Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + :  Isa 1 – Ps 50 – Heb 11 – Lk 12

Today’s readings offer us two of western society’s pet aversions; the first is the angry-sounding God, and the other is the call of Jesus to sell our possessions and give the money to the poor. It’s good to tussle with these issues. What do we do with the wrathful God we meet in the prophet’s writings and in the Psalm; how can we integrate this God with our idealised image of the God who loves us all unconditionally? And secondly, what do we do with Jesus’ command to give?

The eighth-century prophets we’ve been reading lately link these issues through their two deepest concerns: being faithful to God, and social justice. What links them is that for the prophets, being faithful to God meant living a life of complete loyalty to the God of the Exodus: the God who had brought their ancestors up out of slavery in Egypt. In the Exodus, God had shown an absolute commitment to the Israelites, even though they were nobodies – they were slaves. In the view of the prophets, the natural response to God’s love and kindness was to respond with love and faithfulness/loyalty of our own.

Yet everywhere the prophets looked, they saw idolatry and injustice. They had to teach the people to show love and loyalty to God. But how might the people best express this? The prophets taught that the best way to express loyalty to God was by practising social justice. They taught that a loving, faithful response to God was best articulated by dealing kindly with the nobodies in their own society, just as God had dealt with them when they were nobodies in Egypt. And this was to be their proclamation to the nations – we are a just and kind society because our God is just and kind.

Like all the great themes of the Hebrew Scriptures, these three intertwined themes of the prophets – loyalty to God, social justice and proclamation – these themes draw their meaning from God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12.1-3:

¹ Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. ² I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. ³ I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

Here’s the whole reason for the Hebrew people: God chooses them, loves them and blesses them so they will be a blessing to all families of the earth; so all creation will know the blessing of a union with our creator, just as God’s people enjoy union with the creator.

This is why social justice lay at the heart of the prophets’ preaching. The chosen people were to reflect God’s universal love to all creatures first by living it in their own society. This is where Isaiah of Jerusalem is coming from when he cries out: ¹⁷ learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow.

Perhaps now we can approach the writings of the prophet without our wrath-proof goggles on. As it happens, the words wrath and vengeance don’t occur in the passage we’ve heard this morning, and yet there are undoubtedly some of us who heard these words, even so.

The God who is revealed in the prophets is admittedly upset. But God has a repertoire of emotions that’s far wider than just love and anger, and so our response is correspondingly invited to range far wider than just adoration and fear. The God we meet in the prophets is more often than not a God who feels humiliated and shamed by the public conduct of the chosen people; a God who feels injured and betrayed and misrepresented. How can creation come to know the creator if the witness borne by the chosen people is corrupt and hypocritical?

And yet this God perseveres with them: ¹⁸ Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

God remains determined that these people who any other self-respecting authority would dump will be the means by whom all families of the earth are blessed. God will see this through whatever the cost! So when Jesus, in today’s gospel says: ³²Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom. … there can be nothing of which his listeners could be more certain.

But it’s what Jesus teaches us to do with this certainty that’s at once most predictable and most bewildering. ³³ Sell your possessions, and give alms. His message is the same as Isaiah’s. Social justice is the way for God’s people to proclaim who God is. It’s predictable because it’s the same message as has always been preached among God’s people. Yet it’s bewildering to us because it’s a message founded on certainties revealed in the past – God’s promise to Abraham; God’s rescue of the chosen people from slavery in Egypt. It looks to the past.

Paradoxically, we live in a society where would-be prophets and gurus tell us the certainties that count must be future certainties. They tell us the search for security must focus on the future – to rock-solid investments and superannuation schemes that will keep us going when the pension system as we know it has dried up. We even sell things called futures, whatever they are.

And it’s here that Jesus’ message becomes most challenging of all – most counter-cultural. ³³Make purses for yourselves that don’t wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. ³⁴For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. This is a challenge to us as individuals to live out, but also for us to speak out as a direct challenge to the would-be prophets of our time – powerful political and commercial interests that always want to direct our eyes to the future; or, at any rate, their vision of the future. The future can’t be predicted, and yet they want us to trust them to shape it. Their advertising and slogans portray the future as a dangerous place if we don’t enter it under their protection. And we follow, generally. Is it any wonder God is upset?

Jesus’ words call us to resist these false prophets: to catch a vision of the love God has shown us and all creation, and to respond by living out of that vision, defiantly and joyously; to be empowered by this vision, and to express it through social justice. Because this vision shows us how much God loves us, it can free us to give; to give in defiance of the fear our modern prophets would trap us in. We can even capture a completely new vision of what treasure actually is.

The saint we celebrated yesterday was St Lawrence, a deacon martyred in 258 CE, during the persecution of the Roman emperor Valerian. The emperor had demanded that Lawrence surrender the treasures of the Church to him. Lawrence, feisty like all deacons, gathered lepers, orphans and blind people and bringing them to the emperor, said: ‘Here is the treasure of the Church.’                          Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost +7C: Hosea 1, Ps 85, Col 2, Lk 11

Before we hear Hosea 1.2-10

We’re about to hear a story where God asks the prophet Hosea to marry a shameful woman – he marries Gomer a woman who may be involved in fertility rites connected with worship of the Canaanite god Baal. The marriage is an enacted parable; it’s meant to show the pain of God’s relationship with unfaithful Israel, where many people involved in Baal worship. Then when Hosea and Gomer have children, God tells Hosea to give them names with horrible significance.

Jezreel                יִזְרְעֶאל          I“May God sow” Also the name of a valley famous for the atrocities of Israel’s idolatrous kings

Lo-Ruhamah      לֹא רֻחָ֫מָה      “Not pitied”          God’s mercy is cut off

Lo Ammi            לֹא עַמִּי         “Not my people” You’re not mine! The most fearsome  oracle any prophet had to deliver.

Is it strange of God to ask Hosea to do these things? Does this sound like the God we know? If we want to understand this story, we need to know that the people of Israel were God’s partners, like we are. Yet as God knew, they weren’t behaving like a faithful partner; and they weren’t raising their children as God’s children.

So God asks Hosea to marry Gomer – one of these unfaithful people – and to give their children horrible names. Israel needed to know what it means that people offer thanksgiving and worship to artificial idols instead of the living God who has given them all they have and are: what it means that they dedicate their children to these idols instead of teaching them know the true God’s love. But listen specially for the end of this story, where God’s love is stronger than God’s anger.  READINGS

Sermon:    Today’s readings confront us with the way we see God; the apparent difference we see between the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and the God of the New Testament. This tension is palpable in the Psalm we read this morning. At times, you could be forgiven for thinking that the psalmist is talking about two different Gods.

The first part of Psalm 85 (vv.1-7) sees God as angry and displeased, and tries to remind God to show us that kinder, gentler side that people knew and loved once upon a time. The second part, (vv.8-13) asserts a God who meets us with words of peace, with the promise of salvation, the intimacy of a kiss, and the good gifts of truth and plenty. So when we recited that Psalm, we sounded as though we were talking about two different Gods: the old fire and brimstone one first, and then the gentle, sensitive New Testament God. That’s a real tension for us.

We also get a sense of this tension in the letter to the Colossians and in the Gospel. Today’s reading from Colossians warns members of that Christian community not to be taken in by people who encourage them to prove their faith through rituals – like adopting traditional Jewish religious customs like circumcision, eating only kosher foods and observing the festivals – as though God wants to be appeased by public piety. No, this Letter tells them that outward signs are not what God wants. Don’t allow these people to make you feel disqualified from the Faith just because you don’t follow all their religious practices. The love you share with Jesus is the only measure of your faith; not getting some arcane religious ritual correct.

There’s a pattern developing in our readings, isn’t there: a theme running through the Scriptures which teaches us that outward show is hollow; that pious religious observance can even take us away from God. But even more disturbing, we may read of the ministry of a Godly prophet like Hosea, and somehow misconstrue what God is saying through him. We can see his portrait of God in the opposite way to what’s intended; and so we may decide that the God of the Old Testament is different from the God revealed in Jesus. But this is not right. The God of the Hebrew Scriptures and the God revealed in Jesus are one and the same. The message about God in the Scriptures is much more than the means of its delivery. Hosea’s message is more than just a challenge to infidelity and complacency and decadence. Even though that challenge is God’s word given for a particular time and situation, the full message is what lies behind that prophecy.

The full message is God’s commitment to us; it’s the commitment of a God who addresses us not as minions, but as partners – as family. The message is that God’s commitment to us as family is utterly real – to us and our children and to all the families of Earth whom God intends to bless through us.

This family partnership we have with God is the heart of today’s Gospel passage.

¹ Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”   ² He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name.

The first thing Jesus teaches his friends about praying is to call his Father God our Father. This has special cultural significance. In that part of the world these days, I’m called Abu Andrāwus – father of Andrew. I’m named in the expectation that if I ever have a son, he’ll be named after my father. So I am forever the custodian of my father’s good name; his honour depends on me. It’s the same when God’s children bear God’s name; we are the shop-front of the holy Name – the way the world sees God. So it’s important that we faithfully represent God’s character to the world. ^{(cf Jeremiah 13 – mentioned in my weekly – where Israel is represented as the intimate clothing in which God’s earthly presence is presented to Earth)} We’re the ambassadors of the sacred Name on Earth.

The sacred Name; what do we call God? For some of us, the name Father is a difficult issue; what about people who’ve experienced abusive fathers, and so don’t want to relate to God as Father? At the same time, these abused people are misunderstood by others who’ve had positive experience of worshipping of God as Father; who find calling God anything else sacrilegious. It’s tricky.

What today’s Scriptures teach us is that God wants a family partnership with us; not a friendship – a family partnership which cannot be broken by anything. Nothing can stop you being somebody’s child – not even death. And that basic message is not affected by whether we call God Father or Mother or anything else that expresses an unbreakable, trustworthy relationship.

But where does that leave us? There’s still great potential for hurt in that difference of opinion. I think God deals with this in typically humorous fashion. You see, the other thing God does to us by calling us all children is to make us brothers and sisters with each other, and as we all know, brothers and sisters will never agree.

So having set things up this way, I don’t expect God is worried if we never reach a consensus on things like ‘our Father’ or ‘our Mother’. But by the same token, God has also made sure that we can never ignore our differences either. By making us brothers and sisters, God has made sure that the bond between us is one that nothing can break, no matter how much we disagree on things. So we’re stuck with God’s delight in diversity, and with our own various forms of conservatism that make us struggle with it all.

The sense in all this became very poignant for me in a conversation I had with someone who was very worried about being rejected by God: the worry had come up because of a fire and brimstone sermon this person had heard.

Armed with this week’s readings, I was able to illustrate for this person my absolute confidence that absolutely nothing could make God reject them, because we were talking about the God who, in the Hebrew Scriptures forcefully reminds us that we are inseparably God’s partners and children. And in the New Testament, that same God in Jesus teaches us that the first thing we must acknowledge about our relationship with the Divine is that it’s a relationship that cannot be broken. Jesus has done this by giving us the privilege of calling God by the Name which meant most to Jesus himself. In English today, Father is a pretty formal way of addressing your Dad. The way Jesus would’ve said it to his friends was to use his native Aramaic word, Abba; a more familiar, intimate expression than Father. I remember how delighted I was when I first heard a little Israeli boy we know, Jonathan, calling out to his Dad to come and push him on the swing: his word was, of course, Abba!                              Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 7: Amos 8 1-10, Psalm 52, Colossians 1 15-23, Luke 10 38-42

This past week, Vicky and I have been at the UCA President’s conference in Nadi, Fiji. I’d never visited the Pacific. Fiji exceeded my dreams; it’s an enchanting, beautiful place, and the people are infectiously happy and kind. The conference title was For the whole of Creation. One of the primary issues it tackled was the global climate emergency. It was held in the Pacific as a sign of solidarity with the Uniting Church’s partner churches in the Pacific – especially the Methodist Church of Fiji – but there were also delegates from the churches of Tonga, Tuvalu and Kiribati.

This very intensive four-day conference gave us an opportunity to listen carefully to each other’s stories as fellow Christians. We learned how our Pacific family still struggles to become decolonised, both mentally and politically. But most particularly, we encountered at a very deep and personal level the grief caused by the double catastrophe of rising sea levels, and the pollution ravaging ocean, air, land and living creatures in the Pacific region – all casualties of our civilization’s greedy culture of more is better – our relentless plundering of our children’s future .

I want to tell you about Josefa, a minister from Tuvalu. Josefa told us his family’s story of the rising water that we all know threatens Tuvalu right now. We know of it but not personally. Josefa gave us permission to share his story.

Josefa’s ancestors raised a large mound on their farm, and on that mound, they built their family home. Josefa had just spoken on the phone with his brother who told him that the water has now come up to the mound. The unthinkable is staring them in the face. The terrible sadness Josefa feels came home to me when he told us of a traditional family custom on Tuvalu. Every year, around Christmas time, families go to the cemetery together to visit their ancestors’ graves. ‘We show our love and respect for our parents, grandparents and ancestors by carefully tending their graves, but especially at this time. Then we all go back to our family home together and share a wonderful feast of thanksgiving for our family.’

At this point, Josefa fell silent. Then, almost gasping with the effort to speak, he asked, ‘How can we do that any more? They’re saying we’ll have to leave our island soon and find somewhere else to live. But who would we be then? Who would we be without our island? We could no longer be the people of Tuvalu. If there is no Tuvalu, then we are no more.’ The depth of Josefa’s grief was overwhelming; I can’t imagine losing my connection with everything my families have ever been; never able to go back to the place my story happened. That’s death.

So what can we do? One of our keynote speakers was Rev James Bhagwan, the chair of the Pacific Council of Churches (PCC). James spoke with us about the Pacific churches’ response to this tragedy – how they’re developing a theology that can help care for people facing forced relocation. Will their forced migration be an Exile or an Exodus – a pathway to slavery or to some sort of freedom?

James outlined the evolving PCC theology; it’s practical and pastoral. It includes the concept of radical hospitality: receiving such forced migrant communities with no strings attached; not demanding ‘integration’; not demanding the loss of their sovereign identity! That is radical. He also spoke of the PCC’s theology of accompaniment – if people just can’t bring themselves to leave, some of us will go to stay with them – right to the end. This is an astounding demonstration of practical love – of the saying that Justice is what love looks like in action.

Before I left Adelaide, I’d prepared a sermon on today’s Gospel – the story of Mary and Martha – having no idea how transformed I would be by this conference. Oddly enough, I’d read a news item before I left which said that young people won’t come to church because we don’t speak about the real issues of our time; issues like the climate fear which confronts their generation. That article, immediately followed by the conference have left me with no option but to preach a completely different sermon today; this one.

I’ve been driven away from in-house controversy of the Mary and Martha story, and directly into the path of the prophet Amos with his message that God calls on the wealthy and powerful to act with justice and mercy toward the poor and the defenceless.

Like all the eighth-century prophets, Amos preached about God’s attitude to rich and powerful people when they become obsessed with material gain, and how that selfishness comes at such a terrible cost to others. As Amos puts it, they become people, who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land. Today’s Psalm echoes the prophets’ demands for justice too. But have they been heard? The injustice they describe is still how the poor experience power today – the manipulative world of trade negotiations with corporations and governments who hold all the cards; and the Psalm tells how the poor experience the malignant deafness of economic neo-colonialism – deafness to their cries of pain, grief and need.

This is where God’s people are called to step in and make a difference. And we do: ABM, Anglican Overseas Aid, Uniting World, Pacific Council of Churches and the agencies of other denominations are all critically important partners with the churches in our region and beyond. Through these agencies, we are almost always the first responders to suffering like Josefa’s and his family on Tuvalu.

But I’m concerned that we don’t do this in a set-and-forget way; donate to an agency to express our commitment to compassion and justice, but rarely engage at a congregational level – or at a personal level. Probably we do, but no one else necessarily knows because we may be afraid of sounding party-political if we speak of our passion for justice. Isn’t it a terrible travesty that people sometimes feel we can’t openly express our grief at injustice to the poor – our opposition to the destruction our civilization is wreaking on Earth and our fellow creatures – without being accused of being political?

Some try to silence the truth about tragedies like Josefa’s by ‘politicising’ them – accusing the victims and their supporters of some sort of subversive political motive. The Psalm calls out such people’s destroying slanders: tongues [which] cut deceitfully. If you’re ever in doubt, just read Amos, Hosea and Micah – or any of the prophets. They make it absolutely clear that being political is to be faithful, because justice will always be political.

God’s prophetic communities must always let the truth about justice for the poor and the vulnerable ring out loud! Amos and the Psalmist tell us today to remember Josefa; remember Tuvalu, and be bold to speak out.  Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 4C:  2K5 Ps 30 Gal 6 Lk 10

You never know what kids are going to say next, do you. They can blurt out an unwelcome truth without warning. Here’s a delightful example I found on the web.

A couple invited some people to dinner. At the table, Mum turned to their six-year-old daughter and said, ‘Would you like to say grace for us?’ The girl replied, ‘I wouldn’t know what to say.’ Mum said, ‘Just say what you’ve heard me say.’ ‘Okay,’ said the daughter, and bowed her head. ‘Lord, why on earth did we invite all these people to dinner?’

You only want that sort of honesty in your life when you’ve got nothing to hide.

I tell you this story because we just heard how Jesus sent out several dozen early-stage disciples to be his ambassadors to the Samaritan towns and villages he’d visit on his way to Jerusalem. What on earth might they say to such tetchy people while Jesus isn’t watching them!? You remember last week how his inner circle of disciples were so blinded by their own ambition that they just didn’t get what Jesus was doing. They were loose cannons liable to misfire at any moment. They wanted to destroy one over-sensitive Samaritan village. So what about these seventy – completely unknown quantities? Jesus sure had a lot of trust in people!

I said last week that this is the turning point in the Gospel. ^9.51 When the days drew near for [Jesus] to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. Yes, it’s his turning point. But there’s another turn. Until now, the gospel’s been all about what Jesus did and said. Before, only the twelve had been sent out on mission.^9.1-6 Everyone else – people in the story and us, the readers – were onlookers to the acts of Jesus; listeners to his teaching, but not much more involved than that.

But from here on – and this is the real turning point – we are called to action as well. From now, things start to snowball. These seventy unnamed followers of Jesus that he appointed and sent out actually represent you and me. Luke means us to sense ourselves among these un-named disciples. Luke means we are to prepare people for Jesus to come into their lives. Now that’s a turning point, isn’t it! Are you feeling comfortable? Can Jesus really place such confidence in you and me?

We saw it happening last week—messengers sent ahead to make ready for Jesus’ coming to a Samaritan village; ill-equipped messengers sent into uncomfortable territory. This is the pattern for the rest of Luke’s writing, both the gospel, and his second volume, Acts. Today, with some very important words about ‘harvest’, Jesus begins by giving his messengers instructions about the preparations they are not to make for their mission; like the preparations Jesus told the twelve not to make when they were sent out. ^(9.1-5) Basically, don’t be self-reliant.

This is a difficult passage for many Christians today, for at least three reasons. First, the sending of the seventy says Jesus’s missionaries or apostles are much more than just the twelve. It says that proclamation of God’s peace and God’s Kingdom is the responsibility of all disciples; not just a select few. This disappoints both those who think of themselves as the select few and those who prefer not to get involved.

Then the seventy are to go in pairs to neighbouring towns. It’s an assertive type of outreach program that many Christians find uncomfortable.

And third, the harvest-metaphor (v. 2) picks up on the urgency we first sensed last week; something many Christians no longer feel. For a farmer, harvest-time is the most urgent season of the year. It’s like tax time for an accountant, Christmas for a shopkeeper, or exam time for students and teachers. Most of us can survive failure on an ordinary day, but failure in these ‘harvest seasons’ can be disastrous. It can mean starvation, bankruptcy; the end of a career. Many Christians have trouble believing that failure to proclaim Christ can also have disastrous consequences.

If that’s not enough to chew on, when we take this seriously – if we believe that this gospel is speaking to us – then another thing it confronts us with is the challenge to trust God. We’re being sent out without any of the paraphernalia we think a person needs to survive on the road. And we’re pointedly told that it’s a dangerous road; See I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.

Even so, says Jesus, don’t take things that will make you self-sufficient or secure. Just rely on people’s hospitality, and be prepared to be generous in your ministry to them – generous with the things of the Kingdom. But confront them with what they’re turning down if they reject you. Most of us have had just such pairs of missionaries visit us at some stage; Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. We don’t tend to like them; we think their faith is naïve, that they’re brainwashed fundamentalists. We reject their style and we also reject their message. There’s an interesting conversation we need to have about that.

The people that Jesus was sending out had probably lived good, faithful, godly lives up until they met him. The way they’d served God was the commonly accepted one in the place they grew up. They would have appeared normal, mature, good people. But what Jesus was asking them to do was to take on something completely different; to step out and see what God could do through them.

And that’s what this gospel challenges us with too. We are mature religious people who have very respectable ways of worshipping and serving God. We are on a path which assumes self-reliance, paying our way – all of those sorts of things. But now this gospel comes along and challenges us to rethink; to re-prioritize.

Remember that first bit about the harvest? Jesus believes it’s urgent that people are connected with the Kingdom—belong to it now; not at some vague future time. (Remember last week’s urgency; Jesus rejecting those who said, I’ll come but…) The harvest metaphor for the Kingdom says that our proclamation brings people what sunshine, soil and water give to a crop – the source of new life. So the pointy end of the season is always now. Listen to the farmers! We shouldn’t just associate urgency with a crisis. The Kingdom that has come near is vital throughout life – not just close to harvest time; vital for all God’s creatures, just as we experience it for ourselves.

So, when do we start? That’s actually not the question; it’s where.  Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 3C  2 Kgs 2 1-14, Ps 77, Gal 5 13-25, Lk 9 51-62

We wear the mantle of our faith—we are the ones who will hand it on.

I didn’t like school much; I decided I’d prefer to be an apprentice mechanic. So I worked in a service station most school holidays to get experience. Early on, I had a great boss, but he retired and sold up. Then I had a not-so-great boss, so I gave up on the idea. I realised that an apprentice can be pretty vulnerable. But then, with a bad apprentice, the boss can certainly suffer too. Jesus had some pretty iffy apprentices – men and women the Bible calls disciples and apostles. And they had an even shorter apprenticeship with Jesus that I would have had as a mechanic. We just read about the high-handed way some of these disciples behaved at a pivotal moment in Jesus’s ministry. But I’ll get back to them in a moment; first, Jesus.

When the days drew near for Jesus to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. Luke 9.51 is the turning point in Luke’s Gospel – literally. These words mark the conclusion of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee. He turns south and sets his face irrevocably on the path which will lead to his torture and death. But his disciples just don’t get it – and they won’t really; not until they can look back on all those events later on. At this particular time, they’re pre-occupied with themselves. They have a sort of tunnel-vision focus on their own prestige; their own primacy in the pecking-order. You see this when you look back earlier in the chapter.

The day before today’s episode, Peter, John and James had been with Jesus and witnessed his Transfiguration. ^(9.28-36) And today he’d just performed a healing miracle. ^(9.38-43) So you’d think they’d be suitably awestruck. But no; what follows is one of those embarrassing moments where Jesus actually tells them what was going to happen to him in Jerusalem: Let these words sink into your ears: he says, the Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands (9.44). And as usual, it falls on deaf ears. Luke tells us the disciples reacted by squabbling with each other about which one of them was the greatest. ^(9.46) Work that one out!?

So Jesus tried to get through to them a different way. He put a little child beside him and told his disciples that the least among them was the greatest. (9.47-48). Still they didn’t get it. They changed the subject, condemning some outsider for using Jesus’s name to perform exorcisms without their permission. Jesus tried to correct them yet again – whoever is not against you is for you, he said. ^(9.49-50) But as we just heard, their main focus remained their monopoly over the ‘Jesus brand’; their insistence that they were in charge. They stayed on message; wilfully deaf to any other thought than their own. We just heard them offer to punish a Samaritan village for a perceived insult – Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them? ^(9.54-55)

You’d think Jesus would feel like dumping this crew and looking for some humbler replacements. But he doesn’t. In fact in the next chapter, we’ll see him send lots of his apprentices out to proclaim God’s Kingdom to every village they visit. Is this foolhardy? Overly trusting? Well we’re the result, ultimately, so you be the judge.

One thing I do feel about Luke’s gospel from this point on is that Jesus is often more grumpy. I understand this as his very reasonable reaction to the predicament he’s in. For Jesus, setting his face to go to Jerusalem meant a journey to betrayal, rejection, torture and death – but as often as he told his apprentices, they just didn’t get it. That’d be enough to try anyone’s patience. So Jesus travelled a frustrating road in company with these unpromising apprentices. He went anyway; he went there for them, and for you and me. And we are the legacy of his faithfulness – his insistence on following his call. When the Spirit calls us, that’s our way too; no matter what. A true follower of Jesus will always respond to the Spirit’s call.

That’s no straightforward matter. I’ve tended to think of some people as naturals on the spiritual path. But a story I once heard about Desmond Tutu set me straight on that score. A former Archbishop of Melbourne, David Penman told a story about the time Desmond Tutu stayed with him and Jean.

He said that Tutu would spend between four to six hours of every day praying in the chapel at Bishopscourt. He was someone who truly opened himself to the Spirit. Each one of us who has been baptised has that same Holy Spirit living in us. But who of us keeps the door of our heart so wide open to the Spirit’s transforming power – four to six hours a day!? How do we begin to travel that road?

In Galatians 5, we heard St Paul teach that the choice to travel that road involves a daily decision to turn from those things which divide us – abusive, aggressive, selfish behaviours – and instead, to turn to the things that connect us and truly nourish us – friendship, community and love. Paul gives us the guidance of nine principles which he calls the fruits of the Spirit; love and joy, peace and patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and gentleness, and self-control.

I like it that he calls them fruits, because it reminds me that these qualities are the result of the Spirit’s careful attention to us. These are the fruits of the Holy Spirit at work in a life of daily decision to turn to God; daily choice. If we are to grow as a community who can truly hand on the mantle of our faith, we do it by listening for the Spirit’s call from within us and by answering that call with our lives: and love and joy, peace and patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and gentleness, and self-control are the fruits of such choices.

We are called to make daily choices which agree to the Spirit shaping us as people who can truly hand on the mantle of our faith to people who need to know the love of Jesus; to people who need to know God’s commitment to justice and mercy; to people who need to know the Holy Spirit’s power to transform – everything really.

Today’s message for St John’s is this: We wear the mantle of our faith—we are the ones who will hand it on. Someone has done that for us. We will be next to hand it on. God trusts ordinary people to do this. Those frail early disciples show us that! Each one of us can tell the story of our own journey in faith; we wear the mantle of our faith—we are the ones who will hand it on.             Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 2: 1 K 19, Pss 42 & 3, Gal 3, Lk 8

Have you ever been to prison? Inside a prison? Has your life ever felt like a prison? Have your mind or your heart ever felt like they’d locked you up – or locked you out? It’s a dreadful experience; nowhere to turn; no choices; depressed; no hope; no feelings, really; hard even to imagine joy. We don’t have to be in a physical gaol; chronically sick people often feel trapped and depressed; people in trouble – people who’ve suffered abuse know imprisonment too; trapped; sad; hopeless.

This is an experience of bars and locked doors which are invisible to others. Many of us know people who suffer this way. Something deep inside locks our friends away from hope and happiness – from us. In our readings today, we meet people trapped in these interior prisons. They also show God breaking these gaols open to free the poor prisoners. It’s important that we think about this because of our parish’s special mission to people who are locked out and homeless. What are you and I called to do?

The first prisoner we meet today is Elijah. His gaol is fear. The furious Queen Jezebel had vowed to make his ‘life like that of one of her [false] prophets’. Elijah flees in terror from her fury; even death in the wilderness would be better. Then God sends an Angel to minister to Elijah in his prison of fear. The Angel feeds Elijah so he’s strong enough to travel to Mount Sinai. And there, where God was once present to Moses, the Lord also blesses Elijah with the healing gift of his presence in the sound of sheer silence – what our old Bibles used to call the still small voice.

God’s presence for Elijah comes in the form of food, a journey, and finally, an inner peace; the silent peace of God, deep inside him. And in the strength of that beautiful silent peace, Elijah finds the will to go on with his remarkable ministry.

Food, a journey, and an inner peace; people have always sought that peace – that silent peace. We still do so today; we still meet God in this beautiful, liberating divine silence. If you want to explore this, then I suggest you talk with Lynne about our parish’s Thursday-afternoon Centring Prayer gatherings.

Elijah’s experience of peace in the silence is the same peace that God gives to the Psalmist. But this time, it comes to heal a different predicament. The Psalmist is crushed beneath a burden of inner noise. Why are you so full of heaviness, my soul and why so unquiet within me?

This time, God comes to the Psalmist from an earlier time in life; through memories of healing, lightness and peace. The Psalmist had met God in these experiences before and so now trust that it’s possible to meet the Lord in them again. God can bring peace from our past. The Psalmist prays: ^43.3 send out your light and your truth, and let them lead me: then I shall go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight; … and to the harp, I shall sing your praises, O God, my God. So God’s light and healing release this prisoner too. God gives the same peace, and this time the silence opens the way to joyous relief; God’s peace gives voice to songs of praise.

The next prisoner we meet is not an individual, but rather groups of people in the first Christian communities of Galatia. The prison bars and locked doors that Paul talks about in Galatians 3 are still to be found inside people everywhere. These are the bars, the locked doors and glass ceilings and the utter blindness of prejudice; the social barriers we people put up between ourselves and others; barriers we defend fiercely. Like Elijah did, Paul speaks the Lord’s mind at great personal risk – speaks it into a society that is predicated on a few people excluding and controlling all the others on the basis of their race, on the basis of their social standing – are they are slaves or free people – and on the basis of whether they are male or female.

Just as we saw God set Elijah and the Psalmist free from their prisons, now Paul sees Christ at work calling us to declare why he came; to set all his children free. He challenges the Galatians, and he challenges us, to make right choices. And the choice before the Galatians then, as it is for us now, is whether to accept social conventions that restrict and separate and imprison on the basis of race, gender or social position, or to believe that Jesus wants everyone set free from those restrictions and divisions.

In this case, God comes calling us to exercise free choice; to recognise God’s passion for everyone to be free, and so to choose to free ourselves and each other. Again, the prison has bars and locked doors that we can’t see. Again God breaks in, offering us healing and peace. This choice thing might all seem distant and theoretical. What about when we don’t have choices? What about people who are beyond all hope, beyond all help; in places where they are overcome by evil. What does God do then?

We see Jesus today going to just such a person in just such a place. Jesus and his friends get out of their boat in unclean territory – opposite Galilee. There, a naked lunatic confronts them. He lives in a graveyard and he’s infested by thousands of unclean spirits. No-one wants to go to such a place; no-one wants to confront such a dangerous person; a man possessed. Do we fear people so disturbed?

Maybe. But in goes Jesus to confront the demons; to name them and to cast them out. We might be uncomfortable with notions of demons and evil. But if you think of the types of evil that we see in our community, maybe they’re not so very alien. Think of the evil that imprisons identifiable groups of people in our own time; imprisons them in inter-generational poverty and poor health; in slavery to addictions, in cycles of ignorance; that muzzles them in secrecy and hides them away from scrutiny.

The demons that imprison people in this city – in their addictions to alcohol, drugs and gambling that imprison people in loneliness and ruined health – are often, in their turn, the result of other people’s addictions to the money and power that lie behind it all. The demons that lock people into cycles of poverty and disease – cycles that span generations – are the perennial demons of addiction to power and prestige which blind and deafen people to the needs of God’s little ones. So these primary and secondary addictions are prisons both for inmates and their gaolers.

Today, we’ve seen very clearly God’s response to such prisons. Ours is to pray that God breaks in and sets people free. But be warned; as God’s people, it’s our calling to become God’s answer to the prayers we offer. Are we willing?                   Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost +10 C: Isa 5 1-7, Ps 80 1-2, 8-19, Heb 11 29-12.2, Lk 12 49-59

The high emotion of today’s scriptures is about faith as a life-and-death matter – that your life can be in danger because of what you believe. That’s normally alien to us. We think we live in a pretty tolerant culture. But then we encounter internet trolls or hear of white supremacist rampages, and we’re forced to think differently.

But for most people of the world, these scriptures speak directly to their experience of life. Most of the world knows life’s fragility far more immediately than we do. Most live a hand-to-mouth existence. But probably their greatest difference from us is that most people live in a vividly spiritual world. We don’t any more. The steady increase in our prosperity has seen a corresponding decline in our spiritual life. Our precious consciousness of fragility and mortality is drowning under our stuff.

So we come to these scriptures today spiritually handicapped. They speak out of a world that we only visit as tourists, or that only comes home to us when tragedy strikes us or our loved ones. I don’t know how often I’ve heard the OT written off as judgmental and violent. But it’s actually true to life for the majority of humanity who’ve never left that real world. So let’s enter that world for a few minutes.

Actually, we have little choice; Jesus pushed us straight into it today. I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! ^{Lk 12.49} The NT scholar Alan Culpepper helps us approach this saying with more understanding by taking us to the non-Biblical Gospel of Thomas. There, Logion 82 reads Whoever is near me is near fire; whoever is distant from me is distant from the kingdom. Culpepper puts the two sayings together and writes, ‘Although the Kingdom of God is always characterised by reconciliation and peace, the announcement of the kingdom is always divisive, because it requires decision and commitment.’ ^{Luke  266} Fire in Luke often means judgement (3.9, 17) and it’s clear that Jesus believes he is in no way going to be spared: ^12.50 I have a baptism with which to be baptized, and what stress I am under until it is completed!

Ever since the moment we read about on that last Sunday in June where Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem, ^{Lk 9.51} he lived under the threat of that baptism which members of Luke’s community knew only too well; a baptism in his own blood.

^12.51 Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! Remember Culpepper’s thought, ‘the announcement of the kingdom is always divisive, because it requires decision and commitment’. If you hold to your integrity strongly enough, you’ll inevitably arrive at lines in the sand you won’t cross, or meet people you can’t go along with. And in this whole section of the Gospel …the prophet’s journey to Jerusalem… Jesus has been preparing his followers for their coming life of just such a radical discipleship; we’ve seen him

• training them for mission (10.1-24 Mission of the seventy)
• teaching them how to pray (11.1-13 Lord’s Prayer)
• teaching them how to fight evil spiritual forces (11.14-26)
• teaching them how to resist conservative religious factions (11.37-53)
• and encouraging them in personal ethical integrity (12.1-48)

This is all pretty standard, team-building stuff, isn’t it. Luke’s community needed material like this to sustain them in their struggle for identity and validity in the face of persecution and ostracism. But Jesus doesn’t stop there. In a move from that standard, predictable stuff, he launches into the unspeakable. Jesus goes on to claim a commitment from his followers that challenges the basic unit of all that is to be valued in the Middle East—the family.

⁵² From now on five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; ⁵³ they will be divided: father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.

Luke is clear about how central the family is to everybody’s identity in his time and place. Luke tells us the unforgettable stories of the prodigal son ^15.11-32 who wished his father dead and the rich young ruler ^18.18-25 who couldn’t sell his possessions. And into that all-important family culture, Jesus says he’s come to bring division. We can be in no doubt that what Jesus teaches here is deeply offensive; deliberately offensive.

But by the same token, we need to acknowledge that for many of us now, what Jesus teaches here may well be a painful fact. Our commitment to Christ is often something which highlights divisions between ourselves and our friends, and even divisions within our families and church communities. When I do training programmes in marriage preparation and enrichment models, they certainly wake me up to that again. Families and churches can be dangerous places.

Extreme sectarian groups will sometimes call on a passage like this one to justify isolating their followers from infidel family-members and friends. But there is no sense in which Jesus is calling people to reject one-another in his name. Rather, he is saying that a decision to follow him as a disciple will necessarily expose the forces which work against that discipleship. Those forces are the false gods of

• appearances, personal power and control culture ^{37-53 The hypocritical religious leaders,}
• finding security in wealth ^{13-21 The rich fool,}
• and a life lived in fear ^{22-34 Consider the lilies…,}

To an extent, the traditional position of the family in the Middle East had virtually attained the status of the sacred. There is great good in this – belonging, generosity, security – but it could be distorted. Then anything and anyone could be sacrificed on the altar of family honour – and as we know, still is in many traditional communities, with the hideous practice of so-called honour killing. And because of our vulnerability in our families – and in our Church communities – there must always be challenges to our integrity as Christ’s people. Those false gods – the gods of appearances, personal power and control, of security in wealth, and the cruel oppression of a life lived in fear – those false gods were – and still are – alive and operative in families and communities. Jesus came – and sends us – so these evils will reveal themselves, and people might be rescued from such prisons. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Trinity Sunday C 16-6-2019: Prov 8, Ps 8, Rm 5, Jn 16

We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ … God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. ^{Rom 5.1,5}

Christianity is the only faith where one God is revealed to be a community; Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The two other one-God (monotheistic) faiths we know best – our sibling religions Judaism and Islam – don’t share this understanding of God as a community. There’s an Arabic inscription inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem which reads – God is only One God. Far be it removed from His transcendent majesty that He should have a son.

So we know God as a community of three persons, and yet as one God. We see the community in the obvious love which our Lord Jesus shares with God – the one he teaches us to call our Father. And last Sunday – Pentecost – we saw how the Spirit of Jesus first came to dwell in and among us, drawing us into communion with God, with Jesus, and with each other. So if the Trinity weren’t complicated enough, there’s this fourth element; us. We believe God is a community, and we also believe we’re invited to live our lives embraced in the divine community’s love; nurtured so that we might discover ourselves to be the image and likeness of God; community.

This all sounds amazing, but what about our experiences of spiritual drought; our times of crushing loneliness? What about that God of community then?

We only know how important things are when we’ve had to do without them. We can only really appreciate God as Trinity – really appreciate the love and wholeness and beauty of community – if we can know life cut off from it. If we don’t know this – if we don’t have personal experience of such a loss – some stories and analogies can be helpful. Such stories let us share these experiences safely, and not have to go through them personally. One story that helps me comprehend the desolation of life apart from the divine community is Tim Winton’s wonderful novel, Cloudstreet. There we meet a woman who has experienced devastating loss of community. She’s an extraordinary good, strong woman called Oriel Lamb.

Oriel is a rather grumpy mother of six. Tragedy struck her as a child; her mother and sisters were all killed in a bushfire, which she survived. Oriel says, “Hell is being the last one left.” Tim Winton takes us with Oriel on an incredibly painful journey of life in isolation, and then, thank heaven, the return journey to belonging.

“Hell is being the last one left.” It’s so true. The last one left faces utter, terrible isolation – there’s nothing you can share because there’s no-one to share it with. No-one to love you; no-one for you to love. All joy, all hope silenced. Who could survive this? You’d want your own heart to stop beating. Oriel does survive – but the pain doesn’t stop coming – and new pain comes too.

Cloudstreet begins with an accident that leaves Oriel’s favourite son with a permanent mental disability. Part of that disability leaves him unable to see his mother any more. He can see everyone else – even spirits – but just not his Mum. This locks Oriel out all over again, in the terrible isolation she felt after the fire.

This story reminds me that we’re only really who we are when we belong. Without someone else, we can’t be a whole person; we can’t even know who we are without someone to reflect us back to ourselves. Many of us learn how true that is when we lose someone we’ve loved, we are suddenly empty; we are lost.

Community is the only way we can be whole people. To be lonely is to be less than whole. Like Oriel Lamb, we know that all too painfully when we’re cut off from our loved ones. But I pray that like Oriel did, we will also experience the healing of that pain with the ever-new gift of love and re-built community.

The way we discover our own wholeness is by belonging in community, and that’s an important insight we need if we are to grasp what it actually means for us that God is Trinity – three in one, and one in three. God our creator is a community. And the communal character of God the Trinity is stamped on creation; on the symbiotic interdependence there is between us and all Earth-creatures. Creation reflects the true nature of our maker.

We Christians recognise this interdependence – the costly giving by the one for the other – as love. Jesus revealed that love to us through his life and his teaching, but most particularly, through his self-giving love for us, and in his love for the Father.

The community of the Trinity is the reason we, Earth and the universe are the way we are; why everything is in relationship; why we all work best interdependently. It’s also the reason that the highest value of all is love. Self-giving love describes the relationship that has existed from before time between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. It also describes the way we experience God. Everything we know is freely given; this love is the grace that holds all things together. God is Love.

Before time, Jesus is in a loving relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit. And he came to invite all of us to the centre of that relationship – to welcome us as participants in the divine dance of love – of community.

Jesus guides us into this dance in every possible way. His own self-giving life reveals the intensity and presence that he gives to make the dance accessible to everyone. And he sends us the Holy Spirit so we might hear her prayers constantly within us, calling us to join fully in he dance of love.

Trinity life is a relationship of self-giving love; knowing ourselves as loved and lovely. Let me finish with a few words and silences for meditation. Meditate for a while on any of the words that speak to you.

• Love seeks the happiness of the beloved – not ownership or control
• I am not loved because I am beautiful: I am beautiful because I am loved
• The wrath of God is God’s wounded love ^{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s04zdvrBz-c – Jürgen Moltmann & Miroslav Volf}
• Love rejoices in the joy of the beloved; suffers with the suffering of the beloved

Recognising that God is a community reveals God’s basic character; God is love. As God’s creatures, then, it’s no surprise that we discover our own wholeness in relationship, in community, in belonging, in love.                             Amen

Rev’s Peter Balabanski

Pentecost:  Acts 2 1-21

Acts 2.¹² All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’ ¹³ But others sneered and said, ‘They are filled with new wine.’

Paul Gallico was someone who wrote wonderful stories. My favourite is called The man who was magic. It’s about a man called Adam, who wanted to be admitted to the Guild of Master Magicians. To do so, he had to perform a worthy trick in front of a large audience. Everybody else performed their vanishing lady acts and their handkerchief acts and their fire breathing acts. Then Adam took his turn. He scrambled an egg, then he unscrambled it. Slowly and surely, the scrambled egg changed back into an unscrambled egg and then got back into its shell.

Everyone was dumbfounded. They wanted to know how he did it, but he could only, truthfully reply that it was magic – the usual kind. Some people got angry at this; many of them felt threatened. They didn’t appreciate someone who could actually do something that they made a living pretending to do. The world becomes a strange and dangerous place when people start defending their illusions with threats and slander. But perhaps you’d better read the book if you want to find out what happens.

The opposition Adam met felt like the criticism the disciples suffered in today’s story from the book of Acts. But I’ll get back to that later.

Today is the Spirit’s day; the day Holy Spirit brought the Church to birth through wind and fire. Jesus had ascended to God’s right hand. But without his physical presence, could the movement he had founded continue? Just before today’s story, we see the disciples choose a successor to Judas. So there was some sort of future planning; but we don’t know what they had in mind?

Today, we see the Holy Spirit intervene, and what might have faded away and died is abruptly born anew.

A rush of violent wind – divided tongues, as of fire rest on each of them and they begin to speak in foreign tongues – and yes, the word for languages and tongues is the same in Greek too – and they go outside and in Gallico’s language, they begin to unscramble an egg.  What egg? Do you remember the story of the tower of Babel in Genesis 11 – the whole earth had one language. It was a unified whole, like an egg. Then humankind embarked on a course of action designed to make God redundant.

We built a tower to reach up to the heavens; we sought to make a Name for ourselves – replace God’s Name with ours. This was the last in a series of misguided actions that began in the Garden of Eden – people trying to break down the distinction between human and divine. Let’s make a Name for ourselves so we can call on our own name instead of God’s! We’ve still got that voice with us proclaiming that destiny; saying human ingenuity can replace the need for God.

God responded decisively to the tower of Babel; God scrambled our language, and scattered us over the earth. Our quest for equality with God alienated us again – just as it had in Eden – alienated us from God and from each other. Our tongues were divided; we couldn’t understand each other.

Today, at the first Christian Pentecost, we read how all those divided tongues came back together to reside among God’s gathered people. Jewish people from all over the known world had come to celebrate Shavu`ot – the feast we Christians call Pentecost. In the Jewish faith, Shavu`ot is the spring festival which celebrates God’s gift of the Law to Moses.

Shavu`ot is being celebrated tomorrow in Synagogues all over the world. But until the first century, Jewish people travelled to Jerusalem to celebrate the festival. And that’s where we find them this morning when Jesus’s disciples burst out amongst them – tongues of fire on their heads, and a burning message in dozens of languages on their tongues.

Today, we see the moment when the scrambled egg begins to be unscrambled. Faithful Jews and proselytes were gathered in Jerusalem from all the known earth. Through the Spirit’s work, their divided languages were all given over to the one message; a message for all the world to hear about God’s deeds of power.

Peter recognised the work of the Spirit in this; he remembered how the prophets had said this would happen – that God would pour out the Spirit on all flesh. The message came in every language to show that it was a blessing offered to the whole Earth. That day, the first Christian Pentecost, the blessing God gave to Abraham, that all families of the earth would receive God’s blessing, that ancient blessing came true, uniting these gathered  people.

Jesus had told his disciples that the Spirit of truth would come and declare to us the things that are to come. Peter understood that this had now happened, and he declared it that day in Jerusalem. The whole Earth could consciously encounter God at work as life-giver, indwelling Spirit, creator.

What this says to us is that God who created diversity loves diversity. God’s response to Babel wasn’t punishment, but playful, creative diversity. And this diversity was re-affirmed at the first Christian Pentecost. This makes me believe that where we try to standardise our faith, we oppose the heart of God, and we give up the birthright which we inherited at that Pentecost. Christian unity does not mean standardised conformity (Thanks Jamie). And God puts broken people back together; God puts broken communities back together. (Unscrambled eggs) God not only can do that; God wills that we do it. And that is a desperately needed message.

That’s the Good News of Pentecost – the end of the seasons of Easter and Ascension – that a broken and dead body can live again. Ours is to call for the Spirit; to welcome the Spirit; and inspired by the Spirit, to proclaim God’s mighty deeds – the sanctity of diversity and community, and above and in all, the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus; to whom be Glory and Praise forever,     Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Easter 7 C: inaugurating the week of prayer for Christian unity.

John 17 and the foundation of the Church of South India: a contemporary Wirkungsgeschichte

Today I want to tell you a story; a story of the way one verse from today’s Gospel passage inspired one of the most wonderful events I can think of in all church history. This verse inspired competing church denominations to put aside their differences and lay down their treasures to work together – to become one church.

On September 27^th 1947 the Church of South India (CSI) was inaugurated. This act achieved something that scandalised churches in Australia and the rest of the world. It united a church that has bishops with other churches that didn’t have them, and they didn’t re-ordain anyone. That’s what would have to happen if I suddenly wanted to be a Catholic priest, or if a Uniting Church Minister wanted to be an Anglican Priest. We’d be re-ordained, because some churches won’t recognise the ordinations of other ones. But not so in the Church of South India; they just did it.

This was their response to the call they heard in Jn 17.21 when Jesus prayed, ‘I ask …²¹that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe …’. Lesslie Newbigin, a Church of Scotland missionary, called the union ‘the great adventure in obedience.’ ^{A South India Diary 22} Newbigin was consecrated a bishop in this inaugural service. You can’t imagine what a change of thinking that required in a Presbyterian.

How did this happen? The idea of this union of churches in South India came from a number of early 20^th century missionaries who found themselves working in the one mission field, but competing with each other. One of them, a Congregationalist missionary called G.E. Phillips, described their experience:

‘I have lived in a station where the Christian Church was represented by a feeble handful despised by the great mass of surrounding Hindus … and that feeble handful broken into … portions … over the communion question. You can scarcely imagine how insane seem our ecclesiastical divisions in those circumstances.’[i]

To complicate matters even further, the different denominational missions found converts in different castes, so that the tiny Christian churches were divided both along denominational lines and caste lines, ^{Diary, 49–50} further obscuring the church as a reconciled and reconciling body.

These missionaries used to head for the hills during times of extreme heat, so they found themselves close together quite regularly. At one of these retreat times, a group of Indian pastors and two of their European friends met in a mission hill-station called Tranquebar on May 1–2, 1919. In 1919, the historical and political context made a fresh reading of biblical passages concerning unity not only possible but imperative. Gandhi had inspired a unity between Hindus and Muslims, and this challenged Christians divided by western denominationalism. The war to end all wars was over; there was a League of Nations in the making. ‘The established order of things was going and gone. No established order had any right to exist. Was that not also true of the Church?’[ii]

So up at the hill-station, it’s no surprise that the leading theme for all their discussions was the text about the unity of the church, Jn 17.21. The conference resulted in the Tranquebar Manifesto. Over the next 28 years, this document would evolve into what ultimately became the Basis of Union of the CSI.

The Basis of Union opens by invoking Jn 17.21 as Christ’s prayer for the unity of his Church. It says that Jn 17.21 names what is the essential purpose and nature of Church – unity. This unity for which Christ prayed is enabled through the Holy Spirit and is therefore ‘fundamentally a reality of the spiritual realm.’[iii] This is a reality that the CSI does not claim to create, but to have discovered through repentance; through turning from disunity to oneness. This raises the issue of relationship between spiritual unity and organic unity – organic unity simply means choosing to unite; to actually become one. As you’d guess, most interpreters focus on spiritual unity, but for the drafters of the Scheme, the one required the other:

‘this unity of the Spirit must find expression in the faith and order of the Church in its worship, in its organization and in its whole life, so that, as the Body of Christ, it may be a fit instrument for carrying out His gracious purposes in the world.’[iv]

This connection between spiritual and organic union profoundly shaped the CSI’s service of inauguration in 1947. Early in the service, John 17 was read by a member of the laity. It replaced the usual recitation of the commandments as an invitation to repentance, and so became the new context for the prayer of confession. The last of the five confessions in the litany which followed was explicit: ‘We acknowledge, O Lord, our share in the sin and shame of divisions in Thy holy Church’[v]

These prayers of confession were followed not by a declaration of forgiveness, but by a prayer for God’s absolution, and then a decisive act of obedient repentance. The 4,000 people in the congregation knelt while the documents of assent to union from the uniting churches were laid on the altar. This was followed by further prayer inspired by a text from Jn 10.16: ‘Hasten the time, O God, when throughout the world there shall be one flock, one Shepherd…’. When the congregation stood, the president, again used words from John 17, declaring the inauguration of the Church of South India.

Dearly beloved brethren, in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church, Who on the night of His Passion prayed that His disciples might be one; and by authority of the governing bodies of the uniting Churches, whose resolutions have been read in your hearing and laid in prayer before Almighty God; I do hereby declare that these … Churches … are become one Church of South India.[vi]

The motto of the CSI, That they all may be one, is drawn from John 17:21. It is understood as the prayer of our Lord Jesus Christ who prayed not only for the Church but also for the whole world. This universality is expressed by placing these words on its logo (see your pewsheet) in a form of a circle. This understanding has been there from the beginning: the inauguration of the CSI was a beginning.

Newbigin’s private prayer as the service concluded was “and above all keeping before every Christian mind the purpose of our union – ‘that the world may believe’.”[vii]

The response from the western churches was tragic. The worldwide Anglican communion imposed a moratorium, banning any CSI clergy from being licensed to serve in churches outside south India for thirty years. And that charge was led by dioceses in Australia, I’m ashamed to say. We assumed that it would take that long for the bishops and priests whose ordination we didn’t recognise to retire. Then purity would be restored – ordination by ‘real’ bishops would resume. Maybe we forgot that the CofE in Australia had been governed by the Diocese of Calcutta from 1824 to 1836!

The CSI has seen sustained growth. It’s now just about four times the size it was in September 1947. Ironically, that’s about the same amount by which we overseas churches who opposed its organic union have shrunk in the same time.

This story of the CSI union shows that Jn 17.21 has inspired unity when historical and political circumstances have made Christians bold enough to make this verse our own. A unique church was born out of the blending of the Episcopal and non-Episcopal traditions as a gift of God to the people of India and as a visible sign of ecclesiastical unity for the Universal Church.

The question this raises for me, and I hope for all of us, is what Jn 17.21 can achieve in this broken and divided world if we are willing to embark again on ‘the great adventure in obedience.’                                            Amen.

 [ii] Sundkler, Church of South India, 88

[iii] Scheme of union: including the basis of union as adopted by the uniting churches, the constitution of the Church of South India, and other documents (Madras: Christian Literature Society for India, 7th edn; 1949) 1.

[iv] Scheme of union, 1.

[v] Order of service, 2.

[vi] Order of service, 4.

[vii] B. Sundkler, Church of South India: the movement towards Union 1900–1947 (London, Lutterworth Press 1954) 28