Yesterday I accidentally got to see the Australian Senate pass Dean Smith’s private member’s bill on marriage equality. I was in Canberra for about six hours with three other members of Australian Christians for Marriage Equality. We could almost have been the start of a joke: an Anglican priest, a Baptist pastor, and two Uniting Church ministers walk into Parliament House …
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Sermon for Williamstown
26th of November, 2017
Matthew 25:31-46
Recently I had a short street debate with a couple of Muslim men. It was a Saturday, and I was in the city on my way to a protest march. As I walked up Swanston Street I found two competing groups of evangelists on two different corners of the Swanston-Bourke Streets intersection; a group of Christians and a group of Muslims. As I walked past the Islamic group something they were saying about the Bible caught my attention and I stopped to talk to them.
The two men I talked to were comparing the Bible to the Koran. I don’t know anything about the Koran, but I know enough about the Bible to be able to agree with them. Yes, I agreed, some parts of the Bible contradict other parts. Yes, I agreed, the gospels were most likely written by people who had never seen Jesus themselves, people who were writing stories that had been passed down to them through oral traditions. Yes, I agreed, in the gospel according to Matthew Jesus is reported as saying that: ‘just as Jonah was for three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth’ (Matthew 12:40) and yet Jesus would only have been in the tomb for at most two nights. Basically, I agreed with all their arguments for the fallibility of the Christian scriptures. Why, then, they asked me, was I Christian? I explained that it was because I experience God’s love for me in Jesus. So, they said, it was blind faith. I said that I wouldn’t call my faith ‘blind’ but I agreed that it was faith. Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
12th of November, 2017
Joshua 24:1-3a 14-25
Joshua, the successor of Moses, is old and well advanced in years, and giving his last words of advice to the people of Israel, now living in the land of Canaan. Joshua wants the people to choose to follow the God who rescued them from Egypt, but he isn’t at all sure that they can. He tells them: ‘Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’
The people, of course, say that they want to worship the God who brought them up from the land of Egypt and freed them from slavery. But Joshua says to the people, ‘You cannot serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good.’ And the people said to Joshua, ‘No, we will serve the Lord! Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
5th of November, 2017
Matthew 5:1-12
1 John 3:1-3
Tuesday was the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther possibly nailing his 95 theses on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, a day we celebrate for Luther’s insight that we are all sinners who are only justified, made right with God, through God’s grace. Wednesday was All Saints’ Day, a day that we Protestants now use to remember all those we love who have died and are now part of the great cloud of witnesses that surround us. We are also reminded that we are called to be saints, too; to purify ourselves as God is pure. We are all sinners. We are all saints. For the Uniting Church, these two identities might be called our Reformed (Presbyterian and Congregationalist) identity, and our Pietist (Methodist) Identity. How do we reconcile them? Continue reading
Have you heard of ‘virtue signalling? The British journalist and author James Bartholomew claims to have coined it in The Spectator in 2015 after realising that Victorians gave much more to charity than contemporary British people do. He says that it describes:
… the way in which many people say or write things to indicate that they are virtuous. Sometimes it is quite subtle. By saying that they hate the Daily Mail or UKIP, they are really telling you that they are admirably non-racist, left-wing or open-minded. One of the crucial aspects of virtue signalling is that it does not require actually doing anything virtuous. It does not involve delivering lunches to elderly neighbours or staying together with a spouse for the sake of the children. It takes no effort or sacrifice at all.
‘I invented “virtue signalling”. Now it’s taking over the world’ The Spectator, 10 October 2015 Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
29th of October 2017
On Tuesday it will be exactly five hundred years since an Augustinian monk called Martin Luther, priest and doctor of theology, nailed a list of 95 theses (arguments or propositions) on the door of the cathedral in Wittenberg, Germany. This was the equivalent of a modern academic or theologian writing an article to challenge their colleagues. And so began what we Protestants call the Reformation.
The Uniting Church isn’t a Lutheran Church. One of the ways in which we describe ourselves is as ‘Reformed,’ looking back to the Reformers who followed Luther rather than Luther himself; people like the French John Calvin, who created a ‘presbyterian’ or committee-based church structure in Geneva, and John Knox, who took Calvin’s ideas to Scotland. But the 31st of October is our anniversary too. Continue reading
The Blessing of the Animals this morning, so no sermon. I’ll sometimes make children sit through my sermons, but I won’t do that to innocent animals.
Instead, here’s a couple of photos from my visit to Castlemaine yesterday. One is from the Castlemaine Baptist Church. The other is a poster from Minus18 (Australia’s largest youth-led organisation for gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans youth) that is in the window of Stonemans Bookroom. I think one gives a message of love and welcome, and the other does not.
I wish more churches could understand how important a message of love is to people, and how little most of us need to be reminded of our sins.
Sermon for Williamstown
15th of October 2017, Pentecost 23
Exodus 32:1-14
The God who is portrayed in today’s story from the Hebrew Scriptures is quite terrifying; an apparently angry and unforgiving God, eager to punish his sinning people with total annihilation. Admittedly, their sin in the today’s reading is quite extreme. Last week we heard the Ten Commandments, gifts to the people of Israel from the God who had rescued them from Egypt. The response of the people to those commandments was: ‘Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do,’ and almost instantly the people have broken the commandments that they welcomed. In response to their rejection of God, God rejects them, saying to Moses: ‘Your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have acted perversely …’
The character YHWH in today’s reading from Exodus isn’t simply the same as the God we worship, and neither is the king in Jesus’ parable in today’s gospel reading. In both cases we have stories which teach us something about God, about our relationship with God, and about ourselves, but which aren’t straight-forward descriptions of the ways in which God acts. They need to be interpreted. So let’s do that. What does this story of the golden calf have to say to us today? Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
8 October 2017
Exodus 20:1-20
Psalm 19
The Ten Commandments, known by Hebrew Scholars as the ‘Ten Words,’ don’t have a good reputation among some Christians. Way back in 2008, as part of the introduction of his ‘New Faith,’ the then-minister at St Michael’s Church, Francis Macnab, put up an enormous billboard over the Tullamarine freeway with the text: ‘The Ten Commandments: The most negative document ever written.’ As a publicity campaign it was brilliant; as a piece of biblical interpretation it was appalling. The Synod meeting that year asked St Michael’s to take the billboards down and apologise, which as you can imagine was an unusual step for the Uniting Church to take. (In response Dr Macnab said that he had been defamed.) One of the reasons that Dr Macnab gave for his argument was that:
There are three critical commandments which are disregarded … “Thou shalt not kill”. (In wars we have killed approximately 70 million men, women and children in the 20th Century to the present time.) “Thou shalt not bear false witness”. People do this without reflection. “Keep the Sabbath day holy”. Continue reading
Sermon for Williamstown Uniting Church
1st of October, 2017
Talking about the Eucharist
Today I’m not going to preach on the Bible readings; I’ve decided instead to colour outside the lines. Today I want to talk about food.
Later in this service we’re going to celebrate what is called Eucharist or Communion or the Lord’s Supper. ‘Eucharist’ comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving and the name goes back to Paul’s description in First Corinthians when he describes what Jesus did: ‘when he had given thanks’ and ‘given thanks’ is eucharisteesas (1 Cor 11:24). ‘Communion’ describes what we do, we gather as community to share in common the body and blood of Christ and thus commune with God. ‘The Lord’s supper’ is what Paul called the meal when writing to the Corinthians; he says: ‘When you come together it is not really to eat the Lord’s supper’ (1 Cor 11:20). That name also reminds us of who is the Host at the table. The church isn’t hosting this meal; we’re all the guests of God. Continue reading
Rev Doc Geek 