Tag: Grafton Cathedral

There is no written text for this unplanned and unscripted sermon for the mid-week service at Christ Church Cathedral this morning, we do have a video of the sermon …

Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
Advent Sunday
29 November 2020

[ video ]

Well, here we are: Advent Sunday 2020.

A new church year has begun, and what a train wreck the last year has been! 

We get to beat most people to the end of year reviews and NYE resolutions, but what are we to make of 2020 and what might we hope for in the future?

Ah yes … HOPE. Our word for today, this first Sunday of Advent: hope, peace, love, joy …

2020 has not exactly been a year marked by hope, or peace or joy. Thankfully there has been a lot of love and compassion on display for much of the time.

While hope, peace and joy have been hard to find this past year, there has been an abundance of challenges that seek to eliminate any hope for a better life.

This time last year the major source of concerns were the fires. Extreme fires. Across so much of the country including areas not far from here. Our skies turned red and the air was filled with smoke. Homes were lost. Lives were lost. Billions of animals were destroyed. So much of the landscape was scorched and vegetation burnt.

Then came COVID-19.

At first just a news report about a weird virus in one part of China, then the cruise ship slow-motion horror stories, followed by the outbreaks in aged care homes, then the death rates in Italy, Spain, France, the UK and in the USA. All year in the USA. Outbreaks in Sydney. A second wave in Melbourne. Closed borders. Families kept apart from one another.

Businesses closed. Schools closed. Churches closed. Hand cleanser bottles everywhere. No singing allowed. Online streaming of church services. Face masks at the Altar.

We are so ready to say farewell to 2020 and to the Year of Matthew.

We are so ready to see things turn for the better.

Our first reading today speaks to that reality:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence! When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. [Isaiah 64:1–4]

The anonymous prophet whose words are preserved in the final section of the great Scroll of Isaiah was seeking to speak hope to a community living with fear and disappointment.

To paraphrase him, we might say: God, where are you? This would be a really good time to show yourself and let us see how well you can turn things around here!

The earliest Christians spoke Aramaic, and some of their prayers have survived even in the Greek NT. One of their most striking arrow prayers is simply: Marana tha; Come, Lord!

That is an Advent prayer, is ever there was one.

In this season of waiting, longing and preparation our hearts cry out: marana tha … our Lord, come.

In the gospel today we are offered a glimpse into the other side of our longing for the God we call Emmanuel(God with us) to come among us or, as Jesus would say, the God’s reign to here, active in our lives and in our contexts.

It is a strange kind of text as it uses apocalyptic (end-of-the-world) and dystopian imagery to reassure the readers. It was intended as a message of hope even if our first reaction to this weird material is to wonder how to make sense of the extreme metaphors. After all, we understand—unlike the ancients—that the sun cannot go dark, the moon cannot turn to blood, and the stars cannot fall from the sky and land on the earth. It may help to think of all that language as first-century science fiction, but we cannot miss the point Jesus is making:

But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. … And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake. [Mark 13:32–33, 37]

As we get close to the end of 2020 and as we begin a new church year, what does KEEP AWAKE mean for us?

For sure it means we choose to reject fear, despair and complacency. We are never going to accept the ways things have been as good enough.

We choose not to allow the past to be the best predictor of the future, our future.

We choose to be awake and not asleep.

We choose to make our future and not simply accept what life serves up.

We choose to say YES to God and to work with the Spirit of Life to rebuild, reshape and recreate a broken, scorched and virus-ridden world.

We choose to live into the future with our eyes wide open, with courage, with compassion and with hope.

Marana tha … our Lord, come.

Christ Church Cathedral Grafton
Pentecost 19A
11 October 2020

[ video ]

The Table of the Lord

The Table is at the centre of our faith. It is great symbol of who we are and how we become who we are. This is not so for all Christians at the present time, but it certainly has been so for most Christians through most of time during the past 2,000 years.

It is not our prayers or our songs or our sacred texts which make us unique, but the simple meal we share together around the Table of the Lord.

As we break the bread and bless the cup, we participate in an ancient spiritual practice that goes all the way back to Paul and beyond him to the followers of Jesus himself. To the last supper and beyond, to the everyday meals of Jesus with his circle of friends.

The Altar Table is the holiest object inside the Cathedral, and we treat it with immense reverence.

Tables are friendly places. We know them well. We find them in our homes, in the parks, in the restaurants, and in our churches …

They are places of gathering, storytelling, celebration, reflection, meaning, hope …

Around these tables we form communities and we tell the stories which make us who we are.

We have special rituals and taboos around food.

Our table friends are our closest friends and to betray a table friend is a shameful act.

This seems to hold true from the schoolyard to the family kitchen to the parliamentary dining room.

In the Bible it is no surprise to find that the feast of the Lord, the supper of the Lord, is a powerful symbol of blessing for Jews as well as Christians.

At our religious tables we have a taste of what is to come.

But it can all go awry, and many a family meal has been a time for arguments and conflict. Indeed, we have such a story in today’s Gospel and to a lesser extent in the OT reading as well.

Matthew and the feast

This gospel found its final form about 40 years after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE. In the meantime Christians and Jews have been drifting further apart and the hostility between them has been increasing. It is a sad and tragic story. I am sure Jesus weeps.

As Matthew tells a traditional story from Jesus about the wedding feast it takes on a decidedly anti-Jerusalem spin. 

He is living in a world where powerful men can do what they like with their women and their slaves, a world where powerful men attack anyone who oppose them or criticise them.

I am trying to describe life almost 2,000 years ago but it probably sounds a lot like life in the USA at this time, or China, or Iran or Russia or a whole lot of other countries where nothing much has really changed in all that time since Matthew.

What started as an inclusive story offering hope has become—at the hands of Matthew—a story of privilege and power, a story of pain and revenge.

Oddly enough, that has happened to the church as well.

And we see it happen so often in personal relationships.

Reading Matthew’s story of the wedding feast today

So the question for today is:

How do we read this text so that it affirms love not power, inclusion rather than exclusion, forgiveness rather than revenge?

We wrestle with the text, and we seek to discern what the Spirit is saying to the church through such a passage. We tune our hearts for the word of the Lord. Straining to hear …

Except for those precious times of direct personal religious experiences, our faith depends on other people and sometimes they distort the message as it comes through to us. They do not mean to do this. It is simply natural and inevitable.

Meanwhile, we are living in a different reality from even just 50 years ago so that even the same message will now mean different things to us …

So to misquote a dear friend and mentor, Marcus Borg, we need to “hear this story again for the first time … “

Matthew himself has taken a simpler and more generous version of the story told by Jesus, and given it a particular “spin” as we would say.

We can see what has happened because we have two much simpler versions in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Thomas, and all three versions seem to derive from a very primitive collection of sayings which scholars call “Q”; for the German word, Quelle (source).

The International Q Project is an international group of religion scholars which has been working on the question of Gospel sources for many years. They have closely examined all the extant versions of shared material and even suggested what the original form may have been.

Their version of the Great Feast story sounds more like Luke than Mathew and goes like this:

The Parable of the Invited Dinner Guests
Q 14: 16-18, 19-20, 21, 23 

16 A certain person prepared a large‚ dinner, and invited many‚ 17 And he sent his slave at the time of the dinner‚ to say to the invited: Come, for it is now ready. 18 «One declined because of his» farm. 19 «Another declined because of his business.» 20 … 21 «And the slave, <on coming, said> these things to his master.» Then the householder, enraged, said to his slave: 23 Go out on the roads, and whomever you find, invite, so that my house may be filled.

As Matthew decides to use that story in his gospel, he reads it through the lens of his community’s experience during the decades since Easter. Perhaps this was already how people in Matthew’s church were telling this Jesus story to one another? A simple story about God’s generosity has been turned into a symbolic story about their experiences as Jewish followers of Jesus:

• Jesus has invited people to the great feast
• The disciples went out to invite their fellow Jews
• Their mission was unsuccessful
• Jesus or God sends the Romans to destroy Jerusalem
• Now the disciples are going to the Gentiles
• There has been a huge response
• But guests need to keep the rules!

Frankly, that is not Jesus even though it has been attributed to him for almost 2,000 years.

As followers of Jesus, we do not call down divine wrath on those who oppose us or see things differently.

Instead, we choose to follow the dream that Jesus himself lived: forming and sustaining diverse communities of people who would normally not get on all that well together, but who—under the yoke of Christ—can become, in our better moments, people of compassion rather than vengeance, people of hope rather than despair, people who forgive rather hold a grudge.

We catch that vision when we gather at the Table of Jesus. 
At this table we discover that we have become a community of grace.
We are the body of Christ for we all share the one bread.
The Spirit of Jesus is within us because we all bless the one cup.
As we come to that table we share the sign of peace, even in a COVID-safe manner.

I am grateful to Matthew from reminding me of the need to stay true to the original vision of Jesus, and to set aside our natural instinct to hold a grudge and seek revenge.

Fifth Sunday in Creation Time
Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton
4 October 2020

… to be fully alive is to appreciate our place within the web of life in all its diversity …

[ video ]

For five weeks now we have been observing the special season of Creation Time, coinciding with Spring in our part of the world.

Our overall theme has been: A jubilee for the Earth.

In this context jubilee does not means simply a 50-year anniversary, but a time for forgiveness and a fresh start.

In the biblical texts, every 50 years all debts were to be cancelled and all ancestral lands restored to the families which previously held them.

Whether or not this covenant ideal was actually practiced in ancient Israel, it is a biblical model for our relationships with each other, with the Earth, and with the diverse web of life of which we a part.

We might paraphrase it with phrases like “wipe the slate clean” or simply, “starting all over again.”

Of course, it is not that simple since we cannot just hand back land which has been devastated, forests which have vanished, species which have become extinct, or water reserves which have been wasted or polluted.

In addition to restoration we need to embrace the concept of restitution.

Restitution imposes real costs on actual people and on businesses, as well as some obligation to go the extra mile and give back even more than we have taken and destroyed.

Apart from the political controversy and the financial burdens, can it even be done?

Are we already beyond the tipping point, have we passed the point of no return?

Some people think so.

This is not the place and I am not the person to resolve that dilemma, but we all have to live with the realities of environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, land with depleted soils, insecure water supplies and creeping climate change.

We are not alone in this, since the same applies to every other creature on planet earth. We are indeed in this together. We are not alone. No matter who is responsible for the situation, we are all in this together.

That is surely one lesson we have learned during the current pandemic. A tiny virus which we cannot see, feel, hear or smell is turning our lives upside down. 

There is indeed more to reality than what we can see, although in this case we have created the tools which allow us to track both the presence of this virus as well as its modus operandi.

Maybe our best researchers will find a vaccine, but perhaps we shall just need to change the way we live in order to avoid losing many more lives and a vast number of livelihoods.

We are not alone.

We are part of an amazing web of life in all its diversity.

St Francis of Assisi seemed to sense that life is about relationships; with each other, with other sentient life forms, with the physical world, with poverty, and even with death.

Our texts and our music today invite us to see life in this way.

Not as resources over which we have some agency, but as diverse expressions of God’s own essence.

Not as threats to be avoided or defeated, but as opportunities to deepen our intentional engagement with God’s eternal work in creation.

Even Sister Death is to be welcomed as a guest who ushers us into the next stage of God’s great plan for the universe.

As Paul wrote in his letter to the Christians in Rome:

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; … [when] … creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. [Romans 8:19. 21–23]

Together with every other creature, we yearn for the day of redemption.

More than that, we are a voice for the Earth as it looks for that day of jubilee. Our prayer is for the Spirit of God to move once more upon the seething waters of creation and renew the face of the earth.