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

The desert waits,
ready for those who come,
who come obedient to the Spirit’s leading;
or who are driven,
because they will not come any other way.

The desert always waits,
ready to let us know who we are –
the place of self-discovery.

And whilst we fear, and rightly,
the loneliness and emptiness and harshness,
we forget the angels,
whom we cannot see for our blindness,
but who come when God decides
that we need their help;
when we are ready
for what they can give us.

– Ruth Burgess, 1990

As we gather this week in worship and in prayer, we are confronted by the disaster following the earthquake in Türkiye and northern Syria.

As the death toll passes 20,000 people, and the physical devastation is appalling, we are mindful of those whose lives have been changed irrevocably. People are overwhelmed with grief at what is happening before them, as they try to survive the chaos. There will be years ahead of recovery and rebuilding; the grief alone is almost too much to bear.

This will not be over within a news cycle; our prayers and support will be needed for many months ahead.

We will pray, and I offer a prayer, below. We need to pray for our friends around us in the church and community who are from the Middle East, whose lives and families and communities are affected. Don’t simply pray for them; call them, offer them your support.

We can also offer financial support through the National Council of Churches of Australia https://www.ncca.org.au/ or the Australian Relief Organisation https://aro.org.au/home/homepage

Prayer

O God, our God,
the world is not what it was;
the ground has shifted,
the earth has taken people we knew and loved
and we don’t know what to do,
or how to understand.

Hear our grief,
hear our lostness,
hear our prayer. 

We pray for the people of Türkiye and Syria,
as they are addressed by chaos.
As they act to save others,
to provide safety,
to recover those who have died,
be present in all the destruction,
in grief, in calamity,
in every sign of hope and life.

Hear our grief,
hear our lostness,
hear our prayer. 

Urge governments to act,
especially in Türkiye and Syria,
and in every nation,
that resources might be made available,
for hope, for recovery.

Hear our grief,
hear our lostness,
hear our prayer. 

Spirit with us,
keep us mindful of our neighbours,
welcomed from that region of your world,
that we might share meals, and grief,
and stories with them,
offering them hope and hospitality
in their bewilderment.

Hear our grief,
hear our lostness,
hear our prayer. 

We pray, in time,
that you lead these nations, these families,
these people, to life again;
holding their grief,
and enabling them to know your presence
is with them
in every aspect of their lives,
even in their worst moments.

Hear our grief,
hear our lostness,
hear our prayer. 

May the hope we find in the risen, crucified Lord,
find them now
and every day.

Through Christ we pray.
Amen.

In the midst of it all, a baby.

Tiny and defenceless, the promise and presence of God.

In this wondrous moment, in the simple vulnerability of God in the world, hope is asserted. This assertion is not only about Jesus’ birth offering hope for humanity; God’s hope reaches even more profoundly.

The birth of Jesus is how God asserts hope in humanity. In us.

This single grain of sand in the sirocco of Caesar’s empire is what transforms everything. This assertion of God that we are worthy of hope and life; God’s hope, God’s gift of life.

Sit with this, for a moment.

Too easily and too often we have been convinced it is our failure which motivates God’s act, as if God is harnessed and haltered by us. Too simply and too loudly we are told that God was so angry at our sinfulness that God’s son is only born to die, making our lives and prayers engagements of fear over love.

We are too quickly inclined to believe the worst of ourselves and the worst of God.

As God breaks into the world as Jesus, we hear and see – and proclaim – God’s absolute engagement, God’s entire commitment to our lives and to our world.

At the heart of the Christmas event is God’s statement of faith in us. The gift of Jesus for the sake of the world.

What does that mean right now, that God has hope in us?

As I write this piece, the travesty of Russia’s invasion and war continues in Ukraine; while war scars other nations not deemed as newsworthy. What does hope mean as Ukraine fights for its very existence?

As empires which we have trusted, or feared, for these last few centuries topple and seem likely to fall – into disrepair, or despotism – there are echoes of Herod’s violent jealousy as a tiny baby destabilised everything he believed about power.

What sense does the birth of Jesus make as we consider formalising a voice to Parliament for our First Peoples?

The still, small voice of Jesus spoken into a corner of the Roman Empire rose to become a song which questioned the meaning of Empire and reordered the world. What might the disciples of this Jesus say about advocating to those in power, offering a voice when so many have been unjustly silenced?

What sense does the advent of God make for communities addressing the immediate challenge of floods, or striving for recovery after a season of extraordinary rainfall?

When we are overwhelmed with loss, or chaos, or with grief, the presence of God in the world is found in the starkness of a stable, or even less. Our loss is not airbrushed, or ignored, but God is present in the chaos of our lives. Emmanuel, “God with Us” means precisely that, and never more than when all seems to crumble.

God, exercising extraordinary hope in the birth of Jesus, invites a response from us: to act in hope, in life, as God has acted, and continues to act.

God elects to offer life, because God is completely convinced of our value. The truth that God has chosen to become precisely like us is not just a wonder, but the profound assertion of the inherent worth we have to the God of all creation.

Can we believe that at Christmas – and in the astounding wonder which awaits the world at Easter – that we see the best of the living God, because God believes in what is possible for us?

As Mary and Elizabeth sing with prophecy and power,
as the angels’ song fills the sky,
as shepherds stumble to the light and magi find their way,
as Herod’s depredations appal us still,
and as we wait for the family’s return from Egypt;

We name a God who is with humanity in all our wonder and all our frailty, and yet declares in the child born where all God’s hope resides – in Jesus and thus, in us.

May the hope of God find you this Christmas.

#GodsHopeInUs

Image: Our Lady of Kyiv, on the wall of the Kyiv metro by an unknown artist.

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This Christmas we encourage those of you that can lend a helping hand and those that are in need, to visit our website at www.findafeed.uca.org.au where you will find a range of support services and help.