Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Gen 2 4-25, Ps 148, Acts 17 22a-28, John 1 1-5

‘People are not changed by ethical urging, but by transformed imagination’ ^{Walter Brueggemann}

Dear God, there are hard things to hear in the Season of Creation. But I pray that what I say today can be something which works at the level of transforming imaginations rather than coming across as mere ethical urging. Because the Season of Creation reminds us that we must change. Please make this possible! Amen

This year’s theme for the Season of Creation is Immersion in Living Water. It’s based on Ezekiel’s vision of a river flowing out from the Temple; a river which so personifies the creating God, that it enables super-abundant life to flourish where once there was none; even bringing the waters of the Dead Sea to life. ^{Ezek 47 1-12} It’s a vision of healing, on-going creation and blessing. God’s presence is known in this water that brings life to where it had been despaired of. It’s a vision we need very much now.

Yet I can’t talk about living water without acknowledging the deadly flooding tragedy that’s struck the poor people of the Nepal-Tibet border region, and the very real fear that it will happen again soon. So we greet our living water theme from a very sombre place. That terrible river of death which has caused such grief and destruction feels like it mocks Ezekiel’s living water. And we’re told its most likely cause is human-induced global heating. So that speaks directly to us humans.

Humanity is relentlessly causing this damage. That’s why, we need a vision as stupendous as Ezekiel’s healing, living water if we’re to face this tragedy and inspire all God’s people to hope, to advocate and to act in God’s world for the protection and healing of Creation. The worldwide voice of all people of faith needs to be heard in all lands where the halls of power crawl with lobbyists who use threats and disinformation to manipulate decision-makers. The lobbyists’ effect is undeniable: governments, industries and corporations everywhere seem unstoppable in their race to sacrifice Earth’s future on the insatiable altar of endless economic growth and wild consumption.

So how to respond? Only an alternative world-wide voice from people who answer to God can address this slow-motion calamity. The Church of the so-called ‘developing nations’ have been doing this for a long time. And they’re calling us to stop being slow-boiling frogs ^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog}, and join them to challenge the human-induced disaster that they are suffering first-hand. We must answer their call; join our voices with theirs, and act together for the sake of God’s Creation.

Our warrant for this action is found in our readings today. They’ve been chosen to inspire us, and if necessary, convert us; to get us ready to speak and act together as God’s people in God’s world, where the worship of money and power is having such a disastrous effect. The international Catholic-Protestant body called the ‘Consultation on Common Texts’ chose the readings we’ve heard today. It’s the first change to the Revised Common Lectionary in over 40 years! These texts give us the name they’ve given to this morning’s service The Feast of Creation in Christ.

Creation in Christ! How can the whole of Creation fit inside Jesus? There’s quite a lot in today’s liturgy that talks about this. Today’s collect prayer begins: O God, in whom we live and move and have our being, in Christ you created the worlds. That first phrase, in whom we live and move and have our being comes from our reading from Acts. There, we see Paul with Stoic and Epicurean philosophers of ancient Athens debating the nature of God. To assert that God is creator of all, Paul quotes one of their own Stoic poets who described God as the one in whom we live and move and have our being.

But our sentence from Colossians says that in Christ all things were created. ^1.16 And the Gospel speaks of Christ as God’s creating Word, through whom all things came into being. That’s where the second phrase in the collect prayer comes from: in Christ you created the worlds. It recalls the first creation story ^{Genesis 1} where everything came into being at God’s word – Let there be light … and light was. In God’s Word is all things that are. The world and you and I and all creation are in the Word – in Christ. I know it’s bewildering to think of the whole creation as contained in that kind, loving man whose stories we share. But it says we’re all in him, together. If that’s so, ‘How should we then live’?

I find some very important guidelines in the Psalm and in the reading from Genesis. The Psalm declares that everything in Creation exists to the praise of our Maker. How could it be otherwise? The intricate, interconnected unity of Creation – this world of wonder and symbiotic diversity, forever evolving and adapting – is a magnificent witness to the nature and love and patience and glory of God. Creation praises God by its very being. It’s a priceless treasure to be cherished for all time.

And that’s where we humans fit in. You’ll notice in our reading from Genesis, there are two footnotes to verse 15. When this verse was first translated into English, the relationship between people and Earth predated the destructive, industrial way it’s abused now. Till and keep the land’ just meant growing plants in harmony with the natural cycles of seasons, and giving the land periods of rest – letting it lie fallow.

But the Hebrew translated as till literally means to serve or minister. And today, that’s a much more appropriate way to translate it. Particularly together with the other word – to keep the garden/land – which is really meant in the sense of protect, preserve or guard the garden/land. We, God’s people, are called to serve and protect Earth; and that means to oppose the wholesale loss and pollution of soil, the rape of forests and eco-systems, and the exploitation and abuse of Earth to the point of collapse. At a local level, we’re engaged in that battle now with the threat to the parklands. We, all God’s people, are called to serve and protect Earth.

The other guideline is one I find in verse 20. It’s about valuing each other equally as partners in this work.

The verse reads, for the man, there was not found a helper as his partner. In a patriarchal world, verse 20 has always been read to imply that the woman is of lesser significance. But the word translated helper occurs 22 times in the Hebrew Bible. In 20 of those, it refers to God. But in this case, it refers to the woman.

That’s extremely significant. The unwarranted denigration of women – half of created humanity – is a wilful blindness – a deliberate sin. The devaluing of our fellow creatures, likewise. And for that matter, the unwarranted denigration of any people or nation by another is not the way we’re created to be.

The suffering of so-called ‘developing nations’ from the ecological vandalism of the so-called ‘developed nations’ continues because racism and nationalism means we are able to turn a wilfully blind eye to the effect our lifestyle has on the well-being of the other. It’s a post-colonial hangover that we sustain – an artificial us and them – where we act as if the other – like our Pacific neighbourhood – is somehow lesser; less worthy; maybe even hysterical about their experience of climate change – to remember a useful old misogynistic catch-all.

The primordial first relationship between man and helper was anything but hierarchical in any way. The word helper is used 20 times for the relationship humans enjoy with God. The only human to receive the same honour is the woman. In God’s Earth, there’s no place for lesser and superior – woman and man – chosen and outsider. There’s just God’s call to humanity to serve and protect creation.

Together, we are all called to live out our first vocation; to serve and protect all of God’s Creation. Imagine that!  Amen.

‘People are not changed by ethical urging, but by transformed imagination’ ^{Walter Brueggemann}

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 14 A  –  Exod 3 1-15, Ps105 1-6 & 23-26, Rom 12 9-21, Matt 16 21-28

Twenty-five years ago, in July 2001, General Synod declared that the last Sunday in August each year should be a day of prayer for refugees. It was extraordinary timing! On the last Sunday of that August ^(26-8-01) a Norwegian freighter, MV Tampa, rescued 433 Afghan Hazara refugees from a distressed fishing boat off Christmas Island. To prevent the possibility of any asylum claims, our government sent SAS troops to ensure the ship didn’t enter Australian territorial waters.

Just over a fortnight later on September 11 – the twin WTC towers went down, and populist politics took their campaign into overdrive to make refugee a synonym for terrorist. Three weeks on, Australian government ministers using doctored photos made false claims that refugees on another boat, Siev 4, had thrown their children into the sea to force a rescue. These lies were never retracted. All this would lead to Australia’s aptly named Pacific Solution; the harshest anti-refugee policy in the world at the time. It continues to this day.

Back then in 2001, the UNHCR was concerned for the welfare of about 20 million displaced persons. Tragically, that number has since grown by another 100 million. So each year, as we observe this day of prayer for refugees, it’s ever more important that we do. We Christians particularly remember that the baby Jesus and his family were themselves forced to seek asylum. God is with refugees!

Refugees flee war; they escape places of natural and artificial disaster. These people desperately seek entry to countries where they and their families might find safety, and a way to know community life again. But just as desperately, destination countries seek to prevent them from entering. Sudanese refugees escape a crazed and barbaric civil war and trek across Africa to try their luck at a Spanish enclave, only to be ejected. The people of the drowning islands of Tuvalu and Kiribati contemplate a possible future in Australia. Refugees the world over are desperate. But loud voices online, in the media and in parliaments depict them as a threat. These loud voices falsely claim they are defending us against dangerous people.

We’ve been thinking over the past couple of weeks about the cruel, dehumanising language that populist politics uses to represent other people’s need as a threat; a threat that only they can effectively repel. It’s a cruel lie they peddle for electoral gain. It persecutes innocent people who are already on their knees. It’s nothing new. Western politics has been consumed with this for a long time now. And Christians and people of other faiths have steadfastly spoken out against this travesty.

Our scriptures all speak of hospitality to strangers. Paul’s letter to the Romans today puts it in black and white – ¹³ extend hospitality to strangers. ¹⁵ Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. You know the line from the Servant Song that’s based on this verse: I will weep when you are weeping. Singing that regularly at Inverbrackie detention centre was a consolation to the detainees.

This is very personal for me. I spent the first 12 years of my working life teaching within a schools, AMES and TAFE system that was supportive of refugees. We didn’t lock people away in detention centres. They lived freely among us, supported to live and study. We sought to equip them with the best possible tools to enable them to bring their skills and insights into the upbuilding of this, their new home.

Extend hospitality to strangers. It’s a simple command, and today it stands defiantly against the tidal wave of paranoid disinformation and confected hostility that washes constantly over us. It moves me deeply that this community of St John’s has stood against that grotesque tidal wave for decades. St John’s support for refugees is courageous, tireless, generous and effective. And by refugees, I mean both fellow humans seeking asylum from brutal conditions overseas, and also young, homeless, South Australians who need us to believe in them, and to give them the tools to find a place they can call home. Extend hospitality to strangers. That’s the mindset of St John’s as a parish, and St John’s as a Youth Services provider. I came home when I returned here.

In today’s first reading, we meet Moses again. And again, we’ve jumped several years. Last week he was the baby who really was put in the water, but in a tiny basket the Bible calls an Ark. He was drawn from the river into an altogether new life. Now we witness his call from God to become himself a sort of Ark for his people who will see them safely across the deep waters of death at the Red Sea.

The Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, ⁸ and I have come down to deliver them. … ¹⁰ So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’

It feels ambiguous on this day of prayer for refugees, because we know that this escape will eventually see the children of Israel join the ranks of the displaced for forty years. But despite their often dreadful behaviour, God journeyed with them – something I believe God does for every refugee – God as one of us all!    Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 13A- Ex 1 8-2 10

Last week, we looked at readings that helped us challenge and heal the way some people dehumanize others. This theme stayed alive for me during the week when I read an article in the Médecins Sans Frontières magazine. An MSF volunteer in Ukraine met a man at an evacuation centre. He’d walked there with his two dogs and two cats. He said his animals had saved his life on that walk. “There were drones above my head, but they didn’t attack me because they saw I had animals with me.” Isn’t ‘humanity’ fickle! Isn’t enmity ridiculous! The drone pilots would kill a man, but not his cats and dogs!

This ludicrous dehumanizing comes up again in this week’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures. We’re back in Joseph’s story A few weeks ago, we saw him sold off by his brothers to slavery in Egypt. Later he’d call those brothers and his parents to join him there, saving them from a catastrophic famine along with his adopted Egypt. Today we’ve moved on about 400 years in the story. Joseph’s descendants still live in Egypt. But from a clan of 12 households, they’ve become a numerous people. There’s a new Pharaoh, and he sees foreigners in such numbers as a security threat. He doesn’t care that they’re the people of Joseph who saved his country from ruin. Hidden in the translation, he seems to call the Israelites a racist name; ‘apiru. It sounds like Hebrew, but it doesn’t mean Israelite. Across the Near East, ‘apiru was a word that meant non-citizen, refugee, fugitive, fringe dweller. It’s like one of the many phobic slurs around today.

400 years! Today’s story is part of a grand historical sweep. But unlike other grand historical narratives, it doesn’t spend much time on the comings and goings at the palace. Nor does it tell of militant operatives running an underground resistance movement. No, we zoom in on five women. Inspired by them, I call this sermon Bad girls for God! We first meet two Jewish midwives who conspire to save life rather than obey the Pharaoh’s order to kill baby boys. They conspire to pervert the course of injustice. Their names are Shiphrah and Puah. ^{(Fair and Splendid)} Then there are Moses’ mother Jochebed, sister Miriam and the Pharaoh’s daughter.

Midwives Shiphrah and Puah expose the Pharaoh’s bigotry brilliantly; the mind that lies behind dehumanizing a vulnerable, innocent people. When the Pharaoh confronts the midwives with their failure to obey his order and kill the ‘apiru baby boys, their reply plays on his racism. When he asks, Why have you allowed them to live, they reply, Because the ‘apiru women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. ^(v.19)

They play on his assumption that these foreigners – ‘apiru – are not like ‘normal humans’. And this difference is obviously going to show in the way ‘apiru women bear children. The Pharaoh would never question a statement which implies that ‘apiru are more like vigorous breeding animals than human beings. And of course his other prejudices are that these ‘apiru midwives wouldn’t possibly be smart enough to try to trick the Pharaoh with a lie, and they certainly wouldn’t be brave enough to engage in real civil disobedience!

The Pharaoh digs himself in deeper and deeper, and in the process, exposes his own heart as the place of real sub-humanity. He tries again. If these ‘apiru boys must be spawned, then let’s throw them in the river; drown them like the rats they are. Who’s the real inhuman one? The story tells it all. And so we read on to the part we all know so well – Moses in the bullrushes.

We see baby Moses drawn from the Nile – born again from the river sometimes called the Mother of Egypt. A child ‘abandoned’ in a basket on the river according to the letter of the law, is drawn from the river alive in defiance of that law – but by an enemy! Death is turned to life. It’s an image we remember at baptisms. It’s also a parable of salvation history written from the perspective of the freed slaves.

One fascinating detail that I absolutely love is that his basket is called תֵּבָה (te.vah) – a word we’d normally translate as ‘ark’. ^{(Gen 6-9)} Baby Moses’ basket very rightly has its name from the vessel God told Noah to build; an ark to save life on Earth.

Do you need to be a slave to enter this story? Do you get included in the story – like the midwives and Jochebed and Miriam and the Pharaoh’s daughter did – by being midwives to a new and risky rebirth? These women got under the guard of the regime and served God’s purpose – ultimately to set a whole people free. Do we face anything like they did? Are there stories like this where we can join in with these women? Or are we meant to be more like the Pharaoh’s daughter – privileged, and compassionate? Could one act of our compassion have such consequences?

We Australians also have stories of so-called illegal aliens and dangerous waters and vulnerable children. These stories are with us more than ever. I remember in the 1990’s there were about 25m displaced people in the world. Now UNHCR says it’s 120m – about 1 in 70 of Earth’s people, each with a shocking story to tell.

The women of today’s story show us that God’s little people are called to subvert power that dehumanises. We are called to act in a way that helps vulnerable people who need safety and dignity to find it. Today’s story challenges our Pharaohs when they turn bigoted stereotypes into ‘truth’; seek to discard their victims somewhere where people can’t learn their real names or hear their true stories; places like Gaza, Nauru, or Cox’s Bazaar. But today we learn that God does know their stories, and that we are to work to rescue them and help make their stories heard.

If we accept without question that dehumanised people and their stories get irretrievably locked away, this has spiritual consequences. We must respond to the love in the women’s defiance and be encouraged by their wit and their bravery. A three-month-old baby was hopefully entrusted to the river by his mother and sister, launched to a new future in a tiny ark tevah תֵּבָה and watched and prayed for.

An ark is God’s way of preserving the future against calamity. Our role in this sort of rescue mission today is to build arks – or even become arks ourselves – for the ones whose stories are systematically silenced – refugees, Aboriginal people, unemployed and homeless – and because of the Noah reference, our duty extends to rescuing endangered species and endangered ecosystems. This story calls us to be like the two midwives and the three other women, to turn fearful bigotry on its head so life may be honoured and preserved. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 12 – Gen 45 1-15, Ps 133, Rom 11 13-36, Matt 15 21-28

Our readings and prayers today challenge the awful politics of grievance. Its demonising and dehumanisation attack the world’s social cohesion, and mean crimes against humanity can proliferate. The politics of grievance ‘creates’ an enemy – an ‘other’. It names groups or people, and falsely makes a scapegoat of them to blame for things we don’t like about our life together. It demonises and dehumanises that ‘other’, so people won’t oppose the confected enemy being attacked in the most shocking ways – even to the point of genocide. The politics of grievance is driven by a desire for power, wealth and influence; it is murderous selfishness on a mass scale.

Our readings and prayers call us to model an answer to this scourge. They call us to live in unity and to embrace reconciliation at a personal level; to show the world that God’s justice and God’s gift of liberty are intended to bless everyone. It’s our job to meet lies with truth, to counter self-centredness with compassion, and most particularly, to disempower feuding by choosing forgiveness. The sentence of the day says that God’s people are to maintain justice, and do what is right. The prayer of the day fine-tunes that. We pray for grace to dedicate our freedom to God’s service so that all people may know the glorious liberty of the children of God.

So with the sentence and prayer giving us a focus on maintaining justice, on doing right, and on dedicating our freedom to helping others know God’s liberty, what do we see in today’s readings?

The reunion of Joseph and his brothers sets the tone. Last week, we watched his brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt. The chapters we’ve missed between then and today tell of his rise to power as the Pharaoh’s right-hand bureaucrat. Because of Joseph, Egypt was the only land to prosper during a seven-year regional famine. Now his brothers have come to Egypt, cap in hand, to buy food. And who do they have to ask for help but Joseph. He chooses reconciliation with his brothers, even though they’d sold him down the river. We are here because of Joseph’s choice!

The Psalmist sings that reconciliation like this is the stuff of eternal life – ⁴For [in this harmony] the Lord has commanded his blessing: which is life for evermore.

But it’s hard work. In his letter to the Church in Rome, Paul brings home the fact that freedom, truth and reconciliation need just as much vigilance within the Church as they do in the wider world. He’s writing to Rome some time after the death of the Emperor Claudius. Claudius had decreed that all Jews must be banished from Rome. He made no distinction between different groups of Jews. So Jewish Christians got exiled as well.

This meant the Church in Rome, which had been a mixture of Jewish and Gentile converts, suddenly became a Gentile-only body. Abruptly, all decisions fell to this group, and the Church’s culture shifted away from its Jewish origins. Can you picture this happening here? Imagine that we share this building with Lutherans, and suddenly, one day, all Anglicans are banned from Adelaide. Off we go, and only five years later, when the anti-Anglican regime has been replaced, we return in dribs and drabs to our beloved churches. But things have changed. If we want to worship here, now we have to sit down for the hymns and stand up for the prayers, and communion only happens every few months.

Paul is writing as Jewish Christians return to find a church which they barely recognise. It seems from this passage that each group is running the other down in a power-struggle to control the Church culture. Paul’s message to them is that a power struggle over control of the Church is ridiculous. At the end of the day, only God’s grace counts. If God loves someone, who are we to exclude them, or their lifestyle, or the way they offer their worship to God? Paul’s letters to churches are often written to settle disputes. Reconciliation is a major theme of his writing.

And the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman. As far as we know, Matthew’s community was based to the north of the Holy Land (Syrian Antioch). And so they have heard this story as one of hope for them and their mission. Ulrich Luz says they’d hear this story from within their own experiences of discouragement and illness; from their own context of separation from Israel. They’d hear it speak to them as a faith community amongst Gentiles. This story told them of the power of prayer and faith from the woman’s perspective; that Jesus was there for such as them.

This story also told them Jesus’s influence was not confined within the borders of Israel. His power was as present to them and their Gentile neighbours as it had been in distant Galilee. This was an encouragement to them in their task of living out and telling the Gospel among their Gentile neighbours. So while we’re scandalised about how exclusive the children’s food to the dogs metaphor sounds, for Matthew’s community, it’s a story full of the hope of reconciliation, freedom and truth. We just have to learn to hear it from that different cultural perspective.

So where might the rubber hit the road for us right now? Today, our community is called to model a tangible alternative to the growing cancel-culture of grievance, demonising and dehumanising. The greed and selfishness at the heart of this culture will eventually be exposed. But our commitment to compassion, reconciliation and forgiveness will reveal the glorious liberty of the children of God. That’s our calling. So may God give us grace to dedicate our freedom to that mission. Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 10 A – Genesis 32 22-31

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 9A – Mt 13 31-34 & 44-58

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

Pentecost + 7  – 12-7-2026 – Mt 13 1-9, 18-23

Just before I start, and in case we lose the main messages of this sermon, its main themes are, first, that we are the soil in which Jesus plants his teachings; second, that God brings life from death and decay, and finally, God’s extravagance; God’s blessings can never be wasted because they can never run out.

One of the most memorable sermons I’ve ever heard about this parable of the sower was when Rev’d Dr Andrew Dutney talked about our Christian formation turning us into good compost so the seeds of the gospel planted in us can bring forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. It made me wonder about the apostles; should we re-name them compostles. Because out of their unpromising beginnings, they became a soil that yielded a harvest no-one could ever have predicted.

That’s how Jesus operates. He takes ordinary people, turns our weaknesses into blessings and sends us out with the Spirit to guide and protect us. Ordinary people.  That day by the lake, he may have seen a farmer at work beyond the crowd, and seen in their work an image of the way God scatters blessings so extravagantly.

Jesus taught what God’s Kingdom was like through his parables; human stories with divine significance. His stories of people’s mundane lives revealed something extraordinary. That day, he’d been threatened by the religious authorities and even opposed by his own family. But he kept on sharing his vision – extravagantly, regardless of whether he was sharing it with the spiritually blind, the spiritually sighted, opponents, friends or everyone in between.

I wonder what farmers make of this. Whatever they think, Jesus has turned their job into one of the best-known lessons in the Christian tradition. The word of God is scattered for everyone. Much is squandered, but God is not to be discouraged. The word is scattered, regardless of how much might seem wasted. It will go on being scattered; people will be transformed, and there will be a staggering harvest.

Imagine if you were minding your own business one day and Jesus gathered a crowd nearby, pointed to you at your work – housework; gardening; home-maintenance; office work; care of your family – if Jesus pointed out your work to everyone there and told them about the deep, spiritual significance of your efforts.

When you stopped listening and resumed work, how would you be? Your work’s the same. You do the same things you’ve always done. But now the normal things you do are icons of God’s work; signs of God’s action through you.

Please think of things you’ve got planned for the coming week, and for a few moments, imagine what Jesus might tell the crowd about the significance of your work.

Pause        

It’s a bit daunting, isn’t it. It’s not just the intentionally spiritual things we do that are sacred. Everything we do is sacred. It’s how we see things that counts; our perspective transforms us; composts us. This parable changes things for Jesus’ disciples. It changes our perspective on all we can do.

Over the past weeks, we’ve been reading a part of Matthew’s gospel called the Mission Discourse. Chapter 10 was where Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and sent them out to proclaim, the Kingdom has come near. ^(10.1-7) He warned them that they wouldn’t necessarily be welcomed, and in fact there’d be rejection and persecution. ^(10.8-39) And chapters 11 and 12 show us that. Some people accept Jesus. But conflict with the religious authorities dogs him and his disciples wherever they go, and no matter what good they do. ^{(12.2, 14, 24)} So how can he move his disciples into a head-space where they’ll survive this? It’s only their first week in the job. How will they come to see their mission in a way that makes it worth all the pain it brings? How does Jesus prepare them to face so much rejection?

He does it with his parables. And to make sure we know this parable is an answer to the problem of rejection, our Gospel reading today actually starts with the words, That same day ^(13:1a) This links the rejections of ch 12 with the new perspectives that the parables of ch 13 will shine on those rejections – those failed plantings.

The great crowds of chapter 12:^15-21 gather around Jesus again in 13:2. And just as in chapter 12, some will accept, but many will reject Jesus. Yet even so, they are all still offered his priceless teaching – if only they can receive it. This is not so much a parable of the sower as a parable of the different types of soil. Or if we want to see it as us being transformed, maybe it’s a parable that invites us to accept that: being given time and nourishment to become the kind of compost that transforms decay into new, abundant life.

I once knew a Greek barbeque missionary called Peter. He had a barbeque trailer and he’d go out and spit roast entire lambs on it to feed homeless people. Once, he rang and told me how he’d finished a feeding and he had lots of salad left over. He worried about wasting it. But then a thought came to him about God’s abundance; how God seems to squander treasure. And he realised, Happy worms!

Jesus gives new perspectives to help his disciples to understand rejection and so not to be discouraged by it. The good seed is his word in our lives, and our work is to scatter it. It’s good; the soil is variable. Some will be fertile and yield a crop; often it won’t. But that’s okay: God is prodigal; God is extravagant. God won’t run out.

Followers of Jesus are to be with people in their ordinary lives – to embody our Lord in the world. We are to be ourselves the best soil we can be, and to scatter the seeds of God’s Kingdom as extravagantly and recklessly as we dare.  Amen

Rev’d Peter Balabanski

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are the body of Christ.  Amen