Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Lent 1b – Gen 9 8-17, Ps 25, 1 Pet 3 18-22, Mk 1 9-15

Last Tuesday evening – Shrove Tuesday – many traditional Christians would’ve finished clearing their pantries of sweets and delicacies, and, with the odd pancake or ten, eaten them up before Lent. We clear things out that might distract us from the focus of the fasting time. That focus is the simple truth that ultimately, we rely on God alone. Churches pare down too – no flowers; ornaments veiled, violet robes and hangings. With distractions out of the way, life is more austere and basic. Then that essential truth can come more easily into focus; we rely on God alone.

On Ash Wednesday, we thought about the way fasting from food has the effect of changing our experience of time. Our days are no longer partitioned into the spaces between meals, snacks and sleep. Instead, our days stretch out into an unfamiliar, trackless emptiness. Each day is then an obstacle-free space for God to find us.

We can achieve the same effect as fasting from food by fasting from overwork, from compulsive shopping, from over-consumption of news and media, from obsessive hobbies or passions (eg., worry). We can fast from speaking – inhabit the silence. Each is a chance to make obstacle-free space for God to find us.

For a long time now, the wider community has been bewildered by this sort of practice – if not downright hostile towards it. And that’s understandable. Our ‘quality of life’ is conventionally measured by how much we consume and how full our social and working calendars are. Fasting from such things questions this measure of life, and many dislike such indisputable standards being challenged.

Yet communities of faith – all faiths – have always valued fasting as a spiritual exercise. So what do we discover in this self-emptying process? What does it do for our spiritual health? There’s more to it than that silly joke about banging your head against a wall – that it feels better when you stop? Today’s collect prayer seems to me to point to what’s happening – particularly the way it links the waters of the primordial flood with the waters of our baptism. It recognises that at the same time as these waters are bringing death, they’re also germinating new life.

God of the new and eternal covenant, as the forty days of the great flood swept away the world’s corruption and watered new beginnings of righteousness and life: grant to us, who are washed clean and born again in the saving flood of baptism, the wellspring of your grace, that your gift of new life may flourish once again; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer

The flood story is about washing away the wickedness and evil that had come to characterise humanity – ^{Gen 6.5} every inclination of the thoughts of [human] hearts was only evil continually. Selfishness and disloyalty lay behind the human violence that so grieved God. The community on the Ark sheltered as much from those evils as they did from the waters of the flood.

And the story of Jesus’ baptism sees him immediately after his baptism going to the people-free ‘ark’ of the wilderness – to be with wild creatures and angels, rather than humans – and await his call to mission.

Both the Ark community and Jesus emerged from a fast – a retreat from everyday life where God could come near them – where they could experience the utter dependence of all life on God alone. And when they finally left that wilderness, the Ark community and Jesus emerged in obedience to God’s command to restore life to Earth – to reaffirm the reign of God on Earth.

Lent is the time for the Church to rediscover, reaffirm and reinforce our basic values of love for God and neighbour. Lent is the time for the Church to remove ourselves from the prevailing climate of entitlement – and we’ve always been complicit in that – and re-equip ourselves for the self-emptying life that we see yet again modelled in Jesus today.

Jesus didn’t go down to the river to take over from John the Baptist; he went down there just like everyone else to receive baptism. That is our model – rely on God alone, assume no entitlements, make obstacle-free space for God to find us.

Lent is our chance to return to the wilderness – to remove ourselves from all that numbs our spiritual senses – and wait for God – to wait upon God.                  Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Transfiguration – Mark 9.2-9 

Sometimes at the end of a very cloudy day, just when you think you’re headed from one depth of shadow into the even deeper shadow of night, the sun appears under the clouds just before it sets. Suddenly its glorious, golden light transfigures everything; forest treetops shake off their dull grey-green to reveal a sparkling copper crown that shimmers for as far as the eye can see. Old stone buildings seem to come to life. The world feels caught up into a holy moment, and you soak it up while you can, because you know it’ll only last for moments.

Mark frames the moment of Jesus’ transfiguration just like this. Just as the shadow of thick clouds and the deeper shadow of night can frame a glorious moment of sunset, Mark frames the transfiguration with worrying stories – shadow stories.

Three times in this Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples of his coming death and resurrection and their reactions are very disappointing. On two of those occasions, Peter, James and John are named as the disciples who just don’t get it. Before today’s reading, Peter rejects the thought and tries to talk some sense into Jesus,^8.32 and after today’s reading, James and John ignore what he says as they obsess about their own future eminence.^10.35-37

The transfiguration is a momentary glimpse of Christ’s true glory, but even here, Peter, James and John just don’t get it. These three are its privileged witnesses, but they’re utterly unable to comprehend it. It really jars, and it’s meant to. Jesus’ dazzling transfiguration should transform them, and all of us, like those special sunsets do to a cloud-shadowed world. But in that moment, it doesn’t; the full wonder of it is only accessible to them – and to us – in the light of Easter. So what’s going on?

A while before today’s story, Jesus had said, Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power. Now, six days later, for these three, Peter, James and John, that’s just what happens. Jesus takes them up Mount Tabor, Moses and Elijah appear with him, and the disciples see that the kingdom of God actually has come with power. The kingdom has come in the person of Jesus.

So what do they do? Peter wants to put Jesus, Elijah and Moses in boxes. His motives are good; it’s what the Jewish people had always done with sacred things; put them in a safe place so nothing can defile them.

Even though they witness the transfiguration, Peter, James and John don’t have the full picture. They have no idea that the Messiah can die, far less rise again.

So Jesus tells them to keep quiet about what they’ve seen until after he’s risen from the dead; don’t tell the story until you can tell it all. You can’t say who I am until you know the whole story. They wander on, wondering what it can mean; this rising from the dead business. And yet there’s this memory of an incredible vision that they’d never shake off; a vision of life beyond our ‘natural’ one. A glimpse of something more that they don’t seem ready to understand yet.

We’re in a similar spot to the disciples. Every now and then, we can also have a profound encounter with Jesus; feel as if we get who he really is. But like his first disciples we’re on the learning journey with him too. Where his words about rising from the dead were a mystery for them, for us, I wonder if it’s the mystery that he said he’s coming again, and that we will be raised from the dead with him.

What does the transfiguration say to us? Jesus’ transfiguration reveals who he really is. And just as the first disciples grew into a deeper understanding of who Jesus actually is, we travel the same road they did.

On Ash Wednesday this week, we turn with them to follow Jesus on the cruel, mysteriously providential road to Jerusalem. And as we learn more about him, we pray to learn more about what he calls from us. Sometimes, other people can see that there’s more to you or me than we know ourselves. Sometimes other people are given the gift of telling us who we really are. Sometimes we are given that gift ourselves for fellow pilgrims; transfiguration moments of light at work in each other; we’re like that forest set aglow at sunset.

I remember as a very new Christian I’d done something stupid, said some hurtful things, and I felt ashamed of them. 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 nasty words weren’t who I really was; that deep down, there was a more real me.

The real person was the one who could see those actions and words for what they were; the one who wanted to do better; leave old ways behind. In a way he held up a mirror to me; held it on an angle that shone transfiguring light on me.

Just as Peter, James and John were not prisoners of their bad choices and mistakes, I didn’t have to be either. Jesus transformed their lives, and Jesus transforms our lives.

I pray that this is our gift to each other, and to our community. May we be compassionate, transfiguring people who reveal/reflect each other’s deeper inner lives: reveal/reflect the indwelling of God in each of us; reveal/reflect to the world Christ in whom even death is transfigured into new life.    Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Epiphany + 5 – Healing Sunday – Mark 1.29-39

Jesus heals Peter’s Mother-in-Law and she gets straight up to serve everyone. I remember years ago reading this story and feeling as if she got a bit of a raw deal. And I must confess to having harboured this misgiving until recently. I disclosed this misgiving to a notable Biblical scholar who reminded me of something Jesus said later in this Gospel – ^10.45 the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve’. It’s a teaching we see in two of the other gospels ^{(Mt 20.28 and Jn 13.1-17 footwashing)}, so scholars see this service teaching as ‘normative’ – as essential to the nature of Jesus and his followers – as a standard by which we understand other parts of the Gospel.

What that means in today’s case is that for Peter’s Mother-in-Law, being healed and enabled to get up and serve identifies her in the Gospel as someone who is like Jesus; as someone who serves. Her healing by Jesus restored her as someone who provides hospitality – an extremely high value in her culture, and in the Gospel. Her healing by Jesus restored her honour and dignity to her, and affirmed her ministry. That’s healing – it’s far more than a cure.

This particular sort of healing still happens today. I want to tell you about someone I used to visit in the burns unit of the Royal Adelaide Hospital. He’d been badly burnt in a house fire – he’d gone back in to save his dog. During these visits, there were three things that I marvelled at. The first was the bed he was on. The second was the eternity it seemed to take for the healing process to inch forwards. But most amazing was the honouring of this man’s humanity and dignity that was so much a part of his recovery – or as I see it, his rebirth.

The bed. On one visit, he invited me to sit on the bed because there wasn’t a chair in the room. For a little while, everything seemed normal. But then, very gently, a wave seemed to go under me. It lifted me up and tilted me to one side. It felt like being in a rubber boat on the sea. I didn’t like to mention it at first, but it happened a few more times, and when I’d developed a bit of a list to starboard, he saw the look on my face and explained it to me. His bed did this all the time, so that no part of his skin would have to bear the pressure of his body-weight for longer than a few minutes.

Eternity. I marvelled at how much time it took his skin to heal. From one visit to the next, his progress seemed unbelievably slow. He seemed to be cut off from time, cocooned in a room by himself, receiving the most frequent, and the most unbelievably painstaking care you could imagine. From visit to visit, with a sort of time-lapse photographic view, I watched his hands and arms, his scalp, his chest and his back being progressively given back to him.

Rebirth. But I said he surprised me too. It surprised me that he got well again at all, considering how he’d looked when things started. He came to talk often about how he’d come to understand that God wanted him to stay around for a bit longer. And he wanted to find out why; what was it that God wanted him to do. I believe an important part of what moved him to this point was the way the burns-unit staff treated him. They didn’t know who or what he was in life (he was on an invalid pension and lived in a housing trust unit); they simply devoted themselves to this human being’s comfort, and to his recovery.

For the rest of us looking on, these staff were the way God answered our prayers for our friend. Their conduct spoke clearly of how God wanted his dignity and significance as a person to be honoured. And he was given much more than his old sense of self by this. He was cured, but also healed – past wounds of the soul were also addressed by the respect and care he was given.

The time, the patience, the delicacy of each change of dressings, the bed designed to preserve him from the degradation of further agony – in all this, he came to know that God cherished him, and wanted him to stay alive. And his life from then on became a quest to figure out what God want him to do with it. Healing is more than a re-instatement of what was; it’s a furthering of the process of creation. So our friend was given something more than he had before he was injured – he was given a new life. And he decided to dedicate his new life to God who gave it to him; he committed himself to do whatever it was that God wanted of him. And he sought that purpose within the context of a community of friends he knew loved and cared for him.

I pray God’s continued blessing on our regular healing ministry.             Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Septuagesima  – Mt 20 1-16

(Kids: The professors’ table in Hogwarts’ great hall is called a ‘high table’.) One night at high table at a Melbourne uni college hall, somebody had been to chapel, and today’s parable was the Gospel reading. They were incensed by it, and decided to tell one of the theological teachers how unfair they thought it was. It became quite a heated discussion; something almost unheard of at high table. Soon the people on either side of them got interested, and the theolog had to tell them the parable too.

Then it was on; you should have heard the outrage. Suddenly there weren’t two, but six people arguing about it, then ten, then twelve, and eventually, all twenty-four people – respected academics from the whole range of disciplines – and all arguing furiously about the rights and wrongs of this parable. I had never seen that normally bored, urbane gathering at high table get so animated about anything before.

Back then, my day job was to teach English to refugees and recent immigrants and I was always on the lookout for things that would inspire my students to practise their conversation. That night at high table, I decided this was the very thing for them. Could this happen in my classroom too?

It did, and spectacularly. So I used it with lots of my classes. It was fascinating how different national groups reacted to it. Engineers fresh from the solidarność uprising in Gdansk despised the landowner. Paying latecomers the same as the all-day workers was an injustice to them, because, naturally, they saw themselves as the morning crew. Latin Americans saw the landowner using his wealth to inflate his own ego, and humiliate poor, honest workers. Others were disgusted by the owner’s insensitivity – paying the late-comers first made the ‘real workers’ hope in vain for better. My French students would never speak to such a person.

But each time, when everyone had reported back and the hubbub finally died down, the eldest Vietnamese man in the room would stand to speak for his people on this weighty matter. And was always the same message.

He’d say, ‘We think the landowner is a good man. He understands that everyone needs enough money to give their families food and clothes, and he gives it to all of them. He is a good man. The latecomers to the vineyard had been waiting all day for work, and so it was wonderful that their hope was rewarded.’

For some of the other students, this understanding might as well have come from a different planet. But the Vietnamese students always felt a deep kinship with the labourers who’d waited all day for work and were last to be hired. So they always rejoiced with them in their good fortune. That was what life had become for them in Vietnam – no bank account; no job security; no dole; only paid for piece-work if and when it suited an employer. And that’s what life’s still like for huge numbers of people who can never be sure where the next meal’s coming from.

So, back in another thought universe, at high table, scholars argued about justice, and Eastern Europeans and Latin Americans spoke of honour, equality, and just deserts But this parable takes us with those values into the realm of grace; into the Kingdom understanding that everything is a gift – everything is given in love, and love cannot be confined to our judgements of people’s worth or what they deserve.

Vicky and I were blessed to meet this story in the flesh in Jerusalem. At about 5.15 each morning, the call to prayer would wake us, sounding from the minaret just down Nablus Road. Morning Prayer in the cathedral was a bit later, so we had a time of quiet meditation to contemplate the sounds of the waking day. One sound always came just after the prayers at the mosque had finished. It was the sound of hundreds of feet; men walking wordlessly from their mosque down towards the old city.

They were headed down to an open market place on the corner of Sultan Suleiman Road and Prophet Street, over the road from the Old City’s Damascus Gate. Every day, they waited there from early morning, hoping to be hired as day labourers.

We passed this market place often. We saw the way the men were hired. A truck or a car would pull over to the kerb, and one of its occupants would bellow out the number of labourers they needed. Then several of the job-seekers would run over and jump aboard, and off they’d go.

Where people live under military occupation, large gatherings of men are not viewed favourably. So several times each day, a truckload of young, conscripted soldiers would drive onto the market place and give the would-be labourers a hard time, demanding to see their papers, searching them, shoving and kicking them around. It was all part of a daily ritual of humiliation and oppression.

But still the men came – every day. And many were still there waiting late in the day. Staying all day is dangerous; humiliating – it must have sometimes seemed futile. But they had no other way of providing for their families.

I hear this parable and always imagine what it would mean for those men if a land-owner came back every few hours to rescue more of them from their plight. I imagine what their families would think of such an owner, paying enough for daily bread even to the last ones hired, regardless of the hours worked.

Can we open ourselves to this parable from the late-comers’ perspective? Could we receive that vital gift and have it set us free from the fear that we don’t really deserve it? have it set us free from the fear that it’d be taken away from us if only someone knew the truth about us? have it set us free from the fear that we’ve let the side down somehow, and we’re not really worthy?

That’s the emotional challenge of this parable. But our faith is not determined by our feelings; because feelings don’t determine what is real; God’s love does that. The job-seekers who wait all day with no job must feel wretched – failing their needy families. And yet their will to stay all day is a courageous act of faith; that there’s always hope. That’s a gift; the strength to stay; the refusal to leave. That faith has been given to them, just as their life has been. God’s love is what’s real.

The Kingdom of heaven is like this landowner…the Kingdom which operates on the principles this land-owner works by is a Kingdom which the world desperately needs; a Kingdom where a life is valued for itself; valuable regardless of works or background or length or dis/ability or feelings.

Those poor, desperate day labourers and their families are precious. But unless the one in the car calls out, they have nothing to give – like that thief on the cross beside Jesus who prayed that Jesus would remember him when he came into his Kingdom. Even when these job-seekers can’t fulfil their side of our social contract, this parable promises them the gift of abundant life because God cherishes them – cherishes all.

When people get this, it’s amazing. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/this-doctor-gives-free-health-care-to-struggling-temporary-visa-holders-in-australia

So we pray with Jesus – let the Kingdom come here too.  Amen

Insights from the commentators noted by Ulrich Luz.

Since the Mishnah calculates that a person needs a minimum of 200 denarii per year in order to exist, this income presupposes that a day laborer was able to find work at least 200 days in a year and that he furthermore did not have to support a family. One denarius could buy 10 to 12 small, flat loaves of bread; 3 to 4 denarii 12 litres of wheat (from which one could make about 15 kilograms of bread) or a lamb; 30 denarii a slave’s garment; 100 denarii an ox. In view of these prices the day laborers had a hard life (M. Šeb. 8.4; m. Šeqal. 4.9; m. Menaḥ. 13.8; m. Arak. 6.5). ¹

As the farmer dealt with the last workers, so Jesus deals with those who by normal standards have no claim on God. In the name of God he affirms the sinners who do not keep the law; the women and the poor, who for various reasons cannot keep the law in its entirety; the sick, who are excluded from the community; and the unlettered am ha aretz (people of the Land), who are ignorant of the law (Luz).²

The parable is most likely directed against human efforts to link God’s justice and God’s graciousness in such a way that one becomes the standard for the other. In that case either God may no longer be gracious, since the principle of justice forbids it, or he must be gracious to all, since the principle of equality dictates that all have an equal claim to graciousness. Thus the parable is focused on a just God’s freedom to be gracious. It does not offer a new system of unmerited graciousness that will take the place of the normal standards of a justice that grants to all what they have earned. Instead, the standard values are “disrupted” by the appearance of God’s love, and they thereby lose their deadly universal validity. “I came not to call the righteous but sinners” (Mark 2:17). This description of Jesus’ activity neither denies nor excludes the righteousness of the righteous. It simply brings God to those who need him, the sinners.

Finally, the scope of the parable includes a new attitude toward one’s neighbor which the experience of grace makes possible. Those who make God’s justice the dominant principle and do not permit his graciousness to appear alongside it are incapable of solidarity. With his direct question in v. 15 the owner of the vineyard makes the “spokesman” aware that the principle of achievement leads to arrogance toward those who have earned less and envy toward those who have earned more or who have been rewarded unjustly. Part of the parable’s point—not as the result of a theoretical insight but as a practical consequence of one’s own experience—is a new sense of solidarity with those who are not well off but to whom God is gracious.³

Every “human claim shatters on the freedom and the greatness of God’s grace.” (Bornkamm) Even earlier H. J. Holtzmann had said: “This remarkable parable deals a death blow to the concept of reward by making use of it” and by letting concepts such as reward and achievement “sink under the weight of a religious idealism to which all reward no longer appears as legal recompense but only as a gift, as overflowing grace, as the reward of grace.” Finally, for Joachim Jeremias two worlds are at odds in this parable: “the world of merit, and the world of grace; the law is contrasted with the gospel.”⁴

 

^[1] Luz, U. (2001). Matthew: a commentary Vol 2. (H. Koester, Ed.) (p. 530). Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg.

² Luz, p. 533.

³ Luz, p. 534.

⁴ Luz, p. 527.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Epiphany + 3b – Jonah 3 1-10, Ps 62 5-12, 1 Cor 7 29-31, Mk 1 14-20

In a little while, the younger people among us will be heading off for a new year at school or kindy. When you start something new – a new school year, a new job, or if you move to live in a new place – you often feel you’re not ready yet. You need more time, more training; somebody should prepare you for it. Maybe you just don’t want things to change. I feel like that when I’ve just arrived on the beach – that moment of decision; should I go in now or wait ‘til I’ve warmed up a bit? How cold is that water? But what if somebody suddenly yells out that they’re in trouble; that they need our help!’ What do we do then? To heck with the cold; in we go!

Today’s OT and Gospel stories both start on the beach. For Simon, Andrew, James and John, it’s the umpteenth time they’ve been there. They make their living out of fishing. For Jonah, it may only be his second beach experience. The first was just after God asked him to go to Nineveh. He dashed down to Joppa ^{(which we call Jaffa)} and took a ship to Tarshish ^(Sardinia); as far from Nineveh as he could possibly get. Jonah’s second beach experience – when the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed him out – was far to the north of Jaffa, so not too far to travel to Nineveh when God called him the second time. For all of those beach people, the Galileans and Jonah, today’s experience on the beach was a call to do something they probably felt completely unprepared for. But just like a call to rescue someone who looks like they’re in trouble, the calls they heard weren’t something they could ignore.

What’s God’s call about? Why would God call Jonah to go to Nineveh, and why would Jonah particularly want to avoid going to that great city? The second part of the question is easy. Nineveh was a great military power, and famous for its ruthless and terrible treatment of their enemies. If you were told to go and preach repentance to a people like that, what would you do? Suddenly Jonah’s response doesn’t look that silly. But it still doesn’t explain why God wanted him to go there. It concerned God that Nineveh was a violent, brutal place. God wanted it to change.

So Nineveh was God’s mission, and God gave that mission as a gift to Jonah. By doing that, God gave Jonah the meaning of his own life – the rescuer of all the people and animals of Nineveh. But Jonah flees from this gift. It doesn’t say Jonah flees from Nineveh; it says he flees from the presence of the Lord. ^1.3 On board the ship to Tarshish Jonah’s sleeping down below. God sends a mighty storm against the ship. It’s not alright by God that somebody sleeps away their life’s vocation.

What the book of Jonah gives us is a parable about our vocation to help people to discover God’s grace. Jonah, like all of us, is called to join in God’s mission. If we can see people cut off from God’s love and compassion, we feel called to do something about it. It’s obvious, but it’s something we’re not comfortable with – our calling as God’s people is to draw others into relationship with the true God. But we don’t jump at it. We stand on the beach. The water looks cold. Out there, flailing in the drink, people are in trouble, and someone nudges us – calls us.

Aunty Betty’s story.

It’s good to read Jonah 3; to see those people of Nineveh actually listen to the prophet and respond. They responded to God’s call and turned from their former lifestyle. And in that turning, they rediscovered their full humanity – and many animals were saved too, says God. I like that particularly in our warming world .

I think we have two jobs to do as a community. The first is to come to terms with the idea that God is most likely to be nudging us – calling us – towards someone. It’s happened before. But who is it this time? Which cry for God’s kindness are we being nudged to notice? We can discern this as a community through prayer and discussion. … The second thing we have to do is to respond – follow that cry; heed that nudge – don’t run from God; remember Jonah. The gifts we bear are not the beads and trinkets of self-interest, but the very love of God. And in bearing the specific gift God has given us – bearing this gift to the ones God intends it for, we discover God’s other unique gift to us; our true selves. Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Epiphany +2b – 1 Sam 3 1-10, Ps 139 1-18, 1 Cor 6 12-20, Jn 1 43-51

To the one who searches us out and knows us, Amen

Epiphany is the season when we celebrate God’s appearing to all of us outsiders. During this season, our Scriptures call us to notice one special way that God has of appearing to people; by calling them; calling us. A call is one of the more forceful ways God appears to us. But it has to be, because often we don’t hear, or we won’t hear, or sometimes we hear something else and mistake it for God. Sometimes God is direct about it, like with the boy Samuel. Other times, our life as we know it can suddenly, unaccountably fall to bits, and we have to start again on a new path.

We humans are often amazingly slow at recognising that God is calling us. But God persists, and a funny thing is that when we just can’t see it, it’s often quite obvious to even the most casual onlooker. There seems to be a moment in every Christian’s life when someone like the greengrocer tells us that God is trying to get through to us. If we’re lucky, we may even meet two such people in a lifetime.

The obvious thing that today’s Scriptures are saying to us is that God calls people. You don’t need any particular qualifications before God will call you. Samuel’s youth and inexperience show us that age is no barrier. Nor is understanding. Samuel didn’t even know God; he hadn’t learned the scriptures when God called him. Other parts of Scripture show us that people don’t need squeaky clean moral qualifications for a call either – or special piety or even humility. Today’s Psalmist reveals that the Call of God is something that’s basic to being human:

… you have created my inward parts: you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

…You knew my soul and my bones were not hidden from you

when I was formed in secret, and woven in the depths of the earth …

‘I was called by God,’ says the Psalmist; ‘I was called before I was even born.’ In fact, the last line of v.14 suggests that the Psalmist was called from the dust that God drew together to form the first human being. ‘My purpose’, sings the Psalmist, ‘my purpose was thought through by God before time ever dawned.’ At the most basic level, we’re here because God has called us into being; called us to be who we can truly become; called us to be that together. It’s lovely, isn’t it! There must be a catch. Well there is, but the catch is also rather lovely.

The catch is that when God calls us, God doesn’t just call for little bits of us; things like ‘intellectual assent’, or a week’s commitment: God’s not satisfied by these; God’s not necessarily satisfied by a ‘good life’ either: Yes, I’m a Christian; I mean I obey the Ten Commandments.

God, not satisfied? No, I’m afraid we had that other reading today too – from that confronting old apostle Paul. And he’s adamant – like he always is – adamant that God calls the whole person: body, mind, ethics, feelings, loyalties, soul, freedoms, time … the whole lot. That’s quite a catch, isn’t it!

But I did say it’s a lovely catch. The lovely bit is towards the end of what Paul writes. Don’t you know, says Paul; don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Paul’s a bit like the greengrocer I mentioned; one of those people with that galling knack of stating the obvious; telling us just how close God is to us … as close as our own mind, heart, soul, body. And we together are the body of Christ.

Think back to your memories of the Samuel story. Samuel would go on to oppose the people when they wanted to replace God’s judges with a king. Then he went on to call kings to account. It’s a dangerous thing to heed God’s call. Samuel spoke God’s mind into his time. He proclaimed God’s opposition to injustice and betrayal – he proclaimed God’s call to people to be just and loyal – to live God’s love.

We, the body of Christ are called, both corporately and individually, to speak that mind of God into our own time too. Whatever God may ask of you or me individually is for us to discover. But there’s no question that God calls us as the Church to confront the issues of injustice and betrayal that plague our time: unjust war; abuse of refugees; avoidable homelessness and hunger; obscene disparities in wealth between rich and poor; the unethical collusion of politics, money and media to create a false world view in the pursuit of power – our particular curse right now.

God calls us to confront these wrongs in Jesus’s name because we are called to be God’s shopfront to the world. Jeremiah taught that we are God’s clothing. Teresa of Avila said, we are God’s hands, feet, face. People are meant to encounter God’s call to justice and loyalty and honesty – to encounter God’s love for them – through the Church. So while an individual call might be very tricky to pin down, corporately, it’s clear who we’re called to be. People who embody God’s love.              Amen

The Rev’d Susan F. Straub

Isa 60:1-6; Ps 72:1-7,10-14; Ephesians 3:1-12; Matthew 2:1-12

Introduction

Today we celebrate Epiphany. It’s the 3^rd January 2021: a fact and we have to believe it!  Time is leading us further and further into the twenty-first century with new wonders of human endeavours in science and technology confronting us every day: “A vaccine for CoVID-19? Don’t hold your breath!” they said. Bit of a sick pun. But the doubters were wrong! Those who saw the star and travelled faithfully towards it’s light found what was thought improbable, and have shared this disease-preventive with the world.

We’re at a time when more of us than ever before are aware of the vulnerability of all life on Earth, and the preciousness of life. When more of us than ever before are aware of the damage human populations can do to planet Earth. When more of us than ever before, are aware of the dangers to life on Earth, not only from ourselves, but from external events, such as a pandemic, or a collision with an asteroid. No wonder those who think about such things become anxious.

Matthew 2: 1-12

In this season of epiphany, we remember that our soul’s travel, like the souls of the wise men, begins with seeking the Christ-child. The magi found him in an unexpectedly ordinary place, but saw him for who he was and is for us: Son of God, the promised Messiah of Judaism, king above all worldly kings and rulers.

St. Matthew shows us that awe and humility are not attributes solely of the poor and lowly. The shepherds in St. Luke’s gospel saw wonders in the heavens, came to the place where Jesus lay, and worshipped. Likewise, those magi, kings and spiritual authorities in their own lands, came and worshipped, just as Queen Elizabeth will do in the chapel royal on Wednesday, the 6^th of January, the actual feast day. As we know, her family motto is ‘Ich dien’, ‘I serve’.  The magi too bowed their heads and were able to bring gifts from their material wealth: gold, frankincense and myrrh.

We find ways of bringing our gifts to the Christ-child. Each of us is in a sense a king, in that we make our own decisions, yet each of has at some point voluntarily decided to come to the Christ-child. I remember coming to church as a thirty-something wife and mother, and wondering: I know about Jesus, but how is he Son of God?  Each of us has come to face him and brought whatever it was that we thought identified us, the kind of people, group, tribe, category even, to whom we felt we belonged.

Like the wise men, once we’ve seen and experienced for ourselves the saving love of Christ, God helps us to keep him alive and guard him from the Herods of our age.

When I was Chaplain and Student Counsellor at St. Mark’s College, a residence and community of university students, an exchange student who’d grown up in Eastern Germany under Soviet communism told me: “When I was thirteen, I wanted very much to be confirmed. I had to choose. Confirmation in my church meant I would not be allowed to go to university at the end of secondary school.  I chose to be confirmed. In 1989, the Berlin wall came down and things started to change.”  And there she was in the mid- nineties, a university exchange-student.

A woman in her 50s was quoted in a newspaper last weekend (Weekend Australian, 26-27^th December 2020) of how her she was guided to find Jesus, the anointed king of Christians’ hearts, minds, and wills: “I was 16 when my classmate shared the Gospel with me. She invited me to join a small Christian fellowship. I found that God was touching my heart and found a peace with Jesus which is hard to express.” Christians are forbidden to share the gospel. As of early this year (2020), it is illegal for those under 18 years to attend church in China.

Back in 2010, to enter China on a holiday visa in 2010, I had to sign a declaration that I would not proselytize while I was there, as the missionaries had many years ago. However, a market stall-holder told a friend and me of his faith and experience as a Chinese Christian. How it was that because he and his wife acted in faith to keep their second child, he lost his prized government job and became a stall-holder for his artist-wife.

Why the Herods’ calculating, sometimes murderous fury?   The love of God cannot be controlled.

From the Christ-child we celebrate today shines forth the both the creative and redeeming power of love.  His mother, Mary said ‘Yes’ to God in faith, even though she would have realised the predicament she would bring to herself and her family. Both St. Luke and St. Matthew are at great pains to show by genealogy that Jesus was not only of good family, something greatly prized in the Middle Eastern culture of his day, but indeed royal, in the line of King David, no less. Since she was betrothed to Joseph, in a marriage contract that would have required divorce to dissolve, some might have accused her of adultery, others might have blamed her father for not protecting her.  The situation was a mess. It was Joseph’s love of God, which went against his self-interest, that redeemed her, bestowed the righteousness of the law on her as his wife. Together they presented Jesus at the Temple as their first-born son, thus sealing the legitimacy of Jesus.  Mary’s love and Joseph’s love united in Jesus.  The grace of love and the requirements of law reconciled.  Heaven and earth united in the Christ-child.

There he lay under the gaze of men who had travelled far from lands east of Judah. It was from lands of the east that powerful kings had conquered Israel, destroyed the Temple, taken the people into exile, and eventually restored them. Wise men of the eastern nations to whom Israel had been forced to pay tribute and homage brought their tribute and paid homage in true humility to this child. Here was another reconciliation. The magi protected Jesus by not returning to Herod.  They knew that he understood, loved, and served only one thing: his power.  The power of loving kindness and mercy, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation were beyond him. Such power gives light to the world: makes a kinder, gentler world.

If Matthew and Luke knew the story of his birth, Jesus must have known. It begs the question:  could he who knew that his being was the will of God, God’s Word to the world, could he have gone against his divine nature when the time came for him to choose between God’s will and self-interest? We who know the rest of his life-story know that he chose to face peacefully those who caused his suffering and death. However, enough for us to celebrate today the Christ-child, Prince of Peace: God’s gift to us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Christmas 1 – 27-12-2020 – Luke 2 22-40

Early in today’s Gospel reading, Luke reminds us of two Jewish customs of his time. First, for the forty days after a Hebrew woman gave birth to a boy, she was viewed as being ritually unclean. At the end of that time, Jewish Law ^{Lev 12} required that she present an offering for her purification. …The other custom looked back to the escape from Egypt. In Exodus 13, we read that every firstborn of the Hebrews was to be dedicated to God. This law softened as the ordained service of God came to be the province of tribe of Levi alone, so parents belonging to the other tribes could dedicate their firstborn, but also redeem them. At the temple, they’d make an offering which ritually bought back their firstborn from God.

So today, Luke shows the Holy Family coming to the temple for purification and for this ritual acknowledgement of God’s first call on their child. But Simeon and Anna appear and declare that despite the ritual buy-back, they’ve been waiting there to hand on God’s call from themselves to this family. Simeon’s lovely words embody this sense of handing on the baton as he takes the little Jesus in his arms:

²⁹ Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; ³⁰ for my eyes have seen your salvation, ³¹ which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, ³² a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.

A light for revelation to the Gentiles – the light of God’s glory offered to everyone. What it means is that everything which the temple had embodied now lies cradled in the arms of Simeon, a faithful old man who held on to the truth. And then the ancient prophet Anna, who also came at that moment began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

Simeon and Anna had lived very long lives of faithful service to God. They saw God as prophets do; they see in real time what God is doing. They saw God handing on the Glory which had dwelt in the temple, and entrusting it to a six-week old baby who would shine with that glory for the whole world to see. For Simeon and for Anna, this was at once a moment of exultation and one of release. They could let go; they could die in peace; someone else would carry the load from now.

This Song of Simeon is called the night-prayer of his life and remains the Church’s night-prayer of handing over to God the troubles of each day.

Of course, the message to those who cradled the new temple of God’s Glory was not all rosy. Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed ³⁵ so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too.’ This story holds a special place in part of the Church’s year where we find ourselves right now. The seasons of Christmas and Epiphany are visible, firstly in the Child, and also in the promised revelation to all peoples. But even now, the suffering of the Cross begins to come into distant focus.

The falling and the rising, the opposition, the exposure and the agony that Simeon foresees for Mary – these are very much part of our experience of holding on to faith too; they describe our predicament and our blessing. Yet Simeon and Anna, knowing this about life, nevertheless proclaim revelation and understanding.

Our own parish embodies everything we read in this story. We have faithful seers and servants who have been holding on to the faith here for a very long time. You each received the faith from your forebears, and by God’s grace, you have borne the light aloft here for many years. We who now share the burden with you faithful mothers and fathers of our church must go on holding the light aloft in an ever-different world. What do you see ahead of us? What can you tell us?

As you hand on the faith to us, and we to succeeding generations, we make Simeon’s song a prayer for ourselves. And we pray that when we hand over the light of faith to those who come after us, we hand it over to people whom we’ve enabled to hold it aloft too; by God’s grace, people whom we’ve enabled to hold aloft the light of faith for a long and complex lifetime.

Little people like you and me – we’re involved in God’s purposes, and no matter if we don’t see results sometimes for many years, we shouldn’t be discouraged. Things might seem out of control at a national or international level, but God still works through us little people to bring about grace, love, peace, hope, joy, justice, mercy and faith. Our part in this is to trust and hold fast to what God has set before us; practise the faith, do justly, rejoice, exult in God. For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations. ^{Isa 61.11} Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Christmas 2020

What’s a Christmas message that might make sense in a year shaped by so much tragedy? There’ve been wars, persecuted minorities, extremist violence, political chaos, that terrible explosion, and the huge and ever-growing refugee crisis. And it’s also a year where a series of natural catastrophes have hurt so many – mega-bushfires, mega-storms, earthquakes, floods, a volcanic eruption, rising sea levels, drought and heat waves. And on top of the human cost, there’ve been billions of wild and domestic creatures lost to our fires, and human-caused global extinction.

And of course there’s the pandemic – families separated, accustomed freedoms withheld, livelihoods destroyed, and so many loved ones killed by that insidious virus – 1.7 m and counting. As one person put it, this isn’t a year that any of us are going to be sorry to see the back of; challenging, unpredictable and just plain tough – there’s been an awful lot about it not to like.

So at Christmas, in all this mess, where do we look for the hope, the good will, the peace and joy that we usually gather to celebrate at this time? Can we possibly find this sort of Christmas message speaking to us in a credible form right now?

The Gospel we’ve just heard tells us the ancient Christmas story, and as ever, it holds out a message of hope – and paradoxically, it does so especially in a time of strange and terrible experiences. That’s because for us citizens of the lucky country, the strange world we’ve suddenly found ourselves living in over this past year bears remarkable similarities to the world of our Gospel Christmas story.

The world Jesus was born into was also a world where ordinary, innocent people experienced political leaders dividing families and countries by decree, deprivation of liberties, checkpoints; worries about where the next meal might come from. Good health and a reasonable life span were by no means to be expected. The main ones who experience these trials as normal hereabouts are Aboriginal Australians.

But this year, for the first time since WW II, we’ve all had a personal taste of it.

This may just be a unique opportunity for us to experience how deep is the Christmas message of hope, goodwill, peace and joy that we sing about so blithely. For the first time in my life, Australians generally have freely given up our lucky country entitlements. We’ve given up precious liberties we’ve taken for granted, and done so for the sake of others we don’t even know. We’ve seen ourselves in the people of the bushfires, drought and floods, in the caregivers and their patients, and we’ve responded by pulling our heads in. Compassion and generosity have awakened in us as a community. We’ve seen our leaders embrace a wisdom and unity and generosity of spirit that only a time of general catastrophe inspires.

There are limits to the good we’ve done. Refugees and foreign students are still left to charities and philanthropic chefs to make sure they don’t starve on our watch. But even there, the tide is turning. Good will is stirring in even the coldest hearts.

The baby we celebrate at Christmas is the model for all of us to give up our sense of entitlement for the sake of others. God freely gives up divine power and freedom to embrace our need and our danger. God, born at Bethlehem, chooses illegitimate birth to displaced parents who must depend on the charity of strangers; and all for our sake. Jesus grows to be a model for all of us by sticking to that poverty, to that itinerancy, to that dependency in order that we might inherit what he gave up for us.

We always talk about needing to become more like Christ. Well this year, a lot of people have done just that. And it’s begun to make this country a much better place – a place where we might be poorer, where we might be less self-confident, where we might be less forceful about asserting our rights and privileges, because we’re so conscious of others who can’t even breathe without help. This has been a year where it’s been on show for all to see. So many have given up freedoms, rights and privileges for the sake of others that it’s been impossible to miss. In this year and the years to come, I pray that we may cherish this practical experience of what it is that God did in giving up freedom and power to become Earthbound for the sake of Earth. Hope, goodwill, peace, joy; we are wildly rich if we have these! Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Advent 4 – Luke 1 26ff – Annunciation, Journey, Magnificat

Lots of us here are of an age to remember the protest singers of the ‘60s and ‘70s – people like Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin. They protested against the Vietnam war, against materialism, racism, sexism and slavery. They were songs of a new generation crying out against the wrongs of their society.

New wars have kept breaking out; materialism, racism, sexism, slavery and injustice have taken on ever more insidious forms. But thankfully, new songs keep being written, calling out the evil and naming it clearly for what it is. In this land, I think of Yothu Yindi, Helen Reddy and many others. Missy Higgins is one of our current champions on the climate crisis. She says, ‘At the moment I’m really into political music because I think that is the bravest thing of all in this climate today. More and more people are less inclined to speak out for fear of being cut down on social media … just music that isn’t afraid to be torn down, isn’t afraid to be judged, declares what it’s there for.’ ^{https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-18/missy-higgins-apocalpyse-and-climate-change-inspire-new-music/9059168}

When something really outrageous is happening – something completely unjust and apparently unstoppable – if someone sings a protest song, naming the wrong that’s being done to the many by a powerful few, suddenly hurt and oppressed people out there know they’re not alone. And these songs terrify their oppressors. Authorities ban them if they can – they try to shut down the social media platforms that spread them. But the songs won’t be silenced.

This is not a new phenomenon. This morning, we shared a very old protest song; Mary’s song – the Magnificat. The heart of Mary’s song is protest, and it has terrified powerful elites down the ages.

The Lord has shown strength with his arm and scattered the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

Meek little Mary; gentle, sweet, compliant teenage Mary? Yeah, right.

Mary fills the shoes of the great women protest singers of her tradition – Miriam ^{(Ex 15:20-21)} Deborah ^{(Judg 5:1-31)} Judith ^{(Jdt 16:1-17)} and Hannah ^{(1 Sam 2:1-10)}.

The Magnificat is such a powerful protest song that several illegitimate regimes have banned its public use. And I’m not talking about the places you’d normally expect.

When a the famous missionary priest and linguist, Henry Martyn, arrived in India in April 1806 he found that it was forbidden to recite the Magnificat at Evensong in case the idea of ‘putting down the mighty from their seats’ was taken too literally. ^{https://sayitstraight.co.uk/local-history/biographies/henry-martyn-1781-1812/}

That might sound absurd, but it’s been banned in more recent times too. In Argentina after the ‘dirty war’ of the ‘70s, it was banned when the mothers of the disappeared used it to call for non-violent resistance to the government. And in the ‘80s the government of Guatemala is also reported to have banned its public recitation.

So what’s this all got to do with Advent? Advent is the time when we remember that we’re waiting for someone to come; someone who expects to see wrongs set right. And we people who are waiting – like Mary, like John the Baptist, like the prophets awaiting Jesus’ first coming – we are meant to be vocal, mindful that the one we’re waiting for expects us to be public poets singing hymns of justice – just like our expectant forbears did.

Mary reminds us today to sing very feisty protest songs;

songs that name greed, injustice, oppression and prejudice; songs that assure perpetrators and their victims alike that justice will come;
songs that name what is good and right to make sure it stays clearly in view;
songs that tell Aboriginal people, refugees, women that their cries for safety, dignity, respect, restitution, treaty, justice and freedom are just and sacred, and will be given them no matter how confident their abusers may feel now;
songs that expose the war we are waging on Earth, our common home
songs that summon us to humility, to repentance, to renounce our greed and our delusional religion of consumptive economic growth

And why should people of the Church concern ourselves with these things? Isn’t that the realm of politics? Listen to Mary again. The Lord has … scattered the proud in their conceit, casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty. Mary is clearly saying politics is God’s business.

So let’s sing it out. To quote Arlo Guthrie, ‘If you want to end war and stuff you’ve got to sing loud.’               Amen.