Category: Sermons

Beam of sunlight above the tomb of Christ at the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem.
Photograph ©2015 Gregory C. Jenks

Pentecost 8B
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
14 July 2024

[ video ]

A couple of weeks ago we celebrated the joint feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

In my sermon for that day, I observed that Peter tends to be a witness to what Jesus was like, while Paul is a witness to the difference Jesus has made.

I went on to say:

We need both those voices, and—I suggest—we especially need the voice of Peter to keep Paul a little more grounded in reality.

One of the fault lines in contemporary Christianity is between those who prefer to shape their lives around Jesus in the Gospels, and those who say that it is the voice of Paul which we most need to hear.

Perhaps what we need most is to stay engaged with both those conversations.

We need to be exploring the meaning of God in Christ, actively reconciling the world (kosmos) to himself (2 Cor 5:19). Without that edge, our faith becomes a historical society devoted to an interesting person from 2,000 years ago.

Today we get an opportunity to think more directly about the difference Jesus has made. 

In particular, I want us to think outside the box a wee bit about what we are doing here when we gather for worship.

Two factors have suggested this focus for me today.

First of all, as noted in the service booklet, today we begin a series of several weeks during which the second reading will be from the letter to the Ephesians.

Ephesians is a very different kind of document from any of the Gospels, as the writer—almost certainly not Paul himself, but perhaps one of his students—is expressing himself in very poetic and even liturgical ways.

Indeed, we use the opening verses of Ephesians as a canticle in the daily prayer service for Wednesday morning.

So, the language and the subject matter of Ephesians 1 invites us to engage in worship and to reflect on what it means for us to gather for worship.

The second factor that has motivated me to focus on these matters in the sermon today was a conversation that I had with a colleague at St Francis College on Friday morning. He was talking about the importance of asking questions when we are teaching a class, and to illustrate his point my colleague said, “What do we think happens when we worship? Who are the ones engaged in worship? Is it something we do as humans, or is God also involved when worship happens?”

To express that question in very simple and direct terms: Does God go to church?

As we prepare to reflect on that question—and seek fresh spiritual wisdom for our everyday lives—let me repeat a few lines from Ephesians:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 
(Ephesians 1:3-6 NRSV)

These poetic words sketch out the parameters of the change that God has made in and through Jesus.

What once upon a time might have been the purpose of sacrifices on the altar of the temple in Jerusalem, has now become our lived experience as people “in Christ.” 

In Christ God has blessed us already—right here and right now, in this life and not just in the life to come—with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

Surely that changes everything, and it also makes coming to church something very special.

We do not come to church to earn these blessings.

We come to church to take hold of these blessings and to develop the skills needed to live such a transformed life.

We do not lose the blessings when we stay away from church, but we do lose the skills in living the blessed life. Our spiritual fitness declines if we do not come to the sacred gymnasium.

But back to that interesting question posed by my colleague and boiled down to its essence in the words: Does God come to church?

Or to ask it another way: What does God do during worship?

For sure God is not basking in our expressions of thanks and praise. 

My first (interim) answer to the question of whether God comes to church, is to say that God is indeed here.

When we turn up for worship, God is here as well.

Of course, God is everywhere; but there is something else happening when we gather for worship.

God joins in.

In the Old Testament, this was described as God coming to visit the people.

Any time that God visited the covenant people, God had not just popped by for a chat. A visit from God—what we once called divine visitation—is always either to bless or to judge.

Something always changes when God visits us.

Even a visit for judging is a blessing, since the point of judging is to restore us back to relationship with God and set things right.

Worship is more than a Bible class or a music session, it is an encounter with the living God, known to us in and through the Risen Lord.

We are all familiar with the words that the priest says during the Great Thanksgiving Prayer:

Therefore, with angels and archangels,
and with all the company of heaven,
we proclaim your great and glorious name …

But those words only tell a part of the greater truth that is at the very heart of our worship.

It is not just the company of heaven that joins us in our worship, but God as well!

Surely the greatest of all the blessings bestowed on us in Christ is that God is here with us this morning.

There is an ancient Hebrew word for this reality: Emmanuel = God with us.

Imagine if we took that truth seriously.

God is here.

God is actively present.

God is here making things whole.

Making everything holy.

God is answering our most familiar prayer:

God’s name is being hallowed when we gather for worship.

God kingdom is happening, right here and right now, as in heaven so on earth.

Here in this place.

Every Sunday.

That is why God comes to church.

I think it should be why we come to church as well.

Pentecost 7B / NAIDOC Sunday
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
7 July 2024

[ video ]

In today’s sermon I want to invite you to join me in a reflection that seeks to intertwine a story of Jesus going back home to Nazareth—described simply as his “hometown”—with our sense of belonging to the places we call home, and with the deep spiritual connection of the Indigenous people of this ancient land to their own country.

In other words, in the quest for spiritual wisdom to help us shape lives that are holy and true, I am looking at the ways that Scripture and context interact.

That context, for us, includes today being NAIDOC Sunday as well as our own sense of being local, people with roots in the place where we belong.

Nazareth

Nazareth is not named in this episode from Mark’s Gospel, but it is clear from the wider narrative that Mark is speaking of Nazareth and not Bethlehem.

Whatever historical value you place on the tradition of Jesus being born in Bethlehem, it is clear that Nazareth was his hometown, his mother’s country, as we might learn to say if we could just listen to our First Nations people.

This is not the time for me to give one of my favourite lectures, on Nazareth in the first century. You can watch one of the videos of me doing exactly that (here is one example), but we are not here for a biblical geography class.

We want wisdom for everyday life, not information about the past.

Suffice to say that Nazareth was a small village in the time of Jesus, with perhaps just 15 or so families.

It was off the beaten track, although within sight of Sepphoris, a small city recently rebuilt by Herod Antipas after having been destroyed by the Roman army after its citizens rebelled following the death of Herod the Great. As part of that devastation the Romans had crucified a Jewish rebel every mile along the highway leading to Sepphoris.

So, part of Jesus being in his own country, on his own land, was to know firsthand what happened to people who rebelled against the Roman empire.

The empire always strikes back, as the people of Gaza know all too well.

He comes to his hometown and joins the other menfolk when they gather for Sabbath prayers. The village was probably too small for a synagogue structure to have been built yet, but the faithful will have met for prayers with 10 men required for a quorum (minyan in Hebrew). This regular gathering of the adult menfolk will have been part religious ceremony and part village council.

They recognise Jesus as one of them. Of course they did. There were fewer than 200 people in the village at the time and most of them would have been children.

Jesus came home, but there was no welcome for him in his own village.

In response, Jesus utters an aphorism that is one the very few pieces of tradition found in all four gospels within the NT:

Prophets are not without honour, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.(Mark 6:4 NRSV)

Our hometown, our own kinship circle

In many ways, Nazareth is the place my heart calls home.

But Nazareth is not my hometown, nor is it my mother’s country. 

My mother’s country is the rich red volcanic soil around Lismore, with what we used to call the north arm of Richmond River cutting through the city and the Nightcap Range creating my familiar childhood horizon in the distance.

That part of the Richmond River has since been renamed the Wilsons River, to celebrate the first colonial station owner when that land was stolen from the Bundjalung Nation by British settlers in the 1840s.

I hope that someday soon we shall rename that river yet again and give it a name that reflects the ancient association of this river with the Widjabul people for whom it is a sacred river and an old friend. 

Although most of my life has been spent away from my country, that is where my soul is anchored. 

It was a great delight to serve as the locum priest for the Anglican community in Lismore last year. It was just a year after the massive floods that devastated the community in 2022, but to be back home was a special privilege.

I wonder where is your mother’s country?

Perhaps it is here in Ipswich, within the ancient lands of the Yaggera people?

Perhaps, like me, your mother’s country is somewhere else, but now we all live on Yaggera country.

How do we name, honour and respect our mother’s country and the places where we were born?

Always was, always will be …

Underneath our buildings, roads and concrete pavements is the sacred soil of the Yaggera nation. 

We breath their air, we drink their water, and we enjoy their trees and we admire their mountains.

It always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

Our ancestors did not seek permission to settle on their land, cut down their forests and pollute their streams.

They simply stole everything. 

Then they took away their dignity and their hope as well.

There is much for which we say sorry and much for us to learn from the dark-skinned prophets of this place about living well on this sacred land.

As an Anglican faith community whose members are either recent immigrants or the descendants of immigrants during the past 175 years, we have mostly been blind to the dignity of the people whose home this has always been; and blind to their suffering.

These past few nights our church walls have been awash with the vivid colours of Indigenous artwork.

May our hearts also be awash with profound respect for the people for whom this country has always been home.

And may that respect inspire us to listen to their voice, to embrace the statement from the heart, and to engage in the hard work of reconciliation and justice for everyone who now calls this ancient land home.

Pentecost 5B
St Thomas Church, North Ipswich
23 June 2024

In today’s set of lectionary readings, we are served up two of the all-time best-known stories from the Bible:

• The epic scene where David defeats the Philistine champion with a single slingshot
• Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee

These stories are vivid.

They are much loved by people who design Sunday School curricula.

More than that, they are primal stories that evoke a response deep within us as we hear the stories. This is true even if we have heard the story many times in the past. 

These tales strike a chord.

As with many of the best stories in the Bible, these tales were doubtless told and retold by word of mouth for many years before reaching their fixed written.

Along the way—like any good fishing story—they may have grown a little in the process of being recounted over and over.

Some of the details do indeed seem far-fetched, but they need not distract us from spiritual wisdom that these biblical texts offer us.

For instance, we know that some individuals can be rather taller than most people in a population group. Or indeed, shorter, for that matter. 

Just as modern basketball teams prefer tall players, ancient armies engaged in hand to hand tended to value larger than usual warriors.

Likewise, with the Sea of Galilee. It is actually a medium-sized lake: just 21 km long from North to South, and 15 km wide (from East to West). However, it does sometimes generate wild tsunami like storms. 

A recent tidal surge storm event generated waves up to 5m and caused immense damage to buildings and parklands around the lake. The story in the Gospel of Mark at least preserves an ancient memory that such wild storms can and do occur on this mostly placid lake.

But we are not here to discuss variations in human body heights or tidal surges on the Sea of Galilee.

We are seeking spiritual wisdom for everyday life.

In everyday life we do face giants, and we can certainly feel that we are being swamped by the storms of life.

The first grain of wisdom may be to shift our mindset from engaging with a story in the Bible to a mindset where we engage with God in our own everyday experience.

Being a disciple is not simply knowing stories from the Bible but being familiar with the whisper of God’s Spirit in our own everyday lives.

In the famous story of Elijah fleeing to Mt Sinai after his conflict with the 400 prophets of Baal on Mt Carmel, he discovers that the most powerful expression of God’s presence is not in the strong wind, or the earthquake, nor even the firestorm, but in the still small voice. In fact, the Hebrew of that sentence is very hard to translate. It is more like a sound of sheer silence (2 Kings 19:12).

Maybe—as we walk towards our confrontation with the giants in our own lives—we need to do more than collect a handful of pebbles from the creek. What we actually need is a profound sense of the powerful presence of God that is beyond any words; whether ours or God’s.

Maybe—as we fear that our fragile vessel is about to be swamped by the tidal surges of everyday life—we need more than a memory of a Gospel story from Sunday School. What we do need is a deep confidence that the God who is already aboard our fragile vessel is perfectly able to still the storm, to calm the sea, to bring peace to our soul. 

We just need to ask.

And maybe our most important mission here in the local community is not to tell people about the Bible, but to teach people how to discern the silent presence of The One Who Is.

The unseen God at the heart of the burning bush.

The utter silence of divine love we retreat exhausted from the struggle of life.

The surprising God who chooses a young boy to defeat a warrior giant.

The sleeping Jesus already aboard our fragile vessel.

Peace. Be still.

A sound of sheer silence.

Such a gift.

Such good news.

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The prayer of the day

O God our defender,
storms rage about us and cause us to be afraid:
rescue your people from despair,
deliver your sons and daughters from fear,
and preserve us all from unbelief;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Pentecost 4B
St Paul’s Church Ipswich
16 June 2024

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[ video ]

Aesop the fabled storyteller of ancient Greece may have lived around 600 years before the time of Jesus. He is thought to have been born around 620 BCE and to have died in the holy city of Delphi around 564. So many legends have developed around this character, that it is hard to say for sure just when he lived or to validate the many clever aphorisms attributed to him.

Among the many witty one-liners supposed fashioned by Aesop is the observation that good things come in small packages.

Rather than being a zinger once said by Aesop, this aphorism is more likely the moral of the famous fable—long attributed to Aesop—in which a lion is rescued by a mouse whose life had been earlier spared by the same lion.

Whoever first said that clever phrase, it could also serve as a summary of one message we can take away from our readings this morning.

Samuel anoints David

In the first reading, the prophet Samuel—who has been the key character in the OT reading for the past few weeks—turns up at the village of Bethlehem on mission to identify the person chosen by God to succeed Saul as the ruler of the people of Israel.

As is the way with ancient wisdom stories, Samuel is not exactly totally candid with the people about the reason for his visit.

One by one Samuel considers each of the seven sons of Jesse, thinking one of them will be person chosen by God. The numbers are significant: seven sons, the first three of whom are named in turn. Finally, when questioned directly by Samuel, Jesse admits that he does have another son.

An eighth son is like an extra day in the week. Not to be expected. A new twist in the story, and thus a significant develop in the plot.

We all know the story.

The unexpected son, the child who is too young to be worth even calling to the festival, turns out to be the one chosen by God. He had been left minding the sheep. Overlooked. Dismissed.

Yet, it is David who will be anointed by Samuel. None of the older brothers—each of them impressive in their own ways—turns out to be the one chosen by God and destined for greatness.

The overlooked youngest child is chosen by God and anointed by Samuel.

As the story ends, we are told that “the spirit of the LORD came mightily upon David from that day forward …” 

The mustard seed

In today’s Gospel reading we have two of the parables attributed to Jesus. Just as Aesop was credited with fables in the ancient world, Jesus is described as a teacher who used seemingly simple stories when speaking with the crowds, but then explaining everything in secret to his inner circle of disciples.

There are 33 unique parables attributed to Jesus in the New Testament, with scholars divided over how many of them really go back to Jesus and which of them were simply attributed to Jesus by his followers.

The parable of the mustard seed is one of the few that almost everyone agrees was first created by Jesus.

Here we have another example of our theme that good things come in small packages.

To express that in slightly different, a small and useless object—in this case the tiny mustard seed—may turn out to be the essential ingredient of success.

As you can see from the photograph of wild mustard plants on the front cover of today’s service booklet, the mustard seed does not grow into a mighty tree. Jesus was making a joke in this parable.

For hundreds of years before Jesus, people had compared the kingdom of God to the mighty cedar trees of Lebanon. These trees were awesome and famous. Indeed, they remain the national symbol of Lebanon.

When trying to explain what the rule of God would be like, Jesus compares it to mustard seed.

When trying to tease out the point Jesus was making in this parable, I like to say that Jesus is referring to the tendency of mustard plants to spread like a weed and take over the garden.

Were he telling this parable today, I suspect Jesus would say, “The kingdom of God is like nut grass!”

One fragment of nut grass—like one mustard seed—can spoil the whole patch. They spread and multiply, until the whole garden—or our carefully manicured lawn—is taken over by the invasive weed.

Our vision of God’s modus operandi

Where do we see God at work?

How do we understand God to operate?

Is God to be seen in the grand gesture and the powerful miracle, or is God to be seen in the subversive presence of love at the heart of everyday life?

Like the prophet Samuel in our first reading, we want to see God in the big, strong and capable people who make an impression on those around them.

Like the audience of Jesus in our Gospel, many of us dream of a time when God’s presence is so powerful that everyone will come to faith and embrace God’s call on their lives; a giant tree where all the birds of the air build their nests.

But maybe we best serve God—and our neighbour—when we focus on the small things that really matter, the small actions that change the world: like compassion, solidarity and justice.

The reign of God comes to be among us one act of love at a time.

Good things do indeed come in small packages.

Pentecost 3B
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
9 June 2024

[ video ]

Water, fire and oil

Here at St Paul’s Church in Ipswich this Sunday we are going to start a young girl on a journey that will take the rest of her life to complete.

She is too young to choose this journey or embrace this life, just yet.

But her family appreciates that it is never too early to begin learning the ways of God that we learn from Jesus. 

Just as she will learn to walk with the example, encouragement and support of her family; so she will learn the walk the way of Jesus from them—and from us.

As this new disciple begins her journey as a Christian, we shall use three very ancient symbols: water, fire and oil.

Water

The primary symbol of Baptism is water.

There can be a lot of water or just a small amount, but there has to be some water.

Water is the great symbol of life: clean, fresh and abundant life. 

In the ancient temple at Jerusalem huge amounts of water were poured out at the end of the Festival of Sukkot. The water symbolised their prayers for winter rain to bring new life to their parched land as summer drew to a close.

When an adult is baptised, they are turning away from their old life to embrace their new as a follower of Jesus. The old is flushed away and everything is new, fresh and alive.

We are praying for the waters of baptism not only to renew and revitalise this chid, but also to transform, cleanse and revitalise her family.

Parents, godparents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and siblings … even her church family here at St Paul’s … we all need the fresh rains to fall upon us and renew the life of Christ within us.

Fire

A dancing flame speaks to us of the great mystery at the heart of our religion.

How do we imagine God?

Fire is one of the best ways to do that.

As we watch the flames dancing around we can catch a glimpse of the God who comes among us, draws us into God’s own life, and gives us the double blessing of light and warmth.

Our fires here this morning are pretty tame, but there are lots of them. There are candles everywhere, and one big candle—the Easter Candle—that represents the risen life of Christ.

We shall take some of the fire from that candle to light a Baptism Candle. 

When we do that the fire is divided, but not diminished; it is shared and increased.

More light.

More warmth.

As we welcome this child into our community of faith we promise to teach her how to tend the fire of God in her own life, so that it never goes out but always sheds light and warmth to those around her.

And we teach that best when we tend the sacred fire within us as well.

Oil

In ancient times the kings of Israel were anointed with sacred oil from the olive groves. We saw that last year when King Charles was anointed with oil brought to London by my friend, Hosam Naoum, the Anglican Archbishop in Jerusalem.

Priests and prophets were also anointed, and the title “Christ” is given to Jesus because we believe he is the anointed one, the chosen one; christos.

As we anoint this chid, we say that God has chosen her for something that only she can ever do. Out of all the billions of humans who have lived on this planet, the child is called and chosen to be the blessing to the universe that only she can be.

And so are you.

And so am I.

For those who will have an opportunity to bless this little girl with the sacred oil, let me suggest you also make the sign of the cross on your own forehead.

Claim a blessing for yourself as well as giving one to her.

Because God has a blessing for you.

We are each chosen to be that person which only we can ever be.

There are other symbols in this service, so keep an eye out for them as we go along.

But the big three are water, fire and oil.

May this child know the profound blessings that these symbols represent, and we may know them in our own lives as well so that we can make this world more like the way God intends it be.

It’s a big job, but that’s what we sign up for as followers of Jesus.

Pentecost 2B
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
2 June 2024

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[ video ]

Sometimes stories operate on multiple levels, and that is surely the case with our first reading (1 Samuel 3) today.

• It is a great story for children and has been used in Sunday Schools over many years. Maybe that is where you first came across this story?
• It had a message for adults in the Jewish kingdom of Judah around 600 BCE, as it formed a key role in the argument that the nation should follow religious leaders rather than elevate someone to serve as prince or king (as we shall see in the readings next week). Samuel is set up by the storyteller as a great example of godly leadership, and this episode is part of that political argument.
• It also speaks to us about living as people of faith at a time when faith is not a strong value in the lives of most people.

It is this third level of the story that I want us to focus on this morning.

The reading begins by telling us that “the word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”

That sounds a bit like the world in which we live.

Most people do not expect God to make any difference in their lives. Religion is a small and diminishing attribute in their personal and collective lives.

In our case, this is mostly due to our secular culture in which there is little room for the sacred, and it has been made worse by the tragic history of abuse of children and other vulnerable people by clergy and lay leaders.

These days the idea of a mother surrendering her recently weaned son to be a trainee priest in the temple fills us with horror, rather than admiration. We fear for the safety of the child. We want to see the “blue card” issued to the elderly priest, Eli.

We live in a very different world.

We hear the biblical stories through very different ears.

The spiritual wisdom we seek from these reading today are not about the arrangements for placing young children in the care of elderly priests.

Rather, we seek wisdom for living faithfully in a world where the voice of God seems strangely silent.

1 Samuel 3 offers us some wisdom of that kind, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see.

The clue is in the name of the young boy: Shamuel.

The SHAMU is a Hebrew word relating to hearing, while the EL is the ancient word for God.

Even so, the word is ambiguous. Does it mean “God hears” or is it better understood as “hear God”?

I think the ancient Hebrew storyteller is intentionally exploiting this ambiguity to draw us deeper into the story.

In the earlier story, God hears the prayer of Hannah, the childless woman who will become the mother of Samuel. Indeed, when Hannah names her child, she says his name is Samuel because God heard me.

Hannah is a woman with a lively faith. Her life is not easy, but she pours out her sorrow to God and when the elderly priest offers her a blessing, she takes the promise to heart and in due course brings the young boy back as a gift to God.

Hannah is a unique character in this story.

For her, the word of the LORD is part of her own lived experience.

After she leaves the boy Samuel with Eli the priest, the focus falls on these two male characters. Both are devoted to the service of God. One represents the past, the other represents the future.

Neither expects God to speak to them.

That is the crux around which this story revolves.

When God does speak to Samuel in the night, at first neither Eli nor Samuel realise what is happening.

Eventually—but only after being aroused from sleep for a third time (a good storytelling device)—Eli realises that perhaps God is seeking to communicate with Samuel.

Then Eli perceived that the LORD was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the LORD came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.” (1Samuel 3:8-10 NRSV)

Now let’s unpack this story a little further in our quest for spiritual wisdom.

Eli is the priest in charge of the temple at Shiloh. He keeps an eye on its operations and is assisted by his sons, who should have become his successors. (That is another story for another day.)

It is a busy parish, er, temple. There was a lot happening. There were people coming for sacrifices, and there were groups of women working in the temple to assist people with the rituals. People came from villages farther way every year, including Samuel’s mother who always brought him some fresh robes as he grew taller.

Good stuff was happening there, but nobody was being given the wisdom to listen to God.

The word of the LORD was rare, and visions were not widespread.

What Samuel needed to become the person God planned for him to be, was to learn how to listen to God.

And what about the people who join us for worship, who come for assistance, who are seeking ways to serve the community, who love to share their gifts of music and song, who volunteer in so many different ways as we celebrated a week ago now?

Like the temple of the LORD in Shiloh this is a busy place.

But are people learning to listen to God here?

Do we teach them how to pray?

Do we encourage time for reflection and prayer in our liturgies?

Yes, we do and for that I am grateful. 

But we can do more as we become better at discerning God’s call on our own life and encourage others to discern God’s call on their lives.

What if the things that St Paul’s Church was most famous for was not our heritage buildings, or our fine music, or our amazing clergy, or our OpShop, or the Sunday afternoon food ministry …

But most of all as a place where people learn to listen to God and say yes to God’s call on their lives.