Pentecost +21A
29-10-2017
^{Dt 34 1-12
Ps 90 1-6 13-17 1
Thess 2 1-10
Mt 22 34-36}

When we decided that today would be our harvest thanksgiving festival, I wondered whether we’d have to change our readings to a more harvest-focussed theme. But when I looked at the readings set for today, they seemed just right. We’ve just heard them: the first sight of the promised land, the Psalmist’s security in God’s protection, Paul’s pride in the lively new Church he founded in Thessaloniki and Jesus’s gift of the way of love — what more could anyone give thanks for? What more clear direction could we need to inspire us to thanksgiving?

Let’s look at each reading briefly. We’ve finally arrived at the end of Moses’s story. He wasn’t able to enter into the inheritance promised to his ancestors. But he was permitted to gaze on it from the mountain opposite Jericho – Mount Nebo. I imagine he gave thanks for a life-mission accomplished. The people he’d struggled so hard to rescue, to guide and protect — they were with him; they were his harvest. They were free, they were alive, they were all together. And they were a short day’s journey from entering into the promise God had made to their ancestors; very soon they would enter the Promised Land.

Moses had much to be thankful for, and the people he led had much to thank God for too; for providing a prophet-leader who could lead them safely into their inheritance.

God’s provision and care are likewise the theme at the heart of today’s Psalm. Just as the story of the Exodus does, this Psalm acknowledges the sufferings and doubts we people experience along the journey of life. And it ends with a wonderful prayer that our lives might be granted meaning: “May the gracious favour of the Lord our God be upon us; prosper the work of our hands, O prosper the work of our hands!” It’s a prayer filled with the hope of belonging — a confident prayer to the One who has been our refuge for untold generations; the One who calls us ‘children’. That is a hope and a security truly to give thanks for, and we share it this hope!

The Epistle reading is likewise a story of a difficult pilgrimage travelled in hope, and at considerable emotional and personal cost to see it through. Paul and his fellow evangelists are writing a letter which is filled with celebration and thanksgiving for the harvest which the Holy Spirit has enabled in Thessaloniki. They have a living, breathing Church to write to; a Church whose faith in God is the talk of Ancient Greece^{1 Thess 1.8}. And for this thumping harvest, Paul, Silvanus and Timothy can’t stop giving thanks to God!

We are hearing all these wonderful tidings as God’s free people. They remind us that the burdens we might carry and the struggles we endure are the common experience of people of faith. And that means we don’t journey alone — which is something I find to be a comfort and an encouragement. In these ancient experiences of God’s providence to ordinary strugglers, I find the hope and the confidence to lay my needs before this very same God who has been the refuge and helper of my ancestors in the faith. This gives me cause for thanksgiving.

And if we ever imagine that God mightn’t understand our predicament — mightn’t get how hard it is for us to live out the faith we hold to be right — we need only look to Jesus to be reminded; God understands our struggles from right inside.

For some weeks now, we’ve been following Jesus’s disputes with the religious authorities in Jerusalem. Wave after wave of them have come at him with their curliest questions; with case studies to trip the wisest expert. Last week, with their question about paying taxes, any answer he gave was dangerous. He’d either be stoned by his own people or crucified by the Romans. A good, peaceful man attacked like this.

So yes, God understands the struggles that good people have to endure. We are not alone.

Now look at how he answers the latest curly question; he does so with the heart of God’s teaching: the greatest commandment. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

There’s the Lord our God again. We are God’s free people — and some of the most prosperous ever on Earth. Our problems and our struggles are very real, but the resources we’ve been given to deal with them are a gift from God, and so far more than we need — such is God’s abundance to us. Last week, we explored the idea that we are not so much the containers of these gifts as channels of them. And let’s face it, if we tried to contain all God’s gifts, we’d burst anyway — so being a channel is a far more comfortable option.

Today — thanksgiving Sunday — we remind each other to give thanks for the abundant plenty which God has showered out on us. And the great commandment reminds us very specifically how God prefers us to give thanks: with heart, soul and mind, and with a desire that our neighbour should be just as blessed as we are.

Remembering the plenty we enjoy; remembering the way Jesus defined neighbour with Luke’s parable of the Good Samaritan; and remembering the fact that a minor slip in luck or relationships can land us in the same boat as those we serve through Anglicare — marriage breakdown or job loss is now making unprecedented numbers of middle-class, professional women homeless in Adelaide and other Australian capitals.

Remembering all that, our wardens and councillors have asked that today, we give our harvest thanksgiving in the form of goods which Anglicare can use to fill Christmas hampers so our neighbours can enjoy some semblance of the pleasure we so often take for granted. Let’s give thanks to the Lord our God in the way Jesus calls us to do; let’s love our neighbours as ourselves. Amen

Pentecost + 20a

^{22-10-2017 Bridgewater Mt 22 15-33}

Jesus lived in a time and place when the Romans said that everyone should respect their leader, the Emperor, as a god. Say the wrong thing about the Emperor in public, and you’re in trouble. Today, we’ve seen some enemies of Jesus, Pharisees, trying to trick him into doing just that; to say something about the Emperor that the Roman governor would think was blasphemous.

The Pharisees ask Jesus a question about paying taxes to Rome. It’s a very tricky question. It’s asked in a way that can only have a yes or a no answer. They try to make sure that however Jesus answers it, he’ll be in trouble. If he says yes you should pay taxes to the Roman emperor, his own people will hate him. If he says no you shouldn’t, he’ll be arrested by the Roman soldiers.

But Jesus surprises them with a question of his own; a question about the coin they had to use to pay those taxes. ‘Show me the coin’, he says. And they do. That’s a surprise. Those scrupulously religious people had a Roman coin in the Temple precinct. Think about it; they’re in God’s house and someone there has a coin with a graven image of a false god on it; an image of the Emperor who the Romans said all should worship as god. Remember the first commandment?

⁶ I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; ⁷ you shall have no other gods before me. ⁸ You shall not make for yourself a graven image, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. ⁹ You shall not bow down to them or worship them; ^{Dt 5:6–9}

Jesus has just shown everyone with eyes to see that these people with their trick question are hypocrites. No-one really serious about their faith would keep one of these coins. But they’ve just shown him one.

Jesus asks them, ^{20 “}Whose head is this, and whose title?”

If you look at the coin, you’ll see a graven image of the emperor’s head, and around it is written “Tiberius Caesar, August son of the divine Augustus, and on the other side, high priest.” So the writing on this coin says this is an image of a god who the Hebrew Scriptures say is false. And how do we know it is false? People experienced this false god through his money and the oppression he used to gather it. We meet the true God through the living, free gift of this creation. False gods always take. The true God always gives;.

So when Jesus tells them “Give …to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” he’s saying the emperor can keep his deluded propaganda. Jesus reminds the Pharisees and everyone there that they and we bear the image of the true God; we belong to the true God.

The Pharisees had tried to trick Jesus into saying something that would divide him from his own people. His answer showed that they’d actually divided themselves between two gods. The enemy is often called the divider. This reminds us of what he said earlier, back in chapter 6^.24, “No one can serve two masters; … You cannot serve God and wealth.” Today, he warns the Pharisees that they are doing just that.

One of the really terrible things that happens when a powerful people controls a weaker ones is that the people under the boot will often fight each other, and not the people who have enslaved them. They lose sight of hope; they can’t imagine freedom from the big power. Instead, they fight each other for the little scraps of power they can get hold of.

Jesus knew this was what was happening to the Pharisees and he wouldn’t join in that self-destructive game. Instead, he reminded them that we all bear God’s image and likeness – he showed us the way back to God.

Whatever happens to us, one thing is sure; we always belong to God. Not even death can separate us from the love of God – Jesus was going to show that with his own death.

The Pharisees’ question was clever and it reflected what life was like for them. But in the end, it wasn’t a real question. It only revealed how sad their situation was. Jesus gave them back the main question; ‘What do we owe God.’ And then he lived and died the answer, so when he rose again, we would know where the strength comes from if we are to name evil and be set free from its divisive power.

Today, we’re pondering this question for ourselves; what do we owe God. The answer, of course, is everything – our lives, our families, our gifts and talents, our character, our prosperity; everything. We owe God everything we have and everything we are.

Jesus calls us to remember that we bear the image of God. That means we don’t just own our gifts and talents, our character, our time and our plenty; no, it means we behave with them in the way God behaves – and that’s with a sense of abundance. How do we do that? The example of Jesus is clear – though he was in the form of God, [he] didn’t regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself…^{Phil 2.6-7a}

A time to look together at the inventory – Review and renew

Disciples of Jesus, our life as Christ’s Church remains true to the people we are. Our life as Christ’s Church truly proclaims Christ to the world where our gifts and talents, our time and our plenty are shared so that the world can continue to experience God’s abundance. Amen

Pentecost + 19A

^{A & C 15-10-2017}

^{Ex 32 1-14,}

^{Ps 106 1-6, 20-24,}

^{Phil 4 1-9,}

^{Mt 22 1-14}

Before the readings – introducing the parable of the wedding feast Mt 22.1-14

The first part of the parable is about people who abuse the King’s invitation to the wedding feast of his son. This is something like what we’ll see in today’s Exodus reading at the base of Mt Sinai – slaves rescued from Egypt reject their saviour and instead give their loyalty and worship to a counterfeit god. The King’s anger in the parable recalls God’s fury at the traitors at Mt Sinai.

The Psalm remembers the danger the Israelites provoked and how they were rescued from the consequences of their actions by Moses stepping in to plead for them. He doesn’t do it because of anything good about them, but because punishing them could tarnish God’s good name. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is very much a second Moses, pleading for us before God

In the parable, the King’s command to invite everyone – regardless of merit or relationship with him – is the offer of the Good News – the Gospel – to us: we are all invited to the wedding banquet, as close friends would be.

The single guest’s missing robe is described in the Philippians reading – the character of a guest seeking a genuine, living relationship with the host.

So the grace is there for all, but to receive it is to accept the challenge to change – to be sanctified – to grow into the likeness of Jesus.

We’ve accepted the invitation. But are we putting on the wedding garment?

We heard a parable today that Jesus tells the Jewish leaders of his time. It’s a life-and-death disputation, and Jesus wants to put the fear of God into them. In the first part of the parable, Jesus compares Israel with people who’ve accepted an invitation to a royal wedding feast, but on the day of the feast, they all refuse to come. Some actually kill the messengers sent to collect them. It’s a declaration of war on their King.

This recalls the way they’d treated the prophets that God had sent to call the Hebrew people to live faithfully. Naturally, the King is enraged and deals with the murderers – even destroys their city. For Matthew’s community, this would make them think of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE; they’d have seen this catastrophe as God’s judgement on Jerusalem.

Then the King in the parable commands something strange; everyone on the main streets is to be invited. This is our invitation; we Gentiles have been called to the heavenly banquet. God called us before we ever knew there was such a being.

But at the banquet, the King sees a guest who isn’t dressed appropriately; one of the people from the streets who’d been invited into the banquet. He is thrown out ‘…into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.” Jesus poses a question which confronts every one of us: who’ll be in, and who’ll be out at the last judgement. The parable tells us his answer with an enigmatic story of a guest without a wedding garment.

There’s one very plain message in this parable. Neither being on the invitation-list, nor even being on the inside – a baptised or an ordained member of the church – is any guarantee of salvation. So the message applies equally to me. Far from being able to grease the works for someone else, I might actually be the one found lacking the wedding garment in the end

In the parable, wearing a wedding garment shows a guest’s true relationship with God. It spells out the relationship publicly; it honours God’s invitation. In the context of Jesus’ argument with the Pharisees, not wearing it represents Israel’s neglect of their relationship with God. In the context of Matthew’s church community, wearing it represented the courage to be Christians in a hostile world and not just at church. It meant solidarity with Jesus who confronted hypocrisy and was prepared endure the cost of his own integrity. The way we wear our wedding garment is how the world is able to see what God is like. (Reflect on Jer 13?)

What might this parable say specifically to us about our path – about our integrity – about the way we portray God to the world? First, it seems to have an internal contradiction. Inviting everyone in from the streets seems to say come as you are. You’re fine as you are. The invitation is generous; broad. But it’s not an invitation to a come as you are party. It doesn’t make the mistakes of today’s self-esteem movement. It doesn’t pretend that “we’re just fine the way we are.” We’re not: some of us are troubled, confused, lonely, mortal – some of us may be criminals.

So this Gospel is not saying that all of us are just fine the way we are. Rather, it tells us how God loves us too much to leave us unchanged. The inclusiveness of the Kingdom is not just an easy tolerance. Jesus wants us in the Kingdom becoming the people he knows we can be, not stuck in the mess we so often make of ourselves.

Putting on the garment is a choice to open ourselves up to that grace. How do we exercise that choice – maintain it? The wedding garment is powerfully suggestive of a baptismal gown. So this Gospel is an open invitation to the wedding banquet of the Son, but the way in is through the waters of baptism. Those who truly accept the invitation will not reject the new and holy identity that God offers them. They’ll keep their baptismal promises. They’ll accept and wear the wedding garment.

Finally, the other aspect of this feasting is that we are called into fellowship with others of God’s children. And by God’s grace, we have the privilege and duty of being co-hosts; not just guests. We are the servants sent out to invite everyone.

Let me conclude with a prayer for all of us which Paul wrote as an exhortation to the first Church he ever founded on European soil: the Church in Philippi. Let’s receive it as a putting on of the wedding robe at the banquet to which we were invited, and to which we must invite others in love and peace

^{Phil 4.4} Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. ⁵ Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. ⁶ Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. ⁷ And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

⁸ Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. 

Amen.

Pentecost + 18 A

^{Oct 8th 2017}

^{A & C Ex 20 Ps 19 Phil 3 Mt 21 33f}

We’ve just heard the readings together. Yes Peter, I hear you say. We do that every week. But something I came across during the week reminded me that the public reading-out-loud of scripture in our tradition is something we’ve done ever since that time at Mount Sinai we just heard about; that’s very important.

When Moses gathered the people who’d escaped slavery in Egypt to read out the 10 C’s to them, it gave them a new story of themselves; a new identity. They weren’t slaves any more; they were God’s, and God’s alone. In this public reading, they heard there was a new way of living as God’s free people – living with God, and living with each other. It was like a public reading of a brand new constitution; an agreed statement of purpose, belonging and identity; a pivotal moment in the story of our people. It happens to be the first time in our tradition that there was a public reading of Holy Scripture. We continue to do that week by week. And each time we do that, it grounds us again in who we are, who we belong to, and why we are the people we are. We must never forget how significant it is to read Scripture aloud.

In Exodus today, ten words – Ten Commandments – were given to a people who God still wants to be a shining light to everyone on Earth. Those ten words are all about relationship; about loyalty, about respect for God and each other, about self-care, integrity and honesty. The ten words describe how free people can choose to live; so different from the way a slave has to live if they want to survive. The three best habits of survival for a slave are pragmatism, pragmatism and pragmatism; whatever it takes for you to survive.

For slaves, the Ten Commandments wouldn’t have been workable; they wouldn’t have been fair until these slaves had been set free. That’s still true for many people today; captives, refugees, oppressed minorities, people living under occupation, people in very poor countries. When the leaders of the free world say that such people should respect laws, these leaders are doing something God didn’t do. God set people free before holding them to standards that free people should live by.

God set the Israelites free. But how hard was it for those escapees from Egypt to make the transition to a new life? In one sense, Moses was asking them all to hand in their old habits and leave them at Mt Sinai. But particularly when you travel, your habits seem to travel with you, unless you deliberately choose to leave them behind. For many of us on our faith journey, that’s a choice we must make daily.

The Hebrew people did come to love the Law that God gave them – they let it shape them. That much was clear from today’s Psalm.

⁷ The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul:

the command of the Lord is true, and makes wise the simple.

⁸ The precepts of the Lord are right, and rejoice the heart:

the commandment of the Lord is pure, and gives light to the eyes.

New life for the soul, wisdom, joy, enlightenment; what more could you want as signs of spiritual growth? Apparently quite a bit. God has never been content to let people settle into good habits or attitudes and just leave it at that. Getting rid of bad habits isn’t an end in itself. It’s a way of freeing ourselves from slavery in order that we might become, and go on becoming what God wants to make of us; agents of blessing and givers of new life. So the freedom and the gifts of this beautiful Law point to something more. They were never meant as an end in themselves.

Freedom, revival, wisdom, joy and enlightenment – these were all given so God’s chosen people might be able to fulfil their call: the call Abraham received on behalf of his descendants that they would become God’s means of blessing to all families of the earth. ^{Gen 12.3b} Maybe this helps us understand some of those scandalous things we heard Paul say about the Law today – that his achievements in obeying the Law to the letter were no more than rubbish. He’d become habituated to think his purpose in life was to be a good Pharisee; someone who knew the Law inside out; someone who made sure he was absolutely blameless before the Law.

But now he sees this wasn’t his purpose at all. He wasn’t meant to dedicate his life to cultivating good habits – some sort of spiritual elephant-stamp collector. Knowing the God who is revealed in Jesus was the important thing; not being better than other people. And knowing God wasn’t an examinable discipline; it was a gift. Jesus sought him out to give it to him on that Damascus road. All Paul was called to do was to show people that Jesus is looking for us too; all of us. We owe a huge debt to Paul for breaking his good habits.

In our last reading today, we meet Jesus in a feisty mood. He’s just cleared the temple precinct of people who were turning God’s grace into a commodity to sell, and he’s in dispute with them now. He challenges them in his parable, portraying them as being like tenant farmers who’ve fallen so far into the habit of being the custodians of God’s good gifts that they imagine they own them outright.

Jesus tells in the parable how they risk becoming the sort of people who would murder the owner’s slaves and finally even his son to assert this false ownership. Then he asks, “Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” His indignant listeners dig themselves in deeper. They said to him, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time.”

This is one of a series of three parables which challenge complacency; challenge habits; assumptions: challenge us to look again at what we take for granted as ours.

So we’ve heard the readings together, and they have called on us to think together about the way we are to be shaped for our vocation as Christ’s free people.

We need to think about what the Scriptures today call us to not so much as individuals, but as a parish. What new ways are there for this Parish of Stirling to be a blessing to the people amongst whom we are placed – the people God has entrusted to our care?

How might we help to set slaves free, revive shattered souls, make hearts rejoice and bring light where once there was only the fog of fear and slavery?

Amen

Pentecost + 12A

^{27.8.17 — Ex 1.8—2.10 Bridgewater}

Bad girls for God

A few weeks ago we began the Joseph story – we saw him sold off by his brothers to become a slave in Egypt. Later he’d call those brothers and his parents to come to Egypt as he saved them and his adopted country from a catastrophic famine. Today we’ve moved on about 400 years in the story. Joseph’s family still lives in Egypt; but now it’s grown from a clan of twelve households to a numerous people. There’s a new Pharaoh, and he sees these outsiders in such numbers as a security threat. He calls them Israelites children of Israel/Jacob the refugee. He forgets or doesn’t care that they’re the people of Joseph, the one who saved his country from ruin. He calls them by a derogatory name too; Habiru-Hebrews. This isn’t just another name for Israelites. Habiru then meant refugee, fugitive, non-citizen, fringe dweller; but mostly Habiru just meant ‘slave’.

Today’s story is part of a grand historical sweep. But unlike other historical narratives, it doesn’t spend much time on the comings and goings at the palace. Nor does it tell of desperate men running an underground resistance movement. Instead, we zoom in on five women; women who conspire to preserve life rather than obey an order to kill children. They conspire to pervert the course of injustice. We’re told the names of two of the women; Shiphrah and Puah (Fair and Splendid); they’re midwives. That they’re named makes me notice that the Pharaoh hasn’t been named.

Shiphrah and Puah expose the Pharaoh’s fearful bigotry; how he dehumanizes vulnerable people. These two women expose him brilliantly. When the Pharaoh confronts them with their failure to obey his order and kill the Hebrew baby boys, their reply plays on his all-too-familiar racism.

He asks, ‘Why have you allowed them to live?’, and they reply,

Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women, for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them. (v.19)

The first of his prejudices they play on is that foreigners – Habiru – are different from ‘humans’, and that this difference will obviously show in the way Habiru women bear children. Pharaoh won’t even question a statement that implies Habiru are more like breeding animals than human beings.

And of course his other prejudices are that these Habiru midwives wouldn’t possibly be smart enough to try to trick the Pharaoh with a lie, and they certainly wouldn’t be brave enough to engage in real civil disobedience!

Pharaoh digs himself in, deeper and deeper, and in the process, exposes his own heart as the real place of inhumanity. If these Habiru boys must be spawned, then let’s throw them in the river; drown them like the rats they are. Who’s the real inhuman one? The story tells it all.

And so we read on to the point we all know so well, where Moses is born again – drawn from the Nile – the river sometimes called the Mother of Egypt. A child ‘abandoned’ in the river according to the letter of the law, and drawn from it by an enemy – death turned to life by commitment and compassion; it’s a parable of salvation history written from the perspective of freed slaves.

Do you need to be a slave to enter this story? Do you get your name in the story like Shiphrah and Puah did by joining in the story – by being a midwife to new and risky rebirth? These women got under the guard of their slavers and worked with God whose purpose was ultimately to set a whole people free. Do we face anything like they did? Are there stories like this where we can to join in with these women?

We Australians also have stories of asylum seekers and dangerous waters and vulnerable children, and East Africa has catastrophic famine again. These stories are still with us; and they won’t be going away. I remember reading in the 1990’s about 25m displaced people in the world. Now there are more than 65 million – each with a real life story to tell.

The women of today’s Bible story show us that God’s little people are called to resist power that dehumanises; called to act in a way that helps vulnerable people needing safety and dignity to find it. Today’s story challenges our Pharaohs when they turn bigoted stereotypes into ‘truth’ and try to hide the victims of their stereotypes somewhere where people can’t learn their names or hear their stories. But today we learn that God knows their stories, and that we are to work in a way to make all such stories heard.

If we accept without question that people and their stories get automatically locked away, this has spiritual consequences.

We must hear the hope in the women’s defiance and be encouraged by their wit and their bravery. A three-month-old baby was hopefully entrusted to the river by his mother and sister, launched to a new future in a tiny ark tevah תֵּבָה and watched and prayed for. This, and the story of Noah’s ark are the only places in the Bible where this word occurs. An ark is God’s way of preserving the future against calamity. What is our role in this sort of rescue mission today – refugees, Aboriginal people, unemployed, endangered species, endangered ecosystems, etc.?

Like the midwives, we should preserve life and defy fearful bigotry. Amen

Pentecost + 11a A & C 20-8-2017

^{Gn 45.1-15,}

^{Ps 133,}

^{Rm 11.13-32,}

^{Mt 15.21-28}

South Africa has been a very profound experience for Vicky and me. It is a nation still wounded by terrible inequities, and now it struggles with a corrupt leader and a ruling party that most believe has lost its way. Yet in all the people we met, there’s such vibrant energy and such a clear understanding of what is the right way ahead that it’s impossible not to hope. Everybody talks about the mistakes being made. Instead of dealing with the real issues of adequate housing and 40% unemployment the government is renaming streets and cities and national monuments. Everyone knows that these triumphalist symbolic put-downs are exactly what Mandela warned against.

Everyone knows this, and everybody speaks their mind; and that’s where the hope lies. These people know that justice is only achieved when all forms of oppression are ended. They’re anxiously awaiting the end of this president’s term. But as they wait, everyone is clear that they have a right and a duty to speak out; and this they do. The truth will not be silenced. So everywhere we went it seemed people were marching or gathering to sing, dance and renew the message that the truth and reconciliation – the freedom they marched for centuries to win – is never going to be lost on their watch.

So a confronting time, yet an inspirational one; and much needed as we’ve returned to news cycle of the racist, ideological violence in Charlottesville, Barcelona and Finland. We’ve seen often over the past century where this can lead. It always comes with the silencing of the truth beneath a barrage of hate-filled, untruthful slogans. Silence is never an adequate response to this.

The South African people teach us to make sure truth is not silenced: freedom truth and reconciliation must be danced and sung out always and everywhere.

Today we have a set of readings that speak out this same reconciliation message. Joseph chooses reconciliation with his brothers, even though they’d sold him down the river. The Psalmist sings that reconciliation like this is the stuff of eternal life – ⁴For [in this harmony] the Lord has commanded his blessing: which is life for evermore.

In Romans, Paul brings home the fact that freedom, truth and reconciliation need just as much vigilance within the church as they do in the wider world. He’s writing to the Church in Rome some time after the death of the Emperor Claudius. This emperor had decreed that all Jews must be banished from Rome; he made no distinction between different groups of Jews. So Jewish Christians got exiled as well.

This meant the Roman church, which had been a mixture of Jewish and Gentile converts, suddenly became a Gentile-only body. Suddenly, all the power fell to this group, and the church’s culture shifted away from its Jewish origins. Can you imagine this happening here? Imagine that we share this building with Lutherans.

Suddenly, one day, all Anglicans are banned from the Adelaide Hills. Off we go, and only five years later, when the evil dictator has been replaced, we return in dribs and drabs to our beloved churches. But things have changed. If we want to worship here, now we have to sit down for the hymns (oh, and the hymn book is different) and stand up for the prayers (and there’s no prayer book) and communion is only every few months if you’re properly catechised.

Paul is writing as Jewish Christians are returning to find a church which they barely recognise. It seems from this passage that each group is running down the other in a power-struggle to regain some balance again.

Paul is writing to them as a Jewish Christian who’ll soon be coming to visit them. His message to them here is that whoever we are, we can’t decide who or what pleases God best. All of us ultimately depend on the grace of God. The power struggle over control of the church is ridiculous. At the end of the day, only God’s grace counts. If God loves someone, who are we to exclude them, their lifestyle, or the way they offer their worship to God? Paul often writes to churches trying to settle disputes. Reconciliation is a major theme of his writing.

And the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman; I’ve preached on this here before, so I’ll only say one thing about it. As far as we know, Matthew’s community was based to the north of the Holy Land. And so they heard this story as one of hope for them and their mission. Ulrich Luz says they heard this story from within their own experiences of illness and discouragement; from their own context of separation from Israel (Syrian Antioch). They heard it speak to them as a faith community amongst Gentiles. This story told them about the power of prayer and faith from the woman’s perspective.

This story also told them Jesus was not confined within the borders of Israel. His power was as present to them and their Gentile neighbours as it had been in distant Galilee. This was a strength in their task of living out and preaching the gospel among their Gentile neighbours.

So while we’re scandalised about how exclusive the children’s food to the dogs metaphor sounds, for Matthew’s community, it’s full of the hope of freedom, truth and reconciliation. We just have to learn to hear it from that different cultural perspective.

Finally, where might the rubber hit the road for us right now?

Our community may soon be subjected to a plebiscite on the question of marriage equality. As a member of the clergy, I am receiving material from both sides which I am apparently meant to pass on to you. Much of it is bigoted and poorly argued. But the Archbishop put out a media release the other day which I find balanced and reconciling. So I share it with you today.

Statement to the Advertiser (17.8.17) 

Within the Anglican Church as with the general community there is a wide range of opinion about whether or not the definition of marriage should be changed in the Marriage Act. Some people are opposed to a change and some are very much in favour. In 2004 the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia welcomed the initiative of the Federal Parliament in clarifying that marriage, at law in Australia, is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.  

Of particular concern in any debate concerning a change in the definition of marriage is that we are not talking only about an idea but we are talking about real people with real lives and this is the case across the spectrum of opinion. We have a responsibility to do all we can to ensure that the views of all are respected and heard and avoid any kind of bullying or coercion as the debate continues. 

If the definition of marriage is changed widespread protections will need to be carefully put in place to protect the right of all Australians to hold and live out religious beliefs including those concerning marriage. This includes faith based organisations as well as individuals.  

My hope is that Adelaide Anglicans whether they are for or against a change in the definition of marriage will participate in the debate in a way which is a blessing to those around them and will ensure Adelaide Anglican churches are a welcoming place for all. 

Geoff Smith

Anglican Archbishop of Adelaide