Rev’d Susan F. Straub

Introduction

The readings from Joshua and I Thessalonians today, hold God’s promise of life:  plenty of life, inexhaustible life, eternal life.  Abram was an old man, as good as dead, and God called him and promised to make through him a great nation.  Jesus died and God raised him and made through him a great people of faith. Is that the end? I don’t think so, life isn’t static is it, it flows on. Same with God’s promises.

What do we need to have in order for God to continue to fulfill this promise?  The lamp of Faith and the good oil so that the light which signals that God’s love is here, right where we happen to be, doesn’t go out in times of darkness.  Faith is simply believing in God, the work of Jesus on the cross, and his promise of eternal life. To make it personal, this means ME! That’s grasping the vision. As we step out to begin the life, we use the good oil of whatever goods we have, and crucially, keep walking and giving to the end of our days.

With new cases of CoVID-19 being found only among those arriving from overseas, it’s no wonder health and government officials are warning us of complacency.  It’s so easy to let our guard down when we’re thinking:  Well, it hasn’t happened yet, could be a while; or even, it might never happen!

Matthew 25:1-13 – The wise prepared and the foolish unprepared

The passage from the gospel according to Matthew this morning is about being prepared:  prepared for Christ’s coming to us, the end of our time on this earth, and our celebration with Christ. It’s about keeping in mind the vision so that the mission is fulfilled through wise stewardship: able to meet those things which are not necessarily hoped for, but which are possible.  Just as Matthew was writing for his church, who hoped for and expected Christ’s imminent return.

Verse 3, at the beginning of Chapter 24,  we read:  ‘When he (Jesus) was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will this be and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus didn’t give them a date: nothing so certain. He did give a list of disasters: wars, conflict, famines and earthquakes. Unfortunately, disasters happen in every age.  At no time in history perhaps are we more aware of disasters around the globe. Our own age is one of almost instant transmission of information. Jesus also warned his disciples of disasters in their relationships with others: hatred, betrayal, being led astray by those whose word they trusted. Again, unfortunately, things that happen at some time in the lives of all of us to varying degrees.

It’s important for us to understand that Jesus was speaking of these things not to the crowds, not to the Pharisees, but to his disciples, those close to him. One who learns a way of being and relating to the world from Jesus, is not guaranteed personal peace, prosperity, health or life being fair: the traditional blessings of the righteous. Again, Jesus turns things around. Rather than good deeds and a righteous life bringing blessings to the individual, being a disciple of Christ is do the work of bringing blessings to those who don’t have them:  his peace to those who don’t have it; prosperity to those who don’t have it; health to those who don’t have it; justice to those who don’t have it. Living the life of Christ, is to live the life of the Spirit: working to bring God’s promise of life to fulfillment. It is to live the life of giving life, and meaning in life, to others. It is to be wise in our stewardship of our resources.

The oil that keeps the lamps burning to light the way for Christ to come, is not only the spiritual oil of faith and vision, and other spiritual gifts, but also the material ‘good oil’. For many the light that allows them to see Christ – precedes his coming into their lives – is thrown by the oil of goods: of buildings and land such as cathedrals, churches, rectories, gardens; of great works of art and literature; newsletters and computers;  bread, cakes, wine and money.  All these are provision for our purpose: lighting the way of Christ.

Those who seek to bring Christ’s peace, prosperity, health, and justice get in the face (or up the nose) of those who have something to gain from their own way of thinking, and living. And sometimes we meet resounding indifference. At some time, too, we might be in need of peace, prosperity, health, and justice.  Disciples of Christ understand that we, as humanity, all share this common life.  Our Lord is God who came among us and shared the life we have in common (disasters unprecedented? Or ‘…there is nothing new under the sun’ ?).

Be that as it may, it’s important for us to recall that Jesus then went on to teach his disciples that whatever the circumstances, they must be constantly prepared to receive him, and to do what was necessary for him when he came. They were to give an account of themselves; not only ready but ABLE; not only with the lamp of faith, but with the ‘good oil’, the provision, to light the way of Christ as he came again. Those in the darkness of despair and hopelessness, may see, find faith in their lives, and stay for the celebration.

Whether he came earlier or later than the disciples expected, once he came, it would be too late to make up deficiencies:  “When was it that we saw you hungry, or thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take care of you?”.  Such deficiencies Jesus told his disciples would exclude them from the celebration:  will exclude us.

The parable tells us that those who think it unnecessary to make provision for a lengthy period of waiting for Christ’s return to judge the living and the dead are foolish. They are rightly excluded from the joy of the feast.

Henri Nouwen wrote:  ‘celebrating means the affirmation of the present, which becomes fully possible only by remembering the past and expecting more to come in the future.   But celebrating in this sense very seldom takes place.  More often than not the present is denied, the past becomes a source of complaints, and the future is looked upon as a reason for despair or apathy. Nothing is as difficult as really accepting one’s own life.’ (Creative Ministry, p. 100).

This is not only true of individuals, but even of the church itself. So, as disciples of Christ, we are to see the future as a land of opportunity for the fulfillment of God’s promise of, not just existence, but never-ending life: eternal life – and joy in it!

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

All Souls 2020 – Job 14.1-15, Ps 90, Jn 5.19-29

You remember the light of the Christ candle at last Sunday’s baptism? It says that the resurrection of Jesus long ago is something we trust in so much that we pass its light on to our children. We look back through the lives of all our dead to the resurrection of Jesus, and that event transforms the meaning of those deaths from futility into hope. The baptismal candle says that resurrection is everyone’s gift.

Because of the resurrection of Jesus too, we can also turn to look into the future and see our own deaths not as capricious ends, but with the hope that they are a part of the way to a joy which cannot be snatched away. Hope; belief. Are they enough? We want certainty, but we’ll never be absolutely sure. And that’s not a bad thing.

We’re often tempted to assert something definite where we want to defy the sadness of loss; where we want to fight with God over the rights and wrongs of someone’s death. But in the end, our faith doesn’t deal in those certainties – doesn’t centre on a God who can be manipulated into indulging us. And that’s good; frustrating, but as it should be.

Job and the Psalmist speak realistically of the difficulties of being mortal. They’re clear about death being a part of life. They don’t pull any punches. They engage with God in very strong language, and ask the same ‘why’ questions that we ask. They know God has something to do with this.

What does our heritage offer us here? After worship in many churches, people will pray that the souls of the faithful departed may rest in peace and rise in glory. There are plaques here and in churches around the world asking that we ‘Pray for the Soul of … . Do we really expect things to change for the dead? Is that what all those plaques are calling for?

One way to think about it is to say that God, free from time’s constraints, is able to be present to us, and at the same time, present to those Souls we are praying for.

I suppose that could mean that just as we pray for the souls of the faithful departed, in God’s present, right now, our distant descendants might be praying for our souls. And while for them, we might be a plaque on a wall or in a churchyard somewhere, what they are praying in that distant future might, by God’s grace, have some influence over the way we choose to live now. I wonder.

Jesus, in today’s gospel, takes us deeper into this realm of fluid time, grace and choice, and so into the significance of such prayer. ²⁴ Very truly, I tell you, anyone who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not come under judgement, but has passed from death to life. ²⁵ ‘Very truly, I tell you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.

Present, past and future all dissolve into grace without time. Death dissolves into a greater reality of life which is an answer to a call – a call from we know not when – but a call which we might dare to ask might be uttered.

For our loved ones, for us, no certainty – but there’s hope. For our loved ones, for us, no manipulating a system, but there’s prayer.

Hope and prayer are not bad options in a real world.

So let’s hope, and let’s pray.         Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

All Saints – Rev 7 9-17

The book of Revelation was written in a time of terrible persecution for the early Church the outsiders of their time. It’s a book willed with visions and dreams, with hope and resilience; but only for those with eyes to see. Revelation has only ever spoken to them; people who can crack its code and find hope and resilience in it. The persecutors of the early Church would have drawn a complete blank.

Often, in times of great suffering, someone will emerge from amongst a sad and frightened people – someone with a vision. This visionary can see something that nobody else can – it’s their gift. The visionary isn’t blind to the day-to-day pain and misery that everyone’s going through; anything but – they’re in it too. Yet they’re given a vision – a vision which can lift a suffering people’s eyes from their misery, and fix their gaze on something better, so that suddenly, their perspective changes.

When perspective changes, nothing tangible changes, and yet everything changes. Suddenly people believe in change. Then the suffering and misery they endure, and the hatred that poisons their lives are no longer their defining boundaries. Without being physically or emotionally set free, people’s spirits are nevertheless released. They’re given their full humanity back – but given it in a secret way – in a secret place that their persecutors can’t reach. That’s what the writer of Revelation gave to a persecuted Church; that’s what visionaries still give people in our time.

So if much of the book of Revelation is opaque to us, maybe it’s just that we’re waiting for the right time to read it – let’s pray that we’re spared that time. Revelation is written in a sort of code. Let’s crack it open a bit. ^{7.9 …} I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages. How does that bring hope to persecuted Jewish and Gentile Christians?

Do you remember the promise God made to Abraham – Genesis 12.3 – in you, all families of the earth shall be blessed? Here it is pictured as fulfilled.

What’s being said here is that persecutors can do what they like, but in the end, what God has promised is what goes. Revelation goes further – all tribes and peoples and languages: languages. This goes back further – to the tower of Babel, where God confused the languages of the people. This vision sees all that division reversed – what was broken gets mended in this vision. So wounds in the Christian community – divisions and misunderstandings – are also going to be healed.

The verse goes on; this multitude is standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. These people are in God’s presence – in the presence of the Lamb. Jesus, the one who was killed but is now alive again, is enthroned in splendour. And the multitude is robed in white, the robe of martyrs – of those who witnessed with their lives – the robe of the baptised.

“These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. ⁵ For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one seated on the throne will shelter (pitch the divine tent over) them.

So these persecuted, martyred ones are resurrected too, and they’re bearing palm branches. What people waved for Jesus on his road to the cross, they wave still, having travelling that road themselves to death and resurrection. What the palms proclaimed of Jesus’ royalty then is vindicated for them now, where all is fulfilled.

Can you see how subversive this writing is? Can you see how it would give heart to people who know martyrdom? And at the same time it confounds their persecutors utterly? It’s a secret language – a precious gift – a language of indomitable hope.

This subversive passage is set for this feast of All Saints to remind us that our defining reality is not suffering and death, but the healing and life which God chooses to give to and through all the nameless little people – the glorious nobodies – who’ve handed our faith down to us. ¹⁷ …the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There is a vast multitude with us today who’ve carried us and whom we carry inside us. We worship God with them today.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 21 – Baptism in Holy Communion – Chizara Obi

You are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you – Mark 1.11

On my silent retreat last week, providentially, one of the Bible readings we were given to spend time with was the story of the baptism of Jesus as it’s described in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. Here’s how it goes. Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptised by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

After I’d spent a long time with this reading, I talked about it with my retreat director who surprised me by suggesting that I should try out hearing those words from heaven as if they were spoken to me. You are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you. I spent the next day wrestling with it. I wonder if you’d like to try it for a few moments – listen to those words from heaven, and hear them addressing you personally. You are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you.

Please hear it again: You are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you.

I don’t know about you, but I found it very difficult to hear these words as being addressed personally to me. It’s something important for me to work through. But for the moment, it’s enough for you and me to know that even if we struggle with it, it is true. Our faith doesn’t depend on how we feel. Those words are true for me; true for each of you, and in a very special way today, true for Chizara Chloe. When Chizara emerges from the waters of baptism today, several things will happen and they will be her first, special taste of those words from heaven; Chizara, you are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you.

The lighting of her baptismal candle from the Easter candle will proclaim that the new life which raised Jesus from the dead lives in Chizara from the moment of her baptism. That’s one way she’ll hear the voice say You are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you.

The joyful procession of thanks will be a way we can share in that delight with Chizara. You are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you.

And then at the altar she’ll be anointed with Chrism Oil, and we’ll all say the prayers of commissioning and welcome which affirm the truth of those words from heaven for Chizara. She’ll be marked as Christ’s own for ever, and she’ll be received and welcomed as a member of the universal body of Christ, as a child of the one heavenly Father, and as an inheritor of the Kingdom of God, together with all the baptised. All this will speak of the meaning of those words from heaven for Chizara – You are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you.

I can see why my retreat director thinks we should each hear those words from heaven for ourselves; you are my Child, my beloved; I delight in you. Nothing can block the truth of that gentle love; nothing can quench that delight. The Spirit who descended on Jesus has, over the millennia since, descended on all the baptised. And this morning, that same Spirit will descend on Chizara.

Let’s begin that part of her journey with her now. I invite her sponsors and parents to bring her forward now.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Dedication Festival – 1 K8 22-30, Ps 84, 1P 2 4-10, Mt 7 24-29

Sometimes when you visit a special place in the Holy Hand, a fragment of Scripture will come alive for you in a new way. One such place for me is a little chapel inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Eastern churches call it the Church of the Resurrection). This ancient church was built around 326 CE by St Helene, the mother of the Emperor Constantine. It was built to enclose two important sites.

One site is the one that gives the Church its name, the Holy Sepulchre. Originally a cave was cut into the wall of a disused quarry, and bought by Joseph of Arimathea to serve as a family tomb. It’s the tomb he gave to enable the hasty burial of Jesus.

The other site is very close by. It’s a rough rocky outcrop that was left over in that disused limestone quarry. It was left there as it was useless for building material. Tradition places Jesus’ crucifixion on the top of this crumbly, fissured outcrop – a highly visible place just outside the city wall. And it’s still there to touch and to see. You can touch the top of the rock from inside a chapel built above it. You touch the stone by crawling under the altar and reaching down to it through a hole in the floor. And downstairs in a small, dimly-lit chapel, you can see its base lit up through a window set into the wall. Pilgrim groups walking the way of the cross stop here for the tenth time to remember Jesus being stripped of his garments before his crucifixion. And the scripture they read is one we heard this morning. The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner. ^{1 Pet 2.7b – Ps 118.22}

Those words in that place. Jesus was the stone rejected by empire builders – people who built on the sand of their own ambition and pride, their selfishness and their cruelty. But Jesus rose from the dead, from a rock cave to be revealed as our cornerstone – the foundation on whom we and everyone and everything stands.

Today we gather in this much smaller, much younger stone church to give thanks for the hundred and eighty-one years of worship and loving service Christians have been able to offer here, and to affirm again that Jesus is our one foundation-stone.

Our parish family began its life here as St John’s in the Wilderness. But with time, things have changed. For many years now, we’ve been St John’s Halifax St., a central-city parish. How have we navigated this change; how have we responded faithfully to what this calls from us? Our foundation, Christ, has always been our guide. His love and acceptance offered to the poor, the lonely, the sick and the troubled have remained our standard. Our mission has become more complex with the passage of time. The needs we are called to address keep growing.

Years ago, we responded to these growing needs through the establishment of St John’s Youth Services, and by entering into a covenant with the Cathedral, St Mary Magdalene’s and Anglicare in order to nurture and manage the Magdalene Centre.

But now both SJYS and TMS have grown up, and despite the strong ties that still bind us, they’ve left us with something like empty-nesters’ syndrome. Painful as that is, it’s a good thing. We can celebrate the wonderful work our kids are doing out in the world. But we can’t relax. So what’s next? Many of us are very active as individuals in voluntary community work. But as a congregation – a parish – what’s our next project? How do we imagine ourselves as the body of Christ – as we say each week – embodying Jesus in a community where, in the post-Covid and climate-changing world, needs and crises are greater than they’ve ever been?

We’re empty nesters. One of Michael Leunig’s cartoons depicts an empty-nester couple sitting in their calf-leather recliner-rockers in front of a magnificent home-entertainment unit, each with a large glass of red in their hand. And there’s an embroidered sampler on the wall proclaiming their new motto: ‘We have overcome’.

Have they shut the world out? We can’t be like that. We have a founder whose example defines our mission as one of active compassion and an accepting hospitality right to the end. We know that we are called to follow Jesus, walking the way of struggle together with each other and with all in need. Today’s hymns, psalm and readings remind us that the blessings we enjoy are inextricably linked to Jesus’ model of compassion and radical hospitality. They say the only way we can live with integrity is to be firmly founded on Christ’s example all our lives. There’s no retirement age for a follower of Jesus.

We’re experiencing our call to mission in the world in a different way from earlier generations because the place we have in the hearts of the wider community is steadily deteriorating. It’s as though we’re coming to be seen in the way the builders saw that old rocky outcrop in the quarry back in Jerusalem; no use for building anything. Many can’t see us as relevant to anything in the modern world.

Rev Andrew’s irrigation installer asked him, ‘So whaddaya do for a crust?’ Andrew replied, ‘I’m a minister in the church.’ To which the irrigation installer scratched his head in bewilderments and exclaimed, ‘Geez Mate! There can’t be much call for that any more!’

The local community care we once offered is increasingly managed by corporate agencies; no longer so much through humble parish relationships with locals. But we have gifts that corporate agencies can only dream of. The stone that the builders might reject can still be revealed as the head of the corner by our response to Jesus’ call. We still offer the millennia-old sanctuary of life-long friendship and protection. We still offer life-long belonging in a family community whose first principle is loving acceptance and hospitality; and we still offer life-long companionship on the pilgrimage that each person travels. Corporate agencies, eat your heart out!

Particularly here at St John’s, as part of our community care, we treasure beauty, culture, creativity, thinking, art, history, literature and music. All of these are under growing threat as a utilitarian world-view poisons our governments against supporting creative people in need, or funding the study of the humanities and social sciences. Again, as in earlier dark ages, this Church – the stone the builders would reject – we can nurture and preserve these gifts of civilization which, like creation herself, proclaim our Saviour as the creative, redemptive giver of all life, beauty and meaning

So what are we going to do next? I’m seriously asking for suggestions from each of you. Building on our strengths is a good start, but how? Over to you.                           Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 19 A – Exodus 32 1-14 Matthew 22 1-14

Was there a sign outside that wedding venue? Dress code. If ladies present, thongs, stubbies and dark blue singlets prohibited! Was it that sort of offence? Is choice of clothing so important that the heavenly bouncer, having roughed you up, then throws you into the outer darkness to weep and gnash your remaining teeth? I doubt it.

This is another in a series of parables where Jesus challenges some who believe they’re called and chosen to be the leaders of the chosen people. Jesus ends this parable with an unnerving warning: ‘many are called, but few are chosen’. Stung, these indignant chosen leaders will plot to trap Jesus.

A scary message of this parable is that there’s no guarantee you’re on the inside. Being on the invitation-list, being an insider – think of being a baptised or ordained member of the church today – neither qualification is a guarantee that you’re in – that you end up being chosen.

What about the chosen people; the called and chosen people – Israel? Over the past months, the lectionary has followed some central events of their call and choosing. The story of the Exodus records their rescue from slavery in the land of Egypt, and their journey towards the Promised Land. We’ve often been up close, like today, wincing at their rocky relationship with the God who rescued them. The people of Israel in the wilderness behave like the invited guests in today’s parable who violated the invitation so dreadfully. They were God’s invited guests – called out of slavery, led through the waters of the Red Sea to journey to a Promised Land, where they were to be blessed with freedom, justice, trust, wholeness and mutual respect; they were called to be a beacon of hope to the world.

To be the ones chosen for such a destiny was a staggering honour – called to robe yourselves in a rich garment of privilege that slaves could never have dreamt of. How do you begin to respond to such grace? This morning, sadly, we see how they do. As they wait for Moses to come back down from Mount Sinai, we watch them lose patience; lose trust. They decide to cover all bases and worship another god, just in case – an image of a golden calf which they make for themselves.

That’s what our parable depicts; people who only honour an invitation if they feel like it, who aren’t really committed – who don’t put on the garment – who publicly insult the King and his Son. The honour of the invitation is unimaginable; impossible to reciprocate. Yet they turn it down and even abuse and kill the bearers of the invitation.

In their place, strangers and foreigners are asked along, regardless; good or bad. This parable drives home the point that it’s not necessarily the people you’d expect to know God who actually do. God is more broad-minded than we can imagine, inviting … well… anyone … into the kingdom. That’s what makes Church so exciting; random; edgy – that’s something we call a foretaste of the heavenly banquet – the unpredictable, wonderful variety of the community God calls; God chooses – not whom we might have thought of at all.

Amidst all this, what’s this wedding garment about? The king noticed one hastily recruited guest who hadn’t put on a wedding garment. We’re clear that it’s an insult – not putting on the garment. But what is this wedding garment – what does it mean?

Over the centuries, people in the Church have come up with a fascinating range of possibilities. Very early on, Tertullian ^{160-225 CE} said it was a garment of good works and self-denial. Later, Hilary of Poitiers ^{315-367 CE} said the garment was the Holy Spirit. Augustine ^{354-430 CE} had two goes; first that it was a garment of love, and then later, that the garment was the Christ himself, whom we put on at our baptism. The Reformation preachers said that the garment was faith; faith that was active – so it was something you could see expressed in love and good works. Catholics of that time agreed about it representing faith, but the faith they meant was shown by the guests accepting the invitation to the feast; not by the garment. For them, it was clearly a symbol of good works.

In the 18^th century, a teaching surfaced that said wedding garments were given to guests by their hosts in that time. As you can imagine, this fitted very well into protestant teaching about faith as a gift from God; not a human work. That’s how it’s been preached in protestant circles now for over two centuries. ^{Luz Matthäus III: 246-9}

I think it was probably preached this way because people felt a need to explain why the king could deal so severely with a guest whose only offence was not to wear a wedding garment. And that severity is certainly an issue.

But this teaching about God giving the garment sidesteps what all the other interpreters of the wedding garment were trying to address, which is what the garment says about our true relationship with God. Whatever else they say, they agree that this wedding garment means that something about us really matters to God, and secondly, that putting this garment is to accept the invitation to belong to God; it is to receive a new identity as one of God’s community. Matthew put things in a pretty scary way – with the murderers and their punishment, and the gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness. Maybe their community needed a bit of a kick-start at the time: this is, of course, told to shape a community, not individuals. So what might this parable say specifically to us? Does our community wear this wedding garment?

By wearing this robe, our community can honour God and his Son. Wearing this robe, we can radiate the joy and expectation of a wedding banquet. Wearing this robe, we can be a beacon of hope in the world. Wearing this robe proclaims that God is changing us; that we’re a work in progress. As one American Catholic scholar put it, today’s ‘Gospel is not the announcement that [we are] fine the way we are. Rather, [that] God loves us so much that he will not leave us unchanged.’ ^{Leonard R. Klein}

We’re called to open ourselves to that grace; to stay open to it so we can be changed and go on being changed; to grow, which is to live. We’re called to put on the garment to signify to the world and to each other our true identity as a community of Christ.                   Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Feasts of Francis and Michael – Jrm 22 13-16, Ps 148 1-13, Rev 12 7-12a, Mt 11 25-30

(Patron saint of ups and downs.) Today, one of those we celebrate is Francis. He’s a wanderer whom we remember with love for his words of encouragement and wisdom to people and to birds and animals. Our Psalm this morning could virtually be his theme song. Praise (הָלַל boast of) the Lord from the Earth! All the creatures in this Psalm are cause to boast of God’s greatness – land and sea creatures, forces of nature, all types of people; everything boasts of God, source of our being.

Psalm 148 takes us back into the journey of our last four weeks where we’ve joined together with forests, soils, wilderness and rivers to praise / boast of God who is with us. In our hearts and minds, we’ve walked in forests where the sounds of the life surrounding us gradually still our talk, and the peace of listening prayer settles in. We’ve acknowledged that we and all life are born of the soil; so we’re all one family. We’ve heard the invitation to stay long enough in the outback that its seeming changelessness brings about deep spiritual change in us. And last week, we recognised rivers as the living bloodstream of this Land – like the blood of Christ is for us, bringing new life, protection and deep healing.

Nature is the constant work of the living God; teaching us about God’s nature. As spring erupts, God’s love for all life and for Earth who sustains us is now on show for anyone to see. May our eyes and hearts keep opening up to embrace a much bigger family than just our fellow humans. This past month, Earth has been our spiritual guide. In Francis we meet a daring ancestor who opened himself, body and soul, to her leading; to the spiritual journey we’ve walked this Season of Creation.

We know Francis gave up a life of wealth and luxury. He set out on his new journey of service to God, barefoot and wearing only rags. His new life was marked by poverty and humility. His vocation – his calling – was to rebuild a Church which was being ruined by its power and wealth, just as he had been.

Alongside his challenge to the church – and that’s still going on – Francis was himself ‘rebuilt’. His new life of poverty and simplicity led Francis to learn that God’s love is for all, not just for the great and the lucky; and not just for the human race either. Francis lived that new insight more deeply as time went on. He taught that all creatures bear witness to God as we do; he called them our sisters and brothers; fellow servants and witnesses of God with us.

So Francis’s original calling from God was to reform the Church.

As his understanding of his vocation developed, it was obvious that Francis’s life would become a challenge to the whole social order. Society should be just and compassionate; all people should be cherished. This conviction lies behind the confronting nature of the scriptures set for his special day. I can imagine Francis preaching from today’s passage in Jeremiah as he takes a rich person to task for using the unpaid work of neighbours to build a luxury home. The example of Francis’s life directly challenged the greed and abuse this represented.

Francis, like Jesus, lamented the idea some have, that only the wise and intelligent are qualified to exercise spiritual authority, or are capable of receiving spiritual guidance. Francis, like all the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, and like Jesus, his model and his master, defied the curse of self-importance; the delusional contempt of this world’s ‘great and powerful’ for the welfare and wisdom of the vulnerable.

A barefoot man dressed in rags lived a life which defied this very powerful delusion. And there’s no point in denying that the delusion lives on. Deluded human beings still seek to take the place of God, and they bring disaster to millions. But a barefoot man in rags who wandered and taught as his Master had done still speaks with a moral authority which human power can’t silence.

Our reading from Revelation 12 reminds us that this is a spiritual, cosmic struggle; one we don’t fight alone. Angels and archangels fight for us in a battle against the forces of hatred. Michaelmas is a time to celebrate with thanksgiving the myriad angels God sends to defend, heal and sustain all life.

As if our mortality weren’t enough, every generation is compelled to endure greed, injustice, hatred and destruction. Michaelmas is a time to stop and remember that God never lets us face these trials alone.

Over the Season of Creation, we’ve looked at the way greed and the abuse of power have been allowed both to ravage the world’s forests, soils, wilderness and rivers; allowed to ruin the lives of the creatures and ordinary people who depend on them for their livelihoods. The feasts of Francis and Michael remind us to be humble, vigilant and outspoken.

In God’s strength, and with the saints and angels beside us, we are called as a prophetic people to name and challenge wrongs when we see them, and to offer support and healing to those who are weary with carrying these heavy burdens. Let us be angels sent by Jesus to give help, rest and hope to these dear ones.         Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Season of Creation 4A River Sunday – Rev 22 1-5, Mt 28 1-10

…the angel showed me the river of the water of life

Whenever I’m out walking with anyone and our path crosses a river, there’s something important we have to do. As we get to the bridge, we each have to find a small wooden stick. Then we go to the upstream side of the bridge, above the middle of the current, lean out as far as we can, and let our sticks drop. Then, for a slow river, we amble across to the downstream side, or for a fast one, we rush over to watch for our sticks to appear again.

Sometimes we treat it all superficially, as if it’s just a race; whose stick’s going to appear first? But deeper down, we share a hope. We hope the sticks we dropped at the upstream side will actually appear at the downstream side; that the unseen bit of the river will flow freely; that there aren’t any hidden snags. Sometimes it can take ages. All sorts of obstacles or eddies you can’t see might be lurking under that bridge. But we wait together in hope. Pooh-Sticks trains us in hope.

Another thing Pooh-Sticks teaches us – and yes, that is the official name of this spiritual exercise in the English-speaking world – another lesson of Pooh-Sticks is that upstream, our relationship with the river is quite different from what it is when we’re downstream. It’s as though we become different people. Upstream, once we’ve dropped our stick, our part of the job is over. We must trust the river to do the rest. All the fun and none of the responsibility – as grandparents sometimes say.

But for downstreamers, there are deeper questions of commitment. When our sticks do come into view, will we still be like the people we were upstream? As the stick appears, do we just smile, and then relieved, turn and walk on our way? Or do we stay to watch them out of sight? If we just turn and walk away, we haven’t grown; we’re still upstream people. But staying to watch – or even better, taking to the river bank and tracking alongside our sticks – we commit ourselves to the down-stream adventure the river calls from us; we commit to a relationship with the river.

We South Australians know well what it means to be downstream people. We’re conscious of our vulnerability. But perhaps we’re not always conscious of the miraculous, intricate web of life that’s also sustained by our river system, which in its turn looks after the health of the rivers themselves. This land is like a living body and the rivers are like its bloodstream. I read recently how the 30,000 Murray Darling Basin (MDB) wetlands don’t just sustain the land’s unique plant and wildlife. They’re like the rivers’ kidneys. They absorb nutrients, filter out pollutants and regulate flow so that they manage the rivers’ ‘flood-pressure’.

We know this is all in grave danger – particularly if the MDB plan is completely mutilated by the politics of greed. Over 80% of the waterbirds we had in 1987 have disappeared. And that seemingly limitless supply of red-gum firewood trucked in from NSW each winter; it’s a frightening local image of the holocaust in the MDB.

So while we hope and trust that those upstream will give us some thought, we must also remember the web of life which the rivers are less and less able to sustain. Are we and the upstreamers willing to be stewards of all this, or are we just another of the introduced pests; self-appointed top predators in a food-chain which we allow to serve only our own interests? What we throw in or take out of the river is a matter of life and death for a vast area of this land and all its ecosystems. Will our legacy be that of life-restoring custodians of the rivers, or the ones who finally killed them?

In Rev 22.1, we heard these words; the angel showed me the river of the water of life. These words echo the story we read three weeks ago in Gen 2 about a stream rising from the Earth – a river flowing out from Eden to water the garden. At the centre of that garden grew the tree of life. The river flowed out and branched into four rivers which brought life to the known Earth. But then we read how the humans behaved like up-stream people. We did what we felt like doing, and the world downstream was cursed to weather the consequences of our selfishness.

Today, hearing the final chapter of the book of Revelation, by the Grace of God, we’re given a call to recommit to being downstream people. And the stream is again the River of the Water of Life. This time, it flows towards us from the Throne of God, past the tree of life, again offering year-round fruit, and now also providing desperately-needed healing to the nations. It’s a clear message for us!

Both the people who wrote the early chapters of Genesis, and John of Patmos who gave us the book of Revelation, were writing at a time of community crisis. Each of their communities was crushed by a powerful, upstream empire; Babylon and Rome respectively. Each community was looking for God to help them with the terrible suffering they were enduring. Their misery was caused by the same thing; the selfish abuse of power by a ruling elite; people of the great cities who sucked up all the goods, and ultimately even the lives of the people of the lands they colonised.

The first river flowed out of Eden to water the garden. People were placed in this garden which was able to provide for everyone’s needs. Yet some wanted more, and they took it, bringing a curse on the ground, our Mother. Human development has been a curse on the land ever since. And yet in Revelation, at the end, God is offering the River of the Water of Life again. This time, very surprisingly, it’s coming from a city to bring healing to the lands; to a renewed Earth, not a new one.

The river at the beginning of our Scriptures and the river at their end both bring life. They are one and the same river. They’re a beautiful image of God coming to us both from our past and from our future along the stream of eternal life. One of the most amazing things about God’s relationship with us is that God approaches us in all time. God comes from our past as we saw in Genesis, and in today’s vision from Revelation, we also see God coming to us from our future. And all the while, God is with us here and now. Do we choose to be upstreamers, entitled and detached, or downstreamers, Earth’s grateful servants and committed protectors?   Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Season of Creation 3A Outback–Wilderness Sunday-Joel 1 8-10, 17-20 Ps 18 6-19 Rom 8 18-27 Mt 3 13–4 2

In my last parish, we did something the Archbishop’s requiring all parishes to do again now; we worked together to develop a Mission Action Plan – a MAP. This parish well knows that a mission’s something you’re sent to accomplish. Anyway, we prayed, thought and discussed what God might want us to do. Eventually, it became clear that God’s mission for us was to work alongside Aboriginal people. We did this in several ways over following years. One of the upshots of that mission is that Vicky, the girls and I have been adopted into a central desert family in Papunya NT, and one of their daughters in particular is now also our daughter.

When Shekayla came to do her schooling here, Adelaide was quite bewildering for her. We confronted her with a strange wilderness filled with rules and regulations about time, money, strange manners and customs, and endless bureaucracy. Her home languages don’t need words for time or number, let alone words to translate our crazy form-filling language; Centrelink, Medicare, bank account applications, and forms for work-experience and school excursions. We’re raised in this jungle of expectations and rules. It was all a painful, steep learning curve for Shekayla.

The shoe was on the other foot when we went to visit Papunya with a bunch of young people. Shekayla wanted to show us a rock-hole where Papunya’s kids like to swim. We drove out towards the nearby ranges, then the track gave out. So we climbed out onto a very stony, slippery landscape. We had sturdy shoes on, which was good; the stones on the ground slipped and moved under us, and they were ferociously hot from the sun. But Shekayla and her cousin Tobias didn’t bother with shoes. They skipped off ahead of us, absolutely at home in this pathless wilderness, laughing and calling out to each other in the beautiful, bubbly language the Land had given her people over tens of thousands of years. It was a precious vision. We saw children who were fully themselves and completely at one with their ancestral lands; kids we love and care for, but whom we really hardly knew.

The Land and its people in harmony; it’s a belonging we’re trying to recover during this Season of Creation. Genesis portrays our common origin with all life – Earth as Mother of all living – and also our tragic loss of that belonging. Today St Paul takes the image of Earth our Mother to a new level in Romans 8. Creation is groaning in labour pains, and we’re there in the birthing centre with her; yet at the same time, we’re in the birth canal – we are to be part of the anticipated, renewed Creation.

Paul reminded us today of the curse which God declared would befall Earth as a consequence of human recklessness. We’d already heard this over the past two weeks in Genesis. Paul goes on to name that curse as creation’s bondage to decay. We resonate with the truth of his words as we did with Genesis.

Because we’re seeing this curse in action right now, and at a catastrophic level. If we hadn’t been plundering the wilderness and making its wild creatures our food, this pandemic and several other of our recent plagues may never have happened.

So we groan with Earth as she endures this abuse. Yet as we’ve just noticed, Paul hears these groans as something more than the sounds of undeserved agony. When he says they’re the cries of Creation in labour, he injects a wonderful hope into the pain. The story’s not headed for inevitable tragedy; God doesn’t want it to be like that. New life is summoned from death; new life is revealed as old life reborn to goodness and health. Somehow, as we see in today’s Gospel, that’s connected with a willingness to endure the isolation and fear of wilderness; a wilderness of unknowing fear, and fearful hope, of hunger and isolation.

It was a good start for us to enter the risky wilderness out beyond Papunya. And it’ll probably be better if, next time we’re there, we go out one at a time; alone. Being alone with Creation, we discover connections with our deepest selves – and with our Maker. We might even learn to hear the groanings Paul describes: Creation groaning in labour pains; our own groaning as we wait to be born into the fulness of a redeemed, renewed Creation; and the groaning of the Holy Spirit, helping us in our weakness; interceding for us with sighs too deep for words.

Celia Kemp writes, When I first left the big cities for Australia’s north someone said ‘that’s great, you can stay for a year and it will look excellent on your CV’. [The implication was that] successful folk can’t spend too long out of the main game. Anywhere else is to be travelled through briefly to mine for experiences that can be used to benefit us back in the real world. ‘A packaged tour of the absolute’, to steal Annie Dillard’s term. … However if we duck the tour bus mentality and spend long enough in the desert the seemingly unchanging surroundings force a massive change in us. We let go of the illusion that we are somehow more special than others.

Surprisingly, one day, we are even glad to be rid of it. For we are free like we have never been before. Celia Kemp: Into the desert. Day 40
So much about our settled, city lives cuts us off from this. And the support systems we require to keep our ever-more-demanding cities alive are the engine room of the destruction we are wreaking on our world.

Plunge into the [wilderness] beyond your own comprehension … Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge. … That’s the way of the cross. You can’t find it yourself, so you must let [God] lead you as though you were a blind person. It’s not you, no person, no living creature, but God, who instructs you by word and Spirit in the way you should go. Martin Luther quoted in Bonhoeffer Nachfolge 83 Which way do you hear God calling us? Which wilderness?

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Land Sunday – Gen 3 14-19 & 4 8-16, Ps 139 7-12, Rom 5 12-17, Mt 12 38-40

My Mum has very, very green thumbs. When we were small, she transformed our garden from a sandy waste into a lush jungle. And she didn’t stop at our garden. When neighbours moved out anywhere up or down our street, before the next people arrived, she and a friend would duck in and plant things in those gardens too. So as I grew up, I watched our street slowly turn green. Mum’s every spare moment was spent in the garden, shadowed by a Labrador, several bantams waiting for her to lift the next pot and reveal the slaters beneath, and Andrew, our bluetongue lizard, ready for Mum to hand over each juicy snail she found.

Once Mum fell seriously ill – a very bad reaction to a cholera shot. Nothing seemed to help, and it wasn’t certain she’d survive. After days of anxiety, she whispered to Dad that if she could only get her hands back in the soil; she was sure it’d help her get better. Moments later, Dad was back with a bucketful of dirt. Her hands went straight into it, and almost immediately her recovery began. Soil bacteria have amazing healing properties – even for depressive illness.1. We come from the soil, we living things. Soil and us, we have a symbiotic relationship.

Today, Land Sunday, we focus on that connection; particularly how we’re looking after our relationship with the ground; looking after the health of the soils we depend on. Today’s two episodes from the early chapters of Genesis address our relationship with the land. They’re not very pleasant reading. We came in at the moment where Adam and Eve were banished from the garden because they’d betrayed God’s trust. Then we moved on to the story of a cold-blooded murder; Cain killed his brother Abel. These are early episodes in a series of catastrophes described in Gen 3–11 which Christian tradition knows as ‘the fall’; terrible choices which lock humanity out of paradise and alienate us from each other and from God.

We normally focus on the way ‘the fall’ alienated humanity from God. But today is Land Sunday, so we’re also reminded to look at the impact of ‘the fall’ both on Earth herself, and on our relationship with the soil. Significant when you think, only last week, we named soil our Mother; Earth, the Mother of all living things.
In the first episode we heard today – the expulsion from paradise – something odd happened. As well as suffering the consequences of our folly – one of which was the curse of patriarchy – God declared that the ground was cursed because of what we’d done. It’s like that story of The Portrait of Dorian Grey. The effects of the shocking things a man did were only visible in his portrait – something outside him, which he hid from others. That’s very like what we see in today’s world. Here in Australia, where land is still being clear-felled, the soil soon degrades or disappears in dust storms. It’s lost its living protection from erosion. But the perpetrators are nowhere in sight; we’re off stage left doing the same thing somewhere else. It’s clearly happening, but today yet another government is gutting the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. But more on that another day.

The second episode we read in Genesis today saw Cain murder his brother Abel. Cain is earlier identified as a tiller of the land; a settled farmer growing crops. Abel is a keeper of sheep; a nomadic shepherd. I can’t think of a time or a country where these two ways of life have not been in conflict, and nomads / subsistence farmers are always the losers. Right now in the Amazon, the Arctic, Mongolia, Indonesia the Philippines, and PNG, they’re still being evicted and murdered by people who replace their way of life with the settled agriculture our insatiable cities demand.

The American biblical scholar, Ched Myers, believes these stories in Genesis preserve the perspective of ancient indigenous peoples towards the ‘curse’ of aggressive, colonising civilisations.2. Today’s chapters were probably written by exiled Israelites trying to tell the story and the lesson of their abuse – in code, of course – first the extortion they endured from their own kings, and now from Babylon who had carried them off into slavery. These chapters describe the early days in ‘the longest war in history, in which relentlessly expanding civilizations conquer and exploit the Earth and all who live symbiotically with her. It continues to our day.’ Myers p. 90. And of course, it’s happening here too; the insatiable demands of our so-called civilization continue systematically to ruin traditional ways of life.

So what’s a faithful response? Our collect prayer reminded me of a poem by W.H. Auden; ‘In memory of W.B. Yeats’. Auden wrote, Earth receive an honoured guest, William Yeats is laid to rest. Our prayer of the day says something like that about us. We are sojourners passing through Creation. May we be gracious guests and mindful stewards … of your good world.

I confess I haven’t lived my waking life thinking ‘I’m a guest on Earth’; but I am. And when I do stop to think about it, it means that ideas I take for granted – like property ownership or citizenship – these ideas suddenly lose their solidity. They’re not real things; just agreed figments of our communal imagination. No I’m a guest; a steward; not an owner. Guests and stewards have obligations. And as we were reminded last week our first vocation is as servants and protectors of what is God’s.

I believe the faithful response that today’s scriptures call from us is a change of perspective. A change of perspective can change things dramatically. The land provides us guests and stewards with our life. Our deluded notions of ownership and entitlement underpin the destructiveness of our ‘advanced civilisation’. They’re an affront to the hospitality of Earth, and to God who made us to be her servants and protectors. Let’s turn from the curses; enmity, pain, endless toil and patriarchy.

This week, let’s focus our prayers on a simple change in perspective; I’m a guest, a steward; not an owner. Let’s remember the stories which tell how God is always calling us back from the dangers of jealousy and arrogance. Let’s go home today, stick our fingers in some soil, and remember that it’s God’s gift of life. Amen.

1 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306452207001510
2 In N.C. Habel, D. Rhoads, & H.P. Santmire (Eds.), The Season of Creation: A Preaching Commentary p.88