Rolling over. Rolling on.

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN 

and

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

FEAST OF ST PETER AND ST PAUL (June 29^th) 2025

 Final sermon of fulltime ministry

 

Matthew 16:13-19

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

I would of course be telling something other than the truth if I claimed that it wasn't just a little on my mind that this day is the last of a stipendiary ministry reaching back 38 years. It is a happy coincidence that we observe today the feast of the combined Saints Peter and Paul, who happen to be the saints after whom the two churches of this parish are dedicated. This parish, this faith community has provided such a heartwarming closure to my career, though perhaps not my vocation.

The unusually brief gospel reading makes it clear to Peter that he was to have a pretty significant place in what scholars call salvation history. I make no such claims for myself. It does though give me opportunity for me to cast my mind back over four decades of preaching, and a fraction less than that or presiding at Sunday services. To think back on what has been I guess a little more colourful a career than I expected when I was ordained in 1987.

This little interaction between Jesus and Peter is a broad hint that that following Jesus is going to be pretty significant. The changes in Peter’s life were mind blowing. He had to make huge alterations in the years before his martyrdom.

For me today the biggest point of reflection is the huge change that has taken place as what we call Christendom, in which Christianity was an official, almost imposed religion across vast swathes of the planet, has crumbled and disappeared into history.

In my early years as a priest I was often called on to breathe something of God’s peace and love into peak moments in human lives. I conducted many weddings, baptisms and funerals, civic functions, human crises. Few of those who called on me and my colleagues for those ceremonies were actively owning or following Jesus, but most had a sense that language of faith was appropriate in critical life-moments.

I have said often that the great current work of the God’s Spirit is the stripping away of assets that once gave us a sense of cosy complacency. Clergy in particular, consciously or otherwise, could too often took their role as an invitation to power and its abuse. There was too often temptation to wallow in a sense of entitlement, self-importance. I’m sure I was no exception. I made mistakes. There were I think Christ-bearing moments, too.

Peter went on to experiencer the cost of following Jesus. The, for want of a better word, “rockship” to which Jesus called Peter was of the hardest granite. This was no money for jam. No money at all, in fact.

My early days of ministry were remnants of the days in which belonging to a mainstream church could provide kudos in society. That was something of a downside, but also provided inroads into society. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

Some abused their status. Thank God most people that I served with and amongst, ordained and otherwise, made every effort possible to have integrity as they carried gospel words and actions into the places to which they were called and in which they lived.

I speak of a word of God’s Spirit. I have said it often, but I believe it is because we are now called to live solely, to proclaim Christ and his resurrection solely, by our authenticity. Our infrastructure is crumbling, and while in this parish we are unlikely to see it for a while, generally it is unlikely that we will be able to maintain expensive buildings and stipendiary clergy. There will be a tiny handful of exceptions, privileged to be so. Great responsibility comes with that privilege. Responsibility to nurture faith beyond our boundaries.

There is something hypocritical in my saying this after four decades of privileged existence! I know that. In a few weeks Bishop Anne, as I am getting used to calling her, will be ordaining four clergy. None of them will be ordained to what used to be called a living. They will be ordained to live and serve our God on their merits. They are tomorrow’s paradigm: non-stipendiary servants of God. As you are. As I will be, now.

The future, though, is God’s. It is full of excitement, challenge and gospel reward for this faith community and for all of us as we seek to serve God wherever God places us.

The  faith will go on. It will go on in this place and it will go on across the globe. These are exciting times to be following in the footsteps of Saint Peter and Paul. May God help us to do so with integrity.

 

dangerous places?

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

St PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

And the GLENORCHY MISSION HALL

ORDINARY SUNDAY 12 (June 22^nd) 2025

 

Luke 8: 26-39

 

Jesus and his disciples arrived at the region of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee.  As he stepped out on shore, a man from the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had not worn any clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs.  When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me,”  for Jesus had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.)  Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” He said, “Legion,” for many demons had entered him.  They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.

 Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding, and the demonsbegged Jesus^[e] to let them enter these. So he gave them permission.  Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd stampeded down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country.  Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they became frightened.  Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed.  Then the whole throng of people of the surrounding region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned.  The man from whom the demons had gone out begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying,  “Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.

 

 

I have a long and slightly tumultuous week ahead of me. Brian, who will be with you soon, has put me on the spot by emphasising that he only gives seven minute sermons.

I can therefore let you off the hook over these last two Sundays that we have together. Almost!

Still ... You  may have heard me say from time to time that the gospel takes us into what I used to call in my early days of preaching the “dangerous places.” I cringe a little as I look back on the naivete of my early sermons, which I am laboriously working through at the moment. I doubt if I’ve been anywhere more dangerous than an armchair in my entire life. 

Maybe on my motorbikes? Definitely. But hardly a gospel-imperative.

I would now be a little bit more conscious of ensuring that forays into places of “danger”– places open to risk of misinterpretation, is what I suspect I meant – were undertaken more cautiously, with risk assessment and due diligence. I learned something useful in my brief career as a firefighter.

Yet I hold by the kernel of what I saw back then. The gospel is a place of comfort, but not cosiness. Perhaps I’ve spent my life too cosily? 

Jesus in his teachings and in his action makes it clear that the way of the cross – the very name he gives it is stupendously threatening – is not a place of complacency. Neither is it necessarily, or even often, a place of popularity. Most of us like at least some popularity. He cared not a fig. 

In this little scene from Luke’s account of the gospel Jesus succeeds in offending almost everyone. There could be, to a first century Jew, few if any concepts more offensive than that of a manic, naked human-being living amongst the tombs, with pigs. 

It is as if Jesus was entering the very heart of reprehensibility, although of course we know the story. We know that his own confrontation with authorities takes him to the even more reprehensible place of crucifixion.

Nevertheless: naked, insane – whatever demonic possession might indicate it is certainly not sanity – living with the pigs and the dead. At this point surely the disciples were deeply worried that this was not what they had signed up for.

I have no idea what is meant in the New Testament references to demon possession. My hunch is that much that we would now call mental health was classified under that sort of label. We only have to look at the ways in which our society struggles to cope with mental health, with housing for, and medical care of the physical manifestations of mental health, to know that any claim that we are better is window dressing. I don’t pretend to know how to do better. It’s not helpful to romanticise the plight of those fragile edges of society. I admire those who work on the fringes, whether their work is faith-based or otherwise.

Ultimately we cannot but be challenged why this encounter with Jesus. I don’t think in our own society we are called to ride in and interfere in realms best tended to by mental health professionals. I do  think that we are called again and again to challenge those in authority to increase budgetary expenditure, to increase what we might call institutional compassion for those whose world is bewildering, frightening and vulnerable.

Let’s not be naive. For many there is no road to recovery from the grip of mental health dysfunctionality. We need to know our limitations. Mucking around in specialists’ fields is beyond our pay-scale as Christ bearers. Nevertheless as we watch Jesus encounter this man, this demoniac, this non-being beyond the fringes of society, we must surely ask ourselves if we might not risk a little unpopularity. Minuscule compared to that which Jesus encountered in polite society, after he strode into this deeply discomforting and risky scenario.

Jesus encountered this man with compassion. There may be many situations in which we need not to interfere but find responsible compassion for those who dwell on the most unpleasant fringes of the world. 

May we allow God to enable us to discern the demonic and unjust in our midst and to speak out in a society that would rather look the other way.

 

don't pay the ... who?

 
SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 33

(November 13^th), 1988

 

 

There was a song doing the rounds some two or three years ago[1] whose words flirted with literary illusions, possibly lost on some listeners.

Don’t pay the ferryman,

don’t even fix a price.

Don’t Pay the ferryman

’till he gets you to the other side.

Ancient literature and religion frequently pay tribute to the belief that the dead passed over or through deep and sinister waters on their way to the hereafter. In a vivid scene from A Pilgrim’s Progress the hapless Christian finally crosses the river to enter the eternal city. In Dante’s Inferno the traveller descends to the underworld and is ferried across the River Acheron by the reluctant ferryman Charon. Dante and Bunyan alike borrow from Virgil, and Virgil in turn from Homer.

Arguably before even Homer there existed the notion of waters being part of the realm of evil and death.[2]  

The earth was a formless void,

there was darkness over the deep,

and the Spirit of God hovered over the deep.

                                                 (Genesis 1:2)

 

Christians quickly began to associate the death and Entombment of Jesus with the language of the waters of death known to them of old. It was after all the Jews, the People of God, who believed that they had passed through the waters of death at the time of the first Passover, and who had seen those waters closed behind them to claim the lives of their pursuers, the Egyptians. Christians soon began to talk of Jesus’ death as a “passing through” waters. Passing through the waters of death.

So it came to be believed by Christians that to pass through the waters of baptism as commanded by Jesus was to pass into and through the waters of death as experienced by Jesus, following the seemingly tragic events of Good Friday. In baptism we enter into the death of Jesus and emerge in him, alive, on the other side. [I wish that we were able more fully to enact the journey here, but it is as a step towards such re enactment that we entered the narthex before baptisms and returned to the nave of the church with the newly baptized.]

If baptism is a ritual by which we enter into the death of Jesus, then so too it must be one by which we enter into the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus emerges from the tomb-womb, just as the people of Israel emerge and are born anew out of the waters of the Red [Reed] Sea, and just as as these children will emerge and be born anew out of the waters of baptism.

So baptism is a sacrament by which we enter into the life of Christ.

The full experience of that sacrament is yet to come. Sacraments are a down-payment on the event of reunion with the fullness of God that is to come. Saint Paul, writing of baptism, says,

When we were baptized in Christ Jesus we were baptized in his death … we went into the tomb with him in death, so that as Christ was raised from death by the Father’s glory, we too might live a new life.

                                                                      (Romans 6: 3-4)

It is to that new life that we are baptizing our children today. The fruit of our actions will only be known when these children in turn face Christ, first in their growing lives, and finally in the experience of death and judgement Then he will plead their cause before the Father. Then, after the last, [the eschaton], baptism reveals its value as a “grafting on” to Christ.

I wish one thing for these children, their families. I wish that they will grow up within the warmth of God’s church. To be Christians not only when it comes to filling in census forms. I wish that they will come to grow up in a warm and intimate relationship with Christ, a relationship in which his name rests easily on their lips not as a curse but as a prayer.

May they indeed

… be true to Christ crucified Do not be ashamed to confess their faith in him.

That is a conditional clause in the contract that we call baptism

---

[1] “Don't Pay the Ferryman” was released by Chris de Burgh in 1982

[2] In 2025 I would argue that Genesis 1 was written a little later than the time at which the Odyssey of Homer was set down on papyrus. Nevertheless, it is possible that the biblical and Homeric legends were coterminous; the dating of either oral tradition is a shaky science.

language of the heart

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and at St Peter’s, Queenstown

TRINITY SUNDAY (June 15^th) 2025
 

It was a somewhat shonky tradition of the church, at least in the Anglican tradition, that Trinity Sunday was the Sunday on which vicars and rectors headed off to ski, fish or play golf, and leave their curates to preach. Sadly or otherwise in my 38 years of priesthood I have only had a curate for a total of ten days, and they did not include Trinity Sunday.

In reality I would not take that course of action. The Doctrine of the Trinity dwells at the heart of my faith. Though as an aside I should mention that when the Bishop of Grafton in New South Wales licenced Anne to work with me in my parish he was very careful to make sure that she was my coequal priest and not my assistant. Nearly 30 years later it seems that all is not fair and just in the universe and I still don’t get to boss her around, but I have to submit it to her authority. Whoever said life was fair?

More seriously though, the Trinity is a doctrine that inspires and energises my faith. I have told the story many times before, probably even here, of Anne’s university friend who one day proudly announced that were it not for the ridiculous doctrines of a virgin birth and the Trinity he could subscribe to Christianity. He was Muslim, and his Islamic faith would not have to change at all.

Yet perhaps more than anything else this incomprehensible doctrine dwells at the heart of Christianity. While I do not subscribe to “turn or burn” doctrines of salvation, and believe that Anne’s friend was and is close to the heart of God as a sincere Muslim, I continue to believe that this is the revelation granted to the early Christians, by which our distinctive relationship with God stands or falls. At least, this side of the grave. Bye

We can't go into the history of how the doctrine formed or how it has been abused over the centuries, and I acknowledge every year that our Jehovah’s Witness friends are correct, the word Trinity does not appear in our scriptures. But our scriptures, the writing of which was complete within seventy or so  years of the first Easter at the very latest, are profound in their attempt to express, in love language,  how God is encountered. God: Eternal Creator. Incarnate God Man of Nazareth. God, throughout time and space in the sometimes overpowering experience of Holy Spirit, who we honoured last week.

Do not expect me in a short time to go into the complexities of the oneness and threeness of Godhead. The language of Trinity is the language of love. Like love it is beyond the limitations of words. It is the language of eternity, language that tells us that the God who flung universes across the heavens is the God who chooses not to sit out there beyond the universe is but to enter into and experience the very depths of human suffering. To experience it and there bring life and light and hope, spread light and life and hope throughout eternity. Light and life and hopoe accessible to all who open hearts and minds to that which is beyond human understanding but who comes to dwell with is, in us, in word and sacrament..

As a lover of contemporary or so-called popular music one song, a song which I like, torments me more than any other. “What if God were one of us,” sang Joan Osborne, though she was not guilty of writing it. I want to scream at the speakers: “you missed the whole point of Christian doctrine, of divine love, light, hope in the deepest  darkness.” Faced with the horrors – no less – of a Trumpian Presidency opening floodgates of violence across his nation and releasing dark genies from delicate political  teapots across the globe, a God who remains utterly distant has very little to say, very little to do except open his or her bucket of celestial popcorn and watch the ensuing debacle.

What though of a God who is one of us, a God who enters the depths of human experience in one unique event 2000 years ago? An event which ceases to be anchored in space and time, ceases to be limited to first century Palestine, ceases to be anchored to our limitations. An event which becomes eternally good news. News that is good, as long as the event of Jesus Christ is not just the coming and tragic going of an itinerant and eccentric wordsmith in an unimportant corner of the Roman Empire.

But the language of love. God’s love for us. Our response through 2000 years and more tells us that in the events of Jesus’ birth, life, teachings, suffering, death and resurrection, all human experience is taken into the heart of God. And, as we are taken into the heart of God, so divine, eternal  hope is made available to those of us. As we open our hearts to God, no longer at the outer edge of universes, that hope is known to us in the risen Christ of scripture and liturgy.

Like the infamous advertisement, there is  more. For through the Spirit all that we need to experience of God is made present and available to us. Present even as Iraq and Israel train their warheads on another, as the streets of the USA begin to burn. Even when our doctors or the police bring us terrible news of our own mortality or the mortality of those we love. Even when we dwell stunned, or anaesthetised perhaps, at the news of an airliner crashing into student apartments claiming some 300 lives. Even then the light of resurrection, the light of hope can break through.

Though of course while we are still trapped in mortality we cannot grasp the whole dimensions of hope, hope brought to us by a triune God, often mediated to us but friends and loved ones, even healthcare professionals.

Never will we get our heads around this. It is the language of the heart. If we open ourselves up to the mysteries of God in worship, in study, in fellowship, then we can through a lifetime journey grasp some small glimpse of the essence of God's love for us. The God who does not let our mortality or the mortality of any living being have the final word but promises and gives us hints of hope beyond our limitations. The God who suffers with us and teaches us moment by moment that there is another day, a celestial day, even when as the hymn puts it, “Change and decay in all around we see.”

 

 

70% of Australians?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH
ORDINARY SUNDAY 31
(30^th October) 1988

 

We are today once more taking part together in a baptism. It is my understanding that when we bring a child to be baptized into the Christian faith we are binding that child to the love and service of God. But what is it to love and to serve God? Often I hear people professing to believe in God, as if that were all it entailed to be a Christian. Yes something like 70%[1] of Australia’s population claim to believe in God; we would be hard pressed to claim that 70% of Australia’s population were Christian.

So what is a Christian? What are we asking of these children that we are about to baptize today?

This morning, as on every Sunday, we have heard the Two Great Commandments. In one New Testament scene, which appears in various forms in each of Matthew, Mark and Luke, a scribe comes to Jesus and asks him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” Jesus replies,

Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

 

Jesus, in replying thus, is more or less quoting the summary of the Law recorded in Deuteronomy, beside which all other law and commandments fade into insignificance. Stemming from that command there is an additional command,

You shall love your neighbour as yourself.

 

Amongst those 70% of Australians who claim to believe in God are a large number who would often bewail the fact that our young people today are no longer brought up to know the Ten Commandments. I often hear that complaint, both in private conversation and in public lamentation, the latter normally being tied up with complaints about contemporary morality. Yet I am left to wonder the purpose of learning the Ten Commandments. All ten fade into insignificance beside the commandment to love God and neighbour, and no amount of rote learning of commandments will assist us in carrying out that decree.

If in fact we were able to claim that we had in our lives carried out the first of those great commandments, then all the other commandments of the Old Testament would fall into place, and we would indeed be able to claim that we not only knew but lived the Ten Commandments. That we lived not only the Ten Commandments but also the all but innumerable[2] and less well known commandments of the Old Testament Law. But what is seen clearly by Jesus, and by those who sought to follow Jesus from the very first, is that no one can claim to have earned the favour of God by living a good life. As Paul expresses it, “All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God.”

We fall short not only by our own sins, but because we are caught up into the entire web of human sin. I may or may not have committed any recognizable sin today, but either way I am caught up in and involved with the human sins that produce the atrocities of Auschwitz and Jonestown, or the horrific statistics of domestic violence, including incest and rape, or the consistent ecological destruction of our God-given planet. We are all enmeshed in the web of human failure.

So it becomes little more than hypocrisy to demand of any generation that all will be well or would be well if only they had learned their Ten Commandments. Even were we to know every law of the Old Testament, to the extent even of rigidly observing such gems as, “when you build a new house you are to give your roof a parapet,” and “you must not wear clothing woven part of wool, part of linen” (Deuteronomy 22: 8, 11), we would still fall short of the command of absolute love demanded of us by God.

Observance of the Law must be a response on our part to our prior love of God. It is therefore insufficient to claim, with 70% of Australians, that we believe in God, but imperative that we seek not merely to believe in God but to love and serve God with all the energy and commitment that we can muster.

Yet even that is only the second part, as it were, of the story. Because the message of Christmas is that it is God who takes the initiative in relationship between divinity and humanity. Indeed, that is a message consistent throughout both the Old and the New Testament: the initiative is God’s.

We can only love God, therefore, in response to the knowledge that God has first loved us. We cannot love God as some abstract being “out there.” One statistician defines 16% of Australians as “believing secularists.” These are people who neither attend church nor pray regularly but who believe “without a doubt” that God exists. The writer adds,

One wonders what “belief in God” actually means for the “believing secularists.” It is not likely to mean anything like fervent commitment to a specific biblical God demanding loyalty and worship.

                                                 Hans Mol, The faith of Australians, 133).

 

We cannot love God as an abstract, but exclusively as the God who reveals himself in the events of the first Good Friday and the first Easter Sunday, the event of Christ. So, Jesus tells the sympathetic scribe, we love God in the first place because he is one God, not merely one of many – “Hear, O Israel: the Lord your God is one” –  and then, as the events of Easter remind us, that the extraordinary depth of God’s love is revealed in the agony of the cross.

God demands nothing less than absolute devotion. Such devotion must accept that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the event in which God ultimately reveals Godself to humankind. Such devotion must then continue into the service and obedience that should be the hallmark of Christian faith.

It is to that service and obedience that I believe we are baptizing Melinda Lee and John to whom I have spoken in private about the meaning of baptism. But to us all here there is implicit in the ceremony that we are about to join in a grave responsibility to ensure that the faith community is a community centred on Christ, to the exclusion of all else. Stemming from that centring on Christ it is to be a community dedicated to love of our every neighbour. Only when we seek to accept the love of God as revealed in Christ and in response to that love seek to turn to love and serve God – far more than merely to believe in God – and to serve our neighbour, are we able to help these two children grow up to desire for themselves the promises of baptism. Only then will our Lord turn to us and say, as once he did to a visionary scribe, “you are not far from the Kingdom of God.”

It is in the Kingdom of God that the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth and children are welcomed as images of true belief.

---

[1] 79% at 1983 census.

[2] There are 613.

she who comes

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN
PENTECOST

(June 8) 2025

  

READINGS

 

Acts 2: 1-21

John 14: 8-17

 

 

Acts 2 is surely one of the best known and most influential passages across the whole of the Hebrew and Greek scriptures. It gave its name to an influential Christian praise band in the 1970s and ’80s, gave shape to the liturgical year which was forming by the 3rd century of Christianity, and gave shape to the experience of many, particularly in the Jesus and Charismatic movements, of the phenomenon that is known as Baptism in the Spirit.

I do not denigrate the many believers for whom Baptism in the Spirit has been a powerful faith experience. During the decades in which Second Chapter of Acts were active, alongside singer-evangelists such as Pat Boone, and Christian musicians like Barry McGuire, the experience of Baptism in the Spirit liberated many individuals and indeed the institutional church from various forms of spiritual incarceration. The winds of the Pentecostal Spirit undoubtedly blew through the Anglican church in those years, and indeed there was considerable impact on the lives of some of those who worshipped in this parish and church.

Like many such movements it came to be abused in some quarters, but I am sure there are many who thank God for those heady days of free-form worship, glossolalia (better known as speaking and singing in tongues) and a general sense of liberated spirits, set free from the stern frowns of stuffy clergymen and strict liturgical rules.

It was however only one of the biblical models of the encounter with the Third Person of the Trinity, the mysterious presence that we call “Spirit,” or indeed until the 1960s, Holy Ghost. She is referred to by various names in the fourth gospel, including in our gospel passage today where she is identified as Advocate, the “paracletos” and “Spirit of Truth.”

Again I should mention that if the feminine pronoun “she” is a little startling, it has long been recognised, though far longer ignored, that the words in both Hebrew and Greek for spirit are feminine, and there is little reason to adopt the masculine for this being, this person of the Trinity. That is so despite her role of making known the entirety of the presence of Jesus throughout space and time.

For Luke, as he wrote Acts, the birth of the church was that dramatic and powerful moment in the upper room. It incorporated vivid experiences that are described as  rushing wind and tongues of fire. For those who were gathered in the room that day it was a transformative and empowering moment never to be forgotten.

The speaking in tongues that caused onlookers to declare that those gathered were drunk is probably not the same as the phenomenon often experienced in Pentecostal churches. Those in the upper room appear to have experienced recognisable languages communicating gospel truth to them, to each their own language. Paul when he writes about glossolalia also indicates a process by which an unrecognised language is translated for the benefit of those gathered.

It is very different to that phenomenon, which may or may not be a gift of the Spirit, which tends to be encountered in Pentecostal circles. I remember well one parishioner in a parish in which I served at some stage in my career, which I will not identify, whose alleged tongue was a constant staccato repetition of a tongue click, the letter “t” repeated ad nauseam, extremely distracting for anyone attempting to communicate with God in their presence.

I decry charlatanism but I treasure the sense of the Spirit who makes known the presence of Jesus throughout space and time. Next week we will touch on the mystery, the inexplicable, unfathomable mystery of the Trinity. But for now, we focus on this bewildering, beautiful, empowering presence of the Third Person of the Trinity.

And mystery she must remain, for the godhead is mystery far beyond human understanding, mystery that, in Bianco da Siena’s 14^th century words, “shall far out pass the power of human telling.” In John Bell’s hymn “Enemy of Apathy,” which I normally inflict on congregations at Pentecost, she “wings over earth, resting where she wishes”: congregations are reminded of her irrepressible presence, moving constantly beyond human expectations, shattering conventions, and drawing her people ever closer to the heart of God.

So perhaps I can conclude simply with two illustrations from my own experience?

Once, as I sat with my German shepherd on the Awhitu Peninsula, south of Auckland, I felt simply and unforgettably the overpowering presence of God in nature. I did not burst forth in tongues, though I undoubtedly murmured under my breath some simple words of thanksgiving to the God who made that remarkable slice of planet earth possible. Then my dog and I went on our way. Nothing had changed I suspect for either of us, and I can certainly assure you that I had no sudden new insights into life the universe or everything. Yet the fact that I have never forgotten the dynamic nature of that moment suggests it was a wonderful and holy moment, a thin moment in a thin place in which the presence of God broke through unforgettably.

There have been many such moments, but I feel I should mention a moment of liturgical worship. For I have had countless overwhelming experiences in that realm too, . Indeed anytime I reach out my hands to receive communion I guess a micro taste of that mystery. But of that another time.

A funeral is not necessarily a context in which we are grasped by an overwhelming sense of the Spirit of God. Many of you will know that my first marriage was to the daughter of a bishop. He died at the ridiculously young age of 53, leaving his diocese and family not necessarily in that order, shocked to the core.

I don’t think I was emotionally close to David. I’m not sure anyone was. But I was gutted for his family of which I was a part by marriage, and his diocese, of which I was a part by geography and employment. I guess I was feeling fairly numb, but as the organ in a large cathedral struck up the opening chords of the famous hymn “Be Still My Soul,” to the tune of Sibelius’ Finlandia, and as over 1000 voices sang through their shock and countless other emotions, the sense of the presence of the God of hope was inescapable.

Again, there were no neon lights as I went on with my life after that. It’s no secret that my marriage subsequently came to an end, so that only one of my six children by that marriage has even the faintest memories of her grandfather or his faith. But as those verses swelled through the cathedral I knew  for one of the most powerful times in my life the meaning of those words of Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.”

Few messages, few sentences can so vividly express the gospel that Jesus came to embody in human history, and which has been without interruption carried out through space and time by the Spirit of Jesus ever since.

Be our experience similar to that of the upper room in Jerusalem in the 2nd chapter of Acts, or more akin to the gentle breathing into the soul of the resurrected Lord on the lakeside in the fourth gospel, the coming of the Spirit is the embodiment of that same message. “All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Or as Jesus put it, centuries before Julian of Norwich, “Lo I am with you always, even to the ends of ages.”

waiting for banished April to return

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH

SUNDAY 25^th SEPTEMBER, 1988

FEAST OF St MATTHEW (transferred)

 

 

                     On a bare

Hill a bare tree saddened

The sky. Many people

Held out their thin arms

To it, as though waiting

For banished April

To return to its crossed

Boughs. The son watched

Them. Let me go there, he said.

                     (from “The Coming,” R.S. Thomas)

 

So often as I speak to people I am confronted with the claim “You don’t have go to church to be good.” It appears that this oft-repeated aphorism is a magic phrase designed to expiate years’ build up of guilt for not being seen in the church to which we claim allegiance. And of course, like so many aphorisms, it is true. You don’t have to go to church to be good.

But also like so many aphorisms, it misses the point altogether. For no one that I have ever heard has made the claim that you do have to go to church to be good. Nor have  I ever heard the claim that attending church makes you good. Any such claim would be far from the teachings of Jesus, and would stand in obscene contradiction to the words of our Lord that we heard read in the gospel today.

For Christ made it abundantly clear in his teachings that he did not see his ministry as one of praise to towards those who prided themselves as being moral and upright religious citizens. Like many notions that those who do not bother to read the gospels espouse, the notion that Jesus was on about being good has no biblical basis. He came to earth, he tells us, “… not to call the righteous, but sinners.” Certainly, he told many  who received his healing love, “Go, and sin no more,” but perfection is far from human experience, and he is telling his followers to strive to avoid participating in the world of sin in which we are all caught up. He is setting an ideal, to which all of us will fall short.

So if we claim that one does not have to go to church to be good, we succeed blithely in missing the heart of the gospel. We set up a religion based on good works, and not one that rejoices in the salvation and love offered in Jesus Christ. We return to the religion of the New Testament pharisees, not to the radically new teaching of the Messiah.

At the heart of Christianity is the belief that we are quite simply unable to be good enough to win the favour of God. This is, ironically, good news: if we are unable to attain salvation by our own merits then there is no room for self-righteous pride – there is no room for teacher’s pets in the Kingdom of God. When we realize that we can’t earn our own salvation, then we join those people who, in the R. S. Thomas poem with which I began, reach out their thin arms to the Cross. We recognise our need of God’s forgiving and nurturing love, and turn to him in the knowledge that we have no bribes to offer.

In our Lord’s words, then, we are all in need of a physician. We are all in need of the forgiving love and empowering Spirit of God. We attend church, then, not to prove that we are good, or even to make ourselves good, but to discover and to acknowledge before God that we are not good enough. In the words of the old Book of Common Prayer, words that are somewhat over-the-top by contemporary standards,

we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we from time to time most grievously have committed, by thought word and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.

 

Having said that, however, I must also emphasize that we are not called to remain wallowing in our wretched state. We may well be convinced of, admit to, our sin, and so it should be. We should also recognize the very real sense in which we are responsible for the death of Jesus.

Who was the guilty, who brought this upon thee?

Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee;

’twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;

I crucified thee.

 

But having made that connection we must not remain there, must not continue to dwell on our guilt. Instead, we must accept the healing the Physician has to offer us. In the words of the same hymn as that just quoted,

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,

I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee.

                                                          (from Johann Heermann, “Ah Holy Jesu”)

 

As that hymnist emphasizes, no small part of that movement from guilt must be the service of liturgy, worshipping together with one another, together with Christians throughout the world, worshipping God who is Father of the Christ-saviour. That is why we worship, why we go to church. It is not so that we become good, or so we might look good in the eyes of the community, but because we there encounter the God we love in a particular manner.

Then, having worshipped God together in the context of the eucharist, the great and catholic prayer of thanksgiving, we are given further responsibility. We are called by God to go out into the world to love and serve him and to love and serve his people.[1] “Go in peace,” we say, “to love and serve the Lord.” We serve and worship him by serving his broken people.

I was hungry, and you fed me.

I was thirsty, and you gave me drink

Says our Lord, and

For inasmuch as you have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren you have done it unto me.

 

Having served and worshipped God in church, then, we must go out and serve him by serving his people in the community. And all people are his people. That is the point of connection that I wish to leave you with today. For today we are celebrating the Feast of Saint Matthew, and it was he who, in popular belief, came to be associated with the tax collector, Levi, with whom Jesus went to eat early in his ministry.

Frequently, in Matthew’s account of the gospel, we find Jesus mixing with the undesirables of society. It is to that that we are called. We too are called to go into the dangerous places, the places where so-called good people are not seen, and there proclaim by our lives the love of Christ. We must be prepared, like Jesus, to get our hands dirty, to risk the misunderstanding of friends and neighbours.

There, amidst whatever dirt and misunderstanding we may find, we will begin to be able legitimately to speak of the God of love.

We cannot proclaim or even know the God of love until we have first discovered that he is indeed the God who is to be found in the squalid – or in contemporary jargon the “uncool” – places. We cannot have the Christ of Easter without the shame of Good Friday.

And one said

Speak to us of love

and the preacher opened

his mouth and the word God

fell out so they tried

again speak to us

of God but then the preacher

was silent reaching

his arms out but the little

children the one with

big bellies and bow

legs that were like

a razor shell

were too weak to come.

                     (from “H’m”, R. S. Thomas)

 

It is to those that are beyond our church walls, those who may not be attractive to us, that we are called to go out. For we may be their only taste of the body and blood of Christ.

---

[1] While in 1988 I worked hard to utilize inclusive language, and had done so sitting at the feet of Enid Bennett of the Religious Studies Department of Massey University, I had not yet considered the use of inclusive pronouns for the Creator.

church as mega-corp?

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St JOHN’S, EAST BENTLEIGH
ORDINARY SUNDAY 24 

(11^th September) 1988

 

“And he charged them to tell no one about him.”

                                                                                      (Mark 8:30)

 

As I cast my eye around the Church I am often saddened by what I hear. All too often the Church’s teachings ooze a sense of triumphant self-assurance, an overly satisfied sense that God is in heaven and that all is well, or well at least for those who are within the walls of Christendom.

And I am saddened because I am aware, partly from my own experience before I converted to Christianity, of how silly it all sounds, how irrelevant it all seems to the average person in the street. And I am further saddened because, quite honestly, I don’t believe that the gospel is a triumphant or cosy message. For the victims of floods in Sudan or Bangladesh, for example a cosy assurance of future reward is poor comfort indeed. For victims of individual or societal violence the assurance of Christ’s love may sound hollow indeed when coming from the lips of those who have never suffered, never really been in need.

And that is most of us.

But what do I mean when I speak of a triumphalist gospel? It is that version of the Christian message that confidently asserts, together with the fourth century emperor Constantine, “in this sign I conquer.” It is the version of the gospel that adopts the sign of the cross as a sign of conquest, as a passport to victory. It is the version of the gospel that seeks to build bigger and better churches, bigger and better structures to enhance its own image in society. It is the version of the gospel that seeks to adopt the marketing strategies of the successful mega corporations to emulate their success.

But it is also, tragically, a version of the gospel that has little to say to those who seemingly fail. To the unbeautiful people, to those who start or finish life a long way behind the race. It is that version of the gospel, for example, that triumphantly hands out New Testaments across the country in a bicentennial crusade, without addressing the more critical needs of our neighbours.

And of course it is biblically based.

For it cannot be denied that there is an element of triumph that runs through many New Testament writings, not least the writings of Paul. But it must be read in context: the hope and exhilaration of the New Testament is precisely a hope born out of the experience of being misunderstood and rejected, and later even persecuted and killed.

But the New Testament writers did not forget what we might call “the dark side” of faith.

As testimony to that we find the early Christians beginning to identify Jesus with the unidentifiable Old Testament figure that we know as “the Suffering Servant.” It is this Old Testament figure that we read of in the first reading this morning.

The Suffering Servant appears in four poems in the second half of the book we know as Isaiah. He it is who in this morning’s reading reminds us,

I gave my back to the smiters,

      And my cheek to those who pulled out the beard;

I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

                                                                                      (Isaiah 50:6)

 

It is he whose words are collapsed together in an aria from Handel’s Messiah, an aria which captures exquisitely the essence of the Servant’s poems;

He was despised, rejected, a man of sorrows

      and acquainted with grief.

He gave his back to the smiters and his cheek to those who plucked off his hair.

He did not hide his face from shame and spitting.

 

The words are unforgettable, and the poetry in Isaiah some of the most beautiful in religious literature.

And yet too rarely do I hear the church proclaiming this spat-upon Christ to the world. For the early Church quickly identified Christ as one who had been thus treated. What a remarkable claim for a Church, an embryonic Church that was proclaiming a new messiah, ana new saviour  to the world. What poor audience research. How unlike the vast mega corporations of our own day.

And we want to imitate the mega corporations.

Sadly, I sense that all too often we do just that. We package our Christ up in a plastic bag, and in the words of a ’70s song, “turn it upside down.” We image for the world a feeble attempt at portraying an all-purpose, extensively guaranteed saviour. And, because we are competing in a better qualified world, we find we are unable to compete with Fosters lager or with the latest brand of cigarette.

By this I do not merely mean that our media evangelism is awry, but that our entire Christian lifestyle is awry. The image that we present is one of self-assurance, yet statistics should remind us that we can be anything but self-assured.

That is where we as a western world Church are falling dreadfully astray. For the Christ we are called to proclaim is not one who reveals himself to the world in staggering success stories, but in absolute tragedy. In Mark’s account of the gospel it is not when the tomb is found to be empty that the glorious work of God is done but when our Lord cries out in utter despair and lets go of his final breath. It is then that the Roman centurion, who for Mark represents the unbelieving world, cries out,

Truly this man was a son of God.

 

It is in a moment of utter despair that God pronounces his victory to the world, in a moment of utter defeat that God chooses to make himself known.

That is why Mark’s account of the gospel is so important for the Church today. It is Mark who realizes with stark clarity that the gospel is neither pretty nor comfortable. Throughout Mark’s gospel account we find what scholars call the “messianic secret.” Whenever someone claims to have made the discovery that Jesus is the awaited Messiah we find Jesus telling that person to remain silent. Hence the text with which I have begun this morning, “And he charged them to tell no one about him” (Mark 8:30)

This text provides the pivot upon which the whole of Mark’s gospel account balances. At this moment the closest follower of Jesus, on whom the Church was to be founded, makes the decisive claim, “You are the Christ.”

It is the claim that we are all called to make. It is the decision for Christ that every evangelist hopes and prays his or her listeners will make. But Jesus knows only too clearly the road to Jerusalem that lies ahead. He knows only too clearly that Peter has grasped only a triumphalist gospel that fails to acknowledge impending agony and failure. It is only when Christ has revealed himself to be Messiah in the midst of absolute disaster that the message of the gospel can truly be apprehended.

It is only because Christ revealed himself in tragedy that he has a message of good news to offer to the world.

A Messiah who is revealed only in triumph has nothing to say to the people of Bangladesh. A triumphalist Church has nothing to say to the people of Bangladesh. A Messiah who dies as a glorious conqueror has nothing to say to the smarting Aboriginal people of this country, stung as they are by the inane remarks Brigadier Garland[1] made this week. Only a Messiah who has himself been spat upon can transform such pain into a revelation of God.

Only in and after such pain does Jesus reveal himself to be the Son. Only in pain and the aftermath of pain does God reveal himself to be the God of the Resurrection, the God who transforms pain and sorrow unimaginable into joy unimaginable. That God instructs us to follow Jesus into the dangerous places, where he treads before us, and where we will experience something both of the cost and of the joy of our gospel.

Where are the dangerous places? They are the places where it is not nice to be. They are the places where we will not find comfort, but rather only pain and misunderstanding. They are the places of Desmond Tutu, the places where we will be despised for our beliefs. They are not the pews of our churches.

It is only when we as Christians are prepared to proclaim the love of God from the dangerous places that we will achieve any tangible results of our proclamation. Only when we turn our backs on the neat marketing packages of the mega corporations will we begin to see gospel love active in the western world. Only when we are allowing God to take us into the uncomfortable places will we learn the meaning of the comfortable words of Christ. Only when we have grasped the message of the Crucifixion will we be able to taste the sweet fruit of the Resurrection

Christian faith then is not a ticket to find parking places when we are in a hurry, nor an easy solution to a sprained ankle. Christian faith will not make our problems go away, and may indeed create more for us. But because Christian faith is born in tragedy it has something to offer the victims of tragedy, with a global or personal. Christianity breathes hope not only into my world but into the entire world. It will eventually turn all night into day. That is why it is good news.

We await the time for that final revelation. In the mean time we must find the dangerous places to which God is calling us, and find means of proclaiming God from those places.

As watchmen wait for the morning, Lord,

so we wait eagerly for you.

Come with the dawning of the day

and make yourself known to us,

not in the glories of success,

but in the breaking of the bread. Amen.

---

[1] Garland was National President of the Returned and Services League of Australia (RSL) from 1988 to 1993. He was well known for pronouncements against Asian immigration: “We want to retain Australia for Australians," and was a vehement opponent of Tutu’s anti-apartheid activism. See “New RSL Chief Enters Migrant Row”, Financial Review, September 9^th, 1988. Accessed April 28^th 2025.