Category: Sermons

Christ Church Cathedral Grafton
Creation Sunday 2: Fauna and Flora
8 September 2019

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During this special series, the season of creation, throughout September we are exploring various aspects of the web of life; that complex and subtle web of relationships between all of us and all of existence.

Last week we reflected on the oceans, that vast body of waters from which all life has emerged.

This week, our focus moves to fauna and flora, the animal kingdom and world of plants found in all their abundant diversity across our glorious planet.

In the ancient Hebrew poem which opens the Bible, we observe a symbolic symmetry between the creation of dry land, the sea and plants on day three, and the creation of animal life (including humans)—creatures who live on the dry land and eat the plants—on day six.

All animals depend on plants, not least for the oxygen they generate. Sea creatures, birds, land creatures are all connected in the fragile web of life.

The Bible encourages us to see all of this as God’s design.

The Scriptures also affirm that this is all good. Every aspect of creation is assessed by God and pronounced to be good, while on Day Six we are told that God saw everything that s/he had made and “indeed it was very good”.

 

Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds! (Psalm 148:100

It is often easier for us to recognise our affinity with the animal kingdom.

As sentient beings, we discern a kinship with the animals that is reinforced by our knowledge of evolution, by the study of our skeletal structures and—more recently—by DNA research.

For many thousands of years, humans have shared our lives with some animals more than others: dogs, cats, horses, donkeys, camels, goats, sheep and cattle among many others.

We have changed through this relationship and so have they.

• Companion animals
• Wild animals
• Working animals
• Production animals
• Dangerous animals
• Scary animals
• Pests

All creatures “great and small”

The diversity of animal life is one of the great ecological assets of our world, and yet that diversity is threatened by our collective actions.

A recent UN report advised that one billion species at risk of extinction.

“Biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people are our common heritage and humanity’s most important life-supporting ‘safety net’. But our safety net is stretched almost to breaking point,” said Prof. Sandra Díaz (Argentina)

According to the IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson:

“The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”

The scientists tell us that it is not too late to turn things around, yet we may wonder what all this has to do with religion.

In fact, for people of faith the future of the planet has everything to do with religion.

It is not just we humans who are beloved by God and for whom God has a dream of a blessed future in perfect harmony and peace. That vision extends to all God’s creation: all the animals, all the plants, the earth itself and the oceans as well.

When we understand our role in the scheme of things, we see ourselves stewards of creation.

If we take our creation theology seriously then we must do all we can to save the planet from the catastrophe that is about to befall us.

 

From grasslands to forests

There is a similar diversity among the plants, but we tend not to relate to our plants in quite the same way we engage with at least some of the animals.

They mostly seem not to be sentient beings, although some avid gardeners insist that their plants respond to more than light and water.

From the beauty of a delicate new bud to the grandeur of a mighty rainforest, the plants evoke a response of awe, admiration, connection and presence.

Some of them have a brief life cycle that makes us seem like the ancient of days, while others live for such a long period that we seem insignificant beside them.

They feed us and they provide the oxygen we need to survive.

Yet we have cut them down, cleared them from the land and set them ablaze … almost always in the search for commercial gain.

We have sold our soul, and what have we achieved?

As the ancient forests of the Amazon blaze with fire we are not just burning down the house, we are giving the animal kingdom a massive case of emphysema.

We are destroying the living creatures who create and purify the air we need.

There is no need to argue about original sin.

Our latest sin is both foolish and self-evident.

 

Consider the lilies

Well might the sage of Nazareth urge us to consider the lilies, to reflect on the ravens … to look beyond our own insecurities and see the bigger picture.

Do not be anxious, says Jesus.

Your father knows what you need.

Relax, focus on what really matters.

Let God take care of those things we really do need.

Focus our best energies on the things where we can make a difference.

 

That is not permission to ignore climate change.

But it is an invitation to stop and smell the roses, to see the staggering diversity of creation that we mostly rush past in our glass and steel cages, or with our faces turned to our smartphones.

 

If Jesus were here today, perhaps he would revise those words from Luke?

Maybe he would say, “There is a good kind of anxiety and a bad kind anxiety.”

It is right to be anxious about creation, but it is wrong to be anxious about our accessories and our comfort.

Actually, he did say that even in Luke:

“Do not keep striving for what you are to eat … and wear;
… instead, strive for God’s kingdom …”

Or in even more direct terms:

“Stop stressing about your first-world problems,
and look at what is happening in the world around us!”

Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
First Sunday of Creation: Ocean
1 September 2019

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Season of Creation: Ocean Sunday

Well, we have no shortage of themes to consider here this morning:

• For starters, it’s Fathers’ Day (at least here in the southern hemisphere).
• In addition, it is the first Sunday of the season of creation and a day when we celebrate the ocean (even though we are many kilometres from the sea).
• It’s also a day when we will be baptising little Ruby and celebrating her presence among us and all that she is going to become in the wider world.
• And it’s a day when the family of Jim Harper has gathered so that we can lay his ashes to rest in the memorial garden beside the cathedral.

Yes, we pretty well have it all today — without even thinking about the topics to be covered in the dean’s forum at 11 AM.

I want to keep our primary focus on Ocean Sunday but weave into that line of thought various other connections as we go along. So buckle your belts and get ready for the ride.

 

Season of Creation

The season of creation is a recent ecumenical and international initiative. It reflects a growing awareness of the ecological dimensions of our faith and also of the religious dimensions of the earth, and our deepest character as Earthlings.

For those of us in the southern hemisphere, one happy outcome from this initiative is that for once in the year what we’re doing inside the church with our liturgies reflects what is happening outside the church in nature.

For most of the year our liturgical cycle is based upon the northern calendar, but for the next few weeks what we’re doing inside church reflects what is happening outside in the garden as new life breaks through the soil, plants blossom and many creatures welcome their new offspring.

Of course, the choice of dates for the season of creation was not made for the benefit of Aussies, Argentinians, Kiwis, or South Africans. Rather, the timing of the season is based on the annual celebration of St Francis of Assisi on October 4. We simply work back the four or five Sundays during September to carve out this special opportunity to celebrate and to reflect upon our place within the web of life.

 

The web of life

We are becoming more familiar with the concept of the web of life.

This idea has deep theological and philosophical roots, and these have recently been validated and extended by scientific discoveries relating to DNA more generally and the human genome in particular.

We now have a whole new appreciation of our deep connection with other people as well as with all of the life forms on this fragile planet.

This sense of deep unity with one another and with all creation is something that we celebrate in the Holy Communion liturgy each and every time that we gather around the Table of Jesus.

 

Ocean Sunday

On this first Sunday of Creation we pause and reflect on the ocean, where all life began. We appreciate our intimate connection with oceans, seas, lake and rivers. And we reflect that our own lives took form in the secret ocean of our mother’s uterus. Before the waters broke.

When we stand on the seashore and watch the immense ocean flowing up to our feet, we are in a sacred space; just as when we hold a new-born baby in our arms. On the edge of mystery. On the edge of the deep.

For those of us who are fathers, we are conscious of being in a line that stretches back into the distant past and beyond us into our children and their children.

Our fathers and grandfathers held us in their arms as our life began, and we gently place their remains in the ground after their lives have ended.

The web of life. We are all connected. We are all one.

All this and more is swirling around us today as we celebrate Ocean Sunday.

But our Bible readings this morning nudge us to engage with these dynamics in some different and particular ways. Let’s turn to them now.

 

Job 38

The first reading this morning was from the book of Job, one of the classic texts of western civilisation.

As the story goes, for more than 30 consecutive chapters (chs 3–37) in that book, God has been listening to Job’s complaint. Life is unfair. He has been treated badly. Job is the ultimate good person to whom really bad things have happened. He wants to ‘shirt front’ God. He has had enough.

Starting with the passage we heard just now, God ‘spits the dummy’. God, for her part, has had enough of Job’s complaints. Enough already! Halaas!

Note the opening lines from chapter 38 as God calls Job into the conversation which he has been demanding the right to have:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.” (Job 38:1–3 NRSV)

 

Ouch!

This does not sound like a gentle conversation, and indeed that it how it unfolds …

“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it?

“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?— when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?

“Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.” (Job 38:4–5, 8–11, 16–18 NRSV)

 

In the ancient text Job remains silent in the face of this divine barrage, but on this Ocean Sunday I suggest we can actually be bold enough to answer God: “Yes, we were and yes, we are!”

In saying that we are not speaking as particular individuals born in the very recent past.

But when we understand who we truly are—beings comprised of ancient atoms from the stardust of the big bang at the beginning of time— then we can claim our true identity and respond to God, “Yes, we were there and yes, we are able to plumb the depths of the sea. She is our mother.”

At the risk of a bad pun, on Ocean Sunday we appreciate the depths of our own existence.

We—that is, the universe finding its voice in us so late in time—we are 15 billion years old. We come from the first nano-seconds of the cosmos. We were conceived in the oceans. We are not just Earthlings, we are also sea creatures.

So today—as we baptise Ruby, and as we, celebrate fathers, and as we inter Jim’s ashes—we remember our deep and ancient roots. We appreciate our true selves, and we celebrate the amazing web of life of which we are integral parts.

 

Luke 5

Our Gospel reading was—most appropriately—a fishing story. A story set on the lake. A story that celebrates a deep intuitive knowledge of the ways of the sea.

But this reading is very different from Job.

God in the person of Jesus asks a very different question. Jesus is not asking, “Were you there?” rather, Jesus is asking, “Will come with me into the future?”

Will you trust my guidance and let down your nets into deep?

And that, of course, is the challenge.

We have some idea of where we have come from, but we have little idea of the future.

We had no choice about arriving here, but the future is ours to choose.

As we baptise Ruby this morning we are making a choice to let Jesus guide us into that future which is known only to God, and we are promising to teach her how to live that way as well.

Let down your nets … the future calls us on this Ocean Sunday.

 

Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
Pentecost 9 (C)
11 August 2019

 

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Each week the lectionary serves up a selection of texts for us to explore as we seek spiritual wisdom for everyday life.

Most times those readings are not chosen for their connection with one another. However, there is a logic to the choice of readings, as you may know.

For a whole year at a time we listen to one particular gospel: Matthew in year A, Mark in year B, and Luke in year C . This year our focus is the Gospel according to Luke.

The first reading is selected on an entirely different basis. During most of the year this reading will come from the Old Testament. We work our way through consecutive portions of various ancient texts, rarely reading the entire document but hopefully gaining a sense of its purpose and flavour.

The Psalm which we sing or read each week is chosen for its ‘fit’ with that first reading. It is not so much a reading in its own right, but rather a reflective response to the reading which has preceded it.

Typically, we also have a reading from the letters of St Paul or one of the other apostles from the early church. Most often it is Paul although this week it is from the anonymous Letter to the Hebrews.

As always, the first task when preparing a sermon is to listen, to read, to sit with the text and see what lines of reflection emerge. What is the Spirit saying to the church through this set of texts?

There are some Sundays when the readings cohere and the sermon almost writes itself. On those days it is often very clear what line the sermon might take.

There are other Sundays when the readings do not seem to converge at all. On such Sundays the preacher has a more challenging task.

Today seems to be one of those Sundays!

As you may have noticed, I tend to focus on the gospel since our core task is to be followers of Jesus. However, today I want to start with the middle reading, the passage from the letter to the Hebrews.

 

Abraham

In Hebrews chapter 11, we have a series of characters who are presented as examples of faith.

In this context interestingly — and unlike the authentic letters of Paul — faith seems to mean a mysterious confidence in providence, perhaps grounded in some secret information revelation, rather than the faithfulness of Jesus which demonstrated in both his living and his dying.

In any case, Abraham is clearly represented as a model for the person of faith.

Let’s unpack that picture a little further.

In the Abraham story we find a character who feels compelled to leave behind everything and everyone which he is familiar, and to embark on a journey into the unknown. The destination is never revealed to Abraham but the consequences of the journey are described.

When Abraham goes on this journey he will discover a new relationship with God and he will also learn that the people amongst whom he then lives count themselves blessed because of his presence among them.

Abraham is to leave his comfort zone in order to discover the place of deep blessing: for him and for others.

 

Isaiah

At this point I want to bring in our first reading from the prophet Isaiah ben Amoz. Isaiah appears to have been a senior official in the royal government in Jerusalem prior to experiencing his own call. We find that described in Isaiah chapter 6.

Like Abraham, Isaiah was being pushed by God to move out of his comfort zone. The journey was not across a great distance, but rather to set aside his privileges as a government official, and to become that crazy person who insisted on telling the king what the king did not want to hear.

Such characters are both necessary and unpopular. This was to be true of Isaiah as well.

But let’s focus simply on the excerpt from Isaiah chapter 1 that we heard this morning.

It is quite a challenging text.

The prophet is calling out his peers because they have got religion—indeed life itself—entirely back to front.

The conventional wisdom said the best way to keep God onside was to be very religious. Lots of prayers. The very best music. Valuable livestock being burned by the wagon load as a gift to God. Beautiful vestments. Wonderful liturgies. Powerful rituals.

Isaiah’s journey from privilege and comfort included the lesson that this was entirely the wrong way to nurture a relationship with the love that is at the heart of the cosmos.

We heard the words earlier, but let me repeat them:

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.
When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand?
Trample my courts no more;
bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—
I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers, I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood. (Isaiah 1:11–15 NRSV)

What God requires is something very different, and much more challenging:

Wash yourselves;
make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice, rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:16–17 NRSV)

 

QUESTION: How do we deepen an authentic relationship with the Sacred?

ANSWER: Not by intense religious activity, but by being a compassionate human being.

 

Heart and treasure

Let me wrap this up with a brief mention of today’s Gospel from Luke 12 where we heard these words:

Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Luke 12:32–34 NRSV)

 

The takeaway from these readings today may simply be to reflect on that final statement by Jesus: Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Like Abraham and like Isaiah we are compelled to reflect on what matters most to us.

What is the treasure we cannot let go?

What is the journey we refuse to take?

Where is our heart?

What matters most to us?

As we come to the Table of Jesus for Holy Communion we seek God’s help to set aside privilege and influence, comfort and security, and to pour ourselves out in compassionate action for the sake of others.

What do we most desire?

Where is our heart?

Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
Pentecost 4C
7 July 2019

 

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Today we going back into the lectionary cycle after several weeks when we have stepped aside from the lectionary to focus on the key phrases in the great commandments: Love God with all our hearts, with our souls, with our minds and with our strength.

The passage served up in the lectionary this morning happens to be the mission charge as Jesus sends out his disciples in pairs to extend the reach of his own ministry and activity.

This offers a fascinating glimpse into the dynamics of the activity of Jesus himself; as well as the activity of those disciples of Jesus who were based in the Galilee and continued to do the ‘Jesus thing’ in the first few years after Easter.

We have two versions of the mission charge, the version here in Luke 10 and a parallel version in Matthew 10. They are very similar. In fact, in places they are word for word the same.

Were Matthew and Luke students handing in essays at a university they would be up on a charge of plagiarism, since they have clearly used a common source – or perhaps copied from each other.

This takes us back into the earliest transmission of the gospel traditions, to an ancient version of the Gospels which scholars call simply ‘Q’, from the German word Quelle, meaning source.

These days this ancient source is more commonly referred to as the Q Gospel, and the people who produced it unknown as the Q community.

While it is hard to name any individuals who were part of that earliest community of Jesus followers in the Galilee after Easter, we can learn quite a bit about them as we read between the lines of the Q gospel.

To reiterate, these were people who lived in the Galilee in the years immediately after Easter and were followers of Jesus. Many of them knew Jesus personally. They had seen him at work in their villages and towns. They had heard him speak. Perhaps they had shared a meal with him. Maybe he had healed them or another member of their family, or at least somebody from their village. One of them was probably the little boy with a basket containing five loaves and two fish, for sure another one was Mary Magdalene.

What a fascinating bunch of people.

How we wish we could have a conversation with them and gain an insight into their experience of Jesus way back in the first century.

These Q people, the very first followers of Jesus, were essentially overlooked and written out of the story as the Christian church developed and gained a foothold in the Gentile world around the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East. After Easter, we never again hear of the Jesus people from Galilee.

But their voice is heard in the Q Gospel, an ancient source which was used by Matthew and later by Luke as they prepared their expanded and updated editions of the gospel according to Mark.

Enough of that for now! This is not the time and place for a lecture on the earliest Christian communities or the formation of the new Testament Gospels!

 

But what I do want to do is to draw your attention to the dynamics which are preserved for us in the mission charge.

These people remembered Jesus as acting in certain ways, and it seems they continued to act in precisely those ways themselves in the first years and decades after Easter.

 

Being sent

Like Jesus, the early Q communities had a strong sense of being sent by God to share good news. They had something to share, they had something to say, they had things they could do which would make a difference in people’s lives.

So the first question for us today is whether we can describe ourselves and our Christian community in similar terms?

Do we have a sense of being sent by God to share some good news which is going to make a real difference in the lives of other people? Do we have something to share? Do we have something to say? Do we have some contribution to make to the well-being of our community, our neighbours and our families?

 

Simplicity

It’s clear from the example of Jesus himself—as well as the example of Paul and the other early apostles—that the instructions given in the mission charge reflect the actual practice of Jesus and his earliest followers.

They were to travel light.

They were to carry no purse, they were to carry no bag, they were to wear no sandals and they were not to be diverted from their missions by others they might meet along the way.

When they reached the village or an isolated farmhouse, they were to greet the residents and seek a place to stay.

Wherever they found hospitality was the right place for them to be.

They need not look for somewhere else. Somewhere better. More comfortable. More amenable to their lifestyle.

They were not TV evangelists or megachurch pastors. Not even cathedral Deans.

They were not to move from house to house, but to stay for a short period with the one householder before moving on to the next village.

They had few resources and there was no infrastructure.

This is the pattern we see in many of the saints, in the founders of religious communities, and in the pioneer clergy who established church in this valley.

Our institutions have grown complex and wealthy, but our impact has diminished.

We need to learn afresh how to travel light.

 

Program

The program of Jesus and of his earliest followers was quite simple and yet it was radical. It changed lives, it transformed communities, and it turned the world upside down.

PEACE: they came proclaiming the arrival of peace, Shalom. Not power, not conquest, not empire building of any kind, but the ‘kingdom of God’, the reign of God experienced in their own lives and in their own communities. Shalom indeed. Your kingdom come …

HOSPITALITY: at the heart of so many gospel stories there is the experience of shared generosity. Some scholars have joked that Jesus ate and drank his way across Galilee, and that flippant remark captures one aspect of the earliest Jesus movement. This movement took root in those times and at those places where ordinary people gathered for meals: in homes, in the marketplace, beside the road, by the lake, out in the fields. At its heart, the Jesus program was simply for people to share what little they had and discover it was more than enough.

HEALING: both Jesus and his followers gained a reputation as healers. But they were not healers who set themselves up in a sacred grove and waited for the sick and suffering to come to them, charging a fee for their prayers and their potions. Rather, Jesus and his followers were healers who spent their time out amongst the broken and the sick. In the ancient world to be sick was to be excluded. In the absence of effective medication, a simple public health measure was to isolate the person with a disease. The individual was sacrificed for the sake of the herd. Jesus and his followers invited people back into the community, declared them clean, and offered them hospitality. Followers of Jesus were a community of outcasts, desperately poor and socially excluded. As they found healing they also discovered community.

 

And us?

We’ve come a long way. And it is not all good. The distance between the practice of Jesus and the practice of the church gives us pause to stop and think.

As we rediscover what God is calling us to be and to do in a post-Christian secular Australia, these three fundamentals from Jesus and his earliest followers in the Galilee may well represent ancient wisdom that we need to embrace afresh:

• Travel light
• Do good
• Share (whatever you have)(all of it!)

 

This is the call of God on us as individuals, as families, and as a cathedral community.

May God give us the courage to do what has to be done.