Author: Gregory C. Jenks

St Andrew’s Church, Lismore
Fifth Sunday of Lent (Year A)
26 March 2023

[ video ]

Our readings today offer two powerful images of profound loss and devastation:

• The valley of dry bones vision in Ezekiel 37, and 
• The death of Lazarus, from the village of Bethany outside Jerusalem

As is often the case with the lectionary cycle, there is a kind of intertextual symmetry between these readings chosen for this final Sunday before Holy Week commences on Palm Sunday next weekend.

On the one hand, we have a vast valley in ancient Palestine covered with the scattered bones of the cream of Israelite and Judean society not long after 600 BCE. 

On the other hand, we have the carefully gathered and wrapped corpse of Lazarus laid in a tomb by his grieving sisters.

National catastrophe and family tragedy.

The scale is different, but the sense of devastation cuts to the core of those involved.

As the vision unfolds before Ezekiel, he hears God saying to him: “Mortal, can these bones live?”

Is there any future for these people, their nations and their families?

And we overhear similar conversations between Jesus and the sisters of Lazarus in the Gospel today:

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

The depth of the pain, and the extent of the loss, is not limited by the number of people killed. 

A letter from the Vice-Chancellor

A strange thing happened during the week as I pondered what I might say on this last Sunday before Holy Week.

As a member of the teaching faculty of the University of Divinity, I received an email from the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Dr Peter Sherlock.

Peter was reflecting, as he often does, on just what value we theologians add to our wider society here in Australia.

He is currently engaged in a research project tracking the careers of people who have studied Theology but not chosen to work within the life of the churches.

In his own words, Peter’s research examines:

… how their theological education has played out in their professional lives, primarily in areas other than religious ministry. All have made significant contributions in fields such as social justice, education, community development, journalism, art, medical ethics, executive leadership and politics. 

He goes on to share the interim findings of this research:

theological graduates stand out from their colleagues because of their capacity to think outside the box, to interpret and question their context on a larger scale than others, to look to the long term – and to treat other humans with compassion because they are seen through a unique lens. 

Let me repeat that powerful set of words, but with a small adjustment:

[the people of St Andrew’s Church in Lismore …] stand out from [others] because of their capacity:

• to think outside the box, 
• to interpret and question their context on a larger scale than others, 
• to look to the long term – 
• and to treat other humans with compassion because they are seen through a unique lens. 

At our best, people of faith—whether university-educated or Sunday School-trained—stand out from [others]because of their capacity:

• to think outside the box, 
• to interpret and question their context on a larger scale than others, 
• to look to the long term – 
• and to treat other humans with compassion because they are seen through a unique lens. 

Saying YES to the future

I have laboured this point, because I think it is important for us during this time of transition.

These insights—I think—speak to the immense spiritual gift which we have in our hands, and which we need to share with those around us.

This is our mission to the community of Lismore and its surrounding villages.

We look at the valley of dry bones (which in our case looks like houses damaged in the massive floods last year) and we dare to imagine a fresh start for our city and our villages.

God says to us: Community of Andrew, can these bones live?

From the grieving family to the devastated Far North Coast: Can these bones live?

Is there a future here?

How do we imagine its outlines?

How do we choose to live with compassion despite all that seems broken and … frankly, over?

Peter Sherlock included in his email some reflections on a recent interview with the well-known journalist, author and Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi man, Stan Grant. Sherlock notes that Grant:

… passionately [affirms] that:

• theology is the only discipline that can truly account for the state of our world, 
• that faith is the only practice that can sustain human communities through incomprehensible suffering from the horrors of war and colonialism to the violence that humans inflict on one another. 
• Only theology has the necessary scale of vision in its apprehension of divine and human natures to meet these tasks, where politics and philosophy fail. 

While Sherlock and Grant are speaking about academic theology, they are also describing us and calling us to embrace who we are … at our best.

Is the Anglican Church in Lismore a valley of dry bones?

Are we busy preparing our church for burial?

Can we even imagine a future in which this church is truly a light set on a hill?

Stan Grant would tell us that only people of faith can give our city and our nation a future worth having.

This is not just an Anglican thing.

Together with other churches and together with other faiths, we are called—like Ezekiel—to speak of a future over the valley of dry bones, and—like Jesus—to call for Lazarus to come out of the tomb.

Lismore needs us to recover our mojo as people of faith.

Imagine if that happened!

From this link you can listen to Stan Grant’s 2022 Brian Jones lecture, “Faith in Troubled Times”

Lent 4 (A)
St Andrew’s Church, Lismore
19 March 2023

There are none so blind [video]

Today we have the latest in a series of significant encounters in the Gospel of John where Jesus meets and confounds various people. 

Time after time he cuts across the grain of the accepted religious and social assumptions of his own culture.

Time after time fresh wisdom breaks through.

Time after time the people he engages misunderstand what Jesus is about.

This is a characteristic of how John likes to tell the Jesus story.

It is very different from the way that story is told in Matthew, Mark and Luke.

Then as now there are different ways to understand Jesus. Different ways to appreciate him. Different ways to follow him. Different ways to tell the Jesus story. Different ways to live God’s truth.

Two weeks ago, we had the story from chapter 3 as Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night. He is seeking insight but fails to grasp what Jesus is saying.

Last week we had the story of Jesus at the well, where he meets a woman from Samaria; an outcast. Eventually the woman seems to understand the message of Jesus, but we are not told that she became one of his followers (although she is Saint Photine for the Orthodox). Such a story of conversion and discipleship might be told in the Synoptics, but John has little place for women disciples trekking the paths of Palestine. And yet the women were there!

Imagine what this woman and Mary the Magdalene could have discussed, had they ever crossed paths!

Now there is an idea! If you remember nothing else from this morning, imagine a conversation between Mary Magdalene and the Samaritan woman. Two outsiders. Women with “reputations,” as the respectable religious folk would say. Both were condemned by centuries of male scholars as promiscuous women and scandalous sinners. Both were misrepresented. Take some time this week to imagine them catching up for a chat after Easter morning, when Mary has encountered the risen Lord.

Today we have the story of the man born blind, and next week the story of Lazarus. Controversy and misunderstanding are in full flight in both those stories, as well as in other chapters from John that we have not been reading this Lent.

In the Gospel of John, we find the tensions between the followers of Jesus and “the Jews” at a high pitch. In the Synoptics, almost everyone in the story is Jewish, and the opponents of Jesus are Pharisees, Sadducees and Herodians. But in John suddenly the opponents of Jesus are simply, “the Jews.” Here is the seedbed of Christian anti-Semitism that would climax with the horrors of the Nazi death camps.

Like the Letters of John, the Gospel of John is written within a framework of fear, hatred and division.

We see this so very clearly in today’s Gospel:

His parents answered, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. Therefore, his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.” 

John 9:20–23

So, we find that although this is supposed to be a story about Jesus healing a man born blind, that element only takes up 12 of the 41 verses. The bulk of the passages is about the hostility of the Jews towards Jesus and anyone who would be his follower.

Running through this long story is the unspoken question: Who is blind here?

Who is unable to see God’s love at work in their midst?

So, what wisdom for everyday life might we discern from this complex story?

I think the first insight is to embrace the idea that we need to look with fresh eyes. We need to remove the blinkers. We need to change the lenses through which we look at others.

And given the tragic history of hatred between Christians and Jews, not to mention Christians and Muslims, we need to look at each other differently. We need our sight to be healed.

Enough of the convenient circles we draw about people who make us feel uncomfortable.

Jesus hates such circles and will never stay inside the religious boundaries that we create. He erases the circles we draw. He leaps over the walls we erect.

Over the past year or so I have been coordinating an international project called, the Afterlives of Jesus. It is being published in three volumes, the first of which was released about 6 weeks ago, and the typeset pages of volume two are on my desk waiting for me to review them before they go to the printer. Volume three is not far behind.

What comes through clearly in the 30+ essays in those three volumes is that Jesus does not belong to the church. He means different things to different people and to different faiths. But he means a great deal to so many people, communities and cultures across time.

We no longer have a monopoly on Jesus, but we are a community that exists to live his wisdom and share his grace with everyone around us.

If only we had the eyes to see …

No more hatred of the Jews …

No more fear of the Muslims …

No more disdain for people with disabilities as somehow to be blamed for their situation …

No more insiders and outsiders …

No more them and us …

Lent 3 (A)
St Andrew’s Church, Lismore
12 March 2023
video

What a feast of Scripture we have been served by the lectionary this week!

It may just be drinks, but living water is still a powerful theme for us to reflect upon in this third week of Lent.

John says that Jesus rested by a well on his way north to Galilee after a stint at the southern end of the Jordan River where John had been drawing crowds for his religious renewal project. 

Jesus, of course, was among the crowds drawn to John.

That detail is not in the portion of John 4 we just read, but it puts the episode by the well in context.

The religious renewal project led by John was calling for people to do more than attend major festivals at the temple in Jerusalem. In that context, baptism in living water (that is fresh water running down the river) was a key symbol. 

Living water was on the mind of Jesus as he rested by the well, and not just any well. This was the well that people believed had been first dug by Jacob, the father of the famous twelve sons of Israel who purchased land at this location (Genesis 33:18–20).

Again, as an aside, notice that the ancestors purchased the lands they came to possess, in this part of the story. The concept of conquest and ethnic cleansing derives from the Joshua traditions.

“Israel” was the name given to Jacob after he spent an anxious night wrestling with a divine figure prior to his reconciliation with Esau. See Genesis 32:22–33:17.

So there is a powerful back story to this well and to the encounter with the local woman.

Wells

In fact, throughout the Bible, wells feature as the sites for important encounters, and often ones that have a critical role in the story of salvation:

• God reveals a hidden to Hagar (Genesis 16) 
• Abraham has a well at Beer-sheba (Genesis 21)
• Abraham’s trusted servant goes to a well when seeking a wife for Isaac (Genesis 24)
• Isaac digs his own well at Beer-sheba (Genesis 26)
• Jacob will meet Rachel at a well (Genesis 29)
• Moses famously meets his future wife at a well (Exodus 2)
• In early Christian tradition Gabriel meets Mary at the well

Here in John 4 Jesus rests by a well and the informed audience knows that he is about to meet someone and that something important is about to occur.

As we still see in many developing societies, collecting water from the community well was women’s work, and usually done early in the day or late afternoon.

The well—like the Furphy & Co water cart in WW1—was not just the place to get water. It was also the place to share news, hence the expression: a furphy (informal information and possibly false news).

The woman at the well

Jesus rests at the well around midday, while the disciples go into the city to look for something to eat.

Then the woman comes out to draw water.

Why at midday?

This is usually understood as a sign that she was not on talking terms with the other women from Sychar, but we can never know why she turned up at the well at the hottest time of the day.

Jesus does what men often do: he asks her get him a drink!

She is happy to do that, but notes that he seems to be Jewish and that people like him would not normally even touch a cup that has been handled by a Samaritan.

She is not inclined to cross cultural boundaries.

But Jesus is a repeat offender in that score.

He is talking with an unrelated woman, and he is asking a Samaritan to serve him a drink!

Living Water

The story is a long one, as is often the case in the Gospel of John. It goes all the way to verse 45! (I have spared you the joy hearing me read the whole thing.)

In this opening scene, Jesus opens up a conversation about living water.

In the sentences that follow directly after our excerpt ended, we have this exchange:

Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” [John 4:13–15 NRSV]

A few chapters later, in John 7—when we find Jesus in the temple that will feature in later parts of his conversation with the woman at the well—we find Jesus saying:

On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive … [John 7:37–39]

That, surely, is our request as we gather around the Table of Jesus today.

• Open a spiritual well deep within us!
• Let us drink from the water of eternal life; life that reflects eternity, not life that lasts forever.
• Quench our innermost thirst.
• May your Spirit surge within us and become a stream of living water for others.

Lent 2 (A)
St Andrew’s, Lismore
5 March 2023

Video of this sermon

As a general rule, I preach on the Gospel since that is the biblical text which points most directly to the risen Lord among us, within us, and between us as the gathered people of God.

But today I start my locum ministry here by breaking my own rule!

ABM Sunday

Today is being observed across the Diocese as ABM SUNDAY, so I want us to reflect more on the mission into which we are being called by God, so I should perhaps declare my own personal interest.

I am a member of the ABM Committee for the Diocese of Grafton, and when I was serving as Dean of St George’s College in Jerusalem I was serving as a missionary sent to that post by ABM.

In addition, the special focus for the ABM Lent Appeal this year is the Diocese of Jerusalem. As always our Good Friday offerings will be sent to Jerusalem to be used for the work of the Anglican Church in that region.

I am a Canon emeritus of St George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem, and I have very close links with people and parishes in that Diocese. That place matters to me and those people matter to me.

But there is another reason for my sermon this morning being grounded in the Abraham story from Genesis 12.

The 2022 floods

This time last year, our city and our local region were devastated by massive floods.

During the past week various events have recalled the floods, the devastation, the loss, the courage and the resilience of this amazing community.

Yesterday morning I sat in a steamy white plastic tent at the Quad with a small crowd to watch the documentary about the Tinnie Heroes.

Those events last year, all that has happened in between times, and the challenges we face right now are yet another reason to go with Abraham this morning and not with Nicodemus.

The people of the covenant

Chapter 12 marks a turning point in the book of Genesis.

During the opening eleven chapters, the ancient storyteller sketched the story of God’s dream for creation on a cosmic canvas: creation, paradise lost, the great flood (!!) and the tower of Babel.

Now the focus narrows to one person (Abram/Abraham/Ibrahim) and the family that will trace its ancestry back to him.

In this opening scene of the Abraham saga, the hero is told to go to a destination chosen by God but not yet revealed to Abraham:

Go from your country 
and your kindred 
and your father’s house
to the land that I will show you.

Genesis 12:1

Fortunately for Abram, that land was not Australia and the time was not now, as he would be turned away at gunpoint and sent to an offshore detention centre.

For Abraham, the unknown destination was not Australia but Palestine.

Like Australia, Palestine was no terra nullius.

It was not a land without people, for a people without land, as the Zionists told each other about 100 years ago.

Palestine had people living there. 

They lived in homesteads, villages, towns and a number of well-established cities.

Abraham was not sent there to displace them nor as punishment for their supposed sins. In fact, on the contrary, the purpose of Abraham and his clan coming to live among the Indigenous people of Palestine was to be a blessing for the Aboriginal peoples there.

Verse 3 is usually translated as: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

However, it is better translated this way:

And all the families of the land (‘adamah) shall bless themselves by you.

That is a fine point, but one worth pondering.

The point of the promise to Abram was not for his personal comfort and tribal success, but to be an agent of blessing for each and every community he lived among.

As we watch the tragic events unfolding in Palestine and Israel these past few weeks, these past 75 years, and for more than 130 years, it is clear that the promises to Abram have been sadly misunderstood. 

Presence among has become power over.

Being a blessing to others has become take it all for my own people.

Religion becomes the pretext for genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The opportunity for the descendants of Abraham to model shalom-salaam is wasted.

The colonial wars

It is not that we can point our fingers at the Jews in Palestine. 

They are simply seeking to do now what our forebears succeeded in doing 100+ years earlier than them. And even earlier in the Americas and southern Africa.

To our shame, the Christians of Europe not only persecuted the Jews but also conquered, subdued and almost entirely eradicated (murdered) the Indigenous people of those faraway lands to which we imagined ourselves to have a god-given right.

Kyrie eleison.

If only we had come in the spirit of Abraham in Genesis 12–25.

If only—even now—we might have the vision and the compassion to see how badly the Indigenous people of this land, and this valley, have been treated.

If only now we had the grace to say YES to allowing them a Voice to Parliament.

Lismore

We can look askance at Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians whose land and whose futures are being stolen and trashed.

We can pride ourselves on our new-found respect for the First Australians and our intention to vote YES! in the referendum.

But we also need to ask ourselves how our presence here in this local community has been a source of blessing, courage, goodness, hope and resilience during the past year. 

And all the years before last year.

That, after all, is our core mission.

We are not here to promote the Anglican Church, but to serve the people of Lismore in the name of Jesus.

If that is not our first priority then let’s not waste our time in seeking a new priest.

There is no need for a church that does not become a blessing to the people where it exists.

God give us the courage of Abram.

God call us into the only mission that matters.

Here or anywhere else, we only exist to be a channel of blessing to others.