Text of a sermon preached for Wednesday after Epiphany 7 Year C Mark 9.38-40. Sirach 4.11-19

Attending to the context of our Gospel passage today, the whole of chapter 9, brings us straight away to a question – what is it doing there at all? We start at verse 38, and verse 37 finishes talking about children. Then we have our passage, and another verse, 41. Then verse 42 picks up the thread and again is talking about children.

Our passage is completely out of context. It has no place in the narrative – and this shows it is something important, something the Gospel writer Mark, really wanted to include somewhere in his account of the life of Christ.

Because though our Gospel today is short in length it is long in meaning and importance. This text, a mere 63 words in English, can bring us to both some of the deepest spiritual principles of our tradition, and some hard truths, truths that may shake us up a little.

Our text is full of unexplained friction and dissonance, things that should not be happening, but things that seem, to the disciples, perfectly fine. John, on behalf of them says to Jesus ‘we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him.’ 

Straightaway we see these students of Jesus have formed a little in-club – “we”.

Now John was one of the earliest disciples, one of the earliest students of Jesus – and maybe the rest of the group, the rest of the “we” in the text were also early disciples. In any case, this little in-group, like little in-groups the world over, in churches, in clubs, schools, workplaces, anywhere we humans gather, this little in-group does what in-groups always do: they police the boundaries of the larger group.

The in-group act as gate keepers – who can be in, who must be out, who is allowed, who is forbidden – the in-group claims the authority to make these decisions, claims the power of membership and the life the broader group offers. In fact, they come to claim what the broader group is and does.

But even worse in our gospel today are these words “we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’”

The in-group of disciples do not try and stop the unnamed man because he may be doing harm, or because of any false teaching or any theological principle. No, they try to stop this healer – and in the ancient world, casting out demons was healing – they try to stop this healer because he was not following them. Not because he was not following Jesus, but because he was not following them.

They have usurped Christ; they have usurped God.

This usurping of God, this deifying oneself is always the dangerous end result of unchecked religious in-club boundary making.

And so, this is probably why Mark includes the passage. Mark was writing around 65-70 CE, a time of wonderful and creative diversity of early Jesus Movements, movements that had names like Saviour Clubs, Supper Clubs, Association of the Anointed and many more. But all which, in pluriform and gorgeous multiplicity, centred on Christ and his power to save, to heal and restore life.

But diversity and difference often engender the controlling impulse of the boundary making in-group, here clearly John and the others he names as “We”. They do not want others being part of the movements of Christ who refuse to follow them, the human ones, but rather follow the Living One, in his Name.

And Christ here is really clear. If we work in His name, if we do a deed of power, and the Greek here for ‘power’ is the same as ‘miracle’, if we work in the Name of Christ, we cannot anymore speak ill or evil of Christ.

Amazingly we have material remains, archaeological finds that may depict what this passage is referring to. There have been discoveries of Roman Pagan healing tablets, tablets with prayers and formulae for healing.

Though clearly Pagan, those dating from the second and third century begin to have a new Name next to the names of the Pagan Goddesses and Gods – Christos. The Name of Christ was known to be healing, salvific and life giving, and so he was included in the prayers for life, and slowly He began to be known.

And this is what Christ is saying: being in his Name we, like those ancient Pagan healers, are changed, we are transformed, we are formed towards him, because we partake of him.

This is because in the ancient world, and still today in many First Nation cultures, names, especially divine names are really, really important. The name of a God IS the God. The name of Christ IS Christ. When we speak, when we chant, write, attend to, meditate on the Holy Name, we make He who is the Name present in our lives and in our world.

And that ultimately is what Christ cares about; not about who or what human person or faction or in-group we follow, but whether in his Name we are changed and in that change we help heal the world.

And though written at the start of the Christian era, speaking to the tensions inside what becomes the early church, our Gospel today is continually alive.

The history of Christianity is populated by the graves and the memorials, the destroyed and rejected lives of those people, mostly good Christian women, men and companions who got on the wrong side of Church leaders who acted like John. Leaders who essentially wanted people to follow them, follow their church tradition, their theology, their doctrine, and not the presence, not the Name of Christ.

And though it is easy to think of others, other Christians not far away, we are always minded to ask ourselves – “Am I John?” Am I part of the in-group?” “Do I police the boundaries of our Church, of this Church assembling here at St Cuthberts?”

It is of course not easy to step outside ourselves, remove ourselves from our actions and motivations as these questions require us to do.

Fortunately, our First Testament reading today may help. From Sirach we hear of that greatly underrepresented and shockingly ignored divine figure who was with God at the Beginning of All, Woman Wisdom.

Woman Wisdom will teach us, will exalt us, Her children and will hold us when we seek Her. She will instruct us and be with us.

Of crucial importance is that the early church identified Jesus with and as Woman Wisdom. So, to seek Her, to seek Wisdom is to seek him.

And because Wisdom was at the beginning and assisted God in Creation, we may find Her and find Christ within all Creation, within all the diverse and wonderful nature and all that lives, all that seeds, sprouts, grows, withers and dies and silently bears His name.

So, our questioning our important and vital questioning of our hidden motivations, if we are subtly, like John, usurping God – these questions can be given to God. They can be handed over to God, to Christ, to Wisdom as we walk a bush trail, bathe in sunlight or reach our hands into soil and life. We bring questions of ourselves to the divine in nature, seeking Wisdom and we will receive Her instruction, Her Answers and Her joy.

In the Name of Christ, Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for the Seventh Sunday after Epiphany. Year C. Luke 6.27-38

Jesus today presents such strong ethical injunctions we may think they cannot possibly apply in the real world, cannot, apart from wishful hope, apply to us. They fly in the face of our natural, our instinctual self: turning the other cheek to be hit again, accepting the theft of what is ours, giving to everyone who asks. None of this comes naturally to us, none of these sit well with our regular, natural sense of self.

Our natural sense of self comes from our growing and maturation, from our families, our friends and our society. All these help to form our sense of self where we know somewhat of who we are, but definitely what is ours – our family, our loved ones, our house, our job, our car, our bank accounts, our bodies, our lives.

Our natural self understands the world: we do things and then receive things in return. We act and things happen, we do a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, we sin or transgress and are punished.

Our natural self does not incline towards the radical self-sacrifice Jesus calls us to, where we act for nothing in return.

However, our natural self which knows what belongs to it – body, house, wealth – this self is actually created by the world and will one day, in this life or at death, dissolve and disappear.

And it is only the loss of this self, the loss of our false, worldly selves that will allow us to fully enter the radical love of Jesus: “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you”.

Or to be the love required for us to “do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return”.

And so, Jesus calls us to a new self, and from that new self, a new ethic, a new way of being in the world and ultimately, to a new world – a world whose contours are sketched out in our Gospel today, a world that we are all invited to, a world that we will all one day inhabit.

All this begins with the opening words of our Gospel: But I say to you who are listening.                        You who are listening.

Let’s remember our context here. Jesus has previously called his disciples, his students, up the mountain, chosen 12 of them to be Apostles and then returned. On the plain, he heals not only Apostle and students but also a multitude of people, Gentile and Jew, outsider and insider alike. And this healing foreshadows the radical ethics in our Gospel today: it occurs without ANY action or commitment or even response on behalf of those needing healing. He heals all without qualification or expectation of any return.

He then, lowering himself, directly addresses his students to pronounce blessings and woes which startle and shock us – the poor have the Kingdom, the rich already have all they will ever have.

It is only then, after the healing of the many and the teaching of his students that we hear ‘I say to you who are listening’.

There is a focusing here: from the many who are healed, to the students who are taught, to the students who are actually listening – the ones who are paying attention, who are focused, who are centred in love on the one who is Love before them.

It is this focusing, this centring on Christ that is the key.

We all know there is a world of difference between simply hearing something, or someone, and actively listening. When we listen, when we attend, when we pay attention something remarkable happens – that to which we pay attention becomes real to us, real to all of us, body, mind and spirit.

This is the essence of the crucial practice of Christian meditation, and indeed our liturgy we work together as One Body each Sunday. When we attend mindfully, when we offer our full consciousness to Christ, then Christ becomes present to us, for us and within us.

And it is this attended-to presence of Christ, of God, within our lives which will bring about the death of the older, false self, and the rising birth of the new self. In C.S. Lewis’s words, our new, Christ centred self “will come when we are looking for Him”.

This new self, because we attend to Christ, because we are listening, this new self will partake of Christ and will in some measure be Christ. And to this new self, the radical call to “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you” is not impossible – because Christ loved his enemies even to death, even to death on a cross.

And, of course, this is not easy.

Paying attention, paying real attention, even in our most intimate and personal relationships is one of the hardest things we will ever do – much less as a Christian practice of meditation for 20 minutes on a hard chair in time carved out of our busy lives. And there are so, so many distractions within us and without us.

There are even distractions from the Christian tradition itself, teachings and ideologies that seek to subvert and co-opt the radical Christ-call to love our enemies.

A dangerous example of these modern views was espoused recently by American Vice-President JD Vance. Though a Roman Catholic, Vance somehow believes that our Christian Love should be ordered, should be controlled:

“We should love our family first, then our neighbours, then love our community, then our country, and only then consider the interests of the rest of the world.”

For the Jesus of love, speaking in love, on the plain, this is utter nonsense.

Vance here has reproduced the hierarchy of love typified in the circles of holiness of the Jerusalem temple we heard last week. Jesus completely and forever dismantles these inner and outer circles, healing all, blessing all and teaching all equally. The command, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” is not qualified or modified by the proximity of the “others” to our lives. We do not “do” differently to our family and to the unmet seeker of asylum; we are called to love all, including our enemies.

So, as wonderful as our Church is, we need to remember we are always a union of divine grace and human, sometimes very human, forces.

But these external distractions and impositions to our attention on Christ are nothing compared with our own internal distractions and barriers.

As soon as we try to attend fully to Christ, to be one of the ones who are listening, to sit still in meditation, to focus inwardly on the liturgy, we will encounter obstacle after obstacle. Our mind will wander, our body will ache, emails left unanswered will arise, shopping to be done will make itself known. We will be swamped with disruptions. This is simply, though so powerfully, our old, worldly self, not wanting to die to the new Christ self, the new self that can and will love enemies.

So, we will fail. Over and over, we will fail to live into the ethics we heard today. Failure though is no reason not to try, no reason not to try and listen rather than simply hear.

Remarkably though, our failures are also part of our becoming.

We fail because we are human, just as Christ is also fully human. So even in failure we can find Christ, even in failure we can attend to Christ, and even in failure – failure at listening, at attending, in meditation or liturgy, even in our failure Christ is present to us and Christ is birthing in us the new self, the new self of love for enemies, the new self of the Kingdom.

In his Name, Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany. Year C. Luke 6.17-26

Our beautiful Gospel today opens with Jesus, coming down from “the mountain”, to give what is often called the ‘Sermon on the Plain’, corresponding to the more well-known ‘Sermon on the Mount’.

Many scholars think that these two sermons contained the core, the living heart of Jesus’s teachings. And so, they were passed on orally for 50 years by the early Jesus movements before being written down in the Gospels.

So, the Sermons, and our Gospel today, are very important. But of equal and easily overlooked importance is the context, locale and audience of the sermon itself, which we will focus on today. Who Jesus delivered the sermon to, how and where he delivered it are just as important as the teachings themselves.

And again, as always, to fully grasp the radical and revolutionary set-up, we are given by Luke in the first few verses, we need to travel backwards in time and miles across space to a culture quite different from our own.

Just before today’s action Jesus spent a night of prayer on “the mountain”. In the morning, he called his disciples and named 12 of them as Apostles also. The Apostles are the “them” at the start of our reading, “he came down with them”.

It is of immense significance that Jesus called his disciples up to the mountain. Mountains were, in ancient south-west Asia, thought to be the home of the Gods, the place where deity resided. In the Old Testament only special people and elders ascended the mountain with Moses to be near God. Here though Jesus, freely calls his disciples – and in the Greek of the time, disciple just meant “student” – Christ calls his students, calls anyone who wants to learn, up the mountain.

This idea of ascent, going up to meet God was reflected in the Jewish understanding of the Temple in Jerusalem. No matter where one lived in ancient Israel, east or west of Jerusalem, in a higher or lower place, on the flats, or in the hill country, one always spoke of “going up to Jerusalem” – because God resided in the temple, just as She was thought to reside up in the mountains.

Those who had been on the mountain, the apostles and the disciples, are however, just two of several distinct and diverse groups. These groups are listed in a very conscious and deliberate order intended to stir the emotions, minds and spirits of the first hearers of this Gospel.

·      There are the apostles, those students chosen by Jesus, those closest to him, those who will be sent out to spread his Word.

·      Then there is a “great crowd” of his disciples, his students.

·      Then a multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem – the native home of the Jewish peoples.

·      Finally, another multitude from the coast of Tyre and Sidon, the ancient Gentile enemies of the Jewish people.

The overarching image is like concentric circles of closeness surrounding Jesus: apostle, disciple, Jew, Gentile.

This consciously mirrors the Jewish idea of concentric circles of holiness surrounding the Temple in Jerusalem. Spreading out from the most inner area, the Holy of Holies, the Holiness got less and less in each subsequent circle – from Sanctuary to Vestibule to the City itself and onwards, less and less holy, more and more impure, more and more unclean.

The temple was the most important, the most holy place on the earth. Because of the constant ritual actions within, and the boundaries to the temple, the very heart of it was pure enough for God to actually reside there.

And the farther away you were from the Temple, the farther away you were from the Presence of God on Earth – until finally, all the way to the very, very, least Holy, the borders of the Land of Israel.

And here we note the first radical act of Jesus – standing with him are people BEYOND even the farthest limits of holiness, people of Gentile, enemy nations, all included in his teaching and his love.

But even more, as we discussed last week, the ancient Jewish understanding is that the seas and the ocean are symbols and the presence of chaos and de-creation. Now Luke tells us these Gentiles are not simply from Tyre and Sidon but are from “the coast of Tyre and Sidon” – and the Greek is literally “the sea-coast” of Tyre and Sidon.

These are gentiles, people who are unclean, people beyond any blessing from God, people who live with the powers of chaos and de-creation around them – and yet even these people have sought Christ and have been welcomed by him.

And even more, we have those considered unclean – Jew and Gentile – unclean because of their illness and disabilities, physical, mental and spiritual.  

And all, “all of them” are healed, all of them are made whole, restored in love by the Love of God.

They are healed because power came out of him … so much so everyone was trying to physically touch him. Power comes out of his body.

This is because God now, as Christ, is human. God is body and flesh just as those healed were, just as we are. God, the Incarnate God, is now longer fully available only in the Temple; God exists fully in the world, and there are no limits to his love and healing. Christ is present up the mountain and on the plain, at the heart of the temple, and at the shores of Tyre and Sidon.

Wherever Christ, as body goes, God is present, and power and healing comes from him to all.

Wherever we, as the Body of Christ go, if we are open, God will be present, and healing, making people whole, restoring life, renewing connections, repairing relationships, will come from us to all.

And is no accident that Luke describes this happening “on a level place”. The whole idea of going “up” to meet God is shattered – everyone, outsider and insider, apostle and gentile, Jesus and God are on the same level. God is among humans and all life-limiting hierarchy has been abolished in the love of God, in the presence of the Body of Christ.

What hierarchies do we, as the Body of Christ, do we as church abolish, how do we level all that needs to be levelled? 

And even more radically, though everyone, including Jesus is on the same level place, Jesus somehow looks up, somehow, figuratively, imaginatively, perhaps in posture and position, through speech and presence, somehow Jesus looks up at his disciples, at his students. Jesus, God, lowers himself to all assembled, the Master consciously becomes lower than the servant.

So, before we even hear the words of the Sermon, Jesus has shattered the traditional notions of power, of purity, of bodies, and of sacred locations. He embodies a new tradition, a new way of relationship with the Divine.

In this new relationship, which we as members of his Body are partakers, Christ levels all hierarchies, all systems of control that limit love, and calls us, out of love, to do the same.

In this new relationship, Christ declares all bodies, every type of body, abled and disabled, well and unwell, as holy and included, and calls us, out of love, to do the same.

In this new relationship, Christ brings God, as his Body, to all the places of the earth, and calls us, as his Body to do the same.

These are our tasks now – before we speak, before we as apostles and students of Christ, share the Good News of his teachings, we are tasked, as his body use our bodies to level, to heal and to bring God to all. We are tasked, using words attributed to St Francis, to “preach the Gospel always, and where necessary, use words”.

In the Name of Christ. Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany 5. Year C. Luke 5.1-11. Isaiah 6.1-8

There is a wonderful song by the brilliant Australian singer-song writer, Paul Kelly, that speaks into some of the rich and powerful themes of our Gospel. It’s called Deeper Water. Don’t worry, I am not going to sing it, though you may know it already.

The song uses the symbols of water and waves, swell and ripples, depths and surface to explore how we grow as humans, as people connected to each other in love. The evocative lyrics and music, like deep waves themselves, pull us on a journey towards wholeness as we hear of childhood, maturing, new life in childbirth, joy and connection – and always the pull, the call for us to go into the deeper waters, deeper into ourselves.

As magnificent as the journey of life the song depicts is,  however, it is inevitably bounded, contained and limited as these lyrics attest:

So the clock moves around and the child is a joy

But Death doesn't care just who it destroys

Now the woman gets sick, thins down to the bone

She says 'Where I'm going next, I'm going alone'

Death. Decay. Aloneness. 

This is the reality of the created world around us. It seems to be the inevitable, the natural, end of all creatures, of all life, ourselves included. We are born, we grow, we age, we wither, we die.

But our glorious Gospel today brings us the Good News of different story, one where the holy uncreated One, the invisible God of All enters creation, as one of us, for all of us, and brings all of us to the Life Eternal and the Life Abundant.

To enter this deep and sacred story, we need to bring ourselves closer to how the first hearers would have heard it. Otherwise, we can simply see it, as it is often described: “Jesus Calls the first disciples”. But it is so much more, in fact, the essence of the Gospel itself.

The first thing we notice is when compared with the other Gospels, the Call here is reversed. In the other Gospels Jesus calls to his disciples, without meeting them. “Follow me”, he says, and they leave their nets and follow.

Here, before they follow, the disciples are already helping, already assisting Jesus – they take him out into the lake, they take him deeper, they help with the abundant catch of fish.

This speaks to us of our participation in God, how we participate in the divine with our bodies, our intelligence, our minds and strength – and how that participation is used to further God’s plan, God’s provision of abundance for the world. We are not passive, but an active part of the working out of salvation, for ourselves, for each other and for the entire Creation.

And our sacred story today shows Christ bringing this salvation to Creation and to each of us. To understand this, we remember that in the ancient Jewish worldview, deep waters, lakes, the sea represented and were signs of the constant threat of chaos, discord and uncreation. This is not simply the personal sense of danger and fear of the unknown we may feel, when, like the Paul Kelly song, we enter “deeper waters”.

This is a mythic, spiritual, cosmic reality.

In the Book of Genesis, the world of Good Order, the world of Life is created by God from the chaos of the waters. But the ordered power of creation is always threatened by the chaotic forces of decreation, forces embodied in the waves and the depths.

So, when Christ, responding to the pressing of the crowds, enters the boat and speaks from the waters, he is doing so within decreation and chaos. And he speaks the word of God! He uses lips and breath to speak – and in the Jewish worldview and language ‘breath’ and ‘spirit’ and even ‘wind’ are expressed by the same word, ruach.

So, he brings the Word and the Breath and Spirit of God to and over the waters … just like we hear in Genesis:

When beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind, a breath from God swept over the face of the waters.

In our Gospel, Christ is initiating a New Creation. 

And this new creation is one where decreation, where death and decay are forever defeated because God has entered creation and, in the person of the Christ, conquered the deep waters and overcome all forces of chaos.

In this New Creation, unlike the Paul Kelly song, the deeper waters are not places of personal depths where we grow and change, but where we ultimately and inevitably wither and die. Rather the deep waters are places of communal new life and abundance. Surprising abundance, like the vast number of fish caught in our story today. 

So, like Simon, like the disciples, participating with Christ in the deep water, we too are called to bring Christ into the deep waters of our lives, our personal life, our family and social life and our life as church.

We are called to bring Christ into those deep, those unexpressed parts of ourselves, unexpressed perhaps even to ourselves, those depths where we dimly see and sense who we really are. Those depths that, while unknown, support the whole of us.

And we do this, when we travel this journey, not alone but with each other, like Simon with James and John, when we travel with each other and with Christ into the depths, we can expect abundance. We can expect new life. We can expect eternal life.

And it is no accident that here in St Cuthberts we are sitting in pews in the part of the church known as the Nave – this is from the Latin word for ‘ship’, an early Christian symbol for the church. We are right now, travelling together into the deep water, the deep where in Christ, as the Holy Eucharist, we find the Life Eternal and the Life Abundant. Our very participation today calls and allures us to enter deeper waters of life; by simply being here, by sitting here today, we have committed our bodies to this journey – Christ also calls us to commit our minds, our hearts and souls.

When we do, when we find the life eternal, the life abundant, when we like Simon see uncreation and chaos conquered, we will, like him fall on our knees. And being creatures of God, we will, inevitably feel wholly and utterly different to God, and perhaps even unworthy compared to God. We may, like Simon using traditional language, express that we are ‘sinful’, separate from God.

But when we do, let’s remember that Jesus’ only response to Simon was, “Do not be afraid”. He does not admonish him, he does not forgive him, he does not tell him to rise and sin no more. He does not even acknowledge that the sin actually exists; he only wants him not to fear.

Isaiah in our first reading has similar feelings of unworthiness. During his vision of the Holy One, he declares himself lost and having unclean lips. But we must remember that even the Holy Angels, the Seraphs, beings without sin, created only to adore God, even they cannot fully look at God: they cover their faces in the presence of the Uncreated One.

But amazingly through the Incarnation, when God becomes as we are, body and flesh, warmth and blood, amazingly we CAN see God fully and with uncovered eyes – in the Body of Christ. Not only each week here on our altar, but each and everyday in and as each other.

And in him and in each other, may we find the life eternal and the life abundant. Amen.  

Text of a sermon preached for Sermon the Presentation of Jesus-Candlemas, Year C. Luke 2.22-40

We hear this account of the Presentation of Jesus every year, and also an additional time in the year of Mark.

And from the words of Simeon we draw the words for the Nunc Dimittis – “now you are dismissing your servant in peace”. This is part of Evening Prayer and Compline. These words will, this evening, be prayed by millions of Anglicans the world over.

So, our passage is quite important.

But our Gospel today – and we often miss this – also describes one of the greatest tragedies, one of the most sorely missed opportunities and most blatant examples of prejudice ever recorded in scripture.

Today, as a baby, Jesus comes to the Temple – why he is there, we will explore soon.

In response to his presence, two things happen.

Simeon receives Jesus into his arms, and speaks the powerful words we quoted earlier, words that were preserved in oral tradition, words that Luke wrote down 80 years after they were spoken, words that are preserved and prayed today and every day.

And then we have Anna. She also speaks. She speaks “about the child”, about Jesus, to all “who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”

Anna is the only woman prophet of the New Testament; she is one of only a handful of New Testament people who are named as prophet. As prophetess she stands in the line of women like the judge, military leader and prophetess Deborah.

And yet, though we are told she did speak, spoke on the same occasion as Simeon, who was not a prophet, whose words are prayed today and every day, nothing of what Anna says is recorded.

Not one word. We cannot understate this.

Anna is a prophet. Prophets speak the Word of God to the People of God.

With Anna, it is the only time a prophet speaks the Word of God to the people of God about the Incarnate God, while in the physical presence of the Incarnate God.

And yet – not one word is preserved.

There is something wrong, something discordant about this aspect our sacred story. Somehow, the voice of Anna, prophetess of God, the inspired word of God, was silenced, and is still silenced thousands of years later.

This silencing is mostly unintentional, a reproduction of the culture and mindset we are raised in, no matter how versed we are in scripture, theology and tradition.

This time a year ago at St George’s Cathedral, the Primate of the Anglican Church in Australia, the Most Reverend Geoffrey Smith, preached on the same text we hear today. In his fine sermon, the Primate praised Simeon and Hannah for their faithfulness, for watching, and I quote, “for the activity of God, even in an environment of foreign occupation where God’s prophets had been silent for many years.”

God’s prophets silent for many years … yet here, in the very text being preached on, there is a prophet who speaks. Somehow though the silencing of Anna is easy to ignore.

The early parts of our Gospel show us the cultural ideology that underlies this silencing of Anna, this silencing of the divine:

“When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.”

Here Luke conflates two things. Firstly, the dedication of Jesus, as first-born male, to God, which did not actually require a visit to the temple at Jerusalem, and the purification of Mary after childbirth, which did.

The first hearers of this Gospel would know what is referred to here, but we may not. The Jewish law stated that after childbirth, the mother, in this case Mary, was considered as unclean as “at the time of her menstruation.”

For a baby boy, in this case, Jesus, this period of ceremonial uncleanness would last seven days, as it would for each period, every month. For a baby girl, it would be two weeks.

For both boys and girls though, their mother would also be unable to touch holy things or enter holy spaces for an additional period of time: 33 days for boys and 66 days for girls.

This impurity was only lifted by visiting the Temple and offering a sacrifice – a lamb and a dove, or if the family was poor, as in the case of Mary and Joseph, simply two doves – only then would the mother, in this case the Mother of God, “be clean from her flow of blood”.

There is much here we may, today, very reasonably find objectionable and repugnant. And while we may console ourselves with the knowledge that was then and this is now, the same patriarchal control of women’s bodies and undervaluing of girls and women was behind the silencing of the prophetess Anna.

So even if, all was gender equal and balanced now in the church, and in the world, we would still, as we are, be without the words of God, through Anna, about God incarnate.

What did God say about themselves, incarnate as a baby, in the temple 2000 years ago? Thanks to patriarchy, we will never know.

And of course, it is not all equal and gender balanced.

To realise this inequality, we only have to drive 20 minutes this morning to find a range of churches where women are not permitted to preach or take up their vocations as priests.

To realise this imbalance, we only have to reflect on the knowledge that last year, here in Australia, women earnt at least 13 per cent less then men.

To realise that the same patriarchal control of women’s bodies we see hidden, but active in our text, still exists - we can reflect and lament on this sober fact: just a couple of years ago a survey of Australian men revealed that nearly a quarter believe they should have rights over their women partner’s choices of work, birth choices and intimate relations.

It is NOT all equal and gender balanced.

But, as always, our scripture guides us to the overflowing life and love God wants for all Her people regardless of gender and gender history.

The Gospel writer Luke often works in pairs, such Mary and Joseph and the sending out of the 70 disciples in twos. Here we have Simeon and Anna. When Jesus enters the temple, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God … the Greek word used for “took” also has a more passive aspect, receive, and in the Orthodox tradition Simeon is known as ‘Simeon the Receiver’ – the one who receives God as the Body of Christ.

And of course, we too, every Sunday take and receive the Body of Christ, we see – and we taste – Salvation.

But there is also Anna – who speaks, prophesies and gives out to match Simeon’s receiving.

So, after receiving we too are called to speak and give out.

Just as Anna talked of Christ to all looking for the redemption of Jerusalem, so we must talk of Christ to all looking for the redemption, the healing, of the New Jerusalem, the Church. And there are so many of us who want this, who need this, who know the Church as a place of healing and love, but whose voices are seldom heard.

Just as Anna was prophet, so too we must be prophets, but prophets who are not silenced – prophets who give voice in our church to the silenced, to women, to girls, to the young, the neurodiverse, LGBT friends, the mentally ill and all excluded.

Just as Anna talked, we must talk of the Christ child in our midst. We must talk of the Christ body.

We must talk of the body itself in all its beautiful and messy life of incarnation, growth, pleasure, illness, decay and death – because it is in Body, the Body which human law and patriarchy try to limit and silence and declare as unclean – it is in Body, only in Body that Christ redeems us and the entire Creation. Only in Body. So, we must talk and never be silent; we must talk and never silence. Ever again. Amen.

Text of a sermon preached for the Third Sunday after Epiphany. Year C.

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Today.

In the Gospel according to Luke, this is the first recorded word of Jesus’s teaching and ministry. Today. Not yesterday, not tomorrow - today. Today the gracious promises of our ever-loving God have been fulfilled.

Today Jesus brings Good News to the poor, proclaims release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. Today he lets the oppressed go free.

And yet, as people who engage deeply with sacred scripture, as people who engage at any level with the news, the very mixed news of the world around us, where innocent people are still captive and oppression still abounds, we naturally react against the idea of “today”.

Our gospel text though helps us understand this seemingly pie-in the-sky optimism of Jesus, proclaimed in a backwater village in an occupied nation. Before the bold and world changing declaration of “today”, Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah. He consciously brings a venerable, and well-known prophecy from the past, from ancient tradition into his day. He takes the words and the proclamation of Isaiah and makes them his own, transcending the barriers of time, collapsing time past with time present.

And as he does so, he makes the prophecy even more beautiful, even more poignant - he tweaks the words. The bulk of the quotation comes from the beginning of Isaiah 61, but Jesus – or Luke – adds the all-important words “to let the oppressed go free” – which comes from Isaiah 58, a chapter where God proclaims Her radical program of social justice for all people.

So, there is not a passive acceptance, not a simple replication of ancient tradition; Jesus negotiates with the past and with sacred scripture and brings it into his present, alive and vital, ready for his day, ready for us, today.

How he does so, how he bridges past and present is crucial.

Jesus uses his body: he stands, he receives the scroll and uses his hands to unroll; he reads with his eyes, proclaims with his breath and his lips; uses his hands again to roll and hand back the scroll, and finally sits once more. His body - breath, limbs, lips - is the vehicle for the renewal and revitalizing of the ancient tradition.

And of course, we are the Body of Christ!

As St Teresa of Avila reminds us:

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which He looks

Compassion on this world.

So, it is we, we who are his Body, who are called to continue his embodied work of proclaiming release and good news. It is we who through our bodies, as the Body, once more collapse time and space and bring the past from Isaiah, through Jesus to the world, right now - from the Temple in ancient Jerusalem to a simple synagogue in rural Nazareth to our community here today in Darlington-Bellevue, we make this scripture our own.

We are able to do this, because, like Jesus, through our baptism and our love, the Spirit is upon us and we too are anointed to bring Good News.

So, we who are made in the image and likeness of a Loving God, we who in the words of C.S. Lewis are being formed into “little Christs”, it is we who are to bring release to the captives, with our bodies, walking our Gospel, making physical changes in this physical world.

We do this, in the words of Paul from our Corinthians reading today, as members of the same body, having care for one another, the whole body suffering if a single member suffers. And in the full vision of Christ, the Body includes the whole world; all people, all beings, everyone and everything is caught up in his love.

And it is here we need caution. Because membership of the Body of Christ has in the past, and sadly, even today, been bounded by human concerns in contrast to Christ’s universal love. We have and still today exclude certain bodies from the corporate body and from the Body of Christ.

Today, Australia Day, the recognition of these many Lands we now call Australia, is a cruel and sad example. Aboriginal bodies were excluded from the corporate body, not counted as citizens, until 1967. And even today, in the corporate body of Australia, aboriginal bodies will die earlier, live harsher and suffer more chronic health problems than any other bodies.

And though these examples are stark and awful enough for us to easily repudiate them, we have to remember that the church, our church, this very church once supported government policies that gave rise to them. To some people sitting in the same pews we sit in today these policies seemed right and just and proper and in accordance with the will of God.

Because of this our church has, and still does, exclude certain bodies from the Body of Christ or from full participation in the Body.

Left-handed bodies, divorced bodies, Roman Catholic bodies, black bodies, Irish Bodies. All excluded at some point.

And still today, not many kilometres away, there are Anglican churches that exclude women bodies from the altar. And we still, as the Anglican Body of Christ, exclude our LGBTIQA+ sisters, brothers and companions from the fullness of the sacramental life; marriage and holy orders.

At the other end of the Anglican inclusion spectrum though are people like Bishop Mariann Budde in Washington. You may have seen and heard a sermon by Bishop Budde this week on the occasion of the Inauguration of President Trump. In that compelling and quietly powerful sermon Bishop Budde lived the Gospel and appealed to President Trump, pleading with him to be compassionate and include all people within the corporate body of the United States; people of black and coloured bodies; migrant bodies and transgender bodies.

She did this because the spiritual powers and principalities, the ideas and ideologies, the defensive thought patterns to exclude and define and guard the boundaries of our corporate bodies and the Body of Christ are alive and are still potent. They still harm, they still bind, they still oppress, and they still kill. Ask any member of the transgender community.

But we, by living the prophecy of Isaiah and of Christ in our world today, we by our anointing and empowerment by the spirit, we can free the oppressed, we can bring new sight and we can release the captives.

We do this, like Bishop Budde by looking the powerful and the lowly in the eye and quietly proclaiming the ancient, the revitalised and ever-new Good News that Christ includes and loves all people, all bodies in his One Body. No one is excluded, no one is left behind, because if one body suffers, we all suffer.

We may not be called to do this with a president or a world leader; but the harm and violence of exclusion only has power when it is held and reproduced, often unthinkingly, by the regular ordinary people in our lives.

And we can look our family and our friends – we can look at them at work, in our social settings, at church – we can look at them in the eye and quietly, but insistently proclaim the radical, inclusive love of Christ, for all people, for all bodies.

If we do this, if we do this wherever there is exclusion and limitation, speaking truth, then like Christ, we also can rest and sit and say:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled”.

Amen.