Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 19:  Lk 18 1-8; Jer 31 27-34, Ps 119 97-104

I usually focus on the scriptures when I preach. I hope that today’s sermon will make it a bit clearer why I think it’s so important to do so.

Luke tells us that Jesus told his parable of a downtrodden yet very persistent widow so we’d know to keep praying and not to lose heart. There was a lot in this widow’s life to make her lose heart. She’d lost her husband, she’d been abused in some way, and to add insult to injury, her access to justice was blocked by a judge who didn’t fear God, and who couldn’t care less about his public image. The widow would’ve had no money to bribe him with and no male advocate to plead her cause for her, so it didn’t look as though that shameful judge would ever listen to her.

Yet she persisted. Repeatedly she confronted the judge’s shamelessness. She knew that the shame of her predicament was a powerful bargaining chip. She knew she was entitled to justice, and so she’d go on complaining until that judge went blue in the face, not her.

Where could she have got her inner conviction of justice from? As a Jewish woman, she participated in the corporate prayer life of her community. She’d have learnt of God’s commitment to justice in the Scriptures ^{(Micah 6.8)}; learnt of God’s particular care for her as a widow. ^{(Exod 22.22-24, Deut 10.17-18)} She acted on her trust in God whom she’d heard speak directly to her in readings from scripture. She acted on her certainty in the God she came to know in those readings. It’s as if, when she had the unjust judge in front of her, she talked to God over the judge’s shoulder so she could keep on demanding her justice. It was time this judge learnt God’s ways.

Jeremiah described where her conviction lay in today’s passage from chapter 31.^{33 …} this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴ No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.

So in his parable, Jesus gave us a widow who had God’s law written on her heart; that was the source of her conviction. She was a citizen of the Kingdom of God. It was irrelevant that she was the least in the social pecking order of antiquity. With the law written on her heart, she was on the same level as anyone else. So she had the conviction, and she found the strength to persist in her demands for justice. This morning’s parable reminds us that it’s also written on our hearts that we belong to God. So can we also have the courage to persist in prayer? And more amazingly, Can we discover God at work in that prayer – God persisting in claiming us?

Prayer is a marvellous, liberating gift from God. It’s a place in our lives where God meets us, embraces us, talks with us, and takes us seriously no matter what our circumstances. God is astonishingly broad-minded, and that’s the lovely thing we discover in the conversation of prayer. … When I say that prayer is a gift, I mean by that a spiritual gift which comes to us because of the Holy Spirit living in us. At baptism, we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. In the conversation of prayer, we find that we have become permanently invited eavesdroppers; eavesdroppers listening in on a conversation between our Mother, the Spirit, and our lovely Heavenly Father.

That intimate conversation is one which goes on whether or not we’re conscious of it. But from our baptism on, we grow in our understanding that this conversation includes us; that this conversation connects us with the true source of our being. St Paul describes that conversation in a part of his letter to the church in Rome.

“the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we don’t know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.   ^{Romans 8:26-27}

So the Holy Spirit speaks to God from deep within us. God searches our hearts, and there, finds the Spirit praying aloud the words written on our hearts. Through the Scriptures, through the Church, through friends, through creation, God speaks to us. Can we hear the Holy Spirit replying; crying out from deep within us?

It’s a life-skill, learning to hear God’s voice. But by giving us the gift of the Holy Spirit at our baptism, God ensures that we are equipped to learn to hear that voice. Like any little child, we’re born with the faculty to learn our parents’ language.

God the Holy Spirit dwells within us. She’s the mother and teacher of our hearts. Because of her dwelling within us, our hearts gradually learn the life-giving nature of divine conversation. There’s something within us, written on our hearts, says Jeremiah – something within us that feels empty and alone until we’re engaged in this conversation. We don’t feel fully ourselves until we can express what is the very deepest part of who we are – until we can participate deeply in the most wonderful and profound relationship there is; discover God’s love. St Augustine prayed it this way; Everlasting God, in whom we live and move and have our being: you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

Jesus walks before us alive in the gospel, and beckons us by his love for us, and by his own example, to join in that conversation – more easily as he’s one of us too. Choosing to join in this conversation just once can change us utterly. Once invited, God persists. When I’m talking about persistence in prayer today, there’s the real persistence; God. God never gives up on us.

What comes of eavesdropping on our divine parents? This morning’s gospel sheds an interesting light on this aspect of prayer. It shapes the way we live, and it shapes the way you see ourselves. Remember that widow? Most onlookers would probably have viewed her as deluded, stubborn and hopeless; and we might be tempted to see her that way too.

But frankly, I see her example as inspiring. She subverted everyone else’s illusion of her powerlessness through her belief in her own dignity and worth in the sight of God. That belief was a free gift which God blessed her with; a faith nourished by her regular encounters with God through scripture and prayer. If you ever wonder why I focus my preaching so much on scripture, this persistent widow is someone I’d recommend you consider.                           Amen

Archbishop Geoff Smith

180th Dedication of St John’s, Halifax Street

• Today we are celebrating the 180^th anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone of the original St Johns church on October 19, 1839.
• It seems incredible that when that foundation stone was laid this church site was in the middle of paddocks. But it was.
• That original church was condemned in 1886 and this church was completed in 1887.
• So, given this is not the original church, today is not so much about a building but about ministry.
• Anglicans have been gathering on this site since the original church was opened in 1841. This site has been a place of worship and fellowship. A place where happy and sad times have been celebrated.
• Anglicans have gathered here through significant times in history which have tested the strength of the people. Two world wars, a crippling depression, the Korean and Vietnam wars plus much more.
• The city of Adelaide has changed very dramatically all around this place. But here we are 180 years later gathered for worship. It’s not about buildings it’s about people.
• The Old Testament reading and psalm for today are in some ways about a building- the temple in Jerusalem. They do focus on that building as the location of the presence of God. But actually, these readings too are about people. About faithfulness. About relationship with God. About seeking mercy and forgiveness. About prayers to God being heard by God. The temple building is significant, but that relationship with the living God is even more so.
• The second two readings, while they use building imagery-for instance cornerstones, and house foundations, are also clearly concerning relationship with God.
• It’s very easy to focus on church buildings because they are tangible. We can see them, we can invest in them. We can give things to build, furnish and renovate them. And they are important. Church buildings can be icons of the presence of God in a community. That there are church buildings visible in a community says something about that community.
• Church buildings are very useful for keeping the sun and rain off when we gather.
• And over time they are made holy I think by the prayers and the memories and the joys and sadnesses that are celebrated in them.
• But a church without a lively living worshipping community using it really is either a public hall for hire, or a museum. Neither of those are bad, in fact they are important for the community, but are not what it’s all about.
• What this is all about is a lively community of Christians worshipping and serving God.
• Our diocesan Vision statement is that our vision and our yearning is to be a diocese of flourishing Anglican communities, united and connected, confident and competent to be disciples of Jesus in the power of the holy spirit. But the question is how do we flourish? The question is how do we be flourishing lively Anglican communities?
• Last week I was in Kota Kinabalu in Sabah. I am the Australian bishop representative on the Council of the Church of East Asia, and there was a full assembly of the Council in Sabah. So, bishops, clergy and lay representatives gathered in KK, as the locals call it.
• The CCEA is an Anglican organisation in East Asia and includes the Anglican church in Korea, The Philippines, Taiwan, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia and Australia.
• Part of the program was a time of reporting from each of the provinces-Japan, Korea, Myanmar, the Philippines, South East Asia and Australia. Some of the reports included stories of religious persecution of Christians for instasnce in Malaysia, others living in a very fragile and unstable political environment, in Myanmar for instance where the civil war has raged for seventy years with impact especially on the Anglican church in whose dioceses some of the worst fighting has occurred.
• Some reports were about battling government corruption and injustice, with priests being imprisoned for their activism, for instance in the Philippines.
• But among the stories of difficulty there were also many stories of growth. The Anglican church in many of these places is numerically growing despite the very tough situations they are in.
• There were a couple of key themes which came out in the reports and they echo the second and third readings for today. The first is commitment to Jesus. And the second is planning and focus for growth.
• The gospel reading today, the little story about building on firm foundations, is actually about hearing the teaching of Jesus and putting it into practice.
• Today’s reading comes at the end of the collection of teaching on discipleship known as the sermon on the mount. Three chapters in Matthews gospel of densely packed teaching about what it means in practical terms to follow Jesus-to be a disciple.
• Our diocesan vision is about being disciples of Jesus.
• We are all called to be disciples through our baptism, it doesn’t matter whether our baptism happened when we were young or old, whether it used a lot of water or a little, or which denomination it happened in. We are called, all of us, to follow Jesus. To learn from him, to take on his attitudes and priorities and to continue his ministry today.
• If it’s been a while since you have read through the sermon on the mount can I encourage you this week to do that. We tend to be aware of the Beatitudes at the start of Matthew 5 and that’s it, but the sermon on the mount starts at Matthew chapter 5 verse 1 and continues to the end of todays reading chapter 7 verse 27. This is among the most important teaching in the Bible because it sets out much of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. And todays passage is all about that taking that teaching seriously and trying to put it into practice.
• Jesus says-anyone who hears these words of mine-that is the teaching of the sermon on the mount, and acts on them will be like a wise man and so on. Everyone who hears these words of mine-the sermon on the mount, and does not act on them will be like a foolish man and so on.
• So, the first thing is to actually take the teaching of Jesus seriously. Not just to believe in God, but to put Jesus teaching into practice. The more a congregation has that commitment the more the congregation will flourish.
• The second theme comes from the reading from 1 Peter and I want to highlight a couple of verses towards the end of the reading. These verses are addressed to the Christians. They say this: ‘But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood , a holy nation, God own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light’.
• You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God own people, why? Not for our own enjoyment or satisfaction, but so that we may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.
• One of the key features in the reports from the Asian churches that are growing is a commitment to spreading the good news about Jesus.
• The reality is that we have blessed by God. We have been forgiven through Christ. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. We are part of Gods great work of a new heaven and a new earth. We have hope for the future. That’s all good news. We have been blessed so as to share that good news. To tell others what we have experienced of God. Not to bottle it up and keep it to ourselves, but to share this good news with others.
• We are like starving people who have discovered an endless supply of free food-we want to share that news with other people who need to know it.
• There is a huge stigma in our church against evangelism-about declaring the mighty acts of God. But in the end, all it is, is us sharing with others what we have discovered about God. How we have been blessed by God. How we have found God to be trustworthy and inviting others to check God out.
• There is also a pressure in our society not to admit we are Christians. I know that. I feel it myself. Even though half the population say they are Christians at census time, there is pressure to keep quiet. So that means we need the courage of our convictions. We need to be brave. Just as those Christians in Malaysia and Myanmar need to be brave. We have discovered something good and trustworthy and we need to be brave enough to share it and to push back against the pressure to be silent.
• There has so far been around 180 years of faithful ministry on this site in Halifax Street. No doubt the parish has waxed and waned through all those years. But we are here.
• And we not here to be museum keepers or public hall curators, but to be a flourishing Anglican community. A community of disciples, all learning of Jesus and committed to putting his teaching into practice. A community of disciples competent and confident to share what we have experienced of God-the mighty acts of him who called us out of darkness into his marvellous light.
• That’s the point. That’s the purpose for St Johns Halifax Street. In order for that to be reality commitment will be needed. Intention and planned action will be needed. It’s not going to be automatic or happen all by itself-and that’s up to us-all of us.
• As we celebrate this anniversary of ministry and presence may the Lord grant us the strength we need to be his people, to follow our Lord and to let the wider community know the good news that is Jesus. Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

St Francis’ Sunday

Back in the ‘80s in Melbourne, Vicky and I were involved in something called a Discipleship School. It was a full-time, live-in programme where young adults gave a year of their lives to being formed as disciples of Jesus. Life was pretty frugal at Discipleship School. No-one was able to give time to earning money; no-one had much of it. The disciples paid what they could – supplemented by whatever their family, friends or supporters might give them. And the parish subsidised the school by paying the rent on the building as well as fuel and water costs.

If life was frugal, it was also very intense. If you’ve ever been on a church youth camp, you’ll remember coming home both exhausted by the intensity of close community life, and filled with the exultation of deep worship. You’ll also remember red-rimmed eyes from the endless, profound conversations that lasted late into the night. Imagine doing that for a whole year.

Discipleship School meant daily Bible classes and worship together. Everyone did lots of work alongside local poor and under-privileged people; everyone taught Religious Education at local schools; everyone was on the team with whatever project or outreach the parish undertook. But the most challenging part was living together under one roof as an intentional Christian community. It’s in close, family community that the great challenges of living justly, truthfully, humbly and compassionately are right in your face every day. Discipleship School was tough and wonderful for everyone involved, and it shaped a number of unique Christians.

I think it’s the closest my life has come to living the sort of life St Francis saw Jesus live, and which Francis therefore chose for himself and for his order of Friars. It’s a life of intense community, a life of costly commitment and obedience, and a life of extraordinary privilege – set free to care for the poor and the sick; to bring the lost back into the presence of Jesus. It’s also a very controversial life: it was back in Francis’ day; it was in the 1980’s, and it’s still controversial now.

Here’s a part of the Rule of St Francis for his Friars.

Chapter VI

The Friars should appropriate neither house, nor place, nor anything for themselves; and they should go confidently after alms [not money or coins], serving God in poverty and humility, as pilgrims and strangers in this world. Nor should they feel ashamed, for God made himself poor in this world for us. … Let this be your portion. It leads into the land of the living, …

The St Francis we meet this morning seems to have a very different emphasis from the one we’ll meet this afternoon at the blessing of the animals. But the kind, gentle, compassionate Francis we meet this afternoon is the very same Francis who, this morning, is so strong on poverty, humility and proclamation.

His liberty from worry about material things set Francis free to join consciously in the community of all life that depends for everything on the providence of God. Can you remember a power outage, a storm, a fire or anything else that’s thrown your independence out the window and made you and your neighbourhood work with each other in an unusual way? You can get quite nostalgic for such times.

Francis, in his poverty, found himself a citizen of creation. His choice for poverty was to live simply as his Lord Jesus had instructed him in the Gospel. Absolutely central for Francis was Jesus sending his disciples out on the missionary road.

^{Lk 10.3 (or its equivalent in Mt 10.7-16)} Go on your way. … ⁴ Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals; and greet no one on the road. ⁵ Whatever house you enter, first say, “Peace to this house!” ^{… 7} Remain in the same house, eating and drinking whatever they provide, for the labourer deserves to be paid.

These are words Francis heard as instructions personally addressed to him: that Jesus called Francis to live the life which he had modelled; a life of pilgrimage as a pauper and a preacher; a life of humility; a life which would mean he was always truly dependent on providence. And that’s what Francis would call for in his Friars. It was counter-cultural in Jesus’ time, it was in Francis’ time, and it is in ours.

The Franciscan movement’s embrace of poverty posed a stark challenge to the monopoly on power which the Western medieval church exercised through its accumulation of wealth. We hear the name Francis and think of a harmless Friar preaching to the birds. But mention of Francis in his own era was just as likely to make people think of a troublemaker, a disrupter, and even a heretic. Franciscanism was hated for its nettlesome critiques of the Church’s abuses of power.

St. Francis, like Jesus, exemplified Christian love. And Christian love isn’t niceness. It’s a passionate and courageous witness on behalf of all God’s creation and against anything that sets itself against the work of God’s kingdom. So like Jesus, Francis exhibited love by celebrating the vulnerable and defending the poor.

St Francis’ Day challenges us to show love by celebrating the vulnerable and defending the poor; to choose a modest lifestyle which won’t alienate us from the living creation; to take hold of life that really is life. We are called to imitate Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, ⁷ but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave….^{Phil 2.6-7}

What might a discipleship school look like for us, here? If we were to encourage each other to live the radical life that Jesus and Francis modelled for us, how might we do it? We’re still on the road to developing a Mission Action Plan.

We celebrate Francis today as one of the great exemplars of the courage it takes to bear the cost of true mission and genuinely follow Jesus. Francis formed an order to serve the world’s poor and the vulnerable; that was his Christlike MAP. We know the blessings his choice brought people. As we end our Season of Creation, it’s clear that a choice to work to protect and remediate Earth’s abused ecosystems is the most effective way to care for the world’s poor and vulnerable. We also know that as Francis experienced, this choice will meet vehement, selfish resistance. Let’s choose true connection with Earth, mutual reliance, lifelong family, and a life lived with Christ in tough, loving ministry to the Earth God has called us to serve. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Michaelmas 2012 A & C: Kids: Angel Windows – connection

The message of our Gospel for the feast of Michael and all Angels is quite simple; tell people about Jesus, and call them to meet him. We saw this acted out right before our eyes where Philip found Nathanael and told him, We have found Jesus—the promised one. When Nathanael seemed doubtful, Philip said, Come and see. And he took him to meet Jesus. That’s today’s message. Tell people about Jesus, and encourage them to meet him.

Why? And what’s it got to do with Michael and all Angels? Angels are messengers: that’s what the name angel means. Philip brought a message to Nathanael, so by definition that made Philip an angel – a messenger. And as he called Nathanael to Jesus, that also made him an evangelist – something Jesus tells all Christians to be. We are to call people to belong, with us, to Jesus.

Who is this Jesus we are introducing people to? He’s the most important person we know; he’s our teacher; our example, our Redeemer and our Saviour. The Christian message is that telling people about Jesus is the same as telling them about God, the source of our being. And that, astonishingly, the source of our being chose to be born and live among us, die our death and rise from the dead, so he’s alive now.

Because Jesus was born and lived our life, died and rose again, we who know Jesus, and anyone we introduce to him, can connect with the source of our being at any point in our life – birth, times of joy, suffering, fulfilment, despair, hope, love, compassion, loneliness, need, fear – and we remain connected on beyond this life. That’s some connection. And when we tell of Jesus as our Redeemer and Saviour, we’re also talking about this connection with Jesus helping us to confront the power of things that attack and divide us: hatred, slavery, greed, apathy – and again, even death. That’s an extraordinary message to carry; it’s a great privilege to be called to carry this message – to join in the work of the Angels.

If people – all living creatures – are to be whole; to thrive; to grow, we need to be connected to the source of our being, like a plant in the soil and sunshine. It’s both a biological and a spiritual necessity. Throughout history, the messages that angels bring are all to do with connecting us with the source of our being – the source of all life and growth. The ancient Jewish sages wrote There is not a single blade of grass on earth below that does not have an angel in the heavens above that strikes it and says to it: ‘Grow!’ ^{(Midrash Rabbah, Bereishit 10:6; Zohar, part I, 251a [on Gen 18.1])}

We people of the book have developed several quirks over the millennia, and we have the joy of encountering plenty of them today. Some of the readings and hymns at Michaelmas can make us feel like tourists in an ancient, exotic world, untouched by the passage of time. As today’s tour guide amongst words and images that the OED labels obs, I want to focus on the centre of all the readings and hymns: our sense of connection with a greater reality than just ourselves – with the divine. I think you’ll agree that this calls for extraordinary language and imagery.

We travel in a realm of cosmology and imagery that lots of people in the developed world find alien; bewildering. What do we make of Daniel’s white-haired Ancient One enthroned in the heavenly court? Isn’t that precisely the picture of God that western thinkers have used to caricature the Church since the eighteenth century? Those same thinkers have also told us to see the cosmic battle in Revelation between Michael and Satan as nothing but an ancient metaphor for the struggle between good and evil.

It’s up to each one of us to choose whether we see these visions and images as literally real, or as metaphors for our connection with the source of our being. I don’t think it makes much difference which we choose. But if our experience of life is to have any depth, we need to venture into that connectedness, and also to respectfully explore both ancient and contemporary ways of naming and expressing it.

Christians believe that the fullest experience of that connected life is to be found in this community that Jesus called into being: the Church – a community where we can and should share our experiences of God’s messengers, and let those messages shape our lives.

One of our most important roles as connected people is to teach our children how to live connected, full, rich lives of belonging. Kindy teachers are experts in this. They get kids singing funny old songs together, playing together, making things together, co-operating and caring. These are time-tested ways in which we hand down our civilization – our belonging – to successive generations.

They are also significant ways we live out that connection as adults. How do we see that at work here? I see a community that learns and treasures the words and tunes of the hymns; I see people singing together; meeting together; praying together; rejoicing together; grieving together; running a community store together; gardening together; learning together, being a multi-generational community where we know each other’s families, children and grandchildren; founding / supporting Christian work like SJYS and the Magdalene outreaches: the list goes on.

I’m conscious that all these treasures we nurture and hand down are things that our secular world is increasingly reluctant to value or support. Our schools and university systems are less and less funded to pass on our history, our wisdom and our deepest values. So it falls to the Church to do this – as we have done in other dark ages. One of the most important jobs this parish has is handing on the legacy of spiritual connectedness that God has given this community. We are a connected community. We are built on the bedrock of God’s love for us. We experience that most perfectly in the love that unites us in Jesus Christ. When we introduce our friends to Jesus, as Philip did with Nathanael, we connect people with God’s love for them, and we offer to share the ways we experience that love in our lives. So go to it Angels!                                                                                                    Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

4C: Colossians 1 15-20

When I was nine years old, I persuaded my Dad to lay his camera on top of our ladder in the back yard one night and take a photo of the Southern Cross. He used slide film so projecting the picture, we’d see a bigger, closer Southern Cross. He set the camera to open the shutter automatically and take a time-exposure shot. That way, there’d be no finger shake, and the stars should come out clear and bright.

When I finally saw the slide, my first reaction was disappointment. The stars didn’t come out as points of light, but as short lines. I felt better when I was told they were lines because of the spinning of Earth. The other thing that struck me was that stars come in different colours. There are three bluish-white stars, a red one and an orange one. The pointers are blue too – and the nearest one is a double star. So I started to learn about hot and cool stars, young and old ones, and binary stars.

But my biggest surprise about the Southern Cross was to come many years later. Down the bottom of the Yorke Peninsula, you can still see the Milky Way very clearly. Looking at the Southern Cross one night, a friend got me to look not at the stars but at the spaces. Could I see the huge Spirit Emu with its head just below the cross – did I know that’s what Aboriginal people see?

I was thus introduced to a totally different perspective on the cosmos – how in the ancient dreaming, life on Earth is spiritually connected with the universe. That book I’ve been quoting by Bruce Pascoe is called Dark Emu. By calling his book by that name, he’s saying that he’s entrusting his readers with the perspective of the Aboriginal People – the perspective of a people whose life and culture has always been profoundly and consciously interwoven with Earth and Heaven – a people who see life where we don’t; where we just see emptiness.

This takes us again to the theme I’ve been emphasising throughout this year’s Season of Creation; the opposites – interconnection and alienation. I continue to discover more and more how the traditional life of Indigenous peoples is one of deep connection with the natural order and with the numinous – the spiritual dimension of life. There is no sharp dividing line between physical and spiritual life in traditional cultures. Everything is interconnected.

By contrast, our culture is becoming increasingly one of alienation; physical and spiritual alienation from the natural world, and from each other. I’ve said a couple of times now that this alienation is a working definition of sin. Its marker is spiritual blindness – whether wilful of born of ignorance; spiritual blindness, whose consequence is alienation from each other, from the created order, and from God. It leads to death; both our own death, and the death we are inflicting on more and more of non-human life. The result of this sin is that we are in crisis, and because of the influence we have over our environment, the whole created order is in crisis too.

So what do we do? How do we address this? On Friday, we saw the young people of the world rise up and demand change. Our children are frightened for their lives; they’re also angry at the obdurate stupidity – the wilful blindness – the greedy deafness – of those who claim the authority to run the world, yet who are allowing the destruction of nature for profit.

On Friday, for anyone with ears to hear, our children demanded something that our Christian faith teaches. They reminded us that the way to deal with the power of sin is repentance; turning around; turning from death to life; turning to follow the Way to life. Our children are calling us to turn to Life. That’s what repentance means.

You can quite reasonably ask me if I am saying this as a Christian teacher or just as a committed environmentalist. Am I just co-opting my faith to make it serve my greenie passions? Does anything in Scripture authorise Christian environmentalists to speak the way I’ve been doing over the past weeks? As it happens, we heard that very Scripture today. We just shared in the Colossians hymn. I picked out a few sentences from it in my weekly – they’re in bold print on the back of the pewsheet. Let’s consider the first three sentences. The first two say

In Christ all things in heaven and on earth were created.

All things have been created through him and for him.            v.16

So this hymn teaches that the natural order belongs to Christ alone.

The third sentence says – In him all things hold together.                 v.17

So this hymn also teaches that the interconnectedness of the natural order is the result of Christ’s agency and will. What these words say to me – Christ’s ownership of the natural order and his will to sustain it – these words tell me that a failure to care for the natural order is a failure to respect the will of Christ. This has practical spiritual consequences.

Standing by while the environment is destroyed has the effect of shutting others off from encountering God. Paul wrote in Rom 1.20, Ever since God created the world, his invisible qualities, both his eternal power and his divine nature, have been clearly seen; they are perceived in the things that God has made. As we look on, human civilization is destroying those very things. Vicky writes about this.

Experiencing the majesty of the natural world, in all its diversity and strangeness, its symbiosis and complexity, is becoming a rare and precious thing – the stuff of eco-tourism and World Heritage sites. Wild places are now packaged and marketed, to manage the tourist footprint. The velvety depth of the night sky unencumbered by artificial lights is now, for very many, a memory.   …

If Christ embodies and reveals the invisible God in and through the natural world, this means of revelation is also becoming increasingly rare and precious. How are future generations going to glimpse the numinous, except artificially, in pre-packaged portions? As we allow the diminishment of species and ecosystems, we diminish our ability – and the ability of future generations – to perceive the glory of God. This can no longer be peripheral to those who love Christ. See VSB,  Colossians: An Eco-Stoic Reading

On Friday, our children called us to action – to repentance and action. Today, our scriptures tell us they spoke the Truth in Christ. How are we, as a parish, going to respond?             Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

3C : Psalm 29

Have you ever been out in a huge storm? Were you unsafe? What or who was your greatest concern? Did you understand what was happening – were you mentally prepared? Do the children you know have any idea about surviving storms?

Look at this picture of a dust storm sweeping east across Melbourne; 8^th Feb 1983. I vividly remember the moment when that dust storm hit. I was teaching at Footscray TAFE College. We had no warning of what was coming; within a matter of seconds, broad daylight outside suddenly turned into an eerie, howling reddish darkness. It was quite terrifying. I remember stories friends told me later – stories about frightened people they’d seen dropping to their knees in the street and tearfully praying. For some, it seemed clear that the end of the world had come.

Storms can provoke very deep feelings in us. They can do it even when we know the science – the way lightning and thunder are produced, where all that rain comes from, and how it sometimes transforms itself into devastating hail. We know all this. And the picture of that tremendous dust storm reminds us that we know the effect we have on the nature of some storms. If you combine land-clearing, over-grazing, old-style ploughing and deep drought then add a 100 km/h wind, like that afternoon in 1983, it can become something like a 500 km wide apocalypse.

We’re emotionally engaged with storms. They bring some of us to places of fear, depression, remorse, or for some of us, exultation – emotions often associated with our spiritual condition. For the ancients, a storm carried both the fear of destruction and the promise of blessing – the welcome rains after a long dry. So are we spiritually connected with God by storms, through awe, through fear, through hope and through the reminder that the vast energy of the universe is not under our control? Today, we’ve heard two different accounts of storms and faith, Ps 29 and the Gospel. Let’s look at the Psalm.

The psalmist calls the Heavens and the Earth to hear God’s voice in storms. We hear God’s voice in the noise, the power and the destructive force of storms, and we join the rest of creation in feeling fear, awe, regret, or maybe wild joy and hope in the greatness of God who promises us the blessing of a fertile Earth, softened at last by the rain.

Maybe we have difficulties connecting with something so primordial and alien to our perspective. We’re not the first. This Psalm was actually a re-writing of an ancient hymn to Baal, the Canaanite storm god. The original was likely to have been a prayer or song which – with the help of some money or gift – would appease the anger of this god of storms. The Psalmist’s rewrite has taken on this protection-racket and set out to free people from slavery to such a capricious system.

Instead, our psalmist proclaims the God whose grace doesn’t depend on people’s willingness to pay; our psalmist proclaims the God who’s not confined by our ideas of what’s invulnerable – neither the cedars of Lebanon nor even the Lebanon itself. Nor is God confined to blessing only those who are worthy (as Jesus says, God sends the rain on the just and the unjust ^{Mt. 5:45}). God is the one who, come what may, is going to bring about the ancient promise to Abram and Sarah; the promise that through them, God will bless all families of Earth. This is a promise of spiritual blessing, but ‘families of Earth’ is also explicitly physical – a blessing we experience through our senses; a blessing lived most truly when we are living in harmony with Earth.

One of the principles of Earth Bible scholarship is that Earth has a voice. Another Psalm, Psalm 19 describes that as a voice from the heavens which have no speech nor words … yet their voice goes out through all the Earth and their words to the end of the world. ^{Ps 19.3-4}       Rant alert. As we’ve acknowledged over the past two weeks, the world’s Indigenous peoples have always been attuned to that voice, living in harmony with Earth.

Indigenous peoples have indeed been that voice crying out against the injustice of colonization. And they are still crying out today; putting the Earth’s teaching about God’s grace into words that we could understand if we would only listen; warning us of the danger of our alienation from Earth. But we don’t listen. Far worse, we are still deliberately silencing Indigenous people’s voices; dividing to conquer, or making laws that imprison them in our alienation from the Land – their Land. Two weeks ago the Queensland government quietly extinguished the native title rights of the Wangan and Jagalingou people over their traditional lands. Shortly afterwards, the people received notices of trespass from a foreign mining company.

The dust storms that used to be so frequent taught us something, you’d hope. But you have to wonder. Will anyone hear Earth’s voice speaking through unheard-of early spring firestorms? Earth has a voice; Earth is speaking. But we are strangely deaf to warning voices. We are becoming steadily more alienated from plain reality. We must do better than a minister for drought and water resources who says talk of human-induced climate change is irrelevant to the fire conditions in Qld and NSW.

We’re into our third week now of exploring an ecological spirituality – how our spiritual life (our relationship with the divine) is deeply shaped by our relationship with nature; our exposure to nature and our attitude to nature. This Season of Creation is a time for us children of Earth to remember our first calling; that’s our God-given responsibility to manage, serve and care for the Earth community. ^{Gen 1-3} This is reinforced in our calling as children of Abraham and Sarah to be God’s means of blessing to all families of Earth. ^{Gen 12.1-3} Our actions are spiritually significant; the way we deal with our Earth family constitutes our service to God who calls us to care and to bless. And Earth has a voice in this. Today we’ve remembered hearing Earth’s voice in storms; remembered our feelings of bewilderment, isolation and helplessness, or maybe wild exultation. May our memories of hearing Earth’s voice remind us to keep listening carefully; listen and respond to God’s call; obediently, humbly, gratefully and with courage.  Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

2C : Job 38, Ps 104, 1st Cor 1, Lk 12

As children, we grew up in something of a botanical menagerie. Mum filled the yards with trees, shrubs, bonsais, mosses and ground cover, and her glass house was stocked with an incredible variety of plants and cuttings taken from roadsides wherever we walked or drove. But even that wasn’t enough for her. She and a like-minded neighbour would lie in wait until any local house went on the market. The moment it was vacant, they’d launch a green-thumb commando raid, planting all manner of things in those gardens too. So our old street now looks utterly different from its surrounding streets; they look like desert wastes by comparison.

But that’s only the half of it; I also mentioned a menagerie. I remember as a ten year old conducting an audit of wildlife at our place. Twenty-two budgies, ten pigeons, four bantams, seven sleepy lizards and a big bluetongue, five guinea pigs, two turtles, a rabbit, a cat forever having kittens, a fat old Labrador, another budgie that sat on Mum’s shoulder everywhere she went, a ringtail possum that ate apples in our bedroom each night then tucked itself in with one or other of us at dawn, a bustling fish tank, and in my sister’s wardrobe, a rogue colony of silkworms. Our cousins out on the farm kept us in touch with our larger hairy brothers and sisters too. Mum has never altered her priorities to this day.

So flora and fauna Sunday is something of a homecoming for me. I love the close observation of wildlife that we just heard in Job and the Psalm; I resonate with the way the writers marvel at it all; particularly at the interconnection they see so clearly between wild creatures, flora, Earth, Sun and Moon, light and darkness. You’d think seeing that interconnection is a bit of a no-brainer really. But then you find that a book like The Secret Life of Trees comes as an utter revelation to people when its author Peter Wohlleben shows how an entire forest is connected by underground networks of fungus to form a massive, diverse, unified organism so mutually loving that it keeps even ringbarked trees alive.

Last week we began to consider the significance of connection as a major theme in the Season of Creation. And you may remember that its opposite, alienation, is a working definition of what the church calls sin; alienation from God and from each other. That’s why connection with each other, with interconnected wildlife and landscapes is so important. It makes the divine tangible; it connects us with God.

Today, on Flora and Fauna Sunday, the natural world presents us with herself; a miracle of interconnection, symbiosis, co-operation and balance; characteristics which are the deepest hallmarks of the natural order. Nature’s interconnection is far more profound than we imagine. By contrast, the competitive, winner-takes-all theories that we have imposed on the natural world have shackled our thinking about nature – as if they explain it entirely. Our theories have blinded us to the centrality of nature’s symbiosis. Of course, these theories have a great deal of truth to them; no-one should deny evolution. But they are nothing like complete enough.

Today I wonder if the doctrines of ‘natural selection’ and the ‘survival of the fittest’ – the so-called ‘cruelty of nature’ – have done something more than just skew our understanding of what is natural; done something more than prevent us from seeing the interconnection that sustains everything living. I wonder if our competition doctrines also shape the way we see ourselves; how we experience community.

Do native flora and fauna have something to teach us about community? What is an ecological perspective on society – an ecological spirituality? The key words seem to be relationship, symbiosis, interdependence, harmony – in a word, Nature.

A few of us met to think through the themes and priorities we wanted to cover in this year’s Season of Creation. Again and again, we found ourselves talking about the harmony of Indigenous peoples with nature. We are sitting helplessly now watching on as the Indigenous people and creatures of the Amazon rainforests are being burnt out of their homes by farmers, just as happened here over the first 150 years of European colonization; just as continues more subtly today. ^{Eco-Rant alert.}

I turn again to Bruce Pascoe’s remarkable book Dark Emu. He cites documents from European explorers and pioneers describing wide-scale Aboriginal agriculture and storages of surplus native grains and yams big enough to support permanent settlements of three or four thousand people between harvests. This was achieved through heavy, co-operative work, but without any need for irrigation, fertilizer or herbicides. Astoundingly, many witnesses have documented a vast, pan-continental ‘grain belt’ thousands of kilometres north of the Goyder line. (Map on p. 28) Our grazing animals ate it all to the ground and uprooted it virtually upon arrival. Their hooves compacted (and still compact) the Indigenous people’s carefully cultivated soil so these native food sources don’t grow there any more. And the original people and wild animals – the competition – disappeared behind euphemisms designed to cover up what we Christians don’t want to know about ourselves.

We don’t live in harmony with nature. We don’t spend time in it; we live, work and travel in climate-controlled silos that interact harmfully with nature. Our economically driven priorities won’t cherish anything we can’t put a money value on. We’re living a lifestyle that destroys anything we don’t value. It turns out we don’t value Mother Earth. We may as well say it plainly. We’re afraid of losing what we have, and so we fight and ignore and vote to protect it – never mind that it costs the Earth. That is true alienation; true sin, and we must repent of that sin.

Christians believe in repentance: it’s not grovelling and apologising, but turning from wrong and amending our ways. It’s easy to remember as a four step process.

1 Acknowledge wrongs we are doing, wrongs done in our name, and wrongs we benefit from. That’s what this sermon is trying to help us do regarding ecology.

2 Renounce those wrongs; stop them. That’s clearly imperative.

3 Turn and resolve before God and each other to try to repair the damage we have caused – seeking help from God and each other to do this, and helping others trying to do this. Students’ Global Climate Strike 20 Sept, 12.00 Victoria Square.

4 Getting on with the repair job, and so returning to a right relationship with our community, in this case the Earth community, and so with God.

We’re each at different stages on the way in this process. But what can we do? In notice time, Nicola will report on an organisation – the Foundation for Australia’s Most Endangered Species that we might choose to support as a community.

It’s one of many that we could choose from, but on this Flora and Fauna Sunday, it’s good to focus on rescuing members of our Earth family from extinction – family members dying out not because they’re a danger to us or to anything else, but just because we don’t seem to care if we never see them again.

That is true alienation; true sin, and we must repent of that sin.

I pray that our descendants will be able to know what Jesus is talking about today – what ravens and lilies and grasses are. I pray that our descendants will be consciously connected with all the wonders of life on Earth which reveal God’s eternal power and divine nature ^{(Rom 1.19)} so that they can come to know God.

Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

1C: Job, Ps 104, Eph 1, Lk 5

I find the ocean to be a restorative wonder. When I sit on a cliff top or walk on a beach to the accompaniment of the slow, rolling crash of the waves, the way they roll towards me, ceaselessly pounding the shore, then thunder past, off into the distance; I don’t know how or why, but it has a life-giving effect on me. Even an hour at an ocean beach with its steady heart-beat of crashing waves can have a wonderful renewing effect, somehow connecting me with the Infinite.

The Pacific islanders we met in Fiji say that the ocean unites their islands – it doesn’t separate them; the ocean is what connects them. That’s different from our usual way of viewing large bodies of water as barriers or dangers to be negotiated.

I think I get it – that for island people, the ocean forms a connection, not a barrier. And for these people, the ocean doesn’t just supply their material needs; it’s a daily spiritual necessity. The Fijian Methodist minister, James Bhagwan told us how his daily prayer always has to be on the water. Swimming or paddling or simply floating, he finds his deepest connection with God in the gentle embrace, the rhythmic movement, and the playful, refreshing power of the ocean. I thought about James floating in prayer when I saw this morning’s reading from the book of Job. – that startling image – ^38.8 the waters of the sea burst out from the womb. Just sit with that for a moment; the [primordial] waters of the sea burst out from the womb. Whose womb?

Let’s picture James; floating on that ocean which burst from the womb to envelop him in prayer. His prayer enacts something we need to know about; a connection with this vast life-bearing body of salt water and so with God – the embrace of the water around him connects with the prayer that wells up from within him. For James, ocean and prayer together embody connection with the source of our being; floating in prayer; a respite that takes us back to the safety of time before our birth. I wonder do salt-water baptisms recall the amniotic fluid of our physical birth?

Rev James helped me explore the spiritual significance of the ocean as the medium from which God called, and still calls life to emerge. And what life! I’ve always been lost in wonder at its teeming life; the giant kelp forests and seagrass fields, the lesser-known lungs of the world; and every shape, size and colour of living being, ranging from the bacteria around hot-water vents, vast shoals of tiny plankton and innumerable krill to the great whales – the largest animals ever to have lived.

I wanted to speak about the ocean today in that sense; the sense of its partnership with God both as a revelation of God’s majesty and of God’s creative delight in the diversity of life and in sustaining it through evolution. I wanted to speak of the ocean’s divinely inspired partnership with wind, sun and moon in the provision of a life-giving and life-sustaining biosphere of staggering power, beauty and diversity. I wanted us all to sit and watch David Attenborough shows together and simply bask and float in all these wonders. But there are other things needing saying too.

I didn’t want to give an environmentalist’s rant, but it’s part of the truth. I won’t make it long. The past week has brought more stories of our civilization’s abusive attitude to the ocean; two reports, one downgrading the Barrier Reef’s health, and another about its water quality,* and then the secretive handling of the Australian chief scientist’s report into prospective oil drilling in the Bight. They come on top of new studies of the ‘great Pacific garbage patch’, an island of plastic garbage almost the size of Queensland**; studies showing that micro-plastics are now measurable across the entire food chain – including us; reports of plastic bags mistakenly eaten by turtles, birds unwittingly feeding their babies bits of plastic so they starve to death; dolphins and whales snared in discarded fishing lines and nets drowning in senseless unseen agony; ocean acidification, oil disasters, gross over-fishing, super trawlers turning the seabed into a desert, all in addition to rising seas inundating island nations. The litany goes on, and we must not let it be silenced. We know where silence leads. The ocean is an expression of God’s love, and it’s being systematically killed as we watch.…There, that’s the end of the rant for now.

It is right that the ocean should supply us with food, just as Lake Galilee did for Jesus and his friends. But there is no place for the sort of abuse and greed that lies behind what I’ve just catalogued. There’s a thoughtful observation about today’s Gospel story by an Indonesian pastor in a village Bible study group. He said ‘In vv 6-7, we see a case of income equality and a spirit in Peter that shows no egotism. But if he hadn’t shared with his friends, his [boat] would have sunk and [he and] his friends would have had no fish.’

A woman in the group responded, ‘it seems to happen just the other way round in our society. For instance, foreign employers drain our fish and our properties for their own profit without sharing or making any adequate compensation.’ *** The people at the bottom of the heap know what’s going on, and we should listen to them.

One more story. I had the chance to read Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu recently. Using the documentary evidence written by early explorers and settlers, he describes Aboriginal agriculture and river and ocean aquaculture before white settlement. In a chapter on aquaculture, he writes of their vast fish traps off the shore near Bermagui and Pambula (p. 70-1), and off Wellesley Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria (p. 90-1). But for me, the most astounding account is of a whaling partnership between the Yuin people (southern coastal NSW) and Orcas. (p. 71) There’d be a regular ceremony begun by a man on shore where the orcas responded by herding a whale inshore. The people would kill the whale, and then share it with other clans and with the orcas – who always got their favourite bit, the tongue. The partnership ended instantly and for ever when a European man shot the lead Orca.

If there’s a take-away message for Ocean Sunday, it’s partnership – connection. Our civilisation is alienated from nature, and so inevitably from God. And we are spreading our alienation – proclaiming our ‘standard of living’ as an end in itself, completely disconnected from its consequences for Nature.

This is a profoundly spiritual disease which we as God’s people are called to name and to challenge.

Alienation from God is a pretty good working definition of sin – living as though God is not there; as though God doesn’t notice what’s going on. And a telling sign of that alienation is our growing disconnection from the natural environment which sustains us and all life – our steady destruction of Earth.

I believe the call of Ocean Sunday is to reconnect with life’s Mother, the ocean;

to care for her and let her care for all the life she sustains;

to speak for her where her voice is being ignored;

to support and protect others who are speaking out, and to refuse to let them or ourselves be silenced.

Let’s commit to pray together with Rev James and today’s Psalmist

Let the sea roar, and all that fills it!                                                        Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 11C : Jrm 1 4-10, Lk 13 10-17

We’re constantly renovating and upgrading things around the parish. Naturally, we Anglicans do that reluctantly. You know the one about how many Anglicans it takes to change a light bulb? All of them; one changes it, and everyone else reminisces about how good the old one was. But one of the frustrating things about renovating is that you go through storms of dust and weeks of inconvenience only to emerge at the end with something that looks normal – something that looks no better than how it should.

But that’s not necessarily so bad. Today, we saw Jesus, the renovator. He laid healing hands on a woman and set her free from a crippling ailment so she could just be the way she should have been for the last eighteen years. We see this happen, we don’t think; ‘Well big deal, she only looks normal now!’ No, we marvel. Or maybe we’re a bit wistful; ‘Why couldn’t it happen for our friend?’  But one person in the story doesn’t see a woman restored to her God-given form; far from being inspired, all the leader of the synagogue can feel is outrage that she was healed on the Sabbath.

There’s none so blind as those who won’t see. The leader of the synagogue doesn’t get that this woman’s been released from her burden on just the right day. The real offence against the Sabbath would have been to let her keep on struggling under the burden of her illness. That Sabbath, Jesus set the woman free from her burden of life as painful drudgery – as work; a life where simply doing what passed for normal was hard work. Jesus set her free to be the woman she truly was. And immediately, she showed who she truly was by leading the Sabbath worship. 13.¹³… immediately, she stood up straight and began praising God.’

Psalm 22.³ says God dwells in the praises of the people. When she praised God, this healed woman’s praises revealed that God lived inside her. She was truly God’s daughter. Her truest self was now plain to her and to all with eyes to see.

She’s God’s child; her joy reveals the family resemblance. And rediscovering God living in her sets her soul free to rest – to truly Sabbath in company with God who dwells inside her. But at that same moment, the leader of the synagogue unwittingly breaks the Sabbath. He sets to work defending a nit-picking legalism that closes him off from the true blessing of the Sabbath. It’s an idol to him because it blinds him spiritually. He can’t see God in the woman’s healing.

Don’t get me wrong; he’s a very faithful man – following the Law to the letter as he understands it. But he shows us that there’s danger as well as blessing in religious discipline. Properly used, disciplines like Sabbathing – stopping to open ourselves to God – can lead to spiritual growth. But imposed obsessively and legalistically, they can enslave people. What should be faithful behaviour becomes driven and neurotic.

A true spiritual discipline – fasting from food, from speaking, from only finding life’s meaning in work – connects us with creation; with people; connects us with God; gives us a life lived in communion. But a simple twisting of the reason for a spiritual discipline can make it a soul-destroying work; something that builds a barrier between ourselves and God; between ourselves and our neighbours.

We see two different responses to God in this story. Both are intended as faithful responses. But their difference tells us that responding to God isn’t without its ambiguities. The woman who was healed seems unconsciously to have got it right, while the leader of the synagogue with all his good intentions and diligence seems to have got it completely wrong.

Our sense of God reaching out to us, calling us, also seems to be a variable experience. Hearing Jeremiah’s clear call, we might grumble, ‘If only I had a call that was so cut and dried, then I’d know what God wants me to do with my life!’ But reading on into Jeremiah’s life story, we’d probably be relieved it wasn’t us. Anyway, we wouldn’t be called to transform a whole nation; we’re so small. … But isn’t that the sort of thing Jeremiah said? ‘I don’t know how…I’m only a child.’

I’m putting the cart before the horse today. I’ve talked about how you express God living in you once you’ve sensed God calling you to a special vocation. But I haven’t talked about how you can be sure whether God has called you in the first place. I think it’s worth putting this particular cart in view first though. Because we need to know that the best picture of God’s call and a right response to that call is the release of the woman who’d been bent over for eighteen years. The best picture of how you might respond to God’s call is the vision of her standing upright and praising God.

The old collect for peace in the Morning Prayer service has these words in it: O God, the author and lover of peace … whose service is perfect freedom. We saw a woman today who proclaimed the kingdom of God as she responded to her unexpected new freedom. The Kingdom broke into her life and instantaneously, it broke forth from her in praise of God.

Just one thing about the Sabbath; it was ordained not just as a day of rest, but as a time when debts were to be forgiven; when people, animals and the very Earth were released from the obligation to work so that all could rest in God’s perfect peace. On this Sunday when we pray especially for the eighty-million people in the world who experience life as exile, let this woman’s liberation on the Sabbath – the time of release from burdens – let her praise be our inspiration. Jesus wishes these people’s freedom; wishes them justice.

I said that renovation is frustrating: that it only makes things look normal. Well maybe normal is actually spectacular; maybe it’s something to sing about. And if you and I experience good health, enough to eat—if you and I belong to a community that could make a difference, maybe God is reaching out to touch us, to get us to help extend the Kingdom, so others can stand up straight, and praise God, just because they can.                                                                            Amen

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