Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 19 b – Michaelmas – SoC 5 – Psalm 148

Psalm 148 is called a Halel הָלַל Psalm. It’s one of the last five of the Psalms, and each one of them begins with the Hebrew exclamation ‘Halleluia’ – let’s praise God! So a Halel Psalm. As we’ve just seen, our Bibles translate that as ‘Praise the Lord’. The first part of the word – Halel – normally gets translated as ‘praise’.

But we had an interesting time with this word in our study group on Tuesday because we found that you can just as easily translate Halel as ‘boast’, like we find it in Psalm 34.2 – My soul makes its boast in the Lord. So boast or praise? Boast and praise are pretty similar in English; just the direction of reference is different – praise is usually aimed at someone else, boasting feels how it reflects back on us.

We have ‘boast books’ or ‘brag books’ full of photos and things that celebrate our children, grandchildren, pets, artworks, gardening exploits, travels – you name it. And we’ll sing their praises to anyone who’ll stand still for long enough to listen because they are our boast; they’re our pride and joy. Anyone can see they’re such a credit to us – so cute, so advanced, so unique, so perfect. And don’t we love it when our little pride and joy reciprocates our boasting and celebrates us.

Boast books / brag books – Psalm 148 feels like someone has put together God’s boast book / brag book. The Psalm calls our attention to creation’s wonderful testimony to God’s glory (which, incidentally, is another word that translates הָלַל). The heavens, angels, hosts – important to begin with them on the feast of Michael and all angels – sun, moon, stars, highest heavens and – remembering the first Genesis creation story’s cosmology – the waters above the heavens – they all bear witness to the glory of God.

So too do all the great sea creatures and the oceans that give them life and a home; so too the great meteorological forces; all land-forms; the plant and animal and avian realms – and us too. All creation – from inanimate created things to living creatures, including us – we’re all part of a mutual, interwoven relationship which boasts of the majesty of God. And in this, our ultimate depth of meaning is revealed; all creation praises the Name of the Lord – boasts of the Name of the Lord by its very being. This Psalm commands that all creation do just that.

But, of course, not all these things have voices, and that’s where the other meaning of Halel comes into play. Nature wordlessly boasts of the glory of its maker.

We began the Season of Creation by meditating on three verses from the scriptures. They were Genesis 1.3 – Then God said ‘Be Light’, and light was…the creative Word of God needed only to name whatever was in God’s imagination, and it was.

The next verse was John 1.14 – The Word became flesh… This means the creative Word of God that we met speaking creation’s birth in Genesis came to be born into Creation to break our bondage to decay. The Word lived among us and we have seen God’s Glory in him most perfectly; astonishingly, in a creature like us!

And lastly there was Romans 1.20 – God’s power and nature have always been understood and seen through creation. And that’s still true, in spite of that bondage to decay which is so tragically tangible in our ongoing violation of Nature’s intricate harmony. 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.

Tragically, as we look on, human civilization is destroying those very things. Our calling as people of God is to do everything in our power to confront and reverse that destruction – to work with God to nurture and restore Creation.

“…Christ embodies and reveals the invisible God in and through the natural world, [but] this means of revelation is … becoming increasingly rare and precious. … 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.”                       ^{VSB Colossians p. 177}

As God’s people, we are called to embrace this vision of creation as a revelation of God. We are to pray with hope that creation will be liberated from its bondage to decay, and that God will ultimately restore the Creation.

As we know, when we pray for something, God enlists us to become part of the answer to that prayer. Are we brave enough to pray this, and then to respond to God’s call? I pray daily that we will be, and that more and more, Nature may go on beautifully and wordlessly boasting of the glory of our maker.  Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 18 – SoC 3 – Prov 31 10-31 Ps 1 Jas 3 Mk 9

The theme of this year’s Ecumenical Season of Creation is Journey Together to Hope and Act with Creation. ‘Journey together’ has put our focus on relationships; our relationships with each other, with God, and with God’s creation. It’s helped us understand our ecological spirituality as the relationship between our actions, our spiritual health, and the health of Earth, our common home. The present state of the Earth shows us how pivotal a healthy ecological spirituality is.

Any close contemplation of the natural world astounds us with the intricate balance of life; the delicate relationships all living things have with each other and with their geographical and climatic environments. To contemplate creation – any part of it – is a magnificent lesson in symbiosis; in the wonder of its interwoven balance. And it’s obvious that our role as the beings who have the greatest impact on nature, for good or ill, is to live in harmony with the natural order; to Journey Together to Hope and Act with Creation. Anything less violates who we are, and life on Earth.

In the Season of Creation, it’s always a bit of a puzzle how our set Sunday scripture readings might help us with this central call of our spirituality: to live in harmony with the natural order. And it looks like today’s first reading provides a particular challenge. ‘A capable wife who can find?’ The first commentator I read warned that preaching on this passage in the midst of the pitched gender politics of our age is like stomping through a minefield. Harmony with the natural order? At first glance, this reading only sounds comfortable for the old patriarchal order, and apparently has little to do with the good of God’s created order. But let’s see.

Who is this capable wife? There’s a hint in vv. 23 and 31. Like her husband, she’s known and praised in the city gates. That’s odd. The city gates were where men publicly negotiated legal and social contracts; where men managed the well-being of the community. But she’s there! Last week we heard that Wisdom’s voice speaks at the entrance of the city gates. ^{Prov 1.21} So this capable wife is being portrayed as the embodiment of the Divine Wisdom that the book of Proverbs celebrates.

If we expect Proverbs will only list traditional women’s roles for her to fulfil, this capable wife proves us wrong. The traditional roles are there, but this woman also negotiates contracts and conducts trade in the way only a man was expected to. This surprising description for a woman living in a traditional patriarchal society shows her as living an honest, thoughtful life, in harmony with her community and with the realities of her time and place, and making a wonderful contribution; a provider.

This capable wife embodies the Divine Wisdom that New Testament language calls the Word of God –Jesus.^{1 Cor 1.24} All the honour, kindness, trustworthiness, strength, generosity, and dignity this woman embodies as Divine Wisdom, Christians see revealed in the selfless life and ministry of Jesus. In the wisdom of this capable woman, in the wisdom of Jesus, the balance of life is in the best possible hands.

That sounds easy to say. But the truth of it becomes very clear when you see what damage can come of its antithesis. The letter of James speaks of the dangers of an unbridled tongue and even credits the tongue with the power to set on fire the cycle of nature. ^{Jas 3.6} Until recent decades, that would have seemed quite a stretch. But we do see clearly now how unbridled tongues – the misinformation machines that were once used to protect the tobacco industry – are now used to subvert the best intentions of governments and organisations seeking to avert ecological catastrophe. Even repeated calls for change by the UN are mocked and ignored with apparent impunity.

The struggling Earth community in so many places today bears witness to these crimes against simple truth. We see everywhere the avoidable consequences of greedy, reckless unaccountable abuse of wealth and power. Deforestation and habitat destruction; poisoning and over-use of water – oceans, seas, lakes, rivers and aquifers; species extinction; eco-system collapse; soil degradation; micro-plastic pollution; greenhouse-gas emissions continuing to rise; destruction and violation of minority populations and first-nations peoples; corruption; prejudice; false history – the list goes on. We can point the finger sometimes, but we need to be reminded how easily we can be complicit. Our Gospel today helps us there.

In our Gospel story, Jesus quietly tells his disciples for a second time that he will be betrayed and killed and rise again. They didn’t hear him before, and this time, they’re deafened to what he says by the sound of their own voices arguing with each other about who’s the greatest. Somehow, despite having chosen to go on the way with Jesus, their teacher, they could drown out this most significant teaching with the chatter of their petty ambition. And we can do that too. How many voices call out to us to follow empty, materialistic dreams? Who do we listen to?

The world is a different place now from the world of the capable wife – the world of Jesus and his disciples on the way together. But the way of wisdom and of selfless, kind, generous hearts remains the same. And so does our call to Journey Together to Hope and Act with Creation. May God fill us with the wisdom of the capable wife, and the self-emptying love of Christ our Lord. May we take a little child on our knee and like Jesus, proclaim and live the Gospel by putting ourselves last in order to serve this child’s hope of a future! Amen

The Rt Rev’d Sophie Relf – Christopher

Mark 8.31-38                                                           

Friends, I am not a fist-thumping fire and brimstone preacher.

Mostly, what I feel compelled to preach on is God’s love for you, and to encourage you in your ministry and mission as empowered agents of God’s love.

If that is all you remember from this sermon- I am ok with that.

But in truth, today, in this season of creation, I will take a departure from the norm of pure encouragement.

This is as close to a ‘fire and brimstone’ sermon as I get, and it is because, as a society, we are asleep at the wheel on so many issues of common justice- including the environment- the inhumane treatment of the homeless, the lack of progress on reconciliation, and the scourge of domestic violence.

The time for gently, gently-subdued-tip-toe church, has passed.

Today we join Jesus in frustration with off-piste distractions.

In the Gospels, the bumbling disciples are often doing and saying the wrong thing (like the story’s buffoons) so that Jesus can set them straight and we can glean the teaching.

Today, Peter is the buffoon. He takes Jesus aside and rebukes him saying “Jesus you don’t need to suffer, you don’t need to die in order to be raised etc”.

Then Jesus is very hard on Peter and says: “Get behind me Satan”, which seems somewhat of an overreaction given his friend just wanted him spared suffering and death.

Some scholars believe that Peter just does NOT GET who Jesus is.

According to this view, Peter is innocent and naïve.

Peter wants Jesus to be that strong-man messiah they’d been waiting for…. without all the unglamorous dying and suffering. We can’t begrudge that impulse.

But look at Jesus’ sharp rebuke “get behind me Satan!”. That admonition does not support the line ‘Peter was a bumbling fool’.

There is another school of thought that says Peter knew who Jesus was.

That Jesus was the Messiah.

If that were true, and Peter took Jesus- the living Christ aside and told him off, it would be because Peter knew best.

Peter had a plan for how this whole ministry will go… and he wants Jesus to follow his lead.

Now that is some hubris. “I know you are God incarnate, but I know better than you about these events. Now, I’ll tell you how this will go”.

That would be some arrogance, wouldn’t it?

The fact that we are all here in church today shows that we mostly feel that there is probably a God who is interested in us and our lives.

The fact that you are here during the ‘season of creation’ at St John’s Halifax Street tells me that you are somebody who knows God is deeply interested in the created world too.

The world needs more Christians like you—more people who are listening keenly to God and want to find spiritual and practical solutions to corruption and exploitation.

The truth is God’s interest is deeper and more encompassing in the material world than we can imagine.

The secular world paints a caricature of Christians in which we can only conceive of the sacred (read very few things) and the profane (read almost everything in our lives).

But this is absurd. Many Christians know God cares about the use and abuse of all the world’s resources no matter where they are, no matter what the rationale for destruction. God cares about every person, animal, and environment whose right to exist is imperilled by greed.

 When I was studying for my first undergraduate degree, as I studied with a lot of journalists. I learnt this terrible truth about the personal proximity to tragedy being required for our concern to be piqued.

The public’s interest in a tragedy is impacted by some key factors, including the proximity of the tragedy, the colour of the skin of the people experiencing the tragedy, the nationality of the victims of the tragedy, the part of the world in which a tragedy is happening, and the number of people impacted by the tragedy.

All these factors influence how much we believe a tragedy to be a BIG deal- and by extension how much we imagine GOD thinks any tragedy is a BIG deal.

If you can visualise, there are concentric circles of interest to do with geography/ race/ and a range of other factors.

So, if something awful happens on Halifax St, it only needs to be a singular event to make the news and impact us. No doubt we think, “Wow, that’s the right near St John’s—how awful.”

If that involves somebody who looks like a member of our family, we will remember that event the following year.

To have the same impact on us, a tragedy interstate will need to be an even greater level tragedy or involve lots more people.

These circles of interest radiate out. The further away from us, or less related, then the less we care.

It means that when Muslim or Jewish children are suffering and dying in a place we know little about, and when they may not look exactly like the children we raised, we can feel quite distant from the tragedy.

Even when the number of innocent children dying in the Holy Land reaches around 15,000 in less than a year and the human suffering is incalculable.

Here is the other side to that- the Peter-like hubris. We can begin to think God is not all that bothered either. God cares more for Adelaide and our needs than anywhere else.

Of course, if disaster were to strike in Adelaide, God would care a lot. The truth we Christians know is that despite our instincts to prioritise human life, God cares a lot everywhere.

God cares about polluted cities in China that we talk about in Australia, but also cares about what people in the luxurious West do with our consumption and destruction patterns.

In 2024 the Church has forgotten the legacy of justice promotion entrusted to it. The time for gently, gently-subdued-tip-toe church, has passed.

Remember the BCP words before we pray intercessions “Let us pray for the whole state of Christ’s Church militant here in earth”?

So we pray that the creator God leads us clearly into as much truth as we can handle this ‘season of creation’, and may God preserve us from the hubris of telling God to follow our plan. Let us each continue to work and pray for the state of Christ’s Church militant here in earth’.

The Lord be with you.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 16B – 2^nd Sunday in the Season of Creation – Isa 35 4-7a, Ps 146, James 2 1-10 14-17, Mark 7 24-37

Last Sunday, we started looking at Ecological Spirituality. As we did, the word that kept coming back at us was relationship: our relationship with each other, with Earth, our common home, with all life on Earth, and our relationship with the Source of all Being – the God who spoke all of us into being. That’s why we named Genesis 1.3 as pivotal – Then God said – the creative Word that made everything.

As we thought about all these relationships, it became clear that our spirituality exists in our physical life just as much as it does in our emotional and intellectual life. Spirituality has important practical, physical dimensions. That’s why we remembered Paul’s words from Romans 1.20 where he says that God’s power and nature have always been understood and seen through creation. Our physical relationship with creation is critical to our spirituality.

That was underlined as we remembered John 1.14 which says that Jesus – the creating Word of God –came among us as a physical, flesh-and-blood human being. God takes physical existence seriously! We looked at the way Jesus modelled relationship through kindness, compassion and costly generosity – just as we’ve seen in the exhausted Jesus of today’s gospel. And since we are spoken into being by God, the model of relationship of Jesus, the Word made flesh, is our guide to living. But kind, compassionate, generous living is vulnerable living. So what happens when we encounter people suffering the effects of greed, and cruel violence? Jesus’ healing and teaching ministry addressed the consequences of greed, and cruel violence, so responding to those consequences is also our model.

So, all the selfish, destructive evils we witness; the shocking disparities in wealth and influence that deprive countless millions of access to the basics of life? What about them, and the chronic, seemingly unstoppable damage being inflicted on the living planet and its worst effects harming the poor and weak? How does ecological spirituality speak to all this? Our scriptures today speak unequivocally of God’s justice.

In today’s scriptures, we encounter words about God’s anger and vengeance. We comfortable Christians are chronically uncomfortable with these sorts of words. Lots of people tell me they don’t like the God they meet in the Old Testament because of all the angry words. But do we forget that we see Jesus angry with the way power is misused by community leaders? We saw him angered in last week’s gospel by the religious-police-tactics of Pharisees and scribes accusing his disciples for eating with unwashed hands. And we liked Jesus protecting us.

We heard God tell Isaiah today to do something similar. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, don’t fear! Here is your God. He’ll come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. We may get uncomfortable about talk of God’s anger and vengeance. That’s because we don’t hear these words as people who have fearful hearts. But in what politicians call ‘our own backyard’, there are people who hear these words of God’s anger and vengeance as uplifting and hopeful. There are downtrodden people in Australia, around the western Pacific region, and in nearby Asian countries struggling to survive in the face of the juggernaut of exploitation, economic colonisation, and a climate catastrophe that is not of their own making.

These are the people of a fearful heart that God wants Isaiah to address. These are people who find hope in words that declare God’s vengeance and terrible recompense. Today’s Psalm underlines this commitment of God’s to the poor and needy. It’s a litany of God’s love for such people – promising justice for the oppressed, food for the hungry, captives set free, the bowed down lifted up, God’s care for the refugee, for the widow and the orphan. And as for the way of the wicked, those who are responsible for all this misery, God will bring it to ruin!

Earth itself is included in Isaiah’s message of hope and healing. Waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; ⁷ the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water. Care of God’s creation is an integral part of our call to care for God’s poor, because they suffer most immediately from ecological harm. We have a chance to roll our sleeves up and do something about that after church today. If you’re able, head up to the wetlands and join Heather and the others in the tree-planting that’s happening there. Ecological spirituality without practical engagement is hollow – to paraphrase the Letter of James.

Speaking of James, it’s not just the Old Testament prophets who declare God’s preferential commitment to the poor, the sick and the needy. We heard James say it quite categorically today: ⁵ Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?

What challenges do we feel as we consider today’s scriptures? What’s our relationship with God’s world? Are we worried that we find God’s anger uncomfortable when poor people can find hope in it? Are we thinking about new initiatives to grow a more mature faith here? What might our collective faith inspire that could respond practically to the chronic homelessness, epidemic loneliness, failure in closing the gap, and rampant environmental vandalism we see around us; all so patently offensive to the God who loves the people and other creatures who suffer these terrible wrongs? How will our ecological spirituality help bring God’s healing and justice to any of these? Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 15  – Song 2 8-13 – Ps 45 1-2, 6-9 – Jas 1 17-27 – Mk 7 1-8 14-23

Three verses underpin our choice to celebrate the Season of Creation. Genesis 1.3 – Then God said… John 1.14 – The Word became flesh… and Romans 1.20 – God’s power and nature have always been understood and seen through creation.

The banner outside the church tells everyone that this month St John’s is exploring ecological spirituality. But what’s that? What do ecology and spirituality have to do with each other? Let’s think about each of them in turn – ecology and spirituality – then see if we can put them together.

So ecology? Ecology is the science which deals with the relationship of living things to their environments. That sounds like zoology; a physical science; not a spiritual one. So am I asking you to imagine David Attenborough squatting beside a hole and a furry little ghost pops out of it? No. So what’s ecology got to do with spirituality? It’s in that word relationship; the relationship of living things to their environments. Relationships aren’t just physical things; they involve much more than our bodies.

So what is spirituality? Spirituality describes our response to the sense that there’s something besides our physical selves; something more to experiencing life in this world than we discover purely through our senses of taste, smell, touch, sight and hearing. Spirituality says we sense that the reality we live in has a cosmic or divine Nature. Spirituality describes our quest to relate to that cosmic or divine Nature.

Our quest to relate – there’s that relationship word again. So ecology studies living beings’ relationship to their home, and spirituality describes our relationship to a greater reality – some call that reality the Source of Being. So, ecological spirituality? Do physical life and spiritual life have a relationship with each other – apart from a body providing a spirit with temporary accommodation? That’s the popular way to describe it. But aren’t spirits pure and bodies gross? Isn’t this like trying to mix oil with water? Is the idea of ecological spirituality trying to force an artificial link between our physical and spiritual life? Is this just religion trying to force imaginary values on us – so it can tell us what we should do with our own bodies?

I can’t pretend some Church leaders don’t make loud public comments about what people can and can’t do with our bodies. Religious leaders of every persuasion have been doing that forever, it seems. We saw it happen in today’s gospel. We saw the Pharisees and scribes, the spiritual leaders of Jesus’ people, challenge Jesus because they saw some of his followers hadn’t washed their hands in the prescribed way before eating. Those spiritual leaders saw a definite link between what we do with our bodies and our spiritual integrity. But I’ll get back to them in a minute.

The Law they were proclaiming talks in one place about people’s wrong behaviour violating the land, and the land reacting by vomiting them out. ^{Lev 18.26-30} That might sound a little bit extreme, but what’s understood here is a complex relationship – and there’s that relationship word again – a complex relationship between what we do with our bodies and our spiritual health, and what we do with our bodies and the effect that has on the health of the land we live on. A relationship between our actions, our spiritual health and the health of the land where we live – that sounds like it has a lot to do with ecology, doesn’t it; ecological spirituality?

So let’s get back to today’s Gospel and those Jewish religious leaders challenging Jesus because some of his followers didn’t wash their hands before eating. It reminds us of that extraordinary time just a few years ago when we had to treat each other and ourselves as if we might infect each other with a deadly disease. Back then, doing the right thing meant avoiding each other’s possible dangerous uncleanness. And violating the land? I’m reminded of last week’s God Forbid programme on ABC RN where Professor Auntie Anne Pattel-Gray spoke about the relationship between Aboriginal people’s language and their ancestral land. They couldn’t take land from a neighbouring nation because they didn’t have the words or songs to understand it and care for it. She described environment and people’s actions, understanding, values and spirituality as intertwined in a living relationship which shapes nature and identity.

The ancient scriptures seemed to get this, but the Pharisees and scribes were so fastidious about what people did with their bodies that they missed the point that relationship lies at the centre of the law’s teaching. That’s what Jesus tried to get through to them. Our spiritual life is healthy if we act not out of fear and knee-jerk judgement, but out of love and commitment to good relationship and belonging.

So what do we do with all this – this interwoven relationship of ourselves, our neighbours, our common home, and the Source of our Being? We don’t need to be reminded of what’s going wrong; that’s plain enough to see. Ecological spirituality challenges much that is damaging that interwoven relationship right now, and it demands that we do something about it right where we are. Heather’s going to give us a few pointers in the notices today about how we can start right here and now.

Today we’re called to turn from fear and isolation, and turn to hope and belonging. We choose to follow Jesus who we saw today brush aside the fixation of the religious leaders on purity, and instead calls us to nurture our neighbours and our common home, drawing strength from the Source of our Being. That’s living ecological spirituality.   Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 14 – 1 Kings 8 22-30, 8 41-43, Ps 84, Jn 6  56-69

Today is the Sunday when the General Synod calls us to a day of prayer for refugees. So it’s particularly appropriate that our first reading is the part of Solomon’s prayer dedicating the new Temple where he prays that God will hear and answer the prayers of foreign visitors just like God hears the prayers of Israelites. When a foreigner comes and prays towards this house, then hear in heaven your dwelling-place, and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you. It was always a part of the Hebrew Law that the sojourner in the land should enjoy the same freedoms and privileges as citizens. And this spills over in surprising and delightful ways in scripture; as we’ve seen in Solomon’s prayer. Your journey of faith – your pilgrimage of hope – deserves to be honoured, whoever you are.

Today’s Psalm (Ps 84) is one we call a Psalm of pilgrimage. The pilgrim Psalms are intensely emotional songs which tell us how the journey to the Temple of Jerusalem could lift people’s spirits from the deepest gloom to glorious heights of joy and hope. I wonder if that’s something any of us has experienced – if this Psalm resonates with our culture – if any destinations have ever had that effect on us. Can you think of any? I have a friend who used to experience this on an annual hike in the Australian high country. We don’t have much of a tradition of pilgrimage in Australia, though it’s growing now ^{(eg, Portland Vic – Penola SA; Subiaco – New Norcia WA)}. We’ve gone to Spain to walk the Camino, or to the Holy Land, or to sites of terrible battles.

But we’ve journeyed here to St John’s this morning. So maybe our pilgrimages are of a different scale. We come here to experience God’s beauty, peace and care in the family liturgy; to revive in the ambience of the hundred and eighty-five years of prayers offered here – prayers infused into the fabric of this building. I’m glad to say that visitors often comment on the peace they experience here.

So today’s Psalm is a pilgrim song; a song people would sing as they went up to the Temple of Jerusalem – the first Temple. We just heard Solomon dedicate the Temple with a prayer focussing on God’s hospitality. The Psalm takes it to another level – including sparrows and swallows – most appropriate as we prepare to enter the worldwide Church’s Season of Creation. I’m struck by the Psalm’s opening words; ¹How lovely is your dwelling-place: O Lord God of hosts! And I’m struck that what draws pilgrims towards the house of God’s presence is desire; longing; rejoicing. It’s a safe place; even birds are safe to nest there in its inmost sanctuary.

People had a sense of God as an honoured guest with them in their own homes and villages. They responded to God who reached out to them; they came to God’s house to offer thanks; to experience the hospitality of God who dwells with us; to sense God’s strength sustaining us on our life’s journey, through good times and bad. ⁵Blessed are those whose strength is in you: in whose hearts are the highways to Zion; ⁶Who, going through the valley of dryness, find there a spring from which to drink: till the autumn rain shall clothe it with blessings. … (The soft green fuzz carpeting the Judean wilderness straight after the first autumn rains).

Psalm 84’s pilgrimage is about a deep and abiding experience of God’s loving care all along our life’s journey. And as people have been singing this Psalm for 3,000 years, it’s been fairly infused into us.

When you think of Solomon’s dedication prayer for this new Temple he’d had constructed – the way it’s to be open to foreigners and sojourners, it’s clear that its doorkeepers were meant to be welcomers; not bouncers. That’s a call we have inherited. Because Solomon knew what God is like, even we foreigners are welcome! As doorkeepers and custodians here, we are called to prepare this place for others. And when we see ourselves as greeters and welcomers, we prepare ourselves to share the excitement of what is here for the pilgrims who are coming.

The Church exists to provide hope for those who need hope, to provide peace in the midst of chaos, and comfort in the midst of distress. We are here to participate in the costly hospitality God offers to everyone, to renew and strengthen them. And by being that beacon of hope, peace and comfort – of Godly hospitality – we are meant to be salt and light to transform the wider community of Australia and beyond.

That’s the discovery we heard Peter make today when Jesus challenged the twelve with the difficulty of the pilgrimage they would have to walk, and that now we must walk. After seeing so many others desert him, Jesus asked the twelve – Do you also wish to go away? The answer was immediate – Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God. And look at what they did with that belief! They worked to make the Church a welcoming community who have opened our doors to the whole world.

What can we do to open our doors wider? Let’s begin by praying as General Synod asks; praying for refugees. Inside the back cover of our service booklet. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 13b  –  John 6.51-58

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

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

Personal relationships and good confrontation in the Church

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 10 B – John 6 1-21

Jesus feeding the 5,000 and walking on water: in our reading last week from Mark’s gospel, those two miracle stories were left out. Well today we’ve got them, but from John’s gospel; not from Mark. And John gives the miracles a very different setting from Matthew, Mark and Luke. In Mark, we’ve tracked with disciples sent out on mission, Jesus ferried around the lake to escape the crowds, and dealing with John the Baptist’s murder by Herod. But John’s gospel is different. John sets the miracles straight after Jesus has been arguing with the religious leaders about having healed someone on the Sabbath. And after the two miracles, he’ll be teaching everyone that he is the bread from heaven. We’ll hear about that over the coming weeks.

At the recent commissioning of the new priest at Burnside, Lyndon Shakespeare, John’s story of the feeding of the five thousand happened to be set as the reading. So the Archbishop preached on it. He focussed on a challenging aspect of that story. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle story that appears in all four gospels, and John has some interesting differences from the others. Abp Geoff focussed on one of those differences. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, the weary, hungry disciples come and ask Jesus to send the crowds away so everyone can buy food for themselves. And when they do, Jesus challenges them to feed the crowd.

But Abp Geoff was struck by the fact that in John’s Gospel, Jesus looks up and sees the crowd, and he asks Philip where can we buy bread for everyone? Philip is astounded and wonders where all the money’s going to come from. A commentator ^{(Karen Yust FotW B 3 284)} has fun describing the way modern church committees might deal with this sort of request from Jesus, just like the disciples try to – it’s not in our mission budget; we don’t have that sort of cash; what do you want? A miracle?

Jesus looks up and sees the need and he’s determined to respond. That’s what the Archbishop noticed; Jesus looks up and sees the need. And Abp Geoff challenged the good parishioners at Burnside to do the same, just as he would no doubt have challenged us here. Do we as followers of Jesus look up and see the need around us like Jesus does. And do we hear Jesus ask us what we’re going to do about the need when we see it? That funny commentator would imagine us turning our pockets inside out, looking helpless and whispering that our cupboard is bare. And it’s true; like many churches, our mission budget is always something of an afterthought. So is there something we can do about it? As the Archbishop’s gaze swept back and forth over us, by this stage, we were all feeling pretty uncomfortable.

But then he asked us to look at what the disciples had readily available – five loaves and two fish – and what eventually happened when it was offered to Jesus for him to share out. Jesus wasn’t asking for more than we have; he just asked that we make available what we do have, and trust in his help for the rest. They started with just five loaves and a couple of fish and however you want to explain it, look what happened; everyone fed, and loads of leftovers. What’s needed, and what can we start with?

So; the need. As I wrote in a recent weekly, we keep being reminded of an epidemic of loneliness in the Australian community. Despite being connected with each other via social media and myriad electronic communication options, we’re realising that there’s no substitute for actually being together in person.

The Covid experience has supercharged an epidemic of loneliness, isolation, depression and anxiety in people. Children are refusing to go to school in record numbers. People don’t want to be at work in person if they can work from home. They want to avoid the tension of being in work situations where people really don’t behave well with each other, not to mention hours of lonely, frustrating commutes. But the electronic modes of being in touch are sometimes even more dangerous – and particularly for our children and grandchildren. ^{cf Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation}

Here we are a small community with a wonderful, abundant resource. We’ve spent a long time as a community where being kind, thoughtful, gracious, patient, generous and gentle is the normal way to be. We have ethical standards which are intended to make this community a place of safety and fulfilment and belonging for everyone. In our gospel story, we’ve seen Jesus look up, see a need, and challenge us to meet that need. And we are being called to address a deep hunger in people right now.

Our loaves and fish? I’m glad to say that we’ve begun something that answers this call, and that’s the children’s choir. The choir is a safe, delightful place for children of different ages to connect with each other in a way that’s not electronically mediated; a place to enjoy each other’s company in a safe, loving environment. Learning to sing together can help fix loneliness and anxiety; and singing itself is a lifelong skill and joy.

But what about the anxious, lonely adults out there? Let’s share ideas. What invitation can I put on our notice board that might help meet a need you know of? I remember knitting groups making beanies for the desert people in winter, and ambulance care bears in the summer. We already have a group greening the parklands together. We have centring prayer groups. But what else to offer – it only need be as humble as five pitas and a couple of fish? What can we offer? Amen