Listening is the key – 08 January 2019
In response to the acts of a minority group in St Kilda last Saturday, Bishop Philip Huggins has released a statement:
The conflict and the visual character of these recent events have ensured their wide publicity, here and overseas.
Accordingly, there will be more of the same. Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
Epiphany 2019
As usual, in the lead-up to today’s celebration of the Epiphany, I have been thinking about stars. I have especially been considering the concept of the ‘lodestar’. A lodestar is a star used for navigation, typically the pole star, Polaris or Alpha Ursae Minoris, in the Northern Hemisphere. We don’t have a pole star in the south, but the Southern Cross is used in a similar way, with the help of the Pointer Stars. According to my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary the use of the word ‘lodestar’ in navigation comes from Middle English, 1150-1349, and the use of ‘lodestar’ as a metaphor, meaning ‘the person or thing on which one’s attention or hopes are fixed’ is late Middle English, 1350-1469. So we’ve been talking about metaphorical lodestars for centuries now. Continue reading
John Squires explains what the somewhat confusing process of the Uniting Church mean for marriage equality.
The last six months in the Uniting Church has been something of an intense roller-coaster, revolving around the issue of marriage. Our processes are somewhat idiosyncratic and, as events unfolded, matters came down to a rather arcane provision in the UCA Constitution.
I offered An Explainer about this process some months back. In light of more recent events, here is An Updated Explainer.
1A. On 13 July 2018, the 15th Assembly decided that Uniting Church ministers are able to conduct the weddings of people of the same gender. Assembly did have a proposal before it at that time, declaring that changing our understanding of marriage was a matter that was “vital to the life of the church”. This drew on aprovision in the ConstitutioninClause 39(a), which provides that On matters which, by a two thirds majority vote, the Assembly deems to be vital to the life of the Church…
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Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
Christmas Day 2018
Isaiah 9:2-7
Luke 2:1-20
Today is Christmas Day, the third most important day in the Church’s calendar and possibly the most widely-celebrated Australian public holiday (although I suspect it jostles with ANZAC Day for top spot). As I mentioned last year, Christmas has never been an exclusively Christian festival, and it most definitely isn’t here in Australia. Australians of other faiths, as well as those of ‘no faith,’ often join in the Christmas gift-giving and feasting, sharing the love and peace and joy of the day. Sadly, Christmas can also look like ‘just another day’. The story of the Christmas Day Truce during World War One, when men in the trenches on both sides sang and played football together, is amazing and beautiful – and profoundly unusual. Wars don’t usually stop for Christmas. Death and hunger and sorrow and pain do not suddenly disappear because we are celebrating the birth of Christ. Natural disasters don’t care about the liturgical calendar.
But Christmas reminds us that the world is not just made up of war and famine, death and destruction. We recognize beauty and hope. We speak and hear of joy and peace. We experience the love that is at the core of creation. We see the light shine in the darkness, and know that the dark cannot overcome it. Christmas reminds us to pause where we are, here and now, and celebrate the coming of the light. Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
23rd of December, 2018
I’m not sure whether you remember this, but I’ve mentioned before an episode of the eighties Australian television program A Country Practice that I’m reminded of every Christmas. The episode centred on an older woman who found herself unexpectedly pregnant and was considering ending the pregnancy. Naturally, everyone in the entire town knew this and had an opinion on it, there were no secrets in Wandin Valley, and one of the doctors went to visit a church to think about it. There she met a priest who asked her about different scenarios in which a termination might be appropriate. One was when the mother was an unmarried teenager for whom giving birth would be particularly risky. Would she perform an abortion in that circumstance? The doctor said, yes, of course. Ah, said the priest, but what if the mother’s name was Mary and the town was Bethlehem?
I don’t remember anything else from that episode. It was screened in 1987, when I was fourteen, and that one scene is the only one I remember. But it comes back to me whenever I read Mary’s story in the Bible. Today’s Jesse Tree ornament is a heart, representing Mary, whose love for God and her son is at the heart of the Christmas story. In this past week, as you coloured in the Jesse Tree pictures, you will have been reminded of the bravery of Esther; the initial cowardice and eventual courage of Jonah; and the prophecies of Isaiah, Malachi, Elizabeth and Zachariah, and John the Baptist – all of them looking forward to the coming of Christ. Mary was also a prophet, and just as brave a woman as Esther. She also follows Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba, the other women mentioned in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, in being the source of scandal. Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
December 16, 2018
Ruth 1:16-19a, 4:13-22
Today, the third Sunday of Advent, is ‘Gaudete’ Sunday – Joy Sunday, the only Sunday in the entire liturgical year whose colour is pink. The name comes in part from a command Paul sometimes gave to his readers as we hear in today’s extract from the letter to the Philippians; in Latin, ‘rejoice in the Lord always’ is Gaudete in Domino semper. In the midst of Advent, which can be rather a sombre liturgical time as we prepare for the Second Coming and are reminded to be ready for the return of the Son of Man, this third Sunday is a time of joy.
Today is also the third week in which we have remembered Jesus’ ancestors in the faith by putting ornaments representing them on the Jesse Tree. In this past week, as you coloured in the pictures, you will have been reminded of God liberating the people of Israel from their captivity in Egypt; leading them through the desert to a new land; and providing them with kings to rule them. This morning we have named Moses and Aaron; Rahab and Joshua; David and Solomon. And we have also named Ruth and Naomi, a most unlikely pair of heroes, whose story begins in tragedy and ends in joy. Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
2nd of December, 2018
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Luke 21:25-36
Happy First Sunday of Advent! Happy New Church Year!
Today, the first Sunday of Advent, is Hope Sunday. As we do every year, we hear today a prophecy of the Second Coming of Christ, the Parousia. This year we hear the prophecy from the Gospel According to Luke, and it is just as violent as those we hear in the Years of Matthew and Mark: ‘People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.’ The gospel writers want to warn us to be ready, because Christ may come at any moment, and if we want to be among those who welcome his coming as our redemption, we need to live lives that will enable us to ‘to stand before the Son of Man.’ But we hear this warning on the first Sunday of Advent because it is also gives us ground for hope. The season of Advent, which looks backwards to the First Coming and onwards to the Second, reminds us that once upon a time God came and lived among us in Jesus. In the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving that we will pray a little later we will all say together: ‘Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again’. The gospel readings for the first Sunday in Advent might use the language of violence but they are describing the coming of Christ in glory, which is something to be celebrated. Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown
25th of November, 2018
John 18:33-37
Yesterday was Election Day here in Victoria and all those of us who are eligible voted – I hope. The UK is currently celebrating the centenary of women getting the right to vote, and as I’ve followed that I’ve been reminded of the great privilege it is to be able to participate in a democracy. It is a right that Australian women won earlier than almost any other women in the world, in 1902. New Zealand women had won the right to vote in 1893, but they weren’t allowed to run for Parliament until 1919. Australian women could both vote and stand for parliament from soon after Federation, as long as they were ‘white’. In White Australia only white people could vote, so we can’t be too celebratory about women’s early enfranchisement. But Australia still had complete women’s suffrage earlier than any other country in the world; we were a model for the rest of the world, hence this amazing banner by Dora Meeson Coates, which was carried in suffrage marches in London in 1908 and 1911.
Every-so-often I think it’s important for us to pause and remember just how astonishing it is that we live in a democracy in which all Australian citizens over the age of 18 are able to vote, and in which changes of government happen peacefully. For most of human history people had no say in who ruled over them, and when those rulers were changed it was by violence. Our electoral system is something to be celebrated. Despite this, we as Christians have an even higher loyalty than our loyalty to our democracy. Democracy is the rule of the majority and sometimes the majority can get things wrong, as it did when only white Australians were allowed to vote. Today, on the last Sunday of the Christian year, we are celebrating the reign of Christ, Christ the King Sunday. Today we affirm that Christ is not just the ruler of our hearts but of the whole world, and that our first loyalty is to him. Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
18th of November 2018
1 Samuel 1:4-20
One of the interesting things about the Bible, this enormous collection of books through which we believe we hear the Word of God, is that our Christian scriptures include within them the scriptures of another faith. These are often called the ‘Old Testament’ but I prefer to describe them as the ‘Hebrew Scriptures’ because they haven’t been replaced or made obsolete by the ‘New’ Testament. If they were obsolete, they wouldn’t be in our Bible. Not only are they in there, they are by far the larger part of it, thirty-nine books (or forty-six books if you’re Catholic) as compared to the New Testament’s twenty-seven. The Christian scriptures contain the Jewish scriptures within them, and we Christians read from them every week.
Note: There was so much I wanted to say about this, but I realised that it didn’t fit in a sermon. But I’ll share it here: For Jews, the Hebrew Scriptures only contain twenty-four books, because books that we divide into ‘First and Second’ – Samuel, Kings and Chronicles – are each one book, and because Christians put the prophecies of the twelve minor prophets from Hosea to Malachi in twelve separate books while for Jews their prophecies are contained in one book titled simply ‘The Twelve’. For Jews the scriptures have three sections: the Torah, the Nevi’im, and the Ketuvim, or the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. An acronym is made from the names of these three sections, which is why you may hear or see the Hebrew Scriptures called the Tanakh. We have divided up the Hebrew Scriptures into four sections: the Law; the historical books; the Prophets; and the books of Wisdom writings, and moved them around a bit. Now back to the sermon. Continue reading
Rev Doc Geek 