Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Easter 2019: John 20.1-18

Don’t hold on to me – go and tell them!

There’s something we haven’t done today that we always do at other communion services. We didn’t confess our sins to God.

We didn’t confess our sins because today we meet the risen Jesus. Jesus is risen, so everything is different. Jesus rising from death to life changes everything and everyone. Mary Magdalene, sadly weeping outside the tomb would have been filled with confusion and sadness. But her world changed, quite literally. The physical presence of her beloved Jesus, risen from death suddenly, utterly changed everything.

Confusion and sadness, guilt and remorse have their place. But not in the presence of the risen Jesus. His resurrection calls for pure joy. So when Mary Magdalene heard her name on the lips of the risen Jesus, she took hold of him – took hold of her beloved flesh and blood teacher; not some sort of apparition or ghost. She seized him; held onto her real, risen Jesus. Confusion, sadness, fear – all utterly swept away in her joy and adoration.

And that’s how we can experience the risen Jesus too. He is the one who made us, and who continues to re-make us daily in a miracle of gracious reconciliation. Jesus is worthy of our worship and praise.

A friend asked me what the resurrection was really about. Was it all about this atonement stuff; all about guilt and sacrifice and original sin?’ This is a strong tradition in the Christian faith, but I can’t see it having centre stage today – the day of resurrection.

The resurrection gospel says to me that the last word is not about guilt and sacrifice; it’s about joyful reunion, because the last word belongs to Jesus, not to us. The risen Jesus is the first and the last Word. Not only is he beyond the reach of guilt and sacrifice, he calls us beyond its reach too. ‘It’s done and dusted, finished, accomplished’, he said. I’ve dealt with everything. Come with me forever. I love you; I want you with me. The last Word is not about what we do at all, but what God has done in Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t wait until we get our lives straightened out. Resurrection is God seizing the initiative; God showing the way beyond struggle, despair and death to the place of new beginning; real new beginning that lets us turn from all that unwanted baggage we left at the Cross on Friday. The party can begin.

This party is a celebration of God coming from eternity through our death to meet us with a new birth: a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, [a new birth] into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for [all of us]. ^{1 Peter.1.3-4}

The resurrection of Jesus is the meeting place – the collision point where we learn the full extent of God’s passion for us. God in Jesus has done something incredible to be at one with us; crashed through into the heavy body of our anxiety, fear and helplessness; crashed through into the body of our mistrust and aggression – and become a part of that body. And because such a mortal body can’t possibly contain all the love and goodness and kindness being forced into it, it bursts asunder, and leaves only the new life remaining.

You’d have to think that means death – and it does. But Jesus, out of pure love; God, out of imaginative grace becomes the body which takes that death, and then swallows that death up in new life – in a resurrected body of love and goodness and kindness. A real one, that is here and now.

The afterlife we expect for ourselves and our loved ones? Maybe we expect something vague and different from what we know now; less fear; less suffering; certainly less guilt and remorse.

The risen Jesus today puts paid to all of that – nonsense he says. Don’t wait ‘til the afterlife for what is yours this very day. Real life is yours; real life with your God who loves you so much, right here and now, that nothing, not even death can stand in the way. And Jesus, by dying for us and rising again has ensured that our death doesn’t have to be our gateway to finding it. New life is ours now; new life is for everyone now.

Can you contain so much love? Can you ever imagine feeling worthy of it? These are irrelevant questions. Along with guilt, remorse and fear, feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness are shoved to one side by the warm, loving friend whom Mary Magdalene was the first to embrace upon his rising again.

That’s why we didn’t say confession today; because Jesus is risen. Today of all days, we don’t dwell on that stuff. He’s dealt with all of it. Today of all days, we must know that Jesus loves us just as we are. He didn’t wait for us to be perfect before he showed us he loves us to death and way beyond – to that collision point called the resurrection. He is here now; so let’s worship him – let’s renew our baptismal vows. He is risen; Alleluia!

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Reflections for Maundy Thursday 2019

O Lord Jesus Christ, enthroned in the majesty of heaven, when you came from God, you chose to be one who serves.

We adore you, because you laid aside the garment of your glory, and clothed yourself with the lowest humility, and serve your disciples by washing their feet.

Teach us to know what you have done, and to follow your example; deliver us from pride, jealousy and ambition, and make us ready to be subject to one another, and with lowliness, to serve one another for your sake,

O Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.            Parish Prayers # 231

I found this prayer recently, and loved the way it focussed on the tremendous paradox of who Jesus is, on the one hand, and the really ordinary, practical things he did.  Here’s a very old hymn that I think might have inspired this prayer.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, the creator God of power and glory; who sits by right between the cherubim is taking upon himself the form of a servant.

He who is clothed with light as with a garment; takes off his coat and girds himself with a towel.

He to whom all creatures on earth and in heaven bow the knee: is kneeling in humility before his disciples to wash their feet.              From the Armenian

and here’s another

Wisdom, who orders the mighty waters above the sky: who gives the oceans their bounds and controls the seas heavenly wisdom is pouring water into a basin: and the ruler of the universe is washing the feet of the lowliest slave

From the Greek

These are lovely old hymns that take us into the awesome mystery of what was going on in the upper room that night.

But sometimes we can be drawn so far into the mystery that we forget the most amazing thing of all; yet that’s also to be found in these old hymns.

The most amazing thing to me is just how mundane this meal is that we read about tonight.

Certainly it’s a Passover meal, so it’s got all the ritual and symbolism wrapped up in it that we heard about in the Exodus reading. But it’s also something normal people did – and still do. The women would have been there, lighting the candles and saying the prayers. There would have been children there too, asking the old questions about the special foods.

It’s just a moment in some people’s ordinary lives – it could have been anyone’s moment – and he was there; one of them; one of us. He’s here now too – calling us to live out the same, practical, thoughtful love that he did. Just ordinary love.

It’s Maundy Thursday – the day we were told to be ordinary, loving people.

Love is the key to the kingdom of heaven: and the path to everlasting life.

Love makes human beings the sons and daughters of God: and heirs to his kingdom.

By love, corrupt nature is purified: and mortality puts on immortality, the earthly is transformed into the heavenly; and we creatures of dust and ashes are  raised to be children of light. From the Armenian

Reflections for Maundy Thursday 2019

O Lord Jesus Christ, enthroned in the majesty of heaven, when you came from God, you chose to be one who serves.

We adore you, because you laid aside the garment of your glory, and clothed yourself with the lowest humility, and serve your disciples by washing their feet.

Teach us to know what you have done, and to follow your example; deliver us from pride, jealousy and ambition,

and make us ready to be subject to one another, and with lowliness, to serve one another for your sake, O Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour.    Parish Prayers # 231

I found this prayer recently, and loved the way it focussed on the tremendous paradox of who Jesus is, on the one hand, and the really ordinary, practical things he did.  Here’s a very old hymn that I think might have inspired this prayer.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, the creator God of power and glory; who sits by right between the cherubim is taking upon himself the form of a servant.

He who is clothed with light as with a garment; takes off his coat and girds himself with a towel.

He to whom all creatures on earth and in heaven bow the knee: is kneeling in humility before his disciples to wash their feet.    From the Armenian

and here’s another

Wisdom, who orders the mighty waters above the sky: who gives the oceans their bounds and controls the seas heavenly wisdom is pouring water into a basin: and the ruler of the universe is washing the feet of the lowliest slave

From the Greek

These are lovely old hymns that take us into the awesome mystery of what was going on in the upper room that night.

But sometimes we can be drawn so far into the mystery that we forget the most amazing thing of all; yet that’s also to be found in these old hymns.

The most amazing thing to me is just how mundane this meal is that we read about tonight.

Certainly it’s a Passover meal, so it’s got all the ritual and symbolism wrapped up in it that we heard about in the Exodus reading. But it’s also something normal people did – and still do. The women would have been there, lighting the candles and saying the prayers. There would have been children there too, asking the old questions about the special foods.

It’s just a moment in some people’s ordinary lives – it could have been anyone’s moment – and he was there; one of them; one of us. He’s here now too – calling us to live out the same, practical, thoughtful love that he did. Just ordinary love.

It’s Maundy Thursday – the day we were told to be ordinary, loving people.

Love is the key to the kingdom of heaven: and the path to everlasting life.

Love makes human beings the sons and daughters of God: and heirs to his kingdom.

By love, corrupt nature is purified: and mortality puts on immortality, the earthly is transformed into the heavenly; and we creatures of dust and ashes are  raised to be children of light. From the Armenian

 

 

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Palm Sunday

Today, we march again behind the one who started all the Palm Sunday peace rallies – our King, Jesus. He marched in the face of the greatest military power earth had known. Jesus marched on an occupied city mounted on an awkward little beast of burden instead of a war-horse. And he marched not at the head of an army, but supported by a hopeful rabble of women, men and children.

We join those women, men and children who marched with him then, and the countless millions who’ve done so since. We march with the poor benighted Christians of today’s Holy Land who’d march if they could. But their road is yet again watched by threatening soldiers and now blocked by a wall. And if we can imagine it, we march today in a procession which is embracing the world, hour by hour as the sun rises on a new place; pilgrims, not soldiers, armed only with cries of mingled hope and pain, calling for peace, and after all these years, still calling the forces of violence and oppression to repent.

Like us, those first pilgrims marched with Jesus on the eve of a festival – for them it was Passover; for us, Holy Week and Easter. Their festival celebrated the ancient Israelites’ escape from slavery in Egypt. Our festival celebrates a rescue from the slavery of fear and isolation too – the very rescue that first Palm Sunday crowd cried out for. But the rescue didn’t happen in the way they expected. They cried out for rescue from the new slavery that oppressed them; Roman soldiers garrisoned beside their temple. They expected armed conflict.

Jesus did confront their oppressors. But instead of meeting violence with violence, he met it with the only thing that could bring about its end. He held firm to an incorruptible reverence for God’s passion for justice, mercy and forgiveness. And in doing so, he embodied the Peace of God.

What Jesus did exposed the shameful emptiness of the addiction to power and influence that still afflicts the world. What he offered us all, even his persecutors, was a vision of a whole human being. He was tortured and murdered but remained whole. Ultimately, by his choice to give his life for all people – for you and me too – Jesus transformed death. The grave could not hold such grace and peace. He rose, he lives, and we follow him.

We follow Jesus because he is the one who taught us how to truly honour life. He did it by giving his life away freely, instead of devaluing it by clinging to it through compromise. We follow Jesus because he is the one who taught us how to break a cycle of violence by letting evil expose itself rather than by meeting it with force. We follow Jesus because he’s the one who cherishes us when we’re brought low; he’s the one who’s with us even when we’re alone. We respond to his love which can adore us even when we cannot love ourselves. We follow Jesus because he loves us, and he calls us each by name.

Responding to his call can seem like that first Palm Sunday. It can seem that he’s calling us to certain failure; calling us to follow him to something that won’t make the slightest difference. Yet when we respond to his call we discover ourselves to be the person he believes us to be. He believes in us. As his disciples, we’ll become more like him; we’ll become whole. If we follow him – let him transform us into the people he believes in – then our wholeness will be his instrument of freeing others whom he calls too.

Palm Sunday marchers are pilgrims on the way to wholeness – on the way to the peace of God. We are pilgrims marching to help rescue all God’s creatures from slavery to fear and isolation. We march as pilgrims in the company of Jesus – our guide, our example, our friend, and our God. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Lent 5 C: John 12 1-8 Phil 3 3-14

Children plant and water wheat – letting it die so it might rise again.

Story of Peter Kahrimanis’s abundant barbeques and happy worms

We are buffeted around by the extremes in today’s gospel. Mary of Bethany bowls us over with her extravagant gift; perfume worth a year’s wages squandered in a moment. Then there’s the portrayal of Judas – so miserable and bitter. And finally, there are Jesus’s words about the poor always with us – words abused ever since.

John’s gospel works at a number of levels. We get extremes, like today, and often words have multiple meanings too. I’ve said before that John’s is a very sensory gospel – there’s more tasting, smelling, touching, seeing and hearing in John than almost anywhere else in the Bible. But when John says ‘see’ or ‘hear’, we’re just as likely to find that it’s not just physical seeing and hearing that’s intended, but spiritual insight and wisdom as well. What happens to people, and what they do in this Gospel is as much spiritual and inward as it is physical and obvious.

So Mary’s gift of nard to Jesus – and by its perfume, her gift to everyone within cooee of him: it’s as much a sign of something else as it’s a very confronting extravagance. The manner of its giving is extraordinary. It’s not given to Jesus for him to keep and use. It’s squandered on his feet, so neither he nor anyone else can ever use it again. It’s given as though none of them is going to see another day.

Like her sister Martha did, Mary senses who Jesus is. She also senses the purpose of his coming into Jerusalem’s hostile environment at a time when doing so can only lead to his death. Martha had declared to Jesus privately that he was the Messiah/anointed one. ^(11.27) Mary proclaims the very same thing publicly by anointing Jesus. But by doing it the way she does, she evokes the anointing that has to do with the dead. She does what we do if we sense that a loved one might soon die. Before they die, we do all we can to show how deeply we love them; to show how much they mean to us.

Mary of Bethany knows instinctively where Jesus is going, yet she doesn’t try to stop him. The children watering the wheat today do something very similar to what Mary does when she anoints Jesus for his burial. They could try to keep the wheat to grind and eat, but they choose to give it up for dead, and trust that God will bless that choice for trust with a wonderful harvest: a resurrection. For the children, the wasted wheat – for Mary of Bethany the squandered nard are signs of hope for a new, life-giving abundance. They’re signs that God’s abundance allows for death, but also that God’s story tells us to look for resurrection to a wonderful new life.

Mary’s gesture isn’t just extravagant; it’s prophetic. Firstly, it’s a proclamation of who Jesus is – God’s anointed one – the one God’s people had sought for over a thousand years. It’s also a well-wishing; ‘Godspeed the feet of the one embarking on this perilous journey.’ And finally, it’s a sign – the last in John’s book of signs – before Jesus’ providential entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

Why can’t Judas be like Mary of Bethany? For that matter, why don’t all Jesus’s followers pour ourselves out like Mary did? Maybe like Judas, our spiritual senses are blocked, and we struggle to accept a God whose extravagance is so great that it blocks out even the terror of death – never mind tomorrow’s grocery bill.

Poor Judas is cut off from Mary’s sense of wonder – her sense of gratitude. He’s trapped by a choice for fear in the miserable world of mistrust – where you keep more fuel in your tank than you’ll ever need – even to the point of pretending you’re doing it for someone else. But wonder of wonders; Jesus came for just such people as Judas. Judas belongs in this story just as firmly as Mary of Bethany does.

Even though he’s one of Jesus’ disciples, somehow Judas can’t see who Jesus is the way Mary and Martha can. Doubtless there are very good reasons for his mixed fear and zeal. But fear is the wrong foundation to build on. The only foundation is Jesus’ love for us; we build our faith on that foundation, in response to that love. That’s what we see in Mary of Bethany today.

Mary’s gesture may have sprung from overwhelming gratitude for Jesus raising her brother Lazarus. If so, is it any more than we sometimes feel when we sense what a gift we have been given in our own lives; in our families and loved ones?

Outrageous grace calls out an extravagant response. We all need more Marys of Bethany to tell us that the fear and suffering and misery of this world are not the defining realities of being. It’s so healing when we meet these reckless givers! They transform our world. The world needs more people to give confrontingly. Judas obviously needs more role-models to shake his defences down.

Our giving to the poor and needy, our prayers for the sick, for the sad and for the unloved; our care for those burdened with responsibilities they may have chosen, but which eat them alive – our gifts and prayers and care are strange if we think of them as inputs for which we expect outcomes. Better that we see them as grains of wheat that God will have someone else harvest? Can we set these prayers and kindnesses loose in the world as fragrances which gently, beautifully alert sufferers to the existence of a different reality?

Gifts and prayers and care make perfect sense when they are seen for what they really are; a response to the Jesus who has met us, who has called us, and who has shown us the way of self-giving, joyful abundant extravagance. We are to bless the world with our thanks for God’s grace to us. And we pray that through our thankfulness, a sense that infectious extravagance might just reveal the greater reality to all who need to know God’s endless love.                  Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Lent 4 C: Mothering Sunday  Lk 15 11-32

On Mothering Sunday, it seems a bit inappropriate that we’re given a Gospel reading about a father and his two sons. So I wonder what the Mum might say quietly to her son after his return. Maybe this…

‘The day you left, you broke all our hearts. Dad couldn’t speak at all for days. Month after month, he sat outside watching for you; just gave your brother and the servants their orders in the morning, then sat there watching, silent again.

I couldn’t do anything to bring him out of it. I could hardly get up in the morning myself. And your brother just got angrier and angrier. Every dinner time, I had to shut him up when he’d start ranting about what you must have been getting up to.

I don’t know what made Dad give you all that money. When I asked him, he’d just say you wanted him dead before his time. If you didn’t want to be with him – if you wanted to live as if he were dead – what was the point of holding on to you? You ordered him to give you your one-third share of our family property. You didn’t want to wait for it. So Dad said “It’s only money. Better to give you what you want; let you go, and hope you come to your senses before you get hurt”.

He regretted it the minute you were gone. We couldn’t sleep for worry about where you might be; what might be happening to you.

Dad stopped going to sit with his old friends in the market. He couldn’t face them – didn’t want to hear the angry gossip about you – off in some foreign land full of strange people. What would they want with a fool like him sitting there, anyway; a shamed man amongst honourable, sensible people?

Then the drought came; no food anywhere, no work for anyone. ‘What if he’s starving!’, he’d say, over and over. ‘Please God; bring him home alive!?’ Watching; watching: as if his hope and love could somehow keep you alive. I can’t bear to remember it’ …

Let’s leave her in peace for a while. She doesn’t want to re-live that horror.

Their younger son wanted everything that comes with belonging, but without having to belong. That’s common now in affluent countries where personal freedom is valued more highly than community. This living without belonging was unimaginable in the world of the parable – and in most of today’s world too – where the link between belonging and survival is so obvious. The younger son’s actions and attitudes rejected the core human value of belonging.

That inheritance he demanded belonged to his future; to his children; not just to him. But he wanted it now, and purely for himself. That’s the make-believe world of today’s credit cards; the self-centred world of advertising slogans about how much we deserve things; how we should reward ourselves—reward for what, I have no idea. What can we deserve that exceeds the gifts of our life and our world? The younger son was a child of our sort of society. So he doesn’t shock us the way he shocked his own people. I wonder what that says about us?

That’s why we may not really get how astonishing his Dad’s response is. The Gospel says he divided his life (ton bion) between the sons. (The son had asked for ousios substance, but the father gave bion) So who’s the real prodigal here? The Dad, who recklessly divided his life between his sons long before he died. Could they be trusted to care for him in old age? The Dad doesn’t ask. He sets aside his rights, gives up his freedom, and risks his future. Precisely the opposite of the son who asserts his rights, demands his freedom and seizes his future.

In time, the son suffers the consequences of his choices. He loses his rights, his freedom and his future. Then amongst the pigs, hungry, he thinks of a scheme that’ll mean he can eat again—but on his terms. As a hired servant, he’ll live apart from the family with independent means. He still doesn’t get relationship. He returns home thinking like this.

Let’s listen to his Mum describe the homecoming.

‘The day you came home, boys from the next village rushed into our marketplace yelling out that you were coming back. A crowd started to gather; angry and ready with bitter words. Some held rotten fruit; a few held stones.

Dad saw all this and rushed out to get to you first. He didn’t care what people thought of him; he could only think of how bad you must feel, and how he had to protect you. The servants and I couldn’t keep up with him. Just as the first hand was raised to throw a stone, he reached you; hugged you; shielded you; kissed you. He ignored their angry words; he ignored your apologies; just yelled to the servants to run back and get his cloak, his ring and some sandals for you. He announced a great party: the whole village must come and celebrate with him.’

The embrace and the kiss were public signs of reconciliation, and were given before the son could finish his prepared speech. That’s grace at work. The relationship of father and son was restored entirely by the grace of the father, not by the bargaining or repentance of the son.

We’re about to meet the older brother again, but first, let’s pause and ask why Jesus told this parable. Do you remember the beginning of the chapter?

…   “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them’”. The older brother grumbled in exactly the same way as they did. He grumbled about his Dad welcoming his ratbag of a brother home and eating with him.

In telling those older-brother Pharisees and scribes this parable, Jesus did for them exactly what the Dad did for the older son when he humiliated himself again before his guests by leaving the feast to beg yet another insolent son to come in. Jesus reached out to these older-brother types; upstanding people who were certain of their inheritance, but equally sure that God should damn other people.

Jesus wanted them inside the love; not locked out by their rage; stopped by their arrogant refusal to come in and eat with him and the people they shunned. In this parable, Jesus tried to show those older-brother Pharisees and scribes that God longs for us all to be inside, all together. The parable also tells us younger son types that God allows us to find that out for ourselves. We’re all loved alike; both blinkered selfish younger brother-types, and self-righteous, judgemental older brother-types.

But it’s Mothering Sunday, isn’t it. Most often when I meet someone who forgives and trusts beyond all reason, that person is a mother.

So perhaps this story of this compassionate, forgiving father is right for Mothering Sunday after all. It’s a story which reminds us that this foolish grace – always ready to forgive, to trust; always determined to keep the connection alive, and always ready to bear the cost of it all – that this foolish grace that mothers find the strength to summon up, over and over again, is a wonderful way to help us understand the nature of God. When we think today of the Church as our Mother, and that she must be Mother to our children as she has been to us, gracious, trusting and tenacious, it’s good to spend time with this story to learn the nature of that Mother whom we must now embody ourselves.       Amen

Mothering Sunday Cake and Posy Blessing

Father God, giver of all joy:

We ask that you bless this cake and these posies, that they may be to us symbols of our communion with you and with each other. As they were once scattered over our land as blossoms and blooms, grasses, vines, trees and cane yet are now one, so let us in our diversity be your one redeemed people, and your delight.  Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Lent 3 C :  Isa 55 1-9, Ps 63 1-9, Cor 10 1-13, Lk 13 31-35

Yesterday was special day in the children’s garden. It was lovely to have a small-scale project and so many willing people working together to make new gardens. There’s something life-giving about getting your hands in the soil together with new friends. Our new soil is wonderfully smelly. Darren wanted it ready to plant things in so they’d start growing straight away. Soil is a very precious thing, it’s just about the most endangered resource on Earth.

Why am I talking about soil on the third Sunday of Lent? Because it’s mentioned in today’s readings. It’s not very obvious amongst all the other words we’ve read about water, baptism and thirst. But in the second verse of the Psalm, we all read My soul thirsts for you, my flesh longs for you as a dry and thirsty land where no water is. The word translated as land – אֶ֫רֶץ (erets) – has lots of meanings, just like the English word does. It can also mean earth or country or territory or piece of ground or soil. So we could just as easily have said, My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, like dry and weary soil where there is no water.

What do we make of this image – of our soul and body being like soil that needs God as the water and warmth to bring life to us? I’ve always tended to think of myself more as a plant. There’s plenty of Biblical imagery encouraging me to think like that, particularly the parables of the weeds and tares, and that one about the sower. And the Bible also tells me I’m meant to bear fruit. So I’ve thought I may be a bit like a pot plant on a window ledge; needing water and regular turning on my saucer to make sure I grow straight.

But this verse from Psalm 63 challenges me with another image. The Psalmist talks of us being like land; soil. So this Psalm calls me to think of another story – the one about the first human that God formed from the dust of the Earth. That story calls us children or substance of Earth – אָדָם (adam – ‘human’) – because ultimately we are all made from Earth – אֲדָמָה (adamah – ‘ground / soil’).

Maybe if you haven’t spent your life thinking of yourself as a pot plant like I seem to have, this won’t sound like a revolutionary idea. But think about it for a moment. You’re not like a geranium or a pot of chives; you’re more like part of their life-source. Soil – and dust mixed with water and sunlight can bring forth new life.

There’s connectedness in all this – there’s partnership. We’ve grown up with images of God as light and warmth and water and grace, and these still hold good. And now we can imagine ourselves responding to God like soil does to light and warmth and water. We’re in an utterly surprising partnership here. Lowly dirt bathed in light and water and there’s life. We see it every day, but we may not sense it in us – you and me bathed in grace – we produce life.

In verse three, we find that the Psalmist has somehow experienced this dazzling connectedness in the temple; in the house of God. And the rest of the Psalm is all about a determination to hold onto this vision in every corner of our life. There’s wholeness, exaltation, security, intimacy and joy – life in all its fulness – in this experience. This Psalmist bathes in the light and the warmth; eats and drinks the elixir of the Divine, and then rests in God, in the meditations of the night watches.

How do we find our way to rest in God – to soak up the nourishment God longs to give us, so that we bring forth living growth that is strong and supple and secure? What sorts of things are that sunlight and warmth and cool water and grace to our bodies and souls? One of my mentors early in my ministry used to find that access to God in the act of painting. Very early each morning, instead of praying with words and silences, quiet time with God happened with paint and a canvas.

I know lots of us find time in the garden is time with God; and maybe that’s why the plant metaphor has always seemed such a rich image to me. But just after the Psalmist gave us the soil as an image of us and our connectedness, there came another one of finding God’s presence in the Temple – in God’s house – together with God’s people – seeking together a nearness to God.

But it doesn’t work automatically. Remember Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem this morning. So how can we connect? How should we find a connectedness with the divine together? There’s * something in us that seems to call out for that connection – a part of us that resonates with the spirituality of the Psalm. How do we embody that? And when we’ve found it, how do we look after it? How do we make sure we get the light and water, the warmth and the occasional turn we need to flourish? How do we do it? Do we know how, or does it happen by chance? How do we know when something in us connects us with the divine? * Something in us …

A few possibilities; does this spiritual part of you sneak up on you when certain pieces of music play; when you’re with someone you love; when you’re in a very special place, or when you catch a whiff of some familiar scent? It is there; that part of you; isn’t it. The Psalmist sings its song; Isaiah proclaims its transcendence, and Jesus cries out to it with the indignant passion of its Creator feeling ignored. In Jesus’s cries, we can hear God calling us to join with the light, the warmth and the grace so we can play our part in the gift of inner life. God is calling us to be to a community of creation; soil – co-workers with God the on-going work of creation.

Finally, it’s important to remember that the scriptures which have guided this morning’s meditation come from communities; not individuals. They come from communities; they were written for communities, and they have belonged to communities like ours throughout the thousands of years of their history. I hope it sets you free on this Lenten pilgrimage of ours to know that whatever God calls you to, you’re not called to go it alone. Wherever we find ourselves opting for lone-ranger spirituality, we’re headed for grief. No, the wonderful thing; the humbling thing; is that we are called to be the people of God: a living organism, co-creators of life and love, nourished by warmth and cool water and grace; life-givers.

We started Lent with ashes and the words, dust thou art. Let’s turn our attention to the potential that we creatures of dust – soil – can have in the hand of God.  Amen

Just as an afterword to this sermon, I was at an interfaith gathering last Sunday evening to pray together for the people of Christchurch. At one point, a dear friend who is a Buddhist member of that organisation used an expression which made particular sense to me after that morning’s sermon on us being like soil.

She talked of our role as being to ‘plant seeds of compassion, tolerance, hope and love’ in order that communities might become safer and more nurturing to everyone.

The sermon focussed on us being the soil that God tends in order that life might spring forth – so the main image was us as co-creators. But the idea that we might plant such precious, transforming seeds in the soil of others’ hearts and minds takes the image to a wonderful new level. I find in this an exciting call to us as God’s instruments of peace and love.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Lent 2 C: Gen 15.1-12, 17-18; Ps 27; Phil 3.17 – 4.1; Lk 13.1-9

Two days after the Christchurch attack

I thought I had my sermon written early this week. But since the events in Christchurch on Friday, what I wrote is not what we need to think about today. We have seen yet another vicious, hate-filled attack on innocent people, and we need to grieve for them, and to join in solidarity with their families and friends, praying with them and for them in their agony.

These people were attacked ultimately because of their birth; their birth is who they are, where they come from, and how they worship God; just like us. These people who died and were wounded are the same as us. They’re members of our family. They claim the same spiritual ancestry as we do because we too are children of Abraham. And as we heard in the first reading today, Abraham, our common ancestor was also a migrant; someone who’d also travelled to find a new country; just like us or our forebears; just like the victims of Friday’s attack.

So the families of the slain who are grieving and shocked – people living a waking nightmare today – these dear people are our kin. And today, as far as is possible at this distance, we cry with these sisters and brothers, we embrace these dear ones; we offer our kin what comfort and love we can.

Friday’s horror has an uncanny parallel with a dreadful scene described in our Gospel today. Some people gathered around Jesus and told him of a very similar attack that had happened to a group of his fellow Galileans. These innocent people had made their pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship God. But as they were in the very act of worship in the Temple, Pilate had them slaughtered – and in a deed of contemptible cruelty, he had their blood mixed with the blood of their sacrifices. Like the murder done in al-Noor mosque and in Linwood mosque on Friday, it was a ghastly, calculated desecration.

People are reacting to Friday’s attack in very different ways – there are even horrible reports of people celebrating the attacks. It’s a difficult mindset to imagine.

There’s another way people are reacting too. There’s a part of human nature that looks for a logical reason for other people’s tragedy – not taking pleasure in it, but perhaps looking for a failing in the victim that might explain why they suffer the way they do. People do think this way; it may spring from fear. We may be afraid of the cost to ourselves if we give ourselves over to openhearted compassion.

I imagine this tendency is what Jesus angrily confronts in the people who tell him about the victims of Pilate’s desecration. He seems to hear them blaming these poor murdered people for what Pilate did to them. It’s as if they’re saying God would only let that sort of thing happen in the Temple to very bad people. It’s a twisted sort of logic to see someone suffer and opt for an arms-length cause; it must be their fault – because otherwise, we’d have to do something about it. So victims are often unaccountably ostracised; shunned.

To be a victim of any sort of abuse is a terrible thing. But to be shunned or even blamed for what’s happened to you is to be abused yet again. It happens to victims of violent assault all over the world – Dressed like that?! Asking for it! It’s an outrageous attitude and we see Jesus confront it very strongly in today’s Gospel. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has shown that we in the Church are as guilty of this attitude as anyone.

So what does God call us to do about it – at a grassroots level? Here?

The Genesis reading today recalls Abraham, our common ancestor, and emphasises the fact that we must look for the kinship there is between us and all God’s children. We need reminding that anything that happens to these kin of ours could just as easily happen to us – that there isn’t some inherent fault or imperfection in them that doesn’t exist in us – to use us-and-them language. Our Scriptures tell us that choosing compassion instead of us-and-them is the responsible reaction.

Do the people telling Jesus the story of the murdered Galileans really mean that God would never let something like that happen to them? That’s what Jesus seems to hear. So he says simply that the tragedy they recount could happen to anyone. He underlines the point again with another story of people being killed when the Tower of Siloam fell on them. It could happen to anyone – this unexpected death.

So he tells them and us to recognise our common frailty. Don’t pre-judge; turn and face God; turn and discover God’s grace, and model our own lives on the basis of that grace; respond to that grace by allowing it to shape us for generosity. That means, in the case of last Friday, let that grace shape us for compassion.

In the parable of the fig tree that bears no fruit, Jesus even sets a time limit on this choice to turn to compassion. Remember how the gardener bargained with the owner of the fig tree to give it just one more season to prove it could bear fruit? The fruit Jesus was calling for then is compassion; the vaccination against victim-blaming.

If the Gospel reveals that a basic human reaction to violence and tragedy is the self defence of victim-blaming, then that is a call – a Gospel call to us – to oppose that tendency by openly choosing to feel and act on compassion; choosing to enter the dangerous space of shared pain; choosing to live as citizens of the costly realm of shared grace. The Gospel call is an invitation to join a counter-insurgency whose mission is not to take life, but to give it; not to mete out blame but compassion.

Let’s pray. Dear God, we grieve for our sisters and brothers who were slain and injured as they worshipped on Friday. We pray for their families and friends in this time of shock, of disbelieving horror, of sudden emptiness, and we ask that you hold them close and gather every one of their tears. We pray you protect these kin of ours from thoughtless words and gestures – we pray that they may be surrounded by compassion and healing love. We offer ourselves today as instruments of your healing grace, in the name of Jesus, Lord of Life,  Amen.

Rev’d David Thornton-Wakefield

Lent 1:  A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…SALVATION HISTORY dtw

O God of the journey, lift me up, press me against your cheek.  Let your great love hold me and create a deep trust in me.  Then set me down, God of the journey; take my hand in yours, and guide me ever so gently across the new territory of my life. Joyce Rupp.

Deut 26. 5 ‘You shall make this response before the Lord your God, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.”

 “Tell me the old, old story, tell me the old, old story, tell me the old, old story of Jesus and his love.” I can still hear the Salvos singing that down Hay St, West Perth in the 60’s.  Today we begin a journey of rediscovering and reclaiming our roots, roots that go back to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and even before them, to the very loins of Adam and the womb of Eve, our primeval ancestors. From Ash Wednesday to Easter Day we journey with the great Bible heroes like old Abe, Moses, Isaiah, Peter and Paul. We are caught up in THE Story of Salvation History. Alongside this, be encouraged each day in Lent to make sacred space and look at YOUR OWN story of faith and life. All of this will come to a huge climax in the events of Holy Week, and notably an upper room, a supper, a cross and an empty tomb.

A wandering Pom was my father, William.  His father’s name was William, like his father before him.  They were all first-born sons in the Wakeford line.  I am not William because I had an older brother, William, who was still-born during the war while my father, a British Officer, was away fighting. But my son is called William. I am part of a story, and not only that story of naming, but I also discovered when I met my father’s sister, then a Mother Superior in a Convent in England in 1981, that I am a descendant of a number of English clergy.

The thing that bothers me about a popular current world-view is that we have to become our own creations, or so it seems.  Individualism is rife. For much of post-modern society life is no longer God’s gift, now it’s a matter of my rights or choice. Once people got their stories from their parents, or their church, or town and they lived them as best they could. Now, choice is freedom – or is it?  I believe that one reason why loneliness, alienation, depression, low self-esteem, suicide appear to plague post-modern life is that this way of thinking can make us all strangers -strangers without a story, strangers without connections or roots. Perhaps some of this leads to forms of abuse as well?  In fact, we are The People of The Story.

The ancient words from Deuteronomy, “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” are still repeated in sacred ritual by the Jewish people today. The story of a great nation enslaved in Egypt, then delivered under the leadership of Moses, is the very crux of Judaism’s Salvation History, while they still await their Messiah. So we Christians have nomadic roots.  Our journey goes right back to the wilderness wanderings of Canaan and down into Egypt and to a Tent of Meeting, a Tabernacle that travelled by day and by night with the Ark of the Covenant. For a time our forebears settled in the Land of Promise where a Temple was built only to be destroyed a number of times; for we were to learn finally, in these later times, of the God who pitched his tent in human form right in our back yard and in our face. The nomadic tribe has now become the people of the incarnation, the body of Christ and themselves, temples of the Holy Spirit. How awesome is this journey.

John’s famous Prologue (John 1.1-18) embraces the journey of the eternal Logos: the Word of God..  This eternal Word became a human being and lived right here among us. The Greek literally means: ‘entabernacled’ or ‘pitched his tent’ among us. Christ is our new Tent of Meeting, for we are the body of Christ. Imagine Jesus turning up at West Beach with his camper trailer! Picture it with me for a moment. People settling in for a frolicking, boozy, laid back time at the beach, letting their guards down with neighbours they only see once a year or never again. You go over to give him a hand with the annex, all the poles and canvas, and he says, “Peace be with you” and hands you a stubby. “Yeah, g’day to you too mate. Interesting jargon: you must be from Tassie!” His eyes look right into you and before you know it he says, “Let’s eat!” Some people would be quite honoured to have him there; others quite annoyed, knowing that the walls are so thin and the jokes a bit on the nose to put it mildly. The mind boggles.

 God chose a very ordinary event in history to do extraordinary things.  His very best shot at us came in the very ordinary business of a very ordinary town during a census, with war, racism, terrorism, poverty and exploitation hovering all around, along with angels and shepherds. Into all of this he pitched his tent. How could this make a difference to our world then? How can it today? We believe in a God who knows the way around this world, who doesn’t wave a magic wand, or descend briefly from the sky to clean things up.  God arrives on earth as a human being who will change things simply by the completeness of divine love: Jesus. Jesus gives himself to this transforming purpose in every moment, whatever it costs.  And the world changes…we are changed.  New things become possible for us, new levels of loving response and involvement.  As has often been said, the Christian answer to the trouble and evil in this world is not a theory but the story and reality of a life and a death and a rising; Jesus’ life and death and rising. And for that answer to be credible now, that story has to be visible in our story too. Christ has to pitch his tent in your heart and mind and soul, and mine too.

These last two weeks have been another tumultuous time for our nation and our church, particularly for our Roman Catholic sisters and brothers.  Actions so contrary to the heart, mind and life of Christ have been perpetrated. More than ever, Christians are called to put on the whole garment of Christ and to incarnate Christ’s authentic love in every corner and crevice of life.

Think of your story today at the beginning of another Lenten journey.  It is in the ordinary, transparent things of your life and service that God incarnates the real work and does extraordinary things that will change the world. Let the salvation history keep rolling on.  Or as someone recently observed in a Q&A hashtag: Let’s make Christianity great again!

For personal reflection:

1. Where did your story of faith begin?
2. Ponder the ‘rites of passage’ that you may have celebrated, e.g. Confirmation
3. Who are some of your favourite Bible heroes?
4. What pieces of Scripture excite you about faith?
5. Are there traditions in your family that still live on?
6. What do you hope to receive from God this Lent?
7. How might you be ‘re-clothed’ in the garment of Christ?
8. Conclude with a prayer for those

1. a) who feel ‘cut off’ from their story, alone, or depressed.
2. b) preparing for Baptism, Confirmation and the Renewal of Faith.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Meditation for Ash Wednesday

On Palm Sunday last year, we held fresh, green palm crosses aloft and cried out with the crowds lining the track from Bethphage to Jerusalem; Hosanna! Save Us!

Today, we bring these palm crosses back. They’re dried out and more khaki than green. Are our hopes dried up too? We burn our palm crosses today. Does that mean we’re declaring our hope dead – the hope we shared with those crowds who thought Jesus would change everything that day? Hosanna! Save us! What from?

I have a sense that burning our palm crosses is in fact a symbol of our solidarity with the one who gave his life for us – a sign that we are prepared to join him in the hopeless despair of Gethsemane if that’s what it takes to be his disciple.

As we look forward through Lent to Good Friday, it’s perfectly clear what we’re crying for salvation from. The ashes also speak of our own death. Yet Good Friday will answer that Jesus is the one in whose death is our salvation. So maybe there’s another way of seeing what our actions today might mean – burning the palm crosses, being marked with the ash, being reminded that we are dust.

We know that in six weeks’ time, we’ll hold fresh palm crosses aloft and cry out again to be saved. The challenge to us is to be transformed people by the time we do that – to be people willing and active in the transforming work God wants to do in and through us. The language we use in the Church is to say we die to our old self in order that God might call forth new life in us. How do we die to that old self which separates us from God, from our neighbour, from our true selves?

Lent is the season where this question is our focus. We enter the journey of Lent today – following Jesus to Good Friday. What lies before us is a journey beset with obstacles we need to overcome like temptation to self-centredness, and full of challenges we must meet like renunciation and repentance. What does this mean?

Temptation does not mean enticement in Scripture. There, the one who tempts most often, is God, and God certainly does not entice us. When God tempts, what is happening is testing, testing the faith and obedience of God’s people.

And renunciation does not mean giving up chocolate or coffee. The word renounce is used at our baptism and it refers to changing our allegiance – turning from godlessness to God – choosing God.

Do you renounce Satan, evil, sinful desires?”

Renunciation is the exercise of our will for God. It’s a positive choice.

So it follows that repentance doesn’t just mean feeling sorry for the mistakes of everyday life; rather it’s the right exercise of this newly empowered will – setting out on the journey in the new direction we’ve chosen, facing Jesus. It’s a total change of perspective and direction; striking out towards a new life in a new world.

How does that work itself out in everyday life? That’s what we seek on the journey of Lent. But a hint comes from today’s Gospel – the first words about giving alms.

Almsgiving was the prime act of piety in Judaism – true religion is this; to care for the widow and the orphan. ^{James 1.27}

So Lent isn’t a time of giving up, but rather giving for – giving for life, giving for love, giving for God. The one who hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord.

Jesus went first on this Lenten journey – Jesus is the one who goes before us, whom we follow. We know where his journey took him, and today, as we remember that we are dust, we commit ourselves anew to accompany him on this scary road.

Mercifully, though, we also know that because of Jesus, death is not the end of this journey. It’s an end which he transformed into a new beginning – new life for those who would follow him into his Kingdom of faith, hope and love. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Epiphany + 8:  Isa 55 Ps 92 1 Cor 15 51-58 Lk 6 39-49

One of the commentators I read for today’s sermon was Maria La Sala. She writes: ‘When I became a mother, a friend sent me a card that included a sentence from the King James Version of today’s reading from 1^st Corinthians: “Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.” In the weeks that followed, we got little sleep and did a good deal of “changing.” However, the text also had a deeper resonance. Paul presents the Christian hope of resurrection in the face of the inevitability of death, and for a parent holding a vulnerable newborn, the question of life and death, of mystery and miracle, is ever present.’

I’m struck by the way talk about death so often involves thoughts about vulnerable new life. And not just in our tradition. In the Church, our funeral services end with the Nunc Dimittis; the Song of Simeon. When he finally held the promised Christ child in his arms, Simeon told God ‘I’m happy to die now’. Death and new life are somehow linked. Again, last week, we read Paul’s metaphor of life after death in terms of us planting the seed of the life we’re leaving, and God calling a new and different resurrection body from that seed. Our mortal body and our resurrection body are not the same, yet they’re somehow linked; there’s a continuity which is influenced by the fruits we bear in our present life. Jesus teaches about this today in his parable of the good and bad trees, and the fruit they produce.

But back to last week for a moment; Paul gave us the image of our death being like a seed we plant which sprouts, but in doing so, dies and is lost. What sprouts from it is not the same as the seed, but it’s definitely in continuity with it. He was clear that we’re not going to rise as some other creature. To mess with a silly phrase that’s doing the rounds, ‘not different, not quite same same’. Remember how the risen Jesus walked with his two sad disciples on the Emmaus road yet they didn’t recognise him until he did something they recognised; the way he broke the bread. The fruit of his life – what Jesus did and taught – that’s how they recognised him.

So I think Paul’s point is made; our natural world proclaims it in the life cycles we observe: new life rises out of old, old life produces new. Today, Paul completes this lesson, his most extended teaching about resurrection. ‘Listen, I will tell you a mystery.’ For Paul, mysterion refers to the hidden counsel or purposes of God, something you can’t know simply through rational problem solving, but only through revelation, proclamation, or fulfillment. ^{Rom. 11:25; 16:25; 1 Cor. 2:1, 7}

Throughout chapter 15, Paul argues for the bodily resurrection of the dead. I confront it every day in the Apostle’s Creed; I believe in the resurrection of the body. Paul is convinced that Christ’s resurrection was not an exception but the crucial precedent – the first fruits of many for those who believe. Our perishable body will put on imperishability too; our mortal body will put on immortality too.

What does this mean for us? Today in our service, we have a focus on healing – and heaven knows how vital that is. What does it mean for me when I bring my illness or the illness of those I pray for every day to someone who will anoint me and pray with me? If I believe that this life is all there is, that can paralyze my hope or smother it in desperation. Depression can then add to any other issues.

But *if we believe that God is calling me beyond the gradual deterioration of my ageing – *that there is hope – *we can honestly say to the people we accompany on their journey from this world that we will be re-united with loved ones – *that death is far more than just a merciful end to suffering – if we can take hold of all that hope together, then our anointing and laying on of hands today is a sign that we are journeying together towards healing; journeying together past death towards God’s tears of joy for us; God’s arms open to welcome us in an embrace of pure love, joy and peace. We are set free from our lonely sickness; set free from our alienation.

This is not a call to squeeze our eyes shut and believe in the tooth fairy. It’s a call to consciously choose freedom and life in the midst of the inevitable aches and pains of our mortal existence; to make life choices based on a determination to be free.

The collect prayer for today holds before us an image of our being set free from bondage to sin – something I’d call the chains of isolation – being set free from that bondage so we can choose to dedicate our freedom to God’s service – and that service means caring for all God’s creatures in need. Almighty God, you have sent the Spirit of your Son into our hearts and freed us from bondage to sin: give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service, that we and all people may be brought to the glorious liberty of the children of God. Amen

Both tragic losses and miraculous rescues can inspire people to dedicate their lives to a cause. If it’s a tragedy, they want to make sure this never happens to anyone else. If it’s a miraculous rescue, then they dedicate their lives to seeing that other people have that unexpected freedom made available to them too. These are people whose extraordinary circumstances have untied them from a normal, routine life. They’ve been set unexpectedly free, somehow, to focus on their particular cause; their mission. And many of them achieve extraordinary things.

Can we pray for this freedom for ourselves and our community – keeping the prayer of the day and the readings from Isaiah, the Psalmist and Paul open before us during the ministry of healing?

Almighty God, you have sent the Spirit of your Son into our hearts and freed us from bondage to sin: give us grace to dedicate our freedom to your service, that we and all people may be brought to the glorious liberty of the children of God. Amen

Today, we offer prayers particularly for survivors of child-sexual-abuse whose wounds have been re-opened by the events of the past week, and for Christians like us struggling with the shame and grief that our family is like this.