Author: Gregory C. Jenks

Feast of St Peter & St Paul
St Paul’s Church
29 June 2025

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This weekend and next weekend we have two special Sundays:

Today we are celebrating one of the major feasts for Saint Paul

Next week we shall celebrate the feast of St Thomas.

These two festivals offer liturgical book ends as we wrap up our first six months together as the Ipswich Anglican Community, the new Parish of Ipswich, with our twin churches of St Paul and St Thomas.

This double celebration is an opportunity to reflect, affirm, celebrate and re-imagine.

This week I invite you to focus on what the legacy of Paul might mean for Ipswich Anglicans.

Next week we shall focus on the legacy of Thomas.

And next week I shall begin the sermon in the same way, except that I will be standing in St Thomas’ Church and all the time signals will be reversed.

Of course, next week we shall be thinking about the legacy of Thomas, and what spiritual wisdom we might draw from his legacy.

But this week we focus on Paul.

Paul is a larger-than-life figure in the New Testament.

At least in the eyes of the people creating the NT, Paul is the person who tells us most clearly and most decisively what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

A huge proportion of the NT is comprised of material linked with Paul. If we include Luke-Acts, then around half of the NT comes from the Pauline faction within the early Jesus movement.

For someone who most likely never met Jesus, that is an impressive statistic.

Whether we like Paul or not—and clearly many other leaders in the church did not like him—Paul is the most important interpreter of Jesus. Ever.

Unlike the other leaders in the Jesus movement, Paul was not from Galilee. He was a diaspora Jew with a good education and considerable social status. He was connected with powerful people in the upper layers of Jewish society and an eager “hitman” seeking to eradicate the Jesus heresy from getting a grip on their Jewish world.

His public activity probably extended over a period of 30 years: from the mid-30s to the mid-60s.

He first enters the story as an accessory to the murder of Stephen (Acts 7) and in the Epistle set for this morning, Paul is portrayed as sensing his own death as a martyr is close.

Paul could change his mind.

He enjoyed excellent personal and family privileges. He was passionate about the old ways, but he became equally passionate in his promotion of the gospel.

Paul had a life-changing encounter with the risen Jesus.

He came to see everything differently because of his absolute certainty that God had been active in Jesus and was offering the blessings once reserved for the biological descendants of Abraham to anyone and everyone who chose to trust in the faithfulness of Jesus.

Paul was a pastor and a team leader.

He never seems to have stayed long in once place, but during even a very short stay he could establish the nucleus of a Christ community and then provide pastoral oversight remotely via letters and messengers. He prayed for his people, and carried them always in his heart.

Paul as an early adopter of new technology.

Imagine what he could have done with our new livestreaming tools! In Paul’s case the new technology was the codex (book) that was replacing the scroll, and the recent development of the personal letter as a way for people to send messages back and forth across long distances. 

Paul was a mentor for ministry associates.

Paul attracted, cultivated and developed the leadership of emerging leaders in the early Jesus movement. The mentoring that he himself had received from Barnabas at Antioch was replicated and paid forward in his care for Andronicus, Chloe, Clement, Crescens, Demas, Epaphroditus, Euodia, Junia, Luke, Lydia, Mark, Mary, Onesimus, Philemon & Apphia, Phoebe, Priscilla & Aquila, Sosthenes, Syntyche, Tertius, Titus, Timothy, and Urbanus.

About half of those names are women!

Paul was an effective communicator

He was a teacher, and at times an argumentative sod. So I do have some characteristics in common with Paul! By spoken word and by written messages he explained, proclaimed, corrected and guided his congregations and his team of ministry leaders.

Paul was even endorsed by the author of 2 Peter, perhaps the final book of the NT by date:

So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures. [2Peter 3:15–16 NRSVue]

Paul was not the easiest guy to understand at times, but he was someone whose writings were already been accepted as belonging to the emerging set of Christian Scriptures.

As the Church of St Paul within the Ipswich Anglican Community we have a rich and powerful legacy.

Had we been following the normal readings from the lectionary today, we would have had the OT story of Elijah ascending into heaven in a fiery chariot while his mantle falls to earth and is eagerly collected by his successor, Elisha:

Elisha picked up the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan. He took the mantle of Elijah that had fallen from him and struck the water. He said, “Where is the LORD, the God of Elijah? Where is he?” He struck the water again, and the water was parted to the one side and to the other, and Elisha crossed over. [2Kings 2:13–14 NRSVue]

May we gather the mantle of Paul and claim the spiritual blessings poured out on the church through the Apostle Paul.

Not for our sake, but for the sake of the city of Ipswich and all whose lives we touch with the good news of Jesus.

Trinity Sunday
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
15 June 2025

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A year ago—at least a year ago in church calendar terms—on this special festival day, I was taking my first service at St Thomas’ Church, having only begun as your locum priest a few Sundays earlier.

It was my fourth Sunday in the parish.

As I reflected with the folk at St Thomas’ Church on the significance of the Trinity, I explored the idea that this uniquely Christian understanding of God also offers us a model for a unified ministry that encompassed both our churches, while celebrating difference and maintaining diversity.

At one point I said:

I think our understanding of God as Trinity offers a model for ways we can work together.

We believe that Father, Son and Spirit exist in, with and for each other.

It seems to me that this is the understanding that has to be at the basis of our shared future together, for surely our future is a shared one.

Well, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since that Sunday last year.

Look at us now.

Within a few weeks of that sermon, the Parish Council at St Thomas’ Church took a bold decision to request they join with St Paul’s Church and form a new ministry unit together here in the heart of Ipswich.

I take no credit for that decision and do not think my Trinity Sunday sermon last year was a game-changer, but looking back I am struck with how everything came together so well in those middle months of last year.

Twelve months later we are eagerly awaiting the arrival of our new parish priest, and we look forward to his leadership as we explore what being one parish with two churches means for us.

We look back, we look around and we look forward.

Our lives as people of faith seem to have many trinitarian dimensions.

That triple perspective is also seen as we bring a young child for Baptism this morning.

Looking back

We look back with fresh insight to understand how the past has shaped who we are and where we are now.

The legacy of the past may be a mixed bag. Some stuff we delight to recall. Other moments we would love to forget. Old wounds may not yet have healed. Challenges and opportunities. 

Each time we gather for worship we look back and name our need for forgiveness, healing and transformation.

We are not obsessed by guilt. We simply have our eyes wide-open about the need to grow, heal and transform.

We turn to Christ, as we shall say in the Baptism service shortly.

Looking around

We also celebrate the grace and the fresh beginnings represented by the present moment. This is never more so than when we hold a new child in our arms.

We cannot go back to the past and we cannot stay in the present, but while we are here we can treasure this moment; a moment of grace.

As we baptise Oliver this morning, we share a moment of grace.

Like all of us, Oliver is loved by God. We may not be able to see that in our lives, but we can see it in the innocence of a child.

Oliver is loved by God simply because he is Oliver.

Not for what he does, what he thinks or what he believes.

Simply for who he is.

And that is also true for each of us.

Just as we are, we are loved unconditionally by God.

In this moment, as we baptise Oliver, we catch a glimpse of that unconditional love that surrounds each of us and all of us every moment.

Looking ahead

Even here in this moment we are looking ahead.

We are making promises to be there for Oliver and for each other in the years ahead.

No matter what the past may have been like for any of us, and no matter how we understand this present moment of grace, we all want Oliver to grow up knowing that he is loved by family, friends and God.

Today here in this church we promise to do whatever it takes to ensure that Oliver knows that he is loved.

It is sometimes said that it takes a village to raise a child.

Villages are hard to find in our sprawling suburbs and fast-moving world, but St Paul’s Church is Oliver’s village.

We are here for him, for his parents and his godparents, and for his wider family.

As we all live into the mystery of God who defies our best attempts to find the right words, we shall find that we are in, with and for each other.

We are one.

We are diverse.

We are loved.

Pentecost Sunday
St Paul’s Church Ipswich
8 June 2025

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Today we conclude the Great Fifty Days of Easter.

This is a day of celebration.

A week of weeks has passed since Easter morning and now we move into a new phase of our life and mission together in the heart of Ipswich.

In another 50 days—another week of weeks—we shall be welcoming Mpole and his family among us as he commences his ministry as our new Parish Priest.

Today we look 50 days back to Easter and 50 days forward to a whole new beginning.

We are at the midpoint of a very special 100 days.

In the Gospel today we are introduced to an unusual word: paraclete.

That term is used four times in John’s material relating to the Last Supper and just one other time in the New Testament: 1 John 2:1 where Jesus is called our Paraclete.

It is never used in the other Gospels. Paul never uses it. Nor do any of the other NT books. It is a word only found within the Johannine communities around the end of the first century.

I would not normally base a sermon around one word in a Bible passage, but I think this word is worth us spending some time to mull it over, as it were.

We discussed this word during our Thursday night online Bible study when we looked at the readings for the next Sunday, so I want to share some of our insights from that discussion with you all here this morning.

The basic meaning of the Greek word is plain enough: called—or maybe, sent—alongside.

We have quite a variety of ways in which this Greek term is translated into English, and even more variety when translators try to express its central idea in other world languages and cultures:

• KJV (1611) – Comforter
• Douay-Rheims (1750) – Paraclete
• New American Standard Bible (1977) – Helper
• New Jerusalem Bible (1990) – Paraclete
• New International Version – Counsellor (1984), Advocate (2011)
• ESV (2016) – Helper
• NRSV (2021) – Advocate
• Holman Christian Standard Bible (2003) – Counsellor

When Jesus speaks of this other Paraclete who he or the Father will send once Jesus is no longer with us, it is quite clear that Jesus is describing the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit of Truth as the ongoing presence of God with us, among us and between us.

But I am intrigued—and we were all intrigued last Thursday night—by the phase “another Paraclete.”

This invites us to think of Jesus as also being our Paraclete, and indeed as the original Paraclete.

This invites us to reflect on how we understand the role Jesus had in the lives of the people of his time, as we seek to grasp what may be the role of the Spirit of Truth in our lives now.

Without going too deeply down the rabbit hole here, let’s just pick up the idea that Jesus was Emmanuel, God with us.

Emmanuel may be one way to get to the heart of what paraclete means.

It is a familiar way of describing Jesus, although we tend only to use that word in Advent and at Christmas time.

• As God-with-us, Jesus comes among us and calls us to turn to God  
• As God-with-us, Jesus forgives our sins and offers us new life.
• As God-with-us, Jesus heals us and calms our troubled souls.
• As God-with-us, Jesus teaches the wisdom we need for everyday life as the people of God.
• As God-with-us, Jesus sends us out to share the good news.

This other Paraclete, the Spirit of Truth, is also God-with-us, also Emmanuel:

• As God-with-us, the Spirit of Truth comes among us and calls us to turn to God.
• As God-with-us, the Spirit of Truth forgives our sins as we are baptised.
• As God-with-us, the Spirit of Truth renews the life of God within us in the Eucharist.
• As God-with-us, the Spirit of Truth speaks to us as the Scriptures are read.
• As God-with-us, the Spirit of Truth empowers us to share the good news with others.

The God who has been known to us as Jesus the Christ, the Anointed One, is the same God now known among us as the Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus.

The same God.

The same dynamic power seen wherever God is active.

The same enlivening, healing and transformative presence.

Emmanuel once more, as always.

With us during the next 50 days, and all the days after that as well.

Alleluia. Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

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.

Feast of St Mark
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
27 April 2025

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Today we celebrate the legacy of John Mark, better known to us Saint Mark.

He is remembered in the thousands of churches, hospitals, health clinics, schools and colleges named after him: from the Basilica of St Mark in Venice to St Marks National Theological Centre in Canberra, and from St Mark’s Anglican Church in Warwick to the Coptic Cathedral Church of St Mark in Cairo (Egypt).

Most famously of all, Mark is remembered each we open the New Testament see that the four Gospels are named: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

We read from the Gospel according to Saint Mark just now.

I wonder how closely you were listening to the Gospel as I read it for you.

For the first time ever, I am kind of hoping that you were NOT listening very closely as that was kind of a weird passage that we heard.

It is also kind of weird for me to say that I hoped you were not listening when I went to all the trouble to draw your attention to the Gospel today.

We carried to Gospel book down into the middle of the church, as we always do. We had candles and a cross. We sang special music as I carried the Gospel book. And everyone stood up to listen to the words that I was reading.

It was just like every other Sunday; except this time, I was kind of hoping no-one was really paying attention.

Why is that?

Well, it is a little bit complicated, but it is also kind of interesting. At least, I hope so.

And maybe there is also an important lesson about how we listen to the Bible and how we find our way in the sometimes-ambivalent world of the church.

The story starts in the final decades of the first century. 

In the year 70 CE the Roman armies captured Jerusalem after a 4-year rebellion by the Jews. They burnt the temple and destroyed the whole city. The war did not end immediately, but after another 4 years the Romans had defeated every stronghold of the rebels, including the famous desert fortress of Masada.

At some stage during the 15 or 20 years after the Roman victory, someone created the first written story about Jesus. We call that document, The Gospel according to Mark.

It was the first of the Gospels to be written, so far as we can tell. 

Even when other gospels were written and between them preserved almost everything that we have in the little Gospel of Mark while adding extra material, for some reason the early church kept Mark in the NT alongside Matthew, Luke and John.

But there is another twist to this story.

The final page of the Gospel of Mark is missing. 

We have thousands of handwritten copies of the New Testament, including quite a number relating to Mark. Almost all of them include the words that I read earlier, but the oldest and “better” copies of Mark do not have those extra words.

We can say with confidence that the material I just read was not originally part of the Gospel according to Mark.

On the other hand, for almost every Christian between about 400 and 1950 these words were in their copy of the Bible, even though almost everyone agrees now that they were not written by Mark.

It feels odd to discard these words after more than 1,500 years, but it is important that we listen to the original version of the Bible so far as we can.

These words seemed to have been composed to “fix” the problem of Mark not having a “proper” ending.

This seems to have happened between 150 and 250 CE.

The good news: poison drinks and venomous snakes are part of our church activities. Phew!

The bad news: we need to switch on our brains when we read or listen to the Bible.

Actually, that is not just true for the Bible. It also applies to prayers, liturgies, hymns, songs and sermons.

And that brings us around to the question of discipleship and faith formation.

These children we have baptised this morning, along with Annabelle who we baptised last Sunday and Carter who I will baptise at 10.30 today, are learning how to be followers of Jesus.

They learn to do that by participating in the life of the church, including our use of the Bible, the prayers we say, the songs we sing, the sermons we hear and the actions we undertake together in the wider community. For example, the food ministry each Sunday afternoon.

All of those things together—along with the personal witness of the Spirit of God within us—teach us how to be followers of Jesus.

But—get this point, for it is very important—none of them are perfect.

Sometimes things are said or done or explained in ways that are not fully in keeping with the Spirit of Jesus. Even our capacity to listen well to the voice of the Spirit is distorted at times.

That is why we need to develop the skills of discernment, and to practice those skills with our fellow disciples.

Rather than say, “This is what Jesus wants us to do …” it is better for us to ask, “What do you think Jesus is asking us to do …?”

Teaching that capacity for discernment is the most important thing that parents and godparents can do for the children in their care, and it is also the most important thing we can teach adult converts as well.

“Have we got the correct answer?” is not as important as asking “How do I discern what Jesus is asking me to do?”

Learning to ask the right question is more important than having the correct answer.

When we do that, we also discover that Jesus does not want us drinking cups of poison or handling venomous snakes!

Thanks be to God!