Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 10 A – Genesis 32 22-31

Have you ever wrestled with a worry or a problem all night? It might give us a way into compassion for Jacob’s night wrestling the stranger.

Our study group is pretty sure the original authors of Genesis had no access to a public relations editor. Stories of the biblical patriarchs – the great role-models of our faith – are often far from edifying. They are busy lying, thieving, putting wives and kids at risk, swindling parents, siblings, in-laws and strangers for personal gain; the list goes on. If scripture is supposed to draw us to God and make better people of us, why hasn’t somebody cleaned up Genesis and shown a better side of these patriarchs!

It seems a fair question. But it ignores what these stories are really about. They’re about God’s patient, loyal commitment to normal people who are very like normal people today – often self-centred, thoughtless and greedy. These stories are about God’s faithfulness, not ours.

Jacob was not a very nice person. He was a conniving trickster. From birth, Jacob was someone who’d grasp and take hold of what wasn’t his. Later Jacob tricks his brother Esau out of his birthright ^(25:29–34) and soon tricks him out of their father’s blessing as the firstborn. Esau was no angel, sure. But Jacob seemed like something else entirely.

To escape Esau’s revenge, Jacob headed to Haran and made a new life for himself with his uncle Laban’s family. But trickery pursues Jacob. He serves his uncle for seven years to marry Rachel, but gets tricked into marrying Leah first, and Rachel next. Then he marries their maidservants as well. Jacob stays on working as his uncle’s shepherd, but slips back into his old ways. He breeds his uncle’s flocks to his own advantage. He ends up exceedingly rich by diddling his uncle and cousins. In the end Jacob flees with his family and flocks, planning to return to Canaan.

The story we heard today takes place when Jacob has heard Esau is coming out to get him – together with 400 men. Jacob does all he can think of: sending a conciliatory message to Esau calling him my lord, sending a multitude of gifts in multiple droves – 580 goats, sheep, donkeys, cows, and camels. And he prays the longest prayer in all of Genesis ^(32:9–12). He begs God, Deliver me from the hand of my brother Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all. ^(32:11)

But just in case, Jacob sends all his wives and children and everything else he owns across the ford at the River Jabbok. He’s left alone and stripped of everything dear to him. Suddenly out of the night-time darkness, a man wrestled with him until daybreak. ^{(v. 24)} Amazingly, Jacob holds his own; the man saw that he didn’t prevail. ^{(v. 25)} But suddenly, the position is reversed. The man touches the hollow of Jacob’s thigh, and in a moment Jacob is lying there helpless and crippled. Now with the desperate grip of one who has been defeated, Jacob will not let the man go. He demands a blessing from this mysterious figure.

What he’s given is a name change and a blessing. Jacob’s name is changed to Israel. The explanation for the name is that Jacob had struggled with God and with humans and prevailed. ^{(Gen 32:28–29)} But this blessing comes not through Jacob’s wit or strength, not through his grasping for it. That had been his way of operating until then. But no, things have changed. The blessing comes as a gift given to one who’s used up all his strength and resources and been defeated.

Who is this man that Jacob wrestled with? A punishing angel? His own ego or conscience? Or could this story be a metaphor for the whole people of Israel throughout history? Charles Wesley’s great hymn Wrestling Jacob thinks it’s Jesus – the Lord of time could do that, I suppose.

Jacob had earlier been given the promise of God’s presence, but he didn’t live by it. Jacob wrestled with this man using all his own strength, but didn’t get away free and unchanged from his encounter. He’d got away with stealing from his father Isaac, from his brother Esau, and from his father-in-law Laban. But not from God! Jacob’s limping becomes a metaphor for Israel’s life with God. The people of Israel, like Jacob, will struggle and wrestle with God. God will promise and give blessing to Israel, but God will also struggle to tame and break the unruly and often disobedient Israel.

And Jacob, who is now Israel, does some naming of his own. He names the place Peniel, which means Face of God, for, he says, I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved. ^{(v. 30)} For the first time, we’re told the true identity of the one who wrestled Jacob – God in human form. And Jacob emerges from this divine encounter with a blessing, a new name, and the sun rising on a new day. But he also walks away with a permanent limp – a reminder of the cost of wrestling with God.

Why is this story important for us? It’s because it reminds us that God actively reaches out to us – no matter what sort of person we might be. We Christians know that vividly from the stories of Jesus reaching out to people whom no-one else would go near: social outcasts, thieving tax farmers, people shunned because they lived outside the public morality of the day. Today, we see the way God blessed Jacob the thieving, selfish con-artist. A challenge, a blessing and a new beginning. Do you see how this reveals the God of the Old Testament and Jesus to be one and the same? God/Jesus reaches out to lift us up from wherever we might have fallen, no matter how far; and helps us become people who can live the promise that through us and all descendants of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, all families of the Earth might be blessed.

Like Jacob we come to God with a life behind us, not all of it good. And like Jacob, we can expect that God will change us – often painfully. But in Jesus, we see God bearing that pain in our place. God remains faithful. God keeps at us and calls us back, no matter how far we’ve fallen. And in Jesus, we know that God takes our fall. Thanks be to God for such grace!     Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 9A – Mt 13 31-34 & 44-58

Today, we heard five more of Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom of God. Two weeks ago the parable of the sower told us the Kingdom of God contains various qualities of soils – that’s us. We bear varying harvests in response to the teachings of Jesus. Last week, the parable of the wheat and the weeds told us unplanned plants grow in the Kingdom. That surprise continues today with the parable of the mustard seed.

Some scholars say mustard was seen as a weed back then in the Middle East. It spread quickly, it was hard to contain and it could choke other crops. Yet Jesus says it’s a gift to the wild birds. What’s going on? Did Matthew’s community record this parable because the Gospel should spread like mustard? Or did some of them feel like the wild birds – strangers to the Jewish faith who found a safe home among the followers of Jesus? If so, this is about the unexpected grace that’s included us wild birds in the Kingdom that opened to us from something as tiny as a mustard seed?

The next parable of the woman who leavens her flour also starts with something tiny that grows surprisingly. We heard that she mixed yeast into the flour. But other translations use different words. They say she hid leaven in the flour. I looked this up and found that the word we translate with the English words – mix or hide – is actually a word we often hear in English today, but in very different contexts: it’s ἐνέκρυψεν  – encrypt. We encrypt access to things we need to protect. Is Matthew’s community remembering that they had to work furtively to fulfil Jesus’ command to proclaim the Gospel? So should we be sneaky and furtive about telling people Jesus loves them, or at least sensitive? The woman didn’t seem to think that way.

She encrypted the flour with a rising agent – actually sour dough – and evidently she had big plans. Three measures of flour is about 20 kg – enough to make bread for 150 people. ^{Luz Mt 8-20} Yet the leaven that would make such abundance possible was inconspicuous enough for Jesus to say its inclusion was encrypted – secret.

There are secret things in the next two parables too. But we’re changing gear. This time, the little things are also very precious. People will give all they own to have them – hidden treasure; a longed-for pearl. If the parables of the mustard seed and the leaven were telling us that from little things, big things grow, are these treasures ways of describing their great value; the treasure we find when we learn of the love Jesus has for us? Are we content to stop with this answer? We tend to think that getting the answer right is finding the treasure – the important thing – as if that’s the goal. As if now we’ve found faith we can relax and get back to normal life.

But it’s not mission accomplished; it’s really only a start. Faith is like that mustard seed: it scatters widely, germinates profusely and it spreads. But as Saint Charles Darwin would have us remember, it has to adapt to live in new conditions.

My story of encountering the unexpected. The first summer school in pastoral care. Faithful life is not about right dogma, but about relationship: care. Youth loves the black and white of finding right answers. But that has its limits. Christmas cake?

So I discovered something really important that wasn’t clear to me before. It was a new beginning; like a new birth. Some leaven got encrypted into me. And the real question ever since has been what I have to do with it today – and tomorrow. It’s been mixed into my life; hidden; encrypted. And it grows and changes all the time.

But this is not just about me or any one of us. These parables were given to all of us to help us become yeast and seeds – to help us welcome, nourish and cherish. They were given to us so we might throw other priorities aside and seek God’s treasures each day. These parables burst us from our personal bubbles. The mustard seed that grows into a bushy refuge, the flour that becomes bread, spiritual treasure that becomes the new focus of our life, the great, indiscriminate catch of fish that reminds us of the variable soil and the weeds – what do they mean when we understand them, when we’ve decrypted them;? And who are we when we have?

What’s the hidden treasure; the pearl of great price? Us! Them! Jesus gave everything he was to have us? When we do understand his parables – when we’ve been discipled into what they mean – we’re meant to see what Jesus is doing for people hearing these stories. These treasures are the new life springing up in us – sources of new life that we in our turn are to pass on to others in ever new ways – like Jesus did. We can use familiar images – small things – to help people consider faith; to sense the extraordinary value and the unexpected shape of the reign of God. God’s way is full of surprises, bringing great things out of small beginnings; a secret treasure, but for everyone! We don’t have to be comprehensive or even feel competent. The smallest thing can keep the rumour of God’s love out there.

Surprising God, make us your indiscriminate welcomers; your secret, transforming leaven. Help us to treasure all your children; to call others to you, no matter who they are; and to accept the setbacks that come with being your followers. As we ponder your reign among us, please demand our attention and inspire us to renew our service to you each day. And as you wake us and renew us again and again, thank you for our vocation, which is to offer your hospitality to all people. Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 8a – Matthew 13 24-30, 36-43

Jesus says The Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in their field. One of the most startling things for me about this parable of the weeds among the wheat is that weeds spring up in God’s Kingdom. If I’d thought you could expect anything about God’s Kingdom, it’s that it should be perfect; a place you’d find perfect justice, perfect peace, perfect company; a weed-free world.

This makes me wonder about the ambiguous words Jesus entrusted to his disciples three chapters ago at the start of the Mission Discourse. Depending on which translation you read, he told them to proclaim that the Kingdom of heaven has come near or the Kingdom of heaven is at hand. Mt 10.7b Come near sounds like it’ll arrive soon; but at hand sounds like right here beside us. The two ambiguities seem linked –weeds tolerated in the Kingdom, and the Kingdom at once near, and right here now.

If I look around the world with eyes open to the good will and compassion that come as naturally as breathing to so many, I feel that the Kingdom has come. But if I look with eyes watching for the cut-throat worlds of competition, politics and violence, then I cry out, How long must we wait?! If Jesus has come and died and risen again, how can the Kingdom not have come, complete, finished and flawless?

The Kingdom has come near / is at hand. The fact that this phrase gets translated two different ways may help us understand how the parable can tell of the Kingdom having weeds in it, or, as we heard in last week’s parable of the sower, that the Kingdom can have grain falling on good, bad and indifferent soil.

We’re hearing that for some purpose / reason best known to God, the Kingdom is a place where the less-than-perfect is allowed to exist side-by-side with the perfect. My teen-age self would say: Impossible. They can’t go together. How can a perfect God tolerate imperfection? Why doesn’t God’s holiness burn up those impurities as they arrive? How can God know there are weeds and not demand that they’re pulled up this instant? They’re not what God wants. Weeds are by definition unwanted plants. If God doesn’t want something, why does God put up with it?

Who can say? But the strange and wonderful thing is that God does seem to tolerate imperfections. And that’s probably why many of us are still here; because God has waited long enough to give us a chance to belong. We can speculate about why. Or better, we can think about what that means for our choices from now on.
The explanation of the parable in verses 36-43 says that we’re in God’s field. We’ve been sown in it as children of the Kingdom. We’re the good seed. But amongst us, the enemy – the source of evil; the source of death – is planting weeds.

In the growing season, there’ll be competition between the weeds and the wheat for moisture, for sunlight, and for nutrition from the soil. So what do we do? If we, the ‘sown good seed’, take our cue from what wheat does, we’ll try to grow as well as we can, and produce as much grain as possible to provide for a hungry world.

I think we’re meant to behave like that. Life-giving people behave creatively, productively, positively, simply and generously. It’s set out in the Sermon on the Mount – the blueprint for a life-giving life. (Matthew chapters 5-7; well worth memorizing some day) The Sermon on the Mount also happens to tell us about the sorts of things in life to steer clear of. And today’s parable illustrates one of those wonderfully; judgement.

The fact that God does much more than just tolerate the weeds is the thing that intrigues me about this parable. For a time at least, the weeds are actually under God’s protection. When the slaves ask the Master if they should go out and pull up the weeds, the Master tells them not to. In the Sermon on the Mount, (Mt 7.1) Jesus tells us not to judge. The parable says the same. God tolerates weeds – things outside God’s purposes. Who are we to try to correct God’s mercy?

Not even angels are allowed to second-guess God’s judgment. (v 39) We’re told the reapers are angels. They can certainly tell weeds from wheat. But even they aren’t allowed to act on that knowledge. The final decision is God’s (cf Dt 32.35), and God has given the right to make that judgment solely to Jesus. (Jn 5.22 f) This teaching seems to have left the Church with a very difficult job. Since its earliest times, the Church has lived with the challenge of somehow incorporating weeds among its number; even those who cause little ones to stumble, (Lk 17.2) and yet at the same time protecting the weak from the predations of wolves in sheep’s clothing (Mt 7.15)

The parable we’ve been talking about today says that no-one is to go in and start weeding until the final judgement day – when the harvest is gathered in. If God is patient, and even protective of what the angels recognise as weeds, then that’s our calling too.
So we include. We do that believing that if the community of the Sermon on the Mount with its life-giving message of grace and mercy is given its head, it’s just possible that, with the Creator’s hand in it, an emphasis on nurture and trust might even turn weeds into wheat.

And in our own lives? We grow more through encouragement than punishment. Where an angry word can sting us into planting the very weeds we’ve been accused of growing, a kind word can encourage us to try life-giving gardening practices we may never have imagined possible. Lord Jesus, grow in us your kindness. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 6A – 5-7-2026 – Mt 11.28-30

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upo4n you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

In a hospital emergency room, you’ll sometimes see a family or a friend hand over a tremendous burden that they can’t carry any more. They’ve brought their sick one to a place of help; carried them in with all the strength of their loving hope and faith and pain. But once the staff at the hospital take over the burden of care from them, they collapse. Shocked, exhausted, relieved, they dissolve in tears; retreat into nervous waiting. They’ve done all they can; now they wait and hope. Maybe someone will sit with them and put a comforting arm round their shoulder. That’s where Jesus is today:

Jesus asks us to bring our heavy burdens to him. In return he offers us his yoke. His yoke does what it’s made to do. It helps work get done: it gives direction and spreads the load so we can do the work set before us. But it does much more. The image I have in mind for his yoke is Jesus’ arm around our shoulder. He faces the same way we do, so we don’t have to carry our heavy burdens alone any more. Bad things that happen to us are not God’s judgement on us. So let’s drop that burden. How can I believe this?

For me, the answer is in the Manger of Bethlehem and on the Cross of Calvary: in a baby made a refugee through no fault of his own; in a gentle person who lived to love people and ease their pain, yet suffered pain himself – in fact was tortured to death. If someone as good as Jesus could suffer as he did, then the manger and the cross say suffering is where God is in solidarity with us in our pain. The manger and the cross also tell me that Jesus wasn’t the type to seize control and forcibly fix things. He came to be with us; one of us. He became entirely like us. So he came to give us peace with who we are; to set us free from within our vulnerability.

So we aren’t measured by our utility or quality. Jesus knows our reality: our being human – and loves us for it. Being mortal is a condition which means that suffering is inevitable for us. And into that condition, Jesus comes to bring healing – not an end to suffering; not a demand that we become what we’re not, not a cure – just healing. He puts an arm around our shoulder, and faces our pain with us. Where we are burdened by hurt, isolation and fear, his yoke is compassion, his yoke is willing companionship, his yoke is hope for a new start. And we’re called to be like him, wounded healers.

Wounded healers? An industrial chaplain in Victoria talked about two women in two work-places who’d lost loved ones. They started helping other bereaved people to move towards healing and wholeness by staying with them in their time of suffering. This ministry worked because the women offered care out of their own experience of suffering. Their care was real; they had true compassion. So they could be Christ to the people they supported. If you imagine you’re too damaged to give pastoral care, think again. And if you feel strong enough to care for the whole world, think again.

There’s a community dimension to healing. Jesus called a Church into being; not a bunch of super-spiritual hermits. When Canon Jim Glennon was interviewed on a radio programme, he described the importance of community to faith wonderfully.

If [people] are drawing on the healing ministry of the church, it isn’t just their faith, it’s the faith of the people who are believing for them. Jesus said, ‘All things are possible to one who believes.’ He said where there wasn’t healing, it was because of little faith. But he said the responsibility for faith lay with those who prayed from the outside. The Bible says, ‘…Is any among you sick, let them call the elders of the church and let them pray over them, anointing them with oil, and the prayer of faith will raise up the sick person. Community!

When a healing ministry happens in a church, it’s a reminder that we’re all together assuming care of the people who receive that ministry: that we share each other’s griefs; share each other’s burdens. And that’s real. That sharing brings healing.

I’ve talked about the image of Christ’s arm around the shoulder of someone who suffers. Here and now, it’s our arms that are called to offer that solace and solidarity. And there’s another side of that as well. Jesus told people to bring him their heavy burdens so he might take them and replace them with his easy yoke. Our role is not just to bring our burdens to Jesus, but also to encourage people who are terribly weighed down to bring their burdens to him as well. In practical terms, as Christ’s agents now, that means you and I are the ones called to this healing work of his.

You know how we talk about seeing Christ’s face in each other. Today I think we also have to see Christ’s shoulders in each other – ready to bear those burdens that a person needs to hand over when they cannot bear them any longer. And also Christ’s arms in ourselves; offering his easy yoke of compassionate solidarity.

We are the body of Christ.  Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 5A – Genesis 22 1-14

How do we talk about today’s story of Abraham almost killing his son, his only son whom he loves; and because God tells him to!? As you’d expect, rivers of ink have been spilt over this story. Some, like the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews say this shows us Abraham’s utter trust in God ^{Heb 11.17,19}. Others like Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard passionately argue that the God we know would never have commanded such a thing; that Abraham must have heard some other voice.

The OT scholar Klaus Westermann points us another direction. ^{Genesis 12-36 p. 354} He reminds us that God commanded that the first-born of your sons you shall give to me, ^{Exod 22.29} but that this command was repeated but immediately revoked in Exod 34.19-20 when God says All the first-born of your sons you shall redeem [with an animal sacrifice]. That’s what we see the Mary and Joseph do when they take the infant Jesus to the Temple to present him to the Lord. ^{Luke 2.22-24} So Westermann raises the question that this story may be an archetypal myth showing us how Abraham’s faith fulfilled all righteousness centuries before the Law was given to Moses. (Just as an aside, for Muslims, the son bound on the sacrificial pyre was Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arab people. So Abraham is our common ancestor.)

There are thousands of learned arguments. But sometimes the path to understanding becomes clearer through the genius of art. So I want to tell you about two art works. Both of them depict that dreadful scene where Abraham holds the sacrificial knife above his helpless, bound, only son, whom he loves. Their locations are startling.

There’s a chapel in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre / Resurrection in Jerusalem marking the place where we believe Jesus was crucified. It’s called the Chapel of Golgotha, as its altar sits directly above the rock where we believe the Cross stood. The chapel’s other name is the Aqedah Chapel – Aqedah is Hebrew for ‘binding’.

You get why it has this Hebrew name, because as you face the crucifix above the chapel altar, you become gradually aware that looming over your right shoulder, there’s a huge, mosaic, and it depicts the binding – Aqedah – of Isaac. Abraham has his knife raised; the angel is about to stop him; the ram is caught in the thicket. You look from Isaac to Jesus and back again. Jesus is bound and nailed to the wood he’d carried. And Isaac is bound, the wood he carried is ready to burn him once he’s been sacrificed. Two loved children; two shocking stories; each story central to our faith. The images explore each other in extraordinarily powerful ways. Each challenges us to ponder where our freedom comes from, and what it’s cost. Silence

The other artwork is one I only learned about this week when I was talking about this story with Bishop Greg. As I said, it’s also a picture of the binding of Isaac. And again, its location is startling. Bishop Greg served as the Rector of St John’s Darlinghurst back in the early 2000’s. And he told me there’s a window depicting the Aqedah – the binding of Isaac – in that church; and it’s over the baptistery.

It’s literally illuminating the place where people present themselves to the Lord; where people bring their children to present them to the Lord. A baptistery is the place in the church where we use the language of being buried with Christ in baptism and dying to sin so that we might rise to new life with Christ. It’s a place where we make promises to trust in God; to bring our children up in the faith and practice of the church so they can commit themselves to God. And all the while, this picture of the binding of Isaac looms over us to tell us how serious it all is.

Serious? Bishop Greg told me that in 1986, Mordechai Vanunu was baptised there. Mordechai Vanunu was the Israeli nuclear physicist who blew the whistle on Israel’s covert nuclear weapons programme; baptised with that scene above him! An Israeli is often far better understood if they abandon God or die than if they become Christian. What a setting for Mordechai to be baptised as he did the two things Abraham did – in Genesis 12, giving his past to God, and in Genesis 22, giving his future to God.

So in Jerusalem, we’ve got the Aqedah depicted in the place where our salvation is offered to us because of Christ’s sacrifice. And in Darlinghurst, there it is depicted again, at the place in the church where we first take hold of that gift. Our Christian faith echoes the Aqedah, and it’s echoed by the Aqedah – another Son willingly journeying in company with his Father to what seems a senseless death.

You have to lay aside your normal categories of thinking as you hear a story like this. Could Abraham, Sarah and Hagar ever have imagined the size of the promise God made to them? Here we are, over 4,000 years later, children of a land they never dreamt existed, and we, and nearly four thousand million of our living sisters and brothers count ourselves among their children. We do so because they stepped out in faith – risked, trusted – journeyed beyond the horizons of their imaginations.

God once took Abraham outside and said, Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. Then God said to him, So shall your descendants be. ^{Gen 15.5} You and I number among those stars; those children. And every child knows what stars really are, don’t they. When we are challenged in our faith, challenged to put God’s priorities front and centre, here’s a story we can go to.           Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 4 a – Mt 10. 24-39

The teaching before today’s gospel passage is about the urgency and the difficulty of the disciples’ mission. It says people’s spiritual well-being depends upon their receiving the Kingdom; that the disciples are to expect persecution and hardship as they proclaim that Kingdom; and that some families will disintegrate where one member accepts and another rejects what they preach. This will not be easy to bear: the disciples will honestly wonder if what they are doing is utterly misguided. They’ll be accused of serving the king of demons, like Jesus was 9.³⁴; 12.²⁴.

The collection of Jesus’ missionary teachings we call the Mission Discourse was probably recorded to speak to a community struggling with all these consequences of their missionary work. Family breakdown, ostracism from the wider community, accusations of how misguided they were – a downright evil sect at worst. These are hard to face. The religious and civil authorities were united in their persecution of what they saw as troublesome little sects. They weren’t above pressure exercised via the believer’s family if the result would be the speedier extinction of the group.

So while we might think some of the pronouncements in this passage are rather hard to imagine ever having crossed the lips of gentle Jesus, we have to recognise them as the sayings the community remembered when they were facing a time of extreme stress. Apostasy – renouncing your faith altogether – was doubtless an option that many considered, and more than a few might have taken. It would devastate the morale of a persecuted little community. These were sayings recalled and recorded to galvanise their courage; sayings to help them remember what Jesus himself had gone through to bring them the message of the Kingdom. As his disciples, they had to follow his example. So they reminded themselves: ²⁴ A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above the master; ²⁵ it’s enough for the disciple to be like the teacher, and the slave like the master. If they’ve called the master of the house Beelzebul, how much more will they malign those of his household!

There are two levels at which you can live your life. You can either live an expedient, safe existence; not rock the boat and be left in peace to make your way. Or you can live a life open to a higher authority than the culture which seeks to assert its authority over you. You can choose to question and, if necessary, reject the standards of your society. This often means a life of confrontation and danger both for you and your loved ones. You do it because you believe in the rightness of your convictions, and the ultimate destructiveness of the alternative.

If you do end up dying under a jackboot, at least you’ll have decided who it was that died. The easy way out might be just that; the way out of a life lived truly. What do you most fear? Do you fear disease or pain for yourself or for your loved ones? Do you fear an early death? …failure or shame? … loneliness or rejection? Jesus confronts fear head on. ²⁶ … have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known. ²⁷ What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. ²⁸ Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Jesus challenges us to imagine; what if the person who ended up in your grave wasn’t really you? What if it was someone who might have been you if you’d stuck to your principles – if you’d made decisions to be proud of?’ What if? No-one else would know of the swap. But that’s part of the problem, really, isn’t it? If you’d lived a compromised life, it would mean your life had been a lie; anyone who thought they knew you really only knew a mask.

For Jesus’ disciples to have betrayed the discovery they’d made about him – to have gone silent on it – would’ve been to go to just such a false grave. ³² Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven; ³³ but whoever denies me before others, I also will deny before my Father in heaven. So discipleship is about now; not just the hereafter.

Not to have told the world that in this Jesus, they’d met their loving maker and experienced the certainty of God’s love and acceptance of them – this would have been to deny their very selves. Not only that, it would have denied everyone else the chance to know the freedom that belonging to Jesus means. The world had waited centuries for this. To know it and not proclaim it would have been obscene. If they’d clammed up, we wouldn’t be here. So what do we do? How do I exhort us to become a parish of evangelists, street preachers and healers?

Of course prayer is central. But actually doing it? I suggest we start with each of us learning by heart some of the parables of Jesus – his stories of the Kingdom – and finding opportunities to tell them to people. When we can’t think of words to say about a complex ethical or spiritual matter, we should puzzle over a parable. You have no idea how the parable of the labourers in the vineyard goes down at a dinner party! It’ll certainly change the way people think about you, but … ³⁹ Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 3A –  Mt 9.35 – 10.10

Mt 9.³⁵ … Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness.

Who was your favourite teacher at school? The good ones teach by example, don’t they. And then there are the creative ones who teach with stories and through our five senses. But the teachers who make the most profound impact are the ones who are genuinely interested in you. You cherish any teacher with just one of these qualities. But a teacher who combines all three qualities will have every student eating out of their hand; prepared to follow their teacher into any adventure.

Today as we begin to read Matthew’s Mission Discourse, Jesus’ disciples, and we, are under the spell of just such a teacher. The Mission Discourse begins with the Rabbi Jesus going out on mission. His ministry is one of teaching and healing. And once he’s done it himself – shown his disciples what to do – he sends them out on mission. Jesus teaches by example. We also know he teaches through creativity. He is the teller of parables which have set the hearts on fire ever since, giving new life with every reading. He is also the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount, whose words, ever since, have launched movements all over the world striving for justice, for mercy and for liberation. This is the world-transforming mission he sends us out on: a mission to the whole person; a mission to the whole world.

What was his motivation for this? He gave his life to this mission. In chapter 9.³⁶, we read that Jesus saw the crowds, [and] had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Compassion strives for justice, for mercy and for liberation. It’s a demanding emotion. Little has changed for the harassed and helpless since. Nor for shepherds. Leaders inspired by Jesus leaders who show real care for oppressed people these days – are often simultaneously nominees for a Nobel Prize, and targets for assassins’ bullets.

Compassion wells up in Jesus; loving-kindness that’s committed to creating new lives in people through protective judgement of their oppressors, and through healing and new birth for the oppressed. Jesus’ life and teaching speak both to the oppressors and to their victim-survivors’ suffering; physical, mental and emotional; to their fear, poverty, powerlessness and alienation. Jesus is beside the oppressed in all of these. His life, the stories he tells, how he pays for his mission with his life – his utter commitment to the harassed and helpless are all utterly authentic. Because he knows the pain himself, Jesus speaks with authority. He tells stories that name the harassment, exposing it to the light of day and challenging perpetrators.

Jesus is utterly committed to people being granted the freedom that is everyone’s birthright. Often his healings are accompanied with words about release from bondage; about restoration of belonging. And there’s another element to this; grace. Remember how he tells his disciples: ⁷ As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ ⁸ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment. In Jesus’ economy – grace economy – there’s no such thing as user pays. The highest values are not power or wealth, but service; not certainty and control, but hope and trust. Service, hope and trust are the good gifts of our gracious God – and our need for them isn’t subject to a means test. Everyone needs them, and in God’s economy, need is the only qualification required for them to be freely received.

So why doesn’t everyone have them? If we look round the world at the distribution of God’s material provision for us, there isn’t much equity. Some have more than they could ever use, while most remain in need. Imagine if that distorted God’s spiritual provision for us too? What if the Church of God were a selfish spiritual hoarder? There’s a saying in today’s gospel that makes me think this might have even been a problem in Matthew’s community. It’s the sentence we started our worship with today; ³⁷ [Jesus] he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; ³⁸ ask therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest.” ‘Ask God to send labourers’ – why is that there? Some people find they’ve volunteered for things because everyone else has taken two steps back. Was Jesus already preparing his disciples to face that difficulty – finding willing missionaries? Ask God to send labourers – How do we hear that? As our prayer for someone else to do the job, or as Jesus’ call to us?

Nothing is different today about the human condition. The cleansing, freeing, renewing power of Jesus has never been more needed. Our world is one where the harassment of the vulnerable is shockingly widespread, and the helplessness of the poor, and vulnerability of nature are used for profit and power. Spiritual bondage is born of the worsening isolation and bewilderment this sort of society breeds.

That’s why it’s appropriate that there are words of judgement in what we hear today. Of course there would be from the teacher who categorically rules out user-pays ethics, who treasures the vulnerable and threatens the powerful of every age. Jesus called his disciples to mission with these words: The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; ³⁸ therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest. What’s our response? It must be to proclaim God’s grace, and to offer healing that wins people their freedom?  Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost +2– Gen 12 1-9, Ps 33 1-12, Rom 4 13-25, Matt 9 9-13 & 18-26

So Jesus just wanders up to Matthew and says, Follow me; come and belong; come and be one of us. It looks straightforward and friendly. But Matthew was a hated outsider, probably a local customs official, working for outsiders, taxing the goods ordinary people took across an imposed border. In your village, that makes you a real outsider. But when you look at what comes next, you see Jesus wasn’t so much calling Matthew back into the community, as offering to join him outside. When the religious insiders saw Jesus eating with Matthew and people like him, they challenged Jesus’ disciples; What sort of Rabbi keeps such unsavoury company.

And Jesus’ first disciples would have been hard put to answer. Customs officials like Matthew weren’t the sort of people you’d stick your neck out for. Peter, Andrew, James and John would’ve felt pretty uncomfortable. The more radical Jesus became, the more vulnerable they must have felt. And yet that’s the movement of this part of Matthew’s gospel. Jesus has come down from delivering his very counter-cultural Sermon on the Mount to take up a mission that he’s soon to send his disciples out on. And towards the end of today’s chapter we’ll see Jesus publicly denounced as a blasphemer, and in league with the prince of demons ^9:34.

So with his disciples nonplussed and silent, Jesus answers the Pharisees’ question – why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners – by saying, It’s not the healthy who need the physician but the sick! Go and learn what this means, ‘I want mercy, not sacrifice.’ Because I’ve come to call not the righteous, but sinners.

Not the righteous, but sinners. Pharisees were ‘righteous people’. They dedicated their lives to righteousness. If Israel was meant to be a blessing to all families of Earth as we heard in the first reading ^{Gen 12.3} – to reveal to the nations the virtue and blessedness of a people truly close to God – then they needed people who knew exactly what God expected of them – and who were prepared to demonstrate that standard by giving their lives over to the most scrupulously righteous lifestyle.

Jesus challenged their view: Go and learn what this means, ‘I want mercy, not sacrifice. Don’t be so fastidious; focus on compassion; on blessing. Matthew soon shows us Jesus getting right down to it with the synagogue-leader’s daughter and the woman with the bleeding. Jesus’ ministry is welcomed by the crowds; by ordinary people. If the contrast with the Pharisees wasn’t already stark enough, a leader of the synagogue bursts in on this confrontation with an amazing request: My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her and she will live.

Where just before we saw Matthew immediately get up and follow, now it’s Jesus who immediately rose and followed him, with his disciples. His mission is mercy – Jesus’ way of costly love – and he takes it without hesitation. Had it been any of the Pharisees who asked Jesus for help, I’m sure he’d have gone with them too. But would a Pharisee have asked? So is an insider a prisoner, and an outsider free?

It’s not healthy people who need a doctor, but those who are sick. This is the chapter which ends with Jesus saying the harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few. On his way to the leader’s little girl, there’s another desperate need. A woman who’d suffered bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and, reaching out in faith, touched the fringe of his garment. Instantly, Jesus speaks the word of mercy, Take heart daughter; your faith has made you well. The ruler of the synagogue called his child daughter. With the same love, Jesus calls this woman his daughter.

Jesus continues on to the ruler’s house where the professional mourners and flute players are already busy with the ritual of lamentation. He clears the scene of these mourners and mockers who laugh at his apparent foolishness. Again, this is a gospel very much focussed on imagery of insiders and outsiders. What’s really striking is how far that imagery is taken – what’s done with it. Matthew, the outsider is called. But rather than call Matthew into an insider-space of boundaries and righteousness, Jesus opens his arms wider to include the space Matthew inhabits. And Matthew abandons a boundary post to follow Jesus. And just as we begin to lose a sense of what’s inside and what’s outside with this call, some guardians of the nation’s moral boundaries arrive with emergency event fencing.

We in the Church have always known that the Holy Spirit is most active on the boundaries – on the fringes of the Church. She pushes those boundaries out. And that should come as no surprise. We worship Jesus who took the boundaries of God’s love across the borders of the Holy Land, and he charged us, his followers to fulfil God’s promise to Abram and Sarai – to stretch out those boundaries of blessing to embrace every family of Earth.

How do we embrace like this – how do we trail wide the hem of Jesus’ garment for people to reach and touch, so they too can come to know themselves as Jesus’ daughters and sons – can come to discover their birthright? The gospel today challenges us to be that hem of his garment, trailing out, in reckless love for the sake of people whose lives are unravelling. Lord Jesus Christ, lover of all, trail wide the hem of your garment, bring healing, bring peace.  Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Trinity A – Ex 34 1-8, Song 3YM 29-34, 2 Cor 13 11-13, Matt 28 16-20

Kids in a class answering each other’s names disempower a new teacher. Names are power!

I noticed when Adn Sam visited us how he prayed in the Name of the Trinity – Creator, Redeemer and Life Giver. Those were his words the Name of the Trinity, then Creator, Redeemer and Life Giver. God creates us; God restores us when we stray, and God gives us spiritual life. But Adn Sam’s first word was Trinity – God is Trinity; triune; three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, yet one God. So the Trinity precedes creation as a community; as a relationship which is Scripture reveals to us as creative, life-giving, restoring and loving. What this community creates is intended to reflect those qualities; their image and likeness.

Reading through scripture, we can see the Father, Son and Holy Spirit each creating, restoring the lost, and giving life, and so much more: love; peace; balance; harmony. Father, Son and Spirit are in perfect harmony with one another.

So we experience the Trinity like we hear beautiful harmony in music, or see a perfect, graceful dance, or discover the mesmerising symbiosis of Nature. And more than that, we experience Trinity like participants in music-making do, or like dance-partners do, or as carers of life-sustaining forests and oceans do; as part of something much greater. And Trinity is far more than just what we experience.

Yet we try to describe Trinity; we label things. We try to classify creation to seek to comprehend it. We even say a thing doesn’t exist if we can’t measure it. We break things down into categories we can handle. Often, we talk about the Trinity using words that suggest only God the Father specialises in creating, and then delegates repair work to Jesus, and fine tuning to the Spirit. We may not mean it to sound like that. But with time, phrases like Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier sound as if we’re replacing the relational Names, Father, Son and Spirit, with a set of functions: Creator = Factory, Redeemer = Repair Workshop and Sanctifier = Online Firmware Upgrade. Not who God is at all!

We sometimes forget when we use names to describe the three persons we know as the one God that we’re only making associations; like I did with music, dance and nature. The names we use may hold very rich associations and significance for us. But none of them can ever be complete. At times, one name is more helpful than another. Later, another name might suddenly light up with new meaning for us. But we can’t let ourselves forget that these are all associations that we’re making, and they can’t define who or what God is.

That’s probably why silence is so powerful.

What does help is to remember that the names God has chosen to give us in scripture are primarily associated with the intimacy of belonging – of family. Knowing that helps us see how some associations are just dead ends. Knowing that also helps us to identify those associations which might truly open us to life together in the living embrace of the Trinity; in the community of the Trinity.

To do that, scripture offers us the image of a loving family inviting us in and transforming us. Jesus, the Son showed us as a human how compassionate and gracious the Father’s love is for the world. Jesus is also the perfect image of the character the Holy Spirit works to nurture inside each of us. Think of those words of Jesus to his friends that we just heard in Matthew’s Gospel: I am with you always, to the very end of the age. We experience that presence within and without.  

To show us how a person might embrace Christ being with us, and to describe its effect, I’ve asked that today we sing together St Patrick’s ancient baptismal hymn, I bind unto myself today the strong Name of the Trinity. One of our study group observed on Tuesday how this hymn comes from a world where spiritual danger was a constant anxiety. The majority world is still conscious of this danger today. Our society seems to sleepwalk through it.

This hymn describes our baptism as a choice to bind God the Trinity to ourselves as a shield. This binding protects our spirits absolutely from the danger of being possessed by the evil forces at work in the spirit world, and what we call the real world. The verse we just sang to prepare for the gospel describes that baptismal binding. It is an expository prayer invoking Jesus’ words when he said I am with you always, to the very end of the age. So we sang – Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. Speaking with Fr Donald yesterday, he was very moved by the way it can be a stranger who articulates that belonging. This verse is a prayer to plunge into Christ’s presence.

In a few minutes, we’ll sing three more verses of this hymn. In the first, we swear allegiance to the Trinity, and claim protection in the power of the Name. This declaration echoes our first reading today when the Lord passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. In verse 2, we proclaim our faith given through Christ’s birth, baptism, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and second coming, and claim what he has done as our protection. Then in the third verse, Patrick proclaims the wonders of creation itself as daily revelation to him and to us of God’s eternal power and divine nature. Rom 1.20

Our own life-experiences and the associations our minds come up with shape our faith. So faith is a changing, maturing process, and we mustn’t get it bogged down into words that can stop us growing. Our dance with the Trinity evolves us and deepens us – personally and as a Church. And that’s the message we’ll go out with ringing in our ears from our thanksgiving hymn. Today we bind to ourselves the power of God to hold and lead … the wisdom of our God to teach, God’s hand to guide, God’s shield to ward, the Word of God to give us speech … the Trinity of whom all Nature has creation, eternal Father, Spirit, Word.

Thanks be, Most Holy Trinity, Amen.