Sermon Notes Pentecost 2 7th June Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26 by Desiree Snyman

Today I want us to think about shame. 

Many years ago, I was doing the usual Monday morning tidy up around my church and picked up a book left behind by a member of one of the many AA and NA groups that hired the church through the week. On the inside page was scrawled in shaky writing: 

"I am not a bad person wanting to be good. I am a sick person wanting to be well." 

Even today I still feel tearful at the shame that poured out of that sentence. Holding that book stopped me in my tracks. I felt such compassion for the anonymous owner. I realised we have no idea about the inner wounds of shame people carry. 

Shame. When you think about shame, what does your body do in response? Does your head bow? Do you lower your eyes? Do you curl in on yourself? 

There is a difference between guilt and shame. Guilt says, “I did something bad.” Shame says, “I am bad.” Guilt says, “I made a mistake.” Shame says, “I am a mistake.” Guilt can be empowering in that it can motivate repair. Shame is debilitating. It shuts people down. Shame disconnects people from their inner divinity, the Christ within. Shame disconnects people from belonging; it is isolating. Shame says, “You are not good enough.” 

Calling and Healing 

In the second week of Pentecost, we are back in the Gospel of Matthew. Two aspects of Jesus’ ministry are demonstrated: calling and healing. 

Matthew the tax collector is called and ordained to the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples. What’s unusual about Jesus’ decision to choose Matthew is that he is a tax collector. For first-century Palestinian people living under Roman oppression, tax collectors are a hated enemy, Jewish traitors who take money to benefit empire and themselves. Tax collectors are reviled and rejected as the worst of sinners, which is why the Pharisees question why Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners when Jesus enjoys hospitality in Matthew’s home. 

The two healing stories of a young girl and an older woman are knitted together, but there are stark differences. The father of the girl, a synagogue leader, advocates on behalf of his daughter and speaks directly to Jesus, asking that he break purity codes to touch his daughter. Although he is desperate for healing, he has the confidence and authority to speak directly to Jesus. 

The older woman’s faith is profound. Lacking the confidence of the synagogue leader to interrupt Jesus, she believes that simply touching the fringe of his prayer shawl will be enough. Perhaps she is motivated by Zechariah 8:23: "Thus says the Lord of hosts: In those days ten men from nations of every language shall take hold of a Jew, grasping his garment and saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.’" 

In Mark’s Gospel the young girl is twelve and the woman has been menstruating for twelve years. The number twelve is a reference to the twelve tribes of Israel. Under Roman oppression the Jewish people, like the woman and the girl, are literally bled dry to the point of death by exorbitant taxes. 

The Shame and vulnerability Beneath the stories

The calling of Matthew, the healing of the young girl and the woman touching Jesus’ prayer shawl seem separate at first, but they are clearly linked. All three stories show how Jesus contravenes purity codes and offers mercy, healing and compassion to those others might reject. 

It is the underlying shame that connects the stories of the older woman and the tax collector, and how Jesus stands within that shame to bring people to wholeness.  

The synagogue leader embraces the power of vulnerability in asking Jesus for help. His example of vulnerability may have inspired the woman with menstruation to be vulnerable also, and reach out and touch Jesus. 

Shame stems from childhood experiences, but also from societal and cultural influences. One source of shame is the purity codes. Matthew and the woman with menstruation are labelled as unclean and excluded from temple worship and social gatherings. Shame is an emotion, but it has other consequences. It leads to a sense of unworthiness and disconnection. Shame says to Matthew and the older woman, “You are not good enough.” 

Matthew might have had a comfortable life with material wealth, but he would never have left his home without an armed guard. As a tax collector the message from tribe and temple is clear: “You are not worthy of belonging and love.” It does not take long for this message to be internalised. I imagine Matthew would have lived a lonely life. 

A woman experiencing prolonged menstruation may internalize feelings of shame associated with her condition. The ongoing bleeding can limit participation in religious observances, temple worship, and social engagement. Consequently, the stigma extends beyond the physical experience, affecting emotional well-being, social relationships, and economic participation. This case demonstrates how shame is sustained through secrecy, silence, and societal judgment, contributing to a profound sense of isolation. 

National Reconciliation Week

In the context of NRW, we might ask ourselves: Who are we in the story? I wonder whether the story of the older woman might resonate with some First Nations people who have experienced the exhausting effects of prejudice. 

The person I identify with is the tax collector. I carry a sense of white shame and an awareness of the ways my privileged class has profited from past and present injustices. By white shame, I do not mean shame for being white, but shame arising from the ways people like me have benefited from past and present injustices. As a white person privileged by wealth, education, and life in a wealthy nation, I recognize that I benefit from economic, social, and colonial systems that have advantaged some groups at the expense of others. 

For this reason, I may be most like the tax collector. In the Gospels, tax collectors were often seen as people who profited from unjust systems that burdened their own communities. This comparison does not necessarily mean that wealthy people are personally oppressive or intentionally exploit others. Although I carry a sense of white shame, I do not believe shame itself is the goal. Rather, that discomfort can become a doorway to truth-telling, repentance, and transformation. It invites self-examination: 

· Do I benefit from systems that disadvantage others?

· Have I inherited privileges I did not earn?

· Am I willing to acknowledge those realities without defensiveness?

· Do I recognize my need for mercy, healing, and transformation? 

Bringing Shame into the Light

The path out of shame is the power of vulnerability and bringing shame into the light. 

The synagogue leader embraces his own vulnerability and need and reaches out to Jesus for help. Similarly, the woman with menstruation reaches out in vulnerability to touch Jesus. Vulnerability is uncomfortable. We are often taught that vulnerability is weakness. However, vulnerability brought healing, joy, celebration and community for the synagogue leader and his family. 

Shame thrives in secrecy and silence but loses its power when brought into the light. By acknowledging and sharing his experience of power going out from him, Jesus brings into the light the woman who would have spent years hiding in the shadows. Her shame cannot survive when spoken and met with empathy. 

For people who have been pushed aside, worn down or told they do not belong, for those who are desperate, Jesus does not avoid broken homes, public shame, deep grief or physical suffering. Grace comes near. 

Concluding comments

The writer of that book all those years ago believed they were a sick person wanting to be well. Perhaps that is exactly what Jesus sees in these stories. Not bad people needing to become good, but wounded people needing healing. Not people to be excluded, but people to be restored. 

Matthew is called while still sitting at the tax booth. The woman is seen after years of hiding. The girl is taken by the hand and raised to life. 

Researcher Brené Brown argues that shame thrives in secrecy, silence and judgement, but that vulnerability is its antidote. When our wounds are brought into the light and met with empathy, shame begins to lose its grip. Brown goes on to say that vulnerability is not weakness. It is the birthplace of connection, creativity and innovation. 

That insight echoes what we see in these Gospel stories. The synagogue leader risks vulnerability and asks for help. The woman reaches out from the shadows and touches Jesus' cloak. Matthew leaves behind the life he has known and follows. In each case, vulnerability opens the possibility of transformation. 

Again and again, Jesus meets people in the places where shame tells them they are unworthy of belonging and love. He does not respond with condemnation. He responds with mercy, healing and relationship. 

Perhaps that is the invitation for us today: To bring into the light the places where shame has taken root. To risk vulnerability before God and trusted others. For it is through connection, compassion and grace that shame loses its power, and we discover again that we belong and can be whole.

Sermon Notes Trinity Sunday 31st May Matthew 28:16-20 by Desiree Snyman

God Is Love

When I say, “God is love,” people usually smile and nod. But when I say, “God is Trinity,” people often begin to frown. Maybe that is because we have made the Trinity sound like difficult philosophy. The Trinity has been turned into complicated doctrine instead of what it truly is: a way of life, a relationship to enter, a habit of love to practice. St. Augustine once said, “If you see love, you see the Trinity.” 

I suggest there are three obstacles to allowing the Trinity to be the heart of the Christian faith. 

The first obstacle is that Western Christianity has overemphasised the intellectual aspects of belief. Doctrine has also become overlaid with philosophy. Faith is often seen as doctrine to which we give intellectual agreement. What if each of our Christian doctrines were invitations to an abundant life, a life worth living, a habit, a lifestyle? What if each doctrine were a spiritual practice that led to a fuller way of being human and a fuller way of being divine? 

For example, the doctrine of the Incarnation is more than the belief that God became human. Incarnation is a spiritual practice of embodiment, a way of reconnecting with and listening to your body's sensations, emotions, and wisdom in support of healing and well-being. In a moment we shall see that the doctrine of the Trinity is an invitation to live in relationship, to live in the energy of love. 

A second obstacle to living a Trinitarian life is grammar. Remember our grammar lessons from kindy, where nouns were places, people, or things and verbs were actions? People think of God as a noun. What if God is more like a verb? 

Seeing God as a noun turns God into an object. When people think of God as a noun, they often picture God as an old man, cranky and grumpy, and it becomes our job to cheer him up with good behaviour. This is not the Christian God. It may be the god of the Greeks or the Vikings, but in the Christian faith God is not an object, a thing, a noun. God is less like a noun and more like a verb, the living energy of love. There is a dynamism to God.

A third mistake people make with the doctrine of the Trinity is that they begin with the one God and then try to explain how God is nevertheless three. The Bible actually begins with the Three and then shows us how they are One, like three dancers moving in one dance. The Bible begins with relationship. In 1 John we hear: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” In Matthew 28 the three Persons of the Trinity are named alongside one another as equals. The only difference is their ordering. 

Scripture says: God is love. And if God is love, then God is relationship. The Creator loves the Christ. The Christ receives and returns that love. The Holy Spirit is the living bond of love flowing between them. What makes them one is love. We see this most clearly in the baptism of Jesus. Jesus stands in the water. The voice of Love speaks: “You are my beloved.” And the Spirit descends like a dove. In that moment the inner life of God bursts open into visibility. 

The Trinity is not a puzzle to solve. It is a communion of love overflowing into the world.  Here is the astonishing part: humanity is included in this divine life. As 2 Peter 1:4 says, we are called to become “partakers of the divine nature.” God has opened the divine dance and invited us in. 

So, in simple language, what do Christians believe? We believe that God is beyond us, God is within us, and God is alongside us, all at the very same time. We believe that Creator, Christ, and Spirit are so perfectly united in love that they are one. We believe that God is community. 

What does this mean for us? Relationship is not just something God does. Relationship is what God is. We are formed through relationship, with God, with one another, and with creation itself. We are not isolated individuals carrying the weight of existence alone. We belong to one another. That is why baptism matters so deeply. 

At Jesus’ baptism these words are spoken: “You are my beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And in baptism those words become ours too. Because we are beloved, we are invited into the divine dance of love itself. 

The Trinity is not meant to remain doctrine on a page. It is meant to become a spiritual practice. To live inside the flow of loving and being loved. To forgive. To show compassion. To practice mutuality and self-giving love. To see every person not as a rival or an inconvenience but as beloved. And so, the good news of Trinity Sunday is this: God is not an old man in the sky. God is not an object. God is living relationship. God is love flowing endlessly in and through creation. And that love has made room for us. So when we abide in love, we abide in God. And when we live in God, we begin to join the great divine dance.

Sermon Notes Pentecost 24th May John 7:37-39 by Geoff Vidal

How would you respond to someone asking you to explain Pentecost?

Unlike Christmas and Easter, there has been nothing in our shops to say that it is Pentecost. Maybe Pentecost doesn’t get so much attention because no one has found a way to commercialize it. We don’t turn Pentecost into a culture extravaganza, or into a national holiday. So, this major Christian festival goes unnoticed.

But for us Pentecost is a big thing. This festival, this holiday is very important for the life of the church, for your life and mine.

Pentecost for Jews is celebrated 50 days after Passover and for Christians 50 days after the Resurrection. We have made it a red day. We have red decorations and sometimes red balloons; many of you are wearing red clothes. This is not “modern”. In the 13th century, the French Bishop Durandus wrote of Pentecost celebrations with masses of red rose leaves and sparks of fire blown over the congregation. They obviously had no risk assessment requirements back then.

Why red? Red represents the heat, power, and passion of God's love. It mimics the physical imagery of flames described in the Acts of the Apostles. It also honours the courage and missionary zeal of the early Christian martyrs who shed blood to build the early Church.

You also hear of Pentecost being referred to as Whitsunday (White Sunday). White is used during the seasons of Easter and Christmas. It represents purity, holiness, and the joy of Christ's resurrection. Historically, particularly in England, Pentecost was a popular day for mass baptisms. The newly baptised wore white robes to symbolize their new, purified life in Christ.

So, how do we properly describe Pentecost?

It’s not exactly a birthday for the Church. God’s people have always been God’s people meeting as church. But something very special happened at this time. There was a sort of transition from a “Church of Law” to the “Church of The New Covenant of Jesus”. The church began to see that the role it had was to continue the ministry of Jesus. So, perhaps, more than celebrating birth, we have a celebration of newness or remodelling.

And, here’s the real mystery. How do we understand the Holy Spirit? Pentecost was not actually the moment that the Holy Spirit came into being. It’s somewhat misleading to make our Pentecost focus the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was present at creation. The Holy Spirit was with God’s people with Moses in the desert. What we are doing at Pentecost is noticing the Holy Spirit in a new way.

As we will focus on next week, God, The Holy Trinity, has always existed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Here at Pentecost, we celebrate the specific work of the Holy Spirit in giving power to the Church for serving Christ in the world. The Church has always called upon the Holy Spirit when we intend to perform some serious work (such as Holy Communion, Ordination or Baptism).

I’ll share a story. "Several years ago, engineers building a new bridge over the East River in New York, discovered that the wrecked hull of a ship was lying right where the centre piers were to be built. Powerful machinery was brought in to remove the ship, but it would not budge. Then one of the engineers had an unusual idea. Why not have the tide raise the ship! Some strong cables were attached to the hull when the tide was very low. The other ends were fastened to the barge above. As the tide came in, the barge gradually lifted the sunken ship which was then moved out into the ocean and sunk at a spot that would not cause future problems."

God’s Holy Spirit is like the tide, it comes quietly, it comes in slowly, but it comes to us with enough power so that we might do the job God has called, led, each of us to do. There is a power, a force and for many an untapped force in each of our lives, that is the Holy Spirit. Frequently it is not dramatic, it does not cause us to do dramatic things, but it is there to give us the power to live the kind of lives, to be the kind of people, that God intended us to be.

The church grows through the action of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has been calling, prodding and pushing the church into new life right throughout history.

The presence of the Holy Spirit is often connected with the ability to understand different languages and with speaking in tongues.  

In Genesis, we read the story of the Tower of Babel. God’s people were given a lesson when God caused their language to be confused. Now, at Pentecost, God has done something new. Language is no longer confused. There is now a unity of faith and willingness to hear what others are saying. The Holy Spirit brings a willingness to accept different ways of expressing the Good News. This is not uniformity but acceptance and understanding in diversity.

So, in our celebration of Pentecost, what are we able to discover in our Gospel reading today?

In John chapter 7, we have an invitation to come to Jesus for living water. Jesus has gone to Jerusalem to attend the big annual celebration of the Festival of Booths. The festival went on for a week.

This feast included a daily procession of priests to the pool of Siloam. The priests collected water from the pool and brought this water back to the temple. Then, they marched around the altar seven times and recited a passage from Isaiah 12:3 saying, “with joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation”. Then they ceremonially poured out the water at the altar. This was all in remembrance of God’s provision for the thirsty people travelling in the Sinai desert with Moses.

But that water had left the people unsatisfied: the people still grumbled.

The story of God’s provision of water in the desert was significant in people’s minds.  So, it would have been really dramatic when Jesus stood up and shouted out his great invitation to people thirsty for a stronger connection to God; “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and let anyone who believes in me drink. Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”

Everyone understands thirst. We all know what it feels like when our bodies are dry and desperate for water. But Jesus is speaking about a deeper kind of thirst. The thirst of the human heart. The thirst for purpose. The thirst for forgiveness.  The thirst for love and belonging. The thirst for hope; the hope that life means more than what we can see.

At this Festival of Booths, the people were reenacting a tradition that could never satisfy the heart.

Jesus offered them living water and eternal satisfaction.

So, on this Pentecost Sunday, let’s hear again the voice of Jesus calling out across the crowd. Calling us too! Saying, “Come and drink”. 

God is trustworthy, and the Father is how we know. The Father relentlessly pursues us with love and does not give up on his creation. God rescues us, and the Son is how we know. Jesus became one of us and entered our darkness so that he could bring us into God’s light. God is within us, and the Spirit is how we know. The Holy Spirit makes a home in us and invites us to share in the life of our God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We have been invited to come and to drink deeply.

And as you do, may the Spirit of God fill you so fully that rivers of living water flow from your life into a thirsty world.

God’s Spirit is within us. Amen.

Easter 7 by Desiree Snyman 17th May 2026

There is a thread running through the readings today: we are loved by God into being. Our deepest identity and purpose are not defined by the world. Jesus reminds us that we are in the world, but not of it. Our lives are shaped by love, we are made in love, for love, with love and our purpose is to give love. The great adventure of the Christian life is learning to awaken to that love, to live from it, and gradually to become so filled with the presence of Love, the Spirit of God, that like Jesus we become a source of that love for others.

For some, loving seems natural. For many of us, the journey into love is more complicated. We long to love well, yet we encounter resistance within ourselves and around us. The project is to manifest love. Yet it is often hard to consistently maintain a life of full voltage love. We can become exhausted, irritable and even discouraged when our intentions of love are thwarted by the less loving aspects of our inner lives and discouraged also when greed or hatred or vain self- interest push back against us. The point of the seventh Sunday of Easter is to encourage us to keep on loving, to let go of discouragement.

One of the great spiritual challenges comes after we have tasted the presence of God. There may be moments when something opens within us, when prayer feels alive and our hearts burn with love for God. Yet later, after such moments, God can begin to feel strangely absent. This seventh Sunday of Easter stands precisely in that strange in between space: between Ascension and Pentecost, between Jesus disappearing from the disciples’ sight and the coming of the Spirit. 

The Ascension and the Hidden Presence of God

For forty days after the Resurrection, Jesus appeared to the disciples intermittently, teaching them to relate to him no longer by sight, but by faith. He had already told them that he intended not simply to stand beside them, but to dwell within them, in their hearts, words, relationships, and actions. Then comes the Ascension.

We misunderstand the Ascension if we imagine Jesus simply floating upward into outer space. In Acts 1, Luke is not giving us geography; he is giving us theology. The language is symbolic and visionary. A cloud takes Jesus from their sight. Throughout Scripture, clouds signify the hidden glory of God: the cloud covering Sinai as Moses receives the commandments, or the cloud overshadowing the Mount of Transfiguration. The cloud represents a divine presence that is real, but veiled. The Ascension represents the spiritual evolution the disciples experience when they learn that Jesus is not leaving the world. The disciples experience a deeper level of consciousness when the Christ disappears from their sight so that he may become present within them. The Spirit will teach them this. The Spirit will remind them that Christ is no longer merely someone they look at, but the very life within which they live.

Perhaps this is why the experience of God’s absence can become one of our deepest spiritual teachers. If God remains merely an external object, someone who occasionally visits us in moments of consolation, we have not yet awakened to the deeper truth: God is nearer to us than our own breathing. God is not simply alongside life. God is the depth within life itself. 

Glory Revealed Through Love

John’s Gospel leads us directly into this mystery. On the night before his death, Jesus prays: “Father, glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.” Ordinarily, we think of glory as power, triumph, or magnificence. But in Scripture, glory means revealing what is most deeply true about a person. Jesus is saying: Let the world now see clearly who you are and who I am. This revelation happens through the cross. On the cross we see love refusing retaliation, love refusing hatred. We see Love pouring itself out completely and remaining faithful even in suffering. The cross reveals that the deepest truth about reality is not violence, domination, fear, or empire, but self-giving love. This is why Jesus can say: “I have conquered the world.” Jesus conquers the world not by crushing enemies, but by revealing a love stronger than death.

Christianity is not ultimately about admiring Jesus from a distance. It is about participating in the very life that animated him. Jesus not only reveals what God is like; he also reveals what humanity looks like when fully open to God. When Scripture says, “God is love,” it is not sentimental language. It is a description of reality itself. To awaken to love is to awaken to God. Whenever we begin, however imperfectly, to love as God loves, we participate in divine life. We too are held within divine love. 

Remaining Faithful in a Wounded World

The world is beautiful, but it is also wounded. Peter acknowledges this directly: “Discipline yourselves. Keep alert… Resist him, steadfast in your faith.” Whether we understand Satan personally or symbolically, the reality is familiar enough. There are forces within us and around us that pull us away from love: cynicism, resentment, fear, despair, violence, and the temptation to harden our hearts. Perhaps the greatest danger is discouragement.

When love becomes costly, we are tempted to withdraw, to become smaller, safer, less vulnerable. Jesus prays precisely for this moment. Not that we would escape the world, but that we would remain faithful within it.

As we move toward Pentecost, the invitation today is simple: Keep loving. Stay the course. Do not lose heart. Do not abandon love simply because the world does not always reward it. The Christian life is not the avoidance of suffering. It is learning to remain rooted in love through suffering. May it be so.

Sermon Notes Easter 6 10th May John 14:15-21 by Mark Stuckey

If you’ve ever stood at a doorway watching someone you love leave – maybe a child heading off to school, a spouse leaving for a trip, or a friend moving away – you know the ache of separation. I personally felt the ache of separation when I had to work in Port Macquarie for 6 months in 2024 and then felt that same ache when Loretta had to work in Bourke for a week back in March this year. The ache of separation is real, because we miss our loved ones when they are not present and away from us. In John 14, our Gospel passage for today, the disciples are standing in that emotional doorway. Jesus is preparing them for His departure, and their hearts are troubled. 

But Jesus doesn’t leave them with fear. He leaves them with a promise – actually, several promises – and they are just as true for us today.

Our Gospel reading for this morning gives us three anchors for the Christian life.

1.   Love for Jesus is expressed through obedience.

2.   Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit – Our Advocate, Helper, and Companion.

3.   Jesus does not leave us as Orphans – He comes to us!

Anchor 1 – Love for Jesus is expressed through obedience

Our first anchor begins with Jesus providing the Disciples with a simple but challenging line: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” 

Jesus doesn’t say, “If you fear me,” or “If you want to impress me.” He says, “If you love me.” “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” is one of the most misunderstood lines in the Gospel. For Peter, James, John, Andrew and Thomas (the disciples), and for us it’s easy to get tangled up in what this opening sentence is saying. 

Jesus is not setting up a test. He is not saying:

·      “If you really love me, you’d better obey.”

·      “Your obedience earns my affection.”

·      “Your performance determines our relationship.

These would turn the gospel into a merit system.

Instead, Jesus is describing the natural fruit of a relationship rooted in love. 

Love points to obedience. Not: Obedience points to love.

In other words, obedience is not a condition for love—it’s the fruit of love.

When you love someone deeply, their desires shape your actions. Love transforms obedience from a burden into a response. 

When you hear Jesus say, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” hear it as: 

“Your love for me will naturally shape your life – and I will give you the Spirit so that you can live in my love.” I will repeat that… “Your love for me will naturally shape your life – and I will give you the Spirit so that you can live in my love.”  

It’s not pressure. It’s a promise. It’s not a demand. It’s a description. It’s not law. It’s life. 

After Jesus has encouraged the disciples to love him, he moves to sharing with them how he will help them and this brings us to the second anchor needed for a Christian life whereby Jesus gives us the Holy Spirit – our advocate, helper and companion. 

Anchor 2 - Jesus Gives Us the Holy Spirit—Our Advocate, Helper, and Companion

Jesus promises: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever.” Here we pick up on what Desiree was sharing with us last week about the three persons of the Trinity. Jesus is not acting alone. He is revealing the inner life of God.

·      The Son asks

·      The Father gives

·      The Spirit comes

This is Trinitarian life in motion. Jesus is saying “My departure doesn’t end my care for you. I will continue to intercede for you.” 

The disciples are not losing Jesus’ advocacy – they are gaining it in a new form. The Father will give you another Advocate – meaning someone like Jesus. The word another (Greek: allon) means another of the same kind, not to be confused with another of a different kind. In this case it is another of the same kind. 

Jesus is saying: “The Spirit will be to you what I have been to you.”

This was staggering to the disciples who were in the Upper Room with Jesus. Are you staggered by this claim?

The Spirit is not:

·      A downgrade

·      A substitute teacher

·      A vague spiritual feeling

The Spirit is Jesus’ own presence extended.

Everything Jesus was to the disciples – teacher, comforter, guide, strength – the Spirit now becomes. 

The Spirit is God dwelling in us, empowering us to live the life Jesus calls us to. Think about these times in your life: 

Where we feel weak, the Spirit strengthens. Where we feel confused, the Spirit guides. Where we feel alone, the Spirit comforts. Where we feel tempted, the Spirit empowers. 

With the Spirit dwelling in us you are never left to follow Jesus alone.

We move to our third anchor needed for a Christian life whereby Jesus does not leave us as orphans – He come to us. 

Anchor 3 - Jesus Does Not Leave Us as Orphans—He Comes to Us

Our third anchor begins with Jesus saying something tender and profound: “I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you.” 

The disciples feared abandonment. You could make an argument that they were terrified. Understandably, it was an emotional time for them. For us how would we react?

·      Jesus has spoken of going away

·      They don’t understand where?

·      They fear losing the One who called them, taught them, loved them.

They had left everything to follow Him. He is their teacher, protector, guide, friend. 

So, when Jesus says: “I will not leave you as orphans,”. He is speaking directly into their deepest fear: the fear of being left alone in a hostile world. 

For us we may often fear the same because we live in a world where we can experience brokenness and hostility. It is comforting to know that we have Jesus’ ongoing presence in our lives journeying with us, through the Spirit, through His Word, through His people, through His resurrection life in us. 

In the ancient world, orphans were – vulnerable, unprotected, without inheritance, without guidance, socially powerless. To be an orphan was to be exposed. Jesus is saying: “You will not be spiritually unprotected. You will not be left without guidance. You will not lose your identity or inheritance. You will not be alone.” 

He says, “Because I live, you also will live.”  

Our life is tied to His life. Our hope is tied to His victory. Our future is tied to His resurrection. And then He adds: 

“You will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” 

This is union. This is intimacy. This is the heart of the Christian life. Not just believing in Jesus. Not just following Jesus.

But being united with Jesus. 

You are not abandoned. You are not forgotten. You are not alone.

John 14:15–21 gives us a picture of the Christian life that is both beautiful and practical:

·      Love expressed through obedience

·      Obedience empowered by the Spirit

·      Life sustained by the presence of Jesus

This is not a faith of striving. It is a faith of abiding. It is not a faith of fear. It is a faith of belonging. It is not a faith of isolation. It is a faith of divine companionship. 

A Pastoral Word for Today

Some of you may feel spiritually dry. Some may feel abandoned. Some may feel like you’re trying to follow Jesus on your own strength.

Hear Jesus’ promise again: “I will not leave you as orphans.”

The Spirit is with you. Christ is in you. The Father loves you. You are held. You are known. You are never alone. 

Conclusion

As we walk out of this passage, hold onto these truths:

• Love Jesus by trusting His way.

• Rely on the Spirit who empowers you.

• Rest in the presence of Christ who never leaves you.

Because He lives, you live. Because He is with you, you can obey. Because He has claimed you, you are never an orphan.

Mark Stuckey, LLM

Sermon Notes Easter 5 3rd May by Desiree Snyman

“Do not let your hearts be troubled…”. I find that comment troubling. The time when I am most troubled is when I am told not to be troubled. It reminds me of a youth worker I mentored many years ago. I would ask him if he had completed some task. He would reply, “No worries, I’ve got it covered.” Invariably he hadn’t done what he had committed to do, and something would fall apart. “Do not let your heart be troubled.” “No worries.” “I’ve got it covered.” These words often precede disaster in much the same way that “once upon a time” precedes a fairy tale.

Mentoring this young youth worker was effective training for parenting boys. An unusual silence in the house, which other humans might have enjoyed, was usually the precursor to putting out fires, some literal and some figurative. When the twins could speak, the phrase “Don’t be angry Mum, but…” also heralded some creative disaster. When they became teenagers, the comment “Just relax” produced the least relaxed condition possible. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. No worries. I have it covered. Do not be angry. Just relax.” These are hardly words to induce peace or rest.

Similarly, in John 14 Jesus the Christ is about to be crucified, and the early peace movement he established is about to be blown apart. His friends are agitated and disturbed. They are experiencing a kind of churning of the soul familiar to many of us. Without denying the storms within or without, Jesus invites them to trust.

The word trust here is not intellectual assent but an experience, an experience of resting in relationship. When Jesus says trust, he invites us to lean into his relationship with God, to float in his presence much as we might float in a still, supportive ocean. Trust here is about surrender.

The invitation to receive the embrace of love is deepened further by the next encouragement: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Although this is often translated as “many mansions,” the root of the word meno means to indwell or abide in God. This is not simply a pie in the sky future heaven, but a participation in God available now, not merely some future reward. It suggests a spaciousness in God where everyone can find belonging. The doorway is to allow ourselves to be loved, to surrender to love.

When Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” he is saying that the doorway to this indwelling is not belief, knowledge, or skill. The doorway is love, more precisely, allowing yourself to be loved. This is the mistake Thomas and Philip make. Thomas asks, “Show us the way,” and Philip says, “Show us the Father.” They are asking for knowledge, but the door to abiding in God is participation, not information. It is about receiving love.

When Jesus says, “I am going to prepare a place for you,” it does not imply building something from scratch, but rather unveiling and demonstrating. Jesus demonstrates how to receive love and participate in God. Without denying the storms, the turmoil, the depression, the pain, or the challenges we face within and without, Jesus offers a deeper way to exist. “Do not let your hearts be troubled; trust in me, lean on me, abide with me in God,” not because there is nothing to fear, but because there is a deeper reality in which you can dwell.

When you are in the ocean and huge waves approach, the safest thing is often to go as deep as possible beneath the wave and allow it to pass overhead. Ever notice how peaceful it is beneath the churning water? Similarly, “do not be troubled” is not a denial of the waves, but an invitation to abide more deeply in God whenever they come.

Many of you are familiar with Rublev’s Trinity icon. An icon is a kind of window into the kingdom of God. Many people use icons as a form of prayer. Merely gazing at an icon, as you may be doing now, can itself become prayer. Prayer is about allowing the mind to descend into the heart while standing in the gaze of God’s love, allowing that love to saturate you.

Rublev was a monk in the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St Sergius in Russia. He and his fellow monks lived in a time of great uncertainty, civil unrest, wars, anxiety, and stress. He created the icon as a gift of love for his friends so that they might find a safe place to dwell amidst the political turmoil surrounding them.

The icon depicts God as three persons who love one another so deeply that they become one. What is most significant about the icon is not simply the three visible angels, but the invisible flow of love, the circular movement uniting them. As you gaze at the icon, you are naturally drawn into the open space at the front of the table so that you too may become part of the circle of loving and being loved.

This is how we abide in God. This is how we trust God and participate in God, by allowing ourselves to rest within the life of the Trinity. We are not untouched by the dangers and storms that face us, not because we deny them, but because we allow trouble itself to become an invitation to return to God, to abide, to trust, and to participate more deeply in love.

Most of you know that my husband and I have been fortunate to have twin sons who have been a delight to raise. Yet every parent needs a break. While we lived in Johannesburg, the twins would often have sleepovers at their grandparents’ house, and my husband and I would enjoy a date night. The parents loved it, the grandparents loved it, and the twins loved it. Until they did not. 

One night my father arrived at our home with Twin 2. He had enjoyed the presence of his grandparents in the absence of his mother, but there came a moment when he grew tired of the extra sweets, flashy toys, and extra attention. He moved from being irritated, to cranky, to weepy, until he was finally inconsolable. At that point, his grandfather knew that nothing would soothe him except the voice and touch of his mother. The child needed to hear his mother’s voice, and only his mother’s voice. No attempt to replace her, or even to imitate her, helped. There comes a time when only the mother can soothe and comfort. The disquiet disappears only when the mother lovingly calls his name. 

I wonder if this is not also true for us as adults. There are many sounds that distract us for a while, yet only the deepest Silence of the Eternal One can truly name us. We may turn to the various distractions of modern living for entertainment or to numb the existential ache within, yet there comes a time when only the voice of the Good Shepherd calling us by name will truly soothe us. 

There is an infinity to our souls. While we are finite creatures caught in time, creatures with a beginning and an end, we have been breathed into by the Infinite. It is Infinity alone that can satisfy us. There is a timelessness at the heart of the human condition. A well-used reading at funerals is Ecclesiastes. People enjoy the poem about there being a time for everything, but they often forget the sting at the end of it, that human beings are out of sync with the natural rhythms of life. The poet writes: 

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace. 

He concludes with the burden of being human: “I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” 

God has made everything suitable for its own time, but has put timelessness into the human heart, so that human beings remain out of sync with the rhythms of the seasons from beginning to end. This is restlessness. As Augustine said, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Addictions and distractions will not satisfy. 

Inside each of us there is a deep, congenital restlessness. We are not restful beings who sometimes become restless. We are not peaceful creatures who are sometimes anxious. Quite the opposite. We are restless beings who occasionally experience rest. We are always a little dissatisfied. Thoreau was right. We do live lives of quiet desperation. 

We carry a deep congenital restlessness, and the further problem is that our restlessness pushes us outward rather than inward. We try to satisfy it with excitement, distractions, and addictions. It is not so much a question of whether we are addicts, but of how we are addicted and to what. Shadow issues can lead to imbalances and addictions, from work, to busyness, to social media. Like in the opening story, distractions, flashy toys, and sympathetic voices can soothe us for a while. But there comes a time when the ache, sadness, fatigue, and jadedness can be soothed only by the primordial mother who speaks our name and brings rest to our restless souls. 

The Gospel of John is framed by the question, “What are you looking for?” At the beginning of John’s Gospel, Jesus’ first words are a question: “What are you looking for?” In the moment of new creation at the end of the Gospel, in John 20, he asks again, “Whom are you looking for?” The question frames the whole story. It is the question that opens the Gospel, and the question that opens resurrection life. Mary recognises Jesus when he speaks her name. In that moment, John 10:3 and 4 becomes real: the sheep know the shepherd’s voice. 

What is happening here? When God calls us by name, what God is saying is this: I am in love with you. I love you so deeply that I give myself away to you, and you are invincibly precious in my sight, even in the midst of the unresolved matters of your heart. In those unresolved places, I find no obstacle to your infinite preciousness. I pour myself out to you as the life of your life, the hope of your hope. 

Jesus speaks our name and says, in effect: You are beloved. That is who you are. 

You are precious to me, even in the unresolved places of your heart.

You are not your restlessness.

You are not your addictions.

You are not your disappointments.

You are mine. 

And perhaps that is what our restless hearts have been searching for all along. Not another distraction. Not another achievement. Not another voice among the many voices. But the voice that knows us before we explain ourselves. The voice that calls us out of hiding. The voice that speaks our name with love. So, the question remains, as it did at the beginning of John’s Gospel: What are you looking for? Perhaps the invitation is not to search harder, but to listen more deeply. To become quiet enough beneath the noise, beneath the ache, beneath the restlessness, to hear the Shepherd call us by name. And when we hear that voice, we may discover that the rest we have been seeking has already begun. For the One we are looking for has been looking for us.

Sermon Notes by Desiree Snyman Easter 3 19th April

Do you have memories of playing hide and seek? Godly play speaks of the playful, paradoxical nature of God as one who both hides and seeks. On the one hand, God actively longs for us and seeks us, as in the parables of the good shepherd, the lost coin, and the lost son. On the other hand, God is hidden, and once we have been found, it becomes our turn to seek. This raises a difficult and deeply human question: what do we do when God disappoints us? What do we do with the apparent absence of God, especially when that absence is felt most sharply at the very moment God seems most needed? For many, there is an unspoken assumption that faith, goodness, or belief should offer some protection from harm. This assumption sits quietly beneath the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Yet the promise of faith was never that we would be shielded from reality, but that we would not be alone within it. God does not remove us from suffering, but remains present within it, upholding us even when everything else seems to give way. 

But. We. Had. Hoped.

Cleopas and his companion walk the road to Emmaus carrying not just grief, but collapse. They have not only lost Jesus, but they have also lost the future they had built around him. 

“But we had hoped.” The story contains what I consider to be the four saddest and heaviest words in Scripture. Although it is one word in Greek, I sometimes wonder if the four translation words shouldn’t be four sentences. But. We. Had. Hoped. There is such pain, pathos, emptiness and grief held in each full stop. It the loss of the past but also the loss of the future, the loss of possibility, the loss of hope. I’ve heard these four sentences “But. We. Had. Hoped” many times. But we had hoped that the cancer would be cured. But we had hoped that we would grow old together. But we had hoped that the friend, child, parent would be reconciled to us. But. We. Had. Hoped. These are not merely words of disappointment. They are the language of a world that no longer makes sense. Hope has not simply failed; it has been exposed as misplaced. The past is gone, and the future it promised has vanished with it. This is where the story becomes instructive. The risen Christ does not appear at the moment of triumph, nor at the resolution of doubt, but in the midst of confusion, absence, and misrecognition. He walks with them, unrecognised, as they rehearse their loss. 

The striking detail is this: Christ is most fully present precisely where he is least perceived. 

Later, the disciples will say, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road?” Yet in the moment, they experience only brokenness. This is not a contradiction to be resolved but a reality to be held together. The same heart that feels shattered is also, mysteriously, alive with something not yet understood. 

A resurrected faith, then, is not one that replaces brokenness with certainty. It is one that learns to recognise that the burning is already present within the breaking. The absence of God is not the negation of presence, but one of the ways that presence is encountered. 

The turning point comes not through explanation, but through relationship, walking together, listening, and finally, the breaking of bread. It is there, in shared presence, that recognition of the Christ presence occurs. 

Broken hearts and burning hearts

The Emmaus story reveals something essential: presence is not always recognised as presence. The disciples speak at length about Christ’s absence, even as he walks beside them. This reframes how we understand faith. Faith is not the elimination of doubt, nor the replacement of brokenness with wholeness. It is the capacity to hold these realities together without collapsing one into the other. Broken hearts and burning hearts are not opposites. They are the same heart, experienced differently. The crack is not a failure of faith; it is the very place where light enters. As Leonard Cohen wrote, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Jesus is often drawn to those whose lives have been broken open by grief, illness, or disappointment. It is precisely in those places that something deeper can be encountered, not instead of the pain, but within it.

Spiritual direction and the walk alongside

When I first encountered spiritual direction, it was described to me as a conversation with a soul friend. A holy conversation, not in the sense of being elevated or removed from ordinary life, but in being attentive to the presence of the Holy Spirit within each person. The posture is simple: to be calm, centred, curious, compassionate, and connected. To listen deeply. And to remain open to the possibility that Christ is present, not externally imposed, but quietly emerging within the exchange. The road to Emmaus is a model for this kind of encounter. But it is not only a model for spiritual direction. It is a model for all relationships. To be a partner, a parent, a friend, a caregiver, or a professional of any kind is, at its core, is to walk alongside another person. To listen. To hold space for what is broken without trying to immediately repair it. To remain present long enough for something deeper to be revealed. 

This is what it means to be the body of Christ, not as an abstract idea, but as a lived reality. We become, for one another, the place where presence is encountered. The risen Christ is not encountered as an abstract concept, nor simply as a distant third party, but within the act of shared presence itself. In the giving and receiving of attentive, self-giving love, something is made real that was not previously visible. Recognition happens, and then, as in the Emmaus story, Christ seems to disappear from sight, not because he is gone, but because he is now encountered differently. 

Holding the light for one another

The walk to Emmaus offers a reorientation of faith. God is not absent in the way we often assume. Nor is God present in the way we often expect. The pattern is more subtle: presence is mediated through relationship, revealed in companionship, and recognised in hindsight. 

We are not called to eliminate brokenness, nor to resolve every doubt. We are called to walk alongside one another within doubt and brokenness. We are Emmaus walkers becoming for each other a place where hope can begin again, even if only faintly at first. This is the quiet work of faith: not to provide answers, but to embody presence. And perhaps this is what it means to “hold the Christ-light” for one another, not as something we possess, but as something we make visible through love. 

Brother, Sister, Let Me Serve You

Brother, sister, let me serve you,
let me be as Christ to you;
pray that I may have the grace
to let you be my servant too. 

We are pilgrims on a journey,
and companions on the road;
we are here to help each other
walk the mile and bear the load. 

I will hold the Christ-light for you
in the night-time of your fear;
I will hold my hand out to you,
speak the peace you long to hear. 

I will weep when you are weeping;
when you laugh I’ll laugh with you;
I will share your joy and sorrow
till we’ve seen this journey through.

I’d like us to look at two images of the same subject but captured with very different techniques. 

This plant is growing in our garden. I took the first photo a few days ago with my close up, macro lens. This is only a tiny part of the leaf. Using a tripod to steady the camera I was able to get within about 4 inches. Without a tripod there would have been a fair bit of camera shake, which is exacerbated in close up work. I love this image’s sharpness and detail, the clear shapes and colours. 

The second photo – of the same plant – is blurry ... intentionally so. I used a technique called Intentional Camera Movement, where the camera is set to a long-ish shutter speed and is moved during the exposure. It can create all kinds of special effects depending on the movements and length of exposure. On this occasion I used a special app on my phone’s camera which, when you move the camera around, can make static images look painterly. Sometimes it looks like an impressionist painting with sweeps of paint across the image. Sometimes its so abstract you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at. But the blur is intentional – as opposed to those times we take a photo and its unintentionally blurry. 

It occurred to me as I thought about these two images that they reflected two different experiences as we seek to follow in the way of Jesus. 

There are times in our discipleship when things are clear and distinct. Our understanding of faith makes sense, and we are confident about what we believe. 

Then there are other times when our faith is a bit blurry – more uncertain. We have doubts and questions – sometimes through intentionally examining our beliefs, sometimes because life throws things at us and challenges our understanding. 

Three questions arise for me:

•         In which of those times do we find it easier to follow Jesus.

The clear, certain times; or the blurry, uncertain times?

•         In which of those times is our faith stronger? When everything is clear and sharp; or when we’re clouded by doubts and questions?

•         And in which of those times do we learn and grow more? 

The answers may not be what we have been led to believe. 

The church has often had difficulty dealing with people’s doubts, questions and challenges. Or perhaps more accurately, people have had difficulty in the way the church has dealt with their doubts, questions and challenges.  

Some years back a friend had a long period of recovery in hospital.

A few women from a local church visited her regularly and befriended her. When she was discharged, she started going to a study group with them and attending services. All went well until my friend started asking awkward questions. The leaders found it difficult to answer her questions, and the other members found them disconcerting. Before long one of the leaders suggested she stop asking her questions because they were making people uneasy … and if she didn’t, she should leave. 

Chatting with her about her now former church, we talked about the importance of being able to question one’s beliefs and faith. That not expressing our doubts and questions is not only dishonest, it actually impedes our spiritual growth.  

Which brings us to the story of Truthful Thomas … yes, I know he’s usually called doubting Thomas, but that unfair label preconditions our thinking about the story. It’s too tempting to stop at the label, “doubting”, without examining the story itself. 

When we look at the broad sweep of the resurrection stories, in the other three gospels as well as John, we find that all of the disciples doubted reports of Jesus’ resurrection. When the women came back on Easter morning with reports of seeing the risen Jesus, the men didn’t believe them. They had to run to the empty tomb to see for themselves. And they didn’t believe until they had also seen the risen Christ. In fact, there is a reference in Matthew 28:17 where the resurrected Jesus appeared to the eleven – they worshipped him …  but some doubted. They doubted even though they were in the presence of the resurrected Jesus! Seeing is not always believing! 

So, there was nothing unusual about Thomas. The evidence even suggests Thomas was less fearful than the other disciples. While they were locked in the room out of fear, Thomas was out wandering around town. Maybe he’d gone out for a falafel kebab. We don’t know the reason for his absence. Only that the others were too scared to be out in public. And that they required the exact same proof to believe as Thomas did. They didn’t believe the women’s testimony. They had to see for themselves. 

Thomas was simply honest and truthful. Jesus didn’t condemn him.

And notably, the rest of the disciples didn’t reject him. There was still a place for Thomas in their company even when he doubted their witness. Which is just as well, because in the narrative, Thomas represents those who have not seen the risen One. Thomas is US. 

Yet, the “doubting” label remains. Thomas is a convenient scapegoat – someone to blame for a lack of faith. As early as the 4th century theologians wrote that Thomas “is held to blame” for his unbelief. Artwork through the centuries has backed that up.  

The message has been clear. Doubting is wrong. Questioning isn’t welcomed as curiosity. It’s framed as moral failure – or worse. It’s sinful. Disobedient. Which is very convenient if you’re in the business of thought control, as the church often has been – and still is in many places today.  

Doubt is interpreted as “rebellion.” Disagreement becomes “pride.” Asking “why” is recast as a character flaw rather than an honest search for understanding.  

The not-so-subtle message is: good people don’t question; faithful people don’t doubt; and loyal people don’t challenge authority. Those messages often become internalised, so we interpret the discomfort that accompanies doubt as proof that something is wrong with us. 

My own observation – whether or not you consider it wisdom is up to you – is that authentic, adult faith can not only survive honest questions, but also grow through them. And as a church we can provide a supportive, non-judgemental atmosphere.

We’ve all heard the idea that we learn from experience. But do we? Sometimes we don’t. It’s not automatic, and we can easily repeat our mistakes. 

Grass roots educator Myles Horton – a highly influential figure in the background of the American civil rights movement – once said that we only learn from experience we learn from. Think about that seemingly obvious statement. We have to choose whether we want to learn from experience. The same is true when it comes to doubt. We can choose to grow through our doubts and questions – or we can avoid them. 

There’s been research which indicates that if we honour our doubts, there’s a recognisable ‘cycle’ that will take us through them and bring us out the other side – although the “other side” may look very different from where we started. 

If we face them head on, explore what they’re saying, and search for alternate understandings, it can shape new and deeper ways of practising our faith. 

But, if we resist our doubts, if we pretend we don’t have them, we get stuck. We never move beyond them. They’re still there, below the surface. We may show a confident face to the world, but it’s like being locked in an upper room of fear. Our faith doesn’t progress.  

The way forward is through embracing our doubts and questions and working through them.  

What does this say about our journey of faith? That we have never arrived. That we should never look down on others whose faith seems shaky. That it’s healthy to allow space in our church to ask questions. That we all need a safe space when doubts arise, so we can talk about them, be heard, supported and not judged. 

In my last church before retirement, I commenced a Q&A time at the end of my sermons. It soon became obvious that I didn’t have all the A’s to the Q’s. But we still had opportunity to ask questions and discuss what I said. Share alternative ideas. Even disagree. One positive outcome as the Q&A got longer was that it led to shorter sermons. We won’t have one now … but I do invite you to question me about anything I’ve said over coffee. 

Author George Saunders wrote: “In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power... what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).”  

May we be confident enough to be unsure … like Thomas and the other disciples. May we feel safe enough to talk about our uncertainties and work through them. May we feel secure enough in ourselves to help people feel safe with their doubts. And may we all be perpetually curious about following the way of Jesus.

The world is different to what we thought

There have been shattering moments in the development of humanity when we wake up to a world that is not what we thought it was. 

• Imagine life evolving from water to cell to creature to early humans who walk on two legs. Imagine being there at the moment when humans first stood upright, or when fire was first harnessed, or the wheel invented; events that reshaped the future. 

• Imagine living with the assumed “truth” that the earth is flat, only to discover that it is spherical, more precisely a geoid. 

• For centuries, many believed the earth was the centre of the universe, only to learn that it is a small planet orbiting the sun, which itself is not the centre but one star among many. 

• Imagine the shift in modern physics when it became clear that electrons are not simply particles or waves, but exhibit both properties at the same time. 

• Even more, phenomena such as quantum entanglement suggest a deep interconnectedness that challenges our ordinary understanding of space and separation. Imagine the implications of discovering the non-locality of electron spin. The behaviour of one particle is not fully determined by what is happening locally around it. It is connected to something beyond its immediate location. It shows that reality at a fundamental level is more interconnected than classical physics assumed. Non-locality is one of those moments where the world turns out to be different to what we thought. We expected a universe of separate, independent objects. Instead, we discover a reality where relationship is built into the fabric of things. 

• A similar earth-shattering event changed history when the disciples experienced the Resurrection. After the Resurrection, the world was different to what we thought. We expected the universe to operate in one way, instead, because of the Resurrection, we discover a totally different reality. The empty tomb, the appearances of the risen Christ, and the experience of Jesus in a transformed embodied form made real something entirely new. The Resurrection speaks of creation made new. It proclaims that the powers of death do not have the final word, because through love they are transformed into new life. For the early Jesus movement, it was the convergence of these experiences, the empty tomb, the visions of the risen Christ, and encounters with Jesus in a transformed embodied presence, that made the reality of the Resurrection known. 

We are at the heart of John’s Gospel

My conviction is that you and I and everyone we know and love who chooses authentic love is in John’s Gospel, right at the heart of it, leaning into the Christ. We are “the other disciple,” the beloved disciple.

We are “the other disciple” who outran Peter and reached the tomb first. We are the ones who believe in verse 8. Yet verse 8 is strange: “He saw and believed.” The faith of the Beloved Disciple does not sit easily with the very next line, “for as yet they did not understand the scripture.” It is also curious that this disciple does not share his insight with Peter or Mary. We, somehow, experience the resurrection before Peter. We, the beloved disciple, living resurrection faith, are also in John 13 at the foot washing meal, at the cross in John 19 and in 21. 

In John 13.23 we are seated at supper with Jesus as the Beloved Disciple, in the place of honour, leaning into him. 

As the Beloved Disciple, we are entrusted with the care of Jesus’ mother (19.26). She becomes our mother, and we become siblings of Christ and of all who step into the Gospel and take her home. 

When Jesus appears to the disciples in Galilee, it is the Beloved Disciple who recognises him and tells Peter (21.7). After Peter is commissioned, he is gently rebuked for asking about the Beloved Disciple’s role (21.20). 

For the writer of John’s Gospel, the reality of the Resurrection rests on faith, not on the proof of intellectual argument, historical witness, or fundamentalism. The faith that the writer of John’s Gospel envisions is a deep trust in oneing, the relationship of intimate unity between our soul with God’s soul and the souls of each other and the heartbeat of creation. John’s Resurrection account assumes that for us the resurrection is the centre of our faith, the resurrection is an eternal present moment, that we are living the resurrection moment by moment in every breath we breath, but then asks what does a resurrection faith look like? 

For some, resurrection faith does not arrive in light and certainty. It begins in doubt, in darkness, in the slow and painful labour that brings about new birth. Being born again is not a single moment. It is a process. 

We often speak of Easter with images of sunrise, light, and triumph. But the story itself begins elsewhere. It begins in a cave, in the dark, damp earth. The resurrection is announced later, but whatever happened, happened in the dark. No one saw that moment. No light, no witnesses, no spectacle. 

If it happened in a cave, it happened in silence, in darkness, with the smell of stone and soil. And that matters. Because new life always begins this way. A seed grows in the ground. A child forms in the womb. And Jesus is raised in the tomb. 

So too for us. New life in us often begins in places that feel hidden, uncertain, and even painful. Resurrection is not always something we recognise at the time. It unfolds quietly, beneath the surface, before it is ever seen or named. 

Mary recognises Jesus when he speaks her name (John 20:16). In that moment, John 10.3–4 becomes real: the sheep know the shepherd’s voice. A name signals intimacy, not distance. She does not recognise him by sight, but by sound. Perhaps this is the point. 

At the beginning of John’s Gospel, Jesus’ first words are a question: “What are you looking for?” (1:38). And here, in this moment of new creation, he asks again: “Whom are you looking for?” (20:15). The question frames the whole story. It is the question that opens the Gospel, and the question that opens resurrection life. A new ministry is beginning. A new story is unfolding. 

And it unfolds not through spectacle, but through recognition. Through relationship. Through love calling to love. 

This is what the early Christian experience of Easter rests on. Not simply an event to be explained, but a reality to be entered. The risen Christ speaks our name. And in that speaking, something in us awakens. We hear. We turn. We recognise. 

Resurrection faith, then, is not first about certainty or proof. It is about relationship. It is about being drawn into the deep knowing that we belong, that we are held, that we are part of a reality where love is fundamental. 

Jesus speaks our name and says, in effect:
You are love. That is who you are.
And I am the heart of love.
And the heart of love draws you closer. 

So, the question remains for us, as it did at the beginning:
What are you looking for?
Whom are you looking for? 

And perhaps the deeper invitation is this:
not only to look, but to listen
until we hear our name spoken
and recognise that we are already part of the life we seek.

Opening comments: How do we reform and deepen communion and community? 

John’s Passion Gospel differs from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the synoptic Gospels. In the synoptics, the final meal between Jesus and his disciples takes place at Passover. In John’s Gospel, the events occur before the Passover. The suffering that is so apparent in Matthew, Mark, and Luke is largely absent in John’s account of the trial and crucifixion. In Matthew and Mark, Jesus prays, “may this cup pass from me” in John Jesus prays “give me the cup”. 

Each of the Passion narratives offers a different spiritual practice for a different human question. John is not offering history but spirituality. For this reason, John is the least historically focused account. He invites us to go deeper into the Passion so that John 13, 18, and 19 are not simply history or literature, but the landscape of your soul and the map of your inner spiritual life in God and with God. Each Gospel carries its own purpose. Matthew shows us how to wake up and begin again. Mark teaches us how to endure trial and resistance. Luke forms us into mature disciples and apostles. John turns to union, showing how, in the midst of diversity, we are drawn into oneness. We unpack some verses from the passion narrative of John 18-19. 

John 18:1 — “After Jesus had spoken these words, he went out… to a garden.” 

When John18.1 says “Jesus spoke these words” we ask, what words? The answer is obviously from John 17 which is Jesus’ prayer of unitive, nondual consciousness that ends with: “I made your name known to them and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” 

John 18.2

John begins the Passion in a garden. After crossing the Kidron Valley, Jesus enters a garden with his disciples. John does not name it Gethsemane. He simply calls it a garden, and this is not incidental. The garden evokes the first garden in Genesis 1. John’s Gospel opens with creation, “in the beginning was the Word… in him was life.” Now, at the end, we are brought back to a garden. Creation and new creation meet here. What unfolds is not simply the death of Jesus, but the beginning of something new. The garden also evokes the landscape of Song of Songs where the union of lover and beloved is a metaphor for God’s union with us. The key phrase of Songs is “Set me as a seal upon your heart, for love is as strong as death.”  

John 18:4–6 — “Jesus… said to them, ‘I am.’”

When Jesus is approached for arrest, he says, “I am” and people fall down, much like Moses did at the burning bush. The “I am” are the words of YHWH, the divine name, revealed in Exodus. In John, the inner divinity of God and the inner reality of Jesus are one and the same; the I am of YHVH and the I am of Yahweh are the same. This extends the prayer of John 17, that we may be one as God and Christ are one. 

John 19:5 — “Here is the man.”

When Pilate presents Jesus to the crowd and says, “Here is the man,” the words carry a deeper resonance. They echo the earlier moment when Jesus says, “I am.” Here stands the human being, not triumphant or in control, but vulnerable, exposed, and given. In this moment, John redefines what it means to be human. To be fully human is not to dominate but to love. This is precisely what Jesus embodies. 

John 19:25–27 — “Woman, here is your son… Beloved, here is your mother.” 

This is the heart of what we are meant to hear in John’s Gospel: community and communion. 

At the cross, a new family is formed. Jesus says to his mother, “here is your son,” and to the beloved disciple, “here is your mother.” You are the beloved disciple. I am the beloved disciple. If you take Mary as your mother and I take Mary as my mother, then we are not only brothers and sisters to Christ, but brothers and sisters to one another. In the midst of the world’s crucifixions, this is our spiritual practice: community and communion. 

The early followers of the way developed Christianity as both a spiritual practice and a new movement in human consciousness. It was marked by a radical, inclusive vision that crossed tribal boundaries and included both Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free sitting around the one table. The truth it embodied was that we are one community before God, and therefore brothers and sisters to each other. Before the first century, there is little evidence of communities gathering as equals around a shared table. Many traditions, including Judaism at the time, maintained separation, particularly between men and women. Against this, the idea of sitting side by side at one table is strikingly new. In Jesus, we see the emergence of a different kind of family, shaped by shared belonging rather than separation. John’s Passion narrative is a spiritual practice that supports this vision of unity in diversity.

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John 19:28–30 — “I am thirsty… It is finished.”

After this, knowing all was complete, Jesus said, “I am thirsty,” fulfilling the scripture. He was given sour wine on a branch of hyssop. In John’s Gospel, Jesus receives the bitter wine. It becomes a sign that he takes in the world’s bitterness and transforms it into grace as he breathes out The Spirit. We are invited not to avoid suffering but to face it, allowing it to be transfigured in us. 

When Jesus had received the wine, he said, “It is finished.” He bowed his head and gave up his spirit. As Raymond Brown notes, this may mean not only that Jesus dies, but that he gives the Spirit. In this moment, death, resurrection, and Pentecost are held together. His final breath returns us to the beginning, the breath of God moving through creation. 

John 19:34 — “Blood and water flowed out.”

When the soldiers saw he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, his side was pierced, and blood and water flowed out. This is birth imagery. From Christ comes a new creation.

As Genesis begins with creation, John’s Gospel ends with creation renewed. What is finished is also beginning again.

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Living the Resurrection 

Matthew, Mark, and Luke are Lenten Passion narratives, but John is an Easter narrative. John assumes the resurrection and then offers a spiritual practice for living the reality of resurrection moment by moment and day by day. When resurrection becomes an inner reality experienced in the heart, life takes on the character of John 13, where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples. 

As I have been washed, I want to wash others. I want to bend low before all people and be a servant of the God of love. This may help awaken that same experience in their hearts. 

John’s Gospel presents the Passion as an eternal present reality. It is something happening now. 

The truth of the Passion is found in lived experience. We translate the Christ story into our own lives, wherever we find ourselves. What then does Easter look like in marriage, in family life, and in community? It looks like relationships that continually move through death and resurrection. It looks like praying together, because the great Easter experience is the living grace that emerges when we do. It also means recognising that diversity is both our greatest challenge and our greatest gift. Communities of uniformity are easier, but that is not the path we are called to. We are called to discover a deeper oneness beneath difference, to recognise that beyond all superficial distinctions, we are brothers and sisters of one source. 

“Love is as strong as death.” 

Jesus’ yielding to the cross is a declaration that love is as strong as death. Redemptive love means there is nothing that love cannot transform. Jesus enters the garden with this prayer: “that the love with which you have loved me may be in them.” That love is in us. It has never died and will never die. The love of Christ lives in us now.

Things fall apart

There is a hum beneath the routines of daily life. Not panic exactly, but a quiet anticipatory grief. It feels like unmooring. The future is no longer something we move toward, but something we brace against. The maps still exist, but they no longer explain where we are. Institutions, civilisations, and the systems we trusted feel thin. We keep calm and carry on, but underneath there is fatigue, vigilance, and a quiet question: what is holding all of this together? 

It is disorienting because multiple crises overlap: war, climate anxiety, economic instability, institutional distrust. There is no single narrative to organise this experience, and so the psyche cannot settle. We move between urgency and numbness, outrage and exhaustion, longing for stability and being suspicious of it. 

W. B. Yeats captures this atmosphere with unsettling clarity:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

The poem names what many feel: the world we trusted is breaking apart, and what is coming next is not yet known, and may not be what we hoped for. 

Things fall apart in the Gospel of Matthew

Matthew wrote into a world like this. After the destruction of the Temple, identity, leadership, and stability have collapsed. In that context, Matthew offered not blame or despair, but an invitation to move forward with Christ into uncertainty. Darkness is not the end. It is the beginning of something new. God works through disruption, not around it. 

This is already embedded in the story of Matthew. The genealogy in Matthew 1 is filled with flawed and unexpected people, reminding us that God’s purposes unfold through broken histories rather than moral perfection. The path forward is not control, but surrender. 

In the Passion, collapse becomes visible. The disciples scatter. Peter denies. Judas unravels. Institutions fail. Truth is drowned in accusation and noise. This is what it looks like when the centre cannot hold. The good falter. Those who know better hesitate or withdraw. Meanwhile, the crowd grows louder, the authorities press harder, and momentum replaces discernment. 

In this sense, the crucifixion is the drowning of innocence. Jesus stands silent before false accusation. He is mocked, stripped, and struck. Even the sacred becomes theatre: robe, crown, kneeling, all turned into parody. The world has lost its moral centre. 

Here is the crucial difference. Where Yeats ends in dread, imagining something monstrous emerging from collapse, Matthew reveals something else. The darkness at the crucifixion is real, but it is not empty. At the moment of death, the curtain tears, the earth shakes, the tombs open, and even a Roman centurion begins to see clearly: “Truly this was the Son of God.” These are not solutions. They are ruptures. Signs that the world is not simply breaking down, but breaking open. The centre we thought was holding was never the true centre. When it collapses, something deeper is revealed. Not certainty. Not control. But the presence of God in the very heart of the darkness. 

Things fall apart for us

What do we do with our own sense of disarray? Where do we take our fears about world politics, economic pressure, and the recognition that the normalcy of civilisation is often fragile, even violent? 

The words “Truly this is the Son of God” begin to point a way forward. Just as divinity is at the heart of who Christ is, so too is this same divine life our truest ground. Contemplation begins here, not as something we construct, but as something we fall into. It is an unknowing we do not choose, but must inhabit. We relinquish control and begin to trust a deeper, hidden life within. The things that fall apart fall apart because they are finite not infinite. Since the ground of our being is one with God, only that which is infinite can hold us, we will be dissatisfied with anything less than infinite. 

Meister Eckhart, as interpreted by Jim Finley, reminds us that the ground of God is already given as the ground of our own being. We are not separate from God at the deepest level, yet we live as if we are. Our ordinary consciousness, our thinking, remembering, and desiring, operates as though exiled from this ground. This is why we cling to outcomes, relationships, identity, success, control. This clinging produces restlessness, because nothing finite can satisfy the depth of who we are.

The path forward is detachment. Detachment is not withdrawal or coldness, but a disciplined, loving practice. We learn not to let joy or sorrow define us, not to give outcomes authority over our identity, to notice reactivity and gently release it, and to return, again and again, to the deeper ground, the divine with us, the Ground of our Being. This is what it looks like in practice: we may notice a sensation of fear when things fall apart and what we thought was the centre collapses. We notice the feelings and thoughts, but we realise that they are finite, and do not have the final say on who we are, so we release them and let them go. Only the ground of God which is already given as the ground of our own being can define who we are because this Ground of God is Infinite, Infinite Love. Detachment is fidelity to love. It is the quiet work of letting go of whatever pulls us away from what is most true. Over time, this becomes a way of life. In ordinary moments, in relationships and work, in suffering and joy, we are gradually stabilised in a deeper centre, a hidden ground that suffering cannot destroy and success cannot inflate. The journey is not about attaining God, but about being freed from what obscures a union already given, and learning to live from that union in the midst of everyday life. 

The invitation

The invitation of Holy Week is not to cling to what is falling apart, nor to collapse into fear, but to step forward into this unknowing. It is a call to trust that even here, especially here, God is at work bringing new life into being. 

We are called to wait and to witness. To remain present to grief, doubt, and disorientation. To allow them to teach us. We are called to hold to God as the Infinite Ground of Love beneath all finite things that may obscure our true home in God. Uncertainty and collapse are invitations to release the less real for the really Real. As someone once said, there is a deep well within us. In it dwells God. Sometimes, we find ourselves there too.

The symbol of Ash from Ash Wednesday partly defines our Lenten journey. 

It’s from dust and ashes that God created us, and it’s to dust and ashes that our mortal bodies will return. 

I’m going to speak about our Gospel reading today from John but before that I just want to mention that the OT for today is Ezekiel 37:1-14 – the valley of dry bones.  

In many ways it sets the scene for Lazarus’ lifeless body. 

God’s question to Ezekiel is, Can these bones live? 

Logic would say, well they can’t live, powdery and lifeless as they were! 

We began our Lenten journey by identifying with these dry bones: we allowed ourselves to be marked with ashes to remind us that we too came from this dry dustiness, that without the life that God breathes into us, we too are lifeless.

In today’s Gospel Jesus says something to Martha that he said many times:

I am the resurrection and the life. 

The dry bones in many ways represented lost hopes of the people of Israel, just as Lazarus’ lifeless body was, for Martha, beyond human hope. 

Maybe we can relate to that in our lives at the moment.

When life’s challenges begin to overwhelm us, our hopes are sometimes called into question. 

In our world today there are many darknesses:  

We live in the age of rage – there are many angry people and groups out there. 

It’s made worse by social media and the general media helping to turn differences into division and polarisation. 

Also, this is a time of polycrisis - the simultaneous occurrence of several and interactive crises that together produce a damage greater than the sum of their parts. We have conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Congo. 

So there’s much to feel hopeless about. 

Yet Jesus’ ministry to Mary and Martha and Lazarus reminds us that he can meet us where we feel most lifeless, when things seem hopeless, and call us to enter our lives anew. 

The answer to God’s question to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones, Can these bones live? (Can Lazarus live, can we live?) … is yes, they/we can live, if filled with the hope, life and love of the Spirit of Jesus. 

The Spirit breathes life into us. 

On this day, as we keep company with Lazarus and hear the voice of Christ calling to us, what will we choose? Lazarus wasn’t just dead, he was bound up. What might we need to let go of, to loose ourselves from, so that we might become unbound, and move with freedom into the life to which Christ calls us? 

Christians throughout the ages have called upon God’s spirit to come upon them as they gather together for worship – to come to their dryness, their hopelessness. The ancient Veni Creator Spiritus (or Come Creator Spirit) hymn reminds us of this (a Sarum, or Salisbury melody). It’s words date from the 9th Century. We’ll hear it later in this service. 

God breathes new life and hope into us, whatever our situation:

2 Your blessèd unction from above
is comfort, life, and fire of love;
enable with perpetual light
the dullness of our blinded sight;

3 anoint and cheer our mortal face
with the abundance of your grace;

Last week, Chris began his sermon with an interesting picture asking us, “What do you see?” That’s a good question. 

Carol and I saw some beautiful sights on our recent trip in New Zealand. Around the Bay of Islands and right up to Cape Reinga we saw glorious blue sky and magnificent coastlines. And we experienced a great restaurant among the vineyards on Waiheke Island. 

“Seeing” can be visual or understanding. Do you “see” what I mean? 

There are a few stories in the Gospels about blind people having their sight restored. In our last hymn today, we will sing about the blind man who sat by the road and cried. But that was near Jericho and in our long Gospel reading today we were told about a different blind man who lives in Jerusalem. 

What we heard Robin read today is generally agreed to be one of the most important and best constructed chapters of the good news according to John.  

The big picture is that we have heard a long story of two journeys. 

The setting is that Jesus has come to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Booths. Actually, Jesus has just said “I am the light of the world and those who follow me will never walk in darkness”. Now that statement leads into the disciples asking Jesus a question about the reason this unfortunate man was blind. “Why couldn’t he see light?” “Why was he walking in darkness?” 

Even though they knew the story of suffering Job, the people were convinced that poverty and disease were God’s punishment for sin. Thinking that those people who are ill or poor have to be sinners means dragging them further down. Worse still, it makes them wallow in their misery and can prevent them making an effort to get out of their situation. 

Jesus answers definitively. “Neither this man or his parents are responsible for his blindness.” Suffering is not a punishment for sin. Sadly, many people don’t believe this, and I have known lots of lovely people weighed down by their thought that a disaster or problem in their life is a result of God punishing them for some wrongdoing. Jesus wants his followers to know that is not the case. 

Jesus made mud and smeared it on the man’s eyes. Maybe there is an echo of God’s creation here. Jesus making mud to bring new life to this blind man just as God formed clay to create humanity. “Adam” is the Hebrew word for “earth or soil”.  

There may, perhaps, be another echo of Scripture here. King David was anointed with oil by the prophet Samuel to do God’s work and now the blind man is anointed with mud by Jesus to serve God’s purposes. 

Washing off the mud as directed by Jesus in the pool of Siloam, the blind man is healed and sees. How many times have we sung the hymn Amazing Grace; “I once was blind but now I see”. 

This Gospel / Good News story is a story of a person’s journey TO Jesus - coming to the light of the world. We need light to see. Desiree frequently helps us see something important in a Biblical word or name or place. So, could I point out another possible word of significance. John adds as he writes that “Siloam” means “sent”. Is John highlighting for us that Jesus is the sent one. Sent to us so that we might see! 

After the man has washed off the mud from his eyes in the pool of Siloam and begins to see we read that he has to put up with a series of progressively more aggressive interrogations. And each time he is interrogated, the man who is no longer blind “sees” more clearly who Jesus is. 

To his neighbours and those who knew him as a beggar he speaks of Jesus as “The man” who had worked the miracle. Then they bring in the Pharisees to interrogate him. But, by now he is standing up for himself, and he is prepared to argue with them as their equal. 

A change has occurred in this blind beggar who used to spend his days sitting with his hand out. He confidently goes a step further in his seeing and he says, “He is a prophet!” 

In a very human insight, we are told that the parents of the once-blind man (who, without the benefits of NDIS, had obviously fed him and nurtured him as he grew up) are afraid of the Jews and are not prepared to stand up for him. They say, “Yes, he is our son and he was born blind. But don’t ask us about who opened his eyes. Ask him. He is old enough to speak for himself.” 

Abandoned by his parents, this man who now sees has to endure a second tough interrogation by the Pharisees. But he becomes even bolder and he sarcastically asks them: "Do you also want to become his disciples?” He finally gives his interrogators a lesson; “If this man were not from God, he could do nothing”.  

The story moves on and John tells us that Jesus is eventually told that this man who has now come very close to true belief has been driven out of the synagogue by the Pharisees. So, Jesus goes to find him. 

The man who can now see asks Jesus, “who is the Son of Man?” and Jesus responds, “You have seen him and the one speaking with you is he”. 

The man whom everyone, except Jesus, has treated as being insignificant responds to Jesus “Lord, I believe" and he wor­shipped him. 

The blind man and those around him are liberated from this concept that God is going to punish anyone who steps out of line. Freed from blindness, he grows as a human being, and finally he receives the gift of faith. He has gone from describing Jesus as “the man”, to “a prophet”, to “from God”, to “Son of Man” and finally to “LORD” worthy of worship! 

A journey into the fullness of sight has come to an end. A man who had grown up blind and helpless now tells others that after a life where there were many things that he could not know or understand, he now sees. 

But remember that there is a second journey in this story. Another journey has been taking place as the blind man came to full sight. The journey of the Pharisees! 

At first the Pharisees accept the miracle, but they aren’t sure about it being from God. Then, in an attempt to show that there never was a mir­acle, they call for the evidence of the parents, but the parents don’t want to get involved in the argument. They fear the Jews who will drive out of the Synagogue anyone who confesses that Jesus is the Christ. 

 When this plan doesn’t work, the Pharisees resort to abuse. They say that they are disciples of Moses, and they tell the man who can now see that he was entirely born in sin and they throw him out.  

A journey away from sight has come to an end.  

The blind man was always prepared to humbly say, “all I know is” and to look towards Jesus, the Son of Man, as the giver of true light. The Pharisees were full of their own plans and knowledge. They thought that they knew everything. But this only led them on a journey into blindness. It’s always dangerous to be confident that you know! I personally am very pleased to understand that the best thing to know is that I don’t know everything.

Jesus disciples had learned this important lesson that blindness isn’t a punishment from God. God loves us and wants us to live fully. Sometimes our own prejudices and biases are the very means through which God enables us to see new things. Perhaps to see the light! 

Lent is a time to examine where we have placed our hopes. Are we being confident in our own knowledge and self-trust, where God hardly has a place, or are our hopes resting on knowing that we need the good gifts that God alone gives us?  

Do we really know that our Creator God loves us “just as we are” and wants to bless us?

A few months ago, I showed this photo to a friend. She leaned in close – the photo was on my phone screen – squinted her eyes, and asked: “What am I looking at”? Does anyone else have that reaction? After getting over my initial sense of being artistically offended, I recognised it was a small screen and my friend had ageing eyes, and it IS one of my more abstract images. So, I described the photo instead of asking what I should have: “What do you see?”  

SO, I’LL ASK THAT QUESTION NOW: WHAT DO YOU SEE? – (Its geometric patterns in the sand left by the retreating waves at low tide. It was taken from the lookout at the southern end of Shelley Beach in Ballina, looking straight down.) That of course is the BIG picture. But what details are we looking at? There are things like light, shadow, luminance, contrast, a hint of movement, shapes and lines. 

Because my friend asked me, “What am I looking at”, I now try to remember to ask myself that question before I take any photo – what big picture am I looking at? And what details am I looking at? The beauty of that question is that it invites me to pause, step back and consider what I’m seeing. So, I’m grateful for the question.

It’s a question that is also useful when we come to read a passage of scripture. It’s easy to read the Bible on autopilot … especially when it is a well-known story like today’s. We’ve heard it many times and probably heard many sermons about it. And some of those interpretations may be based on centuries old assumptions that actually don’t stand up to scrutiny. Or relatively recent assumptions that are disconnected from the original culture of the story. We may presume things that miss the significant details.

So, what are we looking at here in terms of the BIG picture.  

The first thing we need to note is how the gospel of John is written. John uses a great deal of symbolic language, such as metaphor, to tell his stories and structure the whole book, in ways the other gospel writers don’t. His timeline is also different. That doesn’t necessarily mean the events didn’t happen … but that in retelling them John uses symbolic language. 

It’s helpful to see and consider this story alongside last week’s story of Nicodemus in chapter 3, which uses metaphors of darkness, birth, water, spirit and wind.  

As Desiree reminded us in her beautiful sermon last week, we see a good man, a learned man, a respected teacher, going to Jesus in the night, not yet understanding – fixed in a literal mindset when Jesus is speaking symbolically. The learned, respected man is figuratively in the dark. He doesn’t get it. He remains puzzled. 

In today’s story we find the symbols and metaphors of an Old Testament well, gushing water, seeing, mountains and, again, Spirit. It is Jesus who approaches the Samaritan woman, in full daylight, offering metaphorical living water – she questions, listens and understands! She gets it! Not only that, she raises spiritual questions.

At this point it’s helpful to understand how the big picture affects the way we look at the details:  in particular how the Samaritan woman has been traditionally seen and portrayed. 

Based on spurious interpretations she is usually presented as sexually immoral. One popular American preacher described her as “a worldly, sensually-minded, unspiritual whore from Samaria.” And it’s all based on verse 18, when Jesus said to her: “You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband”. And that’s it. A superficial reading of that sentence has branded her.  

There is a long history of misogyny behind the ways women in the Bible have been misrepresented over the centuries. A lot of it began in the 4th and 5th centuries when St. Augustine projected his guilt over his earlier sexual encounters onto women. Women, in general, became the source of sin, the temptresses, and any woman described in the Bible as ‘sinful’ was assumed to be sexually immoral. 

To this has been added the assumption that because the Samaritan woman was at the well at midday, when all the other women supposedly went to the well early in the day, she was ostracised … treated with contempt by the other villagers because of her sins. No-one seems to consider: maybe she just ran out of water, like we sometimes run out of something and have to make an inconvenient trip to Coles. 

The BIG picture we are looking at is in the symbolism: John is comparing Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman – he goes at night, in darkness – so she goes to the well, not just in the day, but at midday, at the height of the light. 

This misrepresentation of the Samaritan woman stands in sharp contrast to the rest of the story. Neither John as narrator nor Jesus treat her that way. Jesus at no point speaks of her sin or invites her repentance, as he does of others elsewhere in the gospels. 

She could very easily have been widowed or abandoned or divorced many times for little reason – a victim of negligent men or dud husbands. It happens. Five times would be heartbreaking, but not impossible. 

Further, she could now be living with someone she was dependent on. If she was childless and widowed, according to Leviticus, she could be married off to her deceased husband’s brother … but not necessarily considered his real wife: his role more protector than husband. There are any number of ways that this woman’s story could be seen as tragic rather than scandalous. Yet historically, most interpreters assume the worst of her. 

The rest of the story offers a different view. Immediately after Jesus describes her past, she says, “I see that you are a prophet”. “Seeing” in John is symbolic of belief. For John, this is like a confession of faith.  

She then introduces a theological topic. She is far from ‘unspiritual’. She asks about worship Later, when she returns to her village – as the first recorded missionary – her fellow Samaritans are receptive to her message. They would hardly listen to her so openly if she was an immoral outcast.

All this leads us to a further question: not only WHAT am I seeing, but also WHO am I seeing. 

There are people spending big money and giving lots of time trying to make us afraid of those who are different. To hate those who are different. All for their own agenda: make people afraid of Muslims or black people; suspicious of Jews; distrustful of the other side of politics; dismissive of different religions; seeing “others” as the enemy; drawing a line between “them” and “us”. 

Jews and Samaritans had centuries of suspicion and animosity behind them when this story took place. Every Jew knew, like one of our politicians has said, that there is no such thing as a “good” … Samaritan. (Of course, we know differently.) 

This conversation transcends that animosity. Jesus and the woman don’t ignore their differences, but look past them to truly see each other, without fear or suspicion. This is the longest conversation Jesus is recorded as having in the gospels, which points to its prominence. It’s a respectful conversation, full of curiosity. They explore their differences as Jew and Samaritan and search for common meeting points: living water, welling up within; and worship in spirit, above place.  

Jesus sees her as a truth seeker. She sees him as someone who is at One with God.

Whenever we label someone for social, racial, political, religious or gender reasons, we dehumanise them. Objectify them. It becomes easier to call someone a name, to dismiss or ignore them, or make jokes about them. It’s easier to be cruel to them. Or misrepresent them.  

This story invites us to see past differences to recognise our connectedness to others. And to be open to what they may offer us.

I wish I could show you another photo. An old friend posted it on Facebook. He, his brother and sister-in-law are smiling, having a lovely time, and enjoying tasty, aromatic, exotic food at a community night market. They were in a Sydney suburb that same politician recently said we should be afraid of – Lakemba. The markets were selling food for the evening meal after the Muslim fast for Ramadan. Muslim and non-Muslim Australians mingled, enjoyed food, and smiled at each other. No animosity. No fear. Even friendliness. One community. 

So, we have a question that offers the seeds of understanding. Maybe even the beginnings of healing, love and transformation. The question we can all ask: “Who am I seeing”?

The Christian life promises good news. Something good. Something new. We love the idea of good. We pray for good outcomes, good health, good community, good endings. But we are less certain about new. New requires change. Human beings do not easily embrace change. 

D.H. Lawrence observed that the world fears a new experience more than anything else. A new idea can be analysed, debated, and filed into neat categories. A genuinely new experience cannot be controlled or pigeonholed. And that is precisely our challenge. 

Christianity is not fundamentally a new idea; it is a new experience. The makeup of who we are as humans will resist that. We are given a four Gospel journey to help us on the way. 

The Gospels Lead Us into Experience

The Four Gospels gently, persistently lead us toward that new experience.

·      Matthew asks: how do we embrace change?

·      Mark asks: how do we move through suffering? How do we follow Christ when the road leads through loss?

·      John asks something deeper still: will you consent to union? Will you allow yourself to be drawn into life with God, in God, through God?

·      Luke-Acts ask: how do we mature through service?

These journeys are not once only. They repeat throughout a lifetime. We are in John today. John is about celebrating joy in union. 

John: A Garden of Union

The landscape of John’s Gospel is a garden. It asks how we celebrate joy in union. It is dedicated to this good news, something good and something new. We live with fear, with worry, with the distress of the news of war in Iran. People are bombing each other again. It is not breaking news, is it? It is the same story on repeat, and it leads us nowhere. 

We thirst for good news. We thirst for something good and something new, because the old story is no longer working. Before we can receive joy in union, there is a necessary breaking open. Embracing change and moving through suffering breaks off the hard layers of who we are and prepares the soil of the soul for a new experience of the Spirit.

There is one more step and that is letting go of the old traditions, anything that brought us to this moment in time. John tells us this newness is so radical it can only be described as rebirth. 

Nicodemus

Enter Nicodemus, a beautiful man, he represents the very best that any religious tradition has to offer. Mature in so many ways, and loving. Many of us would like to be a Nicodemus. 

We know little about him. He appears only in John, and only three times.

He appears here, in conversation with Jesus at night. He appears again in John 7, when the Pharisees want to get rid of Jesus and Nicodemus insists on due process. Nicodemus appears finally in John 19, working with Joseph of Arimathea, bringing an abundant measure of spices, lovingly preparing Jesus’ body for burial. In those three glimpses we see a human life that faces change, moves through suffering, and comes out the other side quite different. 

Nicodemus represents any tradition that has brought us to this moment. Some of us grew up through Sunday school, and it was good, and it was given in love. But Sunday school faith will not carry us through the mature stages of your life. At some point, we have to let it go. 

We sometimes call this “higher” faith, not as a judgement, but as a wider embrace. A more spacious perspective that transcends and includes what came before, like the way a mature adult can hold more of a wider perspective than a small child can. 

Nicodemus can also represent our parents, and the tapes we still carry. The voices in our heads that once helped us, that were often spoken in love, but that we now need to outgrow. 

And in our context, Nicodemus can also represent a church tradition stuck in its own solidity, battling to let go of the glories of yesterday for the new wonders of what the Spirit might be bringing today and tomorrow. 

Born Anōthen: From Above, From Beyond

“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born anōthen.” 

Born from above. Born again. Born from beyond. Nicodemus stumbles over the word, as we do. He tries to interpret it logically and safely. How can anyone enter a second time into the womb? How can this be managed, controlled, understood? But Jesus is not speaking about improvement. He is speaking about transformation. The life of God is not an upgrade to your existing system. It is not spiritual self-improvement. It is not a moral tidy up. It is an entirely new way of being. To be born of the Spirit is to undergo the quiet death of the old self and the birth of something freer, wider, more spacious. To be born from above invites us into a deeper level of consciousness beyond the “nous”. From a broad cultural perspective, the Greek language in which John was written understood at least four levels of consciousness:  

1.   Soma – the body
Physical existence, sensation, instinct.

2.   Psyche – the soul
Personal identity, emotion, memory, desire. What we would call the ego-self.

3.   Nous – the higher mind
Intuitive, contemplative awareness. The faculty that perceives truth and unity directly.

4.   Participation in the Divine (often linked with Logos or Pneuma)
The highest level, where the human nous shares in or reflects divine reality.

John’s Gospel adopts this language but transforms it. To be born from above, from beyond or born again is not merely intellectual ascent through nous, but Spirit-filled participation in God’s life. 

Meeting Christ in the Dark

Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night. Some think the dark symbolises ignorance. But we say things in the dark we do not say in daylight. The dark can be safer. The dark allows us to be more vulnerable, more honest. Darkness is also a womb of new birth. Darkness is the soil where new beginnings happen. Seeds split open in dark soil. A child grows in the hidden darkness of the womb. A caterpillar dissolves inside the darkness of a cocoon before it becomes a butterfly. 

Nicodemus is worried about being born again, but the irony is that he is, at that very moment, meeting Christ in the dark, being born again. He is right in the womb of transformation. 

Part of the travail of this new birth is questioning his old tradition in the light of the new experience he sees in Christ. What must Nicodemus let go of? Certainty. Certainty looks like the Ten Commandments, the catechism, the creed. None of our religious certainties are bad, they are healthy and holy, they are a necessary scaffolding for a season. But scaffolding is not the house.

Certainty will not carry him into the more expansive life of the Spirit, so we let go of knowing to embrace mystery and unknowing, a richer experience of life in the spirit. 

Jesus says the Spirit is like the wind. You cannot see it. You see only its effects. 

And what are the effects?

If we read to the end of John’s Gospel, the answer is clear. Love. Not sentimentality. Not politeness. But costly, self-giving, boundary crossing love. Notice how this conversation sits within John’s wider story. Just before John 3, at Cana, water is turned into wine. Six large jars set aside for purification become abundant wine. The six jars are a pointer to the six days of creation. Judaism is not discarded. It is transformed. Water becomes wine. Obligation becomes joy. 

Then the Temple is cleansed. The dwelling place of God is no longer stone. It is living flesh. 

Water and wine. Temple and body. Flesh and Spirit. The life of the flesh is water. Necessary. Ordinary. Good. The life of the Spirit is wine. Abundant. Joyful. Overflowing. 

We are invited from water into wine. 

And yet this invitation unsettles us. Because to move from water to wine means letting the water jars be emptied. It means releasing what we thought was sufficient. 

Jesus calls for trust, not comprehension. 

Holding the Opposites

This trust becomes more paradoxical when we remember the story from Numbers. A people bitten by serpents. A bronze serpent lifted up for healing. A killing snake and a saving snake. 

In the early stages of faith, we divide the world neatly. Light and dark. Holy and profane. Saved and lost. But as faith matures, when we embrace the wider experience of spirit, we begin to hold opposites together. 

The cross itself is the great holding together. Heaven and earth. Life and death. Failure and glory. Divine and human.Doubt is not the opposite of faith. It is the energy that carries faith deeper. It loosens our grip on certainty and opens us to mystery.

Perhaps being born again is not about acquiring certainty. Perhaps it is about surrender, consenting to the mystery of a God who cannot be contained. 

The Invitation

Good news. Something good. Something new. To be born anōthen is to discover that the Beauty who is ever ancient and also ever new. The God we thought we understood cannot be contained in our old categories. Faith is not a static possession, but a living participation. 

The Spirit moves like wind through branches. You cannot see it. But you can see love where once there was fear. Courage where once there was caution. Generosity where once there was self-protection. 

So perhaps today the invitation is gentle. 

Where are you being nudged toward something new?
Where are you being invited to let the old self soften and release?
Where are you being asked to trust in the dark soil of unknowing?

Good news.
Something good.
Something new.

May we have the courage to be born from above.

In a news story this week, one of the major grocery stores was heavily criticised for misleading their customers by changing their sale price of items on the shelf from what was advertised. This struck up a conversation between Loretta and I about how from time to time, the packaging of some items, such as potato chips packets have shrunk, but their prices remain the same as when they were in larger packets. I even mentioned that there is one less TimTam in a pack of TimTam’s as a further illustration of price gouging… to which Loretta responded, “Hmm I love a TimTam!”  

That afternoon Loretta went shopping after work and wouldn’t you know it one of her purchases was a pack of TimTam’s! In Loretta’s defence she said to me she just happened to walk down the biscuit aisle, the TimTam’s were on special and by the time she reached the other end of the aisle, a pack of TimTam’s had found their way into the shopping basket. 

Questions one must ask are:
Did my mention of TimTam’s in the morning tempt Loretta?
Was it the specials price tag on the shelf where the TimTam’s were in the biscuit aisle that tempted her?
Or, was it a combination of the two?

Temptations!

They exist in our lives!

They may be a yummy chocolate biscuit that we want to enjoy or advertising campaign that lures us in to say I want this, or I need that. 

This week we begin the Season of Lent. A season marked by prayer, fasting, reflection, and repentance. The liturgical colour has changed to purple. The alleluias have quieted. The church slows down on purpose. 

We begin Lent in the wilderness, another descriptive word for wilderness is desert.

Today, both our readings this morning speak of temptation, being tempted.  

When we turn to our gospel reading for this morning, Matthew 4:1-11, it is about Jesus being tempted by the evil one in the wilderness and ultimately resisting the temptations by relying on the word of God, demonstrating his obedience and faithfulness in the face of adversity. 

Picture it - we find Jesus in the wilderness fasting 40 days and 40 nights. The scene is stark and desolate; the terrain is rugged. Jesus is weary and hungry, is alone, vulnerable in this harsh environment. He is there preparing for his ministry, seeking spiritual clarity and strength through his time of fasting and prayer. The evil one enters the scene and tries to exploit Jesus’ vulnerable state through temptation offering him power, wealth, and worldly glory in exchange for his allegiance. Jesus, however, remains steadfast in his faith and commitment to God resisting all the temptations that were put to him by using wisdom and authority of scripture. It is a powerful demonstration of Jesus unwavering devotion to God and his ability to overcome temptation through the power of God's word. 

Imagine being in a situation where everything around you seems to be pushing you to give into temptation. For us this might be a busy work schedule, the demands of a family, a social life with friends who will try to entice us to focus on worldly things and make these our priority. 

Friends, Matthew 4: 1-11 teaches us the importance of relying on something greater than ourselves when faced with trials and temptations. Can I encourage each of us to think about that! Jesus not only shows us the value of knowing and internalising God's Word but also demonstrates how we can draw strength and guidance from it in our own lives. The passage also challenges us to reflect on how we respond to temptation - do we give in to our urges, enjoying a TimTam, or the desire to want something, but not necessarily needing it; or do we seek solace and wisdom in the teachings of our faith? Let us remember the example Jesus set in these verses as we navigate our own struggles and temptations. We should arm ourselves with the power of scripture and lean on our faith to guide us through these challenging times. We too can find strength and resilience in our beliefs, just as Jesus overcame temptation in the wilderness. 

To conclude I want to finish off with a reflection offered by Richard Rohr. It speaks into the heart of our Gospel reading this morning. In a week where I have been stretched with work, family, university and ministry responsibilities pulled in the direction and that direction, what spoke to me and resonated this week from the reflection as I prepared for today was the phrasing around being ‘transformed’, how our mind, our heart and our body can be transformed. Please make yourself comfortable, you may even like to close your eyes as I read the reflection. 

“The Lenten season always begins with the same Gospel of the temptation of Jesus in the desert. He has gone into the desert for forty days for his own initiation, as it were, and this is a beautiful telling of the demons we all have to face to grow up, to become mature.

The first two temptations are proceeded by the same phrase, “If you are the Son of God.” The primary temptation we all face is to doubt our Divine Identity. That’s what the evil one says to us, too: if you are a child of God. We can all think of a thousand reasons to condemn ourselves. The main temptation we have to overcome is the doubting of our identity. Once we doubt that, it’s all downhill from there. What made Jesus special, it seems, is that he never doubted he was God’s beloved son. 

The first temptation is to misuse power. Maybe we could say it’s a temptation to be spectacular, to be special, to be important, to be showy. The tempter says, “Tell these stones to become bread” (Matthew 4:3). When we’re young, we all want that. We all want to stand out. We want people to notice us. We want to be something special and to do something special, but Jesus refuses to play the game. 

Then a second temptation: “The devil took him to the Holy City and made him stand on the very pinnacle of the Temple” (Matthew 4:5), and tells Jesus to throw himself down. The second great temptation is to misuse religion by playing games with God. Jesus says, “I’m not going to play the religious game either.” It’s transactional religion as opposed to transformational. But what religion is about is real transformation. Changing our mind toward love, changing our heart toward community, changing our body toward living in the present moment. 

The third temptation is the temptation to political power. It’s not inherently wrong. There has to be a way we can use power for good. But until we’re tested, and until we don’t need it too much, we will almost always misuse it. If we’re not tested in the ways of power, very often we end up worshiping power to have power. 

What religion at its most mature level means is that there is one goal. There is one source. There is one focus. There is one meaning. It’s not about making more money. It’s not about being famous. It’s not about winning. What we were given in the Gospel is an agenda in which everybody wins. We’re all equally children of God.” 

Friends, life throws tests at us just like our demanding jobs and family obligations. Jesus stood strong against temptation in the wilderness. Just as he relied on his faith in God's word, we too can find strength in our beliefs. Are you prepared to tap into that same power and remain steadfast when life's challenges try to break you? 

References
Adapted from Richard Rohr, “All Must Be Tested in Regard to Their Use of Power,” homily, March 1, 2020 https://cac.org/daily-mediations/testing-in-the-desert-2023-03-03/

Now I know it’s Transfiguration Sunday- but this year there are not enough weeks for Epiphany 6 and the Transfiguration – so the lectionary gave both options- I chose Epiphany 6-to continue with the ‘Sermon on the Mount’. 

Today I want to speak about Divorce- not an easy topic for the Church — especially since the 1970s, when Justice Lionel Murphy introduced No-Fault Divorce into Australian law. Churches wrestled deeply with what the new laws meant for marriage, for Scripture, and for faithfulness.

Cath and I were married on the 6th of December 1980, on the outskirts of Sydney. We were young enthusiastic Christians (singing Christian’s songs on the street) and we met studying the bible at Sydney Missionary and Bible College. We were what some might call fundamentalist Christians. We believed the Bible contained no error, and we read it literally as our guidebook for life. 

So naturally the sermon at our wedding was from Ephesians 5:

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord… For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church… Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” 

Needless to say, Sylvia — my mother-in-law — and not a churchgoer but a strong advocate for feminism, was not impressed. When we walked out of the church she turned to my mother and said, “oh How could they believe that?” My brethren mother calmly replied, “oh we let them have their little delusion. We know how things really are.” 

As life goes on, our understanding of Scripture deepens- broadens. 

Last year, when I was standing in for Desirée, all Licensed Lay Ministers were asked to complete training in Domestic Violence awareness. During that course I was confronted by some sobering statistics. In fact, I was shocked-A study by the Anglican Church of Australia found 38% of the general Australian population reported experiencing intimate partner violence (Domestic Violence) in their lifetime. That’s a lot 38% of Australians.  But it gets worse.  When they surveyed Anglicans- it rose to 44%. 

It gets more disturbing, some perpetrators (of DV) reportedly used biblical teaching to justify their behaviour. Possibly either the Ephesians ref to ‘wives submitting’ or where the book of common prayer promises to ‘love and obey’. 

Sobering statistics to reflect on. Violence in relationships is not theoretical. It is real. 

Today’s words from Matthew 5 — (from the Sermon on the Mount) are not comfortable words. Jesus rarely offers comfort that allows injustice to remain unchallenged. Instead, when there is injustice- he invites transformation — of hearts, relationships, and communities. 

In this passage, Jesus speaks about divorce. But if we only listen with old rigid ears, we may miss what the Spirit is saying to the Church today. 

In Jesus’ time, a woman could easily be dismissed —divorced, cast aside — Similarly in Islam- the husband just had to say “I divorce you“ x 3. 

Divorce had devastating consequences. Divorce was not simply the ending of a relationship. For women it often meant poverty, social exclusion, and a vulnerable life. When Jesus addresses divorce, he is not endorsing suffering. He is confronting a system that allowed the powerful to discard the powerless. 

And remember: Jesus was a practising Jew. Matthew’s Gospel presents him clearly as a Torah-keeping Jew speaking to Jewish Christians. “Not one jot or tittle,” he says, “will pass from the Law.” Hebrew is a consonantal language — without the smallest markings, the meaning shifts entirely. Jesus affirms the law. 

But Jesus also says, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees…” and the scribes and Pharisees were the meticulous law-keepers.         So, what is he really saying? 

Jesus is pointing beyond mere rule-keeping- to the heart behind the law.  

So- What is the purpose of Scripture? What lies behind the commandments?  

The Love of God and love of neighbour.  The Beatitudes set the tone: mercy, humility, and a hunger for righteousness. 

Some in Jesus’ day followed the letter of the law but neglected its spirit. Divorce was permissible; therefore, it was justified. 

But Jesus asks: what about the person harmed? What about her dignity?  What about her safety?

And so, the deeper truth emerges:

God does not bless relationships that destroy the dignity of another. 

Let me say that again,

God does not ask anyone to remain where they are unsafe.

Our God is not a God of terror. Not a God of bruises hidden beneath sleeves. Not a God of whispered fear in one’s own home.

Our God is a God of liberation. 

Throughout Scripture, whenever people are oppressed, God acts toward their freedom. From Egypt to exile, from the margins to the cross — the story of God is the story of rescue.

So, when we speak of relationships, we must speak honestly about domestic violence. 

It exists.

It wounds,

And — with humility — we must confess that the Church has not always responded as it should. 

There were times when silence felt easier than truth.

Times when preserving appearances seemed more important than protecting the vulnerable.

Times when Scripture was misused in ways that trapped people rather than freed them. 

But hear this clearly:

The Gospel never sides with abuse. Never.

If anyone is experiencing harm, coercion, intimidation, or violence — this is not a cross for them to bear. Christ bore the cross so that you might live in freedom.                                          

Still Salty, Still Shining (With a Bit of Holy Trouble)

Matthew 5:13–16

Jesus has a way of sneaking up on us. He looks out at a crowd of perfectly ordinary people—people with sore backs, complicated families, and strong opinions about how things are- and used to be—and he says: 

“You are the salt of the earth.

You are the light of the world.” 

Not you might be.

Not once upon a time you were.

But you are. 

Which is both a comfort… and, if we’re honest,… a little alarming. 

Because salt, you see, is useless if it stays in the shaker. It’s Very tidy on the shelf. Very polite. But completely irrelevant. And Jesus has absolutely no interest in polite irrelevance. 

Salt exists to be scattered. And yes—sometimes it gets rubbed into places we would rather not talk about. (Have you ever put salt on a wound? Not exactly a warm relaxing experience.) But it heals. It preserves. It tells the truth about what is happening before decay sets in. 

Phrases about salt have entered our everyday language.  People are described as “Salt of the earth” – what does this mean? (according to google). Salt of the earth people are:

•         Honest and Reliable: They are dependable, and often described as genuine and straightforward.

•         Humble and Down-to-Earth: They are not pretentious- they don’t think they are special or better than anyone else.

•         Strong Moral Fiber: They are often seen as "pure" or good. ( having a sound, moral character)

•         Hardworking: salt of the earth people have a strong work ethic, often from the working class.

•         Kind and Helpful:  salt of the earth people are often caring, loyal, and willing to help others in time of need. 

And light—ah! Light is even more troublesome.  

Light exposes things. Have you ever looked towards a window and seen dust in the air? That pile of dust in the corner we were hoping no one would notice. Light does not come to flatter us. It comes to free us. 

You see, for some of us- there is a lie floating around our culture. It says:

“At a certain age, you step aside. You become quieter. You stop stirring the pot and making trouble.” 

But the gospel says something quite different. 

The gospel says: those who have walked longest with God are often the most dangerous— dangerous to the unjust, to the cruel, to those peddling despair. 

Why? 

Because you have seen promises broken and still chosen hope.
You have buried loved ones and still chosen love.
You have seen the world wobble in turmoil and still get up in the morning. 

Having lived and experienced life- does not qualify you to retire in a life of faith- it is not retirement material. It is actually prophetic training. We are all being trained as ‘prophets’ to the world we live in. 

Let’s be clear—Jesus does not call us salt - so that we can make peace with blandness, to be bland in this world. Jesus does not call us light so that we can politely dim ourselves for the comfort of others. 

If our faith never irritates anyone, we may want to check whether it has any flavour left. 

Now, I know—some of us may say, “But I am tired.”
And God says, “Then sit down—and shine anyway.” 

Some of us may say, “I don’t recognize the world anymore.”
And God says, “Good. That means you remember how it ought to be.” 

Your light does not have to be loud. It does not have to be trendy.
Your light shines when you refuse to harden your heart.

When you tell the truth kindly
When you say, “This is not who we are,” and mean it. 

And yes—sometimes being salt and light will make you unpopular. But remember: Jesus was not crucified for being vaguely pleasant. 

He was crucified because light walked straight into the darkness and refused to apologize. 

So, friends, do not hide your light under nostalgia. Do not tuck your salt away for special occasions. This world is hungry. Our world is stumbling around in the dark. And God, in a fit of divine confidence, has decided to use us- each of us. 

Which just proves that God has a wonderful sense of humour. 

There are so many in the bible and human history who gave their best when they were old: 

Biblical Examples

•         Abraham: Embarked on a new journey of faith at age 75 and became a father at 100.

•         Moses: Called by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt at 80 years old.

•         Anna and Simeon: Elderly individuals who worshipped in the Temple and recognized the infant Jesus as the Messiah, with Anna fasting and praying for decades.

•         The Apostle John: Outlived the other apostles, serving as a leader and writing the Book of Revelation in his old age. 

Historical and Early Church Figures

•         Polycarp of Smyrna (c. 69–155 AD): A disciple of the apostle John, he was martyred at age 86. He is remembered for his unwavering faith and kindness to his captors in his final hours.

•         John Chrysostom (c. 347–407 AD): Known as "golden-mouthed" for his powerful preaching, he continued to fearlessly speak truth to power in his older years.

•         John Newton (1725–1807): The author of "Amazing Grace" continued to preach and marvel at God's grace well into his old age, long after his time as a slave ship captain. 

Modern Era (19th–21st Century)

•         Billy Graham (1918–2018): Preached to millions globally for over four decades, continuing his ministry and influence well into his 90s.

•         Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983): After surviving a Nazi concentration camp, she traveled the world in her later years to share messages of forgiveness and God's love.

•         George Müller (1805–1898): Ran orphanages in England for 10,000 children, relying on faith and prayer for funding, and continued traveling to preach in his 70s and 80s.

•         Mother Teresa (1910–1997): Founded the Missionaries of Charity and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 at age 69, continuing her work with the poor until her death.

•         Dr. Catherine Hamlin an Australian Anglican doctor who worked as a doctor in Ethiopia confronting the practice of marrying teenage girls. Who trained medicos to repair the resulting fistulas which came about from having babies when they were too young. Cath and I heard her speak and she was well into her 80’s and still going strong. 

And so many from our own parish who have been salt and light and ministering God’s love in their later years. We remember Lyn Watt, Barry Campie and Dell Ezzy. You are the salt of the earth. You are the light which cannot be hid.

Closing Blessing 

And now, may the God who calls you salt give you courage to be flavourful.
May the God who calls you light give you joy in shining—especially where it is needed most.
May your wisdom refuse to be silent.
May your compassion refuse to grow tired.
May your laughter confuse the powers of despair.
And when the world tells us that our time has passed,
may we hear God laughing gently and saying,
“Oh no, my dear—we are not finished yet.”

Go in peace.
Go in hope.
Go and shine.

Amen. 

Sermon – Micah 6:8 & The Beatitudes

Imagine landing in another country and going to a currency exchange.

You hand over your Australian dollars, and they give you completely different-looking notes back. Same paper, different colours, different symbols, different values. 

If you tried to spend your Australian money in that new country, it wouldn’t work. It simply doesn’t hold value there. 

Jesus says the Kingdom of God is like living in a different country. The currency is different. What counts as wealth, success, and strength is completely redefined. 

In our world, power, image, and self-promotion are valuable currency.

In Jesus’ kingdom, humility, mercy, and peace making are what count. 

The Beatitudes are Jesus handing us new currency and saying,

“This is what has value where I come from.”

One of my favourite verses in the Bible beautifully sums this up:

“What does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” — Micah 6:8

That’s it. That’s the life of faith in one sentence.

And yet, if we’re honest, that kind of life can make us feel a bit… different. Like the odd ones out. 

As people who put our faith in Jesus Christ, we are different — not because we think we’re better, but because we are shaped by different values. We are called to live lives marked by justice, kindness, humility, and a living relationship with the Creator. 

But the world around us often celebrates very different values.

Instead of justice, we hear: “It’s my rights.”

Instead of kindness: “Look after yourself first.”

Instead of humility: “Promote yourself. Be noticed. Be admired.”

It can feel like, day by day, we are drifting further from Micah’s vision: to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God. 

The Values of a Different Kingdom

Jesus describes this different way of living in the Beatitudes. What are they?

They are not rules. They are not commandments. They are descriptions of the kind of people who belong to the Kingdom of God — what we might call the Commonwealth of Jesus. 

And when we place them alongside the values of our society, the contrast is sharp. So, let’s try flipping them — turning Jesus’ words into what today’s world often seems to reward. 

Of Power and Self-Importance

Happy and successful are the arrogant, for they push others aside to get what they want.

Happy and successful are the strong and unyielding, for might makes right.

Happy and successful are those who promote themselves loudly, for they will be noticed and admired. 

Of Success Without Compassion

Happy and successful are the callous, who don’t let other people’s pain slow them down.

Happy and successful are the ruthless, for no one stands in their way.

Happy and successful are those who bend the rules and don’t get caught, for they are admired for their cleverness. 

Of Wealth, Influence, and Image

Happy and successful are the deceitful and corrupt, for they will be rich and powerful.

Happy and successful are those praised by the media for their wealth and influence, for they shall be celebrities.

Happy and successful are you when others applaud your achievements and power — rejoice, for your reward is now, and the world will remember your name. 

Violence and Domination

Happy and successful are the warmongers, for history will call them great.

Take a breath.

That’s the air our culture breathes. And if we’re not careful, we breathe it too.

________________________________________

Not Rules — A Changed Heart

When I was growing up in church, there was a lot of talk about being “separate from the world.” But often that meant outward rules — what you wore, where you went, what you watched.

But Jesus goes much deeper than behaviour. The Beatitudes are not about external rules. They are about the attitudes of the heart. 

Paul calls this way of life “the word of the Cross.” Why? Because these attitudes — humility, mercy, peace-making, self-giving love — led Jesus to the cross. They are beautiful, but they are not safe. They challenge every power structure built on pride, violence, and control. 

When we become followers of Jesus, our values don’t just improve — they transform. We die to the old life of endless consuming, climbing, competing — and God reshapes us into something new. 

We begin to live in Christ, shaped by his heart.

But it’s so easy to drift. To slowly swap the values of Jesus for the values we see on screens, in politics, and in our own ambitions.

So we have to ask:

What do I really value?

What actually drives the way I live?

________________________________________

The Shape of a Beatitude Life

If the world clusters its values around power, image, and success, Jesus clusters his around something very different. 

Of Dependence on God

“Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

This is about knowing we need God. It’s a loosening of our grip on money, status, and self-sufficiency. We don’t stand before God as achievers, but as receivers. 

Of Tender Hearts in a Hurting World

“Blessed are those who mourn.”

“Blessed are the merciful.”

This is the refusal to become numb. It means allowing ourselves to feel the pain of the world and respond with compassion, forgiveness, and care. 

Of Humble Strength

“Blessed are the meek.”

This is not weakness, but strength under control. People who don’t need to dominate or prove themselves, because they are secure in God’s love. 

Of A Passion for What Is Right

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”

A deep longing for justice and integrity. We see this in those who stand with the poor and refugees, who advocate for the oppressed, who quietly and persistently work for what is right. 

Of Single-Hearted Love

“Blessed are the pure in heart.”

A life with no hidden agenda. Loving others not to impress, control, or gain advantage — but simply because they are loved by God. 

Of Bringing Peace in a Violent World

“Blessed are the peacemakers.”

People committed to reconciliation, who resist hatred and refuse to treat enemies as less than human. 

Of Courage to Stay Faithful

“Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”

Because living this way will sometimes bring opposition. Courage is part of the Christian life. 

These are the values of the Commonwealth of Jesus. And history is full of ordinary believers who took these words seriously — and paid a price.

What does a Life lived by the Beatitudes Look Like? 

Jean Donovan was someone who lived by the Beatitudes.

Jean was a young laywoman from the United States who felt called in her walk with the Lord to serve the poor. She joined a mission team in El Salvador during a time of terrible violence and civil war. Alongside Sister Dorothy Kazel and others, she worked with refugees, helped the hungry, drove the sick to medical care, and even helped bury those killed by death squads. 

She was deeply moved by the preaching of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who spoke courageously for the poor and oppressed. When Romero was assassinated, Jean and Dorothy kept vigil beside his coffin through the night. 

Jean knew the danger. She wrote to a friend:

“The Peace Corps left today and my heart sank low. The danger is extreme and they were right to leave… I have decided not to leave. The children, the poor, the bruised victims of this insanity — who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favour the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”

Eight months later, Jean Donovan and Sister Dorothy Kazel were murdered.

That is what the Beatitudes can look like in real life. Not safe. Not comfortable. But radiant with the heart of Christ.

So How Do We Live This Way? 

Hearing a story like that, we might think, I could never be like that.

But the Beatitudes are not a list we achieve by trying harder. They are the fruit of a life lived close to God. 

Micah told us the secret all along:

“Walk humbly with your God.” 

We grow into Beatitude people by walking with God — in prayer, in Scripture, in worship, in quiet conversations with him throughout the day. As we walk with Christ, his heart slowly becomes our heart.

The question is not, “Am I good enough?”

The question is, “Am I walking with God?”

Because if we walk with him long enough, we will begin to look like Jesus — doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God. 

Closing Prayer
Lord God,
You have shown us what is good.
You have told us what you require:
to do justice,
to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with you. 

We confess how easily we absorb the values of the world around us —
the hunger for recognition,
the fear of missing out,
the temptation to look after ourselves first. 

Shape our hearts by the heart of Christ.
Make us poor in spirit,
tender toward the pain of others,
gentle in strength,
hungry for righteousness,
rich in mercy,
pure in love,
and brave in peace making.
Teach us to walk with you each day,
so that, step by step,
your kingdom’s values become our own.
We ask this in the name of Jesus,
who lived the Beatitudes perfectly.

Amen.