say that nothing about tomorrow is necessary. Nothing is predetermined for us by what has gone before.

But we as begin to think more intensely about this, we strike a problem, and it is Adam’s problem in today’s reading from Genesis: we know that we are “naked”. The man and the woman have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and bad, and suddenly they are troubled by what did not bother them before: they have no clothes.

Yet, nakedness itself is not the problem. Adam (and Eve’s) knowledge of good and bad after the apple affair does not include the knowledge that nakedness is shameful. The knowledge of good and bad is not knowledge of what is good and bad, only knowledge that there is good and bad. The man and the woman now know that there is an alternative to being naked, which has not occurred to them beforehand: “the man and his wife were naked, and were not ashamed” (2.25).

Knowing there to be a clothing alternative means that they are now free to – in fact, required to – decide whether to be clothed or remain naked. They are required, that is, to judge themselves and each other: am I adequate? Their judgement is that naked is not good, and they stitch together a few leaves and hide.

The distorted condition of Adam and Eve is not that they are naked but that they know too much: I was naked, Adam says; I see that I could be embarrassed about this, and so I am.

This shift in the story marks the presence of a radical uncertainty in human experience. Awareness of their nakedness is not about their bare skin but is a kind of self-exposure to themselves as responsible before God. With the appearance of choice in the awareness of a distinction between good and bad, morality appears – the possibility of being wrong, and being judged for that failure.

This is what we know as we consider our next steps as a congregation: that God will not tell us what to do, so we must work it out, not knowing what “the right” thing to do is. The apple-eating and its consequences account for our sense of being responsible for what happens next. To protect ourselves, we calculate and plan and rationalise, to act according to whatever seems to be the best principles. In this, we demonstrate to ourselves – and we think we demonstrate also to God – what the future has to look like. We make the future the next necessary thing.

Nothing could be more sensible than working it all out “properly”. Yet this is also fundamentally an exercise in self-justification. To calculate and balance and debate is to demonstrate – to each other as much as to God – that we have done the only thing we could, the necessary thing. Necessary things are safe, but God has no interest in what is necessary; what is necessary is always outside of God. Grace – which is fundamental to the character and activity of God – is radically unnecessary, unlegal, unjust, and is precisely what God does when re-creating us out of nothing in forgiveness or in the gift of a tomorrow we did not imagine but desperately needed.

The gospel is that God has seen us naked and – unlike we ourselves – has neither laughed nor been shocked. But we don’t believe this, so we reach for fig leaves – for visions, for mission strategies and for budgets – and we cover ourselves with these, just in case it be found we don’t have enough on. Yet, to rest our future only on the conviction that we have “done our best” is to declare nakedness before God shocking.

We must surely do our best, but this is not the end of the story because the story of the first couple’s judgement of their nakedness does not end with them hiding in the bushes. At the end of Genesis 3, after hearing all the bad news which now flows from knowing too much, the text reports, “And the Lord God made garments of skins…and clothed them” (3.20).

This gift is not about the durability of leather over withering leaves. It is not about the difference between our Elm Street hall as a temporary fig leaf and what we do next as “better”, as more secure and amenable. The difference between the leaves and the garments of skin is, rather, the difference between what Adam and Eve can provide for themselves and what God provides for them.

What we can do for ourselves is always of the order of fig leaves. We can make these work for a while, as we have made this hall on Elm Street work. Thinking this way, of course, suddenly casts Union Memorial Church itself as something of a fig leaf. As it finally withers and falls away, we naturally reach for something else to cover us. But we must keep in mind that self-provision is always a fig leaf, always an estimation of what we’ll need to cover whatever seems too exposed.

God does not provide us with what we could provide for ourselves – does not provide even a better version of what we might have managed for ourselves. The difference between what we can do for ourselves and what God does for us is the difference between living by our own goodness or cunning and living by God’s grace. What God does for us is grant us the freedom to be wrong. The man and the woman are wrong in their assessment of their nakedness. Yet they are accepted by God, and the garments of leather are the sign of that acceptance. This acceptance does not wear out. The leather lasts forever. To press it to its final truth, Christ himself is these garments of skin.

In clothing us, God says, for all your misjudgement and confusion, you are still mine. There is nowhere to hide. I see you. And my seeing clothes you.

The risk in our conversations over the next little while is that we proceed by telling one another, “If we put that on, we will still be naked.”

God has seen us naked and has not laughed or been shocked. It is neither here nor there. Our conversation today is not about getting dressed because we have to. It is a fashion parade: an occasion to wonder that such garments could be clothing and what it would be like to wear them.

We are free to play dress-ups in this way because God is not overly concerned about what else we wear, apart from Jesus.

We no longer hide from God; we hide in God.

And when we put on Christ,           we are dressed for anything.

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Epiphany 5
6/2/2022

Genesis 2:18-25
Psalm 138
Luke 2:22-40

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In a sentence:
The church is more – and less – important than it can imagine.

Storytellers tell lies.

A storyteller requires her audience to accept some basic premise that is not true, in order that the story might begin to unfold. The premise might be simply the proposal that the story begins where the teller begins, for every story begins somewhere before its beginning. More fancifully, the premise might be that there is, in our midst, a hidden world of wizards and witches, within which is unfolding a drama that threatens the whole world, and everything hinges on the personal character of an 11-year-old boy. If it is not a world of witches and wizards, the premise might be that time travel to the past is possible, or an unbelievably grotesque murder, or that a little drummer boy happened to be passing by just as a baby was being laid in a manger. Once we allow the premise, the story has traction and takes us where the storyteller wants.

Stories, then, are lies. And the storyteller needs our complicity in the lie if the story is to gain lift. We become willing conspirators with the storyteller in this way because, however untruthful the story’s premise is, the story is ultimately not about the lie but about people like us in that kind of context. Stories can brutalise reality because they are not about space travel or magic or prehistoric times but about how the various actors placed on those stages interact in those contexts. The basic premise is a lie, but the action might not be. The truth in the story is the human drama in that imagined context.

Stories, then, are true lies – creations out of nothing. “Once upon a time, there was…” – this always means “There 1was never, ever…” a princess, a frog, a drummer boy or even a manger. Or, at the very least, it would not matter if there were not. And yet does matter what happened after the never-happened.

It is the same in church. We gather here week after week to tell a story, and that story is also a lie told to hear the truth. We’ve heard today from Genesis 2. Genesis 1 relates the creation in 6 days. Genesis 2 seems to forget where Genesis 1 ended and places Adam alone in the Garden without animals or Eve, which are added as the chapter unfolds. After the creation of Eve – which ends this second creation narrative – the story continues in Chapter 3 with the apple affair and the expulsion from the Garden, to which we’ll come next week.

The creation of Adam and Eve is a foundation story that places human beings in creation but also casts them as distinct from the rest of creation. In addition to this shared distinction, the man and the woman are, just as importantly, there for each other.

What the story might mean for human beings in sexual differentiation won’t be our interest today. Neither will the social and sexual dynamics that some have read into Eve’s arrival after Adam as “helper and companion”. Rather, we will first note that this story – in common with all stories – is a true lie. This is what we mean when we call it a myth: not that it is untrue – a very narrow meaning of myth – but that it is a lie told to speak the truth. The truth is that “it is not good to be alone” and God does something about this, which is to say that if there were to be an Adam, there would have to be an Eve.

But we’re going to go another step today and tell a bigger lie, even less believable than the Genesis narrative itself: for a proper understanding of this story, we must see that Adam is the world and Eve is … the church. “It is not good for the world to be alone”, God says. And so Adam is lulled into a deep sleep, and the church is called out of him and presented back to him as “a helper and companion”. And Adam declares with delight, “Here at last is my truth”, and the world leaves what was its own and joins itself to the church. And the creation is now complete.

Now, Genesis 2 is clearly not about this. Of course, it’s not clear what Genesis 2 actually is about. This is not least because the story is three or four thousand years old, and the opinion about its meaning is divided into about one opinion for each of those years. There’s a sense, then, that each time we tell it, we lie above and beyond the original storyteller’s lie – and perhaps we lie all the more, the more seriously we tell it.

Our deceit this morning is not so much the untruth of myth but of typology. Typology is what allows the gospel writer Matthew to say that Jesus is the true Israel, what allows St Paul to say that Jesus is the true Adam, what allows Rowling to say that Voldemort and his Death Eaters are really Hitler and the SS, and what allowed us to say what we did last week: that the Congregation of Mark the Evangelist is the deep and the void God acted upon in Genesis 1. In typological thinking, we take a couple of things which look to be little bit the same and ask, what would we see if they were the same? (In fact, Paul does something a little like what we’re proposing today when he considers human marriage to reflect the marriage of Christ and the church [Ephesians 5.22-32]).

Eve-with-Adam looks a bit like church-with-world. Whatever else we might read into it – and there are some pretty unpalatable readings possible – the Genesis story ties Adam and Eve closely together. This matters if Eve is the church and Adam the world. If Adam and Eve are somehow “for” each other then Eve-as-the-church is for Adam-as-the-world.

In the creation of Eve, we see at least the establishment of human relationships and the possibility of a continuing history. But there is more than this. As we have already noted, creation is completed in Eve. God, then, is finally revealed as the creator in Eve’s appearance: God “becomes” the God we know when Eve arrives. Eve’s arrival, then, becomes a sacrament of the being of God as creator, and so of Adam’s own being as creature. In Eve, Adam receives himself – no longer being alone – and so receives God. There is no Adam, and so no God-as-creator, without Eve.

Such a reading of the Genesis story is risky. But it’s essential to see that it’s risky because we’re telling a lie, and really good liars eventually have trouble distinguishing between the lie and the truth. This is why reading the Bible is so dangerous.

Our particular true lie today is that the church is to the world as Eve is to Adam. We know, of course, that we – as the church – have a mission. But the Eve-Adam dynamic has a surprise in it, which might open up our thinking about how God works with the church. Our experience of mission is that it is hard work and that we’re not very good at it. In the creation story, however, something strange to our expectations takes place: Adam recognises himself in Eve: flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. More than this – surprising in what we assume to have been a patriarchal culture – Adam leaves his family and goes to Eve. Nothing could be easier, so far as Eve – the church – is concerned.

If our borrowing of Eve and Adam for thinking about the church in relation to the world has any truth, it might cause us to wonder: what would it mean for the world to recognise itself in the gift of the church? What “attracts” Adam-world to Eve-church? And what would this mean for the church’s own understanding of itself and its vocation?

As a bare story of the creation of bare human beings we might guess at part of what Adam found attractive in Eve: they were naked and not ashamed! But even the original hints at much more than sex. Adam becomes a believer when he sees Eve, for there is truth in her appearing. In Eve, at last, it all comes together.

And there is truth in the appearing of the church. Here we can begin to build on what we considered last week: the utter freedom the church has, if it is the church of the free God. But the essential thing is that this cannot be sheer freedom from all things, if the church is Eve-like. The freedom of the church will be a bound freedom, a freedom to be itself in relation to the Adam-like world. The radical freedom of the church is a freedom not from but for the world.

This is to say that the freedom of the church is to be oriented towards those as different from itself as Eve is from Adam. Adam is bereft because everything in the world apart from Eve is less than he needs. Adam – and so the world, and so God – are not complete without the sending of Eve.

Can we grant this lie, in order to become the truth of this story? Can the church really be all this? Can Mark the Evangelist be this as we take our next step? Would it be truly a lie to hold this, or would it be to lie truly?

It is only if the latter is that case that it is worth our while even bothering with taking the next step.

It is only in the space between the lie and the truth that God – and we – happen.

Let us, then, become a true lie. Let us strive to be a story about God and the world which could scarcely be true, but must be if God is anything like the story says, and we are to have any hope.

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Epiphany 4
30/1/2022

Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71
Genesis 1:1-5
Luke 4:21-30

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In a sentence

We are, as a congregation, at a moment of creation which – if it truly reflects the creative activity of God – is a moment of radical freedom.

The first few verses of Genesis describe what Christian doctrine has come to call God’s creation “out of nothing”. The problem with this is that there is, in fact, not “nothing” in the text but a “formless void” and a “deep.”

“Nothing” is, in fact, impossible to conceive. Try for a moment to think of nothing. It’s like trying to imagine ourselves dead. We imagine ourselves being dead and experiencing that we’re dead, which we wouldn’t be doing because we would be dead, and the dead don’t experience anything. Thinking nothing is like this: nothing always looks like the somethings of the world.

The Genesis text, then, mythologises here not because it is primitive but because the radically creative act it wants to describe requires this kind of trick. We do the same today even in modern physics, when we talk about black hole singularities or invoke the mathematical idea of zero. Like biblical myth, these are kinds of “placeholders” for impossible thoughts that seem necessary – or at least useful – to think.

Because Genesis has to talk about nothingness in thing-ness terms, it speaks not in terms of quantity – whether there is something or nothing – but in terms of quality: form or formlessness. “…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep…” In this, the earth is a “nothing-something”. It’s “there”, but not in any useful or meaningful sense. Creation out of nothing happens when clay takes form as a pot, noise resolves into a melody, or a dead thing stops being dead: when sense drops out of nonsense.

This understanding of nothingness matters for us right now in this place because there is just such a “nothingness” standing on this property, from which we are about to turn in search of a “something”. Perhaps this seems too harsh a characterisation of Union Memorial Church. Yet the point here is not to offend, or to denigrate what it has been for the last 140-odd years. The point is to understand where we are in our need to make decisions and the theological – “faith” – nature of those decisions.

What Genesis says about the “nothing-something” of the earth “prior” to the moment of creation can be said about UMC. It’s “there” but it is not there in any useful or meaningful sense. Again, this doesn’t mean that UMC has not been important but only that its future is now closed to us. While it still has a diminished form, Union Memorial has proven to be a “deep” from which we’ve been unable to extract what we need.

This is a painful reality. But if it is true, the Genesis way of speaking of the beginning of all things enables us to re-cast where we are now, such that we are not at a point of radical loss but at a creation moment.

This way of seeing things matters for what could happen next because an essential dimension of creation out of nothing is that it is not necessary. It is not necessary, in the sense that it is an effect without a cause. The world did not have to be, and it did not have to be like this. The primal nothingness does not have the seed of the world resting within it, about to burst out. It is not an equation that unfolds into the laws of physics from which everything eventually comes to be.

To put it more concretely, creation out of a deep void is an act of utter freedom – the freedom of God to create or not to create, to create us as we have been made, or differently. Or, we might say, it is good and proper that there is no necessary link between our formlessness today and our form tomorrow. We are, as a congregation, at a moment of creation which – if it truly reflects the creative activity of God – is a moment of radical freedom. And so anything is possible

And yet, freedom is corrupted for us: we cannot be radically free if this means everything which has gone before us be counted as nothing. We can’t really cast Union Memorial Church as a formless void because history is continuous. There are no true beginnings in history – everything has something before it. That is, we remember. And, on the conviction that what we have been has been good and godly, we want the next thing to be kind of the same. Yesterday – how we were – this is our nothing-something: it is nothing in that it is gone; it is something in that we don’t simply forget it. The problem becomes that we are a UMC-shaped congregation trying to fit into what has to be a non-UMC-shaped hole.

We are not, then, radically free. And we will experience this unfreedom in two closely-linked places. First, a tension before God: will we make “the right” decision? Freedom demands responsibility, which requires decision, and we always think about decisions in terms of risk: what if we make the wrong choice? This opens up fear and anxiety before God.

Second, the compromise we’ve all agreed upon just by turning up here each week until now has to be renegotiated. And so we will experience unfreedom in tensions between each other: we value the past differently and so would create different futures if we were God.

These two points of tension are inseparable because, of course, what I finally think God wants I hold to be good not only for God and me but also for you. What does faithfulness look like when our freedom is compromised like this?

We heard another creation-out-of-nothing story this morning, although it didn’t sound like one: God’s call to Jeremiah. Hearing God’s call, Jeremiah responds, “I am only a boy”, which we might paraphrase as, “I am a formless void”. Yet God has already answered this objection before Jeremiah makes it: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you…”. That is, it is not you yourself, Jeremiah, but my knowledge of you that will make these things possible. It is not what you know or how good you are, but my call that will matter, for your ministry will be a creation out of nothing.

This holds for us all and is why we baptise infants. A child might be baptised before she has manifested anything other than a capacity to breathe because in baptism the most fundamental thing we declare is that, without God, we are formless and void, and we come into being at the call of God. The baptismal waters are a wet “Let there be…and there was…”

And it is the same with adults. Of course, like an infant, an adult presenting for baptism is not nothing. Yet in that baptism, he looks forward to what God will make of him, not to what he will make of himself.

As for individual children and adults, so also for congregations: we are together now at a baptismal moment. We are not nothing but tomorrow will be a new giving of form to all that we have been, a re-creation of what we are. What happens next has not been pre-determined by what we have already been, if it is this God who is making us.

None of this tells us what to do, but only indicates the spirit in which we will act if God truly creates in freedom and we are children of this God, being the expression of that freedom. The obvious needs in what confronts us have to do with accommodation, continuity and identity, and self-determination. Such things are about what we have already known. Any community needs these things, and so they are not problems in themselves.

Just as important yet much less obvious is that, as we step forward, it is into a deeper Christian identity in Godly freedom. This will be freedom from things we’ve turned into the stuff of God but which really are not and so can be allowed to lapse into nothingness. Christian freedom is freedom to be wrong, and so it is freedom from fear of judgement and the temptation to judge.

We need such freedom, of course, not only in relation to the future of MtE but also in our own personal lives. Mr Palmer and his United Australia Party are right that we are in desperate need of freedom, even if they seem to have no idea what that means.

To be free after the freedom of the truly creative God is to be free to create what is not necessary to carry but will nonetheless be good, and even very good.

Let us, then, in our life together and in the lives which are just our own, imagine not only what seems to be necessary our past into the future but also what is not necessary – a creation out of nothing which comes as light in darkness, life to the dead.

This is God’s new thing among us, which we and the world desperately need.

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Epiphany 3
23/1/2022

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Psalm 19
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21

Sermon preached by Matt Julius

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E tō mātou Matua i te rangi
Kia tapu tōu Ingoa.
Kia tae mai tōu ranga tiratanga.
Kia meatia tāu e pai ai ki runga ki te whenua,
kia rite anō ki tō te rangi.
Hōmai ki a mātou āianei
he taro mā mātou mō tēnei rā.
Murua ō mātou hara,
Me mātou hoki e muru nei
i ō te hunga e hara ana ki a mātou.
Āua hoki mātou e kawea kia whakawaia;
Engari whakaorangia mātou i te kino:
Nōu hoki te ranga tiratanga, te kaha,
me te korōria,
Āke ake ake.     Āmine.^[1]

Hear these words from the law:

“If resident aliens among you prosper, and if any of your kin fall into difficulty with one of them and sell themselves to an alien, or to a branch of the alien’s family, after they have sold themselves they shall have the right of redemption; one of their brothers may redeem them, or their uncle or their uncle’s son may redeem them, or anyone of their family who is of their own flesh may redeem them; of if they prosper they may redeem themselves.” (Lev. 25.47-49)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer. (Ps 19.15b)

“Some of the [religious leaders] in the crowd said to [Jesus,] “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” [Jesus] answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the rocks would shout out.” (Luke 19.39-40)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

We live on a land of droughts and flooding rains
And the droughts are getting longer
And the floods are getting deeper
And the fires are burning longer
And the crisis is getting deeper
And the wait for justice is getting longer
And the cries are getting deeper

“Without a word, without a sound,
without a voice being heard” (Ps 19.4)

And those who were killed by the colonisers when they came have no voice
And those whose land was taken have had no voice
And those who were enslaved have no voice
And those whose culture has been erased have no voice
And those in youth detention in spit hoods have no voice
And those left in remote communities, when the services are switched off have no voice
And there is no treaty, so there is no voice

“Yet their message fills the world,
their news reaches its rim.” (Ps 19.5)

Āke ake ake

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Hear these words from the law:

“The uniting churches were largely silent as the dominant culture of Australia constructed and propagated a distorted version of history that denied this land was occupied, utilised, cultivated and harvested by First Peoples who also had complex systems of trade and inter-relationships. As a result of this denial, relationships were broken and the very integrity of the Gospel proclaimed by the churches was diminished.”^[2]

The uniting churches were largely silent

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

“Some of the [religious leaders] in the crowd said to [Jesus,] “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.” [Jesus] answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the rocks would shout out.” (Luke 19.39-40)

O lord, my rock and my redeemer.

Leaders met at the meeting place
Coming from all points of the southern sky
At Uluru — and spoke about sovereignty from the big rock

“Sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature,’ and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with [their] ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty.”^[3]

Hear the voice of Mununjali Yugambeh poet Ellen van Neerven:

women are still not being heard
our bodies ignored
crimes against us approved
sister spoke up
it took her life
in custody, without custodianship
children taken, and land
weeping and lonely
no more women unheard behind the wall
no more women dead over unpaid fines
no more women dead by men
it must end.^[4]

…

The Psalmist ties together a reflection on creation with praise of the law. The created order of things is not simply an inert object, not simply a bundle of random stuff. Rather, the created world is the wide horizon of our encounter with God.

God is big.

The story of God can only be told on the cosmic scale of the universe. The rhythms of life, the fact that we human beings are products of nature’s processes, the changing of night to day and day to night … All of this must be included in our account of a God who speaks to the world.

The voice of God comes to us through creation itself. It comes to us through the voices of those who have tended to creation, those who have cared for these lands and waters and living things since the time when the sacred stories were first told.

Too often we have not heard these voice. We have let them go silent.

And yet, says the Psalmist, even though no voice is heard, no words are uttered, even without a discernible sound, God’s message permeates the world.

God’s message speaks of a law that is perfect, demands which are just, decrees which are faultless, of more worth than gold.

What the Psalmist offers us in this rich poem is a vision of a world in which the movement between the world itself and our human community is a seamless whole. We should not seek here a sense of a discussion of creation simply stitched together to a discussion of the law. The law which restores our souls in the law which forms a human community which reaches beyond itself and embraces all people, all things, in a new order of righteousness and love.

For this we must allow the message of God which permeates the world to permeate our souls. We must be open to acknowledging faults … We must be open to letting go of being the ones in control of measuring our own correctness:

“… faults hide within us
forgive me mine …” (Ps 19.13)

says the Psalmist.

We must “keep [our] pride in check, / break its grip; / … be free of blame / for deadly sin.” (Ps 19.14)

We must allow this Psalm to sear into our souls.

There is blood in this land, and not enough justice yet to clean it.

So let us listen to God’s voice in those who speak for justice
Let us hear the call for Voice. for Treaty. for Truth.

Āke ake ake.     Āmine.

^[1] The Lord’s Prayer in Te Reo Māori.

^[2] The Uniting Church in Australia Revised Preamble to the Constitution.

^[3] Uluru Statement from the Heart.

^[4] Ellen van Neerven, ‘Women are still not being heard,’ Throat, p. 47.