virgins and lamps

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA
and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH
THIRTY SECOND ORDINARY SUNDAY

November 8^th 2026

 READINGS 

Josh 24:1-3a,14-25 

Ps 78:1-7
1 Thess 4:13-18
Matthew 25: 1-13

                                 

 “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten young women took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. ² Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. ³ When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, ⁴ but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. ⁵ As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. ⁶ But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ ⁷ Then all those young women got up and trimmed their lamps. ⁸ The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ ⁹ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ ¹⁰ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet, and the door was shut. ¹¹ Later the other young women came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ ¹² But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ ¹³ Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

 

It is a sad reflection on Christian teaching that to preach on any of  the Coming of the Reign parables require a sort of health warning, akin to those you find on a website that contains images that some viewers may find disturbing. In Australia websites often include the warning that the site may include names or pictures of deceased persons – these days the names are generally disguised with an acceptable nickname.

And as a further aside I want to add – and some of you may have seen this – that it has been a sad reflection on the state of human society that the internet has been chock full of speculation and blame following the tragic crash of a Lear jet in Florida this past week. Particularly demonic, and I do not use the word lightly, has been the contrast drawn between the final words of the young and brave co-pilot, replayed ad nauseum across the web, and those of the pilot.

When Jesus spoke of the closure of life he did so respectfully, in parables, not with brutal depictions of human beings’ all-too human fear in the face of sudden death. To move away from the Florida tragedy, permit me to quote my own book on Hebrews:

I have a faint memory of a Christian book written in the months following the Tenerife air disaster of March 1977. The author laments the cry of desperation from one of the crew in his last moments of life, dismissing it as a blasphemous outrage separating the speaker from salvation for all eternity: according to transcripts of the tragedy the pilot of the PanAm flight exclaimed “Goddamn that son-of-a-bitch is coming!” ten seconds before the collision.

The God of the author of Hebrews would not be defeated by the desperate and all too human cry of a man about to die. I know that when I once experienced a front tire blowout on a motorcycle travelling at speed on an Australian freeway I did not have the presence of mind to utter a prayer, and fear my utterance was far more monosyllabic! That does not mean I did not mumble a shocked prayer of thanksgiving when eventually the bike stopped and I emerged from the “tank-slapper” experience unscathed.

 

Enough, then, of that, except to ask that, as you are willing, you whisper a few prayers for those killed in and those who mourn the Florida tragedy.

Though in this context I must mention too the sad news that many of us have received from Bishop Anne, that Sue McCafferty was struck down by a stroke on Wednesday, and that her condition at time of writing critical. Please keep Sue and her loved ones in your prayers.

But what have the ten virgins – discreetly called, in my version of the bible, ten wedding attendants – what have they to do with the solemn situations I have referred to?

The parable of course does hold us responsible for our preparation for our own death. Life is in some ways entirely a journey or preparation for death. It is sometimes said, somewhat fatuously, that we die as we have lived. Some do. Some don’t. And that differentiation is not to any significant degree altered by the degree of faith or unfaith, or even the type of faith owned by the dying person. I have been with believers who have faced their death with obvious terror – I make no guarantee that I would do otherwise, particularly if death came hurtling at me at nearly 600 kilometres per hour. I have been with non- and un-believers who faced their death with holy calm, though they might not thank me for those words.

So what gauntlet is Jesus throwing at our feet as he tells of the ten wedding attendants? I am not one to see the moment of dying as the irreversible summary of our eternal future. Were I to use a blasphemy or swear vehemently in the moment of my death, and that is quite possible, I do not believe that I am in that moment condemned to suffer separation from those I love for all eternity. Indeed I’m not sure that there can be in the hands of a loving, creating God a decision that separates humans from those they love eternally.

Matthew in his telling of Jesus stories usually includes lots of gnashing of teeth and wailing, although funnily enough on this occasion he does not. I don't think that is the focal point of Jesus’ parable.

Nor do I think that God is a God who nonchalantly waves away our degradation, our falling short, our propensity for what Christianity has come to call sin. I have no idea incidentally where the actual 3 lettered word “sin” comes from and can find no explanation easily, but it is well known that the concept was that of an arrow falling short of its target. That concept is one for which for which an entirely unrelated word, hamartia, was used.

I have no difficulty with that word for I know that every hour if not every minute of my life is packed with shortfallings somewhere on a range from humorous to awful.

Jesus in his parable is asking us so to live that those shortfallings do not have the final word. That falling short of the human capacity to love, to love God with all heart mind soul and strength, to love neighbour as self, to love creation, is universal. The work of the incarnation is that this universal human state is not the final word in our life. In reality for most of us it will be the last state we experience – few of us are majestically holy. I don't meet many saints of the absolutely celestially pure type. But that saintly is not altogether expected of us. That is an ideal to which I and probably some of you won’t reach this side of the coming of the bridegroom.

Ultimately I think this parable like so many of the apocalyptic parables and writings is designed not to put into us the fear of eternal hellfire but the encouragement to persevere, to try to be better, and though I am not usually one to quote Melania Trump, to “be best.” Or to be best as best we can.

The entire witness of scripture of course indicates that we cannot do that on our own. It is for that reason that we are asked to be a worshipping praying God-seeking people, individually and collectively. May we be amongst those who trimmed their lamps. It’s all so much easier to live and to die when we are.

wise sages

 

SERMON PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY RINGWOOD EAST

FEAST OF THE EPIPHANY

(January 6^th, 1991)

 

 

READINGS

 

Isaiah 60: 1-6

Psalm 72:1-7, 10-14

Ephesians 3: 1-12

Matthew 2:1-12

 

Just over a year ago, at Christmas, I spoke of the journey of the magi, both the poem of TS Eliot and the biblical, mythological sages who came to view the newborn Christ-child. They came bearing their gifts, from their own riches, of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

Two weeks ago, at Christmas, I spoke in passing of the drummer boy, the simple song of a simple child, who comes only with the gift of his rhythm, the gift of his music. I spoke, too, of the children of Ethiopia who are too weak even to come, but who merely die, experiencing no hope, and only the love of help-less and hope-less parents.

Every now and again outside some church or another I find that tacky sign “wise men still seek Jesus.” Always in the male phrasing, and always with the sure and confident sense that if wise men have sought Jesus, and I have sought Jesus, then I too am a wise man – or woman – or person.

The trouble is that we miss so much of the wisdom of those wise sages who travelled to find the newborn king. We see them, perhaps, as the biblical storytellers wanted us to see them, as symbols of the reaching of the Christ story out into the Gentile world. But too often we try to see them also as early converts – as prototypes of those who would encounter Christ in his church and receive him. Perhaps they were – but the Bible does not tell us that.

What it does tell us is of the coming of other cultures to encounter something of mystery and awe in the birth of a God-child, a God in a smelly manger. It tells us of those who sought the Absolute in their own religion, perhaps the Zoroastrianism strong in the Persian region at the time, coming to seek and acknowledge the Absolute in this uncanny and mysterious birth.

The TS Eliot version takes us one step further, to the mysterious relationship between the child born in a manger, because his mother was rejected from the inns, and the man who died on a cross because his gospel of love was rejected by the leaders of his day.

Unfortunately, too little of our religion or our society today is prepared, as the sages were, to reach out and touch and explore the Absolute. Just as in Harry Chapin’s song “Cat’s in the Cradle,” the “trains to catch and bills to pay” become an obstacle to love between a father and his son. The routine grind of daily existence in all its littleness prevents us from pausing long enough to “consider the works of God’s hand,” to consider the magnificence of creation, or even to consider the precariousness of human existence and the misery of much human experience.

We push on too fast, too afraid, as many philosophers would remind us, to touch the Absolute.

But the wise sages of the Epiphany did.

Much of our religious practice is similarly too fast, too shallow. At one level I want to praise attempts to re-form and re-present our worship, if such attempts are designed more clearly to present the divine drama, the drama of human relationship to God.

It is certainly my belief that good modern liturgists have sought to do that, and have done so by going far back beyond the comparatively modern forms of the Book of Common Prayer and the Latin Mass, back to the rites of the ancient Church, the Church as it began to recognise the miraculous magnificence of the Christ-event.

But if we modernise our worship merely to be “relevant,” if we throw out mystery and drama merely in an attempt to present a form of lowest common denominator religiosity, then we have strayed far from the mystery and the drama of the wise sages who came, bewildered, to see the Absolute, incarnate in a Jewish baby in a not too hygienic manger.

For four years now I have been telling religious instruction children, Bible in Schools children, 11 and 12 year olds, that our god is that which is greatest in our life. That our money, or our sexuality, or our sport, or our religion will be our God if it claims first place in our life. That God is, in the Anselmian definition, “that than which no greater can be conceived.” That God is The Thing that is so big we can think of nothing bigger.

The wise sages knew that. Yet they followed a star, and came to see a lowborn, newborn baby in the City of David, Bethlehem. These sages whose search was a journey into the Absolute came and worshipped a baby, a defenceless and vulnerable child.

For ultimately God recognises that “that than which no greater can be conceived” is all a bit of a mouthful. That the Absolute is, in the end, too great for us to grasp, too frightening for us, aware as we are of our own shortfallings, to turn to.

So the wise sages came, and recognised in Jesus, the fruit of Mary’s womb, the dwelling amongst us of the Absolute, but in utter simplicity and vulnerability.

And they worshipped.

Then they went away again. Mystified, puzzled. But – hopefully like us – prepared to muse and to mumble about the mystery they had encountered:

where meek souls will receive him, still

the dear Christ enters in.

 

Fr Bert Rivett

 

The current church of St Mark, Red Cliffs.
This building was erected after Fr Bert’s time.

SERMON PREACHED at HOLY TRINITY,
RINGWOOD EAST

THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT

 (December 17^th) 1989

 

READINGS

Isaiah 35:1-10
Psalm 146:5-10
James 5:7-10
Matthew 11:2-11
 

(SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the ORDINATION to PRIESTHOOD
of Fr BERT RIVETT)

 

When I arrived in this parish I flicked through the Register of Services and saw there, for the week before Christmas in 1979, the signature of Fr Bert Rivett at the celebration of his fiftieth anniversary of priesting. So we are together today celebrating with Bert Rivett a rare but significant occasion, the likes of which that we see far too few.  

I have, after seeing that Register entry, mused how quickly the years must have flown by for Bert since that priesting on St. Thomas’ Day, 1929. 

To give some indication of the years of Bert’s priesthood, I will celebrate my 60^th anniversary – if God wills – late in the year 2047. We could do worse than to ask the question, “what is a priest?” 

There is a sense in which, by virtue of our baptism, we are all priests. But what is this ordained priesthood into which Bert entered in 1929?

It is many things. But I wish briefly to dwell on three.

The priest is a shepherd or pastor.

The priest is shepherd or deacon.

But, primarily, the priest is an icon, a reminder, an image.

The priest is a shepherd. In fact, as those of you who attended the recent ordination service will be aware, it is primarily the bishop who is the shepherd, who carries the crook, the crozier. But early in the Church’s history it became clear that the bishop could not care for and pastor all his people individually, and so the Church appointed presbyters to care for God’s people in extension of the bishop’s pastoral ministry.

In the charge to candidates at an ordination service the bishop commands the candidates to, in Book of Common Prayer language,

feed and provide for the Lord’s family; to seek for Christ’s sheep who are scattered abroad, and for his children who are surrounded by temptation in this world, that they may be saved through Christ for ever.

It is a task of caring – caring for the people of Red Cliffs or Qumabatook 0r Natimuk or Gisborne or Spotswood – wherever God sends his servants to feed his people.

Secondly, the priest is a deacon. Bert was made a deacon in 1928, and that calling to be a servant was then taken into andbthrough all his years as a priest. Bert is still both priest and deacon, a reminder to us all of Christ the Servant, and of our responsibility to serve one another.

 At his deaconing Bert was charged,

to assist the Priest in the divine service, and especially when he ministereth the Holy Communion, and to help in the distribution thereof; and to read Holy Scripture and Homilies in the church; and to instruct the youth in the Catechism.

We may yet employ him to train our confirmees!

Finally, and I believe primarily, the priest’s task is one of imaging, of being the image of Christ in the world. For this reason, the priest presides at the Eucharist, reminding us of Christ’s presiding at his own last supper, and to make present again and again the Last Supper and the Crucifixion of Christ in our midst.

For that reason it is the priest who takes on the Old Testament priest’s role of offering the prayers of the people, to remind us of Christ’s role as both priest and victim at the ultimate sacrifice.

The priest stands in the Church as a reminder to us of Christ – Christ the Shepherd, Christ the Servant, Christ the Priest. He or she stands to remind us of our own vocation to be priests in the New Testament relationship to God, of our own responsibility to offer prayers and thanksgiving to God for God’s people and God’s world.

It was to this task and privilege that Bert – Father Bert – was ordained in 1929, and in which, despite being retired, he is still able to stand among us today.

The time for congratulatory speeches is not during a sermon. But this is the time to give thanks to God tor the priesthood, and to celebrate with Bert 60 years signifying to the world something of Christ’s love for it.

silent, holy ...

SERMON PREACHED at HOLY TRINITY,
RINGWOOD EAST

Christmas Eve

(December 24^th) 1989

READINGS

Isaiah 7:10-16
Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19
Romans 1:1-7
Matthew 1:18-25
 

Silent night, holy night. A night far removed from our experience of Christmas. We celebrate the birth of our Saviour by cluttering our lives with noise, and tinsel, and expense, and money, money, money. We destroy ourselves and our loved ones on the road, and again and again fail to heed the warnings of police – and common sense.

We celebrate less the birth of a gentle saviour than a frenzied demon. The god of commerce masquerading as the God of love, making a parody of the Saviour whose birth we rejoice in, the Saviour who cried out, “How blessed are you who are poor.”

The Children of Israel had crushed God out of their lives. Consideration of all that God had desired for them had been given away. Love of neighbour, love of God – love of God above all – love and consideration for the poor and the have-nots, the down-trodden. All was forgotten in a orgy of self-importance.

This had been a decade of fraud. The demise of the televangelists and the continuing exposé of Queensland’s God-fearing but corrupt leaders[1] become useful symbols of all that Isaiah despised and mourned as he looked at his people. He – and he was at least three people spanning 225 years – saw all that his people had done to neglect the longings of God, and sought to tell of impending downfall, and yet of God’s continued love.

Jerusalem fell. The city was sacked, the women pillaged and raped, the males slaughtered, and the survivors carried off into exile. Sometimes it seems as if we have approached, in the last decade, similar disaster. Afghanistan, the Falklands, Eritrea, Iran and Iraq, are all global nightmares revisited.

But the greatest nightmare is the damage we have done to our planet. Chernobyl, and countless lesser ecological disasters, demonstrate clearly that we no more listen to our prophets than did the Jewish people to Isaiah. And the televangelists and moral majorities continue to make their millions.

We have begun to pull back from the brink of ecological collapse.[2] It may be too late. While we cry out “How can God let this happen?” we continue to ignore God, ignore God’s tears for us.

Silent night, holy night. The Child-God was born unwanted, lived primarily unwanted, an embarrassment to his family and his people, and died unwanted. Even the miracle of his resurrection was seen at first only by a few timid women.

There is no glamour in Christianity. In the ’80s we have sought gloss and glamour, a Christianity of signs and wonders, of Kodachrome and hi-tech. If we are to be effective witnesses to Christ in the 1990s we must touch those who are born in a manger and those who die on a cross, and must be part of the movement that seeks to pull humanity back from disaster.

Silent night, holy night. Silent because holy. The other kind of silent is silent only because all is dead.

Let us be still, now, and know the silence of the God who is about to be born in our midst.

 

---

[1] The Commission of Inquiry into Possible Illegal Activities and Associated Police Misconduct (the Fitzgerald Inquiry, 1987–1989) released its findings in July 1989. Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen resigned in disgrace. Three former state cabinet ministers and a police commissioner were jailed.

[2] Or so it seemed as the 1980s came to a close.

He is not here

 

SERMON PREACHED at HOLY TRINITY,
RINGWOOD EAST

ORDINARY SUNDAY 32

 (November 12^th) 1989

READINGS

Haggai 1:15b—2:9
Psalm 98
2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17
Luke 20:27-38
 

Jesus was constantly challenged to answer questions brought to him by sceptics. Often the scribes and the pharisees sought to trap him with their questions, but on this occasion it was a group of sadducees who came to him.

The sadducees, as Luke tells us, did not believe in the resurrection. Belief in the resurrection of the dead was, at the time of Jesus, a relatively newfangled doctrine championed by the pharisees and other modernists. The sadducees were suspicious of such innovative doctrines, preferring to stick strictly to the letter of the law, the Torah.

If the suspicion about newfangled doctrines sounds familiar, compare it with the ordination of women. Newfangled, unprecedented belief in the resurrection of the dead took over from the traditional centuries-old belief that death was it. Does this have implications for those whose opposition to the ordination of women is based on tradition – on the traditions of scripture? Those with ears, let them hear.

The story told by the sadducees, though unlikely, is possible. It is a story based on the levirate law of marriage, a law designed to keep property within a family and to ensure an heir from within a family to whom property would be bequeathed. But the sadducees were seeking to bait Jesus with the story, so that he will be forced to deny the resurrection.

This perspective of course is too limited. Too earthly. Their understanding of the hereafter is crippled by limitation to their understanding of the here and now. Their belief is not in a miraculous and awesome God who is the God of the astounding, but in a somewhat myopic, pedantic God, whose relationship to the world is unspectacular and pedestrian.

Jesus, the one who dares to call God “Abba,” will have none of this, and refutes the question by simply commending the hereafter to the world of imagination. It will not be like this but – just imagine. As with all the biblical prophets, he seeks to draw an opulent, attractive picture of that which is to come. God is the God of all to whom his promises are made, and his promises are not thwarted by the petty event of our death. God’s promise of love and of eternity transcend our puny mortality.

I should say at this point that much fuss is made about remarks made in 1985 by David Jenkins, the Bishop of Durham. I would that more people had sought to listen to what Jenkins was really saying. Do not limit your understanding of the resurrection to a mere body, there is more at stake on Easter morning than flesh and blood.

That said, I must emphasise again that Christianity is not on about the immortality of the soul. That is a pagan doctrine far older than Christianity, and has nothing to do with the God of Jesus Christ. But the nature of Christ’s resurrection, the details of the body resurrected, these are red herrings. It is the pronouncement, “He is not here, he is risen,” that rings down through history.

It is that pronouncement that breathes hope into human existence and will continue to do so for as long as we reach out to the world around us and proclaim, “Jesus is Lord.” Or to put it another way, an inclusive way, Jesus is in control of life and of death.

It is that news that we take out to the world.

 

The Lord be with you,

tomb and womb

 

SERMON PREACHED at HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST

ORDINARY SUNDAY 29

 (October 22^nd) 1989

(incorporating baptism of Matthew)

I scripted this sermon with two introductory paragraphs which I later omitted, presumably because they were not suited to the context and added to the length. More than 35 years later I think the omission was wise (!) but I kinda like what I was saying – maybe a message to myself rather than to those who gathered that day? I'm not sure I achieved “new languages and images” but the thought was there. 

I preface my thoughts by emphasising that it is the task of the Church to rediscover and re-present its doctrines for every generation. New languages and images  have to be used to express the truth of Christianity just as new vehicles are used as our transport needs change.

But we as Christians must test our claims – in each generation – by the double yardstick of biblical witness and the tradition of the Church down through the ages.

***

Baptism represents a new start. When Nicodemus quizzed Jesus about the signs he was revealing to the world, Jesus replied by saying that understanding, and full experience of God, could come only to those who are born again. It is a message that has been repeated and argued over by Christians ever since.

What did Jesus mean? I want to stress that our experience of Jesus need not necessarily begin with a clear conversion experience. Mine did, but others’ may not. But I must emphasize too that the promises we make at our children’s baptisms and our confirmations only become fully realised if we seek continually to enter into full relationship with Jesus. We must pray through Jesus. We must explore the scriptures to understand more fully the relationship between God and human history. We must confess regularly our inadequacies before God. We must be active in our allegiance to and involvement in the Church, the Body of Christ.

Baptism is the way by which we enact or symbolize that beginning. Jesus was baptised in order to symbolize his absolute identification with humanity in all its grot – and to accentuate the beginning of his public ministry.

Jesus describes the required commitment to him as one of being “born again.” It is no coincidence that he and the Church adopted water as the sign of that rebirth. Birth is a watery business.

Sigmund Freud says that we spend our lives in the search for means to return to the womb. Günter Grass, in his novel Cat and Mouse vividly depicts one character’s enactment of this desire, as he constantly dives to enter a submerged wreck. Freud may have been wrong in many details, but the similarity between tomb and womb is emphasised in many cultures. It is in our death, it seems, that we are finally brought once more into the womb.

Christianity enacts this return to the womb in the rite of baptism. It is as though the one baptised enters into the womb of God and is born from it. As the new Christian emerges from the waters the people of God rejoice.

We receive and welcome you as an inheritor with us  of the Kingdom of God.

But if tomb and womb are essentially the same we can say also that in that moment there is enactment of resurrection. The baptizand enters into a momentary tomb and emerges, at one with Christ’s resurrection, on the far side.

The fulness of what we are doing in baptism becomes apparent only at the graveside. It is at the graveside that we stand and defy death. We do not deny death. We deny death’s finality. As we have emerged from the waters of God’s womb, and as Christ on Easter Day emerges from the womb of death, the womb of Good Friday, so will we and those we love emerge in God’s time from the womb at our deaths.

It is to that hope, that joy, that we baptise our children.

It is because we must be faithful to that hope that we must work to grow into Christ.

It is only because of that hope, as revealed in the agony, the death, yet the emergence of Christ from the tomb-womb, that we have something to say in the face of San Francisco,[1] of Grafton,[2] or of the death of our loved ones.

The Lord be with you.

---

[1] The Loma Prieta earthquake struck San Francisco on October 19^th, 1989, killing 63, 42 of whom died when the Cyprus St Viaduct collapse. .

[2] On October 20^th, 1989,  21 people were killed and 22 injured when a semi-trailer and bus collided on the Pacific Highway near Grafton, NSW. At the time it was Australia’s worst road transport disaster, though tragically it was surpassed two months later, 200 kms further south on the same highway, when two coaches collided head on near Kempsey, NSW, killing 35. Coroners recommended that a dual carriageway be built, implementation of which took some 26 years.

make eucharist

 

SERMONETTE PREACHED at 
HOLY TRINITY, RINGWOOD EAST
ORDINARY SUNDAY 28 

 October 15^th 1989           (STEWARDSHIP SUNDAY)

READINGS

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7
Psalm 66:1-12
2 Timothy 2:8-15
Luke 17:11-19

Has it ever been your experience to feel a Hallelujah torn from within you and offered, silently or aloud, to the heavens?

To glimpse the moon last night, or to see again the blossoms, or to be struck by the force of Friday afternoon’s downpour; to experience the love of a friend or a child, to be torn apart by a piece of stirring music, poetry, drama or prose: these are moments that no word will suffice, except an offering of praise, silent or spoken, to the heart of the Creator.

There were ten lepers. Branded and hated by society, desperate for love and compassion, beyond touch or healing. Jesus touched. Had he not been crucified he may well have died of leprosy.[1] Jesus touched. Jesus healed. And nine went on their way.

But one came and threw himself at the feet of the healer, and gave thanks.

That man whose offering of tearful thanks was made at the feet of Jesus was doubly a pariah. He was a Samaritan. Like the woman at the well he should despise Jesus and be despised by him.

Just one came back.

A leper. An AIDS victim. A homosexual. A pariah in India. A black in South Africa. A Koori[2] in Australia. A Samaritan. At the feet of Jesus he made Eucharist: he gave thanks.

We too will now make Eucharist.

“Let us make Eucharist to the Lord our God.”

“It is right to make Eucharist and to praise God.”

 
We have much for which to give God thanks. We have much within our lives to offer to the service of God’s Kingdom. It is to that offering of thanks and of our lives that we are called each day.

---

[1] Although I did not know it in 1989 this was a fallacy. Leprosy is not transmitted by skin to skin contact, but, like tuberculosis, by airborne droplets. On the other hand Luke the physician did not know that either!

[2] By 1989 my Australian sojourns had only been in Victoria. It was not until much later that I learned of other designation of First Nations people on the continent of Australia: Anangu, Murri, Nunga, Noongar, Pallawah. For kiwi readers, these designations are not entirely correspondent with iwi except insofar as Australian Indigenous nations are subsets of these regional demonyms, as hapu are a subset of iwi.

sink or stride

 

SERMON PREACHED AT 

St AIDAN’S, ALEXANDRA

and ST JAMES’, ROXBURGH

TWENTY FOURTH ORDINARY SUNDAY

(September 13^th) 2026

 

READINGS 

 1 Kings 19:9-18 
Psalm 85:8-13
Romans 10:5-15 
Matthew 14:22-33

 

                                   

Immediately he made the disciples get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. ²³ And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, ²⁴ but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. ²⁵ And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. ²⁶ But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. ²⁷ But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

²⁸ Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” ²⁹ He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. ³⁰ But when he noticed the strong wind,^[b] he became frightened, and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” ³¹ Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” ³² When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. ³³ And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

 

Perhaps I can begin with a confession? I am not one who slides through life with a deep sense of the tangible presence of God. Despite being a convert Christian I have to admit that much of my life of faith is based in thoughts and intuition, based more on a questioning brain cell then the pumping of the heart. I was often in trouble for that when I mixed in strongly charismatic circles, yet it has stood me in good stead in the years since. I can only hope it will continue to until the day the lights go out, one way or another.

This is not to say that what we call the heart has no role in faith. Emotions, for that surely is what we mean by heart, are a critical dimension of what it means to be human. Not actually uniquely human. Ask my dog, out there sulking in my car! For the more advanced forms of animal carry emotions too. In fact I am advised that even some species of ant are sentient – you can Google that claim later! But as Matthew sat down to record for posterity his account of the Jesus event, he ensured that his brain was fully engaged. He expected that his listeners, for that is what we were meant to be, would engage their brains too.

I say all that in the context of what are called the nature miracles. Those who first heard Matthew’s gospel account certainly had to believe that God, as God is revealed in Jesus,  has the whole world in his hands, as some of you may have sung in Sunday school.

The nature miracles, such as stilling a storm, had to be consistent with the deep sense of God that believers experienced in their lives of worship, lives of study of the scriptures, of fellowship, and even of nature around them. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork,” announces the Psalmist in Psalm 19.

But generally God does not revise the laws of nature on a whim, or to entertain Christian believers, or to create a neon spectacular. To place that responsibility on the shoulders of God makes mockery of the horrendous events of Nepal just a fortnight ago, or the drowning of 14 souls (to use aviation language) when a ferry capsized in the Mediterranean late last month, or 39 souls in a Philippines ferry fire just days ago.

The vagaries of nature are fierce. These are sometimes aided by human irresponsibility and sometimes not. Evils perpetrated by humans on each other are equally or more horrifying. Yet these remind us that all life hangs by a fragile thread. Yours and mine too. The gospel is us that divine love, resurrection hope, transcends even the breaking of that thread. Sometimes it’s hard to believe, and when we can others can for us, bizarre though that sounds. When we pray we are often praying on behalf of those who cannot.

I was not on the shores of the lake nearly 2000 years ago, as Peter had a panic attack while striding on the surface of the water. I was not there moments before this when Jesus strode out to meet his closest followers.

I have no idea what happened or if it happened at all, though I suspect it related closely to some deep experiences of those first followers of Jesus. But I do know that there are moments in our living and in our dying in which the firm hand of God transcends all expectation, all fear, all darkness.

This is not to say that we won’t experience fear or darkness in our living and our dying, but it is to say that the experience of those first followers of Jesus can be our experience too. They grew to believe that the heartening touch of God as revealed in Jesus is greater than even the deepest darkness or what I might call the scaredest scaredness. “In our darkness there is no darkness to you O Lord; the deepest night is clear as the day” as the Taizé chant puts it n its adaptation of Psalm 139.

John Bell’s translation of a Spanish affirms the same message: “Both in our living and in our dying, we belong to God.” That is the gospel we have, as we sung in our first hymn, and we have it to proclaim it. We have a gospel to proclaim, indeed, though sometimes we may struggle to believe it.

This interpretation of the events on the lake applies personally, in times of deep uncertainty in our lives.

It applies globally as we face enormous uncertainty, political and ecological, across the face of the globe.

It applies cosmically, too. That is what the author of Revelation made clear in his recitation of God’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. ² And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them and be their God;
⁴ he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

 

However unlikely and incomprehensibly far off as that universal extinction may seem, even further away than global extinction, that is nevertheless an essential part of the journey of God’s creation and redemption. Even if the means of that extinction were to be AI's destruction of humanity within the next decade, as Evan Hubinger has cautioned. 

For me this does not mean that I stride into personal, global or cosmic events with studied nonchalance or overconfident indifference. This does not mean that when I see sick little pictures posted on the internet by the president of perhaps the world’s most powerful nation, depicting himself nuking his perceived enemies, that I don’t feel a visceral twinge of horror and even doubt. There is probably a Peter in all of us.

But the scene on the lake challenges me to ensure that despite the uncertainties that surround me, I must do my best to help others on their journeys through doubt, through life and through death to resurrection. So must we all.