Rev’d Peter Balbanski

Pentecost + 26 – 1 Sam 14-20, Mk 13 1-11

Today’s collect prayer describes God as a welcoming refuge for the outcast; an upholder of justice for the oppressed; a generous provider willing to look after others in very costly ways. We Christians are meant to embody all that; we who affirm each week that we are the body of Christ on Earth now. But sadly, as we observe National Survivors’ Day, we have to admit that for many people, their experience of us, the Church, makes them fear that these truthful words about God may actually be empty lies. National Survivors’ Day tells us why they can feel that.

If we, the Church, are meant to embody God as safe refuge, justice-giver and gracious provider, we still have a long way to go. What I sent you in my weekly newsletter reveals the Church to be a place where vulnerable people have not been safe. And if we aren’t very careful, Church still is a dangerous place. It takes real, unified commitment, courage, honesty and selflessness for a community to embody the truth about God’s love and kindness. And we’re certainly not there yet.

Today’s readings show us both how to represent God truly, and also how not to represent God to people.

In the first few verses of our reading from 1^st Samuel, we see generous love and cruel bullying side by side. Hannah hasn’t had any children. But her husband, Elkanah, ignores the culture of his time and gives a double portion of the sacrifice to her. It means he’s giving her what in their culture should only go to the mother of his first son. So Hannah experiences Grace – which is what her name means. But at the same time, Elkanah’s other wife, Peninnah, who does have children, bullies Hannah horribly. Same family, good role model, but really cruel behaviour.

Bullying can cut you off from the good that comes to you in other parts of your life. That’s what happened to Hannah. The patriarchal culture that devalued a childless woman, and Peninnah’s on-going, cruel use of it to taunt Hannah cut her off from the healing of Elkanah’s love. She was inconsolable. So she took her grief to the house of the Lord. She wept bitterly and prayed that God might rescue her from her misery. She bargained desperately with God for freedom from her distress. And what happened? God’s representative, Eli the priest, accused her of being drunk. She came to God’s house desperate for mercy and the priest falsely accused her of desecrating the sanctuary by being drunk!

The documents I’ve sent you describe in tragic detail that very same sort of abuse happening over and over again in this diocese – people violated in the heart of their Church family coming back to the Church to appeal for help, for justice, for care, for healing, and instead being silenced, ignored, disbelieved and threatened by the leaders of this diocese. And just like we saw Eli do to Hannah, it was done for the same reason; to protect the institution. Eli’s instinct was to preserve the sanctity of God’s house, and he went for Hannah with accusation and judgement instead of doing God’s work and asking what was so obviously hurting her.

God meets broken people with love, with acceptance, with healing; not with harsh, fearful, reflex judgement and bullying accusation; no, love, acceptance, healing. And God’s little people are the priority; not some building or institution.

Thankfully Hannah stood up to Eli and told him he’d got it wrong. Maybe living with Peninnah had driven her to the point where she wouldn’t tolerate unjustified accusation any more. And mercifully, Eli turned out to be someone who could accept correction; to believe Hannah and behave as a priest should have.

So often, bullying, accusation and threats are cruelly compounded by disbelief, or apparent disbelief. The disbelief that survivors of abuse confront often turns out to be completely insincere. It’s a tactic some people use to protect the institution where the abuse happens; to seek to silence the person who makes a complaint. It’s the same logic at work as Caiaphas’ justification for killing Jesus; it’s better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed. ^{Jn 11.50}

The Church certainly isn’t the only institution where this happens. But the point is that it’s the institution where it should never happen. And it must never happen again. The start of today’s Gospel challenges our habit of institution-protection. Jesus’ disciples admire the Temple. But Jesus replies, ‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’

Buildings and institutions cannot embody the love of God; only communities can do that. And for a community to do that, it takes real commitment and moment-by-moment decision always to prioritise God’s sacrificial love. To get to that point, we need to pray to be converted from fearful, reflex self-protection to courageous, self-giving compassion for others. God’s priorities must be our priorities. That’s how we build safe community. We owe that to all survivors of abuse.  Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 25 B – 1Kgs 17 8-16  Ps 146  Mk 12 38-44

The prophet Elijah was an amazing rebel during the time of Israel’s corrupt King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. They used to rob simple poor people and force them to worship false gods. But Elijah told them and everyone about the true God who gives to everyone equally. Elijah’s was the prophetic voice of truth in his time. In every age, scripture calls to us to join our voices with voices like Elijah’s – voices that tell of God’s special love for little people; God’s special love for the poor, the widow, the orphan, for children and for refugees; the little ones so often carelessly neglected.

Today’s story about Elijah challenges us with this call to share life with God’s little ones. Today we read that Elijah was sent to Lebanon – to a village called Zarephath, near the city of Sidon. There Elijah himself was a stranger; a refugee. Sidon is where his enemy Queen Jezebel came from. It’s a dangerous place. And there, he’s to rely on the charity of a widow; one of the world’s nobodies a single Mum who, in a time of drought, has almost nothing left to live on. This story forms a pair with today’s gospel where Jesus points to the trust and generosity of another, almost destitute widow.

On the face of it, they’re both stories to make you rejoice – at least when we reach the end of them. But we’re part of a world where pain is shared just as much as joy is. And so we can’t pretend we don’t know that those two widows are just like countless millions more very poor people today. So what are we to draw from these stories; the two we’ve heard today, and what are we to draw from all the untold stories? Our Psalm tells us that God calls us to care for refugees, for widows and orphans. It reminds us of the ancient law in scripture that says God’s people are commanded to give special care to these vulnerable little ones of God’s.

^{Dt 24. 21} When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, do not glean what is left; it shall be for the alien, the orphan, and the widow. ²² Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I am commanding you to do this.

^{Jas 1.27} Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.

For thousands of years, God’s people have responded to this call on the resources we share; a call on us as individuals and us as communities. We are meant to be communities of generosity and refuge. Our doors are meant to be open; we are meant to meet vulnerable people not with our strength, but in our shared weakness. We’d be just as vulnerable in their shoes. This is the example of Jesus himself.

The two widows were some of the most vulnerable people of their time. Whatever they lived on came from the charity of others. Both Elijah and Jesus were deeply moved by these women’s predicaments, and how they were nevertheless so generous. But Elijah and Jesus didn’t end the poverty and vulnerability of such people. It’s the call to God’s people to keep on caring for them that remains. And if that’s all we draw from these stories, and it encourages our kindness to develop, then the stories have done their job. We know lots of stories that don’t have happy endings. So many that they crush us. But even so, we know how we are to live.

What people are in that sort of predicament in today’s Adelaide? We hear from some of them, but not many. Their situation silences many of them. Some have lost their jobs in their forties and fifties and haven’t found anything since. Today we might recall the Vietnam vets who felt like no-one wanted them back here. And then there are people who are hidden because of our reaction to their mental illness, their addiction or their difference. And most significantly, we know about ever-more-marginalised Aboriginal people, so many of whose children grow up with their parents in prisons, and even many of the children themselves gaoled for actions that would never see any of us locked up.

We tend not to meet these people. But if we do meet them, we might often recoil from the aggressive behaviour of some of them, from the way they smell; from their loopy, long-winded conversation – just when we don’t have time to listen. And we feel ashamed because of the way they make us feel for our collective failure. Our wider society doesn’t think about Deuteronomy 24 or James 1.

There’s a continuity here with the stories we just heard about the two widows. We saw that they didn’t necessarily have happy endings. And the way our community fails our poor and different members sees them stuck in sad places too.

But each time one of us raises our voice—each time the Church or any other organization acts out of compassion and names the wrong that someone else needlessly endures, something like a resurrection happens. Someone who had been made to feel less than human has their humanity re-asserted. We might be asked why God would want to do that. Where would God – invulnerable, all powerful, all knowing God – find the compassion to consider the needs of the alien, the widow and the orphan; and why. As I pondered that with a friend, she dropped in the observation that God also knows what it feels like to lose an only child. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

All Saints Day – Isa 25 6-9  Ps 24  Rev 21 1-6a  Jn 11 32-44

There are lots of tears in today’s readings. Every time, the tears are a precursor to God’s rescue. And that seems to be central to the teaching of all religion; all human faith vows and declares that suffering is not the final reality; it will be overcome. So on All Saints’ Day, we are offered these texts as expressions of hope in the face of suffering. That’s one way we read the Scriptures; as God’s will and testament for the living to live, for suffering to end, and for death itself to die. It’s the story of the trials and sufferings that God and we have all been through together, and it leads to the good news that at the end, “…those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy.” ^{Ps 126.6}

Human faith declares that suffering is not the final reality. But there’s a time and a place for this to be said, and there’s a time when it’s not yet right to proclaim hope. When you’re in the depths of despair; you’ve just lost a friend, a child, a partner; you’ve just lost a job or missed a life-changing opportunity; your doctor has just told you your own death is near … at these raw moments of agony, it’s not the time for someone to demand that you put your hope in a happy hereafter. That sort of insensitive prating is quite frankly obscene.

What they’re actually saying to you is that your sorrow makes them uncomfortable, and you’d better cheer up for everybody else’s sake – though they’ll tell you it’s for your own good. But that’s not what these texts are saying at all. The tears of Isaiah … the tears of Revelation … the tears Jesus shares with his friends…in these writings, tears are acknowledged as a natural part of our existence; as something fundamental to our being human. In fact, if we had no tears, we would be less than human; and paradoxically, if we had no tears, we’d miss out on each intimate moment of contact with the God who collects each precious tear in his bottle. ^{Psalm 56.8} – God who promises to wipe them away

That’s what makes Jesus the ideal pastoral caregiver in today’s gospel reading. He doesn’t arrive at the mourning village of Mary, Martha and Lazarus rolling with optimistic good cheer. Jesus saw the pain in their faces, and he immediately shouldered his share of the burden of grief that everyone else was carrying.

He groaned under its weight with them. When Jesus saw Mary weeping and the people who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved … Jesus began to weep. Why? Surely he knew about the hope?

He did it because the person you need with you when you’re sad is not someone who tries to put away your burden so you can’t hold onto it; not someone who tells you to think of a future when all this will seem far away. No, those people you don’t want. There’s a rich time of privacy in grief; there’s deep intimacy in grief; there’s the fulness of your own humanity to be experienced there, and no-one should presume to take it from you. No-one else owns it like you do, and they shouldn’t pretend that they do. And nor should they tell you to stop feeling it or expressing it. Instead, we find Jesus shouldering the very same burden of grief as we are carrying, and groaning under its weight with us. He literally shares our own grief with us. That’s who you want with you when you’re sad; someone who does know how you’re feeling; someone unobtrusive, but right there with you in it.

What does this have to do with All Saints Day? It’s got something to do with the unobtrusive, quiet character of a true saint. I’ve said before that the writer Elizabeth Johnson calls the feast of All Saints by a name which captures this privacy and intimacy wonderfully; she calls it the Feast of the Splendid Nobodies. It’s the day when we celebrate all the un-named little people who have quietly lived out lives that have contributed to the dignity of humanity. The sort of people who make space in their lives to stand by us when we grieve; people who stand up for the ones who grieve. People we know; people we’ve known; and thanks to our Lord, even us, as we are known by the ones who love us. The Feast of the Splendid Nobodies.

These are the people who for us truly reflect the nature of Jesus; the ones who give us permission for our tears; the ones brave enough to sit with the discomfort of accompanying us in our times of sadness; the ones humble enough to share our moments of joy, yet without taking either of those moments over. The saints are the ones who truly reflect God’s love for us; always there, unobtrusive, rock solid – splendid nobodies, and All of them, Saints.  Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Sermon for Pentecost + 23 – Psalm 34

You’re at a gathering and someone approaches you – you know their face so well, but what is their name?! What do you do in the few seconds thinking time you have? I start running through the alphabet. The alphabet’s a wonderful thing for jogging memories from their hiding places. You have the certainty of something familiar to work from – something you know by heart – and it’s amazing how often it works to help re-establish your relationship with someone’s name.

That’s one of the hidden delights of today’s Psalm. Psalm 34 is called an acrostic Psalm. It uses this same principle of alphabetical sequence to help the memory, and renew acquaintance. The first word of each of the 22 original verses of this psalm begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, following the alphabetic sequence from aleph to taw. It helps the reciter / listener to remember the whole Psalm accurately.

Psalm 34 happens to be my vestry prayer. Whenever time permits, as our servers and lay readers will tell you, we read out this first part of Ps 34 as the prayer which focuses us on our number one priority, the worship of God. And although only one of us reads it out, it engages us all in a dialogue. Let me try to describe that.

Like most of the Psalms, Ps 34’s verses are each shaped into two balanced halves. As we look at it in translation, we see that the verse halves reinforce each other – there’s often repetition. A Psalm as a whole may traverse a bewildering range of moods and subjects, but each verse is a unit. This comes to life in one of the common ways Psalms are recited in worship – when we say / sing them antiphonally by half verses. You hear yourself say I will bless the Lord continually and then you hear the answering call – his praise shall be always in my mouth.

We hear ourselves in dialogue with each other, and at special moments, we can also hear ourselves in dialogue with the countless people of faith for whom this has been a prayer over three millennia. We may or may not agree with them, but that doesn’t seem to matter. This dialogue between us is not a time for agreement of ideas, but a moment of community with each other, and with our ancestors in the faith.

We don’t necessarily need to recite Psalms communally, either, to get this effect. In verse two, I say the first verse half, Let my soul boast of the Lord, then I wait, and after a few moments, I say the second half – the humble shall hear it and rejoice.

The humble shall hear my soul rejoice! The Psalm reminds us of scripture’s constant witness to God’s preferential option for the poor – the people for whom God has such a great passion. Say or sing a Psalm and immediately you’re in a dialogue with an invisible community of saints – God’s Kingdom of the humble. We cry O Praise the Lord with us, and their answer gathers us in: Let us exalt his name together.

To this point, the Psalm has been a hymn of praise, and we’ve felt ourselves join a vast choir spanning continents and centuries, simply by singing / saying it. Now the Psalm moves into something more like testimony, but it’s still a dialogue. For I sought the Lord’s help and he answered – the Psalmist doesn’t say when, or what happened. That’s something we’ll be able to remember from our own lives. The answer – and he freed me from all my fears – tells us we’re heard, we’re not alone.

Our worship services keep step with this Psalm. We began today with a hymn of praise. In the scriptures, we hear the testimony of other people of faith – testimony to the fact that God walks our road with us, and most closely of all, in our times of weakness and suffering. Soon, we will share the Eucharist together, and this too echoes the Psalm – taste and see that the Lord is good. In a sense, that’s what praying the Psalms is – trying out a little of the way God has walked side by side with humanity down the ages, and discovering that this is the road we walk too.

Often, the language of the Psalms is a little bit alien to us; this Psalm is particularly directed towards the people who suffer want and hunger, and that’s not as common an experience in our society as it was for the Psalmist; though I’m beginning to wonder. But I just wanted to raise the idea above the surface again that there’s a dialogue going on all the time in our faith journeys. It’s a conversation, but we’re hardly aware of it without wonderful gifts like the Psalms to remind us. They call us together into a vast community of faith. For every cry, there is an answer. We see it at work in our gospel Mk 10 today about Bartimaeus, the blind beggar of Jericho:

⁴⁷ When Bartimaeus heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth passing by, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” ⁴⁸ Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” ⁴⁹ Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” What’s our answer?  Amen.

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost +22b – Mk 10.35-45 – Accepting service is leadership

Today’s Gospel is a study in leadership that refuses to be co-opted or to dominate. It’s also about leadership that refuses to dismiss help, however ineptly it’s offered.

It begins for us with that selfish demand from James and John for box-seats beside Jesus in his glory. Their naked ambition is pretty shocking; and all the more confronting when you think what Jesus had been telling them before they buttonholed him: Jesus had taken the twelve aside and told them again what he’d said twice earlier; he predicted his death and resurrection.

The previous two times, his disciples’ response must have made him wonder why on earth he’d ever picked them. The first time, Peter rebuked him. The second time, his disciples argued among themselves about which one of them was the greatest. But once again today, Jesus says his is the way of the Cross – the way of humility. And this time, two disciples respond by asking that they might be elevated to positions of the greatest imaginable privilege and power. They were filled with ambition. Could they possibly hear what Jesus would say about servant-leadership? How could they hear? Their minds must have been buzzing so much with their teacher’s deeds of power that they just couldn’t hear his words about servant leadership. They hadn’t seen the cross or the empty tomb yet.

The challenge to be like Jesus, the servant leader, is central to Mark’s Gospel. Mark is a short Gospel. Anything that made it into this gospel is important. If something’s there three times, you can be sure that it’s absolutely central. So what do we learn from this? First of all, we learn that we can never be exposed too often to Jesus’ teaching about the choice to serve, because it seems a safe bet that we won’t hear what he’s saying the first time, the second, or even a third time. The most important thing we see in the Gospel is Jesus’s humble choice to offer his life to reveal the God of love to the world. This is his boast of God’s love; his service to his fellow women and men, and walking the way of the Cross.

After the first prediction of his death and resurrection, where Peter rebuked him, Jesus taught the disciples about letting go – not clinging to life or to things for security, but trusting in God. After the second prediction, where the disciples were caught talking about which of them was most important, Jesus took a little child in his arms and taught about the importance to God of the tiniest baby.

And today, after Jesus’s third prediction of his death and resurrection, when James and John ask for royal box-seats in the Kingdom, Jesus teaches that a choice to serve others is the blueprint for leadership in the community of his followers.

His path is not about being shy and sweet. It’s about making choices to put God and others first. It’s traditional hospitality on steroids. We’re called to choose to worship God by serving others. That’s our discipleship. That’s how we are called to grow as Christians; and as a parish particularly. We grow by serving.

Our first priority as Christians is the worship of God; to worship God with all we are, and all we have. And Jesus showed us that the way to do that is to serve the community where God puts us. He showed us what was in his heart by serving other people to his own cost. That’s our calling St John’s; that’s why we’re here.

I realise I’m on delicate territory here. We Church-people have often had service demanded of us in the name of our faith – particularly vulnerable, gentle church people, women and children. Some people try turn our vocation to their profit; to manipulate us into their service. So there are probably unhealed wounds about. But service that’s been forced on us is not the service that Jesus lived and taught. That’s abuse – it’s something people do to you; and it happened to Jesus too. But people have no right to manipulate – to force others to serve them. They need to learn the freedom there is in serving God themselves by serving others.

The Christian life is choosing service to God. And it’s also receiving freely-offered service; accepting others’ free gifts of service. That can be hard too. We may not be offered what we want. But it doesn’t mean we reject the gift. Jesus didn’t sack his disciples and ask God to send him another batch just because they tried so ineptly to help him. He teaches us with love; he grows us; he disciples us.

Transformed and nurtured by his patient love, we’re set free to choose to serve others to our own cost – choose; not be forced – and to acknowledge that we confront needs we can’t fulfil. That humbles us. We need the help God gives us. God’s help often comes from the hands of other people. Learning our limitations, accepting help, being interdependent, having our rough edges smoothed off is the beautiful discomfort of Christian community life; it’s part of growing as a family.

The family we’re called to belong to is often people we might not normally associate with. It can involve accepting help people offer us as their service, whether or not it’s what we expect. It can mean giving what we don’t expect too.

And finally, in a family, we don’t get too precious about our own importance. If we’ve been dealt a hand of high social status, or special gifts, they are for service, not for self-importance. Servant leadership is a transforming journey of spiritual growth into Christian maturity, with all the growing pains that brings.      Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 21 B – Job 23 1-9, 16-17, Psalm 22 1-15, Hebrews 4 12-16, Mark 10 17-31

Yabbies are delightful creatures. You can trick them into hanging on the end of a baited string and slowly pull them in until they’re really close. But if you want to catch them, you have to be really quick and deft, or their pincers can really hurt.

Today’s Bible passages are a bit like that. From a comfortable distance, they’re pretty interesting. But to get the most out of them, we have to know pain. The pain that they describe has to meet whatever pain there is in our lives. And then the pincers close. As long as we keep the story and our reality at a distance from each other, they’re pretty benign. But risk letting them come together and the pincer-effect can make things very real. And it seems that’s what we’re meant to do.

Job and the Psalmist both speak from the perspective of feeling trapped in the pincers of pain, powerlessness to change things. Job and the Psalmist cry out that they are trapped in the pincers of mortal existence: the pain of undeserved suffering on the one side, and the pain of God’s absence on the other. Job longs for it to end – ¹⁷ If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!

The pincers of mortal existence can trap us through no fault of our own – like it seemed to do with Job and the Psalmist. We’re just mortal, and pain is part of the deal. But those pincers can also sneak up on us because of choices we make. There might be an ambiguous looking situation like that good-living, rich man we saw come to Jesus today nervous about his prospects for eternal life. Unlike Job and the psalmist who were trapped the pincers of deprivation and suffering, the rich man’s trap turns out to be his comfort and prosperity. Jesus saw that he was caught in the jaws of his parents and society’s expectations on one side, and his unwillingness to leave on the other. To inherit eternal life, he needed to free himself from his expectation that he inherit and perpetuate his social standing. He needed to free himself from that, otherwise he’d perpetuate the trap.

How can anyone become so trapped that they can’t respond to the love and the call of Jesus? He knew what Jesus was; he knew what Jesus was doing. He saw others around Jesus who’d left everything to follow him. And yet something drew him back to the comfort of what he knew, as sad as it made him.

Humankind is still doing that. We’re not changing our comfortable lives as we should for the sake of the planet – for the sake of our children and theirs. We’re wilfully deaf to the voice of wisdom; of science; of compassion. We’re somehow deaf even to the anguish of those suffering monstrous climate catastrophes.

We’ll give to charities, of course. But we’ll also go on voting for governments who promise us they’ll preserve our ‘standard of living’. We are behaving like frogs in water being slowly brought to the boil; we’re staying put. It’s warm and comfortable there; apparently.

So what must we do to inherit eternal life? One side of the pincer is in place for all of us – it’s whatever danger we ignore. If we play the right mind games, we can flex ourselves just shy of this pincer’s point; we can close our minds to warnings of the consequences of selfish choices we make. We can choose, for example, to ignore the cries for help from around the globe and pretend they’re far away. It won’t happen to us, surely.

But what does Jesus say about that? Jesus saw that the good-living rich man was in the pincers of the expectations of his parents and society on one side, and to his own expectations on the other. To inherit eternal life, he needed to free himself from the pincers of those expectations; the pincers of the comfortable life. He’s trapped in the delusional pincers of business as usual, and he needs to be set free. So Jesus says, Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.

Jesus called for compassion – for this good-living, rich man to ease the grinding poverty of all those people around him. But more, to risk genuinely feeling it with them. Can he choose another pincer and risk being committed to the one he’s never known? Can he choose to be trapped in the reality of the life that Jesus chose; a life lived in solidarity with those in need. It’s painful; compassion. But are we changed at all? What changes? Well everything actually. A change of perspective changes everything, and we might suddenly discover what we’re here for.

The call to us, is to trust – trust that we can live our mortal life free from the fear of change. We are called to grow daily in our consciousness that we live in the presence of the God who loves us. We are here to learn that however trapped or uncertain we may feel, Jesus sees us for who we are, and still loves us.

We’re not called to a life without pain – heaven knows Jesus wasn’t spared. We’re called to a life lived following, as best as we can, the one who took on human frailty and vulnerability to the end. He did it so no matter the pain of our life, we are sure that we’re never alone in it. What are we really here for?

As we gather for our vestry meeting after this service, we are to evaluate our mission action plan and see if it stacks up to this gospel mission call.  Amen

 

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