Palm Sunday 13-4-2025 – Phil 2.5-11, Luke 22.14 – 23.56

^{Phil 2.5-8} Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.

Our study group last Tuesday was deeply struck by these words from the Philippians hymn that we just heard read to us this morning.

The Creator and giver of Life empties himself of all power, eternity and majesty – lets go of it. And instead, takes up a simple, mortal existence. And today we see him give up even that; give up even the simple, mortal life that remains to him, in order to ensure our life; my life, your life.

Jesus is the Lord of Life; the Creator. Yet from his own lips in the Passion Gospel, we heard him say just now that he chooses utter humility. And that’s what he wants the powerful among us to do too. In our time of even more than usually hubristic leaders, his words send a very special message to our world.

^{Luke 22.25-27} The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over those people are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.

Jesus put himself at the mercy of all the arrogance and self-delusion of humans who wielded power and absorbed it in his loving humility, exposing its emptiness for all to see. Then he took it with him to the Cross so it should die with him.

His call to his disciples – and they would soon wield great authority – his call to them and to us was always to take the role of the new kid on the block. To work from a posture of humility; to live naïve in the strength of his love. Most of all, he called those of us who are given any authority to let go of the delusion that it gives us any rights or privileges. Instead, he calls us to take hold of the responsibility it lays on us to love humbly. To turn to the sinner on a friendly, neighbouring cross and tell them how they can also be with Christ in paradise today.       Amen

Lent 5C 6-3-2025 – Isaiah 43 .16-21

On one of Richard Fidler’s conversation programmes, he talked with Andrew Harper; a cameleer who took people into the desert for a month at a time. Andrew described how, at the end of each journey, as they walked back into Birdsville his fellow travellers would become sad. Andrew talked about the sadness of ‘leaving my best self back there in the desert’; of his longing to be back there in the silence and the clarity of what’s truly important in life. He described our life in civilisation as a place where we just can’t get that sort of clarity.

This Lent, we’ve been reading scriptures that have taken us into the desert. This Lent has directed our focus at the three aspects of desert spirituality for us. There’s the literal desert that covers much of this Land and shapes what we think is our national consciousness. Then there are metaphorical deserts. The dry times of apathy and loneliness inside us which threaten to consume our life away. And then there are desiccating, enervating setbacks in our community and family life; things like selfishness and indifference.

Our lectionary this Lent has given us weekly Bible stories about people in the desert. Those people have shown us how, when you find ourselves in a desert, you can find a place where you learn to depend on God. One insightful friend told me, the desert isn’t about the absence of God; it’s about depending on God. That’s what we saw first this Lent. We went with Jesus after his baptism as he was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted for forty days. In the face of temptation, Jesus’ response of utter loyalty to God showed us how to stop depending on the transient supports of our everyday life, and instead, depend on God who is faithful.

The next week, we joined Sarai and Abram who’d returned to the Promised Land from Egypt. They felt confronted by their advancing age and the prospect of dying childless and forgotten. God’s response to their prayer happens to be the reason you and I are gathered here today. The desert isn’t about the absence of God; it’s about depending on God. Two weeks ago, we read in Ps 63 how young David was driven into the Judean desert by Saul’s jealousy; the king’s soldiers were ordered to kill David. But there in the desert, he was revealed to us and to himself as the amazing person God had known he was all along.

And last week, it was the Prodigal Son strutting off to his new life in a foreign land. He left his parents in a desert of grief and his brother in the dry place of righteous indignation – never mind the spiritual wasteland he sold himself into.

But amidst his tragedy, Jesus’ parable revealed the beautiful nature of God’s love and grace. That loving grace was the only hope for that family, for their village, and it is our hope too. And it’s there for each to discover in our own private deserts.

These private deserts are part of everyone’s life journeys; places where there seems to be no nourishment or hope; where grief, unforgiveness or disappointment control us. This Lent surprises us as we discover God’s healing love in such dry places. Each desert story has been about the transforming renewal of whole communities; and ultimately about making Earth the place that it should and can be.

The challenge is huge and counter-intuitive. Thinking of dry places on a community-wide scale, many of us will remember the millennium drought. Talk was all about dredging the Murray mouth as we franticly tried to keep the river and the lakes alive. Talk was also about the selfish disregard people from this or that state showed their fellow Australians. It was a bitter time – the water more bitter by the day; the constant to and fro of bitter accusation and angry refusal to turn from the desert of blind selfishness tore at the soul of our national community.

But back to our scriptures. After the past four weeks of temptation, doubt, fear, foolishness, grief and anger, today’s passage from Isaiah 43 is a wonderful refreshment. God is doing much more than just breaking a drought. Thus says the Lord, I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert … to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise. We mustn’t miss the fact that the people still have to cross the desert. But God is with us; making a way, giving us water to drink, sustaining and helping us do what God’s people are always called to do; to offer that water to the world.

Our call is to leave the comfort and security of the familiar and head into the desert, because the desert is the native habitat of our souls; where we can truly be present to God. From there, our praises arise from lived experience as we become instruments of God’s desire to quench the thirst of all the families of Earth.

We don’t have much more time in this year’s Lenten desert. As we prepare for the season of Hope, let’s savour every moment of the clarity we know here in the desert. Those people Andrew the cameleer led back into Birdsville all feeling the letdown of leaving the desert; they’d given the desert a try, and something really important happened. It’s worth us giving it a try too! The desert isn’t about the absence of God; it’s about depending on God.                                              Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 13b  –  John 6.51-58

Isn’t it funny how sharing food is okay within families, but not outside them? It’s strictly limited to families. Double-dip your sausage roll in the sauce at a party and you very quickly become unpopular. Even families don’t do their usual garbage-guts routines in public; there’s not much plate swapping at a restaurant.

There are lots of taboos around food. Mouth to mouth food sharing is strictly limited to the most intimate relationships of all (pelicans vulning). Break that taboo with someone and they’ll carry on as if you’ve poisoned them. Yes, there are lots of taboos to do with food. The strongest taboo of them all is against cannibalism – eating human flesh or drinking human blood. For Jewish people particularly, consuming any blood is an absolute taboo because the blood is the life ^{(Gen 9.4, Lev 3.17 + fat!, 17.10-14, Deut 16, 23)}.

Nothing daunted, Jesus tells the Jewish people of his own home-district that they should eat his flesh and drink his blood; he says it over and over again. Naturally, they’re scandalised by this. But with our hearing, shaped by our familiarity with the language of Holy Communion, we miss a lot of the scandal. But we mustn’t miss it. Christian proclamation is meant to bring people to a decision: and scandal always calls you to take a stand. So if we read this passage from John through the soft focus of a comfortable, routine communion ritual, we won’t be confronted; we won’t decide. But that’s not how it should be.

Jesus doesn’t leave offence to chance; he makes sure he forces people to a choice. Who’s with me? Are you family? Do we share food from each other’s plates, forks, spoons, mouths!? Or are you going to leave? Does that sort of sharing scandalise you? Is it too intimate? Well it’s the only way it can be. This is how John confronts us.

For me, John’s gospel actually does give us an image of mouth-to-mouth feeding to teach us how very intimately God gives us life through Jesus. And it’s not the only time: remember Ezekiel being given God’s words to eat in the form of a scroll in preparation for his preaching. ^{Ezek 3.3} But John does it much more confrontingly.    In 6.57, Jesus says, Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.

Let’s take that one phrase at a time. …Just as the living Father sent me … How did the Father send Jesus? John began this gospel by telling us how Jesus came to us from God? In the first chapter of John, we read that Jesus is the Word of God; that this Word was God; and that this Word became flesh and lived among us. …Just as the living Father sent me … We’re reminded to think about how God sent Jesus. That sends us back to the beginning, and in the beginning, we’re effectively told that Jesus—the Word – came from the mouth of God – was spoken by God. So that’s the first phrase.

Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father…In this next phrase, and I live because of the Father…connects us with chapter 1 again. There we read that the Word, spoken from the mouth of God, became flesh, and lived among us. But the sentence began with just as. These words mean we’re waiting for the next part of a comparison— Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.

Jesus is saying, I came from the mouth of God. I live because I come from God, and so if that life from God’s mouth is my flesh, and you eat my flesh, you will also have within you the life that comes from God. Out of God’s mouth, and into yours and mine, divine life is transmitted.

It might feel like I’m labouring the point a bit, but I want you to see how the evangelist is pushing us to see the confronting intimacy there is in – what is for us – the language of the Eucharist; the language of Holy Communion. Genesis 2.7 springs to mind; then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being – there’s the first kiss of life, for all you St John’s life-saving graduates out there.

In both our dominical sacraments, Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, the life of God passes into us mouth to mouth. In baptism, we believe it’s by the breath – the Spirit, who enters us and gives us our new life in Jesus. And in communion, it’s by the bread and wine – the body and blood of Christ that we receive and put in our mouths. The bread and wine nourish us in extraordinary ways. They make us grow, and they assert, week by week, that we are now God’s flesh and blood; the family of God; the body of Christ. We are what we eat.

And that changes the world for us, doesn’t it. I get an idea of just how changed it is when I remember how St Augustine of Hippo wrote ‘I shall never be separated from God’ ^{Commentary on Psalm 26/2, 18}.This was for Augustine the most important fact about the world that he discovered inside and outside himself.

He discovered that this is a beautiful world of land and sea and sky in which each individual is most precious. It’s a world in which that astounding, transcendent wonder that is God walks the streets with human beings as our neighbour, friend, doctor, sister, brother and parent. It is no wonder that Augustine heard this as a consoling message to a struggling humanity:

Wherever you go on earth, (he wrote) however long you remain, the Lord is close to you. So don’t worry about anything. The Lord is nearby. ^{Sermon 171, 5.}

Mouth to mouth intimacy.   Closer than we are to ourselves.           Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost +12 B  – 2 Sam 18; Ps 130; Eph 4.25-5.2; Jn 6.35, 41-51

Personal relationships and good confrontation in the Church

I said at the beginning of the service that today’s readings all speak about confrontation. And the Psalm reminds us of the deep water we are in. So confrontation – good confrontation – must be our theme; out of deep water and into a lifeboat. So let’s do that with the guidance of our Ephesians passage today.

The letter to the Ephesians has a strong focus on relationships between Christians. Its second chapter effectively says that we’re all in the same boat; that we all started in dangerous water outside the boat, and God rescued us. WCC? It’s a great equaliser. If we’re all in the lifeboat together, it makes no sense if any us claim to be superior to others, or treat others badly, or if there are divisions between us. Yes us, because the way we read Scripture assumes that this letter is in some sense addressed to us. It assumes we’ve all been dragged out of dangerous waters and into the lifeboat. And our state of grace – our status as rescued people – means God should have a lot of say in how we live with all the others God has also rescued.

A Christian lifeboat-community is no place for anyone to dominate or control others. What you’d hope would define all of us is gratitude to God for our rescue; something to bind all of us together in humble joy. Does this sound like hopeless idealism to you? Do you think this writer is naïve about human nature? Oh no! Today’s passage contains the best-known ancient statement there is about anger management: that famous saying, Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. What this sentence is essentially telling us is not shy away from necessary confrontation. If we’ve got an issue – if we’ve been wronged, or witnessed an injustice, this old saying means deal with it; and as soon as possible.

Letting anger fester, letting it sour relationships; letting it ruin our sleep, our appetite; letting it make us grumpy tomorrow – or even for the rest of our life – whatever way this anger shows up in us, the price of delaying resolving it can be very high indeed. So there are very good reasons for going ahead with confrontation when it’s necessary, and this old saying clearly endorses doing so. But this passage also tells us that when we do confront, we are to be imitators of God. Good confrontation can be very Godly; very constructive; very healing.

At its heart, good confrontation enables two things. It enables the truth to be acknowledged, and by clearing the air, it can make genuine forgiveness and healing possible. But neither forgiveness nor healing are ever achieved by a style of confrontation which dominates or humiliates. Remember, we’re all in the same lifeboat! In fact, there are specific instructions against this distortion of good confrontation;

³⁰ …do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom [we are] sealed for the day of redemption ³¹ Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, ³² and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.

Those attitudes we’re called to give up – bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, slander and malice – are dividers; and they’re often old, ingrained fears and resentments we might carry from our past; nothing to do with the dispute we might be managing today. Today, we’re being urged to choose to leave these behind and seek today’s truth together. We want to arrive at a place of reconciliation, having journeyed well, so we’re still together when we get there.

For me, this can begin by remembering the love God has shown in forgiving me and the Holy Spirit working to transform me. Then it seems perfectly reasonable that God asks me to give up my bad habits of suspicion and cynicism; to give someone else the benefit of the doubt like God has so often done with me.

To return to the lifeboat analogy, when we’re baptised as Christians, we celebrate together our rescue from the deep waters of death. Baptism is the moment when that rescue officially happens. We record it in a book: ‘today, such and such became a full member of the Church of God – came out of the deep waters of death and joined everyone else in our lifeboat’. We record it in a book, and we also write it on our foreheads with holy oil, signifying the anointing of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit moves in and spirits of fear, division and self-righteous anger are given their marching orders. We’re committed to work full-time with God’s help now.

We’re officially a family in baptism. And like any family, the Christian Church has its uncomfortable moments – rough edges have to keep being chipped off. And day by day, we learn to live together.

It has its confronting moments. But we are called to make them healing, reconciling ones, by always remembering what God has done, and does, every day for all of us, and before the sun goes down, making sure we’re ready for the next day.

Let’s pray.   ^{(The prayer of St Richard of Chichester.  1197 – 3 April 1253)} Thanks be to you, our Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits you have given us, for all the pains and insults you have borne for us. O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother, may we know you more clearly, love you more dearly, and follow you more nearly, day by day. Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 11B – Transfiguration  – 2 Sam 11. 26–12 .13a;  Mark 9. 2-10

Last week I said a few words to introduce the shocking story we heard about King David’s adultery with Bathsheba, the wife of his loyal soldier, Uriah the Hittite. We heard some of the story last week; about a king who stays home from battle and lets his troops face the danger without him, his adultery, the pregnancy, the failed cover up, and then the plot to arrange Uriah’s death. I said it was a shocking story – that the scriptures don’t gild the lily; that they show what dreadful things people get up to. But then they also show us how God deals with wrongs like this.

Today we hear how God responds. The story’s moved on. David’s plot to have Uriah murdered has succeeded, and after Bathsheba’s time of mourning is over, she becomes David’s newest wife. All good? Will David get off scot free? No way. Now God’s response. ‘The thing that David had done displeased the Lord, ^12.1 and the Lord sent Nathan to David.’ When a prophet comes to speak to you, watch out!

Nathan tells David a parable which exposes David in two ways. It exposes how vile his shabby, selfish and cowardly behaviour was. And it also reveals David’s very clear sense of what’s right and wrong. David’s anger was greatly kindled …. He said to Nathan, ‘As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die …’. And because David can tell right from wrong, it means there’s hope. Shocking wrong has been done, but God’s way of dealing with it means there is hope.

Now Nathan accuses David to his face. He recounts all the blessings God has showered on David, and what punishment might even up this betrayal of trust. Our study group thought the threatened punishment unfairly targeted David’s family rather than him directly. But hyperbole has its place and the desired response was spoken; David said to Nathan, ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’ God’s priority of the poor and vulnerable over the rich and powerful has been made crystal clear.

Our cycle of readings won’t finish this story next week; we’ll have to read it at home. But today, we are given Psalm 51. Many Psalms have a superscription in the Hebrew which says who it’s written for, who wrote it, and sometimes when it relates to a particular event. Psalm 51’s superscription says, ‘To the choir leader. A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.’ Psalm 51 is David’s penitential Psalm on this time in his life. It’s also a testimony to his hope in God’s steadfast love; his hope that we can trust God to renew us – to create in us a clean heart – even if we’ve behaved as badly as David did.

I remember as a new Christian I’d done something hurtful and said some very unkind things. I felt ashamed about this for a long time. When my priest asked me to help in the church, I said I didn’t think I should, because I wasn’t a good enough person. He didn’t agree. He said those hurtful actions and words weren’t who I really was; that deep down, there was a more real me; the one who could see those actions and words for what they were; the one who wanted to do better; to leave those old ways behind. He could see better things in me than I could see in myself.

Jesus’ transfiguration does the same thing. It’s the beginning of another stage in his disciples’ transfiguration. Jesus was revealed to be much more than they could ever have imagined. The Lord of time – present with his friends, and at the same time, present with people from the olden days – Elijah and Moses. The Lord of light –light emanating from him rather than simply shining on him. The transfiguration reveals who Jesus really is. His friends wouldn’t get it until later; not until they saw what he would do for them and for all of us in his crucifixion and resurrection.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. Why would he say that? It’s like us at a funeral; we can have the experience of suddenly realising there’s much more to a person than we ever knew when we hear what people tell us about them at their funeral. All at once, we see what they’d really done with the life they were given. It’s a revelation, isn’t it. Jesus showed he knew this same limitation in his disciples on the way down the mountain of Transfiguration. They wouldn’t get it until they’d seen him on the Cross, and then seen him rise again. But their experience of his transfiguration opened them to the true meaning of the cross.

What does all this mean for us? We are people called to live lives that emulate the example of Jesus. And despite what we might think of ourselves, we are to trust that Jesus sees something much greater in each of us than we dare to imagine; in fact he infuses it into us by the Spirit. We get a taste of this when people can see that there’s more to you or me than we believe of ourselves. Sometimes other people are given the gift of telling us who we really are. Or we can do it for them.

All those years ago, that priest held a mirror up to me; held it on an angle I hadn’t imagined before. And nothing has been the same since. I pray that this might be our gift to each other, and to our community; that we are compassionate, encouraging mirrors who reveal people’s inner lives; that we reveal the hope God offers – death overcome by life. Let the Transfigured Christ, his light and love, his belief in us, shape us as instruments of his Transfiguration, showing all who we can be.  Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost +7A – 16-7-23 – Genesis 25 19-34 Romans 8 1-11

No condemnation for those in Christ Jesus – two-way spiritual stem-cell transplant

We get a confronting entrée to our scriptures this morning. During this Pentecost season, we’re looking at Romans particularly, but we’ve also been tracking with the story of the Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs – Abraham and Sarah, their son Isaac and his wife Rebecca, and today, their twin boys, Jacob and Esau. This was the family through whom God promised all families of earth would be blessed. This glorious promise from God was Esau’s birthright: he should bear this blessing to all subsequent history. Yet he gave it all away for a bowl of red lentil stew and some bread. And Jacob’s dealing with this stolen birthright was hardly more edifying.

Esau had a case of the ‘hangries’, and Jacob was a tad more selfish than is desirable in a biblical patriarch. They serve as compelling case studies in how not to treat God’s blessings. Poor old God – that great vision of all families of the Earth being blessed – how do you recover with drop-kicks like them in the saddle? The attitude we see in Jacob and Esau today is weakness, temptation, proneness to sin – a ‘me-first-now’ attitude – a choice for alienation from God and neighbour. We might call it the human condition. But these were the grandchildren of Abraham and Sarah, for heaven’s sake! How could the rot have set in so soon? Weak, selfish, Godless.

Paul uses a technical term to name this human condition – flesh / sarx. We’ve heard the word ten times in this morning’s Romans reading. It doesn’t mean our bodies. There’s another word he uses for that: soma / body. When Paul uses the word sarx / flesh, he’s naming the selfish, thoughtless attitude we saw in Jacob and Esau; the same shadow-side of human nature that afflicts the world now with all its catastrophic humanitarian and environmental consequences. Sarx is a word from which we get the word sarcophagus – which is appropriate as the thoughtless, selfish proneness to sin (alienation from God and each other) does lead to death.

But don’t despair. We heard Paul first announce in 3.21-22 – the righteousness of God has been disclosed, … ²² the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ. Today he expounds this more fully and joyfully in chapter 8.^1-2 There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.² For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. The Spirit of life in Christ Jesus ­– the Spirit leads to life, the life of flesh leads to death. Flesh and Spirit; the choices we hear named often in today’s passage.

If we think of ourselves as descendants of Jacob and Esau for a moment – with the petty, selfish values they bequeathed to posterity – their self-seeking characters have been apparently fused onto our spiritual DNA – what hope could there be? Plenty! This claim of Paul’s – The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free – announces that something like a spiritual stem-cell transplant has taken place to heal those who are in Christ. And Paul describes this as being something like a two-way transplant; our DNA / stem cells into Jesus, and his into us. ² The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from this curse of an inheritance. But how?

In v. 3, Paul describes what’s happened. Jesus takes on our condition in place of his. ³ God … sends his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh (in our likeness), and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh (specifically, the flesh he took on). He looks like us – embodies our likeness – that of people with self-centred, thoughtless minds and hearts. But Jesus the human never wavers from a life of compassionate, selfless, tough love. And on the Cross, as a real human, he takes the full consequence of human selfish, thoughtless, Godlessness (sarx/flesh). And he takes its power with him to the grave, where it belongs.

In v. 4, Paul says Jesus did this ⁴ so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. Jesus offers us the way of the Spirit and life in place of the way of the flesh and death. A gift we receive not by works, but by faith. It’s all his work; his alone. When we walk in the faith of Jesus, when his Spirit takes up residence in us, the goodness and faithfulness of Jesus is somehow reckoned to us as righteousness by God. The way to death is replaced by the way to life. This choice of Spirit or flesh – life or death – peace with God or alienation – is the subject of the rest of today’s passage. Jesus takes our death into himself, buries it, and in return offers us his risen life.

This rings true for me because of what I see Jesus doing throughout the Gospels. Paul didn’t have the Gospels – his letters all predate them. But we do have them, and they illustrate in story what Paul has discerned and proclaimed.  I remember particularly the story where Jesus is at dinner with Simon the Pharisee. A so-called ‘sinful woman’ comes and washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, dries them with her hair and anoints them with costly perfume, kissing his feet all the while. Everyone else is scandalised that Jesus lets such a woman touch him. Jesus takes her shame from her and in return, gives her his honour. ^{Luke 7.36f}

For me, Paul is writing of just such an exchange between Jesus and me; between Jesus and you. Paul is right to declare what he does: There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Thanks be to God!       Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Easter 7 A – Ac 1.6-14, Ps 68.1–10, 32–35, Ist Pt 5, Jn 17.1–11

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

Holy Father, protect them in your Name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. ^{Jn 17.11b.} John 17 begins each year’s international Week of Prayer for Christian unity – in the lead-up to the first Christian Pentecost.

Today’s gospel reading is the beginning of a passage that the Church calls Jesus’ Great High Priestly Prayer. Here we see Jesus as priest, praying for those in his care that we may be one. What do we make of Jesus as our Great High Priest – which means someone who intercedes with God on our behalf? How do we take hold of that? I’m used to encountering this idea of prayer in churches where saints and angels are also asked to pray for us.

I’ve had conversations over many years with people who view that sort of prayer with deep suspicion. They see it more as a sort of superstitious lobbying than prayer. They feel that ‘real prayer’ should be between just me and God – direct, with no intermediaries. They feel that teaching people to pray by asking Mary or Jude or Christopher or anyone else to pray for us is some sort of heresy. But then I also hear of God answering just such indirect prayers in quite spectacular ways.

And then there are plenty of faithful Christians who look at us Prayer-Book Anglicans with at least one eyebrow raised: Can’t you pray unless it’s written down in front of you? they ask. What sort of prayer is that? Where’s the spontaneity? How do you expect the Spirit to find room to move if your prayers have all been written down years in advance? Providentially, the Holy Spirit is astonishingly versatile – not constrained at all by time; God is very broad minded; and Jesus is welcoming of the most unlikely.

You might think it’s pretty odd for me to be talking about all these differences between Christians on this first day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. No lobbyist worth their salt should do that. But I think it’s really important to enter this week in the clear knowledge that we are all different, and yet, we are all alike loved by God. It’s really important that we don’t confuse a week of prayer for Christian unity with hopes of a week of prayer for Christian uniformity. The two things are not the same. If we try to define unity as uniformity, we are violating something that is fundamental to our created being, and to all our different ways of belonging to Jesus.

Story: The week of prayer for Christian unity in Jerusalem.

Something that’s absolutely basic to the faith of all varieties of Christians is that Jesus did what he did for us before we had taken a single step towards him. So no-one was out in front; no-one stood out as being ‘right’.

St Paul puts it this way in Romans 5.^6-8

… while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. ⁸ But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

What Paul is saying is that our relationship with God doesn’t depend on whether or not we’ve got our theology straight. Paul – once a persecutor of the Church himself – learned that our relationship with God depends purely and simply on one thing; the gracious love of Jesus. And that goes for everyone, even persecutors of Christians.

None of us can say another Christian’s way of responding to God’s is unacceptable to God. It’s up to God to decide. And frankly, what God is gracious enough to accept is always likely to astonish us. That is, quite literally, our saving grace.

Jesus prayed that we may be one. That prayer is the reason for the week of prayer for Christian Unity. The first unity we need to recall is that despite our squabbles and failings, we all stand equal before God – all alike, loved by God. And the proof of this is Jesus’s coming for our sake before any of us knew him. So much for our partisan, tribal disunity. That’s a different world. Our unity is in the welcoming, all-embracing call of Jesus.

But then what? This is where the link with prayer comes in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

Prayer opens us to the in-breaking of the Holy Spirit. She will receive our multitudes of apparently conflicting various yearnings, and somehow weave that chaotic variety and contradictions into a blessing that is whole and unified – a blessing which can empower us to be Christ’s blessed presence in this world. This comes through the grace of unity – then effect of Jesus’ prayer – and our response.

Yes; we have agency in this. Sr Joan Chittister put it this way. She said that …prayer is not something given to us to change the world. It is meant to change us, so that we can change the world. Prayer is something given to us so that we can change the world.

I pray that we may join our Lord Jesus in his prayer that we may be one. May we overlook and even celebrate our variety – because that doesn’t seem to bother Him at all – and so let the world know that no-one can be separated from the love of God, in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Amen

Canon Bill Goodes

Fourth Sunday after Pentecost  2022  II Kings 5:1-14,  Psalm 30, Galatians 6:7 – 18,, Luke 10:1 – 12, 17 – 24

“Cure the sick who are there, and say to them ‘The Kingdom of God has come near’”  (Luke 10:9)

One of the buzz words of the Church today is that we should all be involved in Mission Action Planning, and last month your Parish Council spent some time putting together some preliminary ideas about such a plan for this parish.   The Anglican Consultative Council has identified five “Marks” of mission for the Anglican Communion —

1. To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
2. To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
3. To respond to human need by loving service
4. To transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation
5. To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth

These marks may give a wider picture of “mission” than we have traditionally used, but each depends on the others for completeness.  Our Mission Action Plan is to be aligned to these “marks”, and the whole congregation will have the opportunity to contribute to the formulation of this Plan, as well as being responsible for its implementation!

We noted last Sunday that Jesus had earlier sent the twelve apostles on his mission, and now, after their return, as Jesus’ face is “set to go to Jerusalem”, he expands the mission work-force to involve “seventy others”.  Some have seen this expansion to such a large number of “missioners”, as a sign that mission is the responsibility of the widest possible group of Jesus’ followers.  The whole congregation perhaps?   What do his instructions to the Seventy suggest about our responsibility?

First, it seems, we are to be bearers of a message of peace:  “first say ‘peace to this house!’”  “Peace”, for those who schooled in the Hebrew language, was a greeting that carried with it a richness which is much deeper than the absence of warfare — shalom meant more a total well-being, with everything in its proper place, and a fulness of life.  Our mission, Jesus’ mission, always has that as its primary characteristic — we want everyone to enjoy this richness of peace, and to have that fullness of life that Jesus came to bring.

Then there is an interesting little sidelight there about justice — “eating and drinking whatever they provide,  for the labourer deserves to be paid”.    This refers not only to our responsibility to provide for  suitable living arrangements for people like our parish priests, but also the wider responsibility for ensuring that there is a just recompense for all who work.   The present cost of living concern in our society makes the question of what workers are paid an urgent issue for our community and its leaders to wrestle with.

But there’s the other side of that clause, too: the missioners are to be “eating and drinking whatever they provide”.   There is a responsibility of the guest towards the hosts, the responsibility of identifying with the hosts’ culture, and not imposing foreign values on them.  One of the most encouraging aspects of much of the Church’s mission today is that it tries to value the culture of those to whom it takes the good news of Jesus, not forcing people to abandon their culture and ways (language even!) to conform to foreign customs  before they become Christians.  Those photos of aboriginal children on mission stations dressed in western clothes and forbidden to use their own language, still makes me profoundly uncomfortable!

One of the qualities valued by those who follow a Benedictine spirituality, is Stability.  This has its basis in the instruction Jesus gives his missioners, “Remain in the same house…do not move about from house to house”.   This can speak to us in two directions: the first is about the base for mission.  This parish has been the base for mission for generations of people who have called it “home”.  One of the principal tasks of the parish is to provide a stable basis for people to continue the mission of Christ’s disciples.  We need to remember that stability, and to ensure that the parish provides a consistent encouragement to all its members to continue in mission.  That consistency is greatly strengthened by our regular attendance at worship and other activities.  The whole “two by two” direction to missioners speaks of this mutual encouragement that Jesus saw as fundamental to the task.

The stability works in the other direction as well — in the “targets” of our mission.  Mission requires a commitment and a perseverance with those to whom we take the good news of Jesus.  No flitting about from target to target!

When we listen to Jesus’ instruction to his missioners in the context of our “Healing Sunday” service, of course we will focus on the “cure the sick who are there” direction.  Our care in prayer and loving concern for our sisters and brothers who are dis-eased in any way is fundamental to our mission.  Sometimes we will see improvements in the physical, mental, or spiritual well-being of those whose cure we are seeking, and perhaps there should be more prominence given to our thanksgiving for these improvements.  I like to think of us wanting our friends to experience “wholeness” — after all, that is the word that first became “hale” (as in “hale and hearty”), and then became “healthy”.  Such wholeness (health) has physical, mental and spiritual aspects to its description of a person’s complete well-being, and any move closer to such wholeness can be seen as “healing” and greeted with thanksgiving.

But notice the twice-repeated “the kingdom of God has come near” message that accompanies the curing of the sick who are there.  For the mission that we are involved in is all about the kingdom of God, and the later section of the long Gospel reading today sets out that wider context most clearly.  Jesus’ prayer “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent, and revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”   For the Mission that we are planning into action is not our mission — it is God’s mission, and God graciously reveals to us, infants that we are in so many ways, what this mission is, and how we might co-operate with God in it.  God bless us in our Mission Action Planning, and in our pursuit of that mission

Canon Bill Goodes

Third Sunday after Pentecost – II Kings 2:1-2, 6-14,  Psalm 77:1-2, 10-20, Galatians 51,13 – 25, Luke 9:51 – 62

“Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.”  (Galatians 5:16)

For something like the next 20 weeks, we will be observing the so-called “Sundays after Pentecost”, which we began last week.   This sequence will be interrupted only by the Church’s Dedication Festival, and the month of the Season of Creation.   During these weeks, we follow three independent series of readings:  the first will be the ones from the Old Testament (properly now referred to as “the Hebrew scriptures”), and these will focus on the work of the prophets — this series began last week with the prophet Elijah, and today introduces his successor, Elisha.   The Psalm that is set each Sunday is meant to pick up some part of the theme of the first reading.   Today’s is a lament in which the Psalmist comes to question what God is up to making him suffer like he is — but then he goes on to a confident recital of God’s past actions.

The Gospel readings this year are mainly from the Gospel of Luke and we come today to a turning point in the story that that Gospel portrays of Jesus’ ministry — the point in his ministry where he “sets his face to go to Jerusalem”.   John’s Gospel has Jesus in Jerusalem on a number of occasions before his final time there, but the other three see his move from Galilee to Jerusalem as something that only happens once — as the time of Jesus’ death approaches.   These writers are not so much interested in a kind of Google Timeline, which tracks Jesus’ movements in diary form:  rather they construct their telling of the story in a way that helps the reader to see the logic of Jesus’ ministry, rather than its calendar.

It is interesting, too, to see that Luke places this ‘turning to Jerusalem’ rather earlier in the story than do Matthew and Mark.   The first three chapters in Luke are taken up with the birth stories of Jesus and John Baptist, and then Jesus’ Baptism and Testing. This rite of commissioning and direction-setting  leads to a confident, popular ministry of healing, exorcising, teaching, feeding in the region of Galilee.    He is assisted in this ministry by his twelve apostles.   It is when they return from their mission of preaching the kingdom that Jesus reaches the turning point in his ministry in the crucial events recorded in chapter 9 — in that chapter we have the story where Peter acknowledges Jesus as Son of God, and then Jesus takes Peter, James and John to a mountain where he is transfigured in their sight.   And now, he “sets his face to go to Jerusalem”, because “the days drew near for him to be taken up”.   Over the next Sundays we will follow this journey, with stories of success and threat, until, ten chapters later, Jesus enters Jerusalem and the story of Holy Week begins.    As Luke tells the story, throughout this period “his face is set towards Jerusalem”, and what follows his entry into Jerusalem cannot be avoided:  it is who Jesus is!

The other series of readings is from the letters of Paul — beginning with the earliest of them, the letter to the Galatians.   Each of these letters tries to address particular situations in the life of the various congregations.  They do so by focussing on the person of Jesus, and on the appropriate way of life for followers of Jesus.   Today’s reading is a particularly significant one in describing that way of life — it lists the results of living a life only concerned with what our physical instincts and desires direct, and contrasts that with the fruits of living “in the Spirit”.

One of the principal situations that Paul addresses in this letter is that some people are telling the Galatian Christians they must follow the Jewish Law — and Paul’s experience of that Law is that it imposes a virtual slavery on people:  he contrasts this experience with the gift of freedom which life in Jesus brings:  “For freedom Christ has set us free…do not submit again to a yoke of slavery!” today’s reading began.   However, this very freedom, fundamental to the life in Christ, carries with it a danger:  is the Christian disciple so “free” that there are no boundaries to the disciple’s behaviour?  “you were called to freedom…only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence”.

To make quite clear what he means, Paul then goes on to contrast “gratifying the desires of the flesh” with “living by the Spirit”.    Now this contrast between “flesh” and “spirit” raises some questions for us, because we have grown up being told that “flesh is good” —  our bodies are beautiful, objects of delight, God-given, to be cherished and valued.    Hating the body is thought of as “Victorian”, and out of touch with who we really  are.   The Greek word used for flesh is sarx, which comes into English in words like “sarcoma” or “sarcophagus” , and in Latin this becomes “carnis”, which gives rise  in English to both “carnal” and “incarnation” — perhaps giving an idea of just how revolutionary Christ’s coming “in the flesh” really is!

When I am guiding school-children on a tour of the Cathedral, I often ask them to look at the outside of the building, and ask them which way it points.   While some would say immediately “it points to heaven”, I have to try to steer away from that crude geography, and talk of “higher things” or “pointing away from those concerns that are only to be found in the earthly”.   I don’t know how much that takes root in their understandings, but it is the same contrast that Paul is addressing. For Paul here is using the term “flesh” in the sense of a direction of life governed only by carnal desires, those desires that deal only with the satisfaction of my wants — with no relation to other people or to God.

When we live “according to the flesh”, he says, it results in fifteen types of anti-social and destructive behaviours — these are the obvious ones, and there are others like them.   When we live by the Spirit, are guided by the Spirit, instead we show the fruits of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

This list of “fruits” comes with its challenge to our personal ways of working with one another:  do we always demonstrate these in our relationships in family, neighbourhood, political life, or even in our world-wide considerations?   But what about our Church relationships?   I am afraid that too often we see congregations demonstrating the “works of the flesh” that Paul is talking about — things like “enmities, strife, quarrels, dissensions, factions”.   Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in researching the story of this Parish, this Diocese, the Anglican Communion, historians were able to look at our story as demonstrating “kindness, generosity, love, self-control”   I don’t know why the compilers of our lectionary left out the final verse of this chapter — perhaps it was too close to the bone even then:  it says “Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another”!

“Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh.”

Canon Bill Goodes

Second Sunday after Pentecost  2022  I Kings 19:1-4., 8-15a,  Psalm 42, Galatians 3:10 – 14, 23 – 29, Luke 8:26 – 39:

“What are you doing here, Elijah?”  (I Kings 19:9, 13)

Well, there’s a challenge for you!  It was a challenge for Elijah, and it is just as much a challenge for us.  “What are you doing here?

It came to Elijah who was feeling pretty depressed, Queen Jezebel, in all her power and deviousness, had made a public statement, on oath, that Elijah’s head was for the block!   Having a contract put on you by such a person would justify anyone fleeing for their life.  And Elijah had run for six weeks from Israel and finished up at Mount Sinai, the mountain of God.

We can feel a certain sympathy with the prophet here, as he answers the voice of God by saying “I have been very zealous for the Lord of hosts, for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant…killed your prophets…I alone am left, and they are seeking my life!”  When we think of how things used to be, and how this occasion would see the Church filled with parishioners and members of the Great Priory and their families and friends, we might well be feeling “I alone am left…!”  For that’s not how things are today:   we look around at who we are, all too conscious of our age and our many infirmities, and feel very much with the prophet.  And God says to us “What are you doing here?”

God responds to the prophet in two ways.  First, he shows Elijah something of God’s nature, and goes on to speak of God’s continuing call for the prophet.

God’s nature?  “Stand on the mountain before the Lord”  Then came the tempestuous wind, ripping the countryside to shreds — “but the Lord was not in the wind”.  Then came the trembling of the foundations as the earth rocked — “but the Lord was not in the earthquake”.  Then came a wild-fire, fearsome  and destructive in its intensity — “but the Lord was not in the fire”.  After the fire, “a sound of sheer silence” or “a mere whisper” — the older translations spoke of “a still small voice.”  Elijah then covered his face, stood outside the cave, and heard again the challenging voice “What are you doing here, Elijah?” I wonder whether his carefully rehearsed response might have been delivered a little more hesitantly in the face of this display of God’s presence (and God’s absence!).

There are some very loud voices in our experience, sounding like wind, earthquake, fire:  these voices clamour for our attention, saying “This is where the power is — you’ve got to listen to us!  Listen to our message of wars and rumours of wars, of broken-down systems, of terrible behaviour by people who ought to know better and yet who are in positions of authority themselves.  Listen to our message that says there is no reality other than the material world around us.  Listen to our message that says there is nothing that you can do.”  God’s message to the prophet comes in the quiet which the desert is so capable of — a silence in which one might hear God’s message, God’s challenge, God’s call, God’s reassurance.

God’s call comes to Elijah in two parts:  first he is to go and anoint some new leaders — in Aram, Syria, that power which is the greatest threat to Israel’s peace.  The passage goes on after the part we read, to speak of Israel, anointing Jehu to be king — which means that Jezebel is to get her come-uppance at the hands of one “who drives furiously”.  Then, in the prophetic field, Elisha is to take over from Elijah himself, for Elijah is about to come to the end of the ministry in which he has been so loyal.   And the call has a reassurance at the end of it, “Yet I will leave seven thousand in Israel” who have remained steadfast in their loyalty to the Lord God.  Elijah is not the only one left!

What is God’s call to us, as we put those loud voices behind us, and listen to God in the sound of sheer silence?  Do we look for new leaders, even if we know that they will “drive furiously”?  Do we anticipate our own dying, the ending of things as we know them, so that another may come in our place?  But whatever lies ahead of us, God’s assurance remains, “there are still seven thousand in Israel” — we are not alone in our loyalty to the Lord, the God of hosts”, in spite of how few and how weak we seem to be.

The question “What are you doing here?” comes with a challenge, not only to Elijah, but also to us.  And there is another challenge in today’s readings.  Jesus comes to the Gerasene man, clearly in need of healing, and Jesus is greeted with the challenge, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?”  That challenge continues, after the man is healed, and appears “clothed and in his right mind”, when the villagers come out to see what has happened.  Faced not only with the healed man, but also the loss of a herd of pigs, they “asked Jesus to leave them”.  The man wants to go with Jesus, but is told, “Return home, and tell how much God has done for you.”

Even in our loyalty to the Lord of Hosts, we too are tempted to challenge Jesus with the same message, “What have you to do with me?”  Somehow we find Jesus’ presence even more confronting than the still small voice with which God can speak with us.  We have our ways of “asking him to leave” — I remember when our present Archbishop came to this Church for the first time, one of the comments someone made was “Too much mention of Jesus!”  Perhaps it is because of the kind of challenge that  Jesus gave the Gerasene man,and confronts us as well — “Return to your home and tell how much God has done for you”.

“What are you doing here?”

“What have you to do with me?”

And perhaps for us, nearly as challenging are the words of Paul to the Church in Galatia, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”  Can we make this real in our particular circumstances?