The Sotto Voce

I wrote this sermon yesterday. I’ve never written a sermon so late in the piece.  

Even though all the data points available indicated a Yes defeat, I wasn’t ready to abandon hope for what tomorrow would look like.

Now here we are. Tomorrow.

This isn’t a sermon that is designed to heal us. That would be reckless and self-serving.  

This is a sermon that picks at our wounds in the hope of making a scar so that we never forget this moment, and our faith communities’ complicity in it. This is a sermon that flips tables.

As a lay preacher, I have tried to preach on the Voice in two congregations – one metropolitan and one regional. Both said, “No thank you”. One decided that cancelling their entire Sunday service was preferable to hearing the message.

As a member of the Uniting Church Synod’s Social Justice Commission, I prepared a Worship Resource for Uniting Church congregations in Western Australia to lead their own services on the Voice. I have yet to hear of one that used it. It is possible that some did, but they are the minority.

The Social Justice Commission also offered free large Yes banners to congregations that wanted to display them. Out of Western Australia’s 100 Uniting Church congregations, we only got requests from four. Four. One of those was a request for a No banner.

Time and time again, we’ve heard that thoughtful conversations were the tools that would win this referendum.

Of course, we already knew this. Our very own Scriptures tell us of the liberating and transformative power of conversation. In Matthew 15:21-28, Jesus initially dismisses the Canaanite women’s pleas for help, saying that his concern isn’t for the Gentile ‘other’. But then, after listening to the woman’s argument, he changes his mind.

Yes, conversations change minds. Even righteous ones.

What an opportunity this was for our congregations. People literally walk through our doors every Sunday ready to listen to whatever wisdom and moral guidance there is on offer.  We don’t have to knock on people’s doors. People come and they knock on ours.

And what is more, those people are largely from the demographic that were least likely to vote Yes. They are predominantly older, and they are predominantly white.

We could have used these spaces as opportunities to talk about the fact that, in Jesus, we encounter a God who embraces and includes those whom the law, dogma, history, and cultural norms seek to exclude. Whenever the emperors and the kings, the priests and the public said ‘No’, our God—as revealed through Jesus—said ‘Yes’.

Yes, to an unmarried woman from Nazareth.
And, yes, to pagans from the East.
And, yes, to lowly shepherds.
And, yes, to a Canaanite woman.
And, yes, to tax collectors most despised.
And, yes, to a little man who sought refuge in a tree.
And, yes, to the ritually impure.
And, yes, to a woman who had been married to five men and was now living with a sixth.
And, yes, to a dying thief on a cross.

The cadence of our faith is captured by the words ‘yes, and’. It is through living these words that we realise God’s vision of building a social order that can be likened to a house with many rooms, or a banquet with many guests. The way of Christ is generous and abundant in its capacity to make space for others.

The people whose minds we changed and hearts we inspired through such conversations could have left our pews and had conversations with others.

That’s how mission and discipleship is supposed to work.

Imagine, how different today could have been.

But instead, there have been very few deep and meaningful conversations. Don’t get me wrong. Assembly and our state-based governing bodies have been unambiguous in their support for Yes. But our places of worship have mostly been conspicuously silent.

Even where there has been personal support from local ministers and preachers, the response has been a sort of “yeah, I agree but it’s too hard and too political and not really my place.” Those that have been prepared to speak out have been attacked and vilified and left traumatised.

Unlike the union movement, our campaigning has not been visible and organised on this issue.

Why has it been this way?

As far as I can discern, the logic has been that we don’t want to cause schisms in our church. Our numbers are small, our communities fragile.

But maybe small and fragile communities that avoid discussing matters of justice deserve to be cleaved apart and left to die.

If this is not the hill that we, as a Church, are prepared to die on, then where is that hill?

Somebody, show me the hill.

Our Church is measured by that hill. If we limit our hills to the ones that are small and effortless, then our faith is small and effortless.

Show me the hill and I will show you the Church.

Maybe our congregations are small and fragile and unprepared to climb great moral mountains precisely because they don’t make space for thinking about how Christ’s message of radical inclusion applies to our world here and now.

I’m going to be quoting a lot from the Black Lutheran pastor Lenny Duncan in this sermon because, to be frank, God knows we’re running out of other ways of amplifying black voices in this country. In his powerful book, Dear Church, Duncan says:

You want to know why young people are pouring out of our churches and finding sustenance elsewhere? It’s because we claim to be a community that is founded on the incredible vision of a heavenly banquet, yet we don’t even have enough chairs for everyone sit at the table. We love the hymn ‘All Are Welcome’ but it should come with an asterisk, and we know it. All are Welcome* *if you don’t challenge us *if you don’t question the way we do things … *if you don’t make me feel anything that isn’t positive for this hour and a half…”

To what end are we, in the Uniting Church, being complicit in protecting communities that only want to talk about polite things?

But you might argue, ‘there’s good work happening in our congregations. They collect money for the poor, cans for the hungry, prayers for the suffering. What a shame to lose them’.

What a shame, indeed.

But these good works can’t be a social license to maintain systems of oppression and white supremacy. I’m sorry, but they can’t.

As Duncan goes on to write, his country (like ours) “is fractured, and we are so busy trying to please parishioners, we have forgotten what it means to please God.”

We had a chance to meet Christ in the people on the Anangu lands who asked us to walk with them in a movement for a better future.

We had a chance to meet Christ in the ten-year-old kids locked in cells for 23 hours a day in Banksia Hill because the system we create and defend is failing them.

We had a chance to meet Christ in black bodies pleading – literally pleading – for the equivalent of crumbs in a 122-year-old constitution that governs 60,000 year-old lands that were taken from them by force.     

We had a chance to “wash the weary … feet” (Duncan again) of First Nations people with our hair. Instead, we allowed our congregations to, at best, ignore Christ, and at worst, to inflict pain on him.

What are we going to do to make things right?

The arc of the moral universe does not just bend itself towards justice. It needs to be pulled with all our might.

So, what are we going to do now that the performative protests are over, and we’ve put away our Yes shirts and taken off our Yes badges? What are we going to do now that the three Yes banners at Uniting Church congregations in Western Australia have been taken down and folded up?

The Blak Sovereignty’s No campaign warned us about this moment. They warned about white people showing up for the glitz and not being prepared to stay for the grit.

Tomorrow we are faced with a choice. The choice we make is our second chance, and we are fortunate to have a God who believes in second chances.

So, we must choose wisely. This moment calls for Spirit and not selfies.

If you were quiet in the lead up to yesterday, for God’s sake, make noise once this week of mourning and reflection ends.

If you were loud in the lead up to yesterday, you need to be louder still to help carry the cross for First Nations people whose voices are hoarse and tired from this bruising campaign.

Challenge structural racism everywhere you see it. Challenge individual racism everywhere you see it, especially when you see it in yourself. And challenge Church racism everywhere you see it. Politeness be damned.

Truth and treaty now must be our focus. It must suffuse every aspect of our Ministry.

As a Church, we cannot in good conscience claim to be in Covenant with First Nations people without doing these things.  We cannot claim to walk with people if what we are actually doing is walking away from them or allowing them to walk ahead while we rest.

We followed Christ to the streets of Jerusalem.

We followed Christ to the foot of his cross.

We followed Christ to his borrowed tomb.

We followed Christ as he rose again.

So go follow Christ and do everything in your power to fix this tragic mess so that we, as a country and as a church, can also rise again.

Having studied in the United Kingdom for five years, I’ve been following that country’s recent political dramas with a morbid curiosity.

After a record 45 days in office, Prime Minister Liz Truss was forced to resign after public backlash against an economic policy which cut taxes for the richest. The policy led to an increase in inflation, thus raising borrowing costs for ordinary people and fuelling much anger.

In the middle of the controversy, one of her Ministers reassured the House of Commons that the Prime Minister was not “under a desk”. It is, however, possible that the Prime Minister may instead have been up a sycamore tree like Zacchaeus in today’s reading from Luke.

See, Zacchaeus was also in trouble for his taxation policies. Zacchaeus’s job was to collect taxes from poor Jewish people on behalf of their Roman occupiers. The Romans collected land taxes, head taxes, crop taxes, customs taxes, and special campaign taxes.  But those taxes did not go to building Jewish schools or improving Jewish hospitals – instead, they went to Rome and helped prop up an unjust Empire that most Jewish people would rather see crumble. And, all the while, ordinary Jewish people became increasingly impoverished.

Zacchaeus wasn’t just a tax collector. Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector (in Jericho no less, which was located on a busy transport corridor, and therefore a rather plum posting). Tax collectors were renowned for increasing the tax rate and pocketing the difference and, as chief tax collector, Zacchaeus would have taken his share of these profits.

As far as public figures go, Zacchaeus’s approval ratings would have been dismal. Zacchaeus was, in a word, hated.

So, imagine the crowd’s delight at seeing this little man embarrass himself by publicly scrambling up a tree in a desperate attempt to see a rabbi who was rumoured to be as virtuous as Zacchaeus was wicked. The crowd would have sneered, and pointed, and laughed, and heckled, and humiliated him.

And then, imagine the crowd’s shock when Jesus does the opposite. Instead of ostracising Zacchaeus, Jesus insists on eating with him. It is, quite simply, an act of mercy.

What makes mercy remarkable is that it is totally counterintuitive. It greets greed with generosity, hurt with healing, and pain with peace.

The Good News of the Gospels comes from the fact that Jesus entirely inverts dominant social and religious conventions to produce something radically counter-cultural and liberating.

It is an upside-down theology:

We grow rich by giving away our wealth.

We show strength by exercising restraint.

We die only to be reborn.

For Jesus, the path to justice is not about meeting like with like. Instead, it meets dislike with love.

According to Jesus, “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you … if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.”

We’re very familiar with this passage but, though that familiarity, I think we risk overlooking just how important it is to understanding our theology.  

There are many Christians today who worship a God who damns sinners to eternal suffering. They point to passages in the Old Testament to support their views. It is not hard to find examples of smiting and cursing and vengeance there, including the passage that Jesus quotes.

But, while the Old Testament might be part of our faith journey, it isn’t the end point. Jesus acknowledges what is said in the Old Testament but then, crucially, he keeps talking.

According to Brian Zahnd in his beautiful book, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, “Jesus is what the Law and the Prophets were always trying to say but could never fully articulate. God couldn’t say all he wanted to say in the form of a book, so he said it in the form of a human life. Jesus is what God has to say!” 

And what Jesus says is different.

What Jesus says – and shows – is that the answer must always be love.

This doesn’t mean that Jesus condones apathy or that he doesn’t believe in accountability. We know that he actively worked to create a society that was fundamentally different to the Empire that the Romans imposed, and the religious elites defended. Throughout the Gospel, he repeatedly calls out people for the hurt they inflict on others.

However, Jesus insists that we cannot use the tools of oppression to defeat oppression. Instead, the world’s vicious circles need to be replaced with virtuous ones.

The utterly unparalleled feature of the Christian faith is that a God who was nailed to a tree, invites others to come down from trees. To quote Zahnd again, “When the world says, ‘Crucify him,’ God says, ‘Forgive them’”.

It is important to remember that, as people of faith, we are not just called to love our kind, inoffensive, generous, and perfect neighbours. That’s too easy. Rather, as Christians, we are called to demonstrate the depth of our faith by loving our hurtful, bigoted, selfish, and flawed neighbours too.

After being elected President of South Africa, an aide asked Mandela for a list of people he wanted to invite to his inauguration dinner. Mandela is said to have only insisted on one name – the name of his jailer. Later in his presidency, he also sat down to tea in a white only neighbourhood with the widow of one of the men who designed apartheid.

Like Jesus with Zacchaeus, Mandela made the decision to sit down and eat with those with whom he disagreed.  

If I wanted my sermon to be neat and tidy, I’d probably end it here and say something along the lines of “the world would be better if we all just sat down to dinner and talked”.

On some level, I believe that to be the case. But I am also conscious that it is often the victims of injustice who are tasked with the responsibility of sitting at tables to articulate how the words and actions of others cause them pain. This can be exhausting, and retraumatising.   

It doesn’t seem fair to ask a person living below the poverty line to sit down and repeatedly explain why they deserve a wage that will enable them to feed their children.

It doesn’t seem fair to ask an Aboriginal elder to sit down and repeatedly explain how the experience of being taken away from their family has impacted their lives and the trust they have in institutions. 

And it doesn’t seem fair to ask a gay person to sit down and repeatedly explain how bigotry destroys their sense of self-worth.

Instead, I think Jesus calls Christians to be allies to the oppressed and to take an active role in leading these conversations with those who hurt others.

There are countless examples in the Gospels of Jesus taking up causes and starting conversations to improve the lives of others. He spoke up for women, even though he was a man. He spoke up for Samaritans, even though he was Jewish. He spoke up for the Canaanites, even though he was Judean.  

So, as we reflect on the story of Zacchaeus, I encourage you to follow Jesus’s example and use your everyday interactions with people to change the hearts and minds of those you encounter.

Be like Christ both towards the people in the crowds who need your voice, and the people in the trees who need your mercy.

As people concerned about social justice, we frequently bristle when we hear the offer of “thoughts and prayers” in response to suffering.

It can feel flimsy and flippant, callous, and hollow.

Merely thinking about and praying for something does not require us to be or do anything.

The most egregious use of the sentiment is where it hypocritically distracts attention away from the roles we play in contributing to the suffering that is being thought or prayed about.

Responding to the “thoughts and prayers” of politicians opposed to gun control, Taylor Schumann, who was injured in a Virginia college shooting spree, wrote: “I’m tired of prayer being the end of our work and not the beginning.”

What I like about Taylor’s framing of the problem, is that it doesn’t fall into the easy trap of dismissing prayer as something that is devoid of any value whatsoever.

Prayer is good; it’s just that we’ve forgotten how God instructed us to go about it.

When you look at the Scriptures, the theologian John Dominic Crossan points out that “something strange happens when you compare those who speak to God in prayer with those who speak for God.”

The most obvious examples of people speaking to God can be found in the Book of Psalms. There, prayer generally takes one of two forms – namely, prayers in which we say “please” and prayers in which we say “thank you”.

The “please” prayers, like the one in today’s lectionary, ask God for divine assistance in response to situations that cause individual and collective pain and suffering. The “thanks” prayers praise God for gifts that provide the conditions for us to live lives of dignity.

But as soon as we turn to the passages in our Scriptures in which prophets speak for God, things change. The focus shifts from what God can do from the heavenly realm, to what we should do in this earthly one.

In these passages, God spends a lot of time batting our prayers right back to us.

In the Book of Amos, which was written in the eighth century BC during a time of growing economic inequality under the thirteenth King of Israel, we find the voice of God saying:

I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
    I will not accept them … 

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
 But let justice roll down like water
    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Later, in the First Book of Isaiah, God rebukes us in the same way:

When you stretch out your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen;

your hands are full of blood.

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings

from before my eyes;

   cease to do evil,

 learn to do good;

seek justice,

rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan,

plead for the widow.

According to the Prophets, God’s message is therefore clear.

We cannot pray to a justice-loving God with hands that remain dirty from injustices in which we are complicit.

While we might expect intervention from God, the Prophets remind us that God expects collaboration from us.  

It’s no surprise then that when the disciples asked Jesus how they should pray, he wasted little time in explaining that the only thing God wants to hear about is how committed we are to realising the vision for justice on earth. 

Jesus has the disciples say “Your Kingdom come” to signify, in a very deliberate and very pointed way, that they must reject the governing styles of both Rome and of Herod, which divide and impoverish through violence and exploitation.

The request to “Give us each day our daily bread” is uttered in the context of a system in which the means of production was controlled by the wealthy elite, ordinary people were heavily taxed, and many households had so little that debt, slavery or starvation could be just a bad season away. This part of the prayer is a call for a fairer means of distribution.

Jesus wants his followers to know that, in a just society, people should not only be concerned about whether they themselves have enough to eat; instead, a Christian sense of justice requires everyone to have enough. Jesus’s prayer doesn’t say “Give me each day my daily bread” – instead it uses the collective us and our. As long as there is one person without bread, the vision for justice at the heart of this prayer has not been realised.

Then comes the real kicker in the prayer: “And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” There are really good theological arguments that “forgiving everyone indebted to us” was intended to be understood literally as the forgiveness of financial debts. This part of the prayer isn’t just about an abstract commitment to justice. It tells the followers of Jesus very precisely what they must do, personally, to help create a fairer system for all.

In a recent article, the theological Arthur Wright notes that: “This language creates a rhetorical nudge. If someone unaccustomed to forgiving debts finds themselves praying this prayer, they should be provoked to significant reflection …”.

This is a prayer about doing things, not just talking about the need to do things.  

As much as we who might identify as progressive Christians like to think we understand about the importance of justice, the Lord’s Prayer is a challenge for us to always look inwards to ensure that our commitment to justice is not just superficial. Rather, justice always needs to be lived more than it needs to be talked about.  

During the Black Lives Matter moment, Musa al-Gharbi wrote a powerful piece called “Resistance as Sacrifice” in which he highlighted “a disturbing parity between the people who are most rhetorically committed to ending racialized inequality and those who are most responsible for its persistence.” 

Al-Gharbi says:

It would perhaps be a happy coincidence if racialized inequality could be resolved primarily (or exclusively) by focusing on those who hold ‘unenlightened’ racial beliefs and attitudes, those who fail to vote the ‘right’ way, etc. – i.e. requiring little-to-no change from the ‘good whites’ and how they live their lives. In reality, the main obstacle to a more just distribution of resources and opportunities today may be those who acknowledge racism, identify with the left, and aspire to be (or view themselves as) allies to those from historically marginalized and disenfranchised groups. 

Instead of more “performative antiracism”, Al-Gharbi says we need more “ascetic antiracism”. Just as Jesus’s prayer tells us to do justice rather than just talk about it, Al-Gharbi says addressing racial inequality requires personal sacrifice; things like:

• Abstaining from itemizing charitable donations in an attempt to lower one’s tax liability.
• Refraining from summoning the authorities against people of colour in response to petty crimes, disputes or suspicions.
• Adopting a “yes in my backyard” posture with regards to community development and community housing; and
• If in a position of authority, making extra effort to recruit, mentor, promote or admit qualified people of colour – and work to ensure that all subordinate employees receive compensation that is both genuinely liveable and representative of the value they bring to the organization.

I think we often gloss over the personal changes that can be made, lest it allows “systems” and “structures” to shirk responsibility.

However, the Lord’s Prayer shows us that the choice is not either/or; we must simultaneously oppose structural injustice, and make personal sacrifices to reduce own complicity in and with those structures.

A 2017 article in The Atlantic made a cutting point. It said: “recent history has shown that offering ‘thoughts and prayers,’ alone, is not enough. Unfortunately … calling out others for doing so hasn’t been either.”

In other words, we need to make sure that our commitment to justice extends beyond criticising others for their empty prayers.

The call to justice is a call for personal action, or it is nothing at all.

In March last year, almost one year ago, Clare Menck stood where I am standing today and preached to us.

It remains, and I suspect will forever remain, the most powerful sermon I have ever heard.

In it, Clare tackled what we called “the tricky text” of Chapters 19-21 of The Book of Judges. It’s the passage in which a Levite man has been left by a woman who is referred to only as “his concubine”. The Levite follows her to Bethlehem where the woman has sought refuge in her parents’ home. Her father wines and dines the Levite, and eventually forces his daughter to return to the man from whom she has fled. On their return journey, the Levite and the woman stay with an old man living in a town populated by Benjamites. Late that evening, they are woken by some locals pounding on the door demanding that the old man give up the Levite so they can have sex with him. The old man admonishes them for their “vileness” and, instead, counteroffers with something that he deems less reprehensible; he sends out the woman and his own virgin daughter to be raped and abused by the men throughout the night.

Clare’s sermon was delivered at the very start of our still unresolved national conversation about the culture of sexual abuse towards women in Canberra and beyond. I can still hear Clare’s voice cracking with sorrow and outrage as she reassured those nameless biblical women that we in this church hear their cries, and acknowledge their pain, and commit ourselves to doing better. It was time for us, as Christians – whose traditions have long condoned and perpetuated a culture of hurting and silencing women – to stand with them in saying: ‘Enough’.

A year ago, Clare helped us make sense of an unfathomable injustice, and offered us a path forward.

Today, we are forced to make sense of the unfathomable injustice of Clare’s death on our own. 

The author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes that, “grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be. How full of anger. You learn how glib condolences feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.”

After Clare’s death, I was referred to many passages of Scripture that are routinely offered as a spiritual balm for moments such as this. 

But, like that tricky text from the Book of Judges, I found the words and the sentiments to be cruel and callous. In the midst of grief, they did not soothe; rather, they rankled.

For instance, that famous passage from Ecclesiastes tries to tell us that “for everything there is a season,” and that this suffering is just a moment in time that shall pass.

Except that we don’t want this time to pass. Because the passing of time takes us further away from Clare being here, and that feels too much like forgetting. No. Time should stand completely still because something truly awful has happened to the world. We have lost someone whose presence enriched us, and it does not feel right to move past that fact.

The dad of a friend of mine was a prominent public figure, and his early death was the subject of front-page national news stories and television broadcasts. I asked my friend whether the rolling coverage made things more difficult for him. “No,” he said, “to the contrary; someone who was my entire world is gone and it feels right that the rest of the world should stop to take notice of that.” The writer Adichie evoked a similar sentiment reflecting on the death of her own father. “I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the mailman comes as usual … and regular news alerts appear on my phone screen. How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is permanent scattering?”

While we might feel like everything is scattering now, the Gospel of John tells us to not let our hearts be troubled because everything and, indeed, everyone will come together again. As Jesus promised, “in my Father’s house are many rooms” and there’s a place for each of us. I’m glad of that. I truly am. And yet my heart still feels troubled. I can’t help but thinking that there was a perfectly good room for Clare right here, surrounded by all her family who needed her for many more years to come.

After the death of his wife, C.S. Lewis wrote a beautiful book called A Grief Observed in which he grappled with his Christian faith in the context of an unfathomable loss. In it, there are these raw, angry passages which he describes as being more “yells” than “thoughts”.

He’s wounded, and any attempt to make him feel otherwise assaults him like a fresh injury: “Talk to me about the truth of religion,” he writes, “and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

At first blush, Lewis’ words feel a little heretical.

But, in fact, Lewis’ words aren’t an indictment of God. They are not an indictment of God because these “consolations of religion” don’t come from God.

The “consolations of religion” to which Lewis was referring come from Scripture and, as members of the Uniting Church, we don’t subscribe to the view that the Scriptures are the literal voice of God transcribed verbatim from Heaven to page.

Instead, we know that the “consolations of religion”, as captured in those passages of the Scriptures, were drafted by men and women. They were drafted by men and women who were, like the rest of us, trying to understand the incomprehensible through grief-addled minds, and aching hearts, and shaking hands and clumsy tongues. Through their pain they grabbed whatever was available to them in the form of imperfect euphemisms, hollow metaphors and poorly conceived explanations.

God, on the other hand, has been silent. 

But perhaps that is the surest sign that our God is good and full of grace. God hasn’t given us the words to expunge our grief not because God is stupid or lazy or callous or cold. God hasn’t given us the words because God knows that grief defies language. In other words, there are no words.

The therapist Lori Gottlieb wrote a note to herself after her father died during the recent pandemic. In it she says that the thing that helped the most was just having people sit with her, silently: “They couldn’t take away my pain, but they sat with me in my loss in a way that said: I see you, I hear you, I’m with you. This is exactly what we need.”

In reading Gottlieb’s words, I was reminded of the passage from Zephaniah that tells us that God “will be quiet in His love”.

God is wise enough to know that there is no explanation that would make us feel better.

As those passages in the Scriptures show us, any attempt to offer explanation or comfort would risk sounding tone deaf, or offensive, or self-serving, or insincere, or unkind, or absurd.

God knows better than that.

And so, God does the only thing that is appropriate. God pulls up a pew and just sits next to us. Quietly. Respectfully. Unassumingly. God is careful not to attract attention. God knows this moment is just about us, and the person we are mourning. 

We feel the presence of this quiet God who shares our grief in different ways. My son was diagnosed with cancer when he was seven. 

During the ten months in which we stared down the possibility of his death, God sat quietly in the people who knitted blankets that we used to cover our boy while painful medicines were injected into his tiny veins. 

God sat quietly in the people who played video games with our boy in a hospital bed when all his friends were running around at the school that he was too sick to attend. 

And God sat quietly in the people who smuggled gin into the hospital after hours, and told outrageous stories to my wife and me in an effort to restore some normality into abnormal times. 

Given what Clare had to say about that passage from Judges, I think she’ll be pleased that I’m ending this sermon with a quote from the feminist writer bell hooks. bell hooks said that “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”

God has not given us an explanation for Clare’s death. God has not given us any prayers that can be invoked like magic incantations to bring her back. God has not given us Scripture verses that heal our pain. 

Instead, God has given us this – a community of people whose belief in the power of love and kindness is so strong that it not only withstands the harshest winds and the cruellest blows, but it also actually triumphs in these hellish conditions.

So, 

God of Grief and God of Quiet Love,

we ask for you to sit quietly next to us tonight,

to give us the space to grieve in the way that is right for us,

and, in the absence of words, help us to manifest our grief through acts of love and kindness towards Clare’s family, and towards one another,

as we step into a world that is poorer for the fact she no longer lives in it.

When you go through a period of discernment in the Uniting Church, as I am doing, you get assigned a mentor. Mine is lovely, and intelligent, and wise, and when I asked him whether he had any readings to recommend for a sermon on Christ the King he paused rather thoughtfully, and then said …

“Nah, I always hated that one.”

As Australians, it’s fair to say that we have a complicated relationship with monarchies. Kings and Queens, well, they can be nice enough folk, but …

But they live in another place, far away from us.

But they’re a bit too keen on rules and formalities, and seem too stuffy to share a beer with.

But they represent something that we, as commoners, can never be part of (unless we marry into them which increasingly seems like a foolhardy life choice).

Yet, growing up as a Catholic in a not overly fancy part of Perth, this fancy version of Christ as King is the first encounter I had with Jesus.

On the wall of our little parish was a huge – and I mean, huge – Catholic huge – stone statue of Christ dressed in resplendent robes with a crown of gold on his head.

We’ve all seen images like this. I bet you could make a calendar of them in your mind. I’m actually pretty sure we actually had one in our home. January is Jesus on a throne. February is Jesus holding a sceptre. March is Jesus wearing a red velvet cape. And so on and so forth. In all of them, His clothes are radiant. His skin is clean.

These images of Christ the King stand in contrast to the image of what historians – and indeed our Scriptures – tell us about what the real Jesus was like.

Next month, our lectionary readings encourage us to reflect on how, instead of being born in a palace, Jesus was born in a place literally surrounded by dirt and faeces.

Read on a bit more, and we learn that He didn’t grow up in a nice part of town. Instead, Jesus grew up in Nazareth. It was a place with such a reputation that, according to the Gospel of John, when Nathanael learnt this he uttered that famous line: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” From archaeological records we know that it was a farming village away from main trade routes, that there were no bathhouses, no paved streets, and probably only a few dozen humble houses.

Read on a bit more, and we learn that Jesus didn’t follow fussy rules about social class or etiquette. He contravened both Roman and Jewish conventions by eating and drinking with sex workers, and tax collectors, and people from different tribes and social ranks ─ and he seems to have had a fun time doing so.

Read on a bit more, and we learn that he didn’t wear robes. Instead, we think he wore a short tunic, because the Gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus specifically taught us to “beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honour at banquets.”

In fact, not only, did Jesus wear a short tunic, but John’s Gospel also tells us it was “woven in one piece from the top.” Now, this is significant because historians tell us that, at the time, tunics were mostly “made of two pieces sewn at the shoulders and sides. One-piece tunics in first-century Judaea were normally thin undergarments or children’s wear … [and] wearing a one-piece on its own was probably not good form. It was extremely basic.”

The image that we have in our minds of Christ the King has served to distance us from the Jesus that we find in the Gospels.

The image of a King distances us from the Jesus who knew poverty.

The image of a King distances us from a Jesus who was scathing of those who seek to establish rigid social hierarchies.

The image of a King distances us from a Jesus who didn’t care where you were from, or what you looked like, or how little you had, or whether you observed the etiquette of the day.

There are those who argue that, for this reason, we need to push back against any talk of Christ the King. Instead of preaching on it, we should let this feast day pass by quietly as a ‘filler’ Sunday before the main business of Christianity – all that Christmassy stuff – kicks off next week.

I understand that argument. But I disagree with it.

I think we need to talk about Christ the King because Jesus spent so much time talking about The Kingdom. There are more than 150 references to Kingdom in the New Testament. But, like everything else about Jesus, there was nothing conventional about what he had to say on the subject.

The only lived experience that Jesus and other first century Judeans had of “Kingdom” was the Roman Emperor’s Kingdom which occupied their lands.

Under this imperial system, local kings (like those of the famous Herodian dynasty) were installed to do the Empire’s dirty work, and other local elites (including priests and scribes) did very well for themselves in exchange for their allegiance to this foreign system of rule. This is why we find the priests adamantly shouting, “We have no king but Caesar” in the chapter from which today’s Gospel reading is taken.  

But a great many Judeans suffered under Caesar. The task of taking and defending a vast Empire was very costly, and so this meant that heavy taxes were imposed on the Emperor’s foreign subjects. In addition to paying taxes to Rome, the Jewish people also had to pay tithes to the religious elite. Naturally, these taxes and compulsory offerings had the greatest impact on the poor. According to one historian, “after decades of multiple demands from multiple layers of rulers many village families fell increasingly into debt and were faced with loss of their family inheritance of land. The impoverishment of families led to the disintegration of village communities, the fundamental social form of such an agrarian society.”

Enter Jesus, who talks about a new way of doing Kingdom.

His Kingdom is about peace, in contrast to Roman violence. Before meeting Pilate, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey which is something that old kings used to do to signal that they wanted to sign a treaty (since horses were vehicles of war). Moreover, in the Gospel reading we just heard, Jesus tells Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest…” At first, this sounds like Jesus is disappointed in his followers; but what He is really saying is that, in His kingdom, people don’t use violence to get what they want, unlike the Roman Empire which wages wars and kills people in the name of the state.

Jesus’ Kingdom is about mercy and humility, instead of cruelty and arrogance. When James and John fight about which of them will sit on the left and the right of Jesus’ glorious throne as attendants, Jesus bats away the suggestion and says: “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.”

Jesus’ Kingdom was about rejecting hierarchy and power, in favour of equality, community, and justice.

When Jesus says all this about Kingdom, it is clear that He isn’t just talking about the experience of Heaven in the afterlife. If He was, the rulers of the time probably wouldn’t have been so threatened by Him. Rather, they were threatened because Jesus very clearly wanted to redefine what Kingdoms looked like on this earth.

In talking about Kingdom, Jesus was being deeply revolutionary. As the theologian Wright states, “The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is not about people going to heaven. It is about the rule of heaven coming to earth”. Indeed, Jesus says as much in that famous prayer he gave us.

So, when Jesus was killed by the Empire, the fact that His followers described Him as “King” was a direct and unequivocal challenge to the authority of Caesar. They were effectively saying: “you may have killed the man, but you haven’t killed his movement. We are rising.”

It is for this reason that I think we need to keep up this revolutionary tradition of professing that Christ is King.

It reminds us that the job that Jesus entrusted to us is not yet done.

So long as there is oppression and injustice, our job is not done.

So long as there is social and economic inequality, our job is not done.

So long as there is state-sponsored violence and corruption, our job is not done.

Interestingly, this feast of Christ the King hasn’t always existed. It was created by Pope Pius in 1925 as a response to the fallout of World War One – that terrible, tragic moment in our history that stands as testament to the folly of our worldly kings and leaders.

Today, we need to be reminded of Jesus’ alternative vision for the way our world is governed, as much as we did 100 years ago, and as much as we did almost two thousand years before that.

To say Christ the King is not elitist. It’s radical. So let’s celebrate by continuing to advocate for the type of Kingdom that Jesus thought humanity deserved.

– Dongara Uniting Church, 21 November 2021

On this day in 1977, the spacecraft Voyager 1 took the first picture of the planet Earth and its Moon in a single frame.

Astronauts have said a lot about the mental effect of seeing Earth from space. It’s actually so common it’s been given a name – it’s called the Overview Effect.

Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person to walk on the moon, said that:

“Something happens to you out there. You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty.”

He later wrote a book about the subject in which he said: 

“The Overview Effect is a message from the universe to humanity. The message is that the Earth, when seen from orbit or the moon, is a whole system where borders and boundaries disappear, and everything is interconnected.”

Of course, people of faith already knew this. In 1922, Abdul Baha said: “The world of humanity is one race, the surface of the earth one place of residence and … these imaginary racial barriers and political boundaries are without right or foundation.” 

Similarly, a Church of Scotland minister by the name of William Leitch predicted the Overview Effect when he wrote A Journey Through Space way back in 1861. At the time that he wrote, there were not even cars on the street. But Leitch believed that something transformative would happen if we went into space and saw ourselves from the perspective which we have traditionally imagined that God sees us. He wrote:

“It is the immensity of the universe, contrasted with the humble abode of man, that brings out most strikingly the value of the human soul, as redeemed by the death of the Cross. When you attempt to plumb the depths of space, or number the orbs of heaven, your feeling is, How little is man! And, yet, how great, when measured by the price of his redemption! How little are worlds and systems to a God-loving spirit!”

In other words, when we get a sense of the sheer vastness of the Universe in which our tiny planet is suspended, we also get a sense of how small we are. How petty are our differences. How foolish are our desires to fight over the right to possess just a patch more land. How deluded we have become to believe that strength and power and might have anything to do with any number of weapons or any amount of material wealth.

How little is man.

But how precious is this world we share.

Astronauts speak about how striking it is to see our little planet of blues and greens and whites against a backdrop of vast blackness. James Lovel, who was part of the Apollo 8 crew, described the vision of our planet as “the most beautiful thing there was to see in all the heavens”.

It is no surprise then Lovel and his crewmates felt compelled to read out loud from the Book of Genesis as they looked out the windows of their spacecraft. 

In the first chapter of Genesis:

God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.”

And on it goes according to this pattern. 

God creates seasons with clear signs. God creates order and beauty out of chaos, and the various parts of creation live in harmony with one another. And it is good.

But, we stand here today and things are not good.

The pictures that astronauts took of our planet from space are credited as being one of the catalysts for our global environmental movement. But the voices of that movement have largely been ignored and we stand at a crossroads.

The order that God created out of chaos is being dragged back into a state of chaos. 

Our climate is changing. The pattern is deviating from the pattern God intended for us to have – the pattern which is good. 

The pattern on this scarf has been knitted with love by a movement of Christians called Common Grace. It represents average global surface temperatures since the end of World War One, using the 1960s-80s as the baseline. The blue lines represent temperatures cooler than the baseline. The redder lines, represent temperatures warmer than the baseline. 

It is clear that we are approaching a climate catastrophe and, as such, Common Grace is gifting these scarves to our leaders in parliament to send a clear message that urgent action is needed.

The scarf begins with one type of catastrophe – the final Act of a terrible war – and ends with another – the prospect of irreversible global warming. 

Both these catastrophes are the products of the narrow-mindedness and greed of individual nations. 

Today, we need our leaders to move past the narrow mindsets that leads them to say “this is not our country’s problem”. 

We need our leaders to move past the narrow mindsets that lead them to say, “our country will do more when those countries do more.”

We need our leaders to move past the narrow mindsets that lead them to say, “let’s drag our feet so as to protect our country’s wealth.”

Unless we urge our leaders to reject these divisive mindsets and encourage them to think more globally, temperatures will continue to rise.

And rising global temperatures are the biggest threat to international peace we currently face. 

Between 1900 and 2017, the global average sea level has risen by around 16-21 centimetres due largely to the melting of land-based glaciers and ice sheets, and also the fact that as water gets warmer it expands.

We are at the stage where if we don’t EXCEED the emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, our average global surface temperature will probably rise by 3 degrees by the mid to the late part of this century. 

If temperatures continue to climb, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that by the end of this century the average sea level may rise as much as 1.5 metres. Some estimates put it closer to 2.5 metres based on our current emissions trajectory.

To put that into perspective, around 267 million people worldwide live on land that is less than 2 metres above sealevel.

Much of the land that is at risk of being subsumed belongs either to poorer countries around the tropics or major coastal cities in the economic engine rooms of Asia – Osaka, Shanghai, and Hong Kong.

What will follow is mass displacement of people. Some populations will lose access to fresh water and agricultural land.  And more and more people will compete for what little is left, leading to poverty, competition and conflict. 

Indeed, a sophisticated paper published in 2015 synthesised data from 55 studies and concluded that every 1 degree increase in global average temperatures increases the risk of intergroup conflict by about 11%. 

Of the 20 countries deemed most vulnerable to climate change more generally (not just sea level rises) 12 are already mired in conflict, including Yemen, Mali, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia. 

To achieve peace, we need to see the planet as the astronauts saw our planet. We need to see the planet as God sees our planet. 

Precious. 

Fragile. 

One. 

I can’t intellectually imagine what it would be like to see Earth from space. But there’s a poem by Joe Miller that I keep on my fridge that gets me to the same place. It goes like this: 

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter, floating a few feet above a field somewhere, people would come from everywhere to marvel at it.

People would walk around it marveling at its big pools of water, its little pools and the water flowing between.

People would marvel at the bumps on it and the holes in it.

They would marvel at the very thin layer of gas surrounding it and the water suspended in the gas.

The people would marvel at all the creatures walking around the surface of
the ball and at the creatures in the water.

The people would declare it as sacred because it was the only one, and they would protect it so that it would not be hurt.

The ball would be the greatest wonder known, and people would come to pray to it, to be healed, to gain knowledge, to know beauty and to wonder how it could be.

People would love it … because they would somehow know that their lives could be nothing without it.

If the Earth were only a few feet in diameter.

Many of us gather here today feeling weary. 

Women among us are weary. They are weary of having to defend their bodies from predation. They are weary of being spoken at, spoken for and spoken over by people who call them liars and drunk little girls and then expect them to smilemore. They are weary of having their motives and their characters questioned simply because they have the temerity to say ‘enough’.

Youth among us are weary. They are weary of having to explain science to people who have the capacity to understand it but choose not to. They are weary of being told to go back to their classrooms while the earth that they will inherit is being destroyed to line the pockets of the few. They are weary of being gas-lit into believing that their battle to keep their heads above the poverty line is just a symptom of their unwillingness to work hard or spend less.

People of colour among us are weary. They are weary of having to remind the beneficiaries of their oppression that their people’s land and bodies and liberties were stolen. They are weary of having to argue that, far from being a thing of the past, racism is a masterful shapeshifter that thrives among us.They are weary of having the knee of oppression on their necks. 

And the allies that walk beside all these groups are weary. Weary of being called trouble makers. Weary of being told to calm down. Weary of witnessing their friends in a perpetual state of grief and anger and suffering.

So many people are weary. I would like to pause to take a moment to acknowledge the weariness in your own hearts. I recognise it as real. I honour your struggles. 

Social justice is weary work and this side of Easter is an appropriate time to reflect on this fact. 

In literary terms, we think of Easter Sunday as the dénouement of the Christian story – the part after the climax when all the protagonists’ problems start to resolve.

In reality, where we find ourselves, a fortnight after the crucifixion, the problems for the early followers of Jesus were very far from resolved. Their friend had been captured, humiliated, tortured and executed for daring to challenge the status quo. They lived in devastating poverty. They feared for their own lives.

It took the early Christians a long time to recover. In fact, the lectionary reading we heard from the Gospel of John (which was written in about 90AD) was aimed at communities ofpeople who were scared to identify themselves as followers of Jesus. 

The story begins by saying that Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, in the safety of the darkness. And Jesus teaches Nicodemus that the Kingdom of God can only be realised by being spiritually ‘born again’. 

John tells this story as a way of spurring the early Christians to step out of the shadows and continue the work of Jesus in order to realise his vision of a new social order in which the last shall be first. 

The name Nicodemus translates to “people’s victory”. 

And that is exactly what the Easter story of Jesus’ resurrection was. It doesn’t matter whether you accept the resurrection as a literal truth or read it as a symbolic proclamation that the spirit of Jesus lived on in the hearts of those who received his message. 

Either way, in the context of this sermon, the resurrection means the same thing. It means that the people are stronger than the structures of power which seek to oppress them. 

According to the theologian Robin Meyers, the meaning of the resurrection is that:

“the ways of Rome did not have the last word. It means that as horrifying and powerful as state terrorism can be, built on fear and funded by the principalities and powers,violence is effective only in the short run. It can proficiently kill bodies, but it is ultimately impotent when it comes to slaying the spirit. What was utterly uncommon and turned human history on its axis was the claim that Jesus had been raised from the dead. It reset all the clocks in the Western world. Easter was God’s ‘yes’ to a peasant revolutionary, and God’s ‘no’ to the Roman Empire.”

And so it is that within less than a century of Jesus’ death, the words and deeds of an impoverished man who was a victim of the Roman Empire went on to breach the very walls of that Empire. And the rest, as they say, is history. 

The lesson of Easter is that, while our bodies and minds may grow tired and weary from activism, nothing can destroy the spirit of humanity to fight for a world that is better and more inclusive and more just than the one in which we find ourselves. 

We have, today, have become too willing to cede Christianity to those who wield it as a weapon to divide and exclude, tojudge and marginalise, to exploit and impoverish. 

What I am here to tell you today is that Christianity belongs – has always belonged – to those who are oppressed and tothose who are tired and weary of fighting that oppression. 

As Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons argues in his excellent book “Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity”:

“The bold tradition of people following Jesus – to preach the good news that God is on the side of the vulnerableagainst the racist, sexist, and economic systems that limit human potential – continues to this day. This is not the invention of some new form of Christianity.”

It is no coincidence that the first to witness Jesus’ resurrection were women and people who were exploited and marginalised, and that the people marching in our streets today are women and people who are exploited and marginalised.

So, I say to you, find strength in Jesus, come together in discipleship, and live your life in the radical spirit of theChrist’s resurrection. You are strong. And you are not alone.