Sermon, Advent 2

Sermon, Advent 2

Isaiah 11:1-10

Before one is ordained as a deacon or priest, one goes to visit a psychologist for a battery of psychometric testing, which includes drawing up a kind of family tree of dysfunction. I was reflecting on that experience this week as I celebrated 16 years of ordained ministry, and I remembered explaining to the friendly shrink that both my grandfathers were alcoholics who abused their wives, probably had post-traumatic stress disorder from their war service and who were both remembered as toxic, aggressive, unkind men with few redeeming features. By contrast, my own Father who this week celebrates 45 years married to Mum, is a gentle and kind man who is beloved by everyone he knows. It is no accident that his two sons are a nurse and a priest (albeit a rather cynical and jaded nurse and priest) and that his grandsons are intelligent, creative, kind and respectful young men. While I’m conscious of the privilege of being white and living in Australia, I’m also conscious that in many families trauma begets trauma from one generation to the next, and I count myself very fortunate that the violence and pain of my forefathers is almost entirely absent from the lives of my nephews.

Sermon for Advent Sunday

Sermon for Advent Sunday

Today is the beginning of the church’s new year. Advent Sunday begins the new year, and the beginning of the season of Advent. It also means that we change the pattern of scriptures we read each Sunday at the Eucharist. For the past year, we’ve been hearing from Luke because it was Year C in the three year cycle. For the next year, we’ll be hearing gospel readings mostly from Matthew because it is Year A. Year A also gives us a heavy dose of Isaiah during Advent and Epiphany, so this year, throughout December and January I will be preaching a sermon series on the book of Isaiah. What with one thing and another, it will work out at six sermons. I’ve had to resist the urge to drop too much information in the first sermon, and instead I’m going to try to give you one useful fact about Isaiah in each one. By the end you will have six useful facts, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a good number of useful facts to have about anything.

Sermon for Christ The King

Sermon for Christ The King

Resistance, Sedition and Treason, anyone?

Luke 23:33-43

The practice of saying the Lord’s Prayer and the Nicene Creed has fallen out of custom in some churches. Indeed, when I came here nine years ago, the custom of saying the creed each Sunday had lapsed. I heard of a speaker recently who visited an Anglican school who launched into the Lord’s prayer and expected at least some people to join in, and had to do an unexpected solo.

Sermon for All Saints Day 2019

Sermon for All Saints Day 2019

It all began with taxes. Doesn’t it always? Don’t get me wrong, I don’t object to paying taxes. I understand that we all have to contribute. The Emperor has wars to fight and bureaucrats to pay, and the roads and aqueducts don’t maintain themselves. Do I object to Roman control over my people’s land? Of course I do! But, let’s face it, when we had our own kings back in the day it wasn’t all sweetness and light either. And now we have Herod and his family with the title of King, but we all know they’re just business people, same as me. You’ve got to live in the world as it is, not as you’d like it to be. So I’m living in this world, where the Romans are in charge and always will be, and where I need to get ahead.

Sermon Sunday 27 October 2019

Sermon Sunday 27 October 2019

A colleague of mine arrived at her new parish to discover a particular custom. The custom was that at the conclusion of each Sunday service, the children from the Sunday School would come to the front of the church and display their creations – perhaps a coloured in picture of a good shepherd, or some sort of craft inevitably involving a paper plate. Then, one of the children would be interviewed about what they had learned that day. The random choosing of a child had results that varied from poignant to hilarious to tearful.

Sermon, Sunday 13 October 2019

Sermon, Sunday 13 October 2019

Remember when you were a child, and stories tended to have a ‘moral’ or a object lesson at the end? So, for ‘The boy who cried wolf’ the moral was ‘don’t lie’. And for ‘the hare and the tortoise’ it was ‘slow and steady wins the race’. Well, whenever I was told the story of the ten lepers, the moral was always ‘don’t forget to say thank you’.

Now, I’d hate to discourage anyone from saying thank you when someone is kind to them. It is a very nice thing to do. One should also eat with the correct cutlery and queue correctly. But to diminish the narrative of Jesus and the ten lepers to a lesson about manners is an example of eisegesis. That is, finding in the text one’s own biases, presemptions and agendas. It is hardly surprising that Sunday School and regular school teachers read this text to groups of children, and land on ‘good manners’ as the take-away lesson. Adults in charge of children have a vested interest in good behaviour. But as disciples of Jesus, we do exegesis – we try to let the text first speak from its own context, with its own emphases. What we then do with interpretation and application is another matter – we call that hermeneutic, but before anything else we try to have a sort of scientific, objective view of the text, putting aside (to the greatest extent possible) our own agenda.

Sermon Sunday 22 September 2019

Sermon Sunday 22 September 2019

A Rort and a Twist

Luke 16:1-13

If you have lots of money, there are plenty of ways to rort the system. For instance, you can set up a foundation with deductible gift recipient status. You then funnel some of your profits into the foundation, which employs friends and members of your family to do very important work, and which is heavily branded with your name and logo. The foundation gives some money away, but nothing like as much as it would have cost to pay tax on the original amount, plus you’ve enriched your mates and got some cheap feel-good marketing into the bargain.