Tag: Ipswich

Pentecost 12B
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
11 August 2024

The theme sentence for our liturgy today came from the Epistle to the Ephesians. You can find it at the very top of page 2 of the service booklet:

Be imitators of God, as beloved children,
and live in love,
as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.

As the Old Testament reading grinds its way through the troubles besetting the dynasty of David, and as the Gospel offers yet another reflection on the metaphor of Jesus as bread from heaven for a hungry world, I want us to pause and think about this direct and simple piece of spiritual wisdom from the Pauline tradition.

If you flick over to page 5 of the service booklet you can see that the Christian community in Ephesus at the time of this letter must have been quite an interesting bunch of people.

We do not even have to read between the lines.

It is there in plain sight.

They were known for speaking falsely to one another. No one could trust anything that the church people said to them because they were inclined to misrepresent the truth.

They were inclined to get angry with each other. That was not such a big deal, but they held grudges and then the power of evil was set loose among them. It seems there is nothing wrong with having strong opinions and even expressing them forcefully, but all that needs to have a sunset clause. Literally, when the sun goes down, draw a line under the arguments and start afresh next day,

Some of them were known to be thieves. Seriously! It seems they had not yet given up their stealing, but they are told the time to do so has arrived. For them repentance included a change of lifestyle and a new focus on assisting the needy, rather than nicking stuff from the rich.

Then there was the gossip. What? In a church? Need we ask! Loose lips do not just sink ships. They also damage people and destroy churches. Our words are to be acts of grace for those who hear us, rather than spiritual poison that seeps from one soul to another.

They were to embrace a new set of values: instead of bitterness, wrath, anger, wrangling, slander and malice (what a fun church they must have been), they were to be kind to one another, tender-hearted and forgiving one another.

That is quite a turn around. A real conversion!

Yet these are the people to whom our theme sentence today is addressed. These are the people—liars, cantankerous, and corrupt gossips—who are addressed as “beloved children” and called to live together in love.

It seems that God does indeed think more highly of us than we deserve!

In their life together they were to reflect what we see in God and what we see in Jesus: selfless love.

Had I recently seen a huge argument in this church, or experienced grudges being held long after the sun had set, then this would be a really tough sermon to give.

Maybe I have just not been here long enough yet?

No matter how good or bad things may have been in the past, the call for conversion and a fresh start is very clear in today’s reading.

If we want to kill this parish, today’s reading gives us a checklist of nasty attributes to unleash. That spiritual poison will kill this place dead.

If we want to renew and refresh this parish as we wait for our new priest being appointed, then today’s reading is also very clear.

What reputation do we want this faith community to have around town?

It is ours to create and ours to destroy.

Have we earned a reputation as genuine people who care for each other and look out for the needy?

Are we building a church where others can say: These people act like Jesus!

As today’s theme sentence says:

Be imitators of God, as beloved children,
and live in love,
as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us.

Feast of the Magdalene
St Paul’s Church, Ipswich
21 July 2024

[ video ]

This Sunday we celebrate the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, perhaps better named as The Magdalene.

As we reflect on this feast day and gather up fragments of wisdom for our own lives I want to suggest that we use three simple questions to go deeper in this sacred tradition.

Q1: Why did Jesus give her the nickname, Magdalene/Tower?

Mary was a very common name for Jewish girls in the time of Jesus. Half of the women at that time were named in honour of Miriam, (Mary), the sister of Moses. Like Miriam the sister of Moses, Mary the Magdalene was a woman who stood out from the crowd. Both Miriam and Mary were leaders whose status was no less than that of their brothers. 

Miriam was a prophet and a powerful voice in the circle around Moses. Indeed, she is remembered as having saved his life when he was just an infant. 

Migdal (“tower”) was a common name for villages across the holy land in biblical times, but Mary is never said to be “from Magdala.” Rather, “the Madgdalene” (meaning “the tower”) seems to have been a nickname given to Mary by Jesus, just as he gave similar pet names to Simon (“Peter/Rocky”) and to the sons of Zebedee (“Boanerges / sons of thunder”). 

In some way or other, Mary stood out from the crowd. She was a tower among the disciples, just as Simon was the rock on which Jesus built his first community of disciples. The Magdalene was also the leader of the Jesus women, just as Miriam led the women in their dancing and singing when God saved the Israelites at the Red Sea.

Most significantly, the Magdalene was the first disciple to whom Jesus appears after his resurrection. She is honoured as the Apostle to the Apostles, as Jesus sent her with the good news for her brothers.

Q2: How did the early church with its male leadership treat Mary?

Mary the Magdalene was a towering figure among the disciples of Jesus, although the male-dominated church that emerged after 100 years or so did not know what to do with this woman at the very heart of the apostolic community.

She was silenced and sidelined. As many women have been by the male church over the 2,000 years between the Magdalene and us.

Mary was overlooked and pushed aside as early as the time of Paul, just 20 years after Easter. Mary was never being included among the apostles let alone as one of the pillars of the early Jesus movement.

She was written out of the story by the second and third-century church leaders (all males, of course). In some cases, texts with her name were changed to substitute a more pliable woman into the storyline.

But when the Gospels came to be written after Paul, Peter, James and John were all dead and gone; memories of Mary remained.

The Gospels were written after the authentic letters of Paul and what Mary had done was told “in remembrance of her,” just as Jesus had said.

Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.” (Mark 14:9 NRSV)

Eventually Pope Gregory I (590–604) determined that she had been a sex-worker before Jesus rescued her from a life of shame, except that in the Pope’s eyes the shame never quite got removed.

Despite all that, Mary’s special festival survived in the English Book of Common Prayer. The Magdelene is honoured with colleges at both Cambridge and Oxford, and her legacy has survived among the Anglicans even when her festival was downgraded in Rome.

Q3: What aspect of discipleship does she represent for us today?

In the last few decades the Magdalene has returned to the spotlight as the church struggles to make sense of mission in a post-Christian world.

Mary—the overlooked and despised woman—calls us back to the heart of our faith: our love for Jesus.

Like Mary in Jesus Christ Superstar we often don’t know how love Jesus.

Yet that is the one thing that actually matters.

Not our carefully crafted creeds and volumes of church regulations. Not our buildings and charitable institutions. Not the size of our membership nor the eloquence of our preachers.

All that matters is that we are disciples of Jesus.

In that lies wisdom for today.

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For an earlier sermon on Mary Magdalene see: Mary the Tower (20 July 2019)

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.