She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” [Mark’s Gospel 7.26-28]

What happens when Jesus says something which we think he should not have said? How do you feel when Jesus says something which, from anyone else, would create a response of condemnation or criticism, at the very least?

A common response is that we try to ameliorate what Jesus has said, or we make excuses for him, by claiming he meant something different, or the translation misses the nuance of the words, or he didn’t call her a dog, it was more like a puppy.

We are so caught up in the moment, we don’t see Jesus as the human being God has so clearly intended him to be.

Exhausted, driven, with little chance to rest and facing criticism from the Jewish leadership and many in the community, Jesus seeks refuge in a Gentile town where he hopes he is not known. He slips into a home, and looks for a space to stop, perhaps seeking a moment’s sanctuary. Not a chance.

This mother of a desperately ill daughter, unnamed but identified, falls at Jesus’ feet and begs him for help. Could there be a more significant contrast with the confrontation of the Pharisees and lawyers from whom Jesus has just taken refuge?

However, Jesus dismisses her with a word and a cruel name. For half a breath, we don’t know what to think. And yet, this mother behaves as mothers have behaved throughout history, doing anything to save her child. She answers back, challenging and correcting Jesus.

We hold our breath for another heartbeat. And Jesus is recalled to the breadth and depth of his ministry; not just to the people of Israel, but to all who hunger and thirst for justice and mercy.

In the Old Testament, we hear Abraham, Moses and the Psalmist call God to remember mercy, to remember justice, to remember God’s people. Just like the patriarchs and prophets, this Gentile woman, this foreign mother, calls Jesus to discover and to remember that the hope of life inherent in Jesus is for everyone.

Just as God has cause to remember at the call of his people, so does Jesus. A young girl is given life and the gospel story expands before our eyes from the nation of Israel to a deaf man, to four thousand hungry Gentiles and thus, to us – and all creation. 

For if any are hearers of the word and not doers,
they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves
and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.

– James 1.23-24

How easy (and convenient) to have “predictive text” as we read and listen to the Scriptures.  We have a glimpse of what we think is coming, or someone reads the title of the section before the text itself and really, we almost don’t need to listen too hard.

The Letter of James has endured much in this regard. “Faith without works is dead” becomes the simplistic mission statement, thus justifying all the responsibilities, jobs and rosters. Finally, we corral the story of Mary and Martha in order to take sides – are you Mary, or are you Martha? Thus, we summarise this profound epistle before the kettle has boiled (expecting Martha to pour the tea).

Might I encourage you to stop for a second and observe that James’ letter is not an advertisement for the protestant work ethic, but rather an encouragement to be both hearers and doers of the word.

This is neither about indolence and apathy, nor about busy-ness and activity; it is about allowing our lives and selves to be shaped by the word. James’ original text does not have the distinction of a capital for “Word” (the original text was entirely in capitals), so we are entitled to ask to which “word” are we paying attention?

The New Testament had not yet been compiled when James was writing, so we can assume there were narratives, letters, even testimonies about Jesus, to which the communities of faith had access. These reports of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection were compelling and transforming, but I would suggest that there is more that James intends.

In the verse just before this, James talks of “the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.” Might this be more than narratives, reports and testimonies? This is the Word proclaimed at the majestic commencement of John’s Gospel; “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

If this Word, known to us and among us as Jesus, is implanted in us, what might identify our community as “doers of the Word”? Perhaps how we speak and act and serve and forgive? Perhaps how we bridle our tongues from cynicism and gossip, and release them to bless and honour those around us? How might our lives reflect the presence of Jesus?

Our significant mistake will be to assume we have this in hand. As we pray this week, let us pray for the Word to be embedded, implanted in our lives and our Congregation, that we might be known as “doers of the Word” for our community around us.

“Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

It’s when we make that one decision that everything begins to change. Many of us belong to groups passively, just testing the water, unsure of whether we belong. This is as true of a walking group, or regular Thursday coffee, or settling into a community of faith.

We come along, check if it’s safe and whether we feel we can belong. Belonging may take time. At some point, we decide to stay, or not; to belong, or not; to commit.

In the gospels, the safety and obscurity of the crowd is where we often find ourselves; listening to what Jesus has to say, being fed with thousands of others, chasing him around the lake, expecting a miracle, or a show.

Then Jesus asks more of us. It might feel like too much. We watch him invite himself to lunch with that tax bloke. We see him eating meals with those disreputables. He makes extraordinary claims for himself. He asks us to follow him, risking everything – career, family, income, reputation, life.

When this happens, we find we can no longer just settle obscurely into the crowd.     

A suggestion. We’d like it we could buy the hoodie and the stubby holder, and not need to change how we vote, and how we spend our money, and how we live, and how we speak to others (especially the ones we find difficult to like). Just a suggestion.

In the letter to the Colossians, the author writes, “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

We can’t just buy some merchandise. We are asked to follow, to die and live.

It is only when we test ourselves against the words of Jesus that we discern whether there is real life there, or just a meme. Shall we risk loving – and forgiving – our neighbour, even our enemy?  Shall we risk being forgiven, in our turn?

When we trust that Jesus is more than a persona, more than ethics and morals, we discover there is life for us. And everything changes.

Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love,
as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us … [Ephesians 5.1-2]

There appears to be a significant political investment in fear these days. Certain politicians warn of dark times and an even darker future, unless we place our trust in them.

Apocalyptic visions of the “wrong people” in our communities abound, defined (depending on circumstance) by skin colour, or gender identity, or those experiencing persecution and seeking refuge and hope. The world-weary among us will say it has always been thus, that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’m not convinced. The plethora of media resources ensures our being constantly saturated; whether we listen, or follow, or subscribe, or read, or watch. The church, of course, is not immune; when suspicion, or fear, are the currency minted – and liberally spent – by some politicians and media, we often find ourselves unwitting investors.

Sermons warn of the frightening world outside, or the danger of different faith stories and biblical interpretation, or the risk of mixing with those who think differently. Thus, the church circles our wagons and looks inward, so that we know everyone and try to feel safe. Which is precisely not how we are called to live out the call of the crucified, risen Christ.

Paul challenges us to live fully – hopefully, carefully, gracefully, thankfully.

It is too easy to accuse, to blame, to refuse, to persecute, so that we feel the illusion of a manufactured safety. That is not the gospel.

The witness of our faith is to live as people of hope, not scratching out our existence in fear, or hiddenness. When the community mistrusts difference, how do we embrace our neighbour? When politicians demand that we punish those seeking refuge, how do we offer sanctuary in our homes and communities?

How do we live in the light of Jesus, and thus offer that light to others, with the gentle care which remembers how it was first offered to us?

Blessings for the week ahead of us.

She put me in my place and I deserved every word. We had been rummaging around a topic in a small group, about being hungry and poor, so we had quickly and conveniently moved the focus of our conversation to “spiritual things”, to avoid it brushing too close.

I had begun to wax lyrical about the benefits of spiritual poverty, biblical quotes on the tip of my tongue. She stopped me, mid-theological-stride. “Have any of you ever been really hungry? Being poor is not romantic, it’s not exciting. If you’ve ever been poor, or hungry, you’ll know that.”

Awkward Christian silence.

I have learnt some things along the way, and one in particular is that sometimes (frequently) there will be the need for me to apologise. So I did. We paused, and restarted the conversation, not focusing on the newly discovered prophet in our group, but trying to shape our time with a new discipline of relevance and compassion.

One of the best ways to avoid the words of Jesus having any real effect (or affect) is to shift each bible reflection solely to the spiritual plane. We can make sinfulness simply about the relationship between God and me, not the person next to me. We can make discipleship about getting to eternity, not life here – and now. We can spiritualise bread and hunger and justice so easily that they become almost intangible and avoid our community altogether.

When John tells us Jesus’ words, “I am the bread of life”, he has just fed several thousand people with a snack box, and saved a boatload of friends in a storm. After a series of conversations, John tells us that Jesus saves a woman from being stoned to death, and stopped a cluster of rock-carrying clergy.

What Jesus says matters.

Not only because it’s wise, but essentially because it applies, here. And now. If we trust Jesus for each step, our behaviour and our allegiances change. Jesus is where real  nourishment is found, and not just for one meal, but for always.

Lord, we have again picked up a weapon and fired it.
We repent from our own political violence.

We have again decided to kill our fellow citizens; our partisan T-shirts are covered in blood.
We repent from our own political violence.

Lord, we weep for the broken bodies, the broken minds — for all those broken by our bullets.
We repent from our own political violence. 

Shed light, O Lord, to expose any and all plans of violence; drive such wicked works from our body politic.
We repent from our own political violence. 

May political opponents humble themselves, Lord.
May they serve their country with truth and grace, not insults or lies.

Teach us again to reason together, Lord, though our sins be as scarlet.
We repent from our own political violence.

Disarm us, O Lord — our minds, lips, hearts, and hands — that we may more perfectly love you.
We repent from our own political violence.

Lord, let us be the repairers of the breach in our political life; let us be messengers of hope.
We repent from our own political violence. 

Do not turn your face from us, Lord, but teach us your ways of peace. Amen.

[This prayer was written after former President Donald Trump was shot speaking at a rally in Butler County, Penn., in which two people were killed and one was seriously injured.]

Rose Marie Berger, author of Bending the Arch: Poems, is a senior editor of Sojourners magazine.

One of the signal gifts Jürgen Moltmann brought to the Church is a prophetic voice woven seamlessly with a theological voice.

The journey of his life through the Second World War and its consequences, his ministry, the tragedy of his son’s death, the extraordinary theological voice of his wife Elisabeth, all informed a theologian who strove never to speak in the abstract, but with a profound understanding of, and engagement with, people’s lives, most especially any who suffer.

This gift Moltmann offered is rarely comfortable; the implications of a God who suffers, who loves so passionately, whose Spirit stirs so relentlessly, whose ongoing engagement so consistently compels our response, is not something with which we can ever be complacent.

The event of God in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, was not a moment bookmarked in history, but the event around which all history is shaped – and restored. The Church finds all the good news it needs to proclaim in this alone.     

Moltmann’s seminal text The Crucified God was a “conversion” point for me in my formation for ordained ministry. My copy fell open at this quote, which informs so much of my preaching at Easter and, indeed, at the funeral of a loved friend just this week.

“The message of the new righteousness which eschatological faith brings in to the world says that in fact the executioners will not finally triumph over their victims. It also says that in the end the victims will not triumph over their executioners. The one will triumph who first died for the victims and then also for the executioners, and in doing so revealed a new righteousness which breaks through the vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new [humankind] with a new humanity.”                [The Crucified God, p.178]

May Jürgen Moltmann rest in peace and rise again in glory.

For centuries, an order of Japanese monks
chose one of the elders to deliver prayers
to the island of an important Bodhisattva. They set
the elect adrift in a shrine shaped like a coffin
with a month of salted fish, rice crackers & water
while brothers on shore kept watch for signs of panic.

In many cases, the sacrifice tried to row home
but the others turned him, shoved him back
into the sea. A mirror of human existence:
each of us sent to beg forgiveness from whichever
gods we recognize while death patiently paces
the sky. As darkness swallows the world, imagine
the cry of gulls, glimpses of a distant horizon,
the slow groan of the casket atop the waves

Copyright © 2023 by SM Stubbs. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 13, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

A handful of us in the Synod Office have been meeting each week for prayer and bible study for over five years now, on zoom and face to face. This time together shapes our week and reminds each of us of our first calling; most of us find the time together in prayer and reflection to be indispensable.

As I write this, we have just celebrated the wonder of Pentecost, and the reading for Trinity Sunday is the closing words from Matthew’s Gospel:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
[Mt. 28.16-20]

It is no surprise to anyone in this generation of society and church that compliance and regulation can dominate the agenda of those in roles chosen with other expectations. Ask teachers, or medical professionals, or ministers, about how their diaries (even their vocations) have been incrementally changed to comply with the demands of administration.

In our church and community, we need to ensure that people are safe, especially those at most risk; we need to take appropriate responsibility for our resources – human, financial and property. No one questions that.

However, we can become forgetful.

The insistent demands of compliance can easily drown out the vital voice of our first call, if we are not careful. We can fall for the illusion of planning carefully, of “managing our risks”, when risk and sacrifice are inherent to our vocation.

In reading the Gospel yesterday, I was reminded that the tension is supposed to exist. Sacrifice and mercy, reconciliation and adherence to an alternate life are inevitable consequences of our discipleship to Christ.

We baptise, and remember. We break bread and share wine, and remember. We hold the Word before our gathered communities, and remember.

Our communities of faith have innumerable contacts within our wider communities. We offer meals, and groceries; we have community gardens, we visit hospitals and hospices and people’s homes; we offer breakfast in school and church and the local café; we sit in courthouses and injecting centres and prisons of the body and mind, because sometimes company is all people require; we serve and bless people at the beginning of life, throughout life’s journey and as life draws to its completion.

When we are asked why we are caring and serving and offering hospitality, what shall we say? Some carefully scripted, even formulaic, lines written with no attention to context? Some bland murmurings about “being on the roster”? Awkward silence?

Or might we speak about the sense of hope we find when we consider how loved we are by Jesus Christ? We could talk about how our faith community has made a place for us which gives us purpose.

We might even talk about our Uniting Church which asserts the passionate love of God for each and every person, in a world where many people are told they have no place, or no name worth enunciating.

Perhaps we could invite those new friends into our faith community, or to the pub, or café, and listen to their story. In those mutual conversations we might discover together our shared doubt and hope, and discern what the Spirit might sing into our lives. Could you invite them to share in worship, or a small group, or to your home for a meal?

From the commencement of Jesus’ ministry to the gospel’s completion, Jesus is inviting people to walk with him; might we not offer a similar invitation? To follow Christ is to live a life of hope – in this world – for mercy, for justice and for life itself.

Is this not worth inviting others to share?

Remember your first love, which placed you here. Recall the hope, the passion and the blessing. Is that not a story worth offering to others with the care and generosity it was offered to you?

In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In his own image, his imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for his glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration.

He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us, and within.

Trinity Sunday | Malcolm Guite

In the silent waiting before God speaks the creation’s beginning, and as God’s breath is building over the waters, we are invited to listen, to attend.

And God speaks light. And dark, and sky and sea and land and life and wonder. And humanity.

There are stories woven throughout scripture, and our experience, where it is only in the silence that God’s voice is heard. In our world, where silence is less and less likely, how shall we find the space to attend to what God might say, in between breaths, in the waiting?

Can we attend to God in the silence, in the whispered breath, when we are being subtly attuned only to wait for the next sound?

“Only in silence the word,
only in darkness the light,
only in dying life…”

– Ursula K Le Guin

It is not only the audible distractions, there are also the “devices” which drag our attention and decimate our concentration, so that everything is truncated to bite-sized pieces of information – and misinformation. Notwithstanding a vital and historical invitation to listen by our First Nations, to heed their voice from history and in our present, other images fill our screens and louder noises fill our ears because there’s a tax on millionaires or MAFS has another fabricated crisis.

As we are trained for sound bite after tiktok, how we will discern what God has to say, when we need to pause, to pay attention? The measured steps to Easter – the journey we name as Lent – require pauses along the way; we lay burdens and distractions aside so that we might better heed what Christ has to offer us.

However, we have better, more colourful things to do and hear and see. We can find a way for worship and witness to fit our culture, so everyone will be satisfied. If we fill our worship with content, then we can hold everyone’s attention; we can craft a sermonette, so that there’s barely a hindrance to our day and our discipleship; and, of course, silence is “dead space”, so we trim that from our diet.

Yet, Easter finds us, each and every year.

We have always tried to whittle God’s presence from our own, and to shape it for our purposes. Lent is offered to challenge that, gradually; Easter stands, at the heart of creation and history, to repudiate it.

When we are sufficiently deceived to think of power as earthquake, wind and fire, a still, small voice, speaks in the silence and the dark.

Before all the hallelujahs, the whisper of God is heard from Gethsemane to Golgotha. We would want to rush to glory, but there is more to hear and see.

At the moment when Christ is silenced, when his execution echoes throughout creation, God’s fullness is proclaimed to us. In the silence, we listen for what God, in Christ, is saying, and we wait. Here, crucified, is God. There is no moment when God is more completely God than this.

This is God, for us, at the heart of history. In the deafening silence of the cross is Jesus Christ.

There, at the foot of the cross, we wait.

And there, at the tomb, we wait, holding every breath.

Then, in the emptiness of the second, new, morning, everything is transformed. God’s breath is stirring in the silence. God speaks light, and life and wonder. And renews our humanity.

We cannot rush here, nor tell this story in a sound bite. We cannot sprint from cross to resurrection without attending to the death of Christ and the wonder of what God in Christ has done. We dare not let ourselves be distracted from this event of God residing at the core.

For all those breaking, or broken; for all those who are lost, or who have lost; for all those believing themselves beyond hope, this story is essential.  

Our hallelujahs rise, because having waited with Christ in the silence, we see what God has done, and is doing. Our hope, our forgiveness, are here, because this event proclaims that death is not the whole story, that resurrected life through Christ speaks more fully than any utterance of death, and our emptiness is filled with the love and glory of God.

Listen, if you have hope, in the silence, for what God will say.    

#WordintheSilence