Category: Sermons

Pentecost 10B
Christ Church Cathedral Grafton
29 July 2018

[video]

This week’s Gospel offers us one of the all-time favourite biblical stories about Jesus.

This story was so popular in the early church that we find it in all 4 gospels, while Mark and Matthew each tell the story twice!

This story is told six times across the four Gospels.

This miracle story resonates with something deep within the Christian heart.

It is especially remembered at the lakeside site of Tabgha, an ancient green spot on the western side of the Sea of Galilee where seven freshwater springs flow into the lake. Because this place stays green most of the year, in the Christian imagination it has become attached to the story of the feeding miracle.

You may recall that our Gospel today says there was a lot of grass in the place. In the earliest account of this miracle from Mark 6 there is a reference to the green grass of the location.

In 1932 a beautiful mosaic of the loaves and fishes was found in the ruins of a Byzantine Church whose existence had long been forgotten by the local people. That mosaic has become famous, and it features in altar ware as well as all kinds of religious souvenirs.

Of course, those of us who work on the archaeological site at Bethsaida will want to claim the honours for our own lakeside patch.

The reality is that competing for the location misses the point of the story.

Magic meals and the open table

Let’s back up a little and think more deeply about this much-loved story.

Jesus is remembered as someone who had an ‘open table’ at the very heart of his Jewish renewal movement. That renewal movement was centred on the immediacy of God’s active presence among us, an idea that was expressed in the distinctive phrase, kingdom of God.

As understood and practised by Jesus, the reign of God was expressed in various signs of renewed community among people, and especially among people who were overlooked by the powers that be; then and now.

Perhaps the most visible sign of the kingdom present among the people gathered around Jesus was the way that people shared meals, crossing social boundaries and discovering a new community of equals.

Yet when Jesus was gathering people for these remarkable and distinctive meals he worked no miracles and used no magic.

We know that, of course. But perhaps we have never thought about it.

As child, Jesus did not take over the kitchen and provide an endless supply of miraculous food for his mother.

When he accepted hospitality at the table of tax collectors and other social outcasts, Jesus did not provide supernatural nibbles.

When the disciples shared food with Jesus day after day as they travelled around Galilee they had to find their own supplies.

When Jesus was chatting with the Samaritan woman at the well, his disciples were in the village of Nablus fetching some food which they later urged Jesus to eat.

When he was arranging for his final meal with the disciples, Jesus had to book a room and send a couple of people ahead to organise the catering.

As a general rule, Jesus organised his food the same way as we do. He did not snap his fingers and invoke supernatural powers to organise the catering for his functions.

So what are we to make of this remarkable tale of Jesus feeding thousands of people with just a handful of food?

Messianic abundance

Like the water turned into wine at Cana, the feeding of the multitude is a symbolic story, rather than a report of something that actually happened.

Like many of the parables, it is an exaggerated account. As is the miracle of the wine at Cana.

There is not just enough for everyone, but there are numerous baskets of scraps left over. In fact, there are more leftovers than Jesus started with.

Likewise at Cana: not only is there a huge quantity of wine (almost 700 litres), but it is the best wine they had ever tasted. The best had been kept to last.

Both these symbolic stories evoke the Jewish expectation of superabundance in the messianic kingdom at the end of time.

Jesus proclaims that God is generous, and calls us to be people of hope and generosity in response to that love.

As with the parable of the sower whose lazy farming techniques still resulted in an awesome harvest beyond all reasonable expectations, so the picnic lunch of a small boy can feed thousands of people and leave bucket loads of leftovers after everyone has had their fill.

The challenge for our Cathedral community is to choose hope rather than fear.

Sure the task ahead of us is immense. But we do not look around and ask “but what is that among so many?”

Rather, we take what we have. We offer it to God with thanksgiving and anticipation. We share what we have and give no thought to keeping back for ourselves in case there is not enough to go around.

When we act like that, we are eucharistic people. We are people of hope, people who know how to respond to God with thanksgiving.

We offer this city … hope.

We offer the families who bring their children for Baptism … hope.

Every time we gather for at the Table of Jesus we celebrate … hope.

So let us come to Table of Jesus with hope in our hearts and a determination to share the message of Jesus: God is amongst us and all will be well.

Come, take the bread and wine, as a sign of a sacred abundance that never runs short.

Thanks be to God!

Easter 7(B)
13 May 2018
Christ Church Cathedral

The ten days between Ascension Day and Pentecost Sunday are marked within the Australian churches as a week of special prayer for Christian unity.

As we reflect on the challenges faced by all Christian communities in contemporary Australian society, it may be worth reflecting on our complex history of relationships between the churches. The good relations which we enjoy and appreciate these days have not always been the norm, and indeed it may be worth asking just how serious we are about Christian unity.

We can perhaps trace the history of our ecumenical relationships through a series of four or five stages. The fifth and final stage—unity—is yet to be achieved, but the other four have been part of our shared journey.

Breaking down the wall of hostility …

REJECTION: During this phase of our ecumenical relationships, each major Christian church liked to pretend that it was the only valid church. Catholics dismissed Anglicans as not a valid church, while Anglican dismissed Presbyterians or Methodists as not a proper church, and so on. Marriage across denominational lines was almost impossible, and considerable suffering was experienced by people whose families happened to include people from more than one Christian tradition.

COMPETITION: Once it became impossible to maintain the fiction that only the church to which we belonged was an authentic church, then we moved into a stage of competition. In this phase we each sought to consolidate our historical privileges and attract new adherents from other traditions or from the wider community.

COLLABORATION: Since the establishment of the World Council of Churches in 1948 there has been a move towards formal collaboration, at least between certain subsets of the churches. The conciliar movement gives de facto recognition to the validity of different expressions of Christianity, whether they are due to cultural and ethnic factors or variations in beliefs and practices. Some church groups found even that level of recognition too much to embrace, with the result that rival councils of churches now exist with the Australian religious scene.

COALITION: In response to various forms of humanitarian and social need even churches that disagree on key beliefs and practices have sometimes found that we can form a coalition to address issues like alcohol abuse, gambling, refugees, and so on. But around issues such as marriage equality there was no grand Christian coalition, since the churches adopted opposing views on the question or chose to leave people to follow their own consciences. In such cases the differences within the one religious community can be greater than those between different communities.

UNITY: There remains the hope of structural and visible unity among the churches, but it seems to be a fading dream. The test for our commitment to genuine ecumenical progress may be how we respond to this challenge from the late Bishop Michael Putney, formerly a colleague of mine in the Brisbane College of Theology. Bishop Michael argued fervently that we should “only do separately those things which we cannot in good conscience do together”.

Here and now

We have some real challenges here in this city when it comes to ecumenism.

For the most part we pretend that all is rosy, but in fact that far from the case.

Every time a new Christian community starts up, it is an act of schism and a new rip in the fabric of the faith.

At the heart of these new fellowships or missions is a belief that none of the existing churches provided an acceptable way for that group of people to serve God’s mission in this city. The others are so wrong about so many serious points of belief or practice that true fellowship is impossible to maintain and yet another new church needs to be created.

And the city looks at us with disdain, while the Lord weeps.

The Christian witness is fragmented and our resources are diverted into buying new properties, erecting new buildings, and engaging new clergy.

Is the Christian church actually any smaller in Grafton than it was 25 or 50 years ago, or are we just so fragmented that almost all of use are smaller inside our half-empty new churches?

But let’s look closer to home. Even within our own Anglican Church we are divided in ways that detract from the mission God has called us to do. We cannot even work together we each other on opposite sides of the river for fear that we might lose something that matters more to us—it seems—that providing a strong Anglican voice in the city of Grafton.

I do wonder how the respect for the Christian churches in Grafton might be improved if our neighbours saw us acting out of such a spirit of mutual acceptance rather than competing for some marginal advantage to the perceived benefit of our own institutions.

Let’s pray that God will make us—Yes, us!—so uncomfortable about the lack of unity within our own church and between the various church communities of this city, that we actually do something to make a change.

As a start, I suggest we embrace the word of Bishop Michael Putney and resolve “only [to] do separately those things which we cannot in good conscience do together”.