Author: Gregory C. Jenks

Christ Church Cathedral Grafton
Creation Time 1: Earth
5 September 2021

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Season of Creation

What were you doing in 1989?

On 1 September that year, Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I proclaimed that date as a day of special prayers for creation by members of the Orthodox family of churches throughout the world.

In the 32 years which have passed since that proclamation, the idea has spread and developed further.

The World Council of Churches embraced the idea but extended the Season of Creation through to the feast for St Francis of Assisi on 4 October. 

In his 2015 encyclical—Laudato Si’ (“Praise be to you, my Lord”)—Pope Francis invoked the words of the famous Canticle of the Sun composed by Francis of Assisi:

Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth,
who sustains and governs us,
and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.

The encyclical is well worth a careful read, but at more than 40,000 words is far too lengthy and complex to read during a church service. I draw your attention to the link in these sermon notes, and encourage you to reflect on the wisdom of Francis; both the saint and the Pope.

God saw what happened and it was good

Our first reading this morning was the opening words of the Bible: Genesis chapter one. We only read as far as verse 25 because we shall read the following verses next Sunday when we reflect on humanity as part of creation.

The opening lines of the ancient Hebrew Scriptures imagine the creation of the universe as a process spread over a week.

It is a carefully crafted text, with actions on days 1-2-3 paralleled by developments on days 4-5-6. As is well known, on the seventh day (Shabbat), there is no more creating to be done and God rests.

We are invited to share that sacred rest, and indeed that may be the ultimate point of the opening chapter.

We tend to read it as an account of God making everything, but in reality it is a poetic invitation to join God in observing Shabbat. The point of creation is not activity (staying busy), but resting mindfully.

Along the way we see the harmony of creation and its intrinsic goodness. At the end of the each of the six days of creative activity, other than day 2 when God simply creates the sky, we read: “And God saw that it was good …”

We miss the point of this classic spiritual text if we mistake it for a description of how the world was made. This “story,” as it is called in Genesis 2:4a, is about who made everything (i.e., where does the universe come from) and the character of the universe (it is good) and the point of it all (resting awe).

Creation matters to God

In the ancient world and even in some forms of Christianity today, there is an idea that the physical world is somehow inferior to the physical world, and that this life does not matter as much as the life to come.

Our biblical texts today make it clear that such ideas are mistaken.

Rather than being a distraction from God’s core business, the universe is a sacrament of divine presence, power and truth.

The universe exists because God wished it to be so and it derives from God’s inner love seeking self-expression.

To love nature and care for creation is to worship God.

Indeed, for Christians, God not only created the world but became part of the world in the person of Jesus.

As theologian Sally McFague has reminded us, we can (she would say “must”) think of the world as God’s body.

As Christians we are not really into abstract ideas and disembodied spirits. Our metaphor for afterlife is “resurrection of the body” and not—as many Christians mistakenly think—immortality of the soul. That idea is never found in the Bible, but comes from Greek philosophy.

Logos Hymn

Let’s conclude this brief reflection for the first Sunday in Creation Time with the soaring theology of John chapter one.

This hymn of the Logos is clearly a riff on the creation poem of Genesis.

In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came into being.
What has come into being in him was life,
and the life was the light of all people.
The light shines in the darkness,
and the darkness did not overcome it. [John 1:1–5]

This Logos that brought the universe into being is also at work in us; if we accept his activity within us:

The true light, which enlightens everyone,
was coming into the world.
He was in the world,
and the world came into being through him;
yet the world did not know him.
He came to what was his own,
and his own people did not accept him. [John 1:9–11]

And note especially the stunning final stanza of the Logos Hymn:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us,
and we have seen his glory,
the glory as of a father’s only son,
full of grace and truth. [John 1:14]

The Word became flesh and pitched his tent with us …

There is no essential divide between matter and the spirit.

We care about the world—and we care for our Planet Earth—because they are not only gifts from God, but also because these are ways for us to express our love for God.

I finish with these words from St Francis:

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, 
especially through my lord Brother Sun, 
who brings the day; and you give light through him. 
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendour! 
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars, 
in heaven you formed them clear and precious and beautiful.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Wind, 
and through the air, cloudy and serene, 
and every kind of weather through which 
You give sustenance to Your creatures.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water,
which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Brother Fire, 
through whom you light the night and he is beautiful 
and playful and robust and strong.

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth, 
who sustains us and governs us and who produces 
varied fruits with coloured flowers and herbs.

Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
Pentecost 13B
22 August 2021

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This seems like a good day to talk about prayer …

Prayer is always an important topic:

• relates to PRAXIS and not THEORY
• touches on how faith is done outside the walls of the Cathedral
• but also concerns the essential spiritual DNA of the Cathedral

We are a place of prayer:

• our bricks call people to imagine there is more to life than the everyday
• we point to eternity
• we invite people to connect

Our readings today all refer to prayer:

• Dedication of the temple in Jerusalem
• Psalm 84
• Paul urges his readers to pray for him
• Jesus attends synagogue in Capernaum

But this is also a day when churches are calling on the nation to pray

• we might wonder why now and not much sooner than now
• but today is the chosen date
• should we join in?
• will it make any difference?

If prayer worked

So, I start by asking, Does prayer work?

Imagine if it did!

• droughts would vanish
• floods would not happen
• bush fires would not wreak havoc on creation
• wars would disappear
• peace would break out everywhere
• hatred, fear and xenophobia would vanish
• the Queen would live for ever
• all illness would disappear
• cancer would not steal our loved ones from our arms
• we would have the politicians we need rather than the ones we deserve
• and every lapsed grandchild would come back to the faith

If prayer worked in the ways we pretend that we expect it to work, then the Cathedral would be packed every Sunday. And probably every day during the week as well! People would be banging on our doors and flooding our email account, asking us to teach them how to pray.

However, prayer is not a formula; it is an attitude.

God is not enmeshed in our transactions, and she is not interested in cutting a special deal for us! No matter what we promise to do afterwards if God would just do this little thing for us … right now!

BTW, we cannot escape from this moral challenge by invoking, “God knows best” when our prayers are not answered.

If God actually knows best, then why do so many bad things happen all the time?

And what kind of God are people imagining when they even speak about God in such terms?

Looking at this from another angle: God’s perspective

We often think about prayer from our human perspective:

• we are asking for things that we cannot achieve by ourselves
• in our better moments, prayer is attentive appreciation for life
• for advanced souls, prayer is simply choosing to be in the presence of the sacred

But have we ever thought about prayer from God’s perspective?

• can we imagine God praying for something?
• Jesus could and I do
• for Jesus, God’s prayer is called the commonwealth of God
• it is expressed in the creation of our amazing cosmos in all its diversity

God has a dream (a prayer, a hope).

Like our own prayers, God’s prayer also seems mostly to go unfulfilled

But do we imagine that God ever stops praying? Indeed, in the NT we are asked to imagine Jesus praying for us without ever taking a break!

So, prayer is not really about outcomes but about inputs.

So we choose prayer

We choose to pray.

We do that not because it is a get-out-of-jail card. Rather, we pray because that engages us in the reality about which we are praying.

If we pray about the poor, we find that we start to care about them. Or perhaps we do already care about them and that is why we pray. Perhaps it is a circle with care growing deeper as we pray more, and those prayers combined with compassion generating action to make a difference … then more prayer, more compassion, more action … more prayer …

You can repeat that paragraph with peace, refugees, climate change, or COVID-19 … in place of “the poor.” 

But never forget that it is the poor who always suffer most, as we are seeing repeatedly in Western Sydney these past few weeks.

It is the poor who are central to God’s own prayers, and it is no surprise that they were right at the centre of the ministry of Jesus.

There is no situation which is not improved by prayer when those prayers draw us into compassionate solidarity with those for whom we pray and compel us into action to set the world aright so that God’s prayers can be answered. By us!

Dormition of our Lady
Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
15 August 2021

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Mary, Mother of the Lord

Our liturgical headline this Sunday is the feast day to commemorate the death of Mary, mother of our Lord.

For Christians in the East, this the feast of the Falling Asleep of the Virgin, the Dormition. For Roman Christians in the West, it is the Feast of the Assumption. For Australian Anglicans it is the last of a series of six Marian festivals which retain “red letter” status in our calendar:

• December 8 Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
• September 8 Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
• March 25 Annunciation of Our Saviour to the Blessed Virgin Mary (Lady Day)
• May 31 Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
• February 2 Purification of the Blessed Virgin
• August 15 The Blessed Virgin Mary or “The Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary”

Like all the other Marian feasts, this festival is a mix of fact and pious imagination.

The factual element is simply that Mary surely died at some stage during the first century. It is actually remarkable that she was still alive around the time of Easter, since peasant women rarely lived into middle age or beyond. We can presume she died within a decade or so of Easter.

The rest is pious imagination from much later times, reflecting devotion to Mary as the ever-Virgin Mother of God (Theotokos in Greek).

Truth to tell we know almost nothing about Mary, and we know even less about her personality, her emotions or her personal religion. That, of course, has not prevented the hagiographers from providing intimate details of her life and inner disposition.

The ancient Christians—and many modern believers—like to imagine Mary as perfect in every way, as befits (they imagine) the mother of our Lord.

Solomon

In the first reading, which comes from the regular lections for this Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, we have a very different character: Solomon, the fabled ruler of Jerusalem.

Here too the character is mostly sketched by pious imagination. There is very little history, if any, in the way that the Bible describes Solomon. 

However, Solomon could hardly be more different from Mary of Nazareth, mother of the Lord.

To take one simple point of difference: Mary is widely believed to have been a virgin when Jesus was conceived and to have remained a virgin throughout her whole life. Solomon, on the other hand, famously had 700 wives (all of them princesses) and 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3).

Despite that remarkable conjugal achievement, as the Bible tells the tale, Solomon was the wisest man who ever lived. 

Yet the same Bible describes his reign as a failure and his legacy as civil war.

Truth beyond factuality

Neither character’s story is based in history.

These tales are the stuff of legend, and they are spun by powerful men who despised and feared the feminine. They seem mostly to be repeated and defended today by men with those same mindsets.

Yet the point of these pious fictions is not what they pretend to tell us about either Mary or Solomon.

The point of these stories is that they invite us to imagine what constitutes a good life.

Today we reflect on the death of a peasant woman from a remote Galilean village, and the career of a powerful king who collected women as trophies the way some people collect sports cars or race horses.

So what is the good life?

And what part does religion play in us attaining the good life?

Is the Cathedral offering medication for anxiety, or wisdom for life?

Are we selling fire insurance for the next life, or making meaning out of this life here and now?

Are we pretending to have the answers for everyone’s questions, or are we seeking to form a spiritual community which follows a path that allows us to live with the questions and not need to have all the answers?

In the story of Mary, the good life is to SAY YES to God.

In the story of Solomon, the good life is to SEEK WISDOM not power.

As we come to the Table of Jesus this morning, I am seeking wisdom for life. 

How about you?

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Year B)
Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
12 July 2021

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This week we have another biblical curve ball served up the lectionary committee. Thanks, guys!

In both the first reading from 2 Samuel 6 and the Gospel we have rich and powerful men behaving badly. Like footballers. Like politicians. Like rich and powerful blokes.

The Gospel passage starts innocently enough: Antipas wants to meet Jesus. 

Who didn’t; and who doesn’t?

But then Mark gets into the gossip. We all love gossip.

Matthew (to his credit) cleans it up a bit, while Luke simply omits that whole scene from his Gospel.

It seems to me that Herodias was not the only person dancing. There was also a weird kind of threesome involving Antipas, John and Jesus.

Let’s review the dance cards.

Antipas

Herod Antipas if you don’t mind. Better still, just call me, Herod!

Antipas was one of three surviving sons of Herod the Great. In the competition over succession following the death of Herod I, Antipas got second prize. His brother Archelaus was given a half-share of their father’s kingdom, while Antipas and their half-brother Philip each received one quarter. Hence the title, Tetrarch (ruler of a fourth).

Antipas spent much of his 40+ years as a ruler trying to secure the Roman appointment as “King of the Jews,” but ended up in exile after his nephew—Herod Agrippa I—accused him of planning a rebellion and snatched the prized title for himself. 

The territory assigned to Antipas was in two pieces: a southern region (Peraea) on the eastern banks of the Jordan River, plus Galilee in the north.

Antipas was obsessed with royal power and ended up losing everything. He is a tragic figure.

John

John was a Jewish prophet who was active in the southern area controlled by Antipas.

From the perspective of Antipas, John was a troublemaker and a potential rebel. John was stirring up opposition to Antipas on the basis of him divorcing his first wife, a Nabataean princess, and marrying Herodias, his sister-in-law.

Actually, Antipas had bigger problems than John since his former father-in-law was less than impressed and invaded Antipas’s territory. The Roman Legate in Syria did eventually intervene to rescue Antipas and compelled Aretas to withdraw, but he also seemed hostile towards Antipas and delayed intervening until after Antipas had suffered serious losses.

John’s public criticism was not helping Antipas get over the public humiliation.

Worse still, John was telling everyone who would listen that God was about to send the Messiah and establish a new kingdom that would reflect the covenant values of God.

Just as his father had wished to do before him with the visting Magi, Antipas detained the troublesome prophet and eventually had him executed. The murder is historical fact, but the events of Mark 6 seem to be legend.

Antipas would be amazed to think people are still talking about John and Jesus after 2,000 years, while hardly anyone has heard of him!

Jesus

When John was arrested by Antipas that seems to have been the trigger for Jesus to begin his activity in the northern region of Antipas’ micro-kingdom (see Matthew 4:12-17):

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali … From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” [Matthew 4:12–13, 17]

Jesus was a protégé of John, and he steps into the gap caused by the arrest of John. From his own prison cell, John sent disciples to ask Jesus whether he was “the one who is to come”:

When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” [Matthew 11:2–3]

Jesus based himself at Capernaum, which was about halfway between the new city Antipas had founded at Tiberias and the “safe zone” in the NE region of Palestine ruled by Philip the Tetrarch, Antipas’ step-brother and bitter rival for the throne.

Several of the disciples of Jesus came from Bethsaida inside the territory of Philip, and according to Matthew the parents of Jesus came from the southern region originally allocated to Archelaus. The circle of Jesus had no reason to support Antipas, and all the more so after he arrests and then murders John.

Antipas hears rumors about a John 2.0, a guy called “Jesus” (Joshua in Hebrew). Antipas wonders whether John has been raised from the dead. He wants to meet Jesus.

Jesus was also talking about imperial power, and speaks incessantly of the reign/empire of God (basileia tou theou) which was not only coming very soon but was already here!

Indeed, Jesus tells people to act as if the reign of God is already here.

That means, of course, acting as if Herod Antipas is no longer the Tetrarch and will never become king.

Antipas meets Jesus

In the Gospel of Luke, there is one scene where Antipas finally gets to meet Jesus. Like Jesus, Antipas is in Jerusalem for Passover when Jesus is arrested by the Temple authorities and handed over to the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. When Pilate hears that Jesus is from Galilee he passes the problem of what to do with Jesus across to Antipas:

When Pilate heard this, he asked whether the man was a Galilean. And when he learned that he was under Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent him off to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at that time. When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had been wanting to see him for a long time, because he had heard about him and was hoping to see him perform some sign. He questioned him at some length, but Jesus gave him no answer. The chief priests and the scribes stood by, vehemently accusing him. Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him; then he put an elegant robe on him, and sent him back to Pilate. That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies. [Luke 23:6–12]

This episode, of course, is the scene in Jesus Christ Superstar when Herod invites Jesus to perform a miracle, or maybe just walk across his swimming pool!

Jesus, I am overjoyed 
You’ve been getting quite a name 
All around the place. 

Healing cripples 
Raising from the dead. 
And now I understand 
You’re God … 
At least that’s what You’ve said. 

So You are the Christ 
You’re the great Jesus Christ. 
Prove to me that you’re divine 
Change my water into wine. 

That’s all you need do 
And I’ll know it’s all true. 
C’mon King of the Jews. 

Jesus, you just won’t believe  
The hit you’ve made around here. 
You are all we talk about 
The wonder of the year! 

Oh, what a pity  
If it’s all a lie …
Still I’m sure that you can rock 
The cynics if you try. 

So if you are the Christ 
You’re the great Jesus Christ 
Prove to me that 
You’re no fool 
Walk across my swimming pool. 

If You do that for me 
Then I’ll let you go free. 
C’mon, King of the Jews!

I only ask things I’d ask any superstar. 
What is it that you have got 
That puts You where You are? 

I am waiting, yes, I’m a captive fan 
I’m dying to be shown 
That You are not just any man. 

So if you are the Christ 
Yes, the great Jesus Christ 
Feed my household with this bread 

You can do it on your head. 
Or has something gone wrong? 
Why do You take so long? 
Come on, King of the Jews! 

Hey, aren’t you scared of me, Christ? 
Mr. Wonderful Christ …
You’re a joke, You’re not the Lord! 
You are nothing but a fraud! 

Take Him away 
He’s got nothing to say 
Get out, You King of the … get out 
Get out, You King of the Jews
Get out, You King of the Jews 
Get out of my life!

Antipas wanted to meet Jesus.

As Luke tells the story there is no meeting of minds. Their ideas of power are light years apart. Antipas wants to control others and enjoy power for himself.

Jesus sees power as loving service, tender care, liberating the prisoners, healing the sick. When he replied to the messengers from John, Jesus said: 

Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” [Matthew 11:4–6]

So Antipas got to meet Jesus. 

Sadly, Antipas had eyes but could not see, and ears but could not hear.

Antipas and Pilate were reconciled after years of rivalry. They saw the world the same way.

As we meet Jesus at the Table this morning, he invites us to see the world differently and live as if the rich and powerful were not in charge. Dare we do that?