From now to next

Easter 6C
1 June 2025
St Paul’s Church Ipswich

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The Great Fifty Day of Easter are almost completed.

Having missed the last 4 Sundays, I feel as if Easter has kind of passed me by this year.

How has it been for you?

The federal election is now behind us and by now almost every seat has been declared. Maybe the culture wars can now be set aside as we seek to become a kinder and more compassionate community.

Things go from crazy to weird in the USA, while in Gaza the genocide continues. And continues. 

Russian missiles rain down on Ukraine and there is a major humanitarian catastrophe developing in Sudan.

A lot has happened, and that does not even take into account what has been happening for us in our families, our workplaces and our street.

This week we are called to pray for reconciliation and unity … in the churches and in the Australian society.

Both are challenging concepts.

We agree with them in principle but putting them into practise is really hard.

Christian Unity

We have left far behind us the bad old days when differences between the churches generated bitter divides and split families.

Our public architecture preserves echoes of that bitter rivalry, but we have moved into a new and more generous space.

This is a good thing, but it is not enough.

We have become comfortable with the status quo and we no longer sense the need to go beyond separate and parallel to united action and shared worship.

So far as I can see, there is not a single event planned for Ipswich this week as part of the Week of Prayer for Chrisian Unity.

Does anyone notice?

Does anyone care?

We like the idea of Christian unity, but we barely have the energy to maintain our own life as an Anglican community here in the heart of Ipswich.

It seems a nice idea but is all seems too hard.

And it seems that our friends in the local Catholic, Lutheran, Salvation Army and Uniting Churches feel much the same way.

We are no longer estranged. We are simply strangers to one another. We no longer care.

At least that seems to be so for the clergy, although I suspect our communities are much more entwined when we think about our membership.

Of course, that also applies within the Anglican community across Ipswich and the West Moreton region.

As I have observed in various conversations, between the Logan Motorway and the top of the Toowoomba range, there is only one Anglican parish with a full-time priest. That is us, and we have funding for two full-time priests. Every other parish is either without a priest, or only able to sustain a part-time pastor.

This makes our Ipswich Anglican Community a rare and precious thing.

We are not merging St Thomas’ Church into our parish but creating a new parish together. We have committed to build a new Anglican community across the two sites, with a genuine sense of shared identity and mission.

That will take energy, commitment and goodwill.

It has started well and we have high hopes for the future.

But do we have any energy left for inter-church unity work?

We must not allow our local project to consume all our energy while we fail to engage more widely; with other local Anglicans as well as with other local churches more generally.

National reconciliation

This week is also a time to pause and reflect on the status of the national reconciliation project.

Surely most Australians want our First Nations peoples to be happy, healthy and prosperous.

Yet we have not found a way to translate that wish into reality.

The Closing the Gap process struggles to make real progress.

Systemic disadvantage cripples their hopes for a better future, and whole generations of young Indigenous people are trapped in a cycle of poor education, disease, sexuial abnuse and other forms of violence.

As this year’s theme for National Reconciliation Week reminds us, we need a bridge to get from now to next.

The churches must be part of that bridge building.

It will take energy, compassion and time.

It will require us to tell the truth about the past and to make amends for what has happened.

Instead of building our wealth on their lost assets, we need to pay the rent and embrace a future together in this ancient land we all come home.

We can move beyond platitudes to action, if we care enough to act. 

May the Spirit of God move us to care and to act.